Then, in 1819, the same year as the Society for Jewish Science was founded, the Hamburg Temple introduced a new prayer-book, and the aesthetic changes spread to more fundamental matters. If liturgical habits could be discarded because they were embarrassing, why not absurd and inconvenient doctrines? The mention of the Messiah was dropped; so was a return to the Holy Land. The idea was to purify and re-energize Judaism in the same spirit as Luther’s reformation.
