464 A History of Judaism
Jewish ethics in comparison to Christian. But his major work in Hebrew,
a commentary on the Pentateuch published between 1862 and 1865
which incorporated evidence from comparative philology and archae-
ology, evoked such strong hostility in parts of the rabbinic world that
in Aleppo and Damascus copies were burned in public.^11
From these modest beginnings the Reform movement in Germany
gradually changed the face of Ashkenazi Judaism in central and western
Europe over the course of the nineteenth century. Many congregations
in Germany liberalized their liturgy, although the Berlin Reform-
gemeinde, established in 1845, was the only German congregation to
worship entirely in the vernacular, with the men bare-headed, and the
Sabbath observed on a Sunday. The ideas of Reform were promulgated
by rabbis trained in Berlin at the Hochschule für des Wissenschaft des
Judentums, which opened in 1872. The Jüdisch- Theologische Seminar
founded in Breslau in 1854 at the behest of Abraham Geiger had proved
insufficient for this purpose with the less radical Zacharias Frankel as
its head. Frankel was sympathetic to Reform but had withdrawn from
the Reform synod of 1845 in protest at the proposal to replace Hebrew
with German and to end references to sacrifices and the return to Zion,
all of which he saw as central to Judaism.
By the 1870s the majority of religious German Jews belonged to com-
munities which had adopted aspects of Reform theology and liturgy to
different degrees, and the Reform movement had spread elsewhere. Con-
current with the developments in Frankfurt in the 1840s, many of the Jews
of Hungary and Transylvania, who were sufficiently assimilated into wider
society to identify with Magyar nationalists, adopted the example of the
maverick Aaron Chorin (see above), who had taken a radically independ-
ent line since the late 1780s, condemning (in the footsteps of Karo) such
ancient folk practices as kapparot (‘expiations’), which involved swinging
a live chicken three times around the head on the eve of Yom Kippur to
symbolize the transference of the sins of the individual on to the hapless
fowl, which he deemed superstitious and contrary to the spirit of Enlight-
enment. Chorin supported not only the innovations introduced in Berlin
and Hamburg in 1818, but also travel and writing on the Sabbath, and
even mixed marriages between Jews and gentiles. The motivations of the
Neologists, as they were unofficially known, were complicated by their
efforts to avoid divisions such as had opened up within German Judaism
and present themselves as the sole representatives of Hungarian Jewry
despite the protests of the orthodox. The principle that the Jews should
have a unified community was strongly supported by the statesman Baron