reform 465
József Eötvös, who had fought since the 1840s for the emancipation of the
Jews and succeeded in passing an emancipation bill in 1867 upon the for-
mation of an independent Hungarian government in that year. But the
National Congress of Hungarian Jewry to which Eötvös helped to organ-
ize elections in 1868 to 1869 was an acrimonious affair, with no agreement
even on terms of reference. The Neologists defined the Jewish community
as ‘a society providing for religious needs’, whereas the orthodox saw
them as ‘followers of the Mosaic- rabbinic faith and commands as they are
codified in the Shulhan Arukh ’. When in 1871 the Hungarian parliament
bowed to such pressure by allowing the orthodox to set up a separate
community at the behest of the Austro-Hungarian Kaiser, the Neologists
made great efforts to repair the breach by refraining from drastic reforms
in liturgy. Rabbis who graduated from the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary,
founded at the behest of the state authorities and with state finances,
received an essentially orthodox training, although (as in Breslau) a critical
study of the ancient sources was also permitted. Some traditionalist com-
munities which declined to align themselves either with Neology or with
orthodoxy, defined themselves accurately but oddly as the Status Quo
Ante group. They survived independently, but only in small numbers and
without government recognition, until 1928; the merger in 1926 of the
Status Quo Ante communities in Slovakia with the Neologists suggests
that by this time at least they saw their identity as primarily opposed to
orthodoxy.^12
The Hungarian Neologists had sought to gain control of the religious
lives of Hungarian Jews, but they had gone to great lengths to prevent
the Reform movement from becoming a schism within Judaism, sup-
pressing in 1852 the younger members of the Pest community who
had been trying to establish a Reform synagogue since 1848, and pre-
venting also an attempt to set up a separate Hungarian Reform
community in 1884. Very different was the lack of concern about such
separation shown by English Jews when the West London Synagogue
was founded in 1841. The West London Synagogue was established for
singularly pragmatic reasons by those wealthy Jews who had moved
away from the City in the east, where the chief rabbi presided over the
Great Synagogue, and, against the chief rabbi’s wishes, desired a new
place of worship closer to their homes. The congregation in London
were at first little touched by the debates on the continent. They declared
in the words of the dedication sermon that ‘our unerring guide has been,
and will continue to be, the sacred volume of the scriptures’ and that ‘in
matters relating to public worship, we desire to reject nothing that bears