466 A History of Judaism
the stamp of Moses.’^ It helped that the community in the 1840s preserved
close family ties with those who remained under the religious auspices of
the chief rabbi, and that they refrained from making a radical distinction
between the Bible as divinely inspired and the Talmud as merely human.
Reform Judaism in Britain thus became increasingly conservative in
the course of the nineteenth century. The general lack of interest in
theology and ignorance of the Jewish tradition among English Jews was
lamented openly by those who founded the Jewish Quarterly Review in
- Matters were not much better when publication of the Review in
London ceased in 1908, to be transferred to the more welcoming envir-
onment of the United States. The wealthy Claude Montefiore, who
financed and co- edited the Review, was a notable exception. A student
of Benjamin Jowett at Balliol, he had studied at the Hochschule in Ber-
lin, and in 1902 he founded the radical Jewish Religious Union along
with Lily Montagu, who came from a prominent banking family long
involved both in British public life as liberal politicians and as leaders of
the orthodox United Synagogue. The Union led in turn, in 1911, to the
establishment of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue. Montefiore’s theology,
focusing on the Jewish conception of God and on ethics, stressed the
similarities between Judaism and Christianity, and strongly opposed
Jewish nationalism, which he saw as compromising Jewish universalist
claims. In practical terms, he was in strong agreement on this latter issue
with other English Jews of his class and background, including both Lily
Montagu’s elder brother, the second Baron Swaythling, who remained (like
his father) strictly observant but still declared roundly his view that ‘Juda-
ism is to me only a religion,’ and (of greater practical significance) another
brother, the politician Edwin Montagu, who opposed and amended the
Balfour Declaration of 1917 from within the British cabinet.^13
Where Reform Judaism was really to flourish was in the new Jewish
world of the United States, where intensive theological debate was rap-
idly added to institutional formation. The Reformed Society of Israelites
was founded in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1825 quite separately
from developments in Germany, but the immigrants from central Europe
who formed Har Sinai Verein in Baltimore in 1842 and Temple Emanu-
El in New York in 1846 brought with them the same debates between
radicals, led by David Einhorn, and moderates, led by Isaac Mayer
Wise. Einhorn had presided over congregations in Germany and Buda-
pest before taking up a series of posts in the United States from 1855, in
his mid- forties, and he sought to institute a theology and forms of wor-
ship similar to those in the Berlin Reformgemeinde, unconcerned if such