478 A History of Judaism
in the United States affiliated to any religious community defined their
Judaism as Reform. The principle of patrilineal as well as matrilineal
descent has been adopted also by the Reform movement in Britain but
not in Canada or in Israel. Reform Judaism has made little headway
among native- born Israelis, whose simplistic tendency to divide their
society into the ultra- religious on the one side and the purely secular on
the other is reinforced by the educational and political systems in the
state, which leave little space for other forms of Judaism. Most Reform
Jews now living in Israel are immigrants from the diaspora. Reform
Judaism has proven more popular among Jews in the former Soviet
Union, not least because a good number of them trace their Jewish
heritage through their fathers rather than through the maternal line.
The enforced lack of Jewish religious education in Soviet times has
required many Russian Jews to learn about Judaism from scratch, a
process which is facilitated by the provision, through the World Union
for Progressive Judaism, of prayer books and other educational mat-
erials in the vernacular.^28
We have seen that in the beginning Reform Jews in the nineteenth
century saw themselves as a movement within Judaism as a whole, and
that it was only gradually that they began in some places to define them-
selves as a distinct denomination within the wider body of the religion.
Reform Jews have never asserted that the religion of traditionalists is
not a valid form of Judaism, even if they have stated at times that the
preservation of redundant customs is primitive and stands in the way of
true religion. The attitude of traditionalists has been more consistently
hostile towards what they see as the betrayal of the essence of Judaism
by Reform, and (as we saw in Hungary in the 1860s) they have often
appeared puzzled by even the suggestion of compromise. The puzzle-
ment is mutual, for the need to enter the modern age has often seemed
obvious to the reformers.