counter- reform 497
and Gateshead, and at London University) and served as rabbi of ortho-
dox synagogues in Manchester and London in the 1940s and 1950s,
resigned his teaching post at Jews’ College, the only orthodox seminary
in the country dedicated to training rabbis for communal service, when
his appointment as principal of the College was vetoed in 1961 by the
chief rabbi, Israel Brodie, on the grounds of heterodox views in Jacobs’
publications. Most important of these (by this stage in Jacobs’ life) was
We Have Reason to Believe, in which Jacobs accepted some of the
methods of biblical critics and asserted that the Bible was in part a
human composition, notions that would not raise an eyebrow within
the Conservative movement. Right up to his death in 2006, Jacobs
maintained, adamantly and with great learning, the orthodoxy of his
views. But he appeared to have trespassed against what had been identi-
fied by Samson Raphael Hirsch as the touchstone of orthodoxy, a belief
that the Torah is from heaven, and forgiveness was not forthcoming
from the chief rabbi or his erstwhile rabbinical colleagues in the United
Synagogue. In 1964 some of his supporters established a new orthodox
congregation, the New London Synagogue – outside the auspices of the
United Synagogue and the control of the chief rabbi – for Jacobs to
serve as rabbi. Jacobs was a respected scholar and the author of books
much read even by many of those who disowned him, and he was popu-
lar with many lay orthodox Jews within the United Synagogue. He
could have continued to present his Judaism as the face of enlightened
modern orthodoxy according to local custom (minhag Anglia ), but he
chose instead in the 1980s to affiliate his congregation to the Conserv-
ative movement in the United States. The result, however, has not been
any mass extension of formal commitment to Conservative Judaism in
England, partly because many Jews attached to congregations within
the Orthodox United Synagogue in any case practise and believe in a
Judaism differentiated from Conservative Judaism only in name.^25
This has been a European and American story. The intense disputes of
reformers and counter- reformers in central and western Europe and the
United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had only
faint echoes in the long- established Jewish communities of the Middle
East and North Africa. There, as in much of eastern Europe, the main
religious response to the challenges of modernity was a reassertion of
tradition, as we shall see in the next chapter.