position that no German Reform rabbi could have maintained. Aron Chorin
of Arad, when condemned for ruling that sturgeon was a kosher fish,
defended his position in terms neither of the Zeitgeist nor of historical devel-
opment, but rather as a legitimate rabbinic leniency and because of the
widespread custom among Jews to regard sturgeon as a kosher fish. His disci-
ple Leopold Löw, who founded the Neolog Movement, continued to apply
this approach into the 1860s to a variety of religious issues, including using
mechanized transportation and musical instruments on the Sabbath.
Most interesting perhaps was the attitude of Italian-Jewish scholars such as
Samuel David Luzzatto. Luzzatto, a graduate of the rabbinical seminary in
Padua – the first such seminary in Europe – and medical school, rejected
entirely the notion that Judaism had to be ideologically reconciled with the
spirit of the age in order for Jews to be accepted into the mainstream. Rather,
he maintained that there was an inherent tension between Atticism – his term
for secular culture, derived from a term for Athenian or Greek philosophy –
and Judaism, but that Jews could embrace both cultural traditions as long as
they were aware of this tension. The upshot is that non-German reformers of
Judaism were able to maintain a relatively strong tie to traditional Judaism
without reference to the spirit of the age or historical development.
All reformers of Judaism, though, agreed that, regardless of the ratio-
nale, Jews could and should embrace the possibilities offered by the
changing world of the nineteenth century. This view was reinforced by the
wave of emancipation edicts that accompanied the revolutions of 1848.
These edicts, though short-lived, demonstrated how deeply Jewish emanci-
pation was woven into the political agenda of liberalism, and that the
triumph of liberalism – which mid-nineteenth-century ideologues increas-
ingly regarded as inevitable if not imminent – would emancipate the Jews
of central Europe and Italy.
In addition, the emergence of nationalism as a driving force of these revo-
lutions revealed how much the gap between Jews and their non-Jewish
neighbors had narrowed in terms of national identity and solidarity, particu-
larly in those revolutions for which Jews fought and died on the battlefield,
such as that of Hungary, or led the revolution outright, such as that of
Vienna. By the 1860s, the triumph of liberalism, coupled with sufficiently
extensive Jewish embrace of the local vernacular and national culture, facili-
tated the emancipation of all European Jews west of Russia by the end of the
1860s, with little or no fanfare.
Orthodoxy: synthesis, secession, schism
The spread of religious innovation across central Europe prompted a concur-
rent backlash among religious traditionalists, which crystallized during the
nineteenth century into a new religious movement: Orthodox Judaism.
Orthodox, though often used interchangeably with traditional or observant,
The age of enlightenment and emancipation, 1750–1880 159