Reform Judaism found fertile ground in America, although not for the
same reason it had succeeded in Germany. American Jews had no angst over
the loss of emancipation – which had never been an issue in America. Instead,
Reform Judaism naturally fitted the openness and individualism of American
society. In Germany, reform had been a means to prove Jews worthy of eman-
cipation; in America, reform was a natural outcome of civic equality.
The first Reform congregation was founded in Charleston in 1819. A second
was founded shortly thereafter in Manhattan. By the 1840s, though, the major-
ity of Reform congregations, and the largest, were in the Midwest, particularly
in Albany and Cincinnati. Like Bnai Brith, Reform Judaism was well suited to
the conditions of the frontier. The growing influence of these Reform congrega-
tions by the end of the 1840s allowed newer communities in the Midwest to
challenge the older eastern seaboard communities for national leadership.
The end of the 1840s was a point of inflection for Reform Judaism in
America, and for America Jewry as a whole. The collapse of the revolutions of
1848 coupled with the discovery of gold in California accelerated the migra-
tion of Jews from central Europe. Moreover, after 1848 a number of Jewish
intellectuals and Reform rabbis who had supported one or another revolution
were forced to flee to the New World to evade arrest. Among them were the
Hungarian Jewish revolutionary Michael (Mihaly) Heilprin, who after fleeing
from Hungary in 1849 emigrated to the United States and became an active
abolitionist.
By the end of the 1840s, two tensions emerged within the ranks of Reform
Judaism in the United States. The influx of German-Jewish émigré intellec-
tuals after 1848 created a tension within American Jewry regarding the
cultural orientation of American Reform Judaism. The newly arrived rabbis
and intellectuals wanted the language of prayer and cultural orientation of
Reform Judaism to be German. Jews born and raised in America preferred
English, and American culture. At the same time, some Reform Jews
believed the Reform movement should be a vehicle for supracommunal orga-
nization; others believed that any supracommunal organization would be
contrary to the core American notion of individualism.
At the center of these tensions was Isaac Meyer Wise, who emerged during
the 1850s as the undisputed leader of Reform Judaism, and the highest-profile
Jew in America. He favored American over German culture, and English as
the language of prayer. He believed that the religious organization provided by
Reform was superior to the cultural organization provided by Bnai Brith, and
hence advocated that the Reform movement form a supracommunal organiza-
tion uniting all of its constituent congregations. As the rabbi of a leading
Reform congregation in Cincinnati, he believed the Midwest had replaced the
eastern seaboard as the center of American Jewish life. Wise published the first
prayer book designed for American Jews, called Minhag America(American
Custom), which quickly overshadowed the European imports. He also
believed that the civic and open quality of American society precluded the
The age of enlightenment and emancipation, 1750–1880 167