necessity of Jewish particularism. Thus, he advocated jettisoning the dietary
laws, and most Jewish rituals not directly associated with prayer, which he
collectively called “kitchen Judaism.”
During the1870s, Wise created the first two successful supracommunal
religious organizations in the United States. In 1872, he founded the Union
of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), which began with thirty-four
member congregations. Under his guidance, this congregational union
founded the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in 1874. The choice of
location – off the eastern seaboard, in the geographical center of the United
States – reflected how the center of American Jewry had followed the west-
ward movement; more important, it reflected Wise’s belief that Jews would
participate in American manifest destiny, creating Jewish communities from
coast to coast.
Within the UAHC, however, tensions emerged between more traditional
and more radical reformers. Kaufman Kohler, a German-born and -trained
radical reformer, emerged as the leader of the radical wing of Reform
Judaism. Through his personal dynamism and scholarship, the movement
moved steadily to the left, culminating in 1882 with an event known as the
Trefa Banquet. This sobriquet referred to an annual dinner of Reform rabbis
that took place in Cincinnati. Despite the fact that some of those attending
the dinner were moderate reformers who still observed the dietary laws, the
menu of this dinner included shellfish, which rabbinic tradition defines as
trefa(unfit to eat). In response, the moderate reformers stormed out in protest
and seceded from the movement.
In order to counterbalance Kohler’s prominence, the moderates took
advantage of the arrival of Alexander Kohut from Hungary in 1885. Kohut
was a towering scholar who was one of Zacharias Frankel’s prized students.
Kohut had been a leader of the moderately traditional Status Quo Movement
in Hungary from 1868 to 1885. In 1885, he moved his family to America,
and was hired as the rabbi of Ahavas Chesed in New York, less than a mile
from Kohler’s congregation. During the spring of 1885, Kohut delivered a
series of Saturday afternoon sermons on the rabbinic text Ethics of the Fathers,
in which he criticized Kohler and the radical reformers. He described
Kohler’s Reform as “a deformity, a skeleton without flesh and nerves, spirit
and soul.” In 1885, he joined several moderate reformers and moderate tradi-
tionalists in founding a new rabbinical seminary to rival the Hebrew Union
College, the Jewish Theological Seminary.
In response, Kohler convened a conference of radical reformers in
Pittsburgh in 1886, at which they issued what would be the official position
of American Reform for half a century: the Pittsburgh Platform. This eight-
point platform carried the universalist trend in Reform Judaism to its
extreme, recognizing monotheism and the moral and ethical tradition of the
Hebrew Bible as the only binding aspects of Judaism, and the remainder of
168 The age of enlightenment and emancipation, 1750–1880