450 A History of Judaism
consciousness of the effort. In the nineteenth century, synagogue liturgy
became a public space in which to stake theological claims about the need
for Judaism to reform in order to reflect the changed needs of a modern
age. There was pressure, often resisted by conservatives, to incorporate
sermons in the Christian style into the regular service and to use the
vernacular in prayers and sermons. Richer communities erected cathedral-
style synagogues in city centres in Europe and America, such as Florence
and Budapest and the Neue Synagoge built between 1859 and 1866 on
the Oranienburger Strasse in Berlin. Such buildings constituted state-
ments of the established place of Jews in these societies, although it is
significant that Jews often chose an oriental or some other ‘exotic’ style
of architecture to differentiate their buildings from churches.^15
Scientific and technological advances laid down many new chal-
lenges for living a life according to the halakhah. Arguments about
cremation for the disposal of the dead, the use of electricity on the Sab-
bath, the permissibility of organ transplants and artificial insemination
have at times become fault lines between Jewish religious groups. There
has been much debate about the use of machines for various processes
required for religious observances. So, for instance, rabbinic debates
over the manufacture of tsitsit (ceremonial fringes on the corner of a
prayer shawl) came down strongly against the use of sewing machines
for attaching the fringes to the shawl: since the biblical verse enjoins
that ‘you shall put fringes on the corners of your garments’, most rabbis
decreed that such fringes fulfil the commandment only if they have been
attached by hand by someone whose intention at the time of sewing was
to carry out this particular religious duty. But machines for making mat‑
zot for Passover are widely used after an initially heated debate in 1859
between Solomon Kluger in Brody and Joseph Saul Nathansohn in
Lemberg (modern Lviv, in Ukraine), even if handmade (shemurah ) mat‑
zot are still seen by some as somehow better.^16
Many of the rabbis guiding Jews in their responses to these challenges
have held rather different positions in relation to their communities in
western and central Europe and the United States than their predeces-
sors before the modern age. From the mid- nineteenth century, most of
these communities in the diaspora have been essentially voluntary
organizations with rabbis as their employees, on fixed- term contracts.
The authority of these rabbis, who are often selected more for their
parochial skills than for their rabbinic learning, has generally depended
as much on personal qualities as on qualifications. It became common
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for western European rabbis