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innovations created a split within American Jewry. He championed ser-
vices on Sunday, organ music and uncovered heads, and believed that
ritual elements in Judaism were a hindrance to rational understanding
of the real meaning of revelation and that the Talmud was no longer
authoritative. His was a complete theology, as can be seen from his
prayer book (Olat Tamid, published in 1856), which omits reference to
the revival of sacrifice, return to Zion and the resurrection of the dead.
It was also distinctively German: his last sermon contained a plea for
retention of German in Reform congregations in North America. Isaac
Mayer Wise had also migrated from Europe, but at a younger age – he
was twenty- seven when he arrived in Albany in 1846 – and with a greater
concern for Jewish unity and a more distinctively American agenda for a
universal faith, based upon monotheism, in which the ideas of Judaism
(in which he included the Talmud as well as the Bible) would play a lead-
ing role, and which would embrace all sectors of Jewry. His was a
rationalistic Judaism, in which an academic lecture each Friday evening
played a prominent role, and English was the main language of prayer.^14
From his base in Cincinnati, Wise had by 1873 organized thirty- four
Reform communities in twenty- eight cities into the Union of American
Hebrew Congregations. With the support of the Union, Hebrew Union
College was founded in 1875 in the basement of a Cincinnati synagogue
for the training of American Reform rabbis, with Wise as president. But
unification provoked a demand for greater clarity about the principles
for which Reform stood, and although Wise presided over the confer-
ence of American Reform rabbis who met in Pittsburgh in 1885, most
of the decisions expressed in the Pittsburgh Platform which emerged at
the end of the conference were far more radical than he himself had
wanted, with the spirit of Einhorn (who had died in 1879) prevailing in
its eight paragraphs:
We hold that the modern discoveries of scientific researches in the domains
of nature and history are not antagonistic to the doctrines of Judaism ...
Today we accept as binding only the moral laws and maintain only such
ceremonies as elevate and sanctify our lives, but reject all such as are not
adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization ... We hold that all
such Mosaic and rabbinical laws as regulate diet, priestly purity and dress
originated in ages and under the influence of ideas altogether foreign to
our present mental and spiritual state ... We consider ourselves no longer
a nation but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return
to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the administration of the sons