refers to something fundamentally different. While advocating meticulous
observance of Jewish laws and customs, Orthodoxy is based on the premise
that Judaism mandates a single correct path, and that all deviation from that
path connotes transgression. Thus, the emergence of Orthodoxy rested on a
paradox: while rejecting deviation from the norm as inherently unacceptable,
the mentality and ideology of Orthodoxy itself deviated from a preexisting
fluid, diverse, accommodating traditionalism that had been fashioned by cen-
turies of Ashkenazic scholars from the Tosafists through rabbis like Ezekiel
Landau at the end of the eighteenth century. In this regard, Orthodoxy was a
response to the nineteenth century, no less than Haskalah, Reform, Positive-
Historical Judaism, or any other nineteenth-century religious movement.
Orthodoxy was born as a backlash to the reform of Judaism.
The long-term origins of Orthodoxy can be rooted in the rabbinic paranoia
regarding Sabbateanism. The more immediate origins were exclusively
Ashkenazic. In Germany, Orthodoxy was a reaction to the spread of ideologi-
cally justified redefinitions of Judaism such as Haskalah, Reform, and
Positive-Historical Judaism. Outside of Germany, Orthodoxy rejected
halachically justified innovations in Judaism. Until the end of the nineteenth
century, when Orthodoxy appeared within Russian Jewry (discussed in the
next chapter), the centers of Orthodoxy were Germany and Hungary. Since
the character and rationale of religious reform differed in Germany and
Hungary, so too did the Orthodox backlash.
Sociologically, it is possible to identify two types of Orthodox Judaism.
Rejectionist Orthodoxy rejected wholesale everything innovative, whether
religiously, technologically, politically, or culturally motivated. Synthesizing
Orthodoxy embraced certain innovations, but then used these innovations to
defend an Orthodox position. For example, present-day rejectionist
Orthodoxy would ban the use of television, and participation in the political
process, as innovations, and hence taboo. Synthesizing Orthodoxy would use
television selectively to disseminate a particular message, and the political
process to protect Orthodox interests.
In addition, in combating religious innovation, Orthodox Jews generally
used one of two strategies or some combination thereof: condemnation and
competition. Some Orthodox Jews simply condemned any and all religious
innovations and refused to have anything to do with them. Such was the case
with the condemnation of the Hamburg temple. The champion of this point
of view was the Frankfurt-born Hungarian rabbi Moses Sofer. In condemning
the Hamburg temple, he applied a talmudic principle that had originally
referred exclusively to the laws of bringing first fruits to the temple in
Jerusalem to all facets of Judaism and Jewish life: “All that is new is forbid-
den by the Torah” (Kol Davar Hadash Asur me-hatorah hi).
Other Orthodox Jews believed that some accommodation to contemporary
circumstances was inevitable, and that the only way to preserve religious
160 The age of enlightenment and emancipation, 1750–1880