Judaism as “a system of training the Jewish people for its mission during its
national life in Palestine” that had long since ceased to have any validity or
meaning. The platform rejected dietary laws and much of Judaism as “foreign
to our present moral and spiritual state.” The Pittsburgh Platform defined
what would come to be known as “classical Reform Judaism” in America, and
would outstrip virtually all Reform currents in Europe in terms of its reduc-
tion of Judaism to a religion of ethical monotheism.
The triumph of Reform in the United States between 1820 and 1880
reflected the fact that, more than anything else, Jews in America were becom-
ing Americans. The degree to which Jews were part of American society was
made plain during the Civil War. Like Americans in general, Northern Jews
opposed slavery and defended the Union; Southern Jews defended slavery and
states’ rights. Jews fought and died on both sides of this conflict.
Equally indicative of the situation of American Jewry was a brief incident
of anti-Semitism that took place during the Civil War. General Ulysses S.
Grant, suspecting that Jews in border states were smuggling war materials to
the South and selling Southern cotton illegally in the North, issued General
Order 11 on December 17, 1862 , expelling Jews from Mississippi. When
several Jewish friends of Abraham Lincoln informed the president, he imme-
diately ordered General Grant to rescind the order. The rights of Jews in
America were never at issue, even when challenged by someone as prominent
as General Grant.
The Ottoman and Russian Empires: tradition
in an imperial world
The absence of emancipation and enlightenment, and the survival of Jewish
tradition, in Russia and the Ottoman Empire give the impression of Jewish sta-
sis or even stagnation. In fact, despite the stark differences between Europe and
America on the one hand, and Russia and the Ottoman Empire on the other,
Jewish life in the latter states underwent significant changes during the nine-
teenth century. The efforts by the Ottoman and tsarist regimes to create more
homogeneous and centralized states began to affect Jews there by the beginning
of the nineteenth century. The arrival of European and European Jewish ideas in
these parts of the Jewish world accelerated changes that had already begun to
take shape under the aegis of these autocratic regimes.
In the Ottoman Empire, the status of Jews was largely a function of gen-
eral political stability. The expansion and resurgence of the Ottoman Empire
under Suleiman during the sixteenth century had vastly stabilized and
improved the situation of Jews. From the seventeenth century on, the situa-
tion of Jews destabilized as the Ottoman Empire entered a period of decline.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Jewish inhabitants of the “sick
man of Europe” faced an increasingly precarious situation.
The age of enlightenment and emancipation, 1750–1880 169