Th e Pentateuch as Scripture and the Challenge of Biblical Criticism 209his younger contemporary Abraham Geiger (1810 – 1884). While Zunz and
Geiger themselves were not overly interested in the Pentateuch, seeing its
nationalism and particularism as running counter to the Reform agenda,
their approval of scholarly inquiry into the Torah had an eff ect on the Re-
form movement itself. Early reformers in Germany were interested in peel-
ing away from Jewish practice what they perceived as superfl uous layers
of rabbinic casuistry and over-stringency and in reducing the particular-
ism they found incompatible with Emancipation. In this initial period, Re-
form leaders contented themselves with the goal of returning Judaism to
its “pristine” biblical form. Th ey maintained their commitment to biblical
law, reaffi rming its divine nature, asserting only that man-made layers of
Judaism were subject to review and even repeal. But from the moment that
Pentateuchal criticism insinuated itself into the Jewish intellectual and re-
ligious context, the nature of Reform underwent a major metamorphosis.
Th e Torah, thus the Jewish religion per se, was a human creation; nothing,
neither ordained nor written, was immutable. Ideas — democracy, equal-
ity, liberty, ethical behavior — took the place of revelation, and the Torah
became the record of earlier attempts to express and actualize them. For
instance, far-reaching measures (such as the displacement of the Sabbath
to Sunday) that were unimaginable in the early days of Reform were a mat-
ter of course for later reformers. Th is was a direct result of the infl uence
of Pentateuchal studies on the reformers: the realization that the law in its
entirety had not been divinely dictated implied, for them, that it was not
divinely mandated. Early reformers had accepted more-or-less traditional
notions in the realm of theology; once their successors discovered the im-
plications of Pentateuchal criticism, modifi ed ideas of God became accept-
able, and even the questioning of the very existence of the divine became
legitimate. Th ough it cannot be denied that scientifi c skepticism concern-
ing religion in general was the prime mover in all of these processes, in the
Jewish world the single most infl uential factor serving to legitimize them
was the critical study of the Pentateuch.
Th e trend toward radical religious reform, which therefore received its
fi nal push from the implications of Pentateuchal criticism, did not con-
fi ne itself to offi cial Reform movements in Europe and the United States.
Eventually, some more traditional groups in both continents, ultimately in-
cluding many Conservative rabbis and leaders in the United States, aligned
themselves with this position: that the man-made, historically conditioned
nature of the written Torah (to say nothing of the so-called Oral Law)
entitled humans to accept or reject it as they saw fi t, to “re-form” — create