Perspectives: History from a Variety of Vantage Points

Leon Jick's classic swept me off my feet when I first read it some 20 years ago. Here was a boldly written, brave new departure establishing the American landscape as the seedbed for Reform. Although lacking a strong original source base and homogenizing certain aspects of the story, this was and remains a seminal work. ¹ As series editor Jonathan Sarna remarks in his forward to a later printing, Jick explores areas and themes which had been largely ignored in the literature, and he also poses what were then new questions for inquiry. ² As Leonard Dinnerstein observes, "Jick's major contribution is to expose the myths of unity, solidarity, and orthodoxy, which some earlier historians have described or implied, and to explain how an unwieldy and diverse number of congregations eventually came to accept Reform Judaism." Jick's work broke with the filiopietism of prior historiography to explain the drive of Jews for acceptance and their accommodation to the positive American environment. ³ This essay will not so much attack Jick's work or challenge its correctness in particular areas as much as it will attempt to place it in relation to varied perspectives.

In preparation for rereading The Americanization of the Synagogue, I reread Michael A. Meyer's magisterial Response to Modernity. ⁴ The contrasts in some respects could not be more striking.

Following different paths and types of evidence, the two historians reversed the trends of the broader historiography. A half century ago Perry Miller's paradigm of a New England mind dominated Puritan studies. An intellectual construct of the views of the clergy, Miller's ideas were challenged beginning in the early 1960s by the then-new social history as young colonialists investigated town and family life from the bottom up. Jick, working from the grassroots, and Meyer, from the intellectual construct of the elite, traveled the opposite course.

Whereas Jick emphasizes the impact of the haphazard move of lay- dominated change, Meyer stresses the intellectual force of rabbinic and lay leaders. Jick sees gradual, nonideological change dominated by the drive for Americanization in a voluntaristic and tolerant society lacking institutional restraints. While alluding to socioeconomic change, Meyer views history from the top down. In Jick's eyes, the few antebellum ministers or rabbis in America either accommodated to lay desires or were largely ignored. Ideology and institutions simply reinforced and legitimized existing practices. European Reform exerted little influence on its American counterpart, and American Reform either preceded or coincided with its sister movement. Although neither ignoring nor denying early, lay-led modifications, Meyer believes reform was not really Reform unless based on a theoretical framework developed by rabbis and lay intellectuals. Meyer observes that American Reform was "intellectually dependent on Europe for its religious ideology and until the last decades of the nineteenth century for most of its leadership." To him, the Reform movement was "born in Europe, [although it] ... thrived fully and, almost easily, in America." ⁵ To Jick, reform in America was indigenous and essentially independent of the European movement until it was well established and European-born and -trained rabbis traversed the Atlantic to codify and institutionalize it.

Indeed, notwithstanding these disagreements, Jick's and Meyer's interpretations share much in common. Both scholars see the rise of the Reform movement as a response to the environment and country-specific factors. Jick's emigrants adjust to a relatively tolerant America where the government followed a laissez-faire policy toward religion, few rabbis ventured, and no structured Jewish community held them in check. Their major objectives were to acculturate and to succeed economically as quickly and easily as possible while maintaining tradition. Alas, it was tradition that almost immediately underwent piecemeal alteration. Yet until this migration sputtered to a trickle by the late 1850s and the immigrants achieved some affluence in postbellum America, congregations vacillated over the degree and types of change without relation to any theoretical or institutional construct...