The Path to Reform Judaism: An Examination of Religious Leadership in Cincinnati, 1841-1855

One Saturday morning in 1841, the president of Cincinnati's Bene Israel congregation summoned the members of his vestry together for an emergency and extraordinary Sabbath session. He reported that Mr. Samuel Kahn had called upon him and "produced a sheep, purporting to have been killed and marked Kosher" by the congregation's shochet (ritual slaughterer). Kahn however declared that the sheep in question was in fact "Tripha" (not kosher). The president called in Samuel Bruel who "after examining the sheep pronounced it Kosher." Whereupon, "Mr Kahn then cut the head and side marks off the sheep and left them in the custody of the President." Subsequently Abraham Wolf Jr. declared the sheep kosher, but Mr. Hart Judah, the congregation's hazan and sometime shochet, judged it "Tripha." Finally, David Goldsmith, the original shochet whose skills were in question, arrived to say that "this sheep was not even the one which he killed and marked." Goldsmith also "made complaint against the butchers," presumably for identifying a sheep that he had not slaughtered as kosher. Goldsmith asked to be relieved of his slaughtering responsibilities, and the congregation responded by cutting it ties to the butcher in question and suspending the shochet until they could call a general congregational meeting to decide what to do. ¹

The chaos prompted by this problematic sheep embodies the disorder described in Leon Jick's influential study, The Americanization of the Synagogue and his observation of the tension between "the desire to maintain traditional standards and the difficulties encountered by small struggling new communities in fulfilling this desire." ² As the opinionated procession of visitors to the Bene Israel president's home indicates, there was no clear hierarchy of religious authority within the Bene Israel congregation. The best the leaders could do was to ask the congregation to choose another butcher. This solution hardly seemed guaranteed to secure more proper observance of Jewish law. With so many individuals asserting disparate halakhic (Jewish legal) judgments, it would not be that surprising to see all claims to traditional authority eventually becoming undermined. Indeed, this Sabbath sheep struggle may well be an instance of the dynamic described by Jick of a congregation "blunder[ing] along seeking to retain something of the old ways while adapting to the demands of a new kind of society." ³

In many ways, Jick's 1976 work, built upon an analysis of existing communal studies and nineteenth-century synagogue records, provides an indispensable guide to the progress of nineteenth-century Jewish religious life in Cincinnati and across the United States. His identification of the general patterns that defined the efforts of American Jews to frame an ancient religion for a new world created a benchmark account against which all subsequent historians of nineteenth-century Judaism have measured their own contributions to the field. As one of the earliest organized Jewish communities west of the eastern seaboard and the eventual home of the greatest organizer of early American Judaism, Cincinnati plays a central role in Jick's story. As a long-time subject of my own research, and a community where the question of religious Jewish leadership played out over many decades, Cincinnati has offered me an important lens through which both to see the general applicability of Jick's analysis and to recognize that close study of a single community can continue to illuminate the broader story of the "Americanization of the Synagogue."

An examination of the internecine struggles that defined Cincinnati's Jewish congregations during the 1840s and 1850s period seems to sustain much of Jick's central premise. ⁴ Congregations Bene Israel (founded in 1824) and B'nai Yeshurun (founded in 1842), although strictly orthodox in the 1840s and early 1850s, would later become two of the pioneering and leading Reform congregations in the country. In these early years, community members often dismissed what early rabbinic-like figures had to...