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1 Introduction The founding of the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith—Hebrew for “Sons of the Covenant”—in New York City in 1843 sparked the development and dissemination of a new Jewish identity in America. This identity was a sign of American Judaism’s profound integration into both the public sphere and the civil self-image of the United States, and it continues to influence the Jewish community today.1 It is based on the construction of explicitly Jewish civil virtues—emphasizing reason, education, character, morality, and humanity as elements of a modern Jewish identity—coupled with the notion of social universality, thus allowing them to unfold on a society-wide basis. After all, it was believed that it is only the interaction between a person’s individual virtue and universal sociability that allows human action to develop a truly “civil” society, based on the interaction of free, equal, and reasonable individuals .2 In the eighteenth century, the Jews’ desire for civil emancipation and embourgeoisement was articulated by European Jews and also promoted by territorial rulers in their efforts to transform their various groups of subjects into modern citizens. In the course of this modernization process, some branches of Judaism viewed traditional lifestyles and the Jewish particularism they promoted as barriers on the path to a civil identity that would supposedly preserve Jewish identity. Thus, within Judaism a young, enlightened , and secularly educated intellectual leadership supported efforts for a religious reform that would allow Jews to develop a modern civil identity alongside their religious identity. This led to the formation of the Reform movement within Judaism, originally a loose group of modern Jewish theologians who sought to reformulate the historical mission of Judaism: they viewed it not as a particularist obligation but rather as a universalistic I N T RO D U C T I O N 2 “mission of Judaism toward humanity,” a special duty to put Judaism’s eternal , unadulterated content into practice, leading it out of the narrow world of the congregation or synagogue and into society as part of the civil world. To this end, modern Jewish identity would need to assume a form that could communicate itself to civil society, find its “place” there beyond the dogmatictheological sphere, and make itself accessible to a broad lay community. In central Europe, attempts at both secular and religious reform and civil emancipation regularly clashed with traditional religious structures and with the state authorities, who approached the legal emancipation of Judaism in a sluggish and often contradictory manner. These difficulties persuaded many Jews to immigrate to the United States.3 Between 1840 and 1870, a total of more than six million European immigrants reached the United States.4 One hundred forty thousand of them were Jewish immigrants who arrived from the German-speaking countries of central Europe during this period. They represented the first major wave of German Jewish immigrants, and they were not unacquainted with religious modernization tendencies.5 Since the days of Moses Mendelssohn in the eighteenth century, the Jewish intellectual elite and a growing new generation of educated middle-class Jews had been discussing ways to make a new, modern Judaism part of civil society.6 In concert with social emancipation , steps were taken toward a religious reform of Judaism oriented to the critique of reason. This was pursued by the laity and young rabbis to ensure the survival of the Jewish religion in the modern world. However, the implementation of their ideas was blocked by the established Jewish intellectual elite, who were not prepared to deviate from their traditional positions, and by the states, which regulated the organization of religion.7 In the United States, religious freedom and the strict separation of church and state had been laid down in the First Amendment to the Constitution in 1791 and represented one of the foundations of the American commonwealth in contrast to the old European order.8 Here, Jews were essentially ordered to take part in the public discourse in an unprecedented manner. Thus, they suddenly were forced to prove that Jewish identity could be combined with a civil American identity. Civil emancipation—at least for men— was effectively achieved through the mere act of immigration; freedom of religion and the separation of church and state largely prevented the exclusion of Jews. In the mid-nineteenth century the order’s founders, all of them immigrants from German or German-speaking territories in central Europe, established a Jewish lay...

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