From Russian Orthodox circles too arose the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a fraudulent documentation of an alleged international Jewish conspiracy to conquer the world by subverting the social order through liberalism, Freemasonry, and other modern movements. The concoction appeared about the turn of the 20th century and was proved to be a forgery by 1921. Despite this demonstration, the Protocols was widely used in anti-Semitic propaganda in Europe, the United States, and the Arab world into the 21st century.
In the 20th century, Jews and Christians moved toward mutual understanding. Although many Christians continued to hold irrational and hostile attitudes toward Jews, some liberal Christian voices were raised against anti-Semitism in the early decades of the century. In the United States the National Conference of Christians and Jews was founded in 1928 in response to the virulent anti-Semitism propagated in Henry Ford’s newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. Some Christian leaders spoke out during the 1930s against the Nazi persecution of the Jews, but the majority of Christian leaders in Europe remained silent, even during the Holocaust. In 1946, however, the World Council of Churches denounced anti-Semitism, and in 1965 the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church adopted the schema on the Jews and other non-Christian religions, which formally revised the church’s traditional attitude toward the Jews as the killers of Christ. A growing feeling of ecumenism was shared between Jews and Christians; indeed, Pope John Paul II made improved relations between Catholics and Jews a hallmark of his papacy. Although there remain many difficulties related to the question of the place that Zionism and the State of Israel hold within Judaism, the older forms of official church anti-Semitism have been radically diminished. Zionism
The most striking of the new phenomena in Jewish life was Zionism, which, insofar as it focused on the return to Zion (the poetic term for the Holy Land), recalled older religious themes. Because it stressed the establishment of a secular state, however, Zionism was yet another example of the secularization of Jewish life and of Jewish messianism. In its secular aspects, Zionism attempted to complete the emancipation of the Jews by transforming them into a nation like all other nations. Although it drew upon the general currents of 19th-century European nationalism, its major impetus came from the revival of a virulent form of racist anti-Semitism in the last decades of the 19th century, as noted above. Zionism reacted to anti-Semitic contentions that the Jews were aliens in European society and could never hope to be integrated into it in significant numbers; it transformed this charge into a basic premise of a program of national regeneration and resettlement. Zionism has come to occupy roughly the same place in Jewish life as the Social Gospel did in Christian life. Involvement in Israel as the new centre of Jewish energies, creativity, and renewal served as a kind of secular religion for many Diaspora Jews. American Judaism
The history of Judaism in the United States is the story of several fresh beginnings. In the colonial period the character of the tiny American Jewish community was shaped by the earliest Sephardic immigrants. The community was officially Orthodox but, unlike European Jewish communities, was voluntaristic, and by the early 19th century much of the younger generation had moved away from the faith. By the mid-19th century a new wave of central European immigrants revived the declining community and remade it to serve their own needs. Primarily small shopkeepers and traders, the new immigrants migrated westward, founding new Jewish centres that were almost entirely controlled by laymen.
Temple Emmanuel synagogue, New York City, 1896.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Life on the frontier in an open society created a predisposition for religious reform, and it is significant that the greatest American Reform Jewish leader of the 19th century, Isaac Mayer Wise (1819–1900), was based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Wise sought to unite all of American Jewry in the new nontraditional institutions that he founded: the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (1873), Hebrew Union College (1875), and the Central Conference of American Rabbis (1889); but his ever more radical reforming spirit ultimately drove traditionalist elements into opposition.
The head of the traditionalists was Isaac Leeser (1806–68), a native of Germany, who had attempted to create an indigenous American community along the lines of a modernized traditionalism. After his death, Conservative forces became disorganized, but, in reaction to Reform, they defined themselves by their attachment to the Sabbath, the dietary laws, and especially to Hebrew as the language of prayer. Under the leadership of Sabato Morais (1823–97), a traditional Sephardic Jew of Italian birth, Conservative circles in 1886 founded a rabbinic seminary of their own, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
The eastern European immigrants who moved in large numbers to American shores from 1881 to 1914 were profoundly different in culture and manners from the older elements of the American Jewish community, and they and their descendants have made American Judaism what it is today. The bridge between the existing Jewish community led by German Jews of Reform persuasion and the new immigrant masses was the traditionalist element among the older settlers. A traditionalist, Cyrus Adler (1863–1940), cooperated with the German Reform circle of Jacob Schiff (1847–1920) in reorganizing the Jewish Theological Seminary (1902) and other institutions for the purpose of Americanizing the eastern European immigrants. Enough eastern European rabbis and scholars had immigrated, however, to create their own synagogues, which reproduced the customs of the Old World. In 1880 almost all of the 200 Jewish congregations in the United States were Reform, but by 1890 there were 533 synagogues, and most of the new ones founded by immigrant groups were Orthodox. The Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, which was established in 1898 by elements associated with the Jewish Theological Seminary, was soon taken over by Yiddish-speaking recent immigrants for whom the seminary was much too liberal. In 1902 immigrant rabbis also formed their own body, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada (the Agudath ha-Rabbanim), which fostered the creation of yeshivas (rabbinic academies) of the old type. In 1915 two small yeshivas, Etz Chaim and Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Theological Seminary, merged and undertook a program of further growth, adding Yeshiva College of secular studies in 1928 and becoming Yeshiva University in 1945. The eastern European Orthodox elements concentrated primarily on Jewish education, and it was they who introduced the movement for Jewish day schools, analogous to Christian parochial schools. Gradually, an American version of Orthodoxy developed on the Neo-Orthodox model of Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88), which combined institutional separatism with a certain openness to general culture.
The immigrants and their children had three desires: to advance socially by joining older congregations or forming their own in an Americanized image, to affirm an unideological commitment to Jewish life, and to maintain their ties to the overseas Jewish communities of their origin. With their strong sense of Jewish personhood, they introduced Zionism into American Jewish life and accepted the basic ideas of the Reconstructionism of Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983), which was committed to Zionism. A small group of anti-Zionists remained a significant force in the 1930s and ’40s, but their central organization, the American Council for Judaism, represented the descendants of earlier German Jewish immigrants. The later immigrants took over all the earlier institutions of the Jewish community and imbued them with their own spirit.
American Jewish religious life is a continuum, from the most traditional Orthodoxy to the most radical Reconstructionism. In theory, all Orthodox groups agree on the revealed nature of all of Jewish law. For Reform groups, the moral doctrine of Judaism is divine and its ritual law is man-made; Conservatives see Judaism as the working out in both areas of a divine revelation that is incarnate in a slowly changing human history; and the Reconstructionists (who also include some Conservative and Reform Jews) view Judaism as the evolving civilization created by the Jewish people in the light of its highest conscience. The role of the rabbi is substantially the same in all three groups: no longer a Talmudic scholar but a preacher, pastor, and administrator, a cross between a parish priest and the leader of an ethnic group. Religious life for the three major Jewish denominations—Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative—revolves around the individual synagogue and the denomination to which it belongs. As religious identification has become increasingly respectable in American life, the Jews have followed the American norm, affiliating in greater numbers with synagogues, though often for ethnic or social rather than religious reasons. Judaism in other lands