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Jewish Theological Seminary

Jewish immigration to the United States bred an amalgam of loose communities, lacking strong tradition or stable structures. In this free-spirited environment, a multitude of forces was at work. As early as 1866, Rabbi Jonas Bondi of New York wrote that a Judaism of the "golden middleway, which was termed Orthodox by the left and heterodox or reformer by the right" developed in the new country. The rapid ascendancy of Reform Judaism by the 1880s left few who opposed it, merely a handful of congregations and ministers remained outside the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. These included Sabato Morais and Rabbi Henry Pereira Mendes of the elitist Sephardi congregations, along with rabbis Bernard Drachman (ordained at Breslau, though he regarded himself as Orthodox) and Henry Schneeberger.

While spearheaded by radical and principled Reformers like Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, the UAHC was also home to more conservative elements. President Isaac Meyer Wise, a pragmatist intent on compromise, hoped to forge a broad consensus that would turn a moderate version of Reform to dominant in America. He kept the dietary laws at home and attempted to assuage traditionalists. On 11 July 1883, apparently due to negligence by the Jewish caterer, non-kosher dishes were served to UAHC rabbis in Wise's presence. Known to posterity as the " trefa banquet ", it purportedly made some guests abandon the hall in disgust, but little is factually known about the incident. In 1885, the traditionalist forces were bolstered upon the arrival of Rabbi Alexander Kohut, an adherent of Frankel. He publicly excoriated Reform for disdaining ritual and received forms, triggering a heated polemic with Kohler. The debate was one of the main factors which motivated the latter to compose the Pittsburgh Platform, which unambiguously declared the principles of Reform Judaism: "to-day we accept as binding only the moral laws, and maintain only such ceremonies as elevate and sanctify our lives."

The explicit wording alienated a handful of conservative UAHC ministers: Henry Hochheimer, Frederick de Sola Mendes, Aaron Wise, Marcus Jastrow, and Benjamin Szold. They joined Kohut, Morais and the others in seeking to establish a traditional rabbinic seminary that would serve as a counterweight to Hebrew Union College. In 1886, they founded the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City. Kohut, professor of Talmud who held to the Positive-Historical ideal, was the main educational influence in the early years, prominent among the founders who encompassed the entire spectrum from progressive Orthodox to the brink of Reform; to describe what the seminary intended to espouse, he used the term "Conservative Judaism", which had no independent meaning at the time and was only in relation to Reform. In 1898, Pereira Mendes, Schneeberger and Drachman also founded the Orthodox Union, which maintained close ties with the seminary.

The JTS was a small, fledgling institution with financial difficulties, and was ordaining merely a rabbi per year. But soon after Chancellor Morais' death in 1897, its fortunes turned. Since 1881, a wave of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe was inundating the country—by 1920, 2.5 million of them had arrived, increasing American Jewry tenfold. They came from regions where civil equality or emancipation were never granted, while acculturation and modernization made little headway. Whether devout or irreligious, they mostly retained strong traditional sentiments in matters of faith, accustomed to old-style rabbinate; the hardline Agudas HaRabbanim, founded by emigrant clergy, opposed secular education or vernacular sermons, and its members spoke almost only Yiddish. The Eastern Europeans were alienated by the local Jews, who were all assimilated in comparison, and especially aghast by the mores of Reform. The need to find a religious framework that would both accommodate and Americanize them motivated Jacob Schiff and other rich philanthropists, all Reform and of German descent, to donate $500,000 to the JTS. The contribution was solicited by Professor Cyrus Adler. It was conditioned on the appointment of Solomon Schechter as Chancellor. In 1901, the Rabbinical Assembly was established as the fraternity of JTS alumni.

Schechter arrived in 1902, and at once reorganized the faculty, dismissing both Pereira Mendes and Drachman for lack of academic merit. Under his aegis, the institute began to draw famous scholars, becoming a center of learning on par with HUC. Schechter was both traditional in sentiment and quite unorthodox in conviction. He maintained that theology was of little importance and it was practice that must be preserved. He aspired to solicit unity in American Judaism, denouncing sectarianism and not perceiving himself as leading a new denomination: "not to create a new party, but to consolidate an old one". The need to raise funds convinced him that a congregational arm for the Rabbinical Assembly and the JTS was required. On 23 February 1913, he founded the United Synagogue of America (since 1991: United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism), which then consisted of 22 communities. He and Mendes first came to major disagreement; Schechter insisted that any alumnus could be appointed to the USoA's managerial board, and not just to serve as communal rabbi, including several the latter did not consider sufficiently devout, or who tolerated mixed seating in their synagogues (though some of those he still regarded as Orthodox). Mendes, president of the Orthodox Union, therefore refused to join. He began to distinguish between the "Modern Orthodoxy" of himself and his peers in the OU, and "Conservatives" who tolerated what was beyond the pale for him. However, this first sign of institutionalization and separation was far from conclusive. Mendes himself could not clearly differentiate between the two groups, and many he viewed as Orthodox were members of the USoA. The epithets "Conservative" and "Orthodox" remained interchangeable for decades to come. JTS graduates served in OU congregations; many students of the Orthodox Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary and members of the OU's Rabbinical Council of America, or RCA, attended it. In 1926, RIETS and the JTS even negotiated a possible merger, though it was never materialized. Upon Schechter's death in 1915, the first generation of his disciples kept his non-sectarian legacy of striving for a united, traditional American Judaism. He was replaced by Cyrus Adler.

The USoA grew rapidly as the Eastern European immigrant population slowly integrated. In 1923 it already had 150 affiliated communities, and 229 before 1930. Synagogues offered a more modernized ritual: English sermons, choir singing, late Friday evening services which tacitly acknowledging that most had to work until after the Sabbath began, and often mixed-gender seating. Men and women sat separately with no partition, and some houses of prayer already introduced family pews. Motivated by popular pressure and frowned upon by both RA and seminary faculty—in its own synagogue, the institute maintained a partition until 1983—this was becoming common among the OU as well. As both social conditions and apathy turned American Jews away from tradition (barely 20 per cent were attending prayers weekly), a young professor named Mordecai Kaplan promoted the idea of transforming the synagogue into a community center, a "Shul with a Pool", a policy which indeed stymied the tide somewhat.

In 1927, the RA also established its own Committee of Jewish Law, entrusted with determining halakhic issues. Consisting of seven members, it was chaired by the traditionalist Rabbi Louis Ginzberg, who already distinguished himself in 1922, drafting a responsa that allowed the use of grape juice rather than fermented wine for Kiddush on the background of Prohibition. Kaplan himself, who rose to become an influential and popular figure within the JTS, concluded that his fellow rabbis' ambiguity in matters of belief and the contradiction between full observance and critical study were untenable and hypocritical. He formulated his own approach of Judaism as a Civilization, rejecting the concept of Revelation and any supernatural belief in favour of a cultural-ethnic perception. While valuing received mores, he eventually suggested giving the past "a vote, not a veto". Though popular among students, Kaplan's nascent Reconstructionism was opposed by the new traditionalist Chancellor Louis Finkelstein, appointed in 1940, and a large majority among the faculty.

Tensions within the JTS and RA grew. The Committee of Jewish Law consisted mainly of scholars who had little field experience, almost solely from the seminary's Talmudic department. They were greatly concerned with halakhic licitness and indifferent to the pressures exerted on the pulpit rabbis, who had to contend with an Americanized public which cared little for such considerations or for tradition in general. In 1935, the RA almost adopted a groundbreaking motion: Rabbi Louis Epstein offered a solution to the agunah predicament, a clause that would have had husbands appoint wives as their proxies to issue divorce. It was repealed under pressure from the Orthodox Union. As late as 1947, CJL Chair Rabbi Boaz Cohen, himself a historicist who argued that the Law evolved much through time, rebuked pulpit clergy who requested lenient or radical rulings, stating he and his peers were content to "progress in inches... Free setting up of new premises and the introduction of novel categories of ritual upon the basis of pure reason and thinking would be perilous, if not fatal, to the principles and continuity of Jewish Law."