the rise and development of the Haskalah
movement in Russia, Jewry in the German-speaking countries tested the
validity both of the rationalistic and of the historic method. The
Reform movement was at first, like the Haskalah movement, little more
than a diluted cosmopolitanism. A typical case is that of David
Friedlander and his friends, who began by reforming the worship in
harmony with modern ideas and the changed social position of the Jews,
and ended in offering to accept Christianity, if they would not be
required to believe in Jesus and could be exempted from the observance
of certain ceremonies. Influenced by the general reaction against
rationalistic tendencies and by the rise of Jewish Wissenschaft, the
Reform movement has had to reckon with the historic method of
adjustment. But that influence has not been strong enough to overcome
its early rationalistic bias from which it suffers to this very day.

The historic method was applied with far more thoroughness and
consistency by the advocates of Historical Judaism. Zunz, Frankel,
Graetz, Herzfeld, Luzzatto and Joel drew the line between adaptation
and assimilation. They laid down the principle that it was fatuous to
speak of a religion adjusting itself when it breaks so completely with
the past as to be unrecognizable. In our anxiety to have Judaism
conform to the needs of the age, we must take care lest we create an
altogether new religion and label it Judaism. Intellectual honesty
demands that we give due heed to the principle of identity, so that
the sameness in our Judaism and that of our fathers be greater than
the difference between them. They therefore applied themselves to the
task of reconstructing the past by dint not of logic and
phrase-mongering, but of patient, plodding search after facts strewn
in the most out-of-the-way by-paths of literature, with the
consequence that they discovered an impassable gulf between the
Judaism of history and the Judaism of the Reform movement. We shall
never be able to discharge fully our debt of gratitude to these Jewish
scholars and historians who have given us, in place of a few vague
and detached memories, a past rich in content and inspiration. But
what they did was only to lay the foundation of the Judaism of the
future. A foundation affords poor shelter against the hail and sleet
of a bleak wintry day. Of what avail is it to keep on forever hugging
the cold foundation stones, when we should be engaged in build