The Arguments That Forged American Judaism

We Jews are an argumentative people. We come by it honestly: Jews have been arguing since Abraham verbally jousted with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. The Talmud, the revered body of Jewish civil and ceremonial law, is essentially one long argument, in which rabbis debated matters from the grand to the petty as they crafted a new Jewish society removed from the ancient holy land.

So it should come as no surprise that when Jews began immigrating to another new land, the fledgling United States, their arguments burst into the open. Unfettered by Old World tradition, free to explore alternative theologies and modes of worship, Jews in 19th-century America grafted new ways onto old and shaped the modern Judaism we recognize today.