had to accommodate to the radically new social, philosophical, and economic conditions of the Greco-Roman Empires. Others had conquered ancient Israel and even taken large population groups into exile, but this conquest was more long lasting and different. Alongside political domination there were strong cultural and philosophical challenges. The intellectual world of Judaism had to defend itself as never before. Most Jews , furthermore, no longer lived within the borders of the conquered Jewish land. A variety of groups provided possible future directions for Judaism , and the Pharisees were the most successful among them. They enabled Judaism to accommodate itself to the new conditions. Over a number of centuries, they renewed Scripture through hermeneutic interpretational systems. The Torah took on new meanings. The“oral law” further extended the scope of the Torah and served as a companion to the written Torah . The new system eliminated many economic restrictions by limiting them to the Land of Israel at a time when most Jews lived outside the land and so they could be competitive. Similarly, the prosbul made it possible for a society with a different economic basis to flourish. In addition to all of this, religious life was redefined through the creation of the synagogue and of family law that existed only in outline form in the Bible , was expanded. This creativity continued through the period of the Mishnah and the Talmud .
Other groups within the community had other solutions or opposed the Pharisees . Even within the ranks of the new rabbinic Pharisaic Judaism , leaders disagreed about what was legitimate. How should Judaism be reinterpreted? The famous debates between Hillel and Shamai were only the best known of these disagreements. The many centuries of dynamic creativity and internal tensions have been well outlined by modern scholarship.
Judaism in the last two centuries has faced the same kind of cultural and philosophical challenges. It has also needed to adapt. Reform Judaism and, later, Conservative Judaism have followed this path with many internal divergent points of view.
We can trace some of these developments by looking at the changing attitude toward women in the Reform movement. Sometimes this was a reaction to external pressures; at other times internal motivations were at work. We shall begin not with Moses Mendelssohn , but with the abrupt call to modernity