96 Mark Washofsky

halakhic discourse, apply that discourse against the backdrop of the social upheavals of the Enlightenment and the Emancipation ? In this, I follow in the footsteps of the late Professor Jacob Katz , the preeminent scholar of the social history of the Jews during that period.® In his Hahalakhah bemeitzar’ Katz charts the course of the ideological and religious battles in central Europe between the newly­emerging Orthodox community and its secular(or religiously reformist) opponents. He notes that the Orthodox reaction to the “deviant” religious behavior of their early- to mid-19th century co­religionists differs significantly from the stance that the leading rabbis had taken with respect to similar challenges in ancient and medieval times.® The classical halakhah, as we shall see, defines the Jew who abandons the discipline of halakhic observance, and particularly the observance of the Sabbath and its prohibited labors, as a mumar, an apostate, who in some cases may be deserving of death but in any case ought to be excluded from the Jewish community.’ Accordingly, earlier rabbis had pronounced bans of excommunication upon those who turned away from the path of Torah law. By contrast, the halakhic authorities of 19™ century Europe , who were increasingly becoming identified as a specifically Orthodox rabbinate, saw themselves as lacking the power to do the same. This difference, in Katz ’s view, reflects the deep change that the Enlightenment and the Emancipation had brought about in the concept of Jewish identity. In an increasingly secular era, one’s communal attachments are determined by factors other than religion. Thus, in their own eyes as well as in the eyes of their Gentile neighbors, Jews were Jews not necessarily by virtue of their acceptance of an official theology or ritual discipline but rather by dint of their common origins and their cultural distinctiveness. The Jews , in other words, were now a people , and even Orthodox rabbis found it difficult to deny a Jew his membership in the people of Israel solely on the basis of his lack of religious observance. The halakhic