126 Joan S. Friedman

of the Jewish court in all the periods of the exile.” Jewish “civil law” was not necessarily distinctive, as were the practices governed by Jewish “religious law,” but the broader the scope allowed to Jewish civil law, the more distinctive the Jewish polity was as a whole. Maintaining juridical autonomy was therefore desirable. It was difficult, however, to maintain the authority of Jewish courts when they lacked powers of enforcement. The inescapable historical observation is that Jewish courts adjudi­cated matters of mamon when the Gentile government allowed and enforced such jurisdiction or when Jews voluntarily submit­ted to their jurisdiction(which usually meant only until A or B realized s/he could obtain a more favorable verdict by going to the Gentile courts). Yet even when Jewish civil jurisdiction was minimal, as it was in many early modern German communi­ties,” Jews did not conclude from that, as Freehof does here, that they would or should abandon“religious” law as a corollary.”

Here we see revealed yet another element of Freehof’s Reform lens. For Reform Judaism , the end of separate Jewish sta­tus and the integration of the Jews into western societies as a religious group was an unmixed blessing. Emancipation brought the abrogation of Jewish “civil law” and made it possible for Reformers to create a new definition of Judaism -as-religion-only using a western, Protestant paradigm of“religion” in which dine mammonot were ipso facto defined as not“religious” because the very category of law had no place in religion, other than the divinely revealed moral law. For traditionalists it was not an unmixed blessing, because it removed the communal structure within which Jewish life had always existed.” Thus in conflating the post-Emancipation non-functioning of halakhah in the realm of mamon with the abandonment of ritual practices, Freehof offers an ideological historiography to complement his ideolog­ical reading of halakha.

But if, as Freehof has it, the abandonment of Jewish civil law is only the first step on an inevitable continuum of change in “practice,” if all realms of Jewish law are alike in that they are equally subject to the transformatory winds of modernity and the people’s decision to abandon them or change them, then they were also alike in the past, in the people’s decision to create them. Hence, for Freehof, there is no contradiction in using J. Bava Metzia, which deals with mamon, as justification for changes in rit­ual or“religious” practice. Elon’s taxonomy and the conceptual