RICHARD ROSENTHAL

law and may be abolished. Kaufman Kohler challenged him, not on the abolition of the rite, but on his scholarship. Kohler was to have the final voice after a bitter debate. The resolution as rewritten by Kohler finally passed twenty-five ayes to five nays. Four of the nays wrote brief statements which explained their vote against the resolution: They were afraid, in the words of Maurice H. Harris , that"the admission of proselytes without milah(sic) is the entering wedge for the abolition of this rite altogether."® The vote probably did not reflect the true opinion of the Conference. A few older members held back, younger members, recent Hebrew Union College graduates must have been in favor; the majority of the members of the CCAR were not in attendance at the convention. The resolution was certainly never questioned again.

What can we conclude from this?(1) The character of the Reform movement was shaped by this debate. Moshe Davis called it the"point of no return" separating the Reformers from the Historical School.'* Reform Jews were certainly distinct from the newly arriving Eastern European Jews and their rabbinic leaders(to whom this entire debate must have seemed like nonsense). Ethical culture and Unitarians saw in the platform a break with universalism and an insistence on Jewish uniqueness.(2) No great multitudes awaited enlightenment, but it made conversion for the sake of marriage easier and realistically possible.(3) It is interesting to note that only one of the discussants in the large amount of material published in the Central Conference of American Rabbis Yearbook of 1891 actually mentioned pain. Adolph Moses'* wrote: "The pain is excruciating, the wound takes between four and five weeks to heal." Jewish tradition took this difficulty in consideration by postponing immersion until after the convert had healed from the circumcision. In fact, the Rambam states that one should not immerse before circumcision because he might find the circumcision too difficult and the immersion would have made him Jewish already.’(4) By relinquishing control of the body, the nature of the body of Israel was dramatically redefined. Israel was seen as

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