10 Peter Haas The civil code of law for the German Empire (the so-called biirgerliches Gesetzbuch), which was based on this historical study, finally went into effect only in1900.

The relevance of these nationalistic and philosophical deliberations in the university for the reform of German Jewry hardly needs spelling out. While the first generation of reformers saw reform largely in terms of ad hoc changes in the liturgy and relaxation of halakhic requirements in public, the university-trained rabbis who had taken over leadership by mid-century clearly saw the need for a thorough, systematic, and philosophically rigorous revision of the whole halakhic system. To be sure, there were a few early attempts to tinker with the halakhic system, attempts that included the publication of a number of early reform responsa justifying various specific halakhic reforms. But it soon became clear that not only would this approach not change the mind of anyone not already convinced, but it also missed the real question. The problem was not with this or that particular norm, practice, or minhag, but with the system as a whole. Change could not be incremental but would have to be systemic. The contemporary legal experience of Europe , I am arguing, served as an instructive model here. The French revolution was not able to bring France into the forefront of the modern world by tinkering with the statutes of the Ancien Régime . Rather, the entire medieval legal legacy had to be thrown out and a whole new system of law set forth. Germany itself was now undergoing this same process, albeit in slower motion. Reform Judaism now came to see itself in precisely the same situation. It should hardly come as a surprise, then, that the debates within the Reform Jewish synods of the 1840s should have echoed the disputes raging at exactly the same moment in the halls of the universities.

There is another aspect of all this that bears mentioning because there is a connection with religion here, as well. This period also saw the beginning of what has come to be called“High Biblical Criticism.” This in turn was linked to a significant extent to the need