14 Peter Haas

at Sinai. Using this view, any change must be a turn away from perfection and truth, a view that leads directly to Moses Sofer ’s dictum that“Kol hadash asur min hatorah.” But to the ear of a German legal academic, Geiger’s statement sounds like the restatement of current progressive academic presuppositions as regards the study of law in general. What Geiger has done is to position Jewish legal reform within the larger context of German legal philosophy, showing at the same time that the Reform movement was in line with the latest academic insights. The rewriting of halakhah was not just an internal squabble within Judaism but a movement to rearticulate Jewish law in step with the rearticulation of European law in the modern age.

Within this conceptualization, of course, emerges the debate as to the extent to which a legislative body is free to construct modern law. For those more oriented around positivism, the legislators, or synods, had pretty much a free hand to enact what changes they saw as necessary in light of reason and current needs. The historicist movement was meant to counter this by requiring that the historical voice of the Volk be given a hearing. That is, modern legislators have to be constrained by what Savigny called“the common consciousness of the people.”

This stance should sound familiar to anyone who has read the debates in the Reform synods of the mid-nineteenth century. Let me just cite one example, this one from Zacharias Frankel from his“On Changes in Judaism”(1845):

True Judaism demands religious activity, but the people is not altogether

mere clay to be molded by the will of the theologians and scholars. In

religious activities, as in those of ordinary life, it decides for itself. This right was conceded by Judaism to the people. At such times as an earlier religious ordinance was not accepted by the entire community of Israel , it was given up. Consequently, when a new ordinance was about to be enacted it was necessary to see whether it would find acceptance by the people. When the

a certain practices to fall into disuse, then the practices cease to

€XI1St.

What I hope I have made clear is that the shaping of the German Jewish attitude toward halakhah and changes in halakhah is deeply