s that the religion of the Jew must square with his life;
the needs of the Jew in the modern environment must be taken into
consideration by Jewish leaders; Reform Judaism, far from making a
separation and raising a barrier between the Jew and life, as those
who call us reformed sectarians like to say--quite to the contrary,
reconciles the Jew to the civilization in which he is living and
wherein his children are growing up. This, to my mind, is the great
significance of the Reform movement, and I believe that all those who
truly understand it look upon it in that way.

The Reform movement, as the movement for religious emancipation, was
the accompaniment of similar emancipatory movements affecting the Jews
at the close of the eighteenth century. First there was the linguistic
emancipation when under the leadership of Moses Mendelssohn the Jews
of Germany discarded the use of the German-Jewish jargon or Yiddish,
the language of the Jew's degradation, (for there would have been no
such thing as Yiddish had the Jew not been degraded and excluded as he
was in the countries of Europe) and began the employment of pure
German. Secondly, there was the educational emancipation. The Jews had
been educated in _chedarim_ where they received instruction only in
Hebrew branches and no so-called secular education whatsoever. This
separated the Jew from the culture of the world. At the close of the
eighteenth century German Jews began to attend schools and
universities. Gradually this took place also in other countries.
Thirdly, there was the civil or political emancipation, when after the
French Revolution the countries of western Europe, one after the
other, accorded the Jews the rights of men. The Reform movement or, in
other words, the religious emancipation, is simply the result of great
world forces, as embodied in these various aspects of emancipation,
and for this reason the Reform movement, far from being simply a
matter of creed or theological belief, made the Jew a citizen of the
world and fitted him for the modern environment.

_The "Body and Soul" of Jewry_

Now there is one other point made by the previous speaker to which I
feel that I must refer and that is the matter of "body and soul."
This is a favorite phrase of Zionist writers and speakers as
emphasizing the difference between Zionists and reformers. We
reformers also believe that the body Jewish is necessary, but in a
sense different from the Zionistic claim