Reforming Ritual

Abstract

Chapter Three follows the projects of Moshe Leib Lilienblum and other male Jewish writers in the 1860s to 1880s who used the popular press and literature to promote religious reforms, and it analyzes the consequences of such efforts in the formation of Jewish Orthodoxy. Imperial attention to women’s status in native law, as well as family breakdown due to epidemics and mass migration, moved questions of gender and sexuality—especially bigamy and levirate divorce (ḥalitsah)—to the center of Jewish critiques of rabbinic legalism and ritual practice. In the 1880s, Christianizing Jewish sects, which rejected the Talmud and much of Jewish ritual, overshadowed moderate reform programs. The chapter closes with the failed experiment of Naum Pereferkovich to open a self-proclaimed Reform Jewish community in St. Petersburg in 1909.