“We Are Not Reformers”

Abstract

Chapter Four explores Jewish religious differentiation in the late Russian Empire, the terms Jews and the imperial state used to describe this diversity, and how the Russian Revolution of 1905 politicized religious difference. The religious reform programs of the tsarist state and Jewish activists like Moshe Leib Lilienblum and Naum Pereferkovich did not produce an official reformation of Judaism in late imperial Russia. The language and threat/promise of reform, however, wielded considerable power in progressive and Orthodox Jewish circles as these competing groups tried to shape a Judaism at once favored by the state and aligned with the ideas, practices, and sensibilities of a diverse Russian Jewry. As liberal Jews became less interested in law as the definition of religion, they distanced themselves from the language of reform.