Redefining Judaism in Imperial Germany: Practices, Mentalities, and Community

Abstract

We may modify these assumptions by pointing to the rich variety of Judaisms that evolved in Imperial Germany. Using the perspective of a school of history known in Germany as Alltagsgeschichte,2 the history of everyday life, we can focus on how changing structures (such as urbanization) and cultural shifts affect subjective experiences. Alltagsgeschichte reveals the qualitative aspects of ordinary people's existencetheir emotions, perceptions, and mentalities. It can illuminate the multiple ways in which individuals interpreted and refashioned their religious beliefs and behaviors.3 Jewish religious life changed unevenly, incorporating a multiplicity of voices and practices in perpetual motion. Two major developments within Judaism, themselves products of their changing times, provided the setting within whichJews could choose how they wished to worship and how they wished to manage their religious lives outside the synagogue: the Reform Movement, which spanned the nineteenth century and attracted increasing numbers of German Jews;4 and modern Orthodoxy, which remained a viable religious movement almost every-

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