Essay Preview: JewsReport this essayPapal States, which existed until 1870, Jews were required to live only in specified neighborhoods called ghettos. Until the 1840s, they were required to regularly attend sermons urging their conversion to Christianity. Only Jews were taxed to support state boarding schools for Jewish converts to Christianity. It was illegal to convert from Christianity to Judaism. Sometimes Jews were baptized involuntarily, and, even when such baptisms were illegal, forced to practice the Christian religion. In many such cases the state separated them from their families. See Edgardo Mortara for an account of one of the most widely publicized instances of acrimony between Catholics and Jews in the Papal States in the second half of the 19th century.
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When the Romans attacked Sicily in 70 BC, they had many, many enemies to contend with. With his help, their naval forces, backed by infantry and small arms fire, managed to force a peace treaty among the Christian tribes. The Romans also had an ally, the Roman Catholic Church, which began to establish a powerful monopoly over all goods which were “contradicted” from Roman commerce, as well as trade, agriculture and military goods. This monopoly also extended more to Jewish merchants who could serve the Romans, so as to increase the cost of making goods for Roman merchants. The Roman Catholic Church continued to supply the Jews with cheap meat and even manufactured clothes for the use of Jewish people who were able to survive the wars. The fact that the Romans were once again at war with the most powerful political power over the world also lent themselves to many of the “papalists” who hoped the Papal States would be an obstacle to a peace settlement. These papal citizens included a number of Christian clergymen and leaders from around the world, who became prominent among the Romans during the Roman period.
On the other hand, some of the Roman Catholics who became known as the “Catholic Mafia” were relatively unknown to American political elites, such as John Quincy Adams. He was the first American politician to be accused of supporting a “communist” conspiracy to destroy the American Constitution in the 1920’s.
Catholic Mass attendance
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Many Jews and other non-Jews attended the Mass outside their homes, because they were considered to have been “religious freedom” victims. When the Jews were forced to convert to Christianity after their conversion, they were treated as having “religious liberty,” and the only people deemed “religious” were those who converted to Judaism because of their “religious freedom.” Such actions had no effect on their religious conviction. The Roman Catholic Church itself was heavily influenced by Christianity. During periods of religious tension the Church worked with the Jewish community to ensure that every person in the Roman Catholic Church and Jewish community in general were fully religious, but there was also a growing anti-Catholic community at home. [See a link.]
Jewish History
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Jewish history and conversion
There is no good historical description of what it meant to be Jewish. Most people who identify with the Jews in general, regardless of their beliefs, choose to identify with one or more faiths. There are several reasons for this choice, such as the fact that Judaism is the only religion that offers a satisfactory explanation for why Jewish people are so different from the rest of the world.
Jews also had quite a bit of social interaction. Their lives were organized in different ways. They had different lives, and their families were organized differently from other Christians and Christian individuals, such
In the 1840s, in contrast to the early American model of synagogues run by a hazan (cantor) or lay leadership, immigrant rabbis began to assume the pulpits of American synagogues. Some sought to promote Orthodoxy, while others merged the ideology of German Jewish Reform with the practices of American Protestant denominations and created a new American version of Reform Judaism. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise of Cincinnati, a leader of American Reform Judaism, sought to develop a Minhag-America (American liturgical custom) that would unite Jews around moderate Reform Judaism. The founding of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (1873) and Hebrew Union College (1875) in Cincinnati sought to actualize his vision. But even as rabbis hoped to unite the community, the greatest legacy of the so-called “German period” is actually Jewish religious diversity. By the Civil War, every American Jewish congregation had at least two synagogues, and major ones had four or more.
The Reform period of American Jewish life started in the first decade of the 20th century. Reform churches merged with Jewish congregations in the mid-19th century. From that point on, America had lost more of its original congregations, and American Reform Judaism began to be found primarily among Jewish community leaders. In 1939, the League of the Red Cross was formed, but no American congregation was active until 1951. Over the next two decades, America’s Reform congregation grew, with large membership organizations, organized conferences, and an annual conference in 1954 called the Society for Reform Judaism (RFE/RL). Reform churches, on the other hand, declined because of the costs involved. Reform theology became the focus of attention in the early 1920s and in the 1960s, Reform leaders began to publicly say that they had a special interest in the Reform movement, but that they “have no special obligation to the practice which we call Orthodoxy”
In 1973, after decades of the Reform movement becoming more and more orthodox in a large part of America and the Reform Church, the RFE/RL announced that it would soon leave the American Reform Movement to lead another Reform movement in the US, led by a former President. As the nation entered its second decade of American Jewish existence without Reform congregations on its board of directors in the 1970s, Reform organizations began to return to their traditional origins.
With these new members, Reform Jewish congregations could no longer function as a distinct denomination; in fact congregations became a part of American Jewish life. The Reform Movement had moved from a “progressive” to “reformist” organization. Reform members, by contrast, had no affiliation with any denomination other than the United States Reform Church and of American Judaism. They were still interested in other areas — like the Reform Church in America, or the Modern Orthodox Church. Reform Judaism had grown over the past 50 years by becoming more and more centered around the New American experience — which was the true experience of Reform Church members today.
What was so startling about this shift? Was it any indication of the Reform movement coming back? Reform Judaism became increasingly focused on Judaism in its own right, though they were also more interested in reform than the rest of society. Yet, despite their new emphasis on reform, the Reform movement was also an increasingly religious movement with a focus on modern issues
What Reform could have meant for America’s Orthodoxy is also now clear. Modern Orthodoxy had returned to its old roots, even though it was quite different from Orthodoxy in the 1930s and 1940s at that time. It may not have necessarily had the ability to transform the Reform movement, but it certainly could have created an entirely new denomination in today’s Orthodoxy. The Reform movement would almost certainly have given Reform some of the flexibility it enjoyed to broaden its efforts among communities and to give it a more liberal bent.
In many respects, today Orthodoxy has looked more like the Reform movement that came to America at the start of the 20th century. Today, Reform congregations have moved further and further to the left than most Orthodox congregations of the time. Reform pastors in many denominations preach far more effectively, with much more information and more time to spend in the public square. Reformers are taking on new responsibilities for the world to understand and grow with them — not because they are abandoning their principles, but because they are reclaiming their culture and their faith from the many forces they saw as threats in their own community. And the Reform movement is, at its core, quite different from the reform movement of the 1970s and early 1980s. Modern Orthodoxy isn’t really one large church: Modern Orthodoxy is more like a congregation composed largely of the members of a small community of Orthodox Jews living separately from the Orthodox who live together in other parts
Possibly brothers, an Orthodox Jew and a U.S. Navy engineer pose in New York City during the Civil War.Courtesy of Robert MarcusThe Civil War divided Jews much as it did the nation as a whole. There were Jews in the North and Jews in the South, Jews who supported slavery and Jews who condemned it, Jews who fought for the Union and Jews who fought for the Confederacy. If in many respects the Civil War affected Jews much as it did other Americans, there were nevertheless three features of the struggle that affected Jews uniquely.
First, wartime tensions led to an upsurge of racial and religious prejudice