Neither Orthodox Nor Reform

Zacharias Frankel was born in Prague in 1801 and trained in both traditional rabbinic learning and the newer academic disciplines of philology and history that German Jewish scholars of his generation were beginning to apply to Jewish texts and law. He served as a rabbi in Dresden through the 1830s and 1840s, a period in which German Jewish religious life was fracturing between an Orthodoxy that treated Jewish law as fixed and unchangeable and a Reform movement that treated much of it as optional or obsolete, to be revised or discarded as modern sensibility required.

Frankel positioned himself against both. At a Reform rabbinical conference in 1845, he resigned in protest when the assembled rabbis voted that Hebrew was not religiously necessary in prayer, a break that made clear he would not follow Reform's more sweeping revisions, while his own scholarly method, treating Jewish law as a living historical development shaped by the practice of the community across centuries rather than as a fixed revealed code, put him equally at odds with Orthodoxy's claim that the law had never meaningfully changed. That middle position, positive toward Jewish law's binding authority while historical in how it explained that authority's development, gave the movement he founded its name: Positive-Historical Judaism.