Pittsburgh

Fewer than twenty Reform rabbis met in Pittsburgh in November 1885 at the invitation of Kaufmann Kohler, with Isaac Mayer Wise in the chair, and produced eight paragraphs that would be quoted for a century. The platform declared Judaism a progressive religion, ever striving to be in accord with the postulates of reason. It held the Bible to be the record of a people consecrating itself to God rather than a source of binding legislation, and it treated the findings of modern science as no threat to that record.

From that starting point the practical conclusions followed quickly. Mosaic and rabbinic law regulating diet, priestly purity and dress was declared to belong to a stage the movement had passed, and observing it was said to obstruct rather than aid modern spiritual elevation. The Jews were described as no longer a nation but a religious community, and the platform therefore expected no return to Palestine, no restoration of sacrificial worship and no reinstatement of any law concerning a Jewish state. It closed by committing the movement to the problems presented by the contrasts of poverty and wealth.

The conference was informal and its platform was never formally ratified, since the Central Conference of American Rabbis was not founded until 1889. It became the working charter of the movement anyway, and it also became the document against which Conservative Judaism defined itself.

The platform of 1885 did not survive contact with the twentieth century intact. The Columbus Platform of 1937 restored the language of peoplehood and, against the explicit refusal of the earlier text, affirmed an obligation to help build a Jewish homeland. A centenary perspective adopted at San Francisco in 1976 went further in restoring the vocabulary of mitzvah, of commandment, that 1885 had set aside. Then in 1999 the Central Conference of American Rabbis came back to Pittsburgh and adopted a statement of principles that spoke of ongoing revelation, of the mitzvot as claims upon Reform Jews, and of a bond to the land and the state of Israel. The reversal was deliberate, and the choice of city was part of the point.

The Jewish community of Pittsburgh is older than any of these documents and is concentrated in Squirrel Hill, one of the few American urban Jewish neighbourhoods never to have dispersed to the suburbs, with Orthodox, Conservative and Reform congregations within a few streets of one another. On 27 October 2018 a gunman entered the Tree of Life building in that neighbourhood during Shabbat morning services and killed eleven worshippers drawn from three congregations sharing the premises. It was the deadliest antisemitic attack in the history of the United States. The city that Reform Judaism used twice to say what it believed became, in the same century, the site of the worst answer given to that belief from outside it.