page_title: Orthodox Judaism
section_title: Eastern Europe
hierarchical_section_title: Orthodox Judaism / History / Eastern Europe
context_page_description: Orthodox Judaism is the traditionalist branches of contemporary Rabbinic Judaism. Theologically, it is chiefly defined by regarding the Torah, both Written and Oral, as literally revealed by God on Mount Sinai and faithfully transmitted ever since.
  Orthodox Judaism therefore advocates a strict observance of Jewish Law, or halakha, which is to be interpreted and determined only according to traditional methods and in adherence to the continuum of received precedent through the ages. It regards the entire halakhic system as ultimately grounded in immutable revelation, essentially beyond external and historical influence. More than any theoretical issue, obeying the dietary, purity, ethical, and other laws of halakha is the hallmark of Orthodoxy. Other key doctrines include belief in a future bodily resurrection of the dead, divine reward and punishment for the righteous and the sinners, the Election of Israel as a people bound by a covenant with God, and an eventual Messianic Age ruled by a salvific Messiah-King who will restore the Temple in Jerusalem.
  Orthodox Judaism is not a centralized denomination.
context_section_description: The much belated pace of modernization in Russia, Congress Poland and the Romanian principalities, where harsh discrimination and active persecution of the Jews continued until 1917, delayed the crisis of traditional society for decades. Old-style education in the heder and yeshiva remained the norm, retaining Hebrew as the language of the elite and Yiddish as the vernacular. The defining fault-line of Eastern European Jews was between the Hasidim and the Misnagdic reaction against them. Reform attempts by the Czar's government, like the school modernization under Max Lilienthal or the foundation of rabbinical seminaries and the mandating of communities to appoint clerks known as "official rabbis", all had little influence. Communal autonomy and the rabbinic courts' jurisdiction were abolished in 1844, but economic and social seclusion remained, ensuring the authority of Jewish institutions and traditions de facto. In 1880, there were only 21,308 Jewish pupils in government schools, out of some 5 million Jews in total; In 1897, 97% of the 5.2 million Jews in the Pale of Settlement and Congress Poland declared Yiddish their mother tongue, and only 26% possessed any literacy in Russian. Though the Eastern European Haskalah challenged the traditional establishment – unlike its western counterpart, no acculturation process turned it irrelevant; it flourished from the 1820s until the 1890s – the latter's hegemony over the vast majority was self-evident. The leading rabbis maintained the old conception of communal unity: In 1882, when an Orthodox party in Galicia appealed for the right of secession, the Netziv and other Russian rabbis declared it forbidden and contradicting the idea of Israel's oneness.
  While slow, change was by no means absent. In the 1860s and 1870s, anticipating a communal disintegration like the one in the west, moderate maskilic rabbis like Yitzchak Yaacov Reines and Yechiel Michel Pines called for inclusion of secular studies in the heders and yeshivas, a careful modernization, and an ecumenical attempt to form a consensus on necessary adaptation of halakha to novel times. Their initiative was thwarted by a combination of strong anti-traditional invective on behalf of the radical, secularist maskilim and conservative intransigence from the leading rabbis, especially during the bitter polemic which erupted after Moshe Leib Lilienblum's 1868 call for a reconsideration of Talmudic strictures. Reines, Pines and their associates would gradually form the nucleus of Religious Zionism, while their conservative opponents would eventually adopt the epithet Haredim (then, and also much later, still a generic term for the observant and the pious).
  The attitude toward Jewish nationalism, particularly Zionism, and its nonobservant if not staunchly secularist leaders and partisans, was the key question facing the traditionalists of Eastern Europe. Closely intertwined were issues of modernization in general: As noted by Joseph Salmon, the future religious Zionists (organized in the Mizrahi since 1902) were not only supportive of the national agenda per se, but deeply motivated by criticism of the prevalent Jewish society, a positive reaction to modernity and a willingness to tolerate nonobservance while affirming traditional faith and practice. Their proto-Haredi opponents sharply rejected all of the former positions and espoused staunch conservatism, which idealized existing norms. Any illusion that differences could be blanded and a united observant pro-Zionist front would be formed, were dashed between 1897 and 1899, as both the Eastern European nationalist intellectuals and Theodor Herzl himself revealed an uncompromising secularist agenda, forcing traditionalist leaders to pick sides. In 1900, the anti-Zionist pamphlet Or la-Yesharim, endorsed by many Russian and Polish rabbis, largely demarcated the lines between the proto-Haredi majority and the Mizrahi minority, and terminated dialogue; in 1911, when the 10th World Zionist Congress voted in favour of propagating non-religious cultural work and education, a large
caption: A photo of Yisrael Meir Kagan, the dominant leader of Eastern European Orthodox Judaism during its consolidation in the Interwar Period, in his old age
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