Abstract:

The minds of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution brought great changes in the lives of the Jews in Europe, gave them important rights like citizenship, and this led them to consider the Jews to be part of the nation they were citizens for the first time. Reform Jewry which emerged in Germany in the 18th century, spreading rapidly to European countries and making significant progress in America, has attempted to create an opinion of Judaism that is compatible with modern Europe by changing traditional religion. At this point, the movement in the first place, with a sensitivity to reforms of religious practices and discourses that emphasized national identity, expressed Jewishness as a religious belief, devoid of national identity. Reforms, such as the refusal to use Hebrew as the language of prayer, Christ, return to the Holy Land, the reinterpretation of exile and chosen nation rhetoric, and the transfer of the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday be considered in this context. Language reform of the Reform Jews they left behind their identity, and the identity of the German nation was an indication that they accept the culture. Likewise, the Messiah (mashiach), the exiled, the elected nation, and the Holy Land expressions were the basic rhetoric of traditional belief. For the Jews who had adopted the German nation, hoping to establish a "Jewish State" in the future was no longer possible to accept that the Jewish race was superior to the other races. For this reason, traditional rhetoric and religious rituals based on them have lost meaning to the reformed Jews. The Pittsburgh Platform, which explains the ideology of the reform movement, has clearly rejected that returning to the Holy Land, which is the basis of traditional Jewish belief and the Messiah by denying the racial, national identity of the Jews and stated that and that "Judaism" meant only religious belief. However, during the period from the Pittsburgh Platform in 1885 to the Columbus Platform in 1937, negative events in Europe and especially in Russia caused Jews to migrate to America. After this stage, America has become an environment where Jews can express their national identity, and the attack on national values in Europe pushes the Jews to possess the national values in America. With the influence of the new "eastern" Jews, the national values that reform rejected began to gain importance, and the reform movement began to lose ideological confidence. In this case, the Reform movement created the 1937 Columbus Platform, advocating the idea of returning to national values and holy lands, preferring to approach the traditional line instead of opposing Zionist ideas. The work dealt with the development of Reform Jewry through the editorial organs of the reformist Jews, platform notifications and personal studies, and the conflicting decisions of the two platforms, collected within a short period of fifty years. Then analyzed the effects of periodic and political developments on the transformation of reform Jewish in the context of cause-effect relations.

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