Tradition and Change: History of Reform Judaism in Britain, 1840-1995

Tradition and Change traces the remarkable story of the birth and development of Reform Judaism in Britain. The twenty-four families who broke away from the Orthodox establishment in 1840 to found their own independent congregation became the forerunners of the second largest synagogue movement in the country today. Its dynamic progress over the past 150 years is bound up with the swirling religious and political traumas affecting British Jewry, and includes key issues such as the fight for the removal of Jewish disabilities in the nineteenth century, Zionism, the Second World War, and feminism.