Judaism means for us the Jewish religion and all that this implies; if the Reform movement in its beginnings went back to prophetism it was simply for this reason--that the pioneers of the Reform movement recognized that the Jews had fallen into the very condition that Dr. Kallen deprecates, namely, they had gotten away from life inasmuch as they had been confined to the ghetto where they had been excluded from the currents of contemporary life. Judaism had become a ghetto religion, and because of this divorce between life and religion the Reform movement arose. The Reform movement is not simply a matter of creed. It affects the whole life of the Jew. One of its basic principles is that the religion of the Jew must square with his life; the needs of the Jew in the modern environment must be taken into consideration by Jewish leaders; Reform Judaism, far from making a separation and raising a barrier between the Jew and life, as those who call us reformed sectarians like to say--quite to the contrary, reconciles the Jew to the civilization in which he is living and wherein his children are growing up. This, to my mind, is the great significance of the Reform movement, and I believe that all those who truly understand it look upon it in that way. The Reform movement, as the movement for religious emancipation, was the accompaniment of similar emancipatory movements affecting the Jews at the close of the eighteenth century. First there was the linguistic emancipation when under the leadership of Moses Mendelssohn the Jews of Germany discarded the use of the German-Jewish jargon or Yiddish, the language of the Jew's degradation, (for there would have been no such thing as Yiddish had the Jew not been degraded and excluded as he was in the countries of Europe) and began the employment of pure German. Secondly, there was the educational emancipation. The Jews had been educated in _chedarim_ where they received instruction only in Hebrew branches and no so-called secular education whatsoever. This separated the Jew from the culture of the world. At the close of the eighteenth century German Jews began to attend schools and universities. Gradually this took place also in other countries. Thirdly, there was the civil or political emancipation, when after the French Revolution the countries of western Europe, one after the other, accorded the Jews the rights of men. The Reform movement or, in other words, the religious emancipation, is simply the result of great world forces, as embodied in these various aspects of emancipation, and for this reason the Reform movement, far from being simply a matter of creed or theological belief, made the Jew a citizen of the world and fitted him for the modern environment. _The "Body and Soul" of Jewry_