The Enlightenment radically changed the way Jewish identity was understood. Previously, Jews often lived as a separate, self-governing people, with their own courts, communal structures, languages, customs, and collective sense of nationhood. But modern European states offered Jews a new bargain: equal citizenship in exchange for giving up their status as a distinct nation within the nation.

In 1789, the French liberal thinker Stanislas Clermont Tonnerre captured this shift when he declared, “To the Jews as a nation, nothing; to Jews as individuals, everything.” Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) helped make this transition possible by presenting Judaism as a private faith rather than a national identity.

The Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment (~1770-1881), deepened this transformation by encouraging Jews to learn European languages, dress like their neighbors, study secular subjects, and integrate into broader society. Reform Judaism (and the other new Jewish denominations) emerged from this new........

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