ABSTRACT
The European Enlightenment and the following Jewish Emancipation are two crucial events that had a great impact on the Jewish people and Jewish religion during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. German Jewry in particular, in the wake of Jewish Emancipation, witnessed the emergence of three modern Jewish movements, which would later turn into three well-established Jewish congregations, namely what we know today as Reform, Conservative and Orthodox Judaisms. In fact, each movement developed as a response to the question of Jewish Emancipation and the concomitant need to reshape Judaism in accordance with the requirements of the new conditions. In other words, all these modern Jewish movements, from the most radical to the most traditionalist, emerged as alternatives to the danger of assimilation.
