Eight Points in November 1885

Fewer than twenty Reform rabbis met in Pittsburgh in November 1885 at the invitation of Kaufmann Kohler, with Isaac Mayer Wise in the chair, and produced eight paragraphs that would be quoted for a century. The platform declared Judaism a progressive religion, ever striving to be in accord with the postulates of reason. It held the Bible to be the record of a people consecrating itself to God rather than a source of binding legislation, and it treated the findings of modern science as no threat to that record.

From that starting point the practical conclusions followed quickly. Mosaic and rabbinic law regulating diet, priestly purity and dress was declared to belong to a stage the movement had passed, and observing it was said to obstruct rather than aid modern spiritual elevation. The Jews were described as no longer a nation but a religious community, and the platform therefore expected no return to Palestine, no restoration of sacrificial worship and no reinstatement of any law concerning a Jewish state. It closed by committing the movement to the problems presented by the contrasts of poverty and wealth.

The conference was informal and its platform was never formally ratified, since the Central Conference of American Rabbis was not founded until 1889. It became the working charter of the movement anyway, and it also became the document against which Conservative Judaism defined itself.