(ANGLO-JUDAICA).

(ANGLO-JUDAICA).

[John Simon]. Is the Oral Law of Divine Origin and Therefore Binding on the Jews? The Advocacy of this Question Contested by a Member of that Community.

English text with some Hebrew. pp. 65. Brittle. Unbound. 8vo.

London, J. Wertheimer, 1842.

    Advocating the abandonment of the Oral Law, seeing as ‘The Age of Enlightenment has come for the Israelite as it has for other men… The idols shall be cast away; the Talmud and its mysteries…’ (p. 64).

    This pamphlet was part of the contention that arose following the establishment of the first reform  synagogue in the United Kingdom. This first synagogue - known today as the West London Synagogue - was in Burton Street, south of Euston Road. “The Synagogue was consecrated in January 1842, but a few days beforehand the leader of the Sephardi Synagogue at Bevis Marks and the Chief Rabbi of the Ashkenazi Great Synagogue issued a Cherem ban. They held the rebels to be in contradiction to the beliefs and practices of Orthodox Judaism, especially in respect of their views that the Oral Law was made by man and that it was God’s Written Law that was the more important.” www.wls.org.uk/our-history

    See David Philipson, The Reform Movement in Judaism (2021) pp. 137-8.

             
    The tract was anonymously written by Sir John Simon (1818-97) a Jamaican-born British serjeant-at-law and Liberal Party politician who studied Hebrew in his youth with the view of becoming a rabbi, his object being to initiate a religious reform movement. See www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13742-simon-sir-john.

     
     See also Prof. David Latchman in Times of Israel: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-chief-rabbinate-too-frum-attacks-from-the-refo rm-movement/.