While insiders and even many outsiders perceive Orthodoxy as an authentic continuation of pre-modern Jewish forms, in fact it is no less a product of modernity than its religious and political competitors. Like the others, Orthodoxy represents a range of self-conscious attempts to negotiate a Jewish identity that is cast as unchanged amidst an environment of sweeping change: the breakdown of Jewish communal autonomy and emancipation under the impact of the Enlightenment and economic revolution.
Orthodox Jews are thus not traditional, but traditionalist. They are consciously and creatively attempting to recreate a pre-modern system in an entirely new context and without the benefit of a world that takes its values for granted or the political power to enforce it. Even beyond the ritual and theological innovations of Orthodoxy - which are many - its self-consciousness, its awareness that other options are available, that one's own world is constructed and not timeless and is therefore contingent and fragile, creates a firm break between Orthodoxy and the traditional world it claims to perpetuate. And it opened the door to endless battles over the boundaries of authenticity.
This book traces the emergence and evolution of the term "Orthodoxy" and the communities that claimed it - while denying it to others - from Germany and Hungary into Eastern Europe and eventually America, Israel and beyond. It charts how a traditional culture shared unreflexively by most Jews evolved into a self-conscious, voluntary religio-political identity maintained by a determined minority that came to view itself as authentically "religious."
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