| Summary: | The occasion for this essay is the discovery in the Zunz archive of a substantial brief on liturgical reform. Published and translated here for the first time, the brief represents a credible application of historical research to religious practice. It had been solicited by the Board of the Berlin Community in the early 1860s as part of its campaign to introduce a modified liturgy into the new synagogue soon to be opened on Oranienburger Strasse. Moreover, circumstantial evidence in the form of related documents, also published here, suggests that the author of the brief was no less a scholar than Moritz Steinschneider. Thus the importance of the Gutachten is twofold: it limns the potential of Wissenschaft to supplant Halakha as arbiter in the determination of religious policy and it underscores once again the involvement of Steinschneider in Berlin communal affairs.
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