IN AN INFLUENTIAL essay, Jacob Katz proposes that Orthodoxy should be read as a modern phenomenon, despite its widespread understanding (both among Orthodox Jews and others) as a faithful continuation of traditional Jewish life. Acknowledging that Jews who never abandoned traditional observance were the majority in Germany until the mid-nineteenth century and in eastern Europe at least until the First World War, Katz nevertheless argues that ‘it would be incorrect to view the behavior of modern adherents to tradition as simply reproducing what I call tradition-bound society’. As opposed to earlier generations of halakhically observant Jews, ‘their loyalty to tradition was the result of a conscious decision, or was at the very least a stance assumed in defiance of a possible alternative suggested by the lifestyle of other Jews’. For these reasons, Katz suggests that modern adherence to tradition should be viewed as a distinct historical phenomenon that he calls ‘traditionalism’, which is a ‘new form of Judaism’ rather than a continuation of ‘the old ways of thinking’. Something of the paradox embedded in this understanding of Orthodoxy rises to the surface, for Katz, in the slogan coined by the Hatam Sofer: ‘Anything new is forbidden according to the Torah’ (ḥadash asur min hatorah, from Mishnah Orl. 3: 9); this slogan midrashically expands a mishnaic dictum forbidding the consumption of new grain to express a (new) form of resistance to all innovation, even with regard to customs rather than halakhah. Orthodoxy in this historical sense is a new phenomenon that, among its strictest proponents, stands in principled opposition to introducing anything new into the Jewish tradition.

The tension between tradition and innovation, continuity and change, is particularly evident in the activities of the Agudath Israel.