From One Congregation to an International Movement

Wine trained and served as a Reform rabbi before founding Humanistic Judaism, and the break was public rather than gradual: the Encyclopaedia Judaica records that his congregation was startled when he began openly omitting prayers addressed to a God he no longer believed existed, replacing them with readings on Jewish history and ethics rather than pretending the theology still stood behind unchanged liturgy. From the single Birmingham Temple congregation the movement grew into a wider institutional structure, the Society for Humanistic Judaism, founded in 1969 to coordinate congregations across North America, and later a training body preparing its own rabbis and communal leaders for a form of Jewish life explicitly organized around peoplehood rather than theology. A Book Forged in Hell, on the seventeenth century philosopher Baruch Spinoza's own break with the theological claims of the Judaism he was raised in, situates Wine's twentieth century movement within a much longer history of Jewish thinkers who sought to preserve identification with the Jewish people while rejecting the tradition's supernatural claims, a lineage reaching back centuries before Humanistic Judaism gave that impulse an organized congregational home.