Orthodox Judaism is ancient in belief but surprisingly modern as a movement
The word Orthodox was first applied to Jews in a Berlin magazine in 1795, borrowed from Enlightenment debate, and many traditionalists disliked it. Historians date the movement itself to a fight over a reforming Hamburg synagogue in 1818, when dozens of rabbis united to defend unchanging religious law against modernisers.
At its core, Orthodox Judaism holds that God revealed both the Written and the Oral Torah at Sinai and that it has been handed down faithfully ever since. Practice matters more than theory: keeping kosher, resting on the Sabbath and holidays, praying three times a day, regular Torah study, head coverings and tassels for men and modest dress for women. Doctrines include bodily resurrection, divine reward and punishment, and a future Messiah who will rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.
It has no central authority. The rough division runs between Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, communities that keep apart from wider society and Modern Orthodox ones that take part in secular life, and each contains many independent groups that argue about where Orthodoxy's edges lie. Counting only the strictly observant, it is a minority of world Jewry, yet with over 2 million practising adherents and at least as many nominal supporters, it is the largest Jewish religious grouping.
The movement grew from the collapse of self-governing Jewish communities. Until the later 18th century, rabbinical courts in Central and Western Europe enforced law with sanctions up to excommunication. Centralising states then stripped those courts of jurisdiction and treated Jews as a religious sect. In Hamburg, Rabbi Raphael Cohen tried to hold the line, ordering men to grow beards, but civil appeals against him badly damaged rabbinic prestige. The Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment led by figures like Moses Mendelssohn from 1782, argued that freedom of conscience should replace communal coercion.
The Hamburg Temple of 1818 brought matters to a head: its prayer book trimmed prayers for the Messiah and sacrifices, and it used an organ played by a gentile on the Sabbath. The backlash from 1818 to 1821 created a self-conscious conservative camp. Scholars stress that Orthodoxy then adapted, sometimes with real leniency, rather than simply freezing tradition. A sharp Orthodox identity formed in Germany and Hungary by the 1860s, in Eastern Europe between the world wars, and among Jews from Muslim lands only around the 1970s, after moving to Israel.
Source: Orthodox Judaism
