N THE nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the scholarly disciplines have achieved an ever greater measure of precision in determining the history of Judaism. This heightened sophistication has added an important element of religious difficulty to the cataclysmic social and political changes which occurred within the Jewish world between the French Revolution and the Israeli War of Independence. In a period of such vast social instability, it is hardly surprising that the theological foundations of Judaism have exhibited a concomitant instability. Biblical scholarship has had an especially important impact on modern Jewish thought. At least one result of this scholarship seems beyond refutation: The Torah is not, as normative Jewish tradition had claimed, a unitary work communicated by God directly to Moses, save for a few verses at the end of Deuteronomy. As long as this view had been convincingly maintained, it had enormous consequences in the life of the individual Jew. If the Torah was the perfect revelation of God's will, when properly interpreted, then none of its injunctions, no matter how opaque to the lucidities of common sense, could be ignored. To have done otherwise would have been to rebel against the will of the Creator. The modem Jew lacks the security of knowing that his religious acts are meaningfully related to God's will. Whether he fulfills all of the Torah's commandments or none of them, he enters a spiritual wager not unlike that made by the believing Christian when he makes a decision concerning the centrality of the Christ in his personal life. As Kierkegaard has suggested, the religious life hovers over a sea of doubt seventy thousand fathoms deep.' When doubts have lain fallow for many centuries, as they have in normative Judaism, and are quite suddenly the object of concerted attention, one must look beyond mere thought to understand the full scope of the crisis. The theological foundations of normative Judaism were most keenly disrupted in a period when Jews were entering the secular society of contract and commerce which developed in the Western World following the French Revolution. Full participation in this new society demanded a radical curtailment of the sacramental aspects of Jewish life. These had included distinctive modes of dress, religious