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Until recently, scholars have assumed that Liberal Judaism’s pre-war stance against Zionism was motivated primarily by a desire to assimilate into bourgeois English cultural mores. This article argues to the contrary: that the founders of Liberal Judaism were expressly trying to combat secular assimilation. Focusing on speeches and writings from Liberal Judaism’s three primary founders, Lily Montagu, Claude Montefiore and Rabbi Israel Mattuck, I find they took a nuanced and principled approach to opposing Jewish nationalism. Their opposition to Zionism stemmed, instead, from a desire to contest definitions of Jewishness. In particular, they were concerned that national conceptions of Jewishness undermined their ethical and spiritual project. I conclude that many of their concerns anticipate problems in modern-day Israel, so that their arguments are worth revisiting.

Claude Montefiore was a member of what Chaim Bermant has aptly called ‘The Cousinhood’ – in other words, the Anglo-Jewish aristocracy. Montefiore was born in 1858, the year in which Lionel Rothschild became the first Jew to take his seat in the House of Commons. Montefiore’s father was a nephew of Moses Montefiore and his mother a daughter of Isaac Goldsmid, one of the founders of the non-sectarian University College, London and also of the West London Reform Synagogue.

German and American Jews tend to be the focus of many of the standard treatments of Reform thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Anglo-Jewry is usually regarded as something of an intellectual backwater and any ripples of innovation have tended to be explained in terms of foreign influence. There are exceptions to this rule, however, and Claude Montefiore is one striking example of a radical English Jew. A co-founder of Anglo-Liberal Judaism, Montefiore was a scholar who specialized in New Testament studies to an extent unparalleled by his German or American contemporaries, and who arguably set the agenda for Jewish New Testament scholarship. This essay considers the ways in which Montefiore viewed the two central figures of Christian thought and the ways in which he utilized their teachings as a means to justify his own brand of Judaism. In particular, it considers in what sense he regarded Jesus' teachings as original and new and how he believed various aspects of Paul's thought could be used to inspire religious Jews. By placing Montefiore's views in the context of other Jewish writers, it is hoped that his innovative contributions to Jewish-Christian understanding and his unique place among Jewish religious leaders will be made clear.