The most significant change to Judaism was its untethering from the ancient tradition of praying for an altogether human messiah to deliver the Jews back to Jerusalem, restore the ancient temple destroyed in the year A.D. 70 and re-establish the House of David to rule over Jews in their ancient land of Zion, as prophesied in the Bible. These were among the enduring 13 principles codified as central to Judaism by Maimonides in the 12th century.

In 1841, the Jews of Charleston, S.C. — then the largest Jewish community in the United States — rebuilt Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim synagogue after a fire and installed an organ, provoking a seminal court battle. The new building posted Maimonides’s main principles but eliminated the ones about going back to Zion. Gustavus Poznanski, the synagogue’s spiritual leader, declared at the dedication, “This synagogue is our temple, this city our Jerusalem, this happy land our Palestine, and as our fathers defended with their lives that temple, that city, and that land, so will their sons defend this temple, this city, and this land.”

Rejecting the plea for a “personal” messiah was hardly without controversy. After disavowing the practice of praying for a personal messiah, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise was ousted from his synagogue in Albany, N.Y., on the eve of Rosh Hashana in 1851 and got into a fistfight with his detractors when he defiantly tried to take the Torah from the ark anyway. The ensuing riot had to be quelled by the police.

But the abandonment of a belief in a Jesus-like messiah figure generally prevailed, as did the growing use of the term “temple” in the United States to describe a Jewish house of worship, as if to imply that the ancient temple of Jerusalem had become irrelevant.

Yet Jews continued to be drawn to the concept of an era of redemption as foretold by the ancient prophets, a time when the wolf would lie down with the lamb. The difference was that while Jews prayed for such a prospect, they increasingly understood that it was up to humans to work to achieve it. In this, American Jews were influenced by the mainstream Protestantism of the Second Great Awakening, the Transcendentalists and others who substituted human agency for God’s work.

Increasingly, Jews in America saw themselves as playing a redemptive role. “We are deeply convinced that Israel has been called by God to be the messiah of the nations and spread truth and virtue on earth,” as Chicago Sinai Congregation put it in the 1860s, using “Israel” as a reference to the Jewish people. The idea of a special messianic “mission” for Jews achieved an apotheosis at the conclave of rabbis in Pittsburgh who established what became known as Classical Reform Judaism.

The Pittsburgh Platform declared in 1885 that it was the duty of Jews “to participate in the great task of modern times, to solve, on the basis of justice and righteousness, the problems presented by the contrasts and evils of the present organization of society.” These pioneering Jews also redefined their history of the diaspora, or exile, seeing these punishments less as retribution for misdeeds committed in antiquity and more as a sacred assignment to disperse, proclaim justice and set an example for a world in need of repair.