engaged with high profile sceptics and atheists such as Robert Ingersoll and Felix Adler as well as with proponents of biological evolutionary theory, with the result that a distinctly panentheistic character of US Reform Jewish theology was observable. Emil G. Hirsch wrote: In notes clearer than ever were entoned by human tongue does the philosophy of evolution confirm essential verity of Judaism’s insistent protest and proclamation that God is one. This theory reads unity in all that is and has been. Stars and stones, planets and pebbles, sun and sod, rock and river, leaf and lichen are spun of the same thread. Thus the universe is one soul, One spelled large. If throughout all visible form one energy is manifest and in all material shape one substance is apparent, the conclusion is all the better assured which holds this essentially one world of life to be the thought of one all embracing and all underlying creative directive mind. ... I, for my part, believe to be justified in my assurance that Judaism rightly apprehended posits God not, as often it is said to do, as an absolutely transcendental One. Our God is the soul of the Universe. ... Spinozism and Judaism are by no means at opposite poles. Similarly, Joseph Krauskopf wrote: According to our definition, God is the finitely, conceivable Ultimate, the Cause of all and the Cause in all, the Universal Life, the All-Pervading, All-Controlling, All-Directing Power Supreme, the Creator of the universe and the Governor of the same according to eternal and immutable laws by Him created. All existence is part of His existence, all life is part of His life, all intelligence is part of His intelligence, all evolution, all progress is part of His plan. Late 19th and early 20th century Jewish evolutionary conceptions of Judaism Lucien Wolf (1857–1930) was a celebrated journalist, diplomat, and communal authority, acting as a committee member of the conjoint committee of the Anglo-Jewish Association and the British Board of Deputies, the two representative bodies of Anglo-Jewry. He wrote "What is Judaism? A Question of To-day" in The Fortnightly Review (1884) in response to the biological-racist anti-Semitism of Goldwin Smith, and accepted Smith's premises (that the Jews were a biological race shaped by a religion that was, in its essence, merely legalism), with a strategy had been to attempt to reverse the value judgment. Wolf understood evolution in the strongly