the Habsburg monarchy, Joseph II's 1781 Patent of Toleration curbed the rabbinical courts' authority, forced secular education and military conscription, and granted many new economic opportunities. Concurrently, the permeation of Enlightenment ideas severely shook the foundations upon which Jewish self-understanding rested, as a Chosen People predicated on a covenant with God, in exile and awaiting the arrival of the Messiah in Judaism. All this led to growing religious indifference, assimilation and demands to reform Jewish communal life and even Judaism itself. In the Kingdom of Hungary, the pace of change was slow. The rural character of Jewish settlement – in the 1780s, 60% of them were scattered in groups of a family or two in the countryside; only 15% resided in communities with over 500 members – the country's relative backwardness and the nobility's steadfast refusal to accommodate the Emperor's policies in general greatly delayed the formation of an urban, affluent Jewish class, the like of which embraced Enlightenment and Reform in the German states. While Rabbi Aaron Chorin of Arad was a vocal proponent of religious modifications already in the first decade of the 19th century, his influence in his own country was meager. He served mainly as a rallying point for Hungarian Orthodoxy, led by the uncompromising Moses Sofer of Pressburg, who was determined to forestall any deviation. The conservatives, facing a growing phenomenon of nonobservance, already entertained thoughts of forming separate communities; however, the laws stipulating the existence of only one Jewish congregation in each locality prevented any action towards this end. The Neologs In 1827, a prayer quorum that instituted the rite practiced in the Vienna Stadttempel was opened in Pest, becoming an independent synagogue in 1830. The Viennese Rite was designated by Isaac Noah Mannheimer: among others, the cantor wore special vestments, the reader's table – from where the preacher delivered his sermon – was moved from the center and placed in front of the Torah ark, weddings were performed indoors rather than under the sky, and a specialized preacher delivered a sermon in vernacular and in modern style rather than the old Pilpul in Yiddish. Mannheimer also had the prayers shortened by dropping several medieval Piyyutim, though he refrained from any ideological changes in the liturgy; in general, he avoided any principled issue with theological implications and clung to the aesthetic aspect of the service. All these innovations resembled the conduct of a church,