The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (323 page)

 
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(1873–1956).
German
rabbi
and leader of
progressive Judaism
. He was a rabbi in Berlin from 1912 (serving as an army chaplain during the First World War). From 1933 he defended the rights of Jews in Nazi Germany and, refusing all invitations to leave, he was deported in 1943 to Theresienstadt concentration camp. After the war he moved to London, and then to the USA, to continue teaching. His best known work was
Wesen des Judentums
(The Essence of Judaism, 1905) in which, reacting against
Harnack's
Essence of Christianity
, he argued that Judaism was essentially a dialectic between ‘mystery’ and ‘command’ within a system of ethical monotheism.

 
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Bah
'
Faith
.

A religion founded by
Bah
'u'll
h
in the 1860s. After his death in 1892, it was led successively by his eldest son,
‘Abdu'l-Bah
(from 1892 to 1921), his great grandson,
Shoghi Effendi
(from 1922 to 1957), and then (in 1963, after a brief ‘interregnum’) by an elected body, the
Universal House of Justice
.
Claiming to be the promised one of all religions, and preaching a message of global socio-religious reform, Bah
'u'll
h initially drew his followers from amongst the
B
b
s
, most of whom became Bah
'
s. Significant expansion in the non-Muslim Third World began in the 1950s and 1960s, Bah
'
s from these areas now constituting the majority of the world's five million Bah
'
s.
Bah