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In the 18th century, new medical findings led to an increasing fear of the burial of the so-called seemingly dead. While the Jewish Lumières criticized the early burial common in Judaism for being backward and demanded its abolition, the rabbinic authorities opposed any kind of innovation. The heated debate referred to as the burial controversy is considered the first and paradigmatic inner-Jewish reform controversy in the early era of emancipation.In Jewish tradition, leaving a dead body overnight to decompose without sufficient reason is considered an insult t…