Haskalah

(lit. "enlightenment"). The Haskalah movement is directly related to the Emancipation of the Jews from the late 18th century on and to the growing tendencies toward acculturation and Assimilation among Jews as a result. Essentially, Haskalah was the expression of a more sympathetic attitude among Jews towards the secular world of their Gentile neighbors. During the centuries of persecution in medieval Europe, Jews were forced to live in isolation in ghettoes. Even when they were tolerated, they required the protection of the crown in whatever country they happened to find themselves. This atmosphere changed dramatically when revolutionary changes swept through France in the latter part of the 18th century and when Gentile intellectuals began to champion the cause of Jewish liberty on the basis of a fundamental "bill of rights" for all human beings. As the trend toward emancipation began to gain momentum, not only in France but in the surrounding countries conquered by Napoleon's victorious armies, the Jews adopted an increasingly sympathetic attitude toward the secular culture of their champions. Furthermore, as the restrictions against Jewish participation in the social, economic, and cultural life of Gentile society diminished, the urge on the part of the Jews to play a more active role increased.

The Haskalah movement comprised several concepts, some of which conflicted with one another:

1. Secular studies should be an integral part of the education of the Jewish child. This concept was usually adopted eagerly by Haskalah-minded Jews, although, in some countries (such as those of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), secularization was made a sine qua non of the curriculum to be followed by Jewish children.

2. Jews must be thoroughly educated in the language of the general society. At times, this idea led to an abandonment of, and even a hostility toward, Yiddish, which was seen as the language of exile and of Jewish self-deprecation.

3. Judaism and Jewish history should be studied at length. The growing interest in the secularized study of Jewish history aroused a growing interest in Jewish roots and thus led to increased sympathy for the language of lost Jewish sovereignty, namely, Hebrew.

4. The study of Hebrew must be promoted. In view of the sympathetic approach to Jewish history, ancient (but not Mishnaic) Hebrew became increasingly attractive and also played an important role in the revival of Jewish national consciousness.

5. The Jewish religion must adapt itself to the changing conditions of the modern world. Now that the Jews were a part of that world and were no longer confined to physical and spiritual ghettoes, there was a growing feeling that Judaism must be modernized. In its more extreme forms, this tendency expressed itself in the development of Reform Judaism, which sought to establish a bridge between Judaism and the secular environment, and declared that Zion existed not in the Land of Israel but primarily in the lands of Jewish dispersion. In its less extreme form, it expressed itself in the modern Orthodox movement (Neo-Orthodoxy), one of whose leaders was Samson Raphael Hirsch and which sought a moderate adaptation of some of Judaism's outward trappings (the integration of secular and Jewish studies, the concept of decorum in the synagogue, limited utilization of Gentile scholarship in the study of the Bible, etc.).

6. Like other nations of the world, the Jews must have their own homeland and must conduct a national struggle in order to obtain it. At this point, a number of the previous points coalesce: an appreciation of secular values (as expressed in philosophy, history, and the sciences), a growing fascination with Jewish history, the increased attractiveness of Hebrew and the concomitant trend toward abandoning the language of exile and segregation (Yiddish). On the one hand, the adoption by the Jews of the ideological notion of modern, secular nationalism was a rejection of the traditionalist reliance on a Messianic deliverance of the Jewish people, a rejection that acquired strength from the profound failure of the Shabbatean (see Shabbetai Tsevi) and Frankist pseudo-Messianic movements. On the other hand, the growth of modern Jewish nationalism, which was expressed first in the Ḥovevé Zion ("Lovers of Zion") movement and later in the more pragmatically minded political Zionist movement under Theodor Herzl, was a secularized version of a basic tenet of Judaism, namely that the Land of Israel is the eternal homeland of the Jewish people.

7. Jewish society, like others, must become more productive and promote more "concrete" occupations, such as agriculture and manual labor, while eschewing "traditional" Jewish ones, such as moneylending and petty trade. On the one hand, this tendency re[resented an acceptance of anti-Semitic charges of alleged exploitation of Christians. On the other hand, the desire to become more "productive" reflected a growing Jewish identification with the more balanced structure of Gentile society and can be linked with the "return to the land" motif in modern political Zionist thought, particularly of the socialist variety. In light of this tendency, programs were set up to teach Jewish youth more practical occupations. The spirit behind these movements inspired the philosophy of the world network of ORT schools and that of pioneering ("ḥalutsic") Zionism.

Haskalah combined both assimilatory and counter-assimilatory tendencies. There were Jews who drifted from Haskalah thought to total identification with non-Jewish society; however, there were also those whose identity as Jews was strengthened through the bonding of Judaism and secular approaches.

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Hebrew term for enlightenment.

Haskalah is the name of the movement for the dissemination of modern European culture among the Jews. The movement began in the mid-1700s in Berlin with the work of the German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729 - 1786). Advocates argued that to achieve emancipation, the Jews must adopt the modern values and social customs of the countries in which they lived. In the mid-1800s, modern European culture for the Jews generally meant German and French culture and secular education, although efforts were made in this period by groups of Jews throughout Europe.

One consequence of this process was the secular use of the Hebrew language to spread the new ideas, leading to an eventual revitalization of the language. Another effect was the creation of a stratum of Jews versed in both the intellectual traditions of modern Europe and traditional Judaism. It was from subsequent generations of these Jews that the ideas of modern Zionism originated. Finally, for many Jews, acquiring modern European culture meant the abandonment of traditional Jewish customs, resulting in assimilation.

Bibliography

Ackerman, Walter. Out of Our People's Past: Sources for the Study of Jewish History. New York: United Synagogue Commission on Jewish Education, 1977.

— MARTIN MALIN

"Haskalah" is the Hebrew term for the Enlightenment movement and ideology that began in European Jewish society in the 1770s and continued until the 1880s. A proponent of the Haskalah was known as a maskil ('an enlightened Jew'; pl. maskilim). The Haskalah shared many aspects of the European Enlightenments, but as a national variant of the general movement it also addressed specific Jewish concerns of the period. The Haskalah was a feature of Ashkenazic Jewish society, the branch of world Jewry with origins in medieval French and German lands whose descendents inhabited German lands, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the partitioned lands of Poland. Beginning in Prussia, and spreading eastward to Austrian Galicia and tsarist Russia, the Haskalah, like the European Enlightenment, was an optimistic, self-conscious intellectual movement that urged European Jews to dare to liberate themselves from their past and fashion their own lives, in the spirit of Immanuel Kant's well-known answer to the question, "Was ist Aufklärung?"; in the Jewish case, maskilim exhorted their brethren to unfetter themselves from and transform the culture of early modern Ashkenazic Judaism. Maskilim, like other European enlighteners, turned back to a classical era in search of an unbenighted rational past free of superstition and religious intolerance. But, in contrast to philosophes and Aufklärer, who, in Peter Gay's interpretation, found their model in the ancient Greco-Roman world, Jewish enlighteners favored the "golden age" of medieval Iberian-Jewish culture, seeking to remake early modern Ashkenazic Jewish culture in its image.

The Critique of Early Modern Ashkenazic Jewish Society and Culture

Contemporary European Jewish society, in the minds of the maskilim, had become insular, valorizing the study of Talmud and its commentaries to the exclusion of the Hebrew Bible, biblical grammar, Hebrew poetry, and humanistic subjects, such as mathematics, geography, natural science, and history, that were indispensable to modern European life. According to the maskilim's critique, the ideal of the Torah Sage (talmid hakham), together with the exclusionary legislation of the non-Jewish political authorities, had resulted in a distorted Jewish economic profile concentrated solely in trade and other "unproductive" professions. Moreover, early modern Ashkenazic Jewry's attachment to minhag (religious custom), in addition to its observance of traditional Jewish law, had deepened its parochialism, leading to an explosion of new Jewish rituals that hindered participation in broader European society. Maskilim resoundingly judged Yiddish, Ashkenazic Jewry's capacious vernacular composed of German, Hebrew, Slavic, and Romance-language components, as incapable of elevating Jewish culture and unsuitable for expressing the values of modern Jewish life. Perforce, the Haskalah was decidedly male, for early modern Jewish life was gendered, and only Jewish men received the requisite education in traditional Jewish languages and texts for a full-scale enlightened critique of their culture.

Marked by a didactic commitment to regenerate and revitalize Ashkenazic Jewish culture as a means of preserving Jewish life in the modern world, the Haskalah gave voice to a new kind of European Jew, a secular intelligent. The worldview of the maskilim, individuals in the process of "enlightening" themselves, was shaped by an ideology of creative tension between the worlds of traditional Jewish culture and European society and values, what the Prussian maskil Naphtali Herz Wessely (1725–1805) called Torat ha-Adam (secular knowledge) and Torat ha-Elohim (sacred knowledge) in his programmatic educational pamphlet, Divrei Shalom ve-Eme (Words of peace and truth, 1782). In contrast to activists in the European Enlightenment who were already Europeans, the maskilim not only waged a self-conscious battle to regenerate Ashkenazic Jewish culture, but also struggled to justify Jewish participation in European society as men, like all other men, endowed with the universal faculty of reason. The Haskalah, in its defense of Jewish particularism, qualified the universalism of the Enlightenment.

The figure of Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), son of a poor Jewish scribe from Dessau who settled in Berlin, the center of the Prussian Enlightenment, epitomized the new type of European Jew. Mendelssohn remained devout throughout his life, yet acquired a vast reservoir of secular and non-Jewish knowledge that he applied to philosophical, political, and exegetical writings, penned in both flawless German and impeccable Hebrew. His Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism (1783), a philosophic defense of the compatibility of the observance of Jewish law with the ideals of Enlightenment natural religion, expressed the Haskalah's conservative attitude toward revelation and inherited traditions, a posture characteristic of the moderate German Aufklärung's debt to the philosophy of Christian Wolff. Shaped in the Prussian context, the Haskalah lacked the anticlericalism and critique of the religious establishment that motivated the French philosophe's conception of Enlightenment.

The generation of Prussian maskilim after Mendelssohn institutionalized the movement by establishing periodicals (Ha-Me'assef/the Gatherer), publishing houses (Hevrat Hinukh Ne'arim/Society for the Education of the Youth), reading circles (Hevrat Dorshei Leshon Ever/The Society for the Promotion of the Hebrew Language, 1782, Königsberg), and schools (Jüdische Freischule/ Jewish Elementary School, 1778), with new textbooks (Lesebuch für jüdische Kinder/Reader for Jewish children, 1779), activities supported by the maskilim and a small group of economically elite Jews with privileges to live in Prussia's cities. By the 1790s, the Haskalah in Prussia encountered the political demands of the centralizing absolutist state, which sought to dissolve all premodern corporations, including the Jewish communal authority (kahal), and the acculturating aspirations of the rising Jewish bourgeoisie, resulting in its radicalization. Prussian Jewish intellectuals soon focused their efforts on political emancipation and cultural acceptance, rather than on inner reform, embodied by the maskil David Friedländer's 1799 letter to Pastor Teller asserting his willingness to convert to Christianity with the provision that he not accept the divinity of Christ. The shift in emphasis was tellingly marked by the failure of Hebrew periodical literature to sustain itself in Prussian lands, giving way to new German periodicals (Sulamith) focused on the struggle for political rights.

The Eastward Turn of the Haskalah

The social and political environment of central and eastern Europe, with their demographically rich Ashkenazic Jewish populations and laggard state-building multiethnic empires, became fertile ground for the dissemination of the Jewish Enlightenment. Although subject to the centralizing political demands of absolutist Austria and Russia to integrate the Jewish community into the life of the state, the quest for political emancipation and religious reform was largely absent among maskilim in the East. Rather, the Haskalah in Austrian Galicia and Russia focused on communal regeneration, particularly as it faced the entrenchment of traditional Jewish culture by Hasidism, the extraordinarily successful Jewish spiritual movement that, born in the mid-eighteenth century, had transformed eastern European Jewry. Using the didactic tools of the general Enlightenment (periodical literature, satire, ethical anthologies, curriculum reform), the battle of east European maskilim, such as Mendel Lefin (1749–1826), Joseph Perl (1773–1839), Nachman Krochmal (1785–1840), and Isaac Baer Levinsohn (1788–1860), against Hasidism gave birth to modern secular Hebrew and Yiddish prose literature, new forms of Bible commentary, and historical writing.

Although always a self-selected intellectual minority within Ashkenazic Jewry, the maskilim represented a radical break with traditional patterns of Jewish life and engendered sharp opposition from traditional rabbinic authorities in central and eastern Europe. Nonetheless, recent scholarly interpretations of the Jewish Enlightenment emphasize its conservatism in comparison with the other responses of European Jewry to modernity (that is, Jewish nationalism, socialism, revolution, migration, political emancipation, and communal self-liquidation/assimilation). Flowering almost a full century after the European Enlightenments, the Haskalah's Hebraism and religious moderation laid the foundation for contemporary constructions of liberal Jewish identity.

Bibliography

Breuer, Edward. The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Germans and the Study of Scripture in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1996.

Feiner, Shmuel. Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness. Translated by Chaya Naor and Sondra Silverston. Oxford and Portland, Ore., 2002.

Feiner, Shmuel, and David Sorkin, eds. New Perspectives on the Haskalah. Oxford, 2001.

Katz, Jacob, ed. Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model. New York and Oxford, 1987.

Mahler, Raphael. Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment: Their Confrontation in Galicia and Poland in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. Philadelphia and New York, 1985.

Sorkin, David. Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment. Berkeley, 1996.

Stanislawski, Michael F. For Whom Do I Toil?: Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry. New York, 1988.

—NANCY SINKOFF

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