Haskalah

1st Row, proto-Maskilim: Raphael Levi Hannover • Solomon Dubno • Tobias Cohn • Marcus Elieser Bloch
2nd Row, Berlin Haskalah: Salomon Jacob Cohen • David Friedländer • Hartwig Wessely • Moses Mendelssohn
3rd Row, Austria and Galicia: Judah Löb Mieses • Solomon Judah Loeb Rapoport • Joseph Perl • Baruch Jeitteles
4th Row, Russia: Avrom Ber Gotlober • Abraham Mapu • Samuel Joseph Fuenn • Isaac Baer Levinsohn

Haskala (Hebrew: השכלה‎, "enlightenment" or "education"; often termed the "Jewish Enlightenment") was an extensive intellectual movement among the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, with a certain influence on those residing in Western Europe and Muslim lands. Active from the 1770s to the 1880s, the Haskala advocated integration of the Jews into their surrounding societies, encouraging among others the adoption of local vernaculars, secular studies and economic productivization. Concurrently, the movement promoted a Jewish cultural revival, manifested mainly in the creation of modern Hebrew literature.

In its various stages, the Haskala had a key role in the modernization of European Jews. Its proponents, the Maskilim, advocated and implemented social, educational and ideological reforms in the private and public spheres of Jewish society. Seeking transformation while maintaining Jewish separateness, they clashed both with the conservative rabbinical elite, which attempted to preserve traditional values in their entirety, and those who aspired for total assimilation.

Characteristics

The Haskala was a diverse phenomenon, which spread in different regions across several generations. Even the name itself was only systematically applied from 1860, when the newspaper Ha-Melitz added it to its motto, though derivatives of maskil and the like were already used much earlier. Yet Its proponents did have common features and a sense of self-identity. Those derived from their connection with the first maskilic centre in Berlin. The works of its leaders, among them Moses Mendelssohn, Isaac Satanow and Naphtali Hirz Wessely, were reprinted and reread by subsequent generations, with each adding to the literary canon of the next. This reflected one of the mainstays of Haskala, the major achievement of which was the revival of Hebrew for secular uses. Kohelet Musar ("The Moralist"), published for a short while by Mendelssohn in 1755, was the beginning of modern Hebrew literature and the earliest periodical in that language. The maskilim renewed interest in Hebrew grammar, a topic relatively neglected. Historians described the movement as basically a Republic of Letters, centered around its printing houses and consisting of their readership.

The Haskala's main motivation and aim was the modernization of the Jews, in accordance with the rationalistic and liberal ideals of 18th and 19th Centuries. Members of the movement sought to acquaint their people with European culture, have them adopt the vernacular language of their lands, and integrate them into larger society. They opposed Jewish reclusiveness and self-segregation, called upon to discard traditional dress in favour of the prevalent one, and preached patriotism and loyalty to the new centralized governments. They acted to weaken and limit the jurisdiction of traditional community institutions - the rabbinic courts, empowered to rule on numerous civic matters, and the board of elders, which served as lay leadership. The maskilim perceived those as remnants of medieval discrimination. They criticised various traits of Jewish society, such as child marriage - traumatized memories from unions entered at the age of thirteen or fourteen are a common theme in Haskala literature - the use of anathema to enforce community will and the concentration on virtually only religious studies.

Origins

As long as the Jews lived in segregated communities, and as long as all social intercourse with their Gentile neighbors was limited, the rabbi was the most influential member of the Jewish community. In addition to being a religious scholar and "clergy", a rabbi also acted as a civil judge in all cases in which both parties were Jews. Rabbis sometimes had other important administrative powers, together with the community elders. The rabbinate was the highest aim of many Jewish boys, and the study of the Talmud was the means of obtaining that coveted position, or one of many other important communal distinctions. Haskalah followers advocated "coming out of ghetto," not just physically but also mentally and spiritually in order to assimilate among Gentile nations.

The example of Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), a Prussian Jew, served to lead this movement, which was also shaped by Aaron Halle-Wolfssohn (1754–1835) and Joseph Perl (1773–1839). Mendelssohn's extraordinary success as a popular philosopher and man of letters revealed hitherto unsuspected possibilities of integration and acceptance of Jews among non-Jews. Mendelssohn also provided methods for Jews to enter the general society of Germany. A good knowledge of the German language was necessary to secure entrance into cultured German circles, and an excellent means of acquiring it was provided by Mendelssohn in his German translation of the Torah. This work became a bridge over which ambitious young Jews could pass to the great world of secular knowledge. The Biur, or grammatical commentary, prepared under Mendelssohn's supervision, was designed to counteract the influence of traditional rabbinical methods of exegesis. Together with the translation, it became, as it were, the primer of Haskalah.

Language played a key role in the haskalah movement, as Mendelssohn and others called for a revival in Hebrew and a reduction in the use of Yiddish. The result was an outpouring of new, secular literature, as well as critical studies of religious texts. Julius Fürst along with other German-Jewish scholars compiled Hebrew and Aramaic dictionaries and grammars. Jews also began to study and communicate in the languages of the countries in which they settled, providing another gateway for integration.

Berlin is the city of origin for the movement. This capital city of Germany had become known as a secular, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic center, a fertile environment for conversations and radical movements. This move by the Maskilim away from religious study, into much more critical and worldly studies was made possible by this German city of modern and progressive thought. It was a city in which the rising middle class Jews and intellectual elites not only lived among, but were exposed to previous age of enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau. The movement is often referred to the Berlin Haskalah. Reference to Berlin in relation to the Haskalah movement is necessary because it provides context for this episode of Jewish history. Subsequently having left Germany and spreading across Eastern Europe, the Berlin Haskalah influenced multiple Jewish communities who were hungry for non-religious scholarly texts and insight to worlds beyond their Jewish enclaves.

Spread

Haskalah did not stay restricted to Germany, however, and the movement quickly spread throughout Europe. Poland-Lithuania was the heartland of Rabbinic Judaism, with its two streams of Misnagdic Talmudism centred in Lithuania and other regions, and Hasidic mysticism popular in Ukraine, Poland, Hungary and Russia. In the 19th century Haskalah sought dissemination and transformation of traditional education and inward pious life in Eastern Europe. It adapted its message to these different environments, working with the Russian government of the Pale of Settlement to influence secular educational methods, while its writers satirised Hasidic mysticism, in favour of solely Rationalist interpretation of Judaism. Isaac Baer Levinsohn (1788–1860) became known as the "Russian Mendelssohn". Joseph Perl's (1773–1839) satire of the Hasidic movement, "Revealer of Secrets" (Megalleh Temirim), is said to be the first modern novel in Hebrew. It was published in Vienna in 1819 under the pseudonym "Obadiah ben Pethahiah". The Haskalah's message of integration into non-Jewish society was subsequently counteracted by alternative secular Jewish political movements advocating Folkish, Socialist or Nationalist secular Jewish identities in Eastern Europe. While Haskalah advocated Hebrew and sought to remove Yiddish, these subsequent developments advocated Yiddish Renaissance among Maskilim. Writers of Yiddish literature variously satirised or sentimentalised Hasidic mysticism.

Effects

Even as emancipation eased integration into wider society and assimilation prospered, the haskalah also resulted in the creation of secular Jewish culture, with an emphasis on Jewish history and Jewish identity, rather than religion. This resulted in the engagement of Jews in a variety of competing ways within the countries where they lived; these included the struggle for Jewish emancipation, involvement in new Jewish political movements, and later, in the face of continued persecutions in late nineteenth-century Europe, the development of a Jewish Nationalism. One source describes these effects as, "The emancipation of the Jews brought forth two opposed movements: the cultural assimilation, begun by Moses Mendelssohn, and Zionism, founded by Theodor Herzl in 1896."

One facet of the Haskalah was a widespread cultural adaptation, as those Jews who participated in the enlightenment began in varying degrees to participate in the cultural practices of the surrounding Gentile population. Connected with this was the birth of the Reform movement, whose founders such as Israel Jacobson and Leopold Zunz rejected the continuing observance of those aspects of Jewish law which they classified as ritual, as opposed to moral or ethical. Even within orthodoxy the Haskalah was felt through the appearance of the Mussar Movement in Lithuania and Torah im Derech Eretz in Germany in response. Enlightened Jews sided with Gentile governments in plans to increase secular education among the Jewish masses, bringing them into acute conflict with the orthodox who believed this threatened Jewish life.

Another important facet of the Haskalah was its interests to non-Jewish religions. Moses Mendelssohn criticized some aspects of Christianity, but depicted Jesus as a Torah-observant rabbi, who was loyal to traditional Judaism. Mendelssohn explicitly linked positive Jewish views of Jesus with the issues of Emancipation and Jewish-Christian reconciliation. Similar revisionist views were expressed by Rabbi Isaac Ber Levinsohn and other traditional representatives of the Haskalah movement.

See also

• Aleksander Zederbaum
• Hebrew literature
• Max Lilienthal
• Moshe Leib Lilienblum
• 19th-century "Science of Judaism"
• Secular Jewish culture

References

• Resources > Modern Period > Central and Western Europe (17th\18th Cent.) > Enlightenment (Haskala) The Jewish History Resource Center – Project of the Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• Rashi by Maurice Liber Discusses Rashi's influence on Moses Mendelssohn and the Haskalah.
• Jewish Virtual Library on Haskalah
• Rasplus, Valéry "Les judaïsmes à l'épreuve des Lumières. Les stratégies critiques de la Haskalah", in: ContreTemps, n° 17, septembre 2006 (French)
• (translated from Oświecenie żydowskie w Królestwie Polskim wobec chasydyzmu)
• Brinker, Menahem (2008), The Unique Case of Jewish Secularism (audio archive giving history of ideas of the Haskalah movement and its later secular offshoot movements), London Jewish Book Week.

External links

• Haskalah at The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe
• Map of the spread of Haskalah
• Haskalah collection, John Rylands Library, University of Manchester

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: