Dank und Vortrag
Jüdische Traditionen in Kultur und Gesellschaft Europas
Schriftliche Fassung des 2007 anlässlich der Verleihung des Meyer-Struckmann-Preises für geistes- und sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung gehaltenen Vortrages
Ladies and gentlemen,
heads of the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf and the Philosophische Fakultät,
the distinguished Dean Prof. Dr. Ulrich von Alemann,
Prof. Dr. Dieter Birnbacher who gave the wonderful Laudatio,
heads of the Dr. Meyer-Struckmann-Stiftung, Prof. Dr. Dieter Spethmann,
the Wissenschaftszentrum NRW and Dr. Dirk Matejovski,
members of the award committee, among them the excellent scholars of Jewish Studies Prof. Dr. Stefan Rohrbacher and Prof. Dr. Marion Apptroot,
dear colleagues and friends,
the book that you have found deserving of the prestigious Dr. Meyer-Struckmann-Preis in the Humanities for the year 2007 is the book I always dreamed of writing. From the earliest stages of my studies at the Hebrew University more than twenty years ago, my most ambitious challenge was to write a comprehensive study telling as fully as possible the historical story of the maskilim, the first modern Jewish intellectuals in Europe – dramatically bringing to life those pioneers and sometimes martyrs of modern Jewish culture. This evening I stand here before you greatly moved and excited, and I feel compelled to say how grateful I am for the realized dream, for this special privilege of seeing the completion of such an extensive project, that was originally composed and published in Hebrew, then translated into English, and now, thanks to the great efforts and dedication of my friend Prof. Dr. Michael Brocke, the Head of the Steinheim-Institut in Duisburg, who initiated it, the excellent translator Anne Birkenhauer from Jerusalem, and the high quality publication of Georg Olms Verlag, it is published in the language which many of the protagonists of my book read and spoke – German; and I am extremely delighted for the distinguished award you have chosen to give me, a historian who was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, but whose thoughts and research energy are constantly directed towards 18th Century Europe and especially towards the Jews who lived in the German territories at that time.
Why the Jewish Enlightenment? Why is it so important historically? And why is it important and meaningful for me personally? In the past, the Haskalah has evoked interest as the movement that led the Jewish campaign for Emancipation, that opened the modern Hebrew literature, that paved the way for modern nationalism and Zionism, or on the contrary, that bore the primary guilt for the assimilation, conversion and destruction of Jewish identity. But what I now suggest is completely different: that it should be historically understood in the framework of the major story of Jewish experience in Europe in the last three hundred years – the dramatic, and sometimes even painful and traumatic, unresolved encounter of the Jews with modernity.
The historical sphere of the Haskalah is the stormy and fascinating 18th Century. Anyone delving deeply into the texts that give voice to the tensions, the disputes, the rebellion, the ecstatic religious movements and to the critics of society and culture, cannot but hear the echoes of enormous deterioration and desire for change, the struggle between the old and the new, the traditional and the modern, the conservative and the liberal. Within all this, it is possible to isolate the voices of the few young Jewish men, actually the natural candidates for membership in the Ashkenazi rabbinical elite, who had a boundless passion for science and philosophy, which was not found in the traditional Jewish library. Frustrated by the restrictive boundaries of the talmudic culture, feeling culturally inferior to what was taking place in European culture, and gripped by a nearly erotic desire for new, secular knowledge, these early maskilim took the first step towards the creation of an alternative intellectual elite, which will challenge the rabbinical dominance and supremacy. Here the revolution of the Enlightenment began. It was what I consider “the French
Revolution” of the Jews. What we witness by observing the 18th Century Haskalah is the crucial shift of cultural hegemony and the beginning of the project of modernity of the Jews.
Lets listen to such a voice from the early Haskalah, lets try for example to enter into the mind of a 27 years old Jewish medical student in the Frankfurt University, and to experience the erotic fantasy written in 1722 by Asher Anshel Worms, in order to better understand the encounter between young Jewish intellectuals and the exciting experience of science.
“Sitting atop a tall tree”, Worms told his readers, “in the center of a marvelous island, blooming with a splendid variety of trees and flowers, I looked out towards the stormy ocean. In the distance, I spied a ship whose sailors were vainly struggling against the immense waves. All of their efforts to row to shore were unavailing. Within minutes, the ship broke in two and sunk into the depths, to the heartbreaking cries of drowning men. A few still tried to grab hold of pieces of the ship in the hope of being carried to shore. I ran quickly down to the shore where I found bodies spread about. Among them was a beautiful girl, a virgin, very fair to look upon, whom no man had known sexually, lying there her face pressed to the ground. She was still breathing, I tried with all my strength to save her. I took off her dress, anointed her body with oils and perfumes and emptied her of the water she had swallowed, until she opened her eyes. Then I carried her over my shoulder to my home,
where I made her a comfortable bed, gave her wine to drink and fed her delicacies until she regained her strength and I could converse with her. Our love grew and her gratitude knew no bounds. Who are you, I asked her, from whence have you come and why were you doomed to such a terrible fate? Since you have saved my life, the girl said, I will reveal to you that in the past I was the daughter of a respectful family from Jerusalem, and with the other Jewish fugitives who departed their land in fear of the enemy, I left to take up a dreadful exile. For many long years, slaves ruled me in place of the kings and ministers to whom I had been accustomed. They betrayed and abandoned me. But a handful continued to recognize my value, until you, my savior, appeared, saved my life and redeemed me. For that, I will be eternally grateful and never leave you. But who are you, I asked, such a beautiful, attractive maiden whom fate has so cruelly treated? And she replied: From the day that I left my land, throughout the years of my captivity, I have been known in the nations as Algebra.”
This erotic fantasy, in which the science of Algebra appeared in the guise of a beautiful and beloved girl, was composed by Asher Anshel Worms, then a young Jewish student of medicine and philosophy at Frankfurt University, as an introduction to a Hebrew Algebra textbook published in 1722. Worms, disturbed by the neglect of sciences in Jewish culture and strongly attracted by the charms of secular knowledge, portrayed himself as the redeemer of science in general and of Algebra in particular. He undertook an ambitious project – the publication of a series of works on science (optics, mechanics, geometry, astronomy and others) and philosophy, to enrich the Hebrew library through an encyclopedic endeavor, only a small portion of which was ever actually published.
Why this small but amazing example is so important to me? Because in my book I describe the emergence of the modern Jewish intellectual in the 18th Century as a process in which young men were irresistibly attracted to and intellectually seduced by secular knowledge beyond the boundaries of Jewish culture. It was a process which many, besides Worms, imagined, believe it or not, as no less than sexual temptation.
What really happened here from the historical point of view? The late British scholar Roy Porter asked recently “Did the Enlightenment matter?” and answered that the most significant historical outcome of the Enlightenment was the secularization of thought, particularly among the elite, as well as the emergence of a new intelligentsia, large and powerful enough to challenge the religious elite of the clergy in Europe. One characteristic of European secularization was the changed venue of decision-making. Elites whose source of authority was supernatural gradually lost their function as decision-makers and masters of culture and morals to elites that drew their authority from human experience and reason.
A similar process took place in Jewish society. It was the intellectual elite of traditional Jewish society that represented the highest social and cultural ideal at its finest. It actually implemented the commandment of the study of Torah, which in principle demands that all of men’s time be devoted to that study, leaving no room for any other knowledge. Members of this traditional elite were Talmudic scholars whose claim to authority was based on their command of Talmudic and halakhic (Jewish Law) knowledge. No less important, this elite also enjoyed nearly exclusive control over the world of Hebrew books. Their members were the ones who wrote and printed books, and issued approbations for the books of their peers. Spokesmen for the Jewish community came only from this elite. In their sermons, halakhic rulings and books of ethics they prescribed norms and thought. In contrast, the maskilim were the first secular intellectuals. They were writers, physicians, philosophers, students, newspaper editors – literate men who, without necessarily losing their commitment to religious belief and practice, already represented a new type of Jewish intellectual.
As a matter of fact, quite a few of the early maskilim were still connected to the traditional scholarly elite. There were very few instances of totally autonomous intellectuals: Moses Mendelssohn, 1786–1729, who first acquired his position as a philosopher in the extra-Jewish cultural arena and society, is a perfect example of such an intellectual.
Indeed, although Mendelssohn had increasingly acquired the image of a leader of the Jews, owing to the public fame he had gained, he did not believe that he possessed qualities and talents outside of his much loved field of philosophy. The circumstances of his life, however, did not allow him to philosophize in solitude. On the contrary, Mendelssohn was the Jew most exposed in his time to the limelight of the public opinion. He did not think of himself as a leader and he hesitated to take his place in the public sphere, but he cared very much for the future of the Jews in the emerging modern Europe. Let us listen to the voice of that Jewish humanist from Berlin who was so sensitive and so attuned to the variations in the culture, thought and politics of his time, and a great believer in religious tolerance.
Actually, he would have liked at least to be able to build a private sphere in which the Jew could develop as an individual and even gain recognition as a learned, “gebildeter” European Jew. But he soon realized that he had to struggle with prejudice and intolerance, he understood that he should not only engage in philosophical speculation, but that he had to fight for what he believed was the obvious conclusion to be drawn from reason, natural rights and humanism – that the Jew too is a human being.
For Mendelssohn, the gap between the restricted status of the European Jew and the innovative changes inspired by the Enlightenment seemed vast, sorely offensive and intolerable. The internal contradiction between the humanistic values of the Enlightenment culture and the “civil oppression” of the Jews troubled him. Mendelssohn gave expression to his feeling of weakness as a Jew in his famous 1770 letter to Lavater:
“I am a member of an oppressed people which must appeal to the benevolence of the government for protection and shelter – which are not always granted, and never without limitations. Content to be tolerated and protected, my fellow Jews willingly forgo liberties granted to every other human being. Barred even from temporary residence in many countries, they consider it no small favor when a nation admits them under tolerable conditions. As you know, your circumcised friend may not even visit you in Zurich!”
And another example: On a summer evening in 1780, Mendelssohn was walking in the company of his wife and their children in the streets of Berlin. A gang of boys attacked the family, yelling “Juden! Juden!”, and throwing stones at them. The children, stunned and frightened, did not understand what was happening. “What have we done to them, Papa? Why are they always chasing us and calling us names? Is just being a Jew enough reason for them to curse us?” And their father, frustrated and helpless, unable at that moment to find any comforting words of explanation, could only mutter to himself with suppressed rage: “People, people, when will you stop doing these things?” Mendelssohn repressed this experience and never mentioned it publicly. Only in a private letter to the young Benedictine monk Peter Adolph Winkopp, one of Mendelssohn’s admirers, he told about this terrifying and humiliating experience of his family, which no one knew about at the time. This was one of those momentary flashes that tore aside the respectable thin cover of his life, a moment that was an affront to his self-respect and shook his faith in religious tolerance.
The tension between his Jewish identity as “other” and his high public standing was one of the major experiences of Mendelssohn’s life. On more than one occasion, this “otherness” of his filled him with a sense of helplessness, insult and weakness. But Mendelssohn’s “otherness” as a Jew did not only mean that he was a victim, exposed to attacks; it also provided him with a special perspective. As a major player in the circles of the German Aufklärung and as a Jew, he could observe his surroundings from a double vantage point – both as a participant on the inside and as a critic on the outside. It kept him from being carried away by the belief that the culture of modern Europe would inevitably bring about the happiness of all human beings, and it made him skeptical about the Enlightenment’s belief that mankind was making progress. Mendelssohn’s historical importance actually lies in the fact that he was not a naïve representative of the Enlightenment. His dreams about the opportunities offered by the modern era were often disturbed by nightmares and anxiety about the failure of the Enlightenment. Mendelssohn, the sober Jewish humanist of the 18th Century, posted his “humanistic command” as a warning sign in Berlin. From an historical perspective, looking at the tragic fate of European Jewry, this warning sign and its humanistic message is of enormous significance. If Mendelssohn had been able to foresee what the future held for the Jews of Berlin about 150 years after his death, he might have tried to use his warning sign to cry out the words he muttered in anger and despair after the attack on his family while they walked through the streets of Berlin: “People, people, when will you stop doing these things?”
Nonetheless, from the inner perspective, which is the main perspective of my book, the Haskalah was, as I said earlier, nothing less than the French Revolution of the Jews, a revolution that made its decisive contribution to secularization and had implications for the way modern Jewish life was shaped until the present day. The Haskalah is important and fascinating because it was the first cultural trend among Jews with a modern consciousness. The maskilim’s consciousness of the avant-garde, which emanated from the personal cultural conversion that each of them underwent (replacing the totality of rabbinic culture with the modern-Jewish European culture) and which left a deep imprint on them, led to a world of vision and a program with a serious transformative force, and invented the modern means of communication through which the Jews’ project of modernity was launched. From a later perspective, one can see how the sharp sensitivity of the maskilim to the historical changes in Europe at the time became the province of a broad Jewish public. From this standpoint the Haskalah was the most significant agent through which the Jews entered the modern era. It was the movement that first touched the sensitive nerves of modernity, and it was the Haskalah which ignited the Jewish Kulturkampf.
A conscious and deliberate revolution began as soon as the first maskil mounted the public Jewish stage and proclaimed the independence of the republic of maskilim: “Listen to me! I bear a reformist and redemptive vision that will be fulfilled in this world; I speak of an allembracing criticism of the ills of existing Jewish life, and I have a detailed plan for the rehabilitation (Verbesserung) of our society and culture. I come armed with new knowledge, I am attentive to European culture and capable of reading the changing map of history and correctly and precisely decipher its codes. My senses are particularly attuned to the changes of the time and I hold a compass that helps me navigate between the paths of present and future without repeating the errors of the past.” The maskilim declared their independence in the 1780s when they created the Jewish republic of letters and the modern Jewish public sphere. This was an amazing event, and it is here, I believe, that the great march of secular intellectuals begins – those laymen who would in future capture the public sphere until the rabbinical elite (not without bitter conflicts!) was relegated to a defensive minority position. With this revolutionary step, sovereignty over the world of culture and values would begin to pass to the writers, journalists, publishers, philosophers, scientists and poets. Therefore, when I am assigned the task of evaluating the various tracks of modernization of European Jewry and their historical significance, I cannot help but give priority (although of course not exclusivity) – to those who invented Jewish modernity, to those who launched the secular revolution in Jewish history – the maskilim.
I must admit that my own existential experience of modernity is first and foremost an Israeli one, in all of its cultural, social and even political aspects. An experience that each and every day provides amazing examples of the ongoing, tormenting and unresolved struggle of the Israeli Jews with challenges that originated in 18th Century Europe. Questions of insularity versus openness, particularism versus universalism, Jews and Gentiles, tradition and innovation, religious leadership and secular leadership, scientific knowledge and holy texts, conservatism and liberalism, collectivism and freedom of the individual – all of these are still on the agenda even after two or three hundred years. My aim as a historian is to penetrate the lives and experiences of those in the various camps fighting the Kulturkampf, with the utmost sensitivity in order to understand the full intensity of the tremendous impact their encounter with modernity had on the Jews and their modern identity. I hope that my book has succeeded in illuminating these experiences and in opening a window through which the reader would be able to look at the history of the Haskalah, and to better understand the Jewish experience of modernity in Europe.
Once more I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all those who found my book worthy of the Dr. Meyer-Struckmann-Preis, funded by the estate of the founder Dr. Fritz Meyer-Struckmann from the city of Essen. Now it is the right time to tell you that there is another reason to my excitement this evening. My late grandparents, the Feiners, came from Poland to Germany in the 1920s and lived in the city of Essen where my father was born. By the end of the crucial year 1933, and when my father was six years old and had just started school, the family came to the conclusion that it was time to leave Germany, and they built a new life in Palestine, and participated in the establishment of the Jewish State a few years later. From this personal perspective the prize is even more meaningful to me.
And my very last sentence: I am asking myself how this book on 18th Century Jewish Enlightenment relating to the questions of an Israeli historian inspired by long term Jewish memory also manages to speak to a broader audience. I think that the values of the Enlightenment are still meaningful to us all, and by choosing this book, you also drew the attention to the story of the first modern battles against tyranny, fanaticism, discrimination and ignorance, and you show appreciation to those who presented a more liberal, moderate and tolerant view for the dignity, autonomy and respect of all human beings. In my mind, the Jewish story of the Enlightenment is now even more interesting and relevant, and bears an important message to 21st Century Europe.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your attention and for the great honor you have given me this evening.