Ruderman David B. Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History

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194 C H A P t e r s i x

how might we assess its continuity or discontinuity with

the period that follows it, usually referred to as the Has-

kalah, or period of Jewish enlightenment, ostensibly

ushering in the modern period of Jewish history?

since the process of major migratory shifts begins not

at the end of the sixteenth century but some eighty years

earlier in 1492, the year of the expulsion of the Jews

from

spain,

would date the beginning of the early mod-

ern period from about that time.

mobility, the radical

shifts in population, and the subsequent displacement

and restructuring of Jewish life they engendered rep-

resent primary factors in the shaping of Jewish culture

in this era, then 1492 represents a plausible beginning,

although one should acknowledge that the rst waves

of Ashkenazic migration from Germanic lands can be

dated even much earlier.

might add that the not-so-insignicant impact of the

renaissance

and

reformation

on Jewish culture needs

to be rethought in light of the movement of Jews into

it-

aly

from Germanic lands, Provence, and

spain

in the late

fteenth and early sixteenth centuries and their intense

social mixing, as well as the later migration of conversos

into

italy

and into such centers of Protestant culture as

Hamburg and Amsterdam.

one

can at least state em-

phatically that the

renaissance

left its mark on a small

but conspicuous group of Jewish intellectuals

—many of

them

immigrants—in

italy

, and to a lesser extent in other

european

centers, who rethought their cultural legacy in

the context of humanist, Aristotelian, and Neoplatonic

categories.

And the reformation in northern europe

also had a signicant impact on the emergence of the

Christian study of Hebrew and Judaism, the publica-

tion of works in Hebrew by Christian scholars, and the

t oWA r d M o d e r N i t y: s o M e f i N A L t H o U G H t s 195

reassessment of Judaism as a factor of early modern cul-

ture from the early sixteenth century onward.

Mobility

that was rst set in motion on a large scale in 1492,

together with the impact of the

renaissance

and the

ref-

ormation

on Jewish culture and on Christian attitudes

toward Judaism, all suggest the beginnings of a new and

distinctive era of Jewish culture already emerging by the

early sixteenth century.

1492 roughly marks the opening of our period, when

should we designate its closing, and by what criteria?

the

beginnings of modernity in Jewish history are often

associated with the emergence of the Haskalah during

the second half of the eighteenth century.

yet

viewing

the cultural world of this Jewish enlightenment from the

perspective of the structural changes highlighted herein

raises some interesting questions about this conventional

dating as the actual beginning of modern Jewish cul-

ture and society: Why indeed, from the perspective of

early modern Jewish history, is the ideational world of

the Haskalah traditionally perceived as a radical break

from the past, iconoclastic in shaping a new secular con-

sciousness, a new intellectual elite, and a new construc-

tion of Jewish identity? How novel, how revolutionary

was its intellectual production?

fro

m the perspective of

the dynamic intellectual universe of the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries, the eighteenth century in Jewish

thought seems rather unspectacular in the novelty of its

formulations and in the intensity of its contacts with the

outside world.

its

signicance lies rather in its radical im-

pact within the political, social, and pedagogic spheres,

not necessarily the intellectual/cultural ones, even when

one considers such exceptional eighteenth-century think-

ers as Moses Mendelssohn or

sol

omon Maimon.

one

196 C H A P t e r s i x

compares how thoroughly up-to-date and how genuinely

aware such early modern writers as Azariah de’

ros

si,

Joseph

del

medigo, or

sim

one Luzzatto were of their

immediate intellectual surroundings with the relatively

limited cognizance of their counterparts some 150 years

later, the contrast is truly striking.

Note a similar sentiment of Paul Hazard in his fa-

mous book regarding the crisis of

european

culture in

general, in which we read, “

the

daring utterances of the

Aufklarung, of the age of light, pale in insignicance be-

fore the aggressive audacity of the Tractatus theologico

politicus,

the amazing declarations of the Ethics. Neither

voltaire nor frederick ii

ever came near the ungovern-

able anti-clerical, anti-religious frenzy of

toland and

his

like. Had Locke never been born, d’Alembert would

never have penned the ‘

discours

preliminaire’ to the

Encyclopedia.”

very much in step with Hazard’s position was the

young

salo

W. Baron, writing in the rst edition of his

Social and Religious History of the Jews in 1937. Hidden

in a footnote, he wrote “Compared with Leone

ebreo

and

spinoza,

the sage of

dessau

[Mendelssohn] appears

to be more of a medieval apologist than a modern secular

philosopher.

the

Mendelssohnian school, by program-

atically republishing in 1794 Azariah de’

rossi’

s Light

of the Eyes, symbolized its indebtedness to the

italian

pioneers.

” And earlier he categorically stated, “But all

the fundamental tendencies of the Haskalah, such as

secular learning, a “puried” Hebrew tongue, histori-

cism and the revolt of the individual against communal

power, had become more and more marked in

italy

and

Holland long before Mendelssohn.”

Baron apparently

had second thoughts about the notion of an

italian

t oWA r d M o d e r N i t y: s o M e f i N A L t H o U G H t s 197

dutch Haskalah since he removed any traces of it in the

later edition of his multivolume history, and besides the

brief comment cited here, he failed to develop his insight

any further.

during

the last eighty years, most historians have

seemingly put Baron’s unsubstantiated inclination to rest

in their clear-cut distinction between the cultural lives of

early modern Jews and those of the maskilim (men of

enlightenment).

for

these scholars, the real innovation

of the Haskalah was its ideology of change and reform

of Jewish culture and society, based on the assumption

that ideologically articulated shifts in conscious thought

are the landmarks of historical change.

since

the ear-

lier patterns of intellectual and cultural changes were

not ideologically driven, they had less signicance in the

process of Jewish modernization.

despite the fact that recent historical writing has

challenged the assumption that cultural change is only

or primarily driven by ideology,

Baron’s proposal of a

dutch

Haskalah has not been readily accepted by con-

temporary historians.

instead,

while acknowledging the

unique conditions of

dutch

Jewish life, one distancing

the realms of the sacred from the secular, one charac-

terized by constant cultural and social interactions with

non-Jewish society, and one based on “an invented tra-

dition,” no one has called this a Haskalah nor consid-

ered it analogous to the momentous changes of the later

period of the

enlightenment.

the contrary, the intel-

lectual elite of Amsterdam were deemed basically con-

servative, cautious, and resistant to change both with

respect to religious and scientic thought.

Perhaps, after all, it is time to reconsider the refreshing

audacity of Baron’s youthful reection in a new light.

198 C H A P t e r s i x

is true that the sephardic Jews living in Amsterdam were

relatively conservative, but conservatism, as we now

know well from the study of nineteenth-century ortho-

doxy, is just as much an ideological response to moder-

nity as that of bold or radical reform and innovation.

Moreover, one should not consider the cultural climate

of seventeenth-century Amsterdam in isolation from its

italian

counterpart. When these two cultural experiences

are viewed side-by-side, it is clear that the

italian

is less

conservative, more innovative, and more daring in its

formulation of Jewish thought and in its dialogue with

the non-Jewish world. As we have noted, Judah Messer

Leon’s cultural ideal of an all-inclusive view of the

torah

was promoted

by several generations of

italian

Jewish

scholars of a different mind-set than many of the for-

mer conversos in Amsterdam.

since—as i have argued

throughout—both of these communities were essential

pieces of the larger cultural landscape shared by all early

modern Jews, the

dutch

experience should not be con-

sidered in isolation but in relation to what transpired in

italy both prior to and during its

“golden age.”

early Haskalah, early Modernity,

and Haskalah

reconsidered

the complex relationship between an early modern

Jewish culture and the Haskalah is further obscured by

the notion of an “early Haskalah” recently proposed

by several historians.

this

view has it that we should

divide the history of a Jewish enlightenment into two

distinct periods: a period roughly falling between 1720

and 1770 called the early Haskalah, and the Haskalah

proper of the 1770s and ’80s.

the

earlier period had

t oWA r d M o d e r N i t y: s o M e f i N A L t H o U G H t s 199

primarily an intellectual and religious coloring, whereas

the later period focused more on reforming Jewish soci-

ety through an emphasis on social and political activity.

other words, the early maskilim, the Jewish propo-

nents of enlightenment, were itinerant intellectuals,

physicians, men of traditional Jewish learning primar-

ily from Germany, Poland, and Lithuania who devoted

themselves to the construction of a rational view of Ju-

daism, grounded in humanism and an appreciation of

the natural world.

their common agenda to expand

the intellectual borders of Judaism without undermining

traditional Jewish norms they emerged as representa-

tives of an enthusiastic new republic of letters, a second-

ary elite who, through the publication of their Hebrew

works, contributed to

the

enlargement of Jewish cul-

tural horizons and paved the way, while not necessarily

being connected, to the later ideological movement of

the 1770s and ’80s.

following

this way of thinking, even

Moses Mendelssohn, the so-called father of the Haska-

lah, in contradistinction to his disciples, was actually a

member of the earlier group and not the later one.

informed by this denition of an early Haskalah, i

wish to offer the following hypothesis: Jewish cultural

history during most of the eighteenth century, at least

until its last decades, needs to be situated within the

early modern period—that is, not as a precursor or early

stage of the Haskalah nor interpreted through the lens

of later Haskalah developments.

the

so-called early

maskilim have a long pedigree.

they

emerged centuries

earlier in ways quite different from their medieval coun-

terparts, as products of the knowledge explosion gener-

ated by the printing press and by the universities of early

modern

europe.

these

early maskilim of the eighteenth

200 C H A P t e r s i x

century, predominantly Ashkenazic Jews, are a familiar

manifestation of an already fully developed phenomenon

of Jewish intellectual life. Jewish scholars without ide-

ological agendas other than to educate themselves and

their students more broadly in multiple disciplines and to

integrate and reconcile this knowledge within the frame-

work of Jewish tradition were part and parcel of the cul-

tural prole of early modern Jewish elites, both primary

and secondary, from at least the sixteenth century on, as

we have seen.

the early maskilim simply followed the

well-trodden steps of such luminaries as Judah Messer

Leon, Azariah de’

ros

si,

sol

omon ibn

ver

ga, Judah

Moscato, Abraham Portaleone,

tob

ias Cohen,

sim

one

Luzzatto, Menasseh ben

isr

ael,

oro

brio de Castro and

many others.

While italy of the late fteenth century,

as we have seen, represents the point of origin of this

new portrait of the h

akham kolel (universal sage), the

term used to describe boldly this new Jewish scholar in

the rst book printed in the lifetime of its author, Judah

Messer Leon, the image and the actual writings of these

scholars were known throughout

europe

both in their

own time and during the eighteenth century.

the de-

ant criticism of the eminent rabbi the Maharal (Judah

Loew ben Bez

alel), emanating from distant Prague, of

Azariah de’

rossi’

s provocative reading of the Aggadah

in Mantua in the sixteenth century, as we have seen,

isaac satanov’

s republication of

rossi’

s Me’or Einayim

(

the

Light of the

eyes)

in 1794 are two dramatic mani-

festations of the impact of the cultural agenda of the

akham kolel across space and time.

While the beginnings of early modernity for Jews

can be established with relative ease by the close of

the fteenth century, as has been argued herein, the

t oWA r d M o d e r N i t y: s o M e f i N A L t H o U G H t s 201

boundaries separating early modernity from modernity

itself are more difcult to establish conclusively.

would

then suggest the following formulation:

the

primary

ingredient of a modern Jewish culture, distinguishing

it from an early modern one, is the changing political

landscape of western and eastern

europe

as it affected

the Jews, the impact of enlightened absolutism on Jewry

policy, the political debates and limited successes of civil

emancipation, and the subsequent use and misuse of

Jewish minorities as tools of nineteenth-century nation-

alism.

dating the beginning of modern Jewish history

at about 1782 and anything before it as early modern

Jewish history,

know

am certainly following in the

footsteps of many historians, from

simon dubnov

on.

But through my new reiteration,

hope to underscore

the Haskalah proper as primarily a political, pedagogic,

and programmatic movement committed to transform-

ing Ashkenazic Jewish culture. Mendelssohn was thus

more an early modern Jewish gure than a modern one,

although the image created by his followers transformed

him into a modern cultural icon.

When the Haskalah

was institutionalized and politicized,

it became a mod-

ern phenomenon and no longer an early modern one.

Accordingly, the real pioneers of the Haskalah were

those offering a political agenda of Jewish moderniza-

tion—men such as Naphtali Wesseley and

isaac euchel,

but not Mendelssohn.

course, 1782 was not only

the year in which

emperor

Joseph

issued his edict of

tolerance but also the year of publication of Wesseley’s

famous ideological manifesto of the Haskalah move-

ment, his Divrei Shalom ve-Emet (Words of Peace and

truth).the Haskalah was then, for the most part, a Ger-

man Jewish development from its beginnings, emerging

202 C H A P t e r s i x

primarily out of a condition of cultural deprivation, of

inequity, and out of a sense of intellectual inferiority and

the deep-seated need to catch up with a world that had

passed Jews by.

it was an attempt by Ashkenazic Jews,

rst in Germany and later in eastern

europe,

to acquire

what other

european

Jews had enjoyed for centuries.

the

ideological program of the Haskalah was relevant

to Jews who themselves lacked the cultural opportuni-

ties available to their coreligionists in other

european

communities.

such places as

italy

, the Netherlands, or

england,

such ideological advocacy was generally un-

necessary and thus relatively absent.

viewing the Modern era in the

Light of the

early Modern

Until now we have looked at the continuities and dis-

continuities between early modern Jewish culture and

the Haskalah in its various phases. But modernity, as

we have already indicated, is a larger and more com-

plex phenomenon that the Haskalah movement alone.

for

many historians, modernization is neither primar-

ily about the ood of new ideas nor about educational

and cultural agendas but about political, legal, and

socio-economic processes.

roughly

at the same time as

the appearance of Wesseley’s educational pamphlet, the

french

and American revolutions took place alongside

the partitioning of Poland. And generally within the

same time frame,

european

states experienced, to vary-

ing degrees, intense urbanization and industrialization,

the aggressive consolidation of national economies, and

the breakup of an older estate system of privileged and

t oWA r d M o d e r N i t y: s o M e f i N A L t H o U G H t s 203

powerful groups upon which mercantile governments

had relied.

the

emergence of the public sphere—of

partial or sometimes full political and legal emancipa-

tion, of the development of democratic electorates and

modern citizenship, of political parties, nationalist ide-

ologies, and more—suggest a rapidly changing social

and political universe where new pressures were being

placed on Jewish individuals, their families, and their

collective institutions and leaders.

this

is not the place

to describe these processes in detail but only to point to

a radically different political and social reality for Jews

that sharply contrasted with the processes we have care-

fully traced in early modern

europe.

Underscoring

the difference between the period under

examination and its successor, however, should not blind

us from observing the obvious continuities between the

two. We have already mentioned the intellectual link-

ages between early modern Jewish intellectuals and the

early maskilim. Accelerated mobility, the dissemination

of printed books, pamphlets, and newspapers, the dimi-

nution of rabbinic authority, and the blurring of reli-

gious identities are primary factors for Jewish culture

both in the early modern and modern periods.

even

the

condition of communal cohesion we have noted in de-

scribing early modernity was never fully eroded in the

modern era.

there

is no doubt that political emancipa-

tion and the civic pressures of the new modern states

precipitated the fragmentation of Jewish collective life

to a greater degree than in the past. Nevertheless, mod-

ernization created new forms of communal cohesion as

it destroyed old forms.

the

rabbis still remained a force

to contend with in the nineteenth century and beyond as