Shmuel Feiner, "From Renaissance to Revolution: The Eighteenth Century in Jewish History"
David Shasha
From Renaissance to Revolution: The Eighteenth Century in Jewish History
By: Shmuel Feiner
In the old Sephardi cemetery in Altona, tombstone No. 1308, decorated with a drawing of a deer and inscribed with Hebrew verse, marks the grave of an Ashkenazi Jew of Ukrainian descent who was buried there in 1805. This is neither a coincidence nor a mistake. Naphtali Herz Wessely, the Hebrew poet and philologist, one of the fathers of the cultural renaissance of eighteenth-century Ashkenazi Jewry, spent his last years in Hamburg. There he made a surprising, unconventional request of the community: he asked to be laid to rest in the Sephardi section of the cemetery, deliberately forgoing burial in the Ashkenazi section where he would have been interred near two of the most prominent rabbis of the previous generation – Jonathan Eybeschuetz and Jacob Emden.1 This was far more than a symbolic act. It was a twofold statement, through which Wessely disassociated himself from the contemporary Ashkenazi culture and identified with what he considered to be the source of inspiration best fitted to a new direction in intellectual life. Wessely had already chosen the Sephardim as his cultural reference group in the formative stage of his life when, in the 1740s, he joined the circle of Amsterdam Jewish scholars who cultivated the Hebrew language, the Bible, poetry, and philosophy. According to one of his biographers, his identification with the Sephardim was so strong that, in his old age, the Portuguese community in London invited him to serve as its Hakham (rabbi).2
About half a century earlier, in 1749, Isaac Wetzlar, a wealthy merchant from Celle, completed his Libes briv, a surprising and radical critique, in Yiddish, of the flaws of Ashkenazi Jewish society, in particular of the religious elite.3 His impressive knowledge of religious literature, especially medieval ethical and philosophical writings, along with his experience as a broad-minded businessman who traveled widely throughout Europe, enabled him to observe the rabbis from outside their circle and to criticize, often with sharp cynicism, their low intellectual level and moral corruption. Since this work remained in manuscript and was never published, it did not provoke any outrage at the time. It is, however, a fascinating and subversive document by one of the lesser-known figures in the early modernist awakening. For example, Wetzlar attacked the tendency to study only the Talmud and halakhah. He saw it as a deplorable evil and linked it to dishonesty in commerce, which, he believed, was being given religious justification and was economically disastrous for the Jews: ‘Today, however, because of our many sins, our holy Torah is unfortunately turned into a fraud by many evil scholars. The truth is hard to find. Similarly, God have mercy, our income and livelihood are difficult and business is fraud and wealth is very unstable’. In confrontations with scholars, Wetzlar writes, he leveled grave accusations at them; for example, he decried their disgraceful inability to represent the Jewish religion properly: ‘In their relations with nobles and gentile scholars, could they defend their faith and sanctify the name of God?’ His recommended remedy is the study of philosophy and ethics, in particular the writings of Saadia Gaon and Maimonides, as well as Bahya Ibn Paquda’s Hovot ha-levavot (his favourite book, which had been reprinted only a short time earlier, after a long absence from the Jewish library). He also praised the curriculum of the Sephardi communities: ‘In contrast, among the Sephardim the curriculum is as God desires. ... I believe that because of this, the abundance of wealth and business have permanence among the Sephardim. ... I do not want to write the truth about who is responsible for this. Let everyone decide and arrive at the truth for himself’.4
Several years after Wetzlar’s death in 1749, a most astonishing text, an anomaly in the world of Hebrew books, was published in Berlin. It was, in effect, a kind of sophisticated secular sermon addressed to young Jewish men – students in batei midrash who were fulfilling the precept of Torah study or embarking on a rabbinical career. This secular sermon, one of the most interesting texts of the early Jewish Enlightenment, promoted two values that had been intrinsic to the European humanistic ethos since the Renaissance and to the contemporary Enlightenment culture: pleasure and the centrality of man. In the sermon, written by the young Moses Mendelssohn and published pseudonymously as the first article in the unprecedented periodical, Qohelet musar, Jews were called on to fill their lungs with the air of natural life, to notice the beauty of nature, to smell the fragrance of the blossoms, to nurture their aesthetic sense and to delight in the perfect harmony prevailing in the world, which, as Leibniz taught, is the best of all possible worlds. Autonomous man, ‘God’s finest creature’, is at the center of nature, and it is unthinkable that the Jews, of all people, should repress their human traits. This secular sermon pushes its readers out the doors of the beit midrash and lowers their gaze from the heavens earthward, to the sensual world, which, although the marvellous creation of God, is also the arena of man’s earthly activity, an inviting, exciting, seductive, thrilling world. Mendelssohn, then in his twenties, rebukes his readers, all of whom certainly belonged to the religious elite: ‘In all my days on this earth, I have never seen a man pass through a pleasant field in which the buds have appeared whose eyes did not roam from its beginning to its end. God gave man an eye with which to see, to feast on the rich pleasure of the glory of all creatures’.5
What is the textual basis for this view? Where does he find legitimation for the experience of pleasure, observation, and hedonism, which seem to be so alien to the ethos of talmudic and halakhic study? He has two sources: the Sages who composed the blessing on trees when they bud in the spring, and, of course, Maimonides, the solid twelfth-century foundation for the workers of the eighteenth-century renaissance:
‘Maimonides explained that everything the Almighty created, He created in the best, most perfect, and most attractive manner. ... He said further that this too is a great principle. A man who contemplates all of these will know and recognize God’s benevolence to him’.6
The quotation from The Guide of the Perplexed is not entirely accurate, but the message is clear: the harmonious world view and the duty to look at nature are values clearly implied in legitimate Jewish texts; hence there is nothing to prevent their adoption – especially since the pleasure Mendelssohn recommended was not merely sensual, but culminated in a philosophical experience, a coherent, analytical observation, a sense of excitement at the perfection of creation as a whole.
Before returning to that secular sermon in Qohelet musar, I want to emphasize that Wessely’s burial in the Sephardi cemetery, Wetzlar’s criticism of the scholars and the Ashkenazi curriculum and preference for the Sephardi model, and Maimonides’ role in Mendelssohn’s text are only three of the many milestones on the road to the revolution that reshaped the cultural and social world of Ashkenazi Jewry in the modern era. It began with a Jewish renaissance, the project of recovering neglected texts and scientific, linguistic and philosophical knowledge – a task that had not been considered relevant in what David Sorkin defined as ‘the Baroque culture’ of pre-modern European Jewry – and the return to the Jewish library of works such as Maimonides’ Moreh nevukhim and Millot ha-higgayon, Bahya’s Hovot ha-levavot, and Halevi’s Kuzari. In the 1740s, Wessely, Wetzlar, and Mendelssohn could read the Moreh nevukhim because it had been reprinted, for the first time in two hundred years, in Jesnitz near Dessau in 1742. Starting in the 1780s, there were signs of a revolution that gave rise to the first modern Jewish ideology, the Haskalah, created the Jewish public sphere, and also set off a Jewish Kulturkampf.
All of this took place in the fascinating, contradiction-filled eighteenth century. What didn’t happen in that century? Throughout the century, among the million to a million and a half Jews of Europe, there existed an underground Sabbatean movement that legitimized religious-radical permissiveness and caused frequent scandals. Study circles of scholars and kabbalists were opened under the auspices of philanthropists. Messianic expectations and calculations of the ‘end of days’ excited mystics and rationalists alike. At an accelerating pace, the members of the wealthy elite were becoming acculturated, first to the lifestyle of the aristocratic Baroque culture and later to the European bourgeois ethos. And unbeknownst to the historians, Jewish deists and atheists appeared and became the target of an early Orthodox offensive. In my recent studies on the formation of the early Haskalah in the eighteenth century, which, among other things, rejected kabbalistic enthusiasm, I concluded that one can-not achieve a full understanding of a phenomenon such as the Haskalah without looking at the overall historical picture, and in particular without an understanding of the power of kabbalistic groups or the strength of the Sabbatean libertine threat to the religious and social order. Everyone – Frankists, Hasidim of the Ba’al Shem Tov, early maskilim, community rabbis, mitnaggedim, later maskilim like Mendelssohn, the economic elite composed of successful merchants, including Italian and western Sephardi ‘Port Jews’ – played a role on the historical stage of the eighteenth century. Their interactions are often the key to understanding the special role of each group. Indeed, this was a century of great political and spiritual expectations of a religious revival, of transformation and rationalization, of divine and earthly redemption, of religious tolerance and cosmopolitanism. But it was also a century of great anxieties and an awareness of crisis. Those who view the eighteenth century as a relatively stable century, the end of the Middle Ages (as Jacob Katz put it), in which processes of change began to emerge only during its last third, must, in my view, adopt a much more complex and dynamic picture, full of conflicts and schisms.
For a long time, I have been suggesting that various historical phenomena in Jewish history should be examined through the organizing term ‘the eighteenth century’. I believe that many conundrums of the Jews’ enormously significant transition from the old world to the modern world can be understood in a new way if scholars can take in a broad, synchronic, and polyphonal view of the entire sweep of processes experienced by the Jews in the eighteenth century. The historical research on the century is primarily thematic. Historians have divided the story of European Jews geographically – Western, Central, and Eastern European Jewry – or according to key processes – the history of hasidim and mitnaggedim, of Sabbateanism, of the Haskalah, of the emancipation, and the roots of antisemitism. Only a few scholars have dared to suggest an overall, integrated picture. The most prominent among them is, of course, Jacob Katz, who, beginning with his Tradition and Crisis, tried to present the face of Jewish society as a whole. His less well-known article, ‘The Eighteenth Century as a Turning Point of Modern Jewish History’, is one of the few in which he tried to propose an overall thesis about the course of Jewish history in the eighteenth century. In that essay, Katz refined his ‘tradition and crisis’ model and argued that maskilic rationalism and hasidic mysticism (with their subversive social expressions in the form of maskilic groups and hasidic courts with their charismatic leaders) devastated the patterns of traditional life. The eighteenth century, in his view, was a turning point in Jewish history. The age of the traditional society passed; from then on, the Jews would voluntarily live in totally different circumstances.7
But the historian who listens to the voices of the eighteenth century, who reads the various texts and attempts to distinguish processes of renewal from desperate at-tempts to hold on to the old world can no longer be completely satisfied with the concepts provided by Katz’s model of modernization. The main critics of this model are Todd Endelman, Yosef Kaplan, and David Sorkin, who argue that the tradition and crisis model is not appropriate for cases such as the Jews of England or western Sephardi Jewry, who did not need an enlightenment movement to become modern; Katz, they allege, failed to take account of their non-ideological process of acculturation or of the ‘Port Jew’ type.8 Indeed, Katz asserted that until the 1770s no Jew felt he was witnessing a meaningful shift.9 This problematic claim overlooks a series of turbulent political, cultural, and social events and presents too shallow a picture of the period. In particular, it fails to see the renaissance of the early Haskalah and is insensitive to the dissatisfaction and the sense of flux typical of many Jews who put their thoughts in writing. Katz’s narrative is fundamentally tragic and draws a picture of collapse, notably the collapse of the community structure and the decline of a society that, in his view, was firmly grounded on the authoritative organizational and political order and on traditional values but now crumbled under a series of blows. He failed to notice the intellectual renaissance; he tried to fit the dream of modernization, with its hopes and traumas, into Weberian paradigms; and he only partially identified the power of the Haskalah revolution, a subject he dealt with rather superficially.
Even in the more sophisticated narrative of Jonathan Israel, the eighteenth century is presented only partially, backed up by minimal documentation and tightly linked to Katz’s framework of ‘tradition and crisis’. In his European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, Israel asserts that the golden age of European Jewry was when western Spanish Jewry flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the eighteenth century was marked by decline – both demographic and economic – and intellectual stagnation.10 Although he did point to several phenomena of revival (such as Hasidism) in the second edition of his book (1989), the concession was made grudgingly and with many reservations. He argued that the drift away from traditional Judaism was a mass movement even before Mendelssohn. The Haskalah, whose value he greatly understates, is viewed as a movement that repudiates tradition and moves towards assimilation. This image is at variance with that proposed by newer research and is more in keeping with the stereotype nurtured by the assimilated, on the one hand, and by the Ultraorthodox, on the other. In general, Israel makes some very sharp observations about the intellectual decadence of Jewish life that he viewed as a more or less universal phenomenon during the first half of the eighteenth century.
His conclusions also contradict the view of themselves held by many persons in the eighteenth century. For example, Wessely’s optimistic take on the last quarter of the century was that many changes were taking place in the lives of the Jews in exile, right before his eyes. They were no longer persecuted as in the past. And although still a nation of merchants, many new economic opportunities were opening up for them. With regard to culture, language, and educational patterns, Wessely drew a line to separate the Jewish communities in the Muslim East and Sephardi communities of Western Europe from Ashkenazi Jewry. Whereas the latter, especially in Poland, was backward, living in the past in isolation and according to the old norms, Sephardi and Eastern Jewry were living in the present and ready for the future. The members of these communities spoke the vernacular naturally; their commercial ties with gentiles were very strong and their manners appropriate to the norms of the surrounding society. What was needed now was a joint effort by enlightened rulers and Jews to transform the Ashkenazim (especially those in Poland, whose cultural situation was the worst). Thanks to education, they too would be fit to be counted as people of the present, people of the eighteenth century.11
It is true that Wessely observed the contemporary scene through rose-colored glasses. Nonetheless, his is historical testimony that cannot be overlooked. Instead of the ‘Tradition and Crisis’ model, perhaps we should interpret the Jewish eighteenth century through the lens of complex and multifaceted Jewish modernization. Straight lines of development cannot always be identified. Elements of the old and the new world intermingled and sometimes engaged in a conflict that was not resolved, even for individuals. It was a far more complex age than the label ‘century of enlightenment’ can depict. In fact, it was an unstable century, which can perhaps be called the ‘melting pot’ of the modern Jewish world. Everything began in it but nothing really ended. It was a fascinating century of innovations, struggles, contradictions, disputes, uncertainties, and hesitations. It included Joseph II in Vienna and the emancipation in Paris, blood libels in Poland and the Uman massacre in the Ukraine, a deist philosopher like Solomon Maimon and an eccentric fideistic kabbalist like Rabbi Nahman of Bratzlav. The status of Jewish women did not change fundamentally and they did not play an active role in the public sphere. Gender differences remained as rigid as ever and women were absent from the ranks of Haskalah. But they did play a key economic role; some of them were businesswomen like Glueckel of Hameln and Esther Liebman. The library of books intended to enhance women’s knowledge of Judaism expanded – particularly in Yiddish. Thanks to private tutoring, women of the upper and middle classes in Central and Western Europe learned European languages and became more acculturated. Towards the end of the century a group of salon women emerged; some of them, such as Rahel Levin Varnhagen and Dorothea Schlegel, were also intellectuals and key figures in the cultural shift from enlightenment to romanticism. Ada Rapoport-Albert has recently shown how the gender boundaries be-tween men and women were broken down in the Sabbatean movement and how egalitarian trends, supported by kabbalist ideas, emerged, notably in Jacob Frank’s anarchist sect.12 As David Ruderman demonstrated about England, not all intellectuals were affiliated with the Haskalah and the Anglo-Jewish intelligentsia was not identical to the Haskalah movement.13 But nothing that began in this century reached by its end: Hasidism, the Emancipation, the question of the rabbinical leadership, the replacement of rabbinical hegemony by secular intellectuals, even the les-sons to be learned from Sabbateanism – none of these fully crystallized.
When we focus the historian’s spotlight on the intellectual elite, we can discern, amidst all the complex events that affected European Jewry during this century, first a renaissance, manifested by the early Haskalah, and later a revolution worked by the maskilim in its last two decades. I have already written extensively about the early Haskalah; here I will merely point to several of its major trends:
– a quasi-erotic attraction to science and philosophy felt by young men of the talmudic elite;
– an attempt to grapple with the legitimacy of this science vis-à-vis the exclusive role of religious knowledge, as principle and as precept, in the pre-modern Ashkenazi culture;
– the production of a new library, alongside the talmudic literature, containing books on science, philosophy, ethics, and the Hebrew language;
– a struggle against superstition, folly, and ignorance, and the ecstatic pietism of the Sabbateans and the enthusiastic hasidim, on the one hand, and against trends of skepticism and heresy on the other;
– a consciousness of intellectual inferiority to the European cultural world, accompanied by an endeavor to redeem the neglected knowledge of science and philosophy at a time of crisis in Jewish culture.14
It is important to realize that the early Haskalah was far from being a united and cohesive movement. It was characterized by many internal contradictions, by uncertainty, and by unusual personalities. Rabbi Jacob Emden, for example, who – considering his curiosity about and immense attraction to secular knowledge, his obsessive fight against Sabbatean apostasy, and his individualism – could be taken for a Jewish renaissance figure, was one of the fiercest enemies of the philosophers. In his polemic against philosophy, in his Mitpahat sefarim, he stated, for example, that he simply could not believe that Maimonides had written the Guide of the Perplexed.15
Although I regard the early Haskalah as a renaissance phenomenon that wanted to restore a vanished world, it also pointed toward revolution. If we return for a moment to Qohelet musar, we should note two important features of this special text. First, it marks a dramatic shift in the description of the world and life from that of the then-popular musar literature. Whereas best-selling, widely distributed books like Qav ha-yashar by Zevi Hirsch Koidonover of Vilna and Shevet musar by Elijah ha-Kohen of Izmir depicted a demonic and threatening world and called upon the Jew to suppress his earthly passions, struggle ceaselessly against his evil instincts, and ponder the horrible punishments of Hell that await all sinners, Qohelet musar’s secular message is optimistic, inviting the Jews to experience a world of earthly pleasures and depicting God as desiring the good of His creatures. Second, the secular sermon did not have the backing of the talmudic elite, but rather of the new secular elite of writers. This fact, which marks the incipient breakdown of the former’s monopoly on knowledge and the public sphere, has revolutionary implications.
This revolution reached its peak in the last quarter of the century in Berlin and Königsberg in Prussia. Its well-known heroes included Isaac Euchel, Isaac Satanow, Aaron Wolfsohn, David Friedländer, Moses Mendelssohn, and Naphtali Herz Wessely. The new secular maskilic elite penetrated the public sphere, undermined the talmudic elite’s dominance of culture, knowledge, and public indoctrination, invented the ‘new era’ as a powerful modernist ethos, demanded the application of religious tolerance to the Jews both from without (the state, with regard to civil rights)and from within (the rabbis, with regard to their coercive powers), established modern educational institutions, and fought the initial battles of a Jewish Kulturkampf. I have written about the course and significance of this revolution at length in my book The Jewish Enlightenment. Here I shall cite one example of a motif that is rarely mentioned – the anticlericalism of the Haskalah.
In Aaron Wolfsohn’s radical play, Sihah be-eres ha-hayyim (‘A conversation in the land of the living’), published in Ha-meˆassef in the 1790s, the culture war is brought for a decision by no less an authority than the Heavenly Court, but first be-fore the medieval philosopher, Maimonides. The litigation pits Rabbi Raphael Kohen of Hamburg against Moses Mendelssohn, with Maimonides as the arbiter. The rabbi appeals for Maimonides’ approval. But as he describes the world view of the rabbinical elite that claims a monopoly on the Torah and its interpretation, on the Jewish bookshelf, and on knowledge itself, Maimonides becomes more and more repelled by him: ‘Woe to the generation whose leader you are! God’s people, how grievously you have stumbled and declined!’16 Wolfsohn scathingly criticizes the narrow-mindedness, fanaticism, and ignorance of the rabbinical elite with the aim of challenging its pretension to continued hegemony. Even in this fictional posthumous confrontation, the rabbi continues to cling to rigidly Orthodox anti-maskilic positions, while Mendelssohn gains Maimonides’ full support and recognition as a kindred soul. The two join the great Greek philosophers in the universal world of souls. God Himself decides the Kulturkampf in favor of the maskilim, declaring: ‘My dear son, Moses [Mendelssohn] has brought to naught the counsel of the evil men of the land who do not understand the actions of the Almighty and the work of His hands’.17
At the end of the play, the rabbi is left standing alone on the stage. The message is unmistakable: the rabbinical elite will soon admit its failure and, mortified, disappear from history, in the Haskalah’s ultimate triumph.
While these trends, which ultimately led to the secularization of Jewish culture and the emergence of a secular intellectual elite, were proceeding, the hasidic revolution was taking place in Poland. It developed an alluring new model of religious life and proposed an alternative leadership that captivated many hearts. The old-style rabbis were rejected in favor of religious leaders who placed the religious experience at the center of life. A counter-revolution began in the early 1770s, a stormy battle waged by those we usually call ‘Mitnaggedim’. They rightly identified among the hasidim trends of openness to earthly life and a rejection of the intellectual religiosity of the talmudic scholars. Ultimately, though, when the early nineteenth century revealed that the confrontation with modernity was the crucial story of the new era in Jewish history, Hasidism proved to be the best bulwark to safeguard Orthodoxy. In the struggle against the enticements of Europe, the new knowledge and the culture of the Haskalah, mystical Hasidism evidently wielded the best weapons for waging the Orthodox battle. Its rejection of modernity was more absolute, underpinned by a religious view that dismissed corporeal existence and rationalist thought. The Hasidim were among the first to adopt unyielding anti-maskilic positions. Hasidism added magic to the world at the very time when secularization was at its height in Europe and the magic of religion rapidly vanishing from it.
The eighteenth century, then, also holds the key to understanding why and how Orthodoxy took the position it did. The roots of Orthodoxy, according to the usual definition of the traditionalists’ defensive, negative counter-reaction when confronted by the threats of modernity and alternative Jewish ideologies, lie in the anti-Sabbatean and anti-maskilic struggles of the eighteenth century. That is in fact how things look retrospectively from the end of that century. During that century, several opposing revolutions took place. The revolution of religious revival, influenced by the Kabbalah, split into two: Sabbateanism and Hasidism. Both offered a promise of freedom – namely, the possibility of a direct or dialectic contribution to the ethos of modernity, to the destruction of traditional rabbinical and community authority, to autonomy and secularization. Sabbateanism, denounced as soon as its destructive potential became apparent, went underground and finally disappeared. Hasidism was persecuted at first but ultimately triumphed in Eastern Europe, where it won over the hearts of the masses and gained religious legitimacy. At the same time, the Haskalah’s revolution was proceeding, fed by the principle of religious tolerance, faith in absolutist rulers, a new reading of universal history, and above all a belief in the Enlightenment. This revolution, too, was perceived as a threat to the rabbinical elite and met by an Orthodox reaction.
The hasidic revolution did not fulfill its subversive potential and merged into Orthodoxy, with which it turned out to have much in common: the religious leader wielded great authority and his followers were dependent on him; it isolated itself from everything modern and external; and it introduced even stricter norms of religious behavior. The early Haskalah fought a two-front battle, against the extreme rationalists and ecstatic kabbalistic religiosity. Similarly, the Haskalah at the end of the century fought against religious hypocrisy and clericalism, but also denounced hedonists, libertines, and assimilationists. The germ of the Kulturkampf and schisms that mark the Jewish world at the beginning of the twentieth-first century was already present beneath the surface at the end of the eighteenth century.
In his lectures in the 1960s on the roots of Romanticism, Isaiah Berlin pointed to the complexity of the eighteenth century:
[P]erhaps somewhat to the surprise of people who believe the eighteenth century to have been a harmonious, symmetrical, infinitely rational, elegant, glassy sort of century, a kind of peaceful mirror of human reason and human beauty not disturbed by anything deeper and darker, we find that never in the history of Europe had so many irrational persons wandered over its surface claiming adherence.18
Those who lived at the time knew that even better than we do. Voltaire, for example, perhaps the most fascinating figure of the eighteenth century, exposed the religious fanaticism of Catholicism as manifested in France in the 1760s in the trials and barbarous executions of Jean Calas and of the Chevalier de La Barre.19 Mendelssohn was skeptical about the possibility of combating prejudice and imbuing the masses with the principle of religious tolerance. In 1784, in his ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’Immanuel Kant concluded that his was not an ‘enlightened age’. At best, he maintained, it is an age in which there is ‘Aufklärung’.20
Even though he was more knowledgeable and cultured than many of his Jewish brethren, Naphtali Herz Wessely, with whom I began, was not acquainted with all the contradictory trends at work during his generation. He was, however, certainly aware of his own role in the cultural renaissance of the early Haskalah and believed that he himself was responsible for the breakthrough that produced the cultural shift in Ashkenazi Jewry. Nonetheless, to judge by his reactions during the 1782 Kulturkampf he instigated with the publication of Divrei shalom ve-emet, it is doubtful that he understood the revolutionary meaning of his challenge to the rabbinical elite and of his demand for a rethinking of all aspects of the social, economic, educational, and cultural life of the Jews. In any event, his request to be buried in the Sephardi section of the Altona cemetery is a historical episode that signifies the emergence of independent, individualistic thinking, critical audacity, and openness to innovative options of living. In this sense, his link to the Sephardi cultural model is emblematic of one of the most fascinating trends of the Jewish eighteenth century.
Notes
1. Yohanan Witkover, Aguddat perahim (Altona, 1880), pp. 303–4
2. On Wessely, see: Moshe Pelli, The Age of Haskalah: Studies in the Hebrew Literature of the Enlightenment in Germany (Leiden, 1979), pp. 113–30; Edward Breuer, ‘Naphtali Herz Wessely and the Cultural Dislocations of an Eighteenth-Century Maskil’, in New Perspectives on the Haskalah, ed. Shmuel Feiner and David Sorkin (London and Portland, Oregon, 2001), pp. 27–47.
3. The Libes briv of Isaac Wetzlar, ed. and trans. Morris M. Faierstein (Atlanta, Ga., 1996).
4. Ibid., Chapter 13.
5. Meir Gilon, Mendelssohn’s Qohelet musar in its Historical Context (Heb.) (Jerusalem, 1979), p. 15
6. Ibid., p. 159
7. See Jacob Katz, ‘The Eighteenth Century as a Turning Point of Modern Jewish History’, in Vision Confronts Reality: Historical Perspectives on the Contemporary Jewish Agenda, ed. David Sidorsky, Ruth Kozodoy, and Kalman Sultanik (Madison, NJ, 1989), pp. 40
8. See: Todd Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (Ann Arbor, 1999); Yosef Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (Leiden, 2000); David Sorkin, ‘The Port Jew: Notes Toward a Social Type’, Journal of Jewish Studies 1 (1999): 87–97.
9. See Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages,
trans. Bernard D. Cooperman (New York, 1993), Ch. 24.
10. See Jonathan I. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism 1550–1750 (Oxford, 1989), Ch. 10 and 11
11. Naphtali Herz Wessely, Divrei shalom ve-emet (Berlin, 1782).
12. See Ada Rapoport-Albert, ‘On the Position of Women in Sabbateanism’ (Heb.), pp. 143–327 in The Sabbatean Movement and its Aftermath: Messianism, Sabbateanism and Frankism, ed. Rachel Elior, vol. 1 (Jerusalem, 2001).
13. See David Ruderman, Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry’s Construction of Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, 2000
14. Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment (Philadelphia, 2003), Ch. 1–3; idem, ‘Seductive Science and the Emergence of the Secular Jewish Intellectual’, Science in Context, 15(1) (2002): 121–36.
15. Jacob Emden, Mitpahat sefarim (1768) (Lvov, 1871).
16. Aaron Wolfsohn-Halle, ‘Sihah be-eres ha-hayyim’, in Studies in Hebrew Satire, I: Hebrew Satire in Germany (Heb.), ed. Y. Friedlander, (Tel Aviv, 1979), p. 151.
17. Ibid., p. 176
18. Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, 1999), p. 47.
19. Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance and Other Writings, ed. Simon Harvey, trans. Simon Harvey and Brian Masters (Cambridge and New York, 2000).
20. Immanuel Kant, ‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?’ Berlinische Monatsschrift 4(1784): 481–9
From Sepharad in Ashkenaz: Medieval Knowledge and Eighteenth-Century Enlightened Jewish Discourse, eds. Resianne Fontaine, Andrea Schatz, and Irene Zwiep, Amsterdam, 2007, pp. 1-10