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The Age of Haskalah is a seminal study of the beginnings of the Haskalah (Hebrew Enlightenment) in Germany in the last quarter of the 18th century. With detailed textual and historical evidence, author Moshe Pelli examines the backdrop of the Hebrew Enlightenment and the impact of the European Deism on the pundits of Haskalah.
Commonly translated as the “Jewish Enlightenment,” the Haskalah propelled Jews into modern life. Olga Litvak argues that the idea of a Jewish modernity, championed by adherents of this movement, did not originate in Western Europe’s age of reason. Litvak contends that the Haskalah spearheaded a Jewish religious revival, better understood against the background of Eastern European Romanticism. Based on imaginative and historically grounded readings of primary sources, Litvak presents a compelling case for rethinking the relationship between the Haskalah and the experience of political and social emancipation. Most importantly, she challenges the prevailing view that the Haskalah provided the philosophical mainspring for Jewish liberalism. In Litvak’s ambitious interpretation, nineteenth-century Eastern European intellectuals emerge as the authors of a Jewish Romantic revolution. Fueled by contradictory longings both for community and for personal freedom, the poets and scholars associated with the Haskalah questioned the moral costs of civic equality and the achievement of middle-class status. In the nineteenth century, their conservative approach to culture as the cure for the spiritual ills of the modern individual provided a powerful argument for the development of Jewish nationalism. Today, their ideas are equally resonant in contemporary debates about the ramifications of secularization for the future of Judaism.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century most European Jews lived in restricted settlements and urban ghettos, isolated from the surrounding dominant Christian cultures not only by law but also by language, custom, and dress. By the end of the century urban, upwardly mobile Jews had shaved their beards and abandoned Yiddish in favor of the languages of the countries in which they lived. They began to participate in secular culture and they embraced rationalism and non-Jewish education as supplements to traditional Talmudic studies. The full participation of Jews in modern Europe and America would be unthinkable without the intellectual and social revolution that was the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. Unparalleled in scale and comprehensiveness, The Jewish Enlightenment reconstructs the intellectual and social revolution of the Haskalah as it gradually gathered momentum throughout the eighteenth century. Relying on a huge range of previously unexplored sources, Shmuel Feiner fully views the Haskalah as the Jewish version of the European Enlightenment and, as such, a movement that cannot be isolated from broader eighteenth-century European traditions. Critically, he views the Haskalah as a truly European phenomenon and not one simply centered in Germany. He also shows how the republic of letters in European Jewry provided an avenue of secularization for Jewish society and culture, sowing the seeds of Jewish liberalism and modern ideology and sparking the Orthodox counterreaction that culminated in a clash of cultures within the Jewish community. The Haskalah's confrontations with its opponents within Jewry constitute one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of the dramatic and traumatic encounter between the Jews and modernity. The Haskalah is one of the central topics in modern Jewish historiography. With its scope, erudition, and new analysis, The Jewish Enlightenment now provides the most comprehensive treatment of this major cultural movement.
The author classifies these activities as a "cultural revolution." In effect, the Haskalah was a counter-culture intended to modify or replace some of the contemporary rabbinic cultural framework, institutions, and practices and adopt them for its own envisioned "Judaism of the Haskalah." --
Revises our understanding of the relationship between the Haskalah, Orthodoxy, and hasidism, reassesses the role of key individuals in the movement, and offers a new, more nuanced, definition of the Haskalah. Should be of interest to all students of modern Jewish history, literature, and culture in eighteenth-century Germany and eastern Europe in the nineteenth century.
The process of secularization, which is one of the sources of present-day democracy, has its radical origins in eighteenth-century Europe. Criticism of religious norms and discipline, institutions and ideology led to the movement known as the Enlightenment. Its Jewish protagonists (the maskilim), a young intellectual elite, undertook the role of culturally revolutionizing eighteenth-century Jewish society. They aimed at overturning the monopolistic control of rabbinic scholars over education, publications, and social behaviour in favour of secular intellectual values. They sought to promote political rights and religious tolerance, embraced humanism, rationalism, and freedom of opinion. In turn, the end of Jewish isolation brought about a significant contribution to philosophy, science, and art, and participation in the culture of modern European society.This introduction to the emergence of Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) in Germany pays special attention to its most famous figure, Moses Mendelssohn, who was active at the centre of the Enlightenment in Berlin. The volume is richly illustrated with images of eighteenth-century manuscripts, books, and pamphlets, some of which are published here for the first time, and which derive from a collection assembled by the famous nineteenth-century scholar Leopold Zunz. This is an attractive book providing an excellent guide to the major cultural metamorphosis represented by Jewish Enlightenment.
Medicine played an important role in the early secularization and eventual modernization of German Jewish culture. And as both physicians and patients Jews exerted a great influence on the formation of modern medical discourse and practice. This fascinating book investigates the relationship between German Jews and medicine from medieval times until its demise under the Nazis. John Efron examines the rise of the German Jewish physician in the Middle Ages and his emergence as a new kind of secular, Jewish intellectual in the early modern period and beyond. The author shows how nineteenth-century medicine regarded Jews as possessing distinct physical and mental pathologies, which in turn led to the emergence in modern Germany of the “Jewish body” as a cultural and scientific idea. He demonstrates why Jews flocked to the medical profession in Germany and Austria, noting that by 1933, 50 percent of Berlin’s and 60 percent of Vienna’s physicians were Jewish. He discusses the impact of this on Jewish and German culture, concluding with the fate of Jewish doctors under the Nazis, whose assault on them was designed to eliminate whatever intimacy had been built up between Germans and their Jewish doctors over the centuries.
Catholics—both religious and the laity—made significant contributions to science, the arts, and the betterment of human life during the Enlightenment, the period between the Reformations and the modern world. Scholar Dominic A. Aquila writes that it is not uncommon for historical accounts of the time to conclude that the Church stood in the way of the scientific revolution and that faith and reason could not coexist. In The Church and the Age of Enlightenment (1648–1848), Aquila outlines Catholic contributions in mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, the arts, and politics, and highlights key figures of the era including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, St. Vincent de Paul, Queen Christina of Sweden, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Aquila begins by looking back at the work of important figures such as Copernicus, Francis Bacon, and Galileo, all of whom died before the 1648. Aquila bookends the Enlightenment era by wars due to dynastic rivalries and social change—beginning with Europe’s Thirty Years War, which prompted a rethinking of religious and political practices, and ending with the Napoleonic Wars. Aquila also highlights key works of visual arts and music from the period, including Giovanni Bellini’s Frari Triptych, the world-renowned Oberammergau Passion Play, and George Fredric Handel’s Messiah. In this book, you will learn: the Church has been western civilization’s primary patron of art and science for centuries; Blaise Pascal believed that the Biblical revelation of God is the story of God’s action in human history; Isaac Newton was unique among the Enlightenment elite because he believed in God; the separation of Church and state was influenced by Catholic thinkers; Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson embodied Enlightenment ideals in the American colonies; and one of the most enduring outcomes of the Enlightenment is the heart-felt desire for continual improvement of life for more people. Books in the Reclaiming Catholic History series, edited by Mike Aquilina and written by leading authors and historians, bring Church history to life, debunking the myths one era at a time.