Halakhic Romanticism: Wordsworth, the Rabbis, and Torah

Abstract

The year 1796 marks the beginning of William Wordsworth’s enormously productive friendship with Samuel T. Coleridge in Dorset, England. That same year, in Vilna, Lithuania, the leading representative of Lithuanian mitnagged Rabbinic Judaism, R. Elijah, the Vilna Gaon, issued a h.erem or letter of excommunication, condemning H. asidism as a pantheistic heresy. Also in that year the H. asidic Rebbe Shneyur Zalman of Liady published his Tanya, a work whose objective was to secure H. asidism’s legitimacy within traditional Rabbinic Judaism.1 Only four years earlier, in Königsberg, Prussia, just two hundred miles from Vilna, Immanuel Kant, the premier philosopher of the Enlightenment, had published Religion within the Boundary of Pure Reason. Kant’s friend and fellow native of Königsberg, J. G. Hamann, the radical Christian polemicist, had died just eight years earlier. Moses Mendelssohn, the leading German–Jewish exponent of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, had also died recently (1786) in Berlin, a mere three hundred miles from Königsberg.2 KeywordsJewish CommunityExternal AuthorityDivine CommandmentModern Western CultureDivine PresenceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.