Songs of the Nation: The Book of Psalms in Late Eighteenth-Century Jewish Enlightenment

Abstract

In the early years of the Haskalah movement (the Jewish Enlightenment), an avant-garde Jewish intelligentsia, which in the 1780s began its organized activity in Berlin and Königsberg as the Society of the Friends of Hebrew Literature (Gesellschaft der hebräischen Literaturfreunde, or Ḥevrat dorshei leshon ‘ever),1 music and music aesthetics or history were practically absent from its agenda as areas of investigation, let alone practice. Following the ideational inspiration of Moses Mendelssohn, the younger generation of maskilim (scholars, proponents of Haskalah) sought to transform Ashkenazic Judaism from within, primarily through a revival of Bible study and exegesis free from rabbinic authority. Above all, they placed Hebrew Scripture at the center of a new Jewish curriculum and advanced the renewal of the Holy Tongue (Leshon ha-Kodesh) as a language of literary, poetic, and scholarly production. Their endeavors simultaneously drew on medieval and early modern non-Ashkenazic rabbinic Jewish textual traditions as well as contemporaneous European Enlightenment philosophy and scholarship.2 Yet while the second half of the eighteenth century saw an upsurge of printed literature on music criticism and aesthetics in North Germany,3 witnessing a rapidly growing participation of enlightened Jews in German musical culture, particularly in such urban centers as Berlin, the fine arts, including music, were not readily adopted as an operative means of advancing the maskilic vision. Despite Mendelssohn’s extensive contribution to European Enlightenment aesthetics from the outset of his philosophical career,4 music is practically nowhere to be found on the pages of the main organ of the Prussian Haskalah, the monthly periodical ha-Me’asef, first published in early 1784. Indeed, music and other arts had not played a significant role, if any, in the upbringing of the maskilim. Entrenched in the traditional Ashkenazic world of Central and Eastern Europe, their education had been dominated by rabbinic law that gave supremacy to Talmud and Torah learning and considered music, like other sensual temptations and vanities, a distraction to religious scholarship and a life of devotion.5