Jewish Enlightenment Research Articles

Antonio's Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (review)

Antonio's Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (review)

More and More Equal: The Literary Works of Sami Michael (review)

Hebrew Studies 48 (2007) 410 Reviews return to this section after reading Dauber’s more innovative and animated case studies in Parts 2 and 3. In the field of Yiddish Literature, a recent scholarly thrust has been toward late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Modernism, a moment which, admittedly, produced fascinating literary output. It is therefore all the more important that Dauber has furnished scholars of Jewish Studies and literary criticism with a sensitive study of Mendelssohn, Wolfssohn, and Perl. The book not only offers an overview of the early poetic, linguistic, and social challenges of Yiddish and Hebrew literature; it invites the reader to examine the varied contexts of the Jewish Enlightenment as a means of better understanding Modern Jewish Culture. (Many thanks to Marc Caplan for his consultation.) Amelia Glaser University of California, San Diego La Jolla, CA 92037 amglaser@ucsd.edu MORE AND MORE EQUAL: THE LITERARY WORKS OF SAMI MICHAEL. By Nancy E. Berg. Pp. x + 219. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Cloth, $70.00. In her research, Berg tries to dissemble two broad conceptions in criticism of Sami Michael’s work. One is his conception as an ethnic writer, and the other is the conception of his work primarily from an ideological viewpoint . Both of these silence or create an erroneous readings of his work. As the result of these two parallel processes, there is a vacuum in the review of Sami Michael’s work. By bringing him into the category of minority writers, a category that includes various eastern writers of various origins, Michael’s work is banished to the sidelines of literary discussion. In addition, most critics dismiss the poetic elements in Michael’s work as failures and the discussions that they devote to the work are mainly ideological or political discussion that have led to erroneous readings. It seems that these assumptions well explain the structure of Berg’s research, a structure with a main point of returning to a primarily structuralist approach and to a somewhat conservative textual analysis that refrains from all political or ideological discussion. Berg’s book is a journey that follows the development of Sami Michael’s work, an examination of the movement of this work from the sidelines to the center and the manner in which it signals a new voice in the Israeli literary scene. The book addresses the educated writer who is interested in a closer Hebrew Studies 48 (2007) 411 Reviews acquaintance with Michael’s writing—its content, the main dilemmas that arise in it regarding the Israeli existence, the molding of the image of the Other in his work, and so on. In these subjects, the book accomplishes its goals. Berg addresses Michael’s work with great respect. She mainly discusses his adult novels and the novelist’s processes of development and maturation as a writer. Her survey focuses on several aspects germane to the genre of the novel: the structure, the characters, and the language. Another chapter deals with Michael’s literary acceptance and surveys numerous articles written about his various books. Yet another chapter examines the evolution of the novel Water Kissing Water from its initial version, written in the fifties, through its final version, published in 2001. In this interesting discussion, Berg uses genetic criticism, which studies “the drafts, notes, and manuscripts that precedes the published work” (p. 163), to shed a new light on the final version of the novel. The most important achievement of the research lies in its comprehensive—panoramic—presentation of Michael’s work. The chapters present a variety of poetic categories, some structural (structure, characters) and others linguistic or spatial. The book offers a structured discussion that deals with each novel separately while pointing out the developments that can be seen from one novel to the next and the connections built between them. Finally, Berg suggests a comprehensive discussion of the characters of the Other in Michael’s work: the immigrant Mizrachi—Jew, the Arab or Mizrachi woman, and Arab characters from various levels of society. As such, the book is a convenient reference for navigating and browsing Michael’s work. Yet the book’s strength as a reference is also its primary weakness...

Antonio's Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (review)

Antonio's Devils: Writers of Jewish Enlightenment and Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, by Jeremy Dauber. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 354 pp. $60.00. All too often, literature and literary questions are addressed solely from their own narrow and self-contained disciplinary confines. Reacting, perhaps, to scholarly predilections of earlier generations, wherein literature was often pressed into service of history of ideas, contemporary scholars have generally insisted upon detaching study of literature from all matters historical. One of many significant contributions of Jeremy Dauber's Antonio's Devils is fact that he sets aside such scholarly inclinations and produces a book that is a wonderfully enriching exploration of literary texts, as well as a suggestive and intelligent foray in field of intellectual history. Dauber's subject is literature of Haskalah, Jewish Enlightenment, which flourished first in Prussia through second half of eighteenth century, and then a few decades later in Galicia. Dauber's key to understanding Haskalah and its variegated literatures and languages-literature written in German, Hebrew, and Yiddish-is use of textual allusion, that is, all manner of explicit and implicit allusion to earlier biblical and rabbinic canons. Given long tradition of allusiveness in Jewish literature, from intrabiblical references to poetry and prose of medieval scholars, focus on textual allusion is a particularly useful tool, one that beautifully captures complex lines of historical-cultural continuity even as they are fraught with far-reaching discontinuities. In Dauber's skilled hands and expertly trained eyes, an appreciation of textual allusion not only highlights rich tapestry of Maskilic literature, but also deepens our understanding of historical context that spawns modern Jewish literature, and beyond that, very tensions and challenges that shaped Jewish encounter with modernity. Dauber begins his book in a somewhat daring fashion with a chapter-long analysis of passage of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, in which Shylock alludes to a section of Genesis, triggering Antonio's famous quip that the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. Dauber's intent, of course, is to illuminate a certain methodological approach, one that refers both to literary contexts of allusive material and historical and social factors that shaped ways in which that material was employed (p. …

The continuity of subversion: Hebrew satire in Mandatory Palestine

Satirical literature attempts to subvert a cultural system through the manipulation of its foundational symbols. It rests on the assumption that the reader is familiar with these symbols' conventional signification and that he or she also possesses deep knowledge of the cultural system being mocked. This statement holds true for modern Jewish satire, which originated among traditionally-educated adherents of the Jewish Enlightenment in late eighteenth century East Europe and flourished throughout the 1800s. When exported in the early 20th century to Palestine, this subversive tradition took the form of parodies of tradi tional texts such as the Passover Haggadah, produced in the secular atmosphere of Tel Aviv and the kibbutzim. This article sets Hebrew satirical literature produced in interwar Palestine against the backdrop of its European predecessors. Changes in the form and content of parodies of sacred Jewish texts nicely demon strate the transition in the first half of the twentieth century from Jewish to Israeli culture. From the turn of the century through the 1930s, Palestine's Jewish community (the Yishuv) was a liminal zone in which a catalytic, yet ephemeral, coming together of Judaic erudi tion and a freethinking spirit engendered a Zionist secular culture. The principle texts analysed here are Isaak Meir Dick's Masekhet Aniyut of 1844, as an example of learned parody from the period of the Jewish Englightenment (Haskalah); Kadish Yehuda Silman's Bava Tekhnika of 1913, to demonstrate the continuation of the Haskalah tradition in the early years of the new Yishuv; and several satiric haggadot published in Palestine during the 1920s and 1930s. My analysis is informed by the anthropologist Mary Douglas' semi nal essay on the joke, which she defines as:

:Renewing the Past, Reconfiguring Jewish Culture: From al‐Andalus to the Haskalah.(Jewish Culture and Contexts.)

How do groups wishing to retain their traditions adjust to societies that invite or pressure them to adopt new ideas, values, and practices? This question, so pressing in liberal, multicultural societies today, has received considerable attention in recent years. Typically the choices presented in the scholarship are between assimilation or acculturation on the one hand and resistance on the other. This collection of erudite and thought‐provoking essays offers another possibility. In the case of the Jews from medieval Spain to nineteenth‐century Germany and the United States, the contributors argue, poets, philosophers, and religious leaders “renewed” and “reconfigured” tradition, thus making it relevant to the concerns of their day. They interpreted texts from the past in terms that made them compatible with the values of the societies in which they lived. In the first chapter, Joseph Yahalom shows how both medieval poets and eighteenth‐century exponents of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, responded to the wider Enlightenment trend of criticizing ornamentalism in literature by invoking an ancient tradition of pure, lucid, and succinct Hebrew poetry. Next Esperanza Alfonso explores the theme of exile in eleventh and twelfth‐century poetry, arguing that the reconfiguration of this older motif provided a means of comprehending the upheavals and (sometimes literal) dislocations of the Reconquista. Dvora Bregman reveals how Hebrew poets in Renaissance Italy justified their borrowings from contemporary gentile forms by insisting that the result captured the spirit of Biblical verse. Similarly, Alessandro Guetta examines the Jewish response to the Italian Renaissance. Focusing on the fifteenth‐century poet/philosopher Moses da Rieti, he describes Rieti's use of Maimonides, a twelfth‐century thinker who, like many of his non‐Jewish contemporaries, sought to reconcile rationalism and faith.

Lubavitchers as Citizens: A Paradox of Liberal Democracy (review)

Reviewed by: Lubavitchers as Citizens: A Paradox of Liberal Democracy Barry Trachtenberg Jan L. Feldman . Lubavitchers as Citizens: A Paradox of Liberal Democracy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. xv + 212. Lubavitch Hasidim appeared in Lithuania at the end of the eighteenth century as one of many Hasidic sects to form in the wake of the death in 1772 of the movement's second leader, Dov Ber of Mezeritch. The founder of the Lubavitch sect, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi (1745-1812), based his movement on a theological doctrine derived from the principles of hokhmah (wisdom), binah (understanding), and da'at (knowledge), earning the group the acronym HaBaD (or, more commonly, Chabad). Over the next two centuries as it spread throughout Lithuania and beyond, its members (like so many other Jews) experienced oppression under the tsars, persecution by the Soviets, and near total destruction at the hands of the Nazis. At the same time, Lubavitch Hasidim were forced to compete for Jewish hearts and minds against other Hasidic sects, mitnagdim (Orthodox opponents of Hasidism), Maskilim (advocates of the Jewish Enlightenment), and various waves of modernity that swept across Eastern Europe. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the sixth Lubavitch rebbe, Yosef Yitshak Schneersohn (1880-1950), reestablished the headquarters of the sect in Brooklyn, where it began to transform itself into an international movement with emissaries and religious schools throughout North America, Europe, Israel, and South Africa. With his passing in 1950, his son-in-law Menachem Mendel (1902-94) assumed leadership of the movement. In the forty-four years that he served as rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneersohn expanded the Lubavitch community to its greatest heights of influence. Although it numbers today approximately 200,000 members out of an estimated thirteen million Jews worldwide, this does not reflect the movement's strength and presence in either the Jewish community or the larger world. At one time forced to practice in secret, the Lubavitch movement found in the United States a society that granted full rights of citizenship without threat of violence or persecution. Operating from this base of unparalleled tolerance, Lubavitch Judaism now boasts a massive network of 2,400 outreach centers in two-thirds of the countries of the world, an annual budget estimated at one billion dollars, and literally millions of Jews who have participated in its outreach campaigns. In recent years its mission has been to keep Jews fully within the Orthodox fold, which leads its activists to fight interfaith marriage, to reach out to [End Page 390] single Jews, and to establish strong ties with influential Jews in politics, business, and entertainment. In this work the movement has at times been very public, very influential, and very controversial. Many Americans have come to learn about the Lubavitch and other Hasidic groups through periodic controversies. These controversies and scandals have included street battles between African Americans and Lubavitchers in Crown Heights, Brooklyn; court battles over public displays of menorahs during Hanukkah; storms of protest over the creation of a school district in Kiryas Joel, New York; charges of voter fraud in Hasidic neighborhoods; and the pardons for the leaders of New Square, New York, by outgoing President Bill Clinton. Recent articles in the press have discussed the messianic activism that has sprung up around the figure of Menachem Mendel and that has left divisions in many Lubavitch communities. Like all other groups of Jews who found safety in North America, Lubavitchers have been forced to contend with the political, economic, and cultural demands of a modern and largely secular society. They too have struggled to find the right balance between their desire to remain isolated from the potentially corrupting influences of modernity and the need to incorporate those aspects of the outside world that are beneficial to the community's survival. For the most part, they have been quite successful at maintaining many of their long-standing communal practices while at the same time keeping abreast of the high-tech, fast-paced world. Despite maintaining a separatist status, they conduct widely publicized telethons, run their own media outlets, court high-ranking politicians, and have countless sites on the Internet. Recent years have witnessed several excellent scholarly...

The City, Sacred and Profane: Between Hebrew and Yiddish in the Fiction of the Early Jewish Enlightenment

By now, it is the stuff of cliche to suggest that writers, in reflecting and representing cities, build them as well; that their tools are words and phrases, not cement and steel, and that while the edifices they construct may resemble the geographical spaces they claim to be in many respects, telling differences delight and inspire historians and literary critics alike. If a writer's portrayal of a city and its inhabitants can be compared to a building, the language of the portrayal follows the iron laws of engineering: the contours and possibilities of a language contours and possibilities shaped by historical moments and forces delimit and shape the finished product in ways just as important as the choice of words within that language. Questions of authors' language choices have always been central to the study of the early Haskala, or Jewish Enlightenment. In fact, the Haskala itself has often been portrayed as a movement concerning itself largely, if not solely, with questions of language; linguistic reform becomes a symbol of the tension between maskilic desire and contempor-

Ashen Hearts and Astral Zones: Bashevis Singer in Yiddish and English Preparations

This article interprets the career of the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, in English translation. Involved is an understanding of the emotional and linguistic impact of the Haskala or “Jewish Enlightenment” on Polish Jewisk life as well as of the other ideologies confronting Jewry—Socialism, Zionism and Hassidic Return, for example. Involved also is a just evaluation of the linguistic achievements of Singer’s translators, especially Jacob Sloan, Cecil Hemley, Elaine Gottlieb, Saul Bellow and Isaac Rosenfeld, all of whom have a creative identity with a thematic and stylistic influence on translation quality. An attempt is likewise made to demonstrate Singer’s transcendence of his rabbinical past and of his refuge in the United States.

Moses Mendelssohn's Philosophy of Jewish Liturgy: A Post‐Liberal Assessment

AbstractThis paper represents an attempt to reflect on the significance of liturgy for postliberal Jewish thought. I do this by investigating the work of the eighteenth‐century Jewish enlightenment figure Moses Mendelssohn in the context of the postliberal thought of George Lindbeck. Mendelssohn not only shows how liturgy can be central to postliberal approaches to monotheism, but he also shows how enlightenment notions of a universal rational religion remain necessary and productive for postliberal interpretations of monotheism. In this latter move, Mendelssohn forms a corrective to Lindbeck's postliberalism.

Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry's Construction of Modern Jewish Thought (review)

Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry's Construction of Modern Jewish Thought (review)

Another Look at "The Life of 'Dead' Hebrew": Intentional Ignorance of Hebrew in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society

The study of language had always stood at the forefront of every Jewish movement of revitalization and cultural renewal. It served as bridesmaid as each new spiritual period began, accompanying it along up to its full ascendancy. —Reuven Fahn (1937), 31 The Hebrew Language—A "Lost Tongue" One hundred and fifty years of arduous attempts to revive Hebrew as a modern literary language preceded its revival as a spoken language. Yet, from its incipience to the end of the nineteenth century, modern Hebrew literature could barely gain itself a narrow circle of devoted readers. One of the more acute expressions of the distress of Hebrew authors in the last third of the century was voiced by Yehudah Leib Gordon (1830-92), the greatest of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) poets.1 In 1871 Gordon published the poem "For Whom Do I Labor?" out of a sense that, lacking an audience, he was perhaps the last of the Hebrew poets: [End Page 171] For Whom Do I Labor? Whilst poesy's muse upon me comes stealing Whilst heart conceives and with right hand composing Poems composing and in a language forgotten Where triumph, what bliss, may ever prevail And for whom do I spend my best years in travail Depriving my person of quiet and gain? My parents—adhering to their Lord and nation Commerce, Commandments, their life's occupation Reason revolts them, good taste never found "Deathly is poetry, and rhetoricheathen! "To lodge near a poet is strictly forbidden!" Thus do they taunt us, viciously hound.2 Gordon avers that his best years have been devoted to composing poetry in a "language forgotten"—a language in demand by no one. His lament is that the traditional Jewish society of his day treats writing poetry in Hebrew as an act of apostasy and attacks and isolates those engaged in it. This lament may strike the modern reader as odd. Scholarship on the origins of Hebrew, like research on the traditional Jewish educational system, rejects as superficial the characterization of Hebrew as a "dead language." Yet if Hebrew was not dead, why were there no readers for modern Hebrew texts? The conventional view can accommodate this difficulty: traditional education indeed prepared potential readers in the Hebrew language, but the community also imposed strict social sanctions on those who read the new Hebrew literature.3 Indeed, many researchers dwell on the preservation mechanisms that sustained the Hebrew language over the generations and kept it in continual use.4 Benjamin Harshav's "Essay on the Revival of the Hebrew Language" is a case in point.Harshav expounds on "the life of 'dead' Hebrew" and claims that explication of Hebrew texts, a central activity in religious life, served to sustain "awareness of the meanings of words and of the parallels between various texts in the Hebrew library."5 In his opinion, such "Education emphasized the understanding of texts" (his emphasis), both in the heder and in the yeshivah. Language comprehension was reinforced by the methods of study employed within the education system, which included reading and translating the Torah in the heder, quoting texts and interpreting them as part of Talmudic studies, and the dialogic method of study employed in the yeshivahs. Hebrew, furthermore, was the language used in religious literature, in responsa, in rabbinic decisions, and in community documents. All these, along with the Hebrew component of Yiddish, show, [End Page 172] in Harshav's opinion, that "unlike Latin, which the common folk did not know and whose primary students were monks, all Jews were required to study texts in the Holy Tongue. ... Even if in the lower classes of society the level of study was not advanced, in fact every male knew—or was supposed to know—how to read. Hebrew texts served also for daily prayer, blessings and so forth. Hebrew was understood well...

To Reveal Our Hearts: Jewish Women Writers in Tsarist Russia (review)

Reviewed by: To Reveal Our Hearts: Jewish Women Writers in Tsarist Russia Gabriella Safran (bio) Carole B. Balin To Reveal Our Hearts: Jewish Women Writers in Tsarist Russia Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2000 In To Reveal Our Hearts: Jewish Women Writers in Tsarist Russia, Carole Balin explores the work and the experience of five women who conformed to neither of the most widely available stereotypes of east European Jewish women: They were neither balebustes (housewives) nor revolutionaries, but writers in Hebrew or Russian. Balin focuses on five women: Miriam Markel-Mosessohn (1839-1920), a Hebrew journalist and translator; Hava Shapiro (1879-1943), a Hebrew journalist and fiction writer; Rashel' Khin (1861-1928), a Russian fiction writer and playwright; Feiga Kogan (1891-1974), a Russian poet and literary critic; and Sofiia Dubnova-Erlikh (1885-1986), a prolific Russian writer of poetry and non-fiction. A chapter is devoted to each woman, offering first biographical and contextual material, then readings of selected works that Balin sees as thematizing the writers' identities as Jews and as women. She concludes with a "Composite Biography," in which she looks at the similarities among the women and the major differences between them. Balin refuses to impose abstract paradigms on her subjects or to draw broader conclusions than warranted. Although she pays attention to the commonalities in their experiences, she acknowledges that these writers were idiosyncratic people who made unconventional decisions and took unexpected life-paths, and she presents each one to the reader as a fascinating, fully fleshed-out character. The two women who wrote in Hebrew, Markel-Mosessohn and Shapiro, might seem not just idiosyncratic but quixotic. As Naomi Seidman argued in A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (1997), east European Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries [End Page 268] associated Hebrew with the male voice and Yiddish with the female voice, which was logical, since boys were much more likely than girls to study Hebrew and Aramaic in heder (a traditional boys' primary school) and had access to more advanced study of Talmud. Indeed, by studying rabbinic texts in these languages, Jewish elite men defined themselves as fully masculine, different from the "women and uneducated men" who knew only Yiddish. Balin complicates this picture. Markel-Mosessohn and Shapiro, as she notes, were both taught Hebrew from childhood, at the insistence of their parents. Although their experience in this regard was not typical, neither was it outrageous. Balin points out that both were mentored by older male Hebrew writers, maskilim (proponents of the haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment movement) who greeted their fledgling literary efforts with enthusiasm, not in spite of their gender, but because of it. Yehudah Leib Gordon, who corresponded with Markel-Mosessohn in Hebrew for two decades, spoke out loudly for improving the position of Jewish women. Most famously, his 1875 poem "Kotso shel yod" (The tip of the letter yod) criticized rabbinic regulations that condemned women who had been abandoned by their husbands to live as agunot, without the legal power to obtain a divorce and remarry. As Balin points out, Gordon's advocacy of women's rights was accompanied by a campaign to infuse the new Hebrew literature with women's voices and women's perspectives. As a maskil and a Hebrew revivalist, Gordon wanted to see a Hebrew literature that would be able to describe the range of emotions and situations evoked in German or Russian literatures. This would require a Hebrew language in which one could write novels with dialogue and interior monologue, exploring the social and inner worlds of Jews of every age and gender. The Hebrew language associated with the experiences of elite males discussing rabbinic texts clearly could not be adequate to this task. Thus, Gordon saw writing by women in Hebrew as "better in style and purer in language" than writing by men, precisely because "the minds of women were not ruined in their youth in the death chambers of the hadarim [schoolrooms]" (p. 16). It was in this spirit that Gordon greeted the Hebrew writing of Markel-Mosessohn, to whom he dedicated "Kotso shel yod." More than many of the other female Hebrew writers who...

To Reveal Our Hearts: Jewish Women Writers in Tsarist Russia (review)

Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2000. 269 pp. $39.95. Carole Balin's fascinating study reminds us that not all Jewish women in nineteenth century Russia were traditional shtetl housewives or secularized revolutionaries. Rather, her focus is on the Russian-speaking daughters of prosperous middle class urban Jews, many of whom were permitted to live in the Russian interior beyond the Pale of Settlement. These acculturated young women attended gymnasia, learned European languages, and earned university degrees, following educational and professional paths comparable to those of many contemporaneous middle class Jewish girls in Western Europe. In fact, Balin's research suggests that secularly educated Jewish women in Tsarist Russia were already looking westward for cultural inspiration when the East European Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment movement, reached its peak during the last third of the nineteenth century. Searching through Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish journals directed at Jewish audiences, Balin discovered the names of 67 female authors, beginning in 1869; of these, 54 wrote in Russian, 17 in Hebrew, and six in Yiddish. Her book delineates the careers of five of these women who wrote for publication in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Tsarist Russia. These unusually prolific writers, of whom wrote in Hebrew and three in Russian, left behind significant personal documents, including diaries, memoirs, and correspondence, in addition to their published work. Although several of these authors wrote movingly about women's lives, they did not see themselves as feminists or as part of a movement of female writing. Rather, Balin describes how each of these authors built independent careers, in part by seeking out the company and mentorship of well-known literary men who would be crucial to their professional development and advancement. Balin's first chapter is devoted to Miriam Markel-Mosessohn (1839-1920), an excellent Hebraist who became a protegee of Yehudah Leib Gordon, the foremost Hebrew poet of nineteenth-century Russia. Markel-Mosessohn learned Hebrew mainly from private tutors and was well read in the secular publications of contemporaneous Hebrew authors and poets. Beginning as a translator of European literature into Hebrew, Markel-Mosessohn became a foreign correspondent for Hebrew journals after she settled in Vienna in 1881. Balin, who describes Markel-Mosessohn as straddling two gender worlds, belonging to neither (p. 50), cites her ambivalence about her craft: despite a mastery of Hebrew, and strong encouragement from maskilim who wanted to see women producing literature, Markel-Mosessohn apparently believed it was inappropriate for a woman to trespass on male territory by writing original works in Hebrew. Hava Shapiro, the subject of Balin's second chapter, was born in Warsaw in 1878 and died in Theresienstadt in 1943; she was the most prolific nineteenth-century female writer in Hebrew who remained in the Diaspora. When she was 20 and already a wife and mother, Shapiro met Reuven Brainin, a married Hebrew and Yiddish author, who became her mentor and lover for the next 25 years. Brainin, who had encouraged Shapiro to leave her husband and son to attend university abroad, ultimately broke off the liaison and emigrated to America with his wife. Fluent in many languages, Shapiro wrote only in Hebrew, publishing collections of fictional sketches and journalism. She remains little known, perhaps because she chose to isolate herself from major centers of Hebraic literary activity and creativity. Balin writes that Shapiro's work raises questions about the role gender played in the resuscitated Hebrew language and its attendant culture (p. …

Antisemitismus bei Kant und anderen Denkern der Aufklarung (review)

Reviewed by: Antisemitismus bei Kant und anderen Denkern der Aufklärung Sven Arntzen Antisemitismus bei Kant und anderen Denkern der Aufklärung, edited by Horst Gronke, Thomas Meyer, and Barbara Neisser. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001. 284 pp. Euro 35.00. The book (in English: “Anti-Semitism in Kant and Other Enlightenment Thinkers”) is a collection of winning essays from a competition announced in 1997 by the Philosophisch-Politischen Akademie in Germany under the topic “Antisemitic and Anti-Judaic Themes in Enlightenment Thinkers.” The book addresses the idea that the enlightenment ideals of the authority of reason and human dignity would preclude antisemitism and religious intolerance. The book consists of four essays: Bettina Stangneth, “Antisemitische und Antijudaistische Motive bei Immanuel Kant? Tatsachen, Meinungen, Ursachen” (“Antisemitic and Anti-Judaic Themes in I. Kant? Facts, Opinions, Causes”), Gerald Hubmann, “Sittlichkeit und Recht: Die jüdische Emanzipationsfrage bei Jakob Friedrich Fries und anderen Staatsdenkern des Deutschen Idealismus” (“Morality and Law: The Issue of Jewish Emancipation in J. Fr. Fries and Other Political Thinkers of German Idealism”), Almut Rüllmann, “Adolph Freiherr Knigge und die Juden” (“The Baron Adolph Knigge and the Jews”), and Martin Damken, “Theoretischer oder praktischer Gott: Versuch einer Annäherung an Salomon Maimons vielfach zerrissene Einstellung zum Judentum”(“Theoretical or Practical God: An Attempt at Understanding S. Maimon’s Many Conflicting Positions on Jewishness”). As the titles indicate, the essays are discussions of German enlightenment thinkers from the late eighteenth century into the early 1800s. [End Page 139] The condition of the Jewish population in the German states during this period was one of oppression and exclusion (Rüllmann). Jews were mostly confined to separate communities in towns and cities, often in great poverty. They were denied citizens’ rights. With few exceptions, the only professions available to Jews were various forms of trade and financial dealings. And Jews were the victims of widespread religious intolerance by the Christian majority. The emancipation of Jews and their integration in German society were natural concerns of enlightenment thought. Most of the thinkers discussed in the book have views, either explicit or by implication, concerning the conditions of such emancipation and integration. As is to be expected in this kind of book, there are no agreed-upon definitions of antisemitism and anti-Judaism. Stangneth distinguishes between antisemitism and anti-Judaism as follows: antisemitism is any form of hostility towards Jews that is not linked to questions of religion; anti-Judaism is animosity towards Jews related to questions of religion. She finds evidence of antisemitism in Kant (1724–1804) in the form of negative generalizations about Jews as a people, for example as a people of profiteers and opportunists who take advantage of others’ needs and labors. Not even the most prominent German enlightenment thinker escaped the popularly held prejudices of his time. In a section on anecdotal evidence concerning Kant’s relationships with Jewish acquaintances and friends, Stangneth shows that such prejudices did not in his case amount to hostility against Jewish individuals. Kant maintained friendly relations with Marcus Hertz, whom he named to be the respondent at his inaugural disputation (1770), and to Moses Mendelssohn, a prominent member of the Jewish enlightenment movement in Germany, the Haskala. Stangneth finds in Kant expression of anti-Judaism with his claim that Jewish faith is not a true religion, because it lacks the foundation and character of religion proper, rational religion. According to Kant’s concept of rational religion, religious faith derives from morality. Our acknowledgement of being subject to moral obligation commits us to believing in one supreme God as the guarantor of reward for good deeds. Since morality has its basis in reason, religion also has this basis. Judaism, with its notion of Jews as God’s chosen people, lacks the universality of rational religion. The God of Jewish faith is merely a world sovereign. Judaic laws have the character of political laws, backed by force, so Judaism lacks the ethical or moral dimension of religion proper, according to Kant. Stangneth also discusses Halberstam’s essay “From Kant to Auschwitz,” and she includes a collection of relevant excerpts from some of Kant’s writings. The collection provides a good basis for examining antisemitism...

New Perspectives on the Haskalah (review)

edited by Shmuel Feiner and David Sorkin. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001. 260 pp. $59.50. Eleven scholars of history and literature present in this volume their perspective on the Jewish Enlightenment movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, known as (1770s-1890s). Enlightened Jews (maskilim) were intellectuals who wanted to bring liberalism and rationalism to Jewish life, and the studies in this volume include fine points about major and minor maskilim. Some of the contributors emphasize the links between and tradition, the old and the new, the modern and the traditional, the enlightened and the Orthodox, rather than the clash between them. glossary (pp. 221-223) caters to the non-expert in the field of Jewish Studies and to a reader who is unfamiliar with the Hebrew terminology, and includes terminology such as aggadah, derush, halakhah, and Pirkei avot. In their introduction the editors suggest that Enlightenment studies should be deflated, that the milieu of the movers of the movement should be studied, and that there were varieties of Enlightenment. Five of the participants have academic titles in history, three of them in Hebrew Literature, two in Jewish Studies and one in theology. Six out of the eleven contributors are Israeli scholars. I will first present the articles written by contributors in literature: Shmuel Werses, Tova Cohen, and Yehuda Friedlander. Shmuel Werses, an Emeritus Professor of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a central figure in the research of wrote Portrait of a Maskil as a Young Man. Werses presents the cost of the attraction of young Jews to the Haskalah. young maskil collided with his teachers, spiritual leaders, parents, and in-laws. Tova Cohen, a Professor at Bar-Ilan University, in Reality and its Refraction in Descriptions of Women in Fiction, argues that men wrote the literature for men, and, influenced by literary conventions, they either idealized or harshly criticized women in this literature. position of Yehuda Friedlander, a Professor of Hebrew Literature at Bar-Ilan University (and its former rector), in the chapter entitled The Straggle of the Mitnagedim and Maskilim against Hasidism: Rabbi Jacob Emden and Judah Leib Mieses, is that in their attack against their Hasidic enemy, the maskilim exploited the works of rabbis who opposed Hasidism beginning with the last third of the eighteenth century. enlightened Judah Leib Mieses of Galicia used Rabbi Emden's anti-Hasidic work in his satires. first article in this volume, The Early Haskalah, is written by David Sorkin and the last one, Towards a Historical Definition of the Haskalah, by Shmuel Feiner, both of them editors of the volume. David Sorkin, a Professor of Jewish Studies and Senior Fellow in the University of Wisconsin, Madison, views the first sixty years of the eighteenth century as an early Haskalah rather than an anticipation of it. intellectual figures of that time strove for a curriculum that could encompass the culture of the time and at the same time pursue the revival of the study of Hebrew, of biblical exegesis, and of philosophy written in Hebrew. Shmuel Feiner, Professor of Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University, presents the ideology, history, and centers of the the portrait of a maskil, and the maskilim's self-image in considering themselves as part of a voluntary, redeeming avant-guard movement. …

Bialik's Other Silence

Chaim Nahman Bialik's (1873-1934) poetic " shtikah " or silence from 1911 to the time of his death in 1934 has been widely discussed and conjectured about from social, psychological, and literary perspectives. "Bialik's Other Silence" focuses on Bialik's vernacular "silence" in representative works of his fiction. To what extent did Bialik's essays express his intellectual support of the necessity for Hebrew speech as part of a nationalist and cultural mobilization of the Jewish people, while his fiction refused to "speak" Hebrew? In "Bialik's Other Silence," Bialik's debut story "Brawny Aryeh" (1899) and one of his final stories "A Fatted Ox or a Dinner of Herbs" (1931) are explored in order to understand the troubled relationship between dialogue and narrative in Bialik's fictional corpus. Throughout the discussion, the particular challenges of Hebrew literary production during the Hebrew revival, the Tehiyah , are explored as they pertain to the ideologies and politics inherited by its practitioners from the Haskalah , or the Jewish Enlightenment.

Azariah de' Rossi: The Light of the Eyes (review)

The Jewish Quarterly Review, XCII, Nos. 3-4 (January-April, 2002) 299-302 Joanna Weinberg. Azariah de' Rossi: The Light of the Eyes. Translated from the Hebrew with an introduction and annotations by Joanna Weinberg . Yale Judaica Series XXXI. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001. Pp. xlix + 802. The innovative character of Azariah de' Rossi (ca. 151 1-ca. 1577) in the history of Jewish thought and scholarship has often been highlighted, first of all by the maskilim, the champions of the "Jewish Enlightenment" and then by the founders of 19th-century Wissenschaft des Judentums. Therefore it might seem surprising that his landmark work MeDor cEinayim ("Light of the Eyes"), a kind of prolegomena to any further attempt of critical Jewish historiography, still is only (fully) available in the 1866 edition by David Casse] ' and so far has never been completely translated. The latter may be the case since anybody considering the awesome task of rendering MeDor cEinayim in a modern language will not only have felt challenged by the obscure style of the original, but also by the vast erudition needed to explain de' Rossi's numerous allusions, ranging from late antique to 1 6th-century literature. One of the few people equal to the task is Joanna Weinberg, who in a number of highly acclaimed studies has shown deep insights into the work of this outstanding Italian Jewish polymath. Weinberg's annotated translation of Me°or cEinayim is preceded by an introduction, which in its condensed character and relative brevity of sixtyfive pages manages to summarize the scholarship on de' Rossi. After a short discussion of the scanty available data about de' Rossi's life, Weinberg draws attention to the unique place of Me1Or cEinayim in contemporary Jewish literature. In regard to the specific character of 16th-century Jewish historical productions,2 she points out that Light of the Eyes does not follow the literary genre of the chronicle—such as Yosef ha-Kohen's 'Azariah de' Rossi, Me'or cEinayim, ed. David Cassel (Vilna, 1864-66. Repr. Jerusalem, 1970). Several chapters of Me3orcEnayim have also been published and annotated by R. Bonfìl, Azaria de' Rossi: Selected Chaptersfrom Sefer Me^or cEinayim and Matsrefla-Kessef (in Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1991). 2 For some additional bibliography, see A. A. Neuman, "The Shebet Yehuda and Sixteenth Century Historiography," in Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume, English Section (New York, 1945), pp. 253-273, repr. idem, Landmarks and Goals (Philadelphia , 1953), pp. 82-104; R. Bonfil, "Esiste une storiografia ebraica medioevale?," in Aspetti della storiografia ebraica: Atti del IV Congresso internazionale dell'Associazione Italiana per lo Studio del Guidaismo, S. Miniato, 7-10 Novembre 1983 (Rome, 1987), pp. 227-247; idem, "Jewish Attitudes Toward History and Historical Writing in Pre-Modern Times," Jewish History 11 (1997) 7-40; A. Melamed, "The Perception of Jewish History in Italian Jewish Thought of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth 300THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW Divre ha-Yamim, to mention a contemporary Hebrew chronicle written in Italy. In contrast, de' Rossi does not reflect on history in the form of a narration of events (narrado rerum), but chooses, instead, the genre of the miscellanea used by encyclopaedists, philologists, and antiquarians of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Weinberg provides an overview of the content of Light of the Eyes (pp. xxiii-xxv) which is divided into three essays : a reflection on the earthquake of Ferrara (1570), which has also been described by a number of Christian contemporaries; a Hebrew translation of the Letter of Aristeas; and studies on Jewish history, chronology, and other antiquarian topics, this third part being the main body of the book. Weinberg's pointed discussion of the "cultural context and purpose" of Light ofthe Eyes is especially insightful (pp. xxv-xxxiii). She stresses that while de' Rossi shared many topics of interest with contemporary Christian scholars, he provided a Jewish dimension to these matters. At the same time, he was aware that his critical approach towards rabbinic literature and his use of non-Jewish sources would not find approval among some of his coreligionists, as Weinberg shows. Nonetheless committed to his faith, de' Rossi argued that non-normative matters discussed in the Talmud...

Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry's Construction of Modern Jewish Thought (review)

by David Ruderman. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000. 291 pp. $39.50.David Ruderman's Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key is, as he states, first comprehensive effort to describe the emergence of Anglo-Jewish thought in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This seminal work, based upon much original archival research and examination of heretofore unknown or neglected texts, as well as a reformulation of previously isolated articles, maps a terrain barely glimpsed before.Presenting a complex understanding of Anglophone Jewish intellectual life and religious polemic, it deliberately complements (as it revises) Todd Endelman's The Jews of Georgian England (1979), an equally important book virtually denies Anglo-Jewish intellectual activity during the period under review. With Endelman, however, Ruderman argues (in a theoretically valuable introduction) for a regional and pluralistic approach to both the Enlightenment and the Jewish Haskalah, one credits the contributions of Anglo-Jewish thinkers in their own right, rather than subordinating them to Eurocentric (Germanic or Mendelssohnian) perspectives which occlude the distinctive characteristics of English culture. Ruderman keeps the European scene usefully in view, however. While overt differentiations between a Lockean world of (ostensible) religious toleration and European antisemitism are not part of his design, the pressures of Anglo-Christian antisemitism against Anglo-Jewish processes of thought and social interaction with clergy are never far from the surface.Because Ruderman illustrates the tonal quality as well as the content of Anglo-Jewish engagement with this Gentile world, the reader hears the substrate of rancor beneath supposedly scholarly Anglo-Christian argument (thus, Julius Bate, writing in 1751, against Jewish editorial traditions conceived by that execrable Rabble called the Rabbins, p. 65). Ruderman's book, illuminating central figures in the Anglo-Jewish community, also helps explain how the Victorian eruption of Anglo-Jewish writing came into being, not ab ovo but from a prior history and the gathering of a critical mass of Anglo-Jewish men and their books -- all writing in defense of Jewry if not Judaism, and against their Anglo-Christian hosts. That much nineteenth-century literature in all forms was generated by women (notably Grace Aguilar and the Moss sisters) -- theological commentary and histories of Anglo-Jewry, as well as poetry and fiction -- is particularly striking when viewed against the intellectual patriarchy Ruderman explores.The hero of this book is David Levi, Hebraist, translator, polemicist, and much more. Levi was not only Joseph Priestley's antagonist and a man who dared challenge the inconsistencies in Priestley's mix of Christianity and Unitarianism at a time when no other Anglo-Jew dared challenge (what Ruderman does not sufficiently stress) Britain's national identity as defined by its established Anglican Church. He was also the chief adversary of repeated efforts by Benjamin Kennicott, John Hutchinson, and their various followers, to claim Christian ownership of the Bible. Following Raphael Baruh's rejoinders to Kennicott in 1775, Levi, like the more radical Abraham ben Naphtali Tang in politics, mocked with satiric boldness the Anglo-Christian disciples of the magisterial Robert Lowth, Bishop of London, for their misunderstandings of both Hebrew and the editorial principles guiding the creators of the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible. Ruderman's arguments, while sometimes more digressive than those of the exegetes (both and Jewish) to whom he gives voice, make clear the presence of committed Anglo-Jewish writers who created a climate of intellectual exchange in which Anglo-Christian power-plays would not pass unchallenged. While they did not actually constitute a movement as in Germany, Ruderman shows many (whether conservative or radical) were Freemasons, chiefly identified with Jewish lodges (thus connected to each other but having lessened contact with Gentiles). …

Origin and Transformation: Salomon Maimon and German-Jewish Enlightenment Culture

Salomon Maimon's Lebensgeschichte (1792) presents a strange and troubled man, a solitary wanderer between the darkness of Polish-Jewish superstition and the light of German-Jewish reason. When he arrived in Berlin in 1777, the 25 year-old Maimon had left behind his life in the shtetl with its great material and intellectual poverty and premature responsiblities. A rabbi and husband at age eleven, he had experienced the near total lack of interest in a larger world, of teachers and books that taught anything, the unquestioning authority of texts that were impenetrable to reason, the absence of thoughtful social—not to mention political—organization and conduct. In Berlin, he was to develop into an intellectual with remarkably broad interests, insights and erudition. But his early struggle to gain access to such learning had impressed on him a sense of authenticity, a "true" self that, given his difficult temperament and the social and political conditions of German- Jewish Enlightenment culture, inexorably separated him from what he most desired: an intellectual community that would accept him as he was. Maimon the intellectual had attracted the interest and support of a number of distinguished Berlin Enlightenment figures, Moses Mendelssohn, Ephraim Veitel, Samuel Levy, David Friedlaender among them. Marcus Herz had sent Maimon's Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie (1790) to Kant, who thought it one of the best critiques of his work. Yet by the time his Lebensgeschichte was published, Maimon had managed to alienate all of them because of his lack of "civility." He could not adapt to their grossbürgerlich sociability and they, the posterchildren of the Enlightenment ideology of tolerance, were too insecure in their minority status to tolerate Maimon's chaotic person and subversive, "heretical" ideas. This conflict points to larger issues of tolerance which are discussed in the context of a general German-Jewish tension around 1800 between assimilation to German society and culture and an enduring Jewish identity.

Reviews of Books:Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry's Construction of Modern Jewish Thought David B. Ruderman

Reviews of Books:Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry's Construction of Modern Jewish Thought David B. Ruderman