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1.2.The Haskala

By the late eighteenth century, the French and German Aufklärung had raised the question whether to emancipate and integrate - or assimilate - the Jewish population on the one side, and an increasing wish to join the European culture on the other. Although in the second half of the siècle des lumières there were only a few Jewish intellectuals who articulated these ideas, most of them belonging to the circle of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) in Berlin, the next decades witnessed the acculturation of a growing segment of the Jewish population in the German territories, as well as within the Austrian Empire. The eighteenth century Berlin Haskala is called the first stage of the Jewish Enlightenment, whereas the early nineteenth century social and cultural developments represent its second stage.

What the first two stages of the Haskala yielded was including a Jewish color on the contemporary Western European cultural palette. “Jewish” was understood exclusively as one possible faith within the list of European religions, and nothing more than a religious conviction. An enlightened Jew was supposed to fully master the educated standard variant of the language of the society he lived in (Hochdeutsch¸ in most of the cases), without any “Jewish-like” feature. Propagating the knowledge of Hochdeutsch and rolling back Jüdischdeutsch had already been the program of Moses Mendelssohn when he began writing a modern targum_²⁴ of the Bible, the Biur. Further, the same Jew was expected to fully master the contemporary European culture, including classical languages, sciences and arts. The only sphere in which this Jew could express his or her being Jewish was the diminished and europeanized arena of religious life. Diminished, because of a secularization of life style; and Europeanized, due to the inclusion of philosophical ideals of the Enlightenment together with aesthetic models of the Romanticism. The traditional religious duty of constantly learning the traditional texts with the traditional methods was sublimated into the scholarly movement of the Wissenschaft des Judentums.

The picture changed dramatically in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Haskala, in its third stage, reached the Eastern European Jewry, including Jews in Poland and Lithuania (under Russian government), Eastern Hungary, and Rumania. Here the Jewish population was far denser, whereas the surrounding society was far behind Western Europe in the process of the social and economic development. In fact, Jews would play an important role in the modernization of those areas. Therefore, several people of Jewish origin could take the initiative and invent absolutely new alternatives to the social constructs that people had been living with so far.

One type of those social alternatives still preserved the idea of the earlier Haskala according to which Jews should become and remain an organic part of the universal human culture. These alternatives proposed thus some forms of revolutionary change to the entire humankind, as was the case in the different types of socialist movements, in which Jews unquestionably played an important role. Esperantism also belongs here, for its father, Ludwig Zamenhof was a Polish-Lithuanian Jew proposing an alternative to national language as another social construct.

The second type of radical answer that Eastern European Jews gave to the emergence of Enlightenment in the underdeveloped Eastern European milieu was creating a new kind of Jewish society. Recall that there was a dense Jewish population living within a society that itself did not represent a modern model to which most Jews wished to acculturate. Different streams of this type of answer emerged, although they did not mutually exclude each other. Many varieties of political activism, such as early forms of Zionism, political Zionism, territorialism or cultural autonomism, embody one level of creating an autonomous Jewish society.

The birth of a new Jewish secular culture, including literature, newspapers or Klezmer music is another one. The question then arose whether the language of this new secular culture should be Yiddish - and thus a standardized, literary version of Yiddish was to be developed - or Hebrew - and therefore a renewal of the Hebrew language was required. In the beginning, this point was not such an enormous matter of dispute as it would later develop into, when “Hebraists”, principally connected with Zionism, confronted “Yiddishists”, generally claiming a cultural and / or political autonomy within Eastern Europe. It is the irony of history that the far more naïve and seemingly unrealistic ideology, calling for the revival of an almost unspoken language in the distant Palestine, was the one that later would become reality.