Season 2: Episode 15 - The Berlin Enlightenment

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Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, says Marcus Garvey. None but ourselves can free our minds. Now I'm definitely looking to free the mind, but the path ahead is not so entirely clear. I can say this for sure, if we don't know where we've come from, we'll never get to where we're headed. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Episode 14, The Berlin Enlightenment So we're still holding on this question, what is the Enlightenment? And really, properly speaking for the Jewish story, the question is, what's the Haskalah? And in the progress of our development through time, we're finally stepping into the struggles and conflicts which are still being fought out on the streets of the Jews in the various camps of the Jewish world today.

Now we saw in the last episode, through the eyes of Moses Mendelssohn, the exemplary figure of the Berlin Haskalah, how the Jewish Enlightenment shared in the two primary intellectual waves that had been rocking Europe for a couple hundred years. First, the uncoupling of knowledge from tradition, that daring to know which Kant labeled as not only definitive of Enlightenment, but really as the essential act of human agency. And this wave is not only going to gather steam in the coming decades, it's going to become a wrecking ball. A culture war is about to erupt between the masculine and the traditionalists in our little age of reason over just how critical a lens one should use to examine our existence as Jews.

The other intellectual motion rocking Europe and pushing it forward, really, at this stage is what I've called the lifting of the horizons of thought. That's the expansion of the world, which has emerged in the wake of geographic exploration, scientific discovery, and philosophical freedom to speculate. The practical question which this expansiveness poses for the Jews in our era is how much time should we devote to the engagement of non-Jewish culture and knowledge. Now, Mendelsohn made his name by mastering Enlightenment philosophy. And he made it his goal to expand the horizons of his people. But he didn't provide any programmatic guide on how that was to be done. And when our sages in the classical age measured how much time one should devote to the study of anything other than Torah, they took their standard from the book of Joshua.

It says there, Let not this book of the teaching cease from your lips, but recite it day and night. And by the way, it ends saying only then will you prosper in your undertakings, and only then will you be successful. It's not just an act of learning, it's the key to the future. So the sages permitted the learning of anything which was in Torah, only at a time that was neither day nor night. But Maskelim and traditionalists alike in the modern era are going to find this an insufficient answer. The insights and knowledge offered by science, philosophy, literature, history, are not so easily dismissed as something other than Torah, whose study is relegated to the twilight. Now, there will be radicals who abandon Torah study altogether, and fundamentalists who reject any new knowledge.

But as we move forward in our story, we're going to see that neither answer is sufficient to meeting the challenges of modern knowledge. But there are more than intellectual ways rocking Europe right now. The age of reason is also the age of revolution. And as governments fall and reform, the question of Jewish emancipation will become more pressing than even that of enlightenment. Remember, the year 1776 is a turning point in human history, and in the long run, it's going to have a tremendous impact on the Jewish story. And now is not the time or place to delve into how deeply the founding fathers of America identified with the Hebrew Bible, or how they saw themselves as an embodiment of the story of the children of Israel, escaped from the wilderness of political oppression, and ready to call forth a nation founded in liberty in a new land.

But by the way, if you haven't read the Federalist Papers, it's really worthwhile. But for now, the principle of religious freedom, which played such a central role in the early history of the colonies, and of course was enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution finds a significant echo in the writings of the Berlin Haskalah especially those of Moses Mendelssohn as we'll see toward the end of the episode. And from the vantage point of the 21st century we have a tendency to see those who sought enlightenment and emancipation as militantly secular. That is largely how it played out. They were looking to free themselves from the religious bondage of the rabbis as much as the political oppression of this state.

And like I said, we're going to see that's not entirely a misconception, but at this stage, the early Mosquilien were not racing towards secularism. On the contrary, they were looking for a way to articulate their Judaism as a confessional faith, as one which could be freely practiced by citizens of a civil state and no longer depended on the corporate autonomy of the Middle Ages' communal structure, or on the oppressive lack of tolerance of the Christian state. Remember, it was Spinoza and not Mendelssohn who was the father of a secular Jewish conception. If you'll recall, you can reach back a little bit, in his theological political treatise, Spinoza asserted that the detachment from country and territory that came with exile nullified the Torah as a civil covenant.

and that freed Am Yisrael from any meaningful obligation to the commandments. And that's true secularism. It's also, by the way, in an odd fashion, a radical reformulation of a notion that we can find in the mouths of the sages of the Talmud who taught that the commandments have real meaning only in the land of Israel. And that combination, the secularism, and the focus, at least inadvertently, on the importance of the land of Israel is going to actually make Sminoza beloved of certain Zionists, as we'll see. But for now, Mendelssohn and the early Maskelim around him in Berlin took the exact opposite perspective. He felt that by grace of exile, religion had extricated itself from a very problematic overlap with civil law, which was in general a key goal for society in Enlightenment thought to disaggregate the two.

In his eyes, from the day our national government ceased, religious offenses were by definition no longer crimes against the state, as the Torah in a sense conceives them to be, and since in Mendelssohn's view an enlightened society recognizes religion as a matter of conscience, this was an improvement. Now, true observance can stem from one's own sense of obligation, and not any system of threats, coercion, or punishment. But before we label him as the secularist, which he'll become seen as, it's critical to recall that no matter how much Mendelssohn distanced himself from the reactionary stance of certain traditionalists, he remained faithful to the binding nature of Torah. I cannot see how those born in the house of Jacob, he said, can in any conscientious manner disencumber themselves of the law.

No sophistry of ours can free us from the strict obedience we owe to the law, and reverence for God draws a line between speculation and practice which no conscientious man may cross. And this will be the crux of what I believe Mendelssohn has to offer to modern society, how one negotiates that tension between a belief in the binding nature of Torah and the value of freedom. So Mendelssohn and the Moskulian will fight a battle for emancipation on two fronts. They fought to erase the social and civil exclusion which Jews suffered in European society. They wanted the right to beat Germans of the Mosaic persuasion. And we'll see some of that battle in the story of Mendelssohn's great work, Jerusalem.

And they ultimately therefore had to fight against the rabbinic power of their day. Because they saw the censorship and communal bans which the religious authorities used to enforce social norms and hold back the tide of the Enlightenment to being misguided at best, if not in actual corruption of the light of Torah. And as we'll see in the storm over Naftali Herzog Wesley and his proposal for educational reforms, this side of the struggle is even more bitter than the first, and really fuels the emergence of what we know as Orthodox Judaism. So, the Mosquilin have their work cut out for them. And in many ways, I see the decades ahead in our story as a parallel process to the end of the Second Temple period.

Now, way back in the middle of Season 1, we traced the story of how the sages were able to craft a relationship to God and Torah which could survive the destruction of the Temple and the dissolution of the national vessel. And here, at this point of our story, in the modern era, It's the communal and religious structures which those sages themselves built that are beginning to crumble under the twin forces of enlightenment and emancipation. And everybody is feeling it. The Hasidim, who we spoke about, and they'll come back to our story, they're moving away from modernity and deeper into their mythic world. Orthodoxy will soon emerge in the fight to maintain tradition and strengthen the authority of law against the assault of personal autonomy.

and the Mosquilin are struggling to integrate reason and revolution with the Torah itself. By the way, it's not even to mention the nationalist option, which is just over our horizon. And our question really is, who will succeed in building new vessels that can carry the Jewish story through the storms of modernity that lie ahead? In the year 1779, Moses Mendelssohn received a letter from the philanthropist, army contractor, and leader of French Jewry, Serf Bir. Now, French Jewry was in a difficult state in the years leading up to the Revolution of 1789, which we'll talk about. Don't worry, not today, though. In theory, their status had been defined way back by the Edict of Expulsion issued in 1394.

And though Jews had drifted back into France over the centuries, officially they had no status. That edict had never been revoked. It began to change with the arrival of the new Christians that we described, escaping the Iberian Peninsula. And they eventually gained some degree of tolerance due to their role in the mercantile economy, a discussion we've had. But France really inherited the Jewish question proper in 1648, when Louis XIV annexed Alsace-Lorraine from Austria, because these provinces were home to many Ashkenazi Jews who by the mid-18th century numbered between 40,000 and 50,000 and their political position was precarious at best. Furthermore, culturally, they were subject to every form of exclusion and oppression that the Middle Ages had cooked up to keep the Jews in their place.

And Serf Baer was their representative to the crown. Why? Because in recognition of his service to the royal army, Baer was granted citizenship by Louis XVI in 1775. And like so many of the court Jews of his day, he used his protected status to wage an unrelenting struggle on behalf of his brethren. But let me tell you, it was an uphill battle. The political field was highly unstable, to say the least, in the years leading up to the Revolution. And the economic interests in Alsace-Lorraine were heavily stacked against allowing Jewish competition. And, furthermore, as we discussed in two episodes ago, some of the leading lights of the French Enlightenment were actually vehemently opposed to Jewish emancipation.

Baer realized that the current age required a different caliber of argument in defense of the Jews. And he also recognized that the road to influencing the French Enlightenment, which really stood behind the crown at this point, ran through Berlin. And so, he sent a request for help to Moses Mendelssohn. But rather than replying directly, Mendelssohn actually forwarded the request to Christian Wilhelm von Domm. He was a Christian scholar who was both a senior government official and a member of the Berlin Enlightenment circles. That's how Mendelssohn knew him. And Domm not only agreed to write a memorandum on the immediate question of French Jewry, he used this opportunity to address the issue of the Jews and the state of the Enlightenment in Europe as a whole.

and the result was a pamphlet entitled Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Status of the Jews. And at first glance, it was a stunning victory. Bauman insisted that a state seeking to embody Enlightenment principles could not treat the Jews with the barbarity that had characterized the Middle Ages when religious fanaticism is what dictated government policy. He furthermore asserted that the characteristics of the Jews which rendered them incapable of making any real contribution to the state, the dubious morality of merchants, over-concentration in trade, deficiencies in general education and physical weakness, were the consequences of centuries of discrimination. Now, that may hurt a little bit, but you should recognize it as the philosophy of Baron de Montesquieu put into practice as we spoke about a couple of episodes ago.

Remember, Montesquieu is the one who insisted that the nature of man is not fixed, but rather a product of his environment. And Dom, therefore, followed through on his thought, saying that the emancipation of the Jew and his integration as a productive member of the state depends on his enlightenment. Now, I'm willing to say that perhaps Dom meant well when he declared that, quote, the Jew is more a man than a Jew, and that we could therefore be reformed in order to fit into enlightened society. But what is absolutely clear is that he made the price of entry into enlightened society checking our culture at the door Now Damm memorandum was published in Berlin in 1781 And only a few months later, perhaps under its influence, the Emperor Joseph II of Austria issued the first in a series of edicts of tolerance for the Jewish communities under his rule.

Damm's thoughts were broad, and his recommendations specific, But now, for the first time, an absolutist monarch, meaning someone who had the power to follow through, had rescinded some of the basic restrictions and discriminations that the Christian state had imposed upon the Jews for centuries. And furthermore, he'd offered them integration into the system of state education, which was the key for advancement in civil society. But, slow down. Lest we think that the emperor was motivated by overwhelming humanism, his prologue to the Edict makes his actual intentions clear. Quote, This policy paper aims at making the Jewish population useful to the state. At least he was honest. The Edict of Toleration opened a wide range of new economic activities to the Jews and lifted some of their more degrading restrictions, like the obligation to wear the Jewish badge or pay a special head tax that was levied on Jews and cattle.

And as I said, one of the edict's bigger innovations was actually opening schools and universities to the Jews. But we can see how much Joseph II shared Doms and Montesquieu's enlightened assumptions. The edict requires that Jewish languages be replaced with the national language of the country. Henceforth, official documents and school textbooks would no longer be permitted to be printed in Hebrew or Yiddish. Furthermore, Jewish immigration into Austria was severely restricted, focusing, of course, on those Jews who could make a productive contribution to the state. Dom's plan and Joseph II's edict were the first signs of civil emancipation in Central Europe, and they definitely offered new horizons for Jewish life in modern Europe.

But they were both very clear in their message. Entry into Enlightenment Europe requires that Jews check their culture at the door. Now, these sudden developments could not go without a response. And who better to do so than the German Socrates? The result was one of Moses Mendelssohn's most interesting works on the Jewish question. It was a translation and new preface to Rabbi Menashe ben Israel's vindication of the Jews. If you'll recall, from way back in episode 8, the vindication of the Jews was Rabbi Menashe ben Israel's defense of the Jewish people, written at the height of his messianic struggle to regain entry for the Jews into England in the mid-17th century. Now, Mendelssohn was far from sharing the Dutch rabbi's messianic motivation.

But nevertheless, he understood the danger of making emancipation contingent on the Jews abandoning their culture, and therefore, he decided to vindicate his people once again. And Mandelson's response to both Dom's analysis and Joseph II's edict was basically, thank you, but no thank you. First, he expressed horror at Dom's account of the innumerable flaws in the Jews' way of life, and bitterly disputed the premise that we required fundamental regeneration before we could be worthy of civil rights. In fact, Mendelsohn suspected that underlying Dom's premise, which linked emancipation to regeneration, were the same old prejudices held by those who opposed Jewish citizenship altogether. Mendelsohn noted that in Rav Menashe's time, enemies sought to transform Jews into fellow Christians, and now they just want to make us into useful citizens.

I quote, It is curious to observe how prejudice assumes the forms of all ages on purpose to oppress us and puts obstacles in the way of our civil admission. According to Mendelssohn, the Jews ought to be accepted as they are without demanding they change their way of life as a precondition for civil rights. The state, he argued, should take the first step by ending all restrictions and discriminations imposed on the Jews. And then, the Jews themselves would willingly adopt the values of tolerance and gratitude for the love showered upon them. But Mendelssohn knew that if he was to succeed in forcing emancipation while leaving enlightenment voluntary, he actually had to fight his battle on two fronts.

And so, after dismissing Dom's proposals as a new form of old prejudice, and proposing his own detailed plan for political and economic integration into European society. Mendelssohn took on another grave obstacle he saw to emancipation, the Jews' own devotion to their communal organization, which had been the mainstay of their autonomous life since the medieval era. Now recall, in the Middle Ages, even Christians weren't citizens in the modern sense of the world, and therefore all the more so Jews. the non-Jewish authorities had related to the Jews as a corporate entity with two responsibilities keep internal social order and pay your taxes and now that the modern states are emerging and in their quest for bureaucratic absolutism removing any and all entities which stand between the individual and the power of the state that's in general, not just the Jews but specifically the role of the autonomous Jewish community had come into deep question And Mendelssohn in particular questioned the role this entity played in enforcing religious and communal norms, an idea that was anathema to Enlightenment thought.

Now, much to Mendelssohn's regret, Dom's plan saw the maintenance of Jewish autonomy as a key element in helping the Jews transition toward emancipation. While he, on the other hand, insisted that if the Jews were accepted as members of civil society, there would be no need to maintain communal autonomy. His was the liberal Enlightenment vision. Judaism would become a community of faith where membership is voluntary and coercion obsolete. And so, despite his orientation toward Dom and Joseph II's edict, Mendelssohn concluded his preface with an emotional call to the rabbis of Europe, asking them to lead the Jews toward Enlightenment and insisting that they relinquish the tools of communal control, the avenging sword which madness only thinks it can manage surely.

He pleads that with freedom from external slavery finally possible, the time has come to forego internal subjugation. The nations are now tolerating and bearing with one another, while to you also they are showing kindness and forbearance. O my brethren, follow the example of love, the same as you have hitherto followed that of hatred. Imitate the virtues of the nations whose vices you hitherto thought you must imitate. If you would be protected, tolerated, and indulge, protect, tolerate, and indulge one another. Love, and you will be beloved. Now, there's the long road which stretches from 1781 to full civil emancipation in Europe, and it's going to be marked by battles, external and internal. Mendelsohn failed to persuade rabbinic leadership to take a proactive stance toward the coming change but nevertheless, credit where credit is due he had read the map correctly integration into the modern state will indeed be bound up with the collapse of the old communal model but that won't be welcomed by religious leadership on the contrary, the reactionary wave has already begun to rise When God in His grace gave me sons and the time arrived to teach them Torah I took it upon myself to translate the Torah into a decorous and refined German such as that used in our time I put the translations into their mouths when teaching them the text so as to introduce them to the intent of Scripture its idiomatic figures of speech and the fine points of its reading These words are from the introduction to the Biur.

That's Moses Mendelssohn's translation of the Torah into German. But what began as a private translation for the sake of his children's education became a project where he was joined in the effort by his children's tutor, the known biblical scholar Shlomo Duvno. And the result was a watershed in German Jewish culture. If you've been listening to the Jewish story long enough, then you know, Greek-speaking Jews produced the Septuagint, and Aramaic-speakers the Targum. Rav Sajid Gaon translated the Torah into Arabic for his contemporaries, and now the Berlin Maskilim, the enlightened Jews, were ready to join their ranks. But there's one key difference between Mendelssohn's Biur and these other translations.

At this point of the late 18th century, there were very few Jews who even read German. Their vernacular was Yiddish, and many still found the Hebrew text completely accessible. So why did his private efforts become a major public project? Well, part of the reason is that key figures of the Bernalian Haskalah quickly gathered around Mendelssohn, with the goal of producing modern commentaries on each of the five books of Moses, which he translated into the finest German prose. And this gave momentum that eventually resulted in a complete translation and commentary known as Seferin de Tivot HaShalom, the Book of the Paths of Peace, that was usually referred to as simply the Biur. It was published between 1780 and 1783.

And in the preface, Mendelssohn sets two primary goals for the project. Number one, to set European Jews free from the flaws he perceived in the Yiddish translations they use. And number two, to combat non-Jewish and even anti-Jewish biases in existent German translations. There was, however, a third unstated goal, and it's one which he expressed in a letter to a Dutch friend, a non-Jewish friend. And he said there that he desired to open the gates of the German language, and therefore Enlightenment culture, to the Jews of his day. And so we see, we see also why the Maskelim would join him, that the beer wasn't just a translation and commentary fit to the needs of its day. It was a bridge for German Jews into Enlightenment culture, and as a project, it really became the coming of age for the Maskelim, written proof that a new breed of Jewish scholars and philosophers had arrived.

And it was far from beloved by the rabbinic authorities. In 1778, the authors published a prospectus, an introduction entitled Alim li Truffa, leaves for healing. It's a quote from Hezcal's Messianic Vision toward the end of the book if you want to look it up. So the prospectus was one part advertisement and sample. Their hopes were of gaining subscriptions before publication. Such a project was quite expensive. And it was another part manifesto of the Jewish Enlightenment. And in it the authors articulated their vision for the project and made it clear that the Biur was the first fruit of a new model of spiritual leadership, the writer-poet, the philosopher-scholar. It was a model which was destined to grow within Europe and which they implied was also destined to replace the rabbi as a leader in enlightened society.

And that might be why Mendelssohn and his co-authors didn't seek any rabbinic letters of approval for the first phase of the project. They wanted to draw a clear boundary to the sphere of rabbinic authority and to place the Biur, and therefore Mendelssohn and his contemporaries, outside of that sphere. But this was not yet an active break with the rabbinic establishment. Remember, the hallmark of the Berlin Haskalah was the attempt to bridge between the traditional and the enlightened worlds. Therefore, before final publication, the authors sought the support of the Noda be Yehuda, Rabbi Hezguel Landau of Prague, whom we last saw, if you recall, in his attempt to reconcile Rabbi Yaakov Emdin and Rabbi Yonatan Eibschitz in their arguments about whether Eibschitz was a Sabbatean or not.

Then he was a relative unknown, but now he's become one of the leading rabbinic authorities of Europe. And it was Shlomo Dovno who was sent to ask him for his opinion of the viewer, hoping, of course, that his endorsement would increase sales. But the rabbi declined to give his support, noting only that the translation's difficult, high-flown German would require teachers to spend more time on grammar and less on Torah learning. In truth, we know that the Note of Behuda already had his doubts about Moses Mendelssohn's loyalty to Torah. Only a few years back, in 1772, when Duke Friedrich von Mecklenburg had ordered that no body of a dead man on his estates be buried until 72 hours had elapsed after his death, a battle erupted between the rabbis and the secular authorities over the Jewish custom of immediate burial and Mendelssohn had taken a very public stance on the side of law and science and against the rabbis and tradition so now in the Beur the Nota Behuda recognized the Moschelian's desire to build a bridge between the Enlightenment culture and Jewish culture and of course he was wise enough to know that bridges work in two directions and in fact, in coming generations rabbinic authorities will see a straight line between the Beur, the ultimate translation of the prayer book into German and the rise of the reform movement which become their primary enemy so, under the leadership of the Nota Behuda rabbinic pressure began to mount against the publication of the Beur in 1782, Shlomo Daldno actually bowed to that pressure he was a traditionalist, he happened to be enthusiastic about the potential for Torah in the project of the Beor, but he was quite ambivalent about his partners and their aims.

And so he abandoned the Beor and left the circle of the Berlin Maskelim altogether for Vilna Ultimately he would actually compose his own commentary on the Torah which did receive the approval of the Notable Yehuda but it remains unpublished to this day However, before any real battle lines between the Maskelim and the traditionalists could be drawn around the publication of the Beor, one of its chief contributors, Naftali Wesley, fired the real opening round in the war between the rabbis and the Maskelim. If one were to search for the origins of modern Hebrew literature, many historians would point them toward Naftali Herz Wesley. Now, if you know a bit of his life story, this might seem strange at first.

Wesley was a poet, a translator, and biblical commentator. But his works, by and large, belonged to the traditional side of our growing divide. In fact, of all the important Hebrew writers who gathered in Berlin in the late 18th century, Wesley is one of the most conservative in his attitude toward Judaism. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of that, he was well aware of the challenges which the traditional community faced, and he singled out the educational system for particularly harsh criticism. In 1778, not long after arriving in Berlin, he wrote a poem entitled Mahaleel Rea, praise of a friend. It was, at first glance, a typical product of Enlightenment culture. It was a poetic approbation of his good friend Moses Mendelssohn, and its goal was to attract subscribers for the coming publication of The Beur, which he was a contributing commentator.

But Wesley did not limit himself to praising the translator or his work. Quote, Ignorance has become widespread amongst our people, so they know not, nor do they comprehend, the difference between the teaching of the ancients and the teaching of the latter generations, and they think it is a simple matter to study the Bible. In this, you hear one of the primary complaints, which the Maskelim will make louder and louder as the years go on, that we in modernity have lost our way, that the accretion and accumulation of rabbinic thought over the topography of the purity of the Bible has obscured its truth. Furthermore, Wesley lashed out at the inability of religious teachers to teach and at their mistaken emphasis on Talmud, the rabbis, he said, are responsible for the low state of Jewish education.

And he didn't stop there, he went one step further, because poor religious education, in his eyes, was the cause of religious decline in general amongst German Jewry, which means that the rabbis are to blame for the breakdown of attachment to Torah. Now those are fighting words. But the combative tone is not necessarily a sign that Wesley had wholly switched his allegiance to the Enlightenment. These could be the words of a passionate conservative, horrified by the failure of those to whom he looked for leadership. Because we know that Wesley was in the midst of an inner struggle which lasted his entire lifetime, and one which in a sense was characteristic of the Berlin Haskalah altogether. This was a generation of transition.

They were universally products of traditional religious education, and their goal at first, at least, was to harness the glories of Enlightenment culture in service of the Torah. But the bounds of traditional society had begun to chaff. Its rejection of any source of knowledge outside of the Torah, and its refusal to engage in critical self-examination meant that men like Wesley and Mendelssohn would begin to seek their place outside. And furthermore, as Enlightenment is joined by the first signs of emancipation, which we mentioned, many conservative rabbis are going to begin to see the social restrictions placed on the Jews by Christian society in the past as an aid in their battle to hold back non-Jewish culture.

In other words, in their fight against Enlightenment, they'll fight against emancipation as well. Now, in a parallel process, as the center of the Haskalah moves from Berlin to Galicia, a far more militantly secular face of the Haskalah will emerge. But for now, at these moments of origin, we have to try to appreciate the inner struggle of thinkers like Mendelssohn and Wesley, who felt that the wisdom of the Torah and the wisdom of the world not only could be joined, but must be. their real question was me, Berosh who goes first is the Torah learning the meat and enlightenment culture the spice or is the philosophy espoused by Kant and company the real source of universal human knowledge which can be supplemented by the particular wisdom of the Torah now this is not a small question because the truth is most people cannot simultaneously hold two frameworks of knowledge Let me explain.

You ever wonder why it is that young children learn multiple languages just by listening and speaking, while the rest of us struggle to read our gas bill? You know, if you ask educational developmental psychologists, they'll say, well, kids learn like a sponge up to a certain point. Everything just pours in. And then there's a point in our thinking processes where those processes freeze. and what happens is we begin to learn everything new in context of what we already know. Now in language that means we end up decoding and recoding until we achieve true fluency. That question of the difference between just absorbing everything at once and learning everything new in context of what you know is the question which underlies the struggle between the masculine and the traditionalist excluding, of course, the extremes at both ends.

Is the Torah the measure by which we judge the world? One which could be illuminated by general knowledge but not supplanted? Or is philosophy the standard which for the Jews can be enhanced by the Torah? I'll give you one example and then I'll move on. You know, one of the great questions that my more liberal students struggle with and which my more conservative students ought to is the question of Jewish chosenness. Now, the Torah, you should know, has no word for rights. The word for rights in modern discourse, which of course is a central principle of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment culture, the word for rights in modern Hebrew is chuyot, which is a borrowed word. It actually means merit.

The concept of rights doesn't exist in the Torah. The Torah is a culture of obligations. I think we've discussed this before. Why do I mention it now? Well, because if you take someone who's been educated in Western post-Enlightenment culture, who assumes that the basic organizing principles of society is rights. And you tell them that we have been chosen. There's a very easy mental equation, which is we've been chosen for better rights. And that's where Jewish superiority and exceptionalism, which becomes very uncomfortable to the liberal mind, comes from. But if your primary frame of arrest is the Torah and its perspective of obligations, once I tell you you've been chosen, it's very obvious that you've been chosen for greater obligations.

We call it the law. Now, I'm not dissimulating. With those greater obligations comes a different category of relationship, but I hope you hear the difference and how really a fundamentally different worldview emerges depending on which frame of reference is primary and which is secondary. Now, in his early writings, it's clear that Wesley saw Torah as the meat and secular knowledge as the spice. But, in 1782, he made a very public about-face. now we spoke about Moses Mendelssohn's at best ambivalent reaction to the edict tolerance issued by Joseph II Austrian Emperor in 1782 because while Mendelssohn valued the edict as a move toward emancipation he strongly condemned the conditioning of opening civil society to the Jews on the transformation of Jewish education and therefore culture Naftali Wesley had no such qualms In response to the Edict, Wesley published a pamphlet entitled Divrei Shalom Ve'emet, Words of Peace and Truth.

It was a call to the Jewish community of Austria to willingly embrace the Edict's demand that they open German language schools for the Jewish children. But beyond taking sides on a political question, Wesley used Divrei Shalom Ve'emet to present the first vision for enlightened Jewish education produced by the Haskalach. And in the pamphlet, Wesley makes a distinction between what he calls Torah to Adam, human knowledge, and Torah to Shem, divine knowledge. Human knowledge, he says, is based on education and subjects necessary to man's relationship with man, meaning studies of language, science, history, common to the entire human race. The divine teachings, he says, are based in Torah, and as such are the inheritance of the Jewish people alone.

And proper education, says Wesley, must incorporate both. So far, nothing new. It's true that since the time of the Maccabees, there's always been a radical camp in Am Yisrael which rejected the learning of any knowledge other than Torah as Greek wisdom. But Wesley had an endless list of traditional advocates for integrated education to point to. And even his proposals for structured curriculum, new textbooks, modern teaching methods, were not so surprising to his readers. The real revolution offered in the pamphlet was in the relationship he posited between the two types of knowledge. In Divrei Shalom V'Hemet, Wesley states that the education in Torah Adam must precede education in Torah Hashem, because without general education, it is impossible to understand the divine subjects.

Did you hear it? This is not simply a reversal in priorities. He's claiming that divine knowledge depends on a proper secular education. And in case his reader missed his point, Wesley asserted explicitly that a Jew could be part of humanity if he lacks knowledge of the Torah but attained a general education, but that a Jew couldn't even be a Jew if he doesn't have a secular knowledge no matter how much Torah he knows. Now remember, this is not just a philosophical treatise. It's a pamphlet in response to the first signs of emancipation. And by proposing to place secular Western culture at the base of all Jewish education, Wesley supported the notion of tying emancipation to a complete break from traditional Judaism.

Why did he do so? In the end, we don't know. But it may just be that the recent events, the spread of the Enlightenment in Europe, Daum's proposal for the naturalization of the Jews, The Edict of Tolerance, the Beur project itself, had convinced Wesley that a historic turnabout in the relationship between the Jews and the modern state was taking place. And he felt the pressure. He felt that the Jews could no longer sit on their hands and wait passively for emancipation. They had to take action. The Reh Shalom V'Amet was a direct appeal for action, specifically to the rabbis and community leaders to bring about their own freedom by voluntarily establishing a system of reformed Jewish schools. Now, to say that the rabbis of Europe were opposed to such an idea would be a gross understatement.

Led once again by the Noda Behuta and the Vilna Goan, who I hope you remember, the traditionalists unleashed a blistering attack on Dere Shalom V'Amet. Controversy erupted. Sermons were preached across Europe against an unordained Jew who dared to usurp rabbinic authority and whose educational ideas threatened a mortal blow to the pillar of Torah study. Now Wesley responded to his critics in two more pamphlets, trying to clarify his position, but to no avail. Sides began to form up. And Diver Shalom V'Emet was published only weeks after Mendelssohn had written his preface to the vindication of the Jews that we mentioned before. And the very hope he expressed there that religious tolerance would lead the Jewish leadership to voluntarily relinquish his authority for punishment collapsed before his eyes.

Rumors of the burning of copies of D.V. Shalom Lehmat got to him, and he heard that pressure was being placed on Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Levin of Berlin to actually excommunicate Wesley. Jewish society was suddenly facing a public enlightenment test, one that was being closely watched by governments and the press alike, and it seemed to Mandelson that their leadership was failing. What will the Christians have to say about this? asked Mendelssohn in a letter to a friend. What will they think when we exert force on this writer and seek to prevent him from simply expressing his thoughts? In other words, why would they let us into modern society if we continue to live in the Middle Ages? Now, Mendelssohn tried to exert his influence in defense of his friend because he was a rather big figure in all sides of the story.

But in the end, he only ended up being tarred with the same brush as Wesley. In fact, in many ways, it was the reaction of the traditionalist camp to Mendelssohn's defense of Wesley that began the Orthodox historiography, which ultimately will label Mendelssohn as, quote, the evil Moses of Dessau, the leader of the rebels who has the cunning of a snake. And this actually proved quite significant. Because other than scholars of Jewish enlightenment, few people remember the name of Natalia Herz Wesley, even though he did write the first true manifesto of Baskalah. But Mendelssohn's name would never be forgotten, not by his partisans, nor his enemies. The Nota Behuda wrote to the Rabbi Berlin that Mendelssohn's preface and his defense of Wesley proved indisputably that he had compromised his loyalty.

Now I see, he said, that every offense we found him to be guilty of was all true. He has declared of himself that he has no share in the God of Israel nor his Torah, and that every man may do as his heart desires. It's hard to hear that when one actually reads it in the context of what Mendelssohn wrote. And even though such bitter criticism seems to have been confined to correspondence between rabbis the idea that Mendelssohn was a dangerous heretic a threat to rabbinic authority and to the very foundations of the Jewish religion was so cemented into rabbinic tradition that you can still find it on the streets today. Mendelssohn wrote one more major work, in case you're getting tired of his story, and it was destined to become the true manifesto.

of the Berlin Enlightenment. It was called Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism, and was compiled feverishly over a period of eight months at the end of 1782, the height of the storm around Wesley's Divrei Shalom V'emet. And as I said, the internal struggle over how to relate to Wesley's revolutionary educational vision, one which upended the traditional relationship between Torah and secular knowledge, was being watched closely by the non-Jewish world. In the summer of 1782, the German satirist August Kranz, who was a supporter of the Jews in the Enlightenment circle and a personal friend of Mendelssohn, reported on the Wesley affair, labeling it an example of religious fanaticism which contradicted the aims and values of the Enlightenment.

And then, in a second article, he challenged the principles which Mendelssohn had put forward in his preface to the vindication of the Jews. Kranz asserted that Judaism was based upon a system of prescriptions and punishments, and it was only political circumstances which prevented the Jewish leadership from imposing the penalties of religious law upon those who deviated from orthodoxy. For Kranz, Mendelssohn's denial in the preface of the right of excommunication was basically a disassociation from Judaism. My dear Mr. Mendelssohn, he wrote, you have, in your remarkable preface, wrenched the cornerstone by stripping the synagogue of its original power. Now, this was no lavator affair. Kranz himself was a deist, and he had no love lost for formal religion of any type, Christianity included.

He was, however, troubled by Mendelssohn's adherence to the Torah, and so he made one further demand. the people are justly worthy of you providing them with a reason for the great disparity between you and the faith of your forefathers or that you announce the cause preventing you from publicly accepting Christianity and here we have explicitly one of the prime challenges which the Masculine would have to face if they were to build a sustainable movement how is Enlightenment Judaism, the Haskalah not simply a stepping stone into Christian culture, even into the quasi-secular culture of Christian deism. And Jerusalem was Moses Mendelssohn's response. It's an articulation of how he believed Jewish identity was simultaneously binding and nevertheless compatible with religious tolerance and therefore how it could be reconciled with the modern era.

Not a simple task. Now, Mendelssohn did not see the question of how the Jew could be a Jew in the modern world as a purely local question for Am Yisrael. It was actually a test case for modern society itself. Could modern society reconcile the conflicting demands of church and state? And when this great philosopher and rabbi looked at the society around him, he saw two primary tensions threatening to tear it apart, and he ought to perk your ears up because they haven't gone away. One tension was between the suffocation of natural rights by tyranny and the anarchy of a society in which liberty is absolute, and the other tension was being religious fanaticism, which breeds prejudice, hypocrisy, and superstition, and the denial of God that leads to the collapse of morality.

Every civil society, he writes, would do well to let neither of them, neither fanaticism nor atheism, take root and spread. Mendelsohn's position on religion is clear. Without belief in God, he says, without belief in divine providence and reward and punishment, a society based on justice and morality cannot exist. His position on the relationship between church and state was equally clear. Quote, the state gives orders and courses. Religion teaches and persuades. The state has physical power and uses it when necessary. The power of religion is love and beneficence. Now, Mendelsohn saw clearly that until Christian society fostered a civic realm which was divorced from religion, then tolerance of the Jews would only ever be based on the old medieval principles of economic expediency or hope for their conversion.

However, he was an evolutionary thinker, not an advocate for the immediate and absolute separation of church and state. In his eyes, the state needed to guard the boundaries of the social discourse from both tyranny and atheism. Let everyone be permitted to speak as he thinks, he says, to invoke God after his own manner, and to seek eternal salvation where he thinks he may find it, as long as he does not disturb public felicity and acts honestly toward the civil laws. He goes on to say that it's really only in some indeterminate future, after centuries of civilization, as he calls it, that the full vision of tolerance can be realized. And in the meantime, despite the internal challenges which Judaism faces, Mendelssohn insisted that emancipation was a right and not a privilege to be gained through sacrifice of our religion.

Society's attitude toward Jews, in his eyes, was actually a measure of the degree to which Enlightenment values were more than just empty words, but actual social principles. In other words, the Jew is the canary in the mineshaft whose liberation or oppression will prove the truth of European Enlightenment culture. And as for his vision of how the Jews would be able to encounter modernity, well first, Mendelsohn half acknowledged Kranz's assertion by admitting that many Jews indeed see Judaism as a religion based on coercion and punishment, but, he insisted, they are wrong. To Mendelssohn, it's obvious and proven that the principles of Torah fall into line with reason and are completely compatible with freedom of conscience.

He therefore distanced himself from the rabbis in the Wesley affair, not only because he disagreed with their methods, but because their religious intolerance was not true Judaism in his eyes. He repeats over and over in the work his dream, his vision, that rabbinic leadership would willingly relinquish any tools of coercion and allowed Judaism to blossom as an enlightened faith, willingly chosen by all those whom he firmly believed were bound by it. Mendelssohn placed personal autonomy at the center of Jewish practice, even as he articulated an unwaving faith in the binding nature of Torah. And placed together with his thoughts on the nature of modern society, these ideas make Jerusalem so much a Jewish Enlightenment treatise that it should have put Mendelssohn on a collision course with the rabbinic elite.

But it didn't. Maybe it was his status, or maybe it was because Jerusalem was actually published in German and hardly read by the Jews of his day, or maybe it was that the forces of traditionalism had a more tempting target in the educational reforms proposed by Wesley in Die Re Shalom V'Hemet. But it was a great disappointment to Mendelssohn that neither rabbis nor Moskielin really paid any attention to Jerusalem Even his Enlightenment colleagues gave him a bit of the cold shoulder. A few thinkers commented on it, and he particularly prized a letter from Immanuel Kant, who viewed the book as a harbinger of great reform. But in truth, Kant exposed the underlying expectations which the Enlightenment had for the Jews in an essay written after Mendelssohn's death.

Because there he asked, in light of Jerusalem, why did Mendelssohn not free his brothers from the burden of the religious precepts. But fortunately for our great philosopher, out of his personal journey into modernity, a movement was being born. And as is true with every movement, it would need its heroes. At the exact same time that Mendelssohn was penning his plea for a liberal tolerant society which would welcome the Jews as Jews, Yitzchak Oichel was busy making a movement. The pieces were all in place. The value of the particular identity of the Jews founded in Torah, together with the universalist vision of enlightenment, a focus on rational thought and educational reform, a revival of biblical studies and a love of the Hebrew language.

All that was left was to reach the people with these ideas. And so in 1782, at the tender age of 27, Eichel founded Hebrad Dolshei Lashon Eber, Society of the Friends of Hebrew Literature. It was really the Haskalah's first institution, a group of young Jewish men dedicated to the study of Torah, the revival of the Hebrew language, philosophy, history, science, and all with the aim of rejuvenating Jewish culture. But one society does not a movement make. We're entering the age of print media here at the end of the 18th century, And when we discuss the rise of nationalism, which is coming up fast, we will look more deeply into the role which the printed page, and in particular journalism, will play in creating national consciousness.

Leichel recruited Maskelim from across Europe, including Naftali Wesley, and together they chose the vehicle of a monthly journal, a format which was already popular in England and Germany at the time. And the title of their publication was Hamehasef, The Gatherer. and its role in creating a movement out of a bunch of scattered idealists was so fundamental that later historians call this generation Dor Hamasvim, the generation of the gatherers, or of the contributors, to this journal. The first edition was published late in 1783, with Yitzhak Oyhe as the chief editor. He gathered poetry, prose, drama, fables, every kind of literary form you could imagine. He included articles on education, science, history, as well as contemporary social and communal issues.

All this was unique for the Jewish world, but the real revolution was that the journal was entirely published in Hebrew. And as I said, we're going to have to have real discussion when we come to nationalism about the power of language to define one's experience and consciousness. But for now, appreciate that this is a classic case of the medium as the message. The goal of the Maskelim was liberation on two fronts. emancipation from the oppression of the non-Jewish society around them, and freedom from the inner cobwebs of exile, which they saw as obscuring the pure Jewish culture within. And, by and large, they agreed with Wesley that emancipation would be achieved through Enlightenment, and that itself was best achieved through returning to our native tongue.

In 1784, the Maskelim established a printing house in Berlin, and the Maasef became more than a simply literate or ideological platform. It was now a focal point, a point around which the Haskelah movement began to take shape. Its contributing writers, its distribution agents, and its readers were physically dispersed throughout communities from Amsterdam to Vilna, but they were tied together by the printed word. And with the founding of the printing house, the Maasef editorial board actually moved to Berlin and a new body was established, the Society for the Promotion of Goodness and Justice. Their goal was no longer simply the revival of the Hebrew language, as was Eichel's original group. It was now the foundation of an international Jewish movement that would provide a home for all who identified with the Haskalah.

In conclusion, in Jerusalem, Mendelssohn had posited the transformation of the state as the vital step in ensuring the existence of the Jews in modernity. But Euchel and Asfim placed cultural transformation at the top of their agenda. It was modern education that would put an end to the restrictive nearness of religious knowledge and values. And furthermore, a rational education system would prepare their youth for life in the civil state. Cultivation of the Hebrew language, science, and philosophy would bring about a cultural renaissance. and Mendelssohn played almost no role in this cultural project. He was not a member of the Society of Friends of the Hebrew Language nor was he a partner in the publication of the Hama Asif.

Nevertheless, Eichel was one of Mendelssohn's greatest admirers and as the real founder of the Haskalah movement he carefully shaped the figure of Mendelssohn as a historical personality. Mendelssohn died in 1786 and only two years later, Eichel wrote the first Hebrew biography of the great philosopher, characterizing him as a moral physician, a thinker whose prescriptions were to be carried out by the activists of the Haskalah. The biography first appeared in installments in Hamasev, and it included an abridged translation of Jerusalem into Hebrew. Now, Mendelssohn's unprecedented status made him the ideal mythic founder, and as we know, I hope at this point, his ideas were very deep. but it's to Yitzchak Eichel and the generation of the Me'asvim that the title of Fathers of the Haskalah really belongs I just want to thank a few people I want to thank all the folks who give their hard-earned money to help make this show happen to keep it free and widely distributed and you can join them now go to ravmike.com and you'll see the button that says Be a Patron up there on the right you can click it for a little bit of per-podcast support I also want to thank the folks at the Land of Israel Network for creating such an amazing platform.

I want to thank the Pardes Institute, that's P-A-R-D-E-S dot org dot I-L, for building an institution that allows Jews of so many types to come together and give me a place to teach. And I want to thank you for listening. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story.