Season 2: Episode 18 - National Jew and International Jew

Generated automatically from the audio and lightly corrected. It may contain errors; the recording is the authority.

At the time of the coming of the Redeemer, says Rav, there will be scholars without Torah, Chassidim lacking chesed, moneyless men of wealth, summers without warmth, winters without gold, and produce that will sprout without rain. Well, I bless you and I hope you bless me back that we'll make it to that time of the Redeemer, because I'm Rav Moik Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Episode 18, National Jews and International Jews So we've been speaking about Enlightenment, Reform, Scientific Judaism, Orthodox Judaism, and these are all very important. But I've got to be honest with you, they're largely issues of Western European culture. There is a tendency to focus on German Jewry when we get to this period in history.

But don't forget, the bulk of Jews are living actually in the Pale of Settlement, that part of the Russian Empire, which includes the eastern part of the former Polish kingdom. And many more, not as many, but many more live in Galicia, that piece of the Polish kingdom that was absorbed by the Austrian Empire. It is the Hasidic heartland. And the concerns of the Jews that live in these places are not exactly the same as those of the German Jews, as we will see. But before we do, I've been struggling for weeks to put my finger on the right frame for the coming section of our story. I would call this section basically from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 that reordered Europe in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, all the way to the Paris Peace Conference that will reorder it once again in the wake of World War I.

And I think I've got it. because there's a struggle brewing at the heart of European culture as we move forward in the 19th century. It's a struggle that will really come to head right at the end, at the turn of the 20th century. And it's got elements of the Enlightenment. It's got parts of the Romantic era. And it has a power that will really fuel the wars and revolutions and the cultural struggles down to our very day because this struggle is not over. And frankly, it's not over now, and it was far from new in the 19th century. I'm talking about the struggle between what I'll call the parochial and the cosmopolitan. Now today, to be described as cosmopolitan, implies that one has a certain intellectual sophistication, that they have tastes shaped by a multicultural context, basically that they're broad-minded.

Oh, and there is an assumption of disdain for certain things, like particularism, patriotism, an existence rooted in specific locality. But things were a little bit different in the 19th century. That was a time of grand narratives, of these isms, the overarching ideologies, whose advocates saw them as forces which were going to reshape the world. And in those days, the term cosmopolitan was a little bit closer to its original Greek meaning, citizen of the world. It has a rich history in the literature of political philosophy. The core principle shared by all cosmopolitan views is that all human beings are, or perhaps can or should be, citizens in a single community, be it political, cultural, or economic.

And the Enlightenment, as well as certain elements of Romanticism, gave birth to a host of cosmopolitan movements. Liberalism, socialism, humanism, communism, ism-isms. In the second half of the century, we'll see the rise of another force that will interact in complex ways with the cosmopolitan ethos, and that's nationalism. And the rise of Zionism is just on our horizon, so we're going to have to find some time between now and then to have a discussion about what exactly the term nationalism means. But for now, I want you to see it primarily as an expression of the parochial, but without the pejorative that you might associate. In opposition to cosmopolitanism, which sees human political, moral, social, and economic happiness as dependent on universalizing structures of power and cultural values, the parochialist's perspective says, let me be me, and only then can I learn how to go along with you.

It says that human happiness and cooperation on sociopolitical issues depends on a rooted, local-scale sense of identity and agency in the world. Now, like I said, we've seen some of the cosmopolitan sparks in Am Yisrael in our previous episodes. And since Mendelssohn, when we've been permitted, the Jews have been mingling at the highest levels of intellectual, international culture. And the longing for the realization of that enlightened ideal of a brotherhood of mind and spirit, which does not recognize distinctions based on religion, has been driving a good chunk of our story. The Reform Movement, which grew out of the thought of Mendelssohn and his students, certainly sought to universalize Judaism.

Remember Rabbi Abraham Geiger, that founder of the Reform, who replaced the redemption of the Jewish people in its land with a messianic age of global harmony. Even a strictly orthodox thinker like Rabbi Shemchun Raphael Hirsch saw the ability of the Jews to fulfill their messianic mission as dependent on taking their place in a modern, international, secular culture. So, since we've given our fair share of time to the Cosmopolitan, let's start off this episode with something downright parochial, shall we? In the Torah it says, In the 600th year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the 17th day of the month, on that day all the foundations of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of heaven were opened, and the rain was on the earth for 40 days and 40 nights.

well, in the ark it's going to get more parochial than that but what I'm interested in is what the Zohar says in response it states that these verses are actually speaking about a messianic prophecy that in the 600th year of the 6th millennium both the waters from below and the waters from above will burst forth and flood the world in preparation for the messianic era and since in the mind of the Torah water always represents wisdom Those above are the secret depths of Torah, while those below could be understood as human knowledge. And lo and behold, when you do the math, the 600th year of the 6th millennium is the year 5,600 in the Hebrew calendar, and it corresponds to 1840. Surprise, surprise.

It's the point in the 19th century around which so many of the radical forces that have been unleashed in the last 100 years revolves. Remember, 1740 to 1840 are 100 years that saw radical change in basically every field of human endeavor. Philosophy, science, industry, urbanization, the American Revolution, the French Revolution. The old world is breaking down. But a new model has yet to fully emerge. And there's a struggle taking place at the heart of Europe about what that model will be, parochial or cosmopolitan. and we're going to see that what eventually does indeed emerge as the new model of organization for human society, the nation-state, will be a product of the complex interaction between these parochial and cosmopolitan forces.

Between those who see the inheritance of the past as something to be honored even as we move forward into the future, and those who are rushing headlong into the future eager to leave the past behind. In addition to all these secular areas of human knowledge, 1740 to 1840 was also blessed with a flood of Torah and in particular of Hasidut which of course was the first movement to teach the inner secrets of the Torah to the Jewish masses. So as we've said a couple times the heartland of Hasidut was in the pieces of Poland which were taken by Austria and Russia after the partition, Galicia Congress, Poland and the Pale of Settlement And we've got a lot to say in coming episodes, about at least two out of three.

For now, Galicia in particular is a swirling mix of the national and the international, particularly for the Jews. And in order to focus our lens on a conflict, which will bear fruit in both the consciousness of the Jewish people and the continuity of our story, let's focus on the struggle between the Hasidim and the Maskilim, the active enlighteners in Galicia. Now, first of all, Hasidut has come a long way since we last spoke about it. Not just in development of its thought, but really in the most basic level. According to the Austrian census of 1824, there were 246,000 Jews in Galicia. And in one of the accompanying documents, the Hasidic reveries are characterized as those who minister to this plebeian class of Jews.

Now, this doesn't mean that only amongst the poor were the Hasidim to be found. It means that most of the Galician Jewry was both Hasidic and poor. The poverty of the Galician Jewry was so widespread and extreme that fully one-third were exempt from government taxes at all. If you want to get a sense of what was happening in this retrograde part of the European-Austrian Empire, this was the time of the candle tax. That was the tax which required every Jewish woman to pay tax weekly on two candles before each Shabbat, whether she lit them or not. It was also the time of attacks on ritual slaughter, which by 1816 had already made kosher meat twice as expensive as non-kosher meat, which led to organized boycotts against the meat altogether and the growth of a significant underground slaughter industry.

You remember the significance that slaughter had in the rise of Hasidut altogether. And as if these tax burdens weren't enough to erode Jewish economy, the new capitalist philosophies, there's another big ism on the horizon, are sweeping European capitals, and they lead to a legal assault on all non-productive forms of labor. In particular, innkeeping and the liquor trade were targeted. At the stroke of a legislative pen, the backbone of Jewish economy of Galicia was broken near the beginning of the 19th century. And in general, the capitalist assault on the structures of money, land, and power, which Galicia had inherited from feudal Poland, was bad news for the Jews, or at least for the Hasidim and it's a phenomenon that repeated itself in every traditional society throughout Europe.

But in particular, the Hasidim were living a lifestyle whose economic, social, and religious principles and not only principles but active structures were built on the relationships that had developed over generations between the Jews and the landed Polish nobility. Out with the old, in with the new, says capitalism. So, in addition to government tax oppression and the social erosion threatened by the Catholic economy. The Jews of Glycia faced one last major problem, and that was a concerted attempt by the Austrian administration to Germanize their culture. Germanization was the word of the day in the Austrian Empire following the Napoleonic Wars, but it had failed miserably with the Polish and Ukrainian subject they'd inherited from the partition, so apparently they decided to take out all their energy on the Jews.

And it wasn't just malice. There is also, I think, a somewhat wise perception that as a small population dispersed throughout Galicia, the Jews themselves could become disseminators of German culture. And as we'll see with the Maskelim, the government was not wrong, but the Hasidim weren't having it. If back in Pressburg, the great Rabbi Hatam Sofer, who really we've pegged as the founder of what we know today as Orthodoxy, had opened the war against reform of all types with the rallying cry of anything new is forbidden from the Torah, the rabbis of Galicia exhorted their Hasidim to remember the words of the Gemara, which taught that Am Yisrael was redeemed from their slavery in Egypt specifically because they didn't change their names, they didn't change their language, or their address.

And they were quite happy to reject German culture. And in addition to these struggles, or perhaps because of them, The teachings of the Rebbes in the first half of the 19th century are filled with stories of poverty and the suffering of Israel in exile. And I think, in order to understand how Hasidut fits not only into the development of Am Yisrael, but really into this ongoing cross-current of the parochial versus the cosmopolitan, it's worth it to understand the model into which the Rebbes integrated these two critical elements of Jewish experience, poverty and exile. because by mid-century there's going to be a lively, competing perspective. Now, Vsim Chambonim in Persischa, just to give you an example, he was a student, by the way, of the Magib Mikkoznitz, and really one of the leaders of Polish Hasidut in the 1820s.

One said to his Hasidim, after they saw him give a sum of money twice to the same poor man, he said, the first I gave out of a feeling of pity, but that wasn't enough, because we must give out of a sense of obligation. now the Torah makes a critical distinction between charity and tzedakah charity is at best an act of chesed of loving kindness, of mercy and perhaps even of pity and chesed of course matters to a chesed in fact in many ways if you read deeply into the stories of chesedut and into their texts you can see that the struggle for redemption be it on the personal, national or existential plane is a struggle against the gvrot, the limitations which block the flow of loving kindness, generosity, and divine influence into the world.

Nevertheless, there's no word for charity per se in Hebrew. The giving of tzedakah isn't an act of mercy, it's an act of justice. And the Hasidic leadership of Europe in the 19th century harnessed the wealth of classical sources to teach their followers that the rich Jew should regard his money as not his, but rather as a loan from God. It's not an unconditional piece of private property. The wealth given to the rich was given on trust by God, in condition that it be distributed to the poor. And therefore, so far, the Rebbis and the radicals, of whom which we will speak, agree that the disparity of wealth in the world is an issue of justice, not a cause for charity. Where they differ is actually on the question of what causes this imbalance.

Because the Rebbe's are still living the mythic worldview which they had inherited along with the rest of the Torah, and which taught them that the poverty of Israel was a result of exile. And exile was the result of the sins of Israel. Because of our sins, we were exiled from our land. And because we're in exile, we suffer under the yoke of poverty. And therefore, in the mind of the Rebbe, the rich man and the poor man each have a job to do in order to bring about redemption. The poor man must bear the yoke of poverty without giving up on the yoke of Torah. And the rich man must do the same, but he has to use his wealth with which God has blessed him in order to do the will of heaven. and if they work together well they can heal poverty and exile all in one stroke you know in a sense we could say that the poverty impression which defined life for so many of the Jews in Galicia and Eastern Europe created two different types of consciousness.

In the radicals, it's going to create a socio-political conscious which will lead them down the path of justice through class struggle. While with the Hasidim, the very same conditions fostered what I'll call a spiritual moral consciousness, which emphasized their obligation to Tzedakah. And it's also noteworthy that both share a belief that only solidarity would overcome their condition. When Reb Hersch of Tzedakah wrote to his Hasidim about how the basis of all Hasidut is love for one another, and that the cause of poverty in the world is the disunity of hearts, he called them comrades. however this is also the place where we're going to see the difference between the national and the international Jew because Hasidut, like all Torah rooted in the mythic worldview sees Am Yisrael as more than a sociological or historical phenomenon stay tuned for a full discussion of nationalism the people Israel to the Rebbes are an essential element of creation the most real nation so to speak, which the world knows and therefore the solidarity which they seek is a unity amongst Jews.

And it often comes together with a vehement rejection of the Goyim, the rest of the world. And we could go into a philosophical and even psychological analysis about how and why national solidarity and the spiritual perspective of existential nationhood are bound up with the rejection of other. But for now, just file it away in the back of your mind to be taken out when we discuss the rise of European romantic nationalism. So the radicals also believed in solidarity. But the camaraderie which they sought was the brotherhood of mankind, or at least of the working classes. Their vision was a cosmopolitan, or at least international vision. And when Marx is able to add a sense of historical inevitability to their struggle, the call for the workers of the world to unite will stand in absolute opposition to all parochial national perspectives.

And, of course, it will claim that religion is the opiate of the masses. Do you hear the war drums in the distance? The struggle with poverty was only one fight that defined Hasidut in the 19th century. The rabbis also entered into deep conflict with the forces of the Enlightenment, as the second phase of the Haskalah, the Galician Haskalah, took off around them. But before we can begin that new fight, first we have to put an old one to rest. You'll remember, I'm sure, that the generations of Hasidim immediately following the Baal Shem Tov were themselves social outcasts, religious radicals subject to persecution and even excommunication by the mainstream leadership. You'll recall the band of the Grah, the Vilna Gaon, the great leader of the Mitnagdin, the opponents of Hasidu at the close of the 18th century, when it seemed the Hasidut was in danger of being destroyed or at least driven underground in much the same fashion as the Sabbatean movement which its opponents accused it of continuing.

So how could it be that by 1847, according to the work of the foundational Jewish historian Yitzchak Marches Yost, only one-seventh of glitzing Jewry did not belong to the Hasidic movement? And furthermore, that by mid-century, the Rebbe so dominated the official posts of state-appointed community rabbis that the term Rebbe and Rabbi was all but synonymous. Basically, how did Hasidut go from being a marginal religious movement, grassroots, to the reigning faith for the majority of Polish Jewry? So one answer has to do with religion, or perhaps more specifically, Limud Torah. You'll remember, I hope, that in the early days of the spread of Hasidut throughout Poland, The role of the tzaddik, the righteous leader, as a spiritual intermediary between Israel and God, was a central tenant of the movement, and one of its greatest causes of controversy.

And the centrality of the tzaddik does not diminish, as the Hasidic dynasties begin to emerge in Galicia in the years following Napoleon's conquest of Poland. On the contrary, under the influence of the students of Rav Yaakov Yitzchak Horowitz, the great Chose of Lublin, the seer of Lublin, the role of the Tzadik as miracle worker and dispenser of material and spiritual abundance only grew. And the Rebbe as wonder worker became a favorite target of the Galician Haskalah, which we'll speak about in more detail, because these Maskelim were opposed to what they saw as superstition on the part of the masses and cynical exploitation on the part of the Rebbes. According to one Hasidic tradition, the Thabak Kadosh, the holy grandfather of Radishes, exercised 15 evil spirits and healed 400 sick in the weeks after he revealed himself to the public.

And though these Rebbes won the hearts of the suffering masses, they were hardly going to be the ones to build a bridge to the rabbinic class who opposed them, or to the Jewish middle class emerging that subverted those scholars. But there was another stream within Hasidut rising, even in the lifetime of a seer, led, according to tradition, by the seer's student, the Yehudi, and ultimately by Rebbe Zimchabunam Mip Shischa. And this new stream had a completely different attitude on learning Torah. It was defined, in the words of the Sarath of Streslik, as the worship of the Lord through Torah and prayer together. Or, as the Yehudi said, what mastery is there in being a miracle worker? Anyone who's reached a certain level of Vodat Hashem, of divine service, has in their power to turn heaven and earth upside down.

But to be a Jew? That's hard. So the rabbis of this branch of Hasidut were themselves the products of the great yeshivot of Poland. They had studied the Gemara to its depth and all the great law codes, and they now began to demand that their Hasidim do the same. And slowly under their influence, the importance of traditional Torah learning began to displace the emphasis on the Zohar and Midrash that had characterized early Hasidut. and this began to build bridges ultimately it would be the Chedishe Harim student of Rav Mendel Mikkotz and founder of the Ger dynasty who perfected this synthesis of learning and piety as he would say, Rav Simcha Bunim led the community through love and the Rav Mikkotz led it through Yira, through awe or fear I lead it through Torah this turn toward traditional learning not only deepened and strengthened in the face of the Hasidim themselves, which was of course the goal of the Rebbe, it won over many of the scholars who were leaders of the mitnagdim, of their opponents, to an acceptance of Hasidut as a part of the religious mainstream.

So that's one factor. Another factor was socioeconomic. Because unlike the poor masses of the proletariat who crowded the courts of the miracle worker Rebbe's, the Rebbe's of the Peshizcha school were themselves members of the well-to-do classes and therefore managed to attract chassidim from amongst the merchants and businessmen who were thriving in the new capitalist economy and who had been up until now traditionally supporters of their opponents. It's not that, God forbid, the Rebbe Zabshischa turned away from the poor. It's that they turned also toward the middle class. As Rebbe Mendel Mikotz himself said to one of his chassidim, a merchant whose large family made it difficult for him to engage full time in Torah, one can also fulfill the Torah and the commandments through trade.

by exercising care and weights and measures by refraining from cheating and deception, and by letting one's yes be a righteous yes, and one's no be a righteous no. So we have a religious shift, and there's a broader socioeconomic one. And finally, there's the old principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The Hasidim, especially those of Ger, were staunchly opposed to the forces of enlightenment infiltrating Galician life. Like I said, they were very fond of repeating the Chatham Sofer's cry, Chadash Asur, Mina Torah, everything new is forbidden. And it was Rabbi Yitzchak Mer, the Chedesh HaRim, who led many of the fights against the Maskilim, whether it was their plan to require teachers in the traditional elementary schools to undergo a state examination, or their attempt to create enlightened schools for Jewish children in Warsaw.

When the government passed an edict banning the Jewish mode of dress, It was the Chedeshe HaRim who made the pious choose the Russian and not the German style in order to allow them to keep their beards and to ensure that they were actually wearing coats that were longer than those fashionable in Europe. And his writings and sermons are filled with warnings against the plague of the Haskalah, which feeds its followers the cursed waters, gal, and wormwood to drink. So from these three reasons, religious, economic, and social, we can see how the Hasidim and the Mitnagdim reconciled in order to stand together as Orthodoxy. But what was this Galician Haskalah against which they stood? You know, the Berlin Haskalah had a swift rise and just as rapid a decline.

Mendelssohn, Wellesley, and the Dorham Asfim, that generation which rallied around Yitzhak Eichel's first periodical, were followed by a process of rapid acculturation and even conversion, as we've discussed at length. But, as the momentum of Haskalah waned in Germany, or dispersed itself in different channels, Jewish Enlightenment found new adherents in Galicia, particularly in the cities of Brody and Tonopole, which were home to the merchant and banking families whose patronage made possible the Young Movement. And many of the elements of the Galician Haskalah were identical with what had taken place in Berlin. There's no need to repeat them. schools were established, journals were published. Its early advocates were passionate about the revival of the Hebrew language before eventually their intellectual inheritors turned toward the assimilationist path, the cosmopolitan path of European Enlightenment culture, as had their predecessors in Berlin.

And the letters preserved from the first decades of the movement show a passion for literature and scholarship which would have made Mendelssohn proud and made them members of an international elite of thought. But, from the outset, there was one particular element that distinguished the Galician Askala from anything happening in Berlin, and that was its unrelenting struggle against Hasidut, because Hasidut was a social and religious force almost entirely absent in Germany. And just as the Galician Maskilim were awakening to what they saw as the enlightened truth of scientific culture, Hasidut was spreading like wildfire amongst their contemporaries. It drew the masses of youth into its camp. Try to imagine the horror that these devotees of reason and European culture felt at seeing their contemporaries dressed in the clothes of poverty, seeking the blessings of the Rebbe, and rejecting the Western worldview based on science and reason.

They tell a story of Rabbi Simcha Budim, that he was once walking with his Hasidim when he bent down to pick up a grain of sand, and then he carefully returned it to its exact place. Looking at his chassidim and saying, whoever does not believe that this grain of sand must lie precisely in this spot because it is so appointed by God is, heaven forbid, a skeptic. Or, as Rabbi Nachman said in a paraphrase, the highest wisdom lies in not being wise at all. So these words were anathema to the masculine and they attempted a two-pronged assault to break the hold of the superstition and anti-rationalism, as they labeled it, of the Hasidim because they saw these as the great evils holding Israel back from taking its rightful place in the nations amongst whom they lived, not being a nation itself but rather participating in every nation in which they found themselves the international Jew literature and government intervention were the chosen tools of the Maskelim and the undisputed master of both in the Galician Haskalah was Yosef Pearl.

A native of Tarnapol, Pearl was an educator, he was a writer, and the leading voice of the Galician Haskalah. Like many of the Maskelim in Galitia, he was in his youth drawn to Hasidut. The idealism and the passion that he found there was quite similar to what he eventually found in his literary circles. But his travels to many cities on behalf of his father's wine business brought him into contact with the Maskelim of his day, and like so many others, once he discovered the darkness and superstition, he turned against his original love with a vicious passion. Now at first, Pearl based his opposition to Chastitut on what he discovered in the writings of the Vilna Gaon, claiming that the movement had left the path of tradition, but as he was drawn deeper into the circles of the Enlightenment, reason and European culture became his standards of measure.

Pearl was the strongest voice amongst many in the Galician Haskalah who, alarmed by the spread of Hasidu, began to accuse the Hasidim of spreading ignorance deliberately, of deceiving the masses, and perhaps most critically, with threatening the welfare of the state. And because he was both a true son of his people and a passionate disciple of the Enlightenment, Joseph Pearl was convinced that books had the power to change the world, and they were his chosen battlefront. In the second decade of the 19th century, two books were published that were central to the spread of Chassidut in Galicia and the rest of Eastern Europe. The first was Shiv Chaya Besht, the praises of the Holy Baal Shem Tov. It's a compilation of stories and teachings meant to glorify the founder of Chassidut.

We actually mentioned it in a previous episode. And the second was the stories of Rabbi Nachman M'Bretzlo, which remains to our very day a central source for those seeking entry into Chassidic thought. I highly recommend it, by the way. Pearl felt he could not leave such a dangerous literature unchallenged in circulation and so his first anti-Hasidic work was an extended pamphlet written in German entitled On the Essence of the Hasidic Set written between 1814 and 1816 the historians believe written but not published because he sent the manuscript to the governor of Galicia accompanied by a letter explaining that his work exposed the customs and way of life of Hasidim as expressed from with their own books in order to prove that it was the source of the dismal cultural condition of the Jews.

And Pearl also noted that he had failed to publish his text because he feared persecution by the sect, which he claimed was thriving, quote, from hour to hour like the disease of cancer and which must be cured at the root. Now, fearing public unrest, the censor also did not permit Pearl to print the text. Nevertheless, the laws limiting Hasidut and strengthening government confiscation of their books increased significantly in the wake of Pearl's efforts. But nevertheless, he tried again, this time with a parody of the stories of Rabbi Nachman, but still to no avail, he failed to publish. Finally in 1819 he succeeded with the publication of Megalei Tamirin the revealer of secrets published under the Sunanism Avadji ben Petachya Now Avadji is presented as a chassid who's venusited all the great tzaddikim, all the righteous, who possessed the power to make himself invisible and knew the secret of Kvitzat HaDerech, that's the shortening of the path, teleportation or apparition, for those of you of the Harry Potter generation.

And the book contains, or claims to contain, 151 letters written by Hasidim, which Ovajah claims to have collected and presented in the form of a Hasidic book, and as its somewhat labyrinthian plot unfolds, the main issue involves attempts by the Hasidim to gain possession of the book, none other than Pearl's original German pamphlet, that negatively influences the attitude of the government toward the Hasidic movement. Megala Tamirim is brutally critical of Hasidic society, its leaders, its customs, depicting the Hasidim as corrupt, backward, and ignorant, and it was so specific in its use of insider language that the average reader of its day knew exactly who it was speaking about. But, of course, it had no particular influence on the Hasidim themselves.

Few of them ever read it. It was, however, a turning point, according to many historians, in Hebrew literature. First of all, it's considered by many to be the first Hebrew language novel. And we will speak more as we get deeper into the Pahel of Settlement. about the rebirth of the Hebrew language, and the very important national role it played, even though it was fostered originally by very cosmopolitan Jews. And in more general terms, this book, Megalatimirim, established a whole genre of anti-Hasidic literature, which really began to become central to the Galician Haskolah's entire worldview, and certainly its treatment of the Hasidim. There were many throughout the 19th century who wrote sequels, or even rewrote the work itself.

But Pearl was not satisfied with the impact of the written word. Like I said, this was a two-pronged assault. So, he wrote many denunciations of the Hasidic movement, similar to the note I mentioned to the government of Galicia, and perhaps his most vehement was an 1838 letter which suggested the government censor Jewish libraries, prohibit meetings in mikveot, those are ritual baths, and close traditional Jewish schools which he called a place of refuge for vagabonds, thieves, a nest of demoralization of nefarious, scandalous deeds. In this sense, Joseph Pearl was the cosmopolitan Jew. He took his cultural and intellectual cues from the light emanating out of all the European capitals. And in this light, his Hasidic brothers appeared as parochial in the worst sense of the world.

And through his writing, he set the mold for a conflict that would continue until the rise of Jewish nationalism drew most of the cosmopolitan energy of the Maskelim into an entirely new channel. But he himself would not live to see it. According to Hasidic tradition, Yosef Pearl died on Simchat Torah, the day of the rejoicing with the Torah. It's a holy day, which you haven't celebrated, I encourage you to try. Traditionally, what we do is we sing, we dance, and in particular, especially in Europe, there was a processional through the streets carrying Torah scrolls. And the tradition says that Pearl had so ridiculed the ecstatic dancing and singing of the Hasidim that they weren't going to miss the opportunity to dance on the fresh dirt of his grave.

So just when you think the mix is full, we've got one more element to throw in, in this story of the parochial and the cosmopolitan Jew. And in many ways, in my eyes, this is the type of Jew who will have the biggest impact on Europe as the 19th century heads toward its general climax of conflict between the national and the international. Moshe Hess, or Moritz, as he was known for most of his younger life, was born in 1812 in the city of Bonn. And from 1795 to 1814, I hope you remember, Bonn was under French rule. Napoleon's troops had come in, and in conquering, they'd thrown open the gates of the ghetto, And after centuries of cultural confinement, the Jews of the day experienced personal freedom, economic opportunity, and generally a liberal atmosphere.

It was intoxicating, especially to the youth. And that's why, after the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, when the Rhineland was annexed to Prussia, and King Frederick William III tried to turn back the clock of emancipation, a crisis of conscience erupted amongst the newly liberated. Many couldn't bear the thought of a return to their former degraded status, and they chose baptism instead. We've spoken about some of them. Those were the children of Moses Mendelssohn, the poet Heinrich Hein, who had been involved in the Verbein movement with Sons. Heinrich Marx, the father of Karl Marx, actually changed his name and his faith during this period on the very same day. There were others, however, who reacted in the opposite direction and became even more fiercely attached to Torah and religion.

Amongst these were the members of Moshe Hess' family. Now, by the way, you just have to wonder, what would have happened to the world if Karl Marx, who himself was the grandson of a rabbi, had been brought up by reactionary religious parents and not on a diet of 18th century rationalism? And the truth is, even though you can't what-if history, we can kind of know, because there's no better example than Moritz Hetz. Because despite his father's religiosity, Hetz, like so many other idealistic young Jews of his time, was deeply moved by the waves of mystic nationalism and romanticism sweeping over the Germany of his day. His father wanted him to enter the family business, but Moritz said, no way. Like many other young men that I know, he had no clear idea of what he wanted to do.

His longing was to serve mankind, to help the poor, to liberate the oppressed, but above all, not to make money, which he looked down on as a bourgeois egotism of the most disgusting type. So, he wandered and starved from England to Holland, from Holland to France. It was in Paris, in the aftermath of the revolution of 1830, when it was the free city of Europe filled with the hopeful drinking coffee, discussing politics, and dreaming of global revolution, where he imbibed the radical social and economic ideals that would shape really the rest of his life. The call of the day was to fight the great-ism, capitalism. and to encourage humanity to abandon individual enterprise and ruthless competition which these idealists saw as destroying the body and soul of mankind.

Their dream was of collective undertakings, undertakings that would release the productive energies of humanity in a planned and harmonious manner and bring universal prosperity, justness, happiness and peace for all. you know, these early radicals started to call themselves socialists and they declared that the very possession of private property was the root of all evil and a new ism in opposition to capitalism was born an ism that said justice and freedom were not possible without complete social and economic equality which depended upon the total abolition of private ownership and young Mortes on the run from his father's sugar factory drank up these ideas like wine adding to him his own enthusiastic faith in the romantic ideals preached by the disciples of Ficht and Schilling that he picked up along the way and of course underlying and really supporting all of this mix and all the philosophy of today was the Hegelian system like I told you in the last episode you cannot overstate the impact of Hegel's thought on the 19th century.

And it's still playing itself out in many ways in our thought today. More than anything else, however, what I want you to take away right now was the sense of inevitability which Hegel imparted to his students. His notion of a movement of the universe towards self-awareness was an inevitable movement. And that awareness that was meant to take the form of the increase in rational knowledge amongst men being an inevitable goal gave them hope. It was also, by the way, the inevitability of the collision between social, intellectual, economic, and political forces which fired his students. After all, if conflict is inevitable, who wants to be on the wrong side of history? So fueled by this secular messianism, as it is known, in which the creed of even though the Messiah lingers, nevertheless, I'll wait for him, that creed has been replaced by the inexorable process, the progress of conflict between theses and antithesis, which produce a higher synthesis.

Fueled by this secular messianism, young idealistic Jews, disillusioned by both the experience of emancipation and conservative reaction, by a shallow cosmopolitanism and a rampant parochialism, began to dream of a different world. not just one which might be but one which must be because remember many of Hegel's students saw the function of this avant-garde this truly conscious and advanced element of society to be a destructive function their role was to destroy everything static, dead, stupid and irrational that stands in the way of the clear path of progress for humanity toward its inevitable destination sounds exciting, huh? But there's only so long that you can survive on weak coffee and strong ideas, and after a few years of abject poverty, Moritz Hess returned home to Cologne on foot and tried to make peace with his capitalist father.

By all accounts, the prodigal Zahn was greeted with open arms by his religious and staunchly conservative family, and his father happily appointed him clerk in the family sugar refinery, which, of course, ended in complete failure. so in less than a year Moritz was unable to bear participating in the capitalist system which he saw as a vampire sucking the soul from humanity he scraped together whatever money he could enough to live for a few months perhaps and then once again walked away from his father's house this time for good in addition to his rejection of participation in the capitalist system Moritz had decided it was time to join the discourse in 1837 he published a metaphysical philosophy of history entitled The Sacred History of Mankind by a young disciple of Spinoza.

There's no need to unpack the ideas in the work. It's an amalgamation of all the philosophies of its day and by most accounts not particularly comprehensible. What matters for us is that the sacred history is written proof that even at this early phase has to become a full-fledged socialist, which gives him a legitimate claim to be the first German socialist. And, furthermore, it tells us that coupled with his socialism was a complete dismissal of his Judaism. In the progress of sacred history, the Jews are mentioned only to be dismissed as a preliminary stage superseded by Christianity. Ooh, that sounds familiar. Hess actually has the following advice for the Jews of his day. The people chosen by their God must disappear forever, that out of its death might spring a new, more precious life.

So, what's interesting to me is that the abolition of private property and the dismissal of Judaism as, at best, an early phase of human history were two principles that Hess shared with his fellow Jew, be an apostate or not, contemporary and eventual collaborator, Karl Marx. Marx came to Cologne in 1841, and Hess fell instantly under his spell. But truth is, the influence went both ways. It was Hess who first preached communism to Marx. Early in September that year, Hess wrote to a friend describing Marx. He is the greatest, perhaps the only true philosopher actually now alive. Dr. Marx, that is the name of my idol, is still a very young man and will strike the final death blow at medieval religion and politics.

He combines philosophical depth with a most biting wit. Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heinenegel, not thrown together anyhow, but fused into a single personality, and you will have Dr. Marx. Now, I don't know how much you know about Marxism, but just remember that Marx maintained the only truly objective ground from which one could attack a given view or institution or existent regime, was that of his new, and at this point still emerging, dialectical science of historical development, rooted in the inevitable analysis of Hegel. Now, Hess's call for the chosen people to disappear forever is somewhat emblematic of the cosmopolitan instinct in the Jew. Why should there be a specific people marked by distinct customs in a world of complete and undifferentiated human freedom?

Marx's analysis of the Jews went a bit deeper, as did his animosity. In 1843, Marx wrote On the Jewish Question. It was a refutation of his former mentor Bruno Bauer's analysis of the attempts of the Prussian Jews to gain emancipation, the story we've been telling all along. It was also one of the first articulations of what would become his materialist conception of history. And the central theme which Marx develops is that emancipation within a nation-state does not require the Jews to assimilate, because political emancipation is not true freedom anyway. Only economic, universal economic emancipation offers true liberation. that the parochial and the national, even as liberal as they may be, stand in the way of true universal freedom.

And in the eyes of Marx, in an economically liberated world, Judaism must disappear, because it's not really a religion. It's actually the ultimate product of capitalism itself. What is the secular basis of Judaism, asks Marx? Practical need. Self-interest. And what is the worldly religion of the Jew, he says? Huckstering. what is his worldly God? Money. And therefore, in the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism. Now Marx's antisemitism didn't stand in Hess's way, nor in the way of the many disaffected Jews who were swept up by the power of his thought and personality. Hess and Marx wandered the capitals of Europe on separate tracks, reuniting in Brussels in 1845.

and it was at this point that Marx had already formed his friendship with Friedrich Engels and developed the framework of economic theory which become known as Marxism. Scholars identify three primary influences in Marx thought Hegel dialectic French utopian socialism and English economics And since we know that it was Hess who really pulled Marx into the socialist net we can say with confidence that Moritz Hess created one-third of Marxism. And he furthermore contributed to the early drafts of Marx's best-known work. Europe in 1847 was approaching the boiling point. And Marx decided that the underground organizations and clandestine meetings that he was having were no longer the path to unite the working classes in their struggle against capitalist oppression.

And so, he founded the Communist League and in February of 1848 published its manifesto, the Communist Manifesto. By this point, Marx had dismissed his former mentor Hess as a feeble echo of French socialism and communism with a slight philosophical flavor. But Engels had actually maintained much more of a relationship. And most scholars agree that they were both completely unashamed to use Hess's earlier drafts in their final composition of the Communist Manifesto. And the dam holding back the liberal forces of Europe burst in the spring of 1848. This is what's known as the Revolution of 1848. Also, the Spring of Nations, the People's Spring, Springtime of the Peoples, or the Year of Revolution. it's a little bit beyond the scope of our story to really describe the impact that 1848 has on Europe but just know, this was the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history and true to our theme, it included everything from ardent nationalists to die-hard communists to utopian socialists and everything in between everybody was looking to overthrow the existing order in order to gain either their parochial freedom or to free all mankind and we'll speak, as I said about the nationalist element and how it plays into Judaism in a coming episode but at this stage Hess was still an international Jew but the revolution of 1848 which broke out while he was in Germany and was basically broken itself rather quickly by Bismarck, the emperor of Australia and Prince Napoleon actually may mark a turning point in Hess's story.

Or, perhaps this occurred slightly earlier. You know, in 1840, in Damascus, a Jew was accused and convicted of committing an act of ritual murder. It was a blood libel, one we're quite familiar with from medieval European history, though unusual this time for taking place in Syria. And as is part of the traditional ritual, anti-Jewish riots followed in its wake. Hess actually records in his journal how painfully he reacted to this incident, and how for the first time he began to wonder whether the universal solution that he'd been seeking for all human ills would in fact cure those of the Jews as well. Meaning, was the cosmopolitan redemption he was seeking good news for the Jews? It was also at this time that Hess, along with most of the rest of the liberal world, became enchanted with the Italian struggle for unity and independence.

Mazzini and his friends were emblematic to large parts of the world of a nationalism which they felt was the true glory of humanity. And in fact, one of the very sharp differences between Hess and the Marxist doctrine that he loved was Marx's denial of any role to nationalism as a basic factor in history. It's the big lacuna in Marxism. So Hess, under the influence of these experiences, began in his writings to condemn cosmopolitanism as an unnatural suppression of real historical differences between nations which enriched mankind. Because Hess believed now, and perhaps always had, in the natural differentiation of mankind into separate races or nations. and as he reflected on the problems of Italian nationalism the nature of his own scattered and sunken people the Jews began to rise in his thoughts and so in 1861 he returned to Cologne under a political amnesty that was granted by the king of Prussia and in 1862 he took all these new thoughts and he put them together in his most successful work it's a book called Rome and Jerusalem and it's expression of this new thought and it fell on Germany, or at least German Jewry, like a bombshell.

Now the book, Rome and Jerusalem, is one part description of the condition of the Jews in the West and a partial diagnosis of their ills. That's the part that really hurt, because to Hess, the denial of nationality, which really he saw as underlaying Western Jewry's efforts at emancipation, was simply a way to forfeit the respect of anybody who looked. Assimilation is no solution, he says. It's not the pious Jew who'd rather have his tongue cut out than misuse it by denying his nationality. It's the modern Jew who is despicable for disowning his race and because the heavy hand of fate oppresses it. Hess even condemns the reform movement amongst the German Jews, saying it's done nothing but bring emptiness into Jewish life.

And with a shameful lack of pride, its leaders tell the Jews to conceal themselves amongst the other nations. Neither reform nor baptism, neither education nor emancipation will completely open before the Jews of Germany, the doors of social life. The modern liberal Jew is to be despised with his fine words about humanity and enlightenment intended only to disguise his disloyalty to his brothers. Do you hear the parochial cosmopolitan tension? So Roman Jerusalem isn't just an analysis of the Jews of the West, it's also a profession of faith on behalf of Hess. He declares he'd been living his life in a dream, and that it was only in 1840, when that charge of ritual murder woke him up, that he suddenly realized where the truth lay.

It dawned on me for the first time, he writes, in the midst of my socialist activities, that I belong to my unfortunate, slandered, despised, and dispersed people. He goes on to say that he'd stifled his cry of pain because of the greater sufferings of the European proletariat to which he thought that he ought to devote his life. But here I am again, after 20 years, in the midst of my people. But he hasn't abandoned his revolutionary posture, and Hess is one of the first to suggest that nationalism is the solution to the Jewish problem, not cosmopolitan emancipation and absorption into European culture. Now remember, to Hess, nationality is real. And this is a discussion we're going to have when we go into the depth of nationality, meaning that nations, in his eyes, are a natural historical product, like families, and like the races in which the science of his day was putting increasing stock.

And that question of the relationship between nationalism and racism will come down to us when we discuss social Darwinism. But, furthermore, Hess rejects Marx's assertion that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, because he maintains that history is dominated actually by the struggles of races and nationalities. Now, before you lump Hess into the chauvinist side of the parochial, you should know that racial and national chauvinism are labeled in Roman Jerusalem as the most evil element of nationalism. But Hess says that to deny one's nation or race is at least as repulsive as to proclaim that it's superior to others. His utopian vision now comes to rest on the assertion that there are no superior or inferior races, but that all races must be made free and only then will they cooperate as equals.

He sees it as a disease of nationalism which seeks to dominate others but he claims that Jews, like all other peoples need a normal national life and for the Jews Hess claims that that normalcy depends on a return to Zion. As he says, without soil a man sinks to the status of a parasite feeding on others. And it's at this point where Hess begins to really prefigure the Zionist writers of the late 19th century. How, he asks, are the Jews going to build a bridge? It's a bridge between what? Between the nihilism, as he calls it, of the reformed rabbis, who have learned nothing, and the stolid conservatism of the Orthodox, who have forgotten nothing. He says there's only one solution, and it waits for the Jews on the banks of the Jordan.

But he asks, who will go to such a barren eastern country? not the Jews of the West for them, the land of Israel will be at best what Hess calls a spiritual nerve center and anyone who knows a Hadam might wonder if he read Rome and Jerusalem he claims that it's the Jews of Eastern Europe and the lands of the East where the ancient faith has kept them solid and insulated from their environment, kept them parochial these are the ones who will rebuild the homeland and furthermore in a radical shift for most of his radical brothers and sisters. Hess says that whereas the Reform Movement is an attempt to free the Jewish people on foreign soil by diluting Judaism, he calls Hasidut a great revivalist sect in a genuine development of the Jewish religion and therefore says it's destined for a great future.

Now these were fighting words, and they weren't going to go unchallenged. Rabbi Abraham Geiger, that founding voice of the Reform Movement, saw himself rightly as a prime target of Hess's criticism. Remember, Geiger's creed was we are first and foremost Germans, Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Americans, and only then Jews. And in an anonymous review of Roman Jerusalem, entitled Old Romanticism, New Reaction, he condemned the book, he called the author an almost complete outsider who after bankruptcy as a socialist wants to make a hit with nationalism. In all fairness, despite this, we'll call it proto-Zionism, Hess never abandoned his socialism. In 1867, he actually joined the International Workmen's Association, founded by his old comrade and remorseless critic, Karl Marx.

He even went to the First International as a Marxist delegate on behalf of the workers of Berlin. In 1870, he was expelled from Paris during the Franco-Prussian War due to his status as a German citizen, citizen. And he went on to Belgium where he called for an alliance of all free peoples against Russianized Germany, as he called it. A country he saw as intent on destroying France only because France wanted to make humanity happier. And in 1875, despite the great passion he brought to the redemption, secular and ultimately national, Moshe Hess died for the most part as he lived, poor and unknown. So I hope by now you've got a little taste of why this tension between the parochial and the cosmopolitan, which defines European society all the way up through the 19th century, can be a powerful frame for looking at the Jewish question.

We saw the Chassidim, who themselves saw the answer to the Jewish question in this national spiritual solidarity and their expectation for redemption. And we know the Moschilin, who fought the Hasidim in Galicia and the Orthodox in Western Europe in their efforts to emancipate, assimilate, and internationalize Jewish society as part of the answer to the Jewish question. And with Moshe Hess, we met the radical Jew, that idealistic youth who stripped the traditional garb from his Methodism and clothed it in the economic theories of his day, but was himself torn by the tension between the Progyal and the Cosmopolitan. Either way, all of these men kept their faith in their ability to transform the world.

You know, Moshe Hess, born Moshe, called Moritz, and then in an act of personal tshuva, of personal redemption really, reclaiming himself as Moshe, had a vision that was universalist, but it wasn't Cosmopolitan. as he said, the first condition of true internationalism is that there should be nationalities in Hess's eyes, internationalism was a movement not to abolish but to unite nations and it's critical that we sense in his words the reconciliation of the prat and the klal of the particular and the universal, the parochial and the cosmopolitan which the Zohar teaches us is the reason the soul comes into the world and always the hallmark of redemption any universal plan for redemption which demands homogeneity will never be the path for the Jewish people no matter how many Jews lead the charge to make it happen by giving up their Judaism and just on an end note a few of Hess's predictions in Roman Jerusalem have proven to be chillingly accurate he says again and again by the way that the Germans are anti-Jewish racially and we're going to have to speak more about the role which race plays in our story going forward, the tall blonde Germans he says, are much too conscious of the small, dark Jews as being something intrinsically different than themselves.

What the Germans hate, says Hess, is not so much the Jewish religion as the Jewish noses. And, he has proved to be right, when he claimed that it would not be the Western Jews who, of their own choice, would choose to emigrate. Because in the end, they're simply too comfortable where they are. And in a final passage that could make your blood run cold, Hess declares that the liberal Jews of Germany will one day suffer a cataclysm to the extent of which they cannot begin to conceive. And to me, this is the shadow on the horizon of our story. Not just the Jewish question, but the question of how the momentum of allowing the Jew into cosmopolitan, universalist culture will end in a paroxysm of parochialism and a nationalist passion which all but destroys them, how the efforts to answer the Jewish question actually end up with the final solution.

But we've got quite a ways to go before we get there. I just want to thank a few people. I want to thank the people who give their hard-earned money to help make this show happen, to keep it free and widely available, and I want to invite you to join them. Go right now to ravmike.com and in the upper right-hand corner, you'll see a button that says, be a patron, click through in order to add your per-podcast support. I want to thank the Land of Israel Network for creating a platform that allows me to reach so many wonderful people. I want to thank the Pardes Institute, P-A-R-D-E-S dot org dot I-L for bringing together so many wonderful Jews and letting me teach them and touch their hearts and minds.

And I want to thank you for listening. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story.