History of the Jews (54 page)

In Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (1720-97), the
gaon
of Vilna, the early hasidics found a dedicated enemy. The
gaon
, even by the standards of Jewish infant prodigies, was a spectacular child. He had delivered a homily in the Vilna synagogue at the age of six. His secular as well as his religious knowledge was awesome. When marriage at eighteen brought him independent means, he purchased a small house outside Vilna and concentrated entirely on study. His sons said he never slept more than two hours a day, nor more than half an hour at a time. To eliminate distractions, he closed the shutters even in daytime
and studied by candlelight. To stop himself falling asleep, he cut off the heating and put his feet in a bowl of cold water. As his power and influence in Vilna grew, so his devotion to study intensified. He did not despise kabbalah, but everything had to be subordinated to the demands of the halakhah. He regarded hasidism as an outrage. Its claims to ecstasy, miracles and visions were, he said, all lies and delusions. The idea of the
zaddik
was idolatry, worship of human beings. Most of all, its theory of prayer was a substitute for, an affront to, scholarship—the be-all and end-all of Judaism. He was the cathedocracy personified, and when asked his opinion about what should be done to the
hasidim
, he replied: persecute them.
⁹⁷
Fortunately for the orthodox, the
hasidim
had started to use unorthodox knives for the
shehitah
or ritual slaughter. The first
herem
was proclaimed against them in 1772. Their books were publicly burned. There was another
herem
in 1781, stating: ‘They must leave our communities with their wives and children…and they should not be given a night’s lodging. Their
shehitah
is forbidden. It is forbidden to do business with them, to intermarry with them, or assist at their burial.’ The
gaon
wrote: ‘it is the duty of every believing Jew to repudiate and pursue them with all manner of afflictions and subdue them, because they have sin in their hearts and are a sore on the body of Israel’.
⁹⁸

But the
hasidim
replied with their own excommunications. They issued pamphlets to defend themselves. In Lithuania, and Vilna in particular, the
gaon
created an enclave of halakhic orthodoxy and scholarship, before departing to end his days in Erez Israel. But elsewhere hasidism established itself permanently as an important and seemingly necessary part of Judaism. It spread west into Germany and thence into the world. The orthodox attempt to destroy it failed. Indeed it was soon abandoned, as both scholars and enthusiasts united in the face of a new and common enemy—the Jewish enlightenment or haskalah.

Although the haskalah was a specific episode in Jewish history, and the
maskil
or enlightened Jew is a special type peculiar to Judaism, the Jewish enlightenment is nevertheless part of the general European enlightenment. But it is, more particularly, linked to the enlightenment in Germany, and this for a very good reason. The movement in both France and Germany was concerned to examine and readjust man’s attitude to God. But whereas in France its tendency was to repudiate or downgrade God, and tame religion, in Germany it sought genuinely to reach a new understanding of and accomodation with the religious spirit in man. The French enlightenment was brilliant but
fundamentally frivolous; the German was serious, sincere and creative. Hence it was to the German version that enlightened Jews felt attracted, which influenced them most, and to which they in turn made a substantial contribution.
⁹⁹
For perhaps the first time Jews in Germany began to feel a distinct affinity with German culture, and thus sowed in their hearts the seeds of a monstrous delusion.

To intellectuals in Christian society, the question posed by the enlightenment was really: how large a part, if any, should God play in an increasingly secular culture? To Jews, the question was rather: what part, if any, should secular knowledge play in the culture of God? They were still enfolded in the medieval vision of a total religious society. It is true that Maimonides had argued strongly in favour of admitting secular science and had demonstrated how completely it could be reconciled to the Torah. But his argument had failed to convince most Jews. Even a relatively moderate man like the Maharal of Prague had attacked Rossi precisely for bringing secular criteria to bear on religious matters.
¹⁰⁰
A few Jews, for instance, attended the medical school in Padua. But they turned their back on the world outside the Torah the moment they re-entered the ghetto in the evening, as indeed did Jewish men of business. Of course many went out into the world never to return; but that had always happened. What the awesome example of Spinoza had shown, to the satisfaction of most Jews, was that a man could not drink at the well of gentile knowledge without deadly risk of poisoning his Judaic life. So the ghetto remained not merely a social but an intellectual universe on its own.

By the mid-eighteenth century the results were pitifully apparent to all. As long ago as the Tortosa dispute, early in the fifteenth century, the Jewish intelligentsia had been made to seem backward and obscurantist. Now, more than 300 years later, the Jews appeared to educated Christians—or even uneducated ones—figures of contempt and derision, dressed in funny clothes, imprisoned in ancient and ludicrous superstitions, as remote and isolated from modern society as one of their lost tribes. The gentiles knew nothing, and cared less, about Jewish scholarship. Like the ancient Greeks before them, they were not even aware it existed. For Christian Europe there had always been a ‘Jewish problem’. In the Middle Ages it had been: how to prevent this subversive minority from contaminating religious truth and social order? No fear of that now. For gentile intellectuals, at least, the problem was now rather: how, in common humanity, to rescue this pathetic people from their ignorance and darkness.

In 1749 the young Protestant dramatist Gotthold Lessing put on a
one-act play,
Die Juden
, which for almost the first time in European literature presented a Jew as a refined, rational human being. It was a gesture of tolerance, warmly reciprocated by Lessing’s exact contemporary, a Dessau Jew called Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86). The two men met and became friends, and the brilliant playwright introduced the Jew into literary society. Mendelssohn suffered from curvature of the spine, which made him retiring, patient, modest. But he had formidable energy. He had been well educated by the local rabbi, trained as a bookkeeper and remained a merchant all his life. But his powers of reading were impressive and he acquired a great range of secular knowledge. With Lessing’s help he began to publish his philosophical writings. Frederick the Great gave him ‘right of residence’ in Berlin. His conversation was much admired and he became a figure in the salons.
¹⁰¹
He was ten years younger than the
gaon
, nearly thirty years younger than the Besht, but seemed divided from both by centuries. The fiery Talmud scholar; the mystic-enthusiast; the urbane rationalist—the whole of modern Jewry was to be written round these three archetypes!

Initially Mendelssohn laid no claim to a specific Jewish stake in the enlightenment; he simply wanted to enjoy it. But he was driven to publicize his Jewish convictions by the ignorance and disparagement of Judaism he encountered everywhere in the gentile world. The traditional gentile world said: keep the Jews under or expel them. The enlightened gentile world said: how can we best assist these poor Jews to stop being Jewish? Mendelssohn replied: let us share a common culture, but allow us Jews to remain Jewish. In 1767 he published
Phaedon
, an inquiry into the immortality of the soul modelled on the Platonic dialogue. At a time when cultured Germans still usually wrote in Latin or French, and Jews in Hebrew or Yiddish, Mendelssohn followed Lessing in striving to make German the language of intellectual discourse and to exploit its magnificent resources. He wrote it with great elegance and decked his text with classical, rather than Biblical, allusions—the mark of the
maskil
. The book was well received in the gentile world, but in a manner Mendelssohn found distressing. Even his own French translator condescendingly declared (1772) that it was a remarkable work considering it was written by one ‘born and raised in a nation which stagnates in vulgar ignorance’.
¹⁰²
A clever young Swiss pastor, Johan Caspar Lavater, praised its accomplishments and wrote that the author was obviously ready for conversion—he challenged Mendelssohn to defend his Judaism in public.

Thus Mendelssohn was driven, despite himself, into a rationalist
defence of Judaism; or, more precisely, into a demonstration of how Jews, while remaining attached to the essentials of their faith, could become part of a general European culture. His work took many forms. He translated the Pentateuch into German. He tried to foster the study of Hebrew among German Jews, as opposed to Yiddish, which he deplored as the dialect of vulgar immorality. As his prestige increased, he found himself fighting the battles of local Jewish communities against gentile authority. He opposed the expulsion of the Jews from Dresden and new anti-Semitic laws in Switzerland. He refuted in detail the common accusation that Jewish prayers were anti-Christian. For the benefit of secular authority, he explained the Jewish laws of matrimony and oaths. But while on the one hand he presented Judaism to the outside world in its best possible light, he sought on the other to encourage changes to rid it of its unacceptable face. He detested the institution of the
herem
, especially in the light of the witch-hunt against Shabbeteans which took place in Altona in the 1750s. He took the view that whereas the state was a compulsory society, based on social contract, all churches were voluntary, based on conviction. A man should not be compelled to belong to one, nor expelled from one against his will.
¹⁰³
He thought it best to end separate Jewish jurisdiction and opposed those gentile liberals who wanted the state to give backing to Jewish courts. He called for the end of all persecution and discrimination against Jews, and said he believed this would come as reason triumphed. But equally he thought that Jews must abandon those habits and practices which limited reasonable human freedom and particularly freedom of thought.

Mendelssohn was walking a tightrope. He was terrified of treading down Spinoza’s road and became upset if comparisons were made. He was scared of bringing down Christian wrath if, in his public controversies, his defence of Judaism involved unacceptable criticism of Christianity. In arguing with Lavater he pointed out that it was dangerous to dispute with the creed of the overwhelming majority, adding: ‘I am a member of an oppressed people.’ In fact he believed that Christianity was far more irrational than Judaism. At all times he was anxious to defend the bridge with the enlightenment while keeping in contact with the bulk of believing Jews. So he sometimes tried to be all things to all men. It is difficult to present a summary of his views without making them seem confused. He followed Maimonides in arguing that the truths of religion could be proved by reason. But whereas Maimonides wanted rational truth reinforced by Revelation, Mendelssohn wanted Revelation dispensed with. Judaism was not revealed religion but revealed law: it was a historical fact that Moses
received the Law at Sinai, and that Law was the means whereby the Jewish people achieved spiritual happiness. The truth did not need miracles to validate it. ‘A wise man’, he wrote, ‘whom the arguments of true philosophy have convinced of the existence of a supreme deity, is much more impressed by a natural event, whose connections with the whole he can partly discern, than by a miracle’ (notebook entry, 16 March 1753).
¹⁰⁴
However, to prove the existence of God Mendelssohn relied on the old metaphysics: the
a priori
or ontological proof and the
a posteriori
or cosmological. Both were demolished, in the general opinion, by Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason
(1781), published in Mendelssohn’s last decade.

As an apologist for Jewish religion, then, Mendelssohn was not very successful. The truth is, there was much of it in which he simply did not believe: the idea of the chosen people, the mission to humanity, the Promised Land. He seems to have thought that Judaism was an appropriate creed for a particular people, which should be privately practised in as rational a manner as possible. The idea that the whole of a culture could be contained in the Torah was to him absurd. The Jew should worship at home and then, when he went out into the world, participate in the general European culture. But the logic of this was that each Jew would belong to the culture of the people among whom he happened to live. So Jewry, which had kept its global unity for 1,500 years despite appalling ill-treatment, would gradually dissolve, except as a private, confessional faith. That was why the great modern apologist for Judaism, Yechezkel Kaufmann (1889-1963), called Mendelssohn ‘the Jewish Luther’—he cut the faith and the people apart.
¹⁰⁵

But Mendelssohn does not seem to have appreciated the logic of his rejection of Torah-culture. The idea that the Jews, absorbed into ‘the culture of the nations’, would gradually lose belief in a Jewish God too, would have distressed him. It is true he argued that Judaism and Christianity could come together, if the latter were stripped of its irrationalities. But he hated the idea of Jews converting to Christianity in order to emancipate themselves. He encouraged the Prussian official, Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, to publish his well-meaning but condescending plea for Jewish liberties,
On the Improvement of the Jews as Citizens
(1781), but found its tone unsatisfactory. In effect, Dohm was saying: the Jews are very objectionable people but not intrinsically bad; no worse, anyway, than Christian ill-treatment and their own superstitious religion have made them. The Jews had ‘an exaggerated tendency [to seek] gain in every way, a love of usury’. These ‘defects’ were aggravated ‘by their self-imposed segregation
owing to their religious precepts as well as rabbinical sophistry’. From these followed ‘the breaking of the laws of the state restricting trade, the import and export of prohibited wares, the forgery of money and precious metals’. Dohm advocated state reforms ‘by which they can be cured of this corruption so as to become better people and more useful citizens’.
¹⁰⁶
But the implication, of course, was that Jewish religion would have to undergo radical changes too.