History of the Jews (60 page)

It was a different matter for the Jews, especially in Germany and other ‘advanced’ countries. Enlightened Jews were ashamed of their
traditional services: the dead weight of the past, the lack of intellectual content, the noisy and unseemly manner in which Orthodox Jews prayed. In Protestant countries, for Christians to visit a synagogue was quite fashionable, and provoked contempt and pity. Hence Reform Judaism was, in the first place, an attempt to remove the taint of ridicule from Jewish forms of worship. The object was to induce a seemly religious state of mind. The watchwords were
Erbauung
(edification) and
Andacht
(devotion). Christian-style sermons were introduced. The reformer Joseph Wolf (1762-1826), teacher and community secretary at Dessau, and a devoted admirer of Mendelssohn, took the best German Protestant orators as his models. The Jews learned to preach in this style quickly, as they learned all novelties quickly. Soon, sermons at the Berlin Temple were so good that Protestant pastors, in turn, came to listen and learn. Hints were exchanged.
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Organ music, another powerful feature of German Protestantism, was introduced, and choral singing in the European mode.

Then, in 1819, the same year as the Society for Jewish Science was founded, the Hamburg Temple introduced a new prayer-book, and the aesthetic changes spread to more fundamental matters. If liturgical habits could be discarded because they were embarrassing, why not absurd and inconvenient doctrines? The mention of the Messiah was dropped; so was a return to the Holy Land. The idea was to purify and re-energize Judaism in the same spirit as Luther’s reformation.
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But there was an important difference, alas. Luther was not constantly looking over his shoulder at what other people were doing, and copying them. For better or for worse, he was animated by his own crude and powerful inner impulse: ‘I can do no other,’ as he put it. He was
sui generis
and his new form of Christianity, with its specific doctrines and its special liturgical modes, was a genuine and original creation. Reform Judaism was animated less by overwhelming conviction than by social tidy-mindedness and the desire to be more genteel. Its spirit was not religious but secular. It was well meaning but an artificial construct, like so many idealistic schemes of the nineteenth century, from Comte’s Positivism to Esperanto.

It might have been a different matter if the movement had produced one of the religious exotics of which eastern European hasidic Jewry was so prolific. But Reform waited in vain for a Luther. The best it could produce was Rabbi Abraham Geiger (1810-74), who effectively led the movement successively in Breslau, Frankfurt and Berlin.
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He was energetic, pious, learned and sensible. Too sensible perhaps. He lacked the self-regarding audacity and willingness to destroy which
the religious revolutionary needs. In a private letter he wrote in 1836, he spoke of the need to abolish all the institutions of Judaism and rebuild them on a new basic. But this was not what he felt able to do in practice. He opposed prayers in Hebrew, but would not eliminate it from the services. He thought circumcision ‘a barbaric act of bloodletting’, but opposed its abolition. He sanctioned some breaches of the Sabbath prohibitions, but he would not scrap the Sabbath principle entirely and adopt the Christian Sunday. He omitted passages on the Return to Zion and other references to what he regarded as outdated historical conditions, but he could not bring himself to surrender the principle of the Mosaic law. He tried to extract from the vast, accumulated mass of Judaic belief what he called the religious-universal element. That in his view involved dropping the automatic assumption of solidarity with Jews everywhere—he thus refused to take an active role in the protest over the Damascus atrocities. But as he grew older, like so many well-educated Jews before and since, he began to feel the pull of traditional Judaism more and more, so that his enthusiasm for change abated.

The Reformers might have had more impact if they had been able to erect a clearly defined platform of belief and practice, and stick to it. But Geiger was not the only one who failed to find a final resting-point of faith. The leading reformers differed among themselves. Rabbi Samuel Holdheim (1806-60), who came from Poznan, but ended up as head of a new Reform congregation in Berlin, started as a moderate reformer—he merely wished to end cantillated reading of the Torah. Gradually he became an extremist. Geiger believed in ‘progressive revelation’, whereby the practice of Judaism had to be changed periodically as God’s will was made manifest. Holdheim wanted to abolish Temple and ceremonial Judaism altogether, immediately. Most of the Talmud had to go too: ‘In the talmudic age, the Talmud was right. In my age, I am right.’ He saw traditional Judaism as an obstacle to Jews becoming part of a universal brotherhood of man, which to him represented the messianic era. So he argued that the uncircumcised could still be Jews. He thought a man’s professional duties came before strict observance of the Sabbath. Indeed, in Berlin he not only radically transformed the services but eventually held them on a Sunday. When he died there was even a row about whether he could be buried in the rabbis’ part of the cemetery.

Holdheim’s version of reform was not the only alternative to Geiger’s. In Frankfurt, an anti-circumcision group appeared. In London a Reform movement accepted the Bible, as God’s work, and rejected the Talmud, as man’s. As Reform spread abroad, it appeared
in more and more guises. Some groups retained links with Orthodox Jews. Others broke off completely. Rabbinical conferences were held, to no great purpose. New prayer-books were issued, and provoked fresh controversies. In one version or another Reform Judaism clearly provided a satisfactory expression of the religious spirit for many thousands of educated Jews. In England, for instance, both a rather traditional-minded Reform Judaism, and eventually a more radical sub-group, Liberal Judaism, became firmly established. In America, as we shall see, the Reform, in both its conservative and liberal versions, became an important element in what was to become the third leg of the Jewish world tripod.

But what Reform did not do, any more than the ‘Science of Judaism’, was to solve the Jewish problem. It did not normalize the Jews because it never spoke for more than a minority. It was, in essence, an alternative to baptism and complete assimilation, among Jews whose faith, or at any rate whose piety, was strong enough to keep them attached to their religion in some form, but not strong enough to defy the world. By the end of the 1840s, it was obvious that it was not going to take over Judaism, even in enlightened Germany. By the end of the century, it had acquired enough institutional supports to keep going, at any rate in some countries, but its creative force was spent. The traditionalist writer John Lehmann noted in 1905: ‘Today, when complete apathy has overtaken the neologue circles, it is hardly possible to imagine that there were once people who regarded it as their life’s task, and who were determined with their whole heart and their whole soul to reform Judaism, and who each considered himself as a miniature Luther, Zwingli or Calvin.’
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One reason why Jews who wished to participate fully in the modern world without losing their Judaism failed to achieve a workable formula was that they could not agree on a language in which to express it. There were, at this stage, three possible alternatives. One was the ancient hieratic language of Judaism, Hebrew. A second was the language of their own country, whatever it might be. The third was the demotic language which most Jews actually spoke, Yiddish. Or possibly there might be a combination of all three. The men of the Jewish enlightenment wanted to resurrect Hebrew. Indeed, the very word Haskalah, with which they chose to identify themselves, was the Hebrew word for understanding or reason: they used it to signify their commitment to reason, as opposed to revelation, as the source of truth. They produced educational works in Hebrew. They ran a Hebrew publication. But there were a number of reasons why their project lacked dynamism. Few of them wrote much Hebrew them
selves—Mendelssohn, their leader, very little. They chose Hebrew not because they wanted to express themselves in it: for that, they much preferred German. Nor did they venerate it for religious reasons. They saw it, rather, as being intellectually respectable, the Jewish equivalent of the Latin and Greek which was the ancient cultural heritage of Christian Europe. The age saw the dawn of modern philological studies. Everywhere in Europe, experts were compiling grammars, putting local tongues into written form and endowing them with rules and syntax—Finnish, Hungarian, Rumanian, Irish, Basque, Catalan were being promoted from local patois to the status of a ‘modern language’. The
maskils
wanted to subject Hebrew to this process. Logically, of course, they should have picked Yiddish, a tongue which Jews actually spoke. But the
maskils
regarded it with abhorrence. They dismissed it as nothing more than a corrupt form of German. It stood for everything they most deplored about the ghetto and unregenerated Judaism: poverty, ignorance, superstition, vice. The only people who studied Yiddish scientifically, they argued, were the police, who needed to know thieves’ slang.

So the
maskils
revived Hebrew. But they did not know what to write in it. Their biggest project was a hybrid presentation of the Bible, using German words in Hebrew characters. This was quite a success. Many thousands of Jews, particularly of the older generation, who had had no access to secular schools, used it to acquire literary German. But this led to less Hebrew, not more. Once Jews read German, and acquired secular culture, their interest in Hebrew declined, or vanished; many even lost their Judaism. Even those who retained their faith found less use for Hebrew as services and prayer-books began to use the vernacular.

There was, indeed, a living if tenuous Hebrew tradition in literature. But the
maskils
found that distasteful too, for ideological reasons. Great medieval scholars like Maimonides had written in Arabic. But the practice of writing in Hebrew also survived in Moslem Spain, and thence it re-emerged in Renaissance Italy. Some Italian Jews continued to write beautiful Hebrew throughout the seventeenth century. Then the tradition acquired a genius: Moses Hayyim Luzzatto (1707-46). This remarkable man came from one of the oldest and most distinguished families of Italian Jewry in Padua. He was a prodigy and had the best teachers, as well as access to the great university. He learned secular science, the classics, modern Italian, in addition to the entire range of Judaic studies. Luzzatto had the unusual capacity of being able to write abstruse material in high academic style, and also to propound complex matters in simple fashion to a popular audience.
He could also express himself in various languages, ancient and modern. One of his works is in Aramaic, the language in which the
Zohar
was originally written. But his customary mode of address was Hebrew. He turned out a great deal of Hebrew poetry, some religious, which has not survived, some secular, in honour of his friends. He produced three Hebrew verse dramas. Above all, he wrote an ethical work,
Mesillat Yesharim
, or
The Path of the Upright
, which in the late eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century was the most influential of all Hebrew books, and the most widely read, in the Jewries of eastern Europe.
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Was not he the ideal progenitor of a Hebrew revival? Not for enlightened German Jews. On the contrary: he symbolized what they wished to repudiate and eliminate.

For Luzzatto was a kabbalist and a mystic. Worse: he may well have been a secret Shabbatean, or something very like it. He had acquired, as he admitted himself, a taste for the fatally insinuating writings of Nathan of Gaza, with their ability to explain anything once you had made the first irrational leap. In Padua, he seems to have drawn around him a group of clever young men who dabbled in dangerous thoughts. The Venetian rabbis had his house searched and found evidence of magic. To escape controversy, he went to Amsterdam. There, too, he was forbidden to practise kabbalah. So he finally went to the Holy Land, where the plague got him in Acre.
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Being named Moses, married to a girl called Zipporah, he seems to have reached the conclusion that he was the reincarnation of Moses and his wife. Many Jews in the East agreed; or at least treated him as a saint. No enlightened German Jew could accept that sort of thing. And, even if his personal claims were brushed aside, the contents of his ethics were also unacceptable to
maskils
. In his
Path of the Upright
and a further work,
Da’ath Tevunot
or
Discerning Knowledge
, he produced a brilliant recapitulation of the history of God’s purpose in the world and the role of the Jews, the covenant and the diaspora. He showed exactly why the Jews were in the world today, and what they had to do to justify themselves. His summary of the purpose of life was uncompromising:

 

The essence of the existence of a human being in this world is that he should fulfil commandments, perform worship and resist temptation. It is unfitting that worldly happiness should mean anything more to him than a mere aid or support in the sense that satisfaction and peace of mind allow him to devote his heart to this service that is incumbent upon him; and it is fitting that the whole of his attention should be devoted only to the Creator—blessed be He—and that he should have no other purpose in any of his actions, whether small or great, except to draw near to Him—blessed be He—and to break down all the partitions separating him from his Owner.
⁶¹

 

Here was a man, writing in Hebrew, propounding a coherent, if rigorous, philosophy which inspired millions of Jews and continues to be a living tradition in Judaism even today. But it was anathema to the enlightened. Far from using Hebrew to beckon the ex-ghetto Jews into the modern world, and bid them take a decent and honourable place there, it did exactly the opposite. It told the Jew to about-face, and turn his gaze to God—as pious Jews had always done. So the living Hebrew tradition, such as it was, could not be fitted into the master-plan of the enlightenment. Their scheme to run Hebrew in tandem with German thus made no progress. Jews simply learned German, and assimilated themselves. The
maskils
were not to foresee that Hebrew would indeed make a formidable re-entry into Jewish life—but as the instrument of Zionism, a form of Judaism which was as abhorrent to them as mystic messianism.