In the winter of 1702, a young Jewish student walked through the corridors of the faculty of medicine at the University of Frankfurt-on-Oder, his heart consumed by a sense of despair and frustration. Shmuel Shimon Ben-Yaacov, a native of Raudenai in Lithuania, had come to the Prussian University from Opatow, Poland, where he lived, to fulfill his dream of studying medicine. Like other Jewish students at German universities, from the end of the seventeenth century, Shmuel had received a well-grounded religious education (before coming to Prussia, he studied for two years in Rabbi Meir Frankel’s beit midrash [house of study]...

Intense curiosity and a strong drive to acquire knowledge not easily accessible within the culture of the traditional Jewish society were the hallmarks of the early maskilim. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it is hard to appreciate how much audacity these men needed to venture into the realms of the forbidden extra-Jewish and extra-religious knowledge. To satisfy their passion for knowledge, they had not only to cross barriers of language and social norms, but also to cope with the fear of undermining their religious faith. When a young Jew took a step like this it often had...

In their books, quite a few early maskilim also undertook to fill the traditional role of moralists for the society at large, a role that until then had been the exclusive province of magidim (preachers) and rabbis. Such a new sociocultural function was filled, for example, by the journal Kohelet musar, which consciously presented itself to its readers as the modern alternative to the traditional preachers, who frequently put the fear of God into their listeners.

This initial attempt by Mendelssohn and his friend Tobias Bock in the 1750s in Berlin, was important for several reasons. First, its editors preached...

On Shabbat HaGadol, the special Sabbath before the Passover festival, David Tevele, rabbi of the Lissa community in Western Poland, rose to the pulpit of the great synagogue to deliver a scathing sermon. “I deplore the act of this man, a hypocrite and evildoer, a boor, the worst kind of layman, by the name of Herz Wessely from Berlin.” The rabbi, in thunderous tones, voiced his swift public reaction to the slim pamphlet Divrei shalom ve’emet, published in Berlin in the winter of 1782. “Proud and haughty is this enemy of the Jews who is a threat to our very...

Wessely was hardly a reliable witness of the reality that existed during his lifetime. On the one hand, his optimism was exaggerated and he depicted the kings of Prussia in ideal terms, attributing to them more tolerance than they actually demonstrated. On the other hand, he provided only a partial description of the Jewish world in the early 1780s, omitting several of the key processes that took place in the life of European Jews in the last third of the century. The Jewish population increased more than two and a half times from the beginning of the century, and the...

Despite the rumors from Altona-Hamburg about the affair involving Netanel Posner and Rabbi Raphael Kohen, the atmosphere in the small circle of maskilim in Berlin in the winter of 1782 was one of elation.¹ Within the brief period of several months, there were many encouraging signs that could arouse the optimism of anyone who believed in the Enlightenment and its practical implications for the fate of the Jews. One after another, Dohm’s On the Civil Improvement of the Jews and Joseph II’s Edict of Toleration were published. The Freischule had been established and was earning the esteem of German intellectuals....

Neither side won a decisive victory in the 1780s campaign of the culture war. Nonetheless, the aftereffects of the Wessely affair continued to be felt for at least three more years. Wessely carried on defending his positions in two more epistles of the Divrei shalom ve’emet series; Mendelssohn had the affair in mind when he wrote Jerusalem, his most significant work; and for other maskilim it was an important, formative episode that sharpened their identity as intellectuals striving with the conservative forces. The question of the hour was whether the rabbinical elite would succeed in maintaining its status despite the...

The year 1782 was a particularly difficult year for Wessely, from the moment he touched off a fierce debate in Jewish public opinion with his Divrei shalom ve’emet. At the end of that year, he received a surprising letter from Königsberg in Eastern Prussia. The writers of the letter, “A society of friends—maskilim and seekers of truth,” signed it with the name “Chevrat Dorshei Leshon Ever” (Society of Friends of the Hebrew Language), and asked Wessely for his patronage and a few articles for the monthly that their maskilic circle planned to publish in the near future. They introduced...

By constructing Moses Mendelssohn’s image as a great teacher, a trailblazer, and the embodiment of the Haskalah, historical memory and research have made it difficult to fully depict the nature and scope of the maskilic republic. Mendelssohn’s personality eclipses the “Berlin Haskalah” chapter in the sociocultural historiography of German Jews in the second half of the eighteenth century, and appropriates to itself the entire story of the Haskalah. In the predominantly accepted version, the major action of the Haskalah took place in the lively salon held in Mendelssohn’s home, at 68 Spandau in Berlin, bustling with many, Jews and non-Jews...

Moses Mendelssohn was the most famous Jew in the German Enlightenment republic, admired by Jews and non-Jews alike. Isaac Euchel eulogized him and wrote his widely circulated biography, which nurtured the Mendelssohn cult and Mendelssohn’s image as the father of the maskilim. It also largely determined Mendelssohn’s place for generations in the collective memory of the liberal Jewish camp. But Euchel was not a naive admirer. As an ideologue of the Haskalah, who believed it was the critical maskil mission to seek out the ills of Jewish society and remedy them on the basis of reason and humanistic values, he...

In the last issue of the third volume that came out in the fall of 1786, the readers of Hame’asef were informed of changes about to take place in the journal as it began its fourth year of operation. In a notice “to their brethren, the maskilim,” Chevrat Dorshei Leshon Ever announced its intent to exploit the journal’s success, to double its membership, to foster new maskilic initiatives, and to add another name—“The Society for the Promotion of Goodness and Justice” (Chevrat Shocharei Hatov Vehatushiyah)—to the society’s original name. By enrolling new members who showed an interest in...

On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year 5548 (1787), the workers of the Freischule printing house published a special poetic salutation to their employer, the provider of their livelihood, “The famous, exalted officer and minister, Daniel Itzig.” This was not merely a gesture of flattery to the Jewish millionaire, but rather a sincere expression of gratitude by the workers, most of whom were of Polish origin and whose employment in the printing house provided them with a license to reside in Berlin.¹ This printing house, then at the peak of its success, operated under the aegis of...

For the young Haskalah movement, the century came to a close in a series of strident, worrisome chords, attended by a profound sense of crisis. The maskilim’s optimistic belief that the Jewish public sphere could be reshaped by modern intellectuals was replaced by their anxiety in the face of the secularization gaining in momentum among the Jewish bourgeoisie in urban communities—a process neither intended by the maskilim nor controlled by them. The disappointing and futile struggle to change the legal status of Prussian Jewry was accompanied by voices expressing deep alienation from tradition and the Jewish community and calling...

The death sentence that David Friedländer pronounced on the Haskalah exemplified the sense of crisis that reached its height in the last two years of the eighteenth century and was manifested in the movement’s almost total waning. Until then the Haskalah had continued to develop, despite the relative decline of the 1790s, and Friedländer himself had been one of its chief patrons. Along with the political campaign waged by the German-Jewish intelligentsia in the general public arena to achieve civil rights, efforts to stabilize the Haskalah republic continued. The hunger for enlightenment and the passion for knowledge, which in the...

The picture of Jewish society and culture in the 1790s is a very complex one, as we have learned from the previous chapters. Only a few years after the maskilim first made their appearance in the public arena, they found themselves embroiled in a series of conflicts, from within and from without. The accelerated pace of secularization, so evident in the city streets, led the orthodox to harden their opposition to the Haskalah. The Haskalah’s prominent spokesmen, headed by Wolfssohn and Friedländer, no longer hesitated to launch even more formidable anticlerical assaults on the rabbinical elite. Moderate maskilim, who were...