Antonio's Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (review)

Hebrew Studies 48 (2007) 406 Reviews ciation of how that text emerged from a cacophony of voices within JudeoArabic culture. One final comment: in the preface, Bernstein notes that a critical edition of the Judeo-Arabic text of “The Story of Our Master Joseph the Righteous” is in the works. Despite the toil involved in such a venture, this would make an excellent companion volume to the translation published here and would be a further contribution to Judeo-Arabic studies. Phillip I. Lieberman Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08540 phlieber@princeton.edu ANTONIO’S DEVILS: WRITERS OF THE JEWISH ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE BIRTH OF MODERN HEBREW AND YIDDISH LITERATURE. By Jeremy Dauber. Pp. xiii + 354. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University, 2004. Cloth, $60.00. ANTONIO I pray you, think you question with the Jew: You may as well go stand upon the beach And bid the main flood bate his usual height; You may as well use question with the wolf Why he hath made the ewe bleat for the lamb (William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice [act 4, scene 1]) From the words of that scoundrel you can see the author must be a Jew. So even more it’s up to us to find out who he is so as to pluck him up by the root. For G-d’s sake, urge all our Faithful to do all what they can, and me and our Faithful around here will also do all what we can, of course—we here—and you—there. (Joseph Perl, Megalle Temirin [The revealer of secrets: The first Hebrew novel; trans. Dov Taylor; Boulder: Westview Press, 1997], p. 53.) “Rabbi Nachman,” Jeremy Dauber reminds us, “who viewed storytelling as a holy act through which man could help achieve the reunification of the Godhead, believed a spark of holiness to exist in every story, Jewish and non-Jewish alike.” (p. 231) There is a certain healthy irony in Dauber’s choice to follow the example of the Hasidic leader in opening his own work, which happens to be on the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), with a Hebrew Studies 48 (2007) 407 Reviews lengthy retelling and analysis of scenes from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. One can almost hear George Bernard Shaw murmur, “So much for Bardolatry.” While we learn that in late eighteenth century Prussia, The Merchant of Venice was indeed extremely popular (p. 26), Dauber employs The Merchant of Venice not as textual influence, but as a social allegory: in Shylock, the Bard created a lasting prototype for an enigmatic, overly literate Jew, caught between the Christian world of Antonio and the Jewish world of his education, his national pride, and his family. The leading figures in the Haskalah fought the similarly diametrically opposed social tendencies toward Christian Judaophobia and insular Jewish extremism. In order to illustrate the tenuous position of the maskil (Jewish Enlightener ), Dauber focuses on three protagonists of the Haskalah: Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), credited with founding the Jewish Enlightenment in Prussia, Aaron Halle-Wolfssohn (1754–1835), who applied Mendelssohn’s enlightenment philosophy to critique what he viewed to be extreme religious practices of the Ostjuden, and Joseph Perl (1773–1831) of Galicia, who polemicized against Hasidic movements in Hebrew, Yiddish, and German. All three writers, while committed to upholding religious and cultural Judaism, were deeply engaged in the relationship between the Jewish community and its non-Jewish neighbors. Significantly, all three of these figures, whose primary thrust was for social enlightenment, developed distinct literary styles. Dauber treats each of the three writers within his individual sphere of influence. Moses Mendelssohn, arguably the best known of the three writers in Dauber’s study, has been hailed for his efforts to smoothly integrate a Jewish subculture into a predominantly Christian society, and scorned as an early compromiser of Jewish practice. (It is, after all, well known that by the time his grandson Felix was composing, the Mendelssohns were as thoroughly integrated into German society as a Jewish family could be.) Jeremy Dauber calls these popular misgivings into question, asserting that Mendelssohn’s position was that of the “exceptional Jew” (p. 112). Moses Mendelssohn, who dedicated his work alternately to Jews and non-Jews...