"Folded White Napkins": The Etiquette Discourse in Haskalah Literature

This article discusses the linkage between the discourse of manners in Jewish Enlightenment literature and modern literary thinking. Through a corpus of maskilic ethical writings (safrut musar) disseminated at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, it examines the different cultural models of behavior the modern Jew was supposed to adopt in order to be regarded as civilized or cultured. Among these behavioral models, reading emerges not only as a channel through which a cultural repertoire is learned, but also as a refined behavior in itself, which embodies and reproduces the European social order and draws a connection between the concepts of civility, civilization, and civil rights.