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Chapter Seven On Religious Power and Judaism Neither side won a decisive victory in the s 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 maskilim’s revolutionary challenge. Saul Berlin’s Ktav Yosher The controversy and the competition for favorable public opinion was conducted by circulating letters, copies of sermons, and printed pamphlets. A rabbi secretly wrote his reaction to the Wessely affair in a trenchant critique, the first maskilic satire. This covert piece of writing, published only after the author’s death, was written by Rabbi Saul Levin-Berlin (–), rabbi of the Frankfurt-on-Oder community, and the son of the rabbi of Berlin, Zevi Hirsch Levin. A scholar in his own right, Berlin’s education, family ties, and position made him a full-fledged member of the rabbinical elite, but secretly he was a maskil. Until nearly the end of his life, he found it hard to change his lifestyle; he never publicly revealed his true leanings nor did he identify himself as a maskil. In his writings, he always hid behind a pseudonym and disguised his true opinions, presenting them as pious views in works that appeared to be totally scholarly in nature. He apparently also allowed his father to believe he was leading only the life of a rabbi and talmudic scholar.1 Unlike his father, who in  was in the eye of the storm, the target of pressures that led him to take the side of his fellow members of the rabbinical elite, the rabbi of Frankfurt identified with Wessely, and devoted his finest talents as a scholar and radical, enlightened anti-clerical critic to Wessely’s cause. The satire Ktav Yosher (A Certificate of Integrity) was written around   Chapter  but remained in manuscript form. It was probably read by many, but not everyone knew that the man behind the pen name ‘‘Avdun ben Hillel Hayiduni ’’ was Rabbi Saul Berlin. David Friedländer did identify Berlin as the author and wrote his name on his copy of the satire, noting that it was written at the time Wessely was being persecuted. Ktav Yosher was printed in Berlin a short time after the author’s death in London, in , when the Berlin maskilim were still active.2 In Ktav Yosher, Berlin assailed the religious and social institutions, in order to unmask them and to condemn all ignorance, wrongdoing, hypocrisy, malice, and corruption. This secret maskil and deist, who served as a community rabbi and was regarded as the finest representative of the social and religious ideal, used the Wessely affair as the linchpin for his sweeping criticism of the world of the elite into which he was born. Ktav Yosher adopted an ironic, radical tone to scorn and denigrate the social stratum which in traditional society, wielded control over religious writings, religious faith and rulings, and education. The author introduced himself to his readers as ‘‘a member of the elite, one of the great men of the generation, a luminary in Torah and wisdom, also knowledgeable in the Kabbalah.’’ Since he knew and liked Wessely, he was particularly vexed by the war being waged against him and tried in Ktav Yosher to clarify why there was so much opposition to Divrei shalom ve’emet. In it, an ignorant teacher from Poland and one of the great rabbis of the rabbinical elite explain to him what Wessely’s offense was, and then he finds a way to persuade them that Wessely’s pamphlet, surprisingly enough, is really a sacred book, which contains nothing less than Kabbalistic secrets. Ktav Yosher takes the doctrine of Kabbalah to absurd lengths, depicting it in a derisive light, debasing it, and totally depleting it of its sacred nature.3 To perceive the irony and the satirical criticism of Ktav Yosher, the reader had to be a scholar; otherwise, he would fail to comprehend the many associations and allusions sprinkled throughout the text, in particular those from the Talmud and the halakhic literature. To such a sophisticated, scholarly reader...

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