The Jewish Enlightenment

Chapter Eight The Society of Friends of the Hebrew Language

Chapter Eight The Society of Friends of the Hebrew Language The year  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 themselves to him as a circle of ambitious intellectuals, including scholars proficient in the religious sources and students knowledgeable in the sciences, and in Greek and Latin literature. They regarded Wessely as no less than an admired prophet, who had engendered an enormous cultural transformation, and flattered him by writing : ‘‘From the moment your pamphlets were circulated throughout the land, you have ignited the hearts of maskilim with the fire of your song . . . for like a seer you have spoken.’’1 In addition to the support he had received from his friends in the Berlin community and his admirers in the Italian communities, Wessely could now take much encouragement from the letter sent him by these young maskilim. He regarded it as an expression of trust in him as well as in the views he had publicly stated during the culture war waged against him. However, the letter from Königsberg also marked one of the most decisive moments in the history of the Haskalah movement. In early , Wessely, at his own initiative, had come out with a detailed and exciting program for an innovative new order, and in doing so had challenged the traditional elite. When this had distressing consequences for him, Jews from Berlin’s intellectual and economic elite rallied to his defense, stridently protesting against the violation of his freedom of expression and the insult to their community’s honor. At the end of that year, the first cohesive group of intellectuals was organized. This group aspired to be at the forefront of an all-inclusive cultural transformation and to found the Haskalah’s literary republic.  Chapter  Establishing a New Public Sphere The new sociocultural history tends to look for the significance of the Enlightenment in a far broader area than the world of ideas of the philosophers—the consummate bearers of intellectual history.2 The new historiography has shifted the emphasis from a description of the individual phenomenon to a study of the social structures, and has added new subjects to historical research, such as ‘‘public opinion,’’ the ‘‘reading culture,’’ and the ‘‘public sphere.’’ As a result, a series of new questions has arisen as well: Who were the bearers of the Enlightenment’s ideas? In which social and institutional settings was the life of the Enlightenment conducted? How were its ideas disseminated? What was the influence of printing and of printed books on the changing social reality? And what impression did these ideas leave on various social groups? It seems that the main focus of investigation has been to find along what lines the writers community was organized and how it functioned. The German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas was the main source of inspiration for this direction in Enlightenment research. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, first published in , he noted the emergence of a literary republic in eighteenth-century Europe, which he regarded as a bourgeois phenomenon of enormous cultural and political import. Private educated persons, possessed of critical-rationalistic thought and nourished by the flourishing world of books, became the producers and consumers of culture , and established in various European cities a network of institutions (reading clubs, salons, Freemason lodges, cafes) and means of communication (letters and periodicals). In addition to the local groups of intellectuals, a kind of independent, cosmopolitan, all-European republic of talented writers emerged, which operated in a virtual space without any personal contact between its members. This was an exceptional development, one subversive in nature, in particular in absolutist states like France and Germany. The members of the literary republic also engaged in public criticism, thus becoming the shapers of cultural taste and the spokesmen of ‘‘public opinion,’’ so much so that they could no longer be ignored.3 The new writers of the Enlightenment viewed themselves as authoritative judges. The revolutionary consciousness...