The Jewish Enlightenment

Chapter Twelve Growth and Radicalization

Chapter Twelve Growth and Radicalization On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year  (), 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 the Enlightenment project, but was a thriving business in its own right, which also published religious literature against payment.2 The Haskalah Library Expands From the time the Freischule printing house was founded in  until , eighty-four titles came off its press, an average of twelve per year. The peak years of the printing house’s output throughout its existence (until ) were  (seventeen titles) and  (nineteen titles). Some of these were no more than pamphlets, several pages each, like the congratulatory poems printed to mark the marriages of some of the more outstanding members of the Society for the Promotion of Goodness and Justice,3 as well as a calendar printed under a special license from the Prussian Academy of Sciences.4 From  to , however, the printing house enriched the Haskalah library with several books that became the basic books of the movement. The society kept its promise to its members and during those years doubled the size and circulation of Hame’asef. The journal came off the presses in Berlin regularly, one issue each month, along with various supplements, including one in German.5 Each of the volumes for – contained about  pages, so that more than , pages were printed of the journal, which was the flagship of the Society for the Promotion of Goodness and Justice. The basic maskilic books printed during those years included Shirei tiferet , the biblical epos of Moses and the exodus from Egypt, written by Wessely,  Chapter  which was still a best-seller in Hebrew poetry in the nineteenth century; Agadat arba’a kosot, by the philosopher and scholar Shlomo Pappenheim of Breslau (–), written after the death of his wife and three sons, as a justification of human fate, which was printed in ten additional editions and was regarded as a literary masterpiece; and Isaac Satanow’s brilliant literary work, Mishlei asaf, a collection of proverbs and parables, written in the style of biblical wisdom literature and aimed at ‘‘instructing man in the paths of knowledge and morality.’’6 For students, Aaron Wolfssohn, a private tutor in the home of one of the Friedländers and a key figure of the Haskalah in the s, printed the reader, Avtalyon, and in  Baruch Lindau printed the science textbook Reshit limudim, which became the most famous, up-to-date book on the Hebrew bookshelf at the end of the eighteenth century.7 Instead of rabbinical approbations, this popular introduction to science was prefaced by letters of praise and recommendation from the two leading Jewish physicians and scientists in Berlin, Marcus Bloch and Marcus Herz, and not surprisingly , a congratulatory poem penned by Wessely was also appended to the book. Nearly an entire issue of Hame’asef was dedicated in  to Euchel’s initiative in printing Givat hamoreh—Solomon Maimon’s commentary on Guide for the Perplexed, which was commissioned by the Society for the Promotion of Goodness and Justice. To raise funds for the book’s publication, a network of no fewer than twenty agents was set up in the territory between Vilna and London.8 In the meantime, in , Euchel printed his biography of Mendelssohn, first in installments in Hame’asef and then as a book. This work also became one of the maskilic classics of the s, enabling readers who were not fluent in German to read for the first time selected excerpts, in Hebrew, from Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem.9 Joel Brill and Aaron Wolfssohn were the editors of a large collective project that they viewed as the fulfillment of Mendelssohn’s last testament and the continuation of the Bi’ur project: the publication of German translations, in Hebrew letters, and a commentary on the scriptures that were not included in the Bi’ur. No fewer than fifteen maskilim, among them the heads of the society , participated in writing and printing the translation of and commentary on Haftarot mikol hashanah (sections...