The Jewish Enlightenment

Chapter Thirteen Crisis at the Turn of the Century

Chapter Thirteen Crisis at the Turn of the Century For the young Haskalah movement, the century came to a close in a series of strident, worrisome chords, attended by a profound sense of crisis. The maskilim’s optimistic belief that the Jewish public sphere could be reshaped by modern intellectuals was replaced by their anxiety in the face of the secularization gaining in momentum among the Jewish bourgeoisie in urban communities—a process neither intended by the maskilim nor controlled by them. The disappointing and futile struggle to change the legal status of Prussian Jewry was accompanied by voices expressing deep alienation from tradition and the Jewish community and calling on the elite to withdraw completely from the backward Jewish society. The internal quarrels among the modern intelligentsia between moderates and radicals and between reformists and assimilationists impeded the momentum of the maskilic republic at the very time when the orthodox protest was growing stronger. Frustrated maskilim, making no attempt to hide their disappointment, left the movement . Maskilim from the periphery who knocked at the gates of the Haskalah in Berlin and Königsberg got no response. The final closure of Hame’asef and the disbanding of the Society for the Promotion of Goodness and Justice in , marked, more than anything else, the collapse of the movement and in one stroke led to the downfall of the organized literary republic constructed in the s. It would be true to say that the end of the eighteenth century brought with it the end of the first chapter in the history of the Jewish Enlightenment movement. Voices of Despair and Protest Four episodes that occurred at the turn of the century vividly symbolize the crisis affecting the Haskalah: the resignation of one of the maskilic teachers in the Freischule; an abortive attempt to revive Hame’asef; a voice of protest against David Friedländer’s betrayal of the Haskalah, and the disgraceful burial of Solomon Maimon. In  Naumann Simonsohn, a senior member of the administrative  Chapter  staff of the Freischule, decided to move from Berlin to Lissa as a declaration of his disillusionment and protest.1 According to the maskilic worldview, this move from Berlin, the city of Enlightenment, to traditional Poland was in a direction opposite to the one in which history was moving. Naumann Simonsohn , who became a maskil in his twenties, had fully espoused the ethos of the Haskalah, revered Mendelssohn, belonged to a group of Berlin maskilim, regarded Joseph II as the historical hero of tolerance, and served as an Inspektor in the Freischule. And now, he decided to slam the door behind him and move to, of all places, the Polish community of Lissa (then under Prussian rule), the city from which Rabbi David Tevele had issued his unforgettable, sharp orthodox protest against the new maskilic elite in . ‘‘All is lost!’’ the frustrated maskil cried out in anguish: a son rises against his father, a pupil rules over his teacher, and every hedonistic, fashionable, freedom-seeking youth nurtures some third-rate sort of ‘‘wild Haskalah’’ which goes completely out of control: A young man who has scarcely read any books calls out ‘‘I am a hero!’’ and all those who have a watch in their pocket and spectacles in their hands, a braid behind them and a fool in front, think themselves wise and intelligent, and carry their heads high . . . they violate all the commandments, desecrate the Sabbath, eat unclean bread and do not call upon God, they anoint their flesh with wine, eat rich food without saying the blessing, go to bed and rise in the morning without prayers . . . and all of this they call a generation of knowledge, a wise and clever people.2 Naumann Simonsohn was one of the few idealistic teachers in the Freischule in the s. He tried hard to implement a balanced curriculum, which combined Torat haShem and Torat ha’adam according to Wessely’s formulation . When he urged one of the wealthy elite in the Berlin community, which supported the modern school for indigent boys, to introduce lessons in Mishnah and Talmud into the school, he encountered opposition: ‘‘What is the purpose of such studies and what good will it bring to Jewry to confuse their minds with such nonsense, to waste their time by neglecting the study of science and beneficial knowledge for the sake of learning casuistry and irrelevant issues from the halakhic disputes between Abbayeh and Raba?’’3 Simonsohn tried to argue by explaining that even the...