Byron and the Jews

Chapter 2. Byron and the Maskilim

54 C h a p t e r 2 Byron and the Maskilim Given the close relationship between intellectual advances and religious reform , presentations of Byron have provided a touchstone for measuring attitudes toward the Haskalah in the East, where development was impeded by both internal and external pressures.1 Unlike the more progressive West, where, in the nineteenth century, Jews were being more easily integrated into the general population, central and eastern European Jewish communities were defined by the pale of settlement, those areas where, since 1794, the migrating Jewish communities had been confined variously by the Russian, Polish, and Austrian governments. Not only were they isolated from the larger community, but Jews in the pale were also subjected to more stringent control by rabbinic authorities who, having been empowered by the government to maintain order in their communities, resisted Enlightenment for a number of reasons. Most obviously, they believed that a secular education would dislodge Jewish learning from its place of prominence in the Jewish culture. Beyond that, they were concerned that a vocational education might tempt the young away from the Jewish community entirely. Even more serious to some was the possibility that religious reform would diminish the control they had over the communities at large. Finally, the metaphorical transformation of Zionism from the spiritual belief in a return to Jerusalem into the symbolic application of Zionist ideals in the Diaspora threatened to replace communal loyalty with individual action. Countering the rabbis’ opposition to secular education, the Russian government, starting in the 1840s, initiated a program of assimilation , the ultimate goal being conversion. Crucial to these plans were government-sponsored Jewish schools, staffed by Jewish teachers who were 55 Byron and the Maskilim hired to provide children with a secular education. Although at first the teachers—characteristically young and enthusiastic maskilim—thought that the schools would support the Mendelssohnian goal of acculturating Jews while permitting them to retain their religion, eventually the hidden agenda became evident. Some of the maskilim converted, only to find that they would never be fully welcomed in the Christian community; others, realizing that they had been duped by the government, returned to a Jewish community that frequently forced them to recant their enlightened views and even burn their “heretical” books.2 All of these positions hinged on attitudes toward Hebrew. On one extreme were those who believed that the language should be reserved for religious purposes; on the other were those who thought that a vernacular education would facilitate assimilation. In the middle, however, many maskilim believed that Hebrew should be the everyday language of the Jews. Their problem, besides ideology, was linguistics. Some skeptics thought that Hebrew, having for millennia been reserved for religious use, was incapable of meeting a broad spectrum of needs. Purists believed that Hebrew had been contaminated by the admixture of other vernaculars introduced into postbiblical religious treatises. They thought that the later accretions needed to be removed before Hebrew could be transformed into a functioning modern language. Recognizing the reality that the biblical vocabulary and syntax were inadequate for modern purposes, many maskilim dedicated themselves to at least trying to develop Hebrew into a modern language. The early Jewish Byronists were all committed Hebraists, their translations punctuating major stages in the Haskalah as a movement. The first two, translating contemporaneously in two different communities, evince some of the difficulties that confronted those maskilim who attempted to introduce new ideas into the culture. The first, one Yaakov Z .evi, is completely unknown except for his translation of Cain. The fact that his codex, containing both an introductory essay and a translation of the play, was never published suggests at least the possibility that communal forces made it almost impossible for eastern maskilim to introduce non-Jewish material at that place and time. Even though his translation of Cain is extant, there is no way of knowing how many other texts were destroyed, or even how many people actually read his. The next Byronist, Meir Halevi Letteris , was more successful at getting published, though he seems to have done so at the expense of his own voice. A respected poet in his own right, Letteris used several of the Hebrew Melodies, along with Darkness, to 56 C H A P T E R 2 introduce skeptical ideas he apparently was able to articulate only through the medium of translation. A decade later, Matisyahu Simh .ah Rabener...