Scientific Literature and Cultural Transformation in Nineteenth-Century East European Jewish Society

Jews' interest and involvement in both the theoretical and applied sciences—one of the most salient proofs of the cultural transformation of traditional Jewish society since the beginning of the Modern Era¹—were part of the accelerated transformation of various groups of Eastern European Jews (mainly those identified with the Enlightenment ethos), which began in the mid-eighteenth century. Like their counterparts in the German-speaking areas, the pioneering enlightened Jews (maskilim) in Eastern Europe grew more interested in scientific thinking and in proto-scientific writing. At the beginning of the nineteenth century this phenomenon spread to maskilic circles throughout the Pale of Settlement, especially in the cultural sphere of Lithuanian Jewry. Modern scholarship has concentrated on the ideological and theoretical sources of this phenomenon² and on the "harbingers of the Haskalah."³ As a result, the social aspects of the phenomenon, meaning the methods by which the scientific outlook was disseminated to and absorbed by wider circles, have not received appropriate attention. This paper takes a different point of view and examines one crucial aspect of this process; namely, the modus operandi used by the main mediators who forged the necessary link between ideology and society to overcome prejudice and primeval fears.⁴

The gabbai, R. Judah b. Rabbi Jehiel ... was well educated and a bibliophile. Once he came over to me when I was studying Maimonides' "Laws of the Sanctification of the New Moon." Seeing me doing calculations with pencil and paper in front of me he asked me ... "have you ever seen the book Kokva⊃ dešaviṭ by R. Ḥayyim Zelig Slonimski?" ... The next day he took me to his library. ... With great pains I found the book Kokva⊃ de-šaviṭ. ... This small volume produced a great and horrible tempest in my heart. This small volume utterly destroyed my world, both my spiritual and my physical worlds.⁵

This passage, from the memoirs of Judah Leib Katzenelson of Bobruisk (1846-1917), offers a typical example of the key role that books in general, and scientific literature in particular, played in the cultural metamorphosis of young Eastern European Jews in the mid-nineteenth century. What was there in that small book that set off the emotional tempest that led Katzenelson and many of his contemporaries onto a new course?

As Shmuel Feiner has shown, the roots of Eastern European Jewish society's interest in proto-scientific thought and in the encounter between physics and metaphysics can be traced back to the mid-eightcenth century.⁶ From the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, the character of that encounter was substantively different. To begin with, Feiner describes a closed discourse that was conducted in a restricted social and intellectual sphere and had no outlet to broader social circles, so that its influence was extremely limited. Works of popular science of that age, such as Moses Markuse's Sefer Refu⊃ot,⁷ were printed in limited runs and did not exert any real influence on the cultural code of Eastern European Jewish society. Second, much of eighteenth-century scientific activity was not conceived of as an independent discipline, but revolved around the attempt to yoke scientific knowledge to the service of halakhic discourse. This bent can be found in proto-scientific works such as the translation of Euclid by Baruch Schick (The Hague, 1780)⁸ and Pinhas Elijah Hurwitz's Sefer ha-Berit (Brunn, 1797),⁹ which reflect the traditional and conservative hierarchy that ranked science as an auxiliary tool to the acquisition of the "true wisdom." From the early nineteenth century, however, broader circles in this society viewed scientific thought as an autonomous discipline, which took on totally different dimensions as the Haskalah expanded.¹⁰ The fruits of this process are evident in a variety of scientific writings, most of them translations of books on popular science. The elements of independent endeavor and the analytic process that characterize original scientific writing hardly exist in these works. Looking at these works as manifestations of their authors' cultural world and placing...