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Chapter Fifteen On Frivolity and Hypocrisy
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Chapter Fifteen On Frivolity and Hypocrisy The picture of Jewish society and culture in the s is a very complex one, as we have learned from the previous chapters. Only a few years after the maskilim first made their appearance in the public arena, they found themselves embroiled in a series of conflicts, from within and from without. The accelerated pace of secularization, so evident in the city streets, led the orthodox to harden their opposition to the Haskalah. The Haskalah’s prominent spokesmen , headed by Wolfssohn and Friedländer, no longer hesitated to launch even more formidable anticlerical assaults on the rabbinical elite. Moderate maskilim, who were observing with concern the growing radicalization of the group leading the movement, and were displeased with what they viewed as a digression from the path of their revered teacher, Mendelssohn, were also attacked and accused of hypocrisy. An internal maskilic polemic soon developed , which further reduced the ranks of the maskilic republic, eroded the public and financial support it had received, and helped hasten its demise. The maskilim, then, were compelled to struggle on two fronts. On the one hand, they escalated their attacks on the rabbinical elite, who they perceived as the enemy of Enlightenment, and on the other, they had to defend the ‘‘true Haskalah’’ against the ‘‘pseudo-Haskalah,’’ which both radical and moderate maskilim regarded as a manifestation of a substandard secularity. The processes of cultural and moral decline taking place in the bourgeois Jewish family were viewed as perversions and caused much concern. The orthodox rigidity and religious hypocrisy of Jewish Tartuffes, on one hand, and the frivolity of young men and women, hungering for the free life outside the ghetto, on the other, compelled the revolutionary maskilim to redefine their role. In the new balance of power, they had to choose between right and left, as the critics and overseers of Jewish modernization, who wanted to see it realized, in spite of the opposition of the rabbis of the old elite, but without dissolving the collective Jewish identity. The Enemies of Enlightenment The Besamim Rosh controversy subsided a short time after Saul Berlin fled to London. However, it left a significant mark on Jewish society. It particularly On Frivolity and Hypocrisy affected the orthodox, always on guard to identify any new threats. Indeed, another provocation, apparently directed at Rabbi Raphael Kohen, evoked an immediate response. In April , an amazing account was planted in a local newspaper in Altona, reporting that a synod of Italian rabbis, meeting in Florence , had allegedly decided to abolish a list of halakhic prohibitions: to transfer the weekly day of rest from Saturday to Sunday, to permit work on holidays, and to allow the use of a razor in shaving and the eating of pork. Many Jews, the account claimed, were interested in these reforms and had been expecting them for a long time. Rabbi Kohen was convinced that this was an attempt to exploit the Italian rabbinate, known for its relatively moderate positions since it had sided with Wessely in the s, and to attack the Ashkenazi rabbinical elite. He sent an urgent letter to Livorno to ascertain the truth of the newspaper account and to demand that a denial be published. After a short time, the rabbis of Italy did publish letters of denial, printed in a special pamphlet in Hebrew and in German translation. Whoever had published the false account, the pamphlet said, ‘‘was one of the mockers of the angels of the Lord. This is their way in their folly to be free of the commandments and to be content with licentiousness, Oh, who would have believed such things could be? Never before has there been such an abomination in Israel . . . the rest of Israel would not cancel even one half of a commandment from our holy Torah.’’1 In this case, even more than in the Besamim Rosh affair, it was not very difficult to defend the orthodox positions, since in the s the leaders of the rabbinical elite had a growing pessimistic sense of being under siege. Rabbi Kohen’s sermons from the s, for example, which were compiled in the book Da’at kedoshim, expressed neither despair nor the admission of defeat. Instead, they reflected recognition of the need to resolutely counter the ‘‘evil ones’’ and at the same time strengthen the self-confidence and the conviction of the ‘‘righteous ones’’—in his view, still the majority of the public—that their path was the right...