Haskalah and Beyond: The Reception of the Hebrew Enlightenment and the Emergence of Haskalah Judaism (review)

Jewish Enlightenment, emerging in the last decades of the eighteenth century, originated in Germany. Its aim was "to become like all other folks" and achieve emancipation. Change, turning to modernism, primarily through education—general and Jewish—was to be the way. This movement, the Jewish or Hebrew Enlightenment, generally known as Haskalah, wanted, apart from introducing general education among the Jewish people, to change radically the traditional Jewish way of learning—away from the casuistic learning of Talmud, away from the Yiddish, which they called "stammering language" and, instead, turning to the study of the Bible and the Hebrew language; all that in order to "restore (Judaism) to its pristine splendour."

These ideas, carried into practice, induced extensive writing in Hebrew on a wide variety of topics; articles and essays about Jewish history, biographies, biblical language, and more, but among them also critical opinions about certain measures of the halakah (religious law), considered to be merely restrictive as well as unswerving attacks on superstitions. Haskalah-Judaism is the term Pelli uses for this approach to Jewish culture and tradition.

In his recent book, Haskalah and Beyond, Pelli explores the reception of the early Haskalah and its impact on the next generations. Thus, Pelli states among the criteria of reception: new editions of books, reprints of essays, biographies, and more. As a more profound level of acceptance, he considers the emulation of style, themes, and literary genres. As an in-depth assessment, he views critiques of later generations, even though they are not always favorable. They prove nevertheless that early Haskalah literature had an impact on the following generation in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and later upon the next one in Russia.

The first periodical of Haskalah, a cornerstone of Hebrew Haskalah literature, Hame'asef (The gatherer) has been published intermittently for nearly thirty years—the first generation of Haskalah. As everything that landed on the editor's table was published, we get a broad view of topics, genres, language, poetics, and rhetoric that were current during that time. Pelli devotes a whole chapter to Melitzah, the form of language prevailing in the early years of Haskalah, a language greatly influenced by biblical Hebrew. Shibutz, insertion of verses or phrases mainly in poetry as well as rhyme and rhythm, are also characteristic and discussed by Pelli. Further, Pelli draws one's attention to the different connotation of words and expressions in the Bible in comparison with the connotations in later years. With German Jewry becoming assimilated, Hebrew literature was no longer in demand. Hame'asef was last printed in 1811. Its influence continued, nevertheless, throughout the first decades of the nineteenth century. The first volumes of Bikurei Haitim (1820-1831) were a partial reprint of Hame'asef with some, but an ever increasing number of new contributions. In the later volumes of Bikurei Haitim and practically throughout Kerem Chemed, the influence of the language of early Haskalah declines and nearly vanishes. Criticism comes up later, starting in the sixties of the nineteenth century and continuing into the early twentieth century. Pelli analyzes and quotes critics such as Papirna, Smolenskin, and others. Harsh words were directed against Melitzah by Peretz Smolenskin: the people of Hame'asef "filled their books with empty and dry stuff which contained no knowledge or ideas" (p. 158). Bialik, in his criticism of early Haskalah language, comes to the following conclusion: the single word was for them like a precious gem "with an independent value all of its own," whereas in the biblical forms "the beauty of the word derives from the place it occupies and not from itself" (p. 159). Others went even further and called Melitzah craft, not art (Ahad Ha'am), or dismissed it totally as non-literature (Ehrenpreis). Pelli regrets that this criticism penetrated the historiography of literature, a realm that is "supposed to be balanced and objective" (p. 160).

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