The Haskalah (, literally, "wisdom", "erudition" or "education"), often termed the Jewish Enlightenment, was an intellectual movement among the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, with a certain influence on those in Western Europe. It arose as a defined ideological worldview during the 1770s, and its last stage ended around 1881–82, when the pogroms in the Russian Empire contributed to a shift among many of its proponents, known as maskilim, toward Jewish nationalism.Shmuel Feiner, "Towards a Historical Definition of the Haskalah", in: Shmuel Feiner and David Sorkin (eds.), New Perspectives on the Haskalah. Littman Library of Jewish Civilization (2001). pp. 184–219.
The movement advocated against Jewish parochialism and encouraged the adoption of prevailing attire over traditional dress, while also working to diminish the authority of traditional community institutions such as rabbinic courts and boards of elders. It pursued a set of projects of cultural and moral renewal, including a revival of Hebrew for use in secular life, which resulted in an increase in Hebrew found in print. Concurrently, it strove for an optimal integration in surrounding societies. Practitioners promoted the study of exogenous culture, style and language as well as the adoption of modern values. At the same time, economic production, and the taking up of new occupations was pursued. The Haskalah promoted rationalism, romanticism, liberalism, and enquiry, and is largely perceived as the Jewish variant of the general Age of Enlightenment. The movement encompassed a wide spectrum ranging from moderates, who hoped for maximal compromise, to radicals, who sought sweeping changes.
In its various changes, the Haskalah fulfilled an important, though limited, part in the modernization of Central and Eastern European Jews. Its activists, the Maskilim, exhorted and implemented communal, educational and cultural reforms in both the public and the private spheres. Owing to its dual policies, it collided both with the traditionalist rabbinic elite, which attempted to preserve old Jewish values and norms in their entirety, and with the radical assimilationists who wished to eliminate or minimize the existence of the Jews as a defined collective.
Definitions Literary circle The Haskalah was multifaceted, with many loci which became more and less prominent at different times and across vast territories. The name Haskalah became a standard self-appellation in 1860, when it was taken as the motto of the Odessa-based newspaper Ha-Melitz, but derivatives and the title Maskil for activists were already common in the first edition of Ha-Meassef from 1 October 1783: its publishers described themselves as Maskilim.Uzi Shavit, "An Examination of the Term 'Haskala' in Hebrew Literature". Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature, 1980. . Ha-Meassif was a quarterly started in Koenigsberg by students of the prominent Haskalah philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and was considered the first Hebrew periodical of the Haskalah in Germany. While Maskilic centres sometimes had loose institutions around which their members operated, the movement as a whole lacked any such.
In spite of that diversity, the Maskilim shared a sense of common identity and self-consciousness. They were anchored in the existence of a shared literary canon, which began to be formulated in the first Maskilic locus at Berlin. Its members, like Moses Mendelssohn, Naphtali Hirz Wessely, Isaac Satanow and Isaac Euchel, authored tracts in various genres that were further disseminated and re-read among other Maskilim. Each generation, in turn, elaborated and added its own works to the growing body. The emergence of the Maskilic canon reflected the movement's central and defining enterprise, the revival of Hebrew as a literary language for secular purposes (its restoration as a spoken tongue occurred only much later). The Maskilim researched and standardized grammar, coined neologisms, and composed poetry, periodicals, theatrical works, and other literature in Hebrew. Historians described the movement largely as a Republic of Letters, an intellectual community based on printing houses and reading societies.Samuel Feiner, "Towards a Historical Definition of Haskalah", in: David Sorkin, New Perspectives on the Haskalah. Litmann (2001). p. 208.
The Maskilim's attitude toward Hebrew, as noted by Moses Pelli, was derived from Enlightenment perceptions of language as reflecting both individual and collective character. To them, a corrupt tongue mirrored the inadequate condition of the Jews which they sought to ameliorate. They turned to Hebrew as their primary creative medium. The Maskilim inherited the Medieval Grammarians' – such as Jonah ibn Janah and Judah ben David Hayyuj – distaste of Mishnaic Hebrew and preference of the Biblical one as pristine and correct. They turned to the Bible as a source and standard, emphatically advocating what they termed "Pure Hebrew Tongue" (S'fat E'ver tzacha) and lambasting the Rabbinic style of letters, which mixed it with Aramaic as a single "Holy Tongue" and often employed loanwords from other languages. Some activists, however, were not averse to using Mishnaic and Rabbinic forms. They also preferred the Sephardi pronunciation, considered more prestigious, to the Ashkenazi one, which was linked with the Jews of Poland, who were deemed backward. The movement's literary canon is defined by a grandiloquent, archaic register copying the Biblical one and often combining lengthy allusions or direct quotes from verses in the prose.Moshe Pelli, Haskalah and Beyond: The Reception of the Hebrew Enlightenment and the Emergence of Haskalah Judaism. University Press of America (2012). pp. 29–32.
During a century of activity, the Maskilim produced a massive contribution, forming the first phase of modern Hebrew literature. In the mid-1750s, Moses Mendelssohn began publishing Qohelet Musar "The Moralist", regarded as the beginning of modern writing in Hebrew and the first journal in the language, though only two issues appeared and its exact date is uncertain.Edward Breuer and David Sorkin (eds.), Moses Mendelssohn's Hebrew Writings. Yale University Press, 2018. pp. 21–50 (introduction to Qohelet Musar). Between 1789 and his death, Naphtali Hirz Wessely compiled Shirei Tif'eret ("Poems of Glory"), an eighteen-part epic cycle concerning Moses. was the Haskalah's pioneering playwright, best known for his 1794 epic drama Melukhat Sha'ul "Reign of Saul", which was printed in twelve editions by 1888. Judah Leib Ben-Ze'ev was the first modern Hebrew grammarian, and beginning with his 1796 manual of the language, he authored books which explored it and were vital reading material for young Maskilim until the end of the 19th century. Solomon Löwisohn was the first to translate Shakespeare into Hebrew, and an abridged form of the "Are at this hour asleep!" monologue in Henry IV, Part 2 was included in his 1816 lyrical compilation Melitzat Yeshurun (Eloquence of Jeshurun).
Joseph Perl pioneered satirist writings in his biting, mocking critique of Hasidic Judaism, Megaleh Tmirin "Revealer of Secrets" from 1819. Avraham Dov Ber Lebensohn was primarily a leading metricist, with his 1842 Shirei S'fat haQodesh "Verses in the Holy Tongue" considered a milestone in Hebrew poetry, and also authored biblical exegesis and educational handbooks. Abraham Mapu authored Ahavat Zion "Love of Zion", published in 1853 after twenty-three years of work and widely regarded as the first full-length Hebrew novel.Robert Alter, The Invention of Hebrew Prose: Modern Fiction and the Language of Realism. University of Washington Press, 1988. Judah Leib Gordon was a Hebrew poet associated with the Haskalah. His works included the 1876 epic Qotzo shel Yodh (Tittle of a Jot).. His most famous work was the 1876 epic Qotzo shel Yodh (Tittle of a Jot). Mendele Mocher Sforim was during his youth a Maskilic writer but from his 1886 Beseter ra'am (), (Hidden in Thunder), he abandoned its strict conventions in favour of a mixed, facile and common style. His career marked the end of the Maskilic period in Hebrew literature and the beginning of the Era of Renaissance. The writers of the latter period lambasted their Maskilic predecessors for their didactic and florid style, more or less paralleling the Romantics' criticism of Enlightenment literature.
The central platforms of the Maskilic "Republic of Letters" were its great periodicals, each serving as a locus for contributors and readers during the time it was published. The first was the Königsberg (and later Berlin)-based Ha-Meassef, launched by Isaac Abraham Euchel in 1783 and printed with growing intervals until 1797. The magazine had several dozen writers and 272 subscribers at its zenith, from Shklow in the east to London in the west, making it the sounding board of the Berlin Haskalah. The movement lacked an equivalent until the appearance of Bikurei ha-I'tim in Vienna between 1820 until 1831, serving the Moravian and Galician Haskalah. That function was later fulfilled by the Prague-based Kerem Hemed from 1834 to 1857, and to a lesser degree by Kokhvei Yizhak, published in the same city from 1845 to 1870. The Russian Haskalah was robust enough to lack any single platform. Its members published several large magazines, including the Vilnius-based Ha-Karmel (1860–1880), Ha-Tsefirah in Warsaw and more, though the probably most influential of them all was Ha-Melitz, launched in 1860 at Odessa by Aleksander Zederbaum.See also: Moshe Pelli, Haskalah Literature - Trends and Attitudes; Pelli, When Did Haskalah Begin? Establishing the Beginning of Haskalah Literature and the Definition of "Modernism".
Reforming movement While the partisans of the Haskalah were much immersed in the study of sciences and Hebrew grammar, this was not a profoundly new phenomenon, and their creativity was a continuation of a long, centuries-old trend among educated Jews. What truly marked the movement was the challenge it laid to the monopoly of the rabbinic elite over the intellectual sphere of Jewish life, contesting its role as spiritual leadership. In his 1782 circular Divrei Shalom v'Emeth (Words of Peace and Truth), Hartwig Wessely, one of the most traditional and moderate maskilim, quoted the passage from Leviticus Rabbah stating that a Torah scholar who lacked wisdom was inferior to an animal's carcass. He called upon the Jews to introduce general subjects, like science and vernacular language, into their children's curriculum; this "Teaching of Man" was necessarily linked with the "Teaching (Torah) of God", and the latter, though superior, could not be pursued and was useless without the former.