Enlightenment values and their influence on Jewish identity

Enlightened Jews

When one thinks about the influences that have affected modern Jewry, the most obvious ones are Zionism and the Old Testament and other liturgical texts. But, as if often the case, what is most obvious is not only simply part of the story, it is also misleading. Jews have certainly been influenced by Zionism -- and this is true regardless of their own views on the subject because Zionism remains in many ways the loudest voice in the debate over the meaning of Jewish identity. But Jews at least as much as any other religious group (and arguably more) have also been influenced by the larger intellectual movements of their times. Even as the lives of Jews have often been circumscribed by the laws and customs of the nations in which they lived -- where they were often confined to ghettos and denied access to education and entry into most professions -- they have been influenced by important shifts in the zeitgeist.

This has been especially true when those intellectual movements parallel or reinforce basic tenets of Judaism as was the case with many of the core ideas of the Enlightenment, especially as these ideas were expressed through the French Revolution and the writers and political leaders associated with it. This embracing of Enlightenment values was encapsulated in the idea of Haskalah, a movement within Judaism that embraced the fundamentally humanistic beliefs of the post-Renaissance world. In this paper I will examine the influence of Enlightenment values on Judaism both in the eighteenth century as the Enlightenment swept across Europe and in the centuries since then.

Centuries in the Making

It is important to note that the influence of Enlightenment ideas on Jewish thought and identity was not coincidental. The Enlightenment itself, while arguably the most important event (although "event" does not quite capture a movement that was both diffuse and intellectual) of the eighteenth century, the architects of the Enlightenment were not working in isolation from either the past or from other events during this century. It is always difficult to know where -- or rather when -- to begin the description of an historical event, because there is always something that comes before whatever one begins as the starting point. I shall resist this temptation when writing about the Enlightenment, but it is important to place it generally within the precursors of Modernism in Europe.

The fifteenth century's opening of the New World to Europe and the beginning of the Renaissance must be taken into account when focusing on the Enlightenment, because everything from the astrolabe to Neoclassicism began to expand the world of Europeans. Jews were sheltered -- or exiled -- from much of the early developments of modernistic thought because of the rampant discrimination they faced across Europe (there is something supremely ironic in the fact that the same year that Columbus touched the soil of the New World, Ferdinand and Isabel expelled the Jews from Spain). But even as Jews remained threatened by a range of official and popular forces in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth (and into the eighteenth) centuries, changes were occurring in Europe that -- while not directly relating to Jewry -- would have significant effects on European Jews.

Since the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in the first decades of the sixteenth century, the hold of the Catholic Church over Europe was weakening. While the Middle Ages brought about an essentially one-to-one relationship between the Church and the State, the Reformation began to peel the two apart from each other. While a number of early Protestants entertained the idea of different forms of theocracy and few -- if any -- entertained the idea of a world in which Jews (or Muslims or agnostics) had equal status with Christians, the fact that the Reformation problematized the relationship between religious and temporal power had the effect of increasing the power of secular society in general. Even for Catholics, the partial disenfranchisement of the Church made it increasingly clear that there were different ways of organizing society. Different ways of organizing a life.

It would take generations for European societies as a whole to create any significant amount of space to be established in a consistent and widespread way between religious and secular life. But by the eighteenth century such a division would be widely felt. Indeed, arguably the modern world is marked by this distinction between religious and secular aspects of life more than by any other single demarcation. Jews would be released from what must have at times been a suffocating intellectual world in which the only access to information beyond daily activities was the rabbi. Changes in French law that were in many ways the culmination of centuries of religious reform and the increasing strength of the state allowed Jewish children to attend public schools. This fact -- both the "small" fact of public school attendance and the "large" fact of the divorce in the modern world of religion from state authority created an entirely new sense of Jewish identity.

(A caveat. There remains a strain of Christianity in many modern nation-states, including in Britain and -- in a very different way -- the United States. But the relationship between Christianity and state power is fundamentally different in the modern world than it was in the Middle Ages -- or than it is now in fundamentalist Muslim states.)

To understand the appeal of the Enlightenment as it manifested itself in France and in the French Revolution it is important to have a sense of what life was like for Jews in the decades (and even centuries) before the revolution. The position of Jews in France was no worse than in other parts of Europe (and was probably better than in some parts of Eastern Europe) but it was still stark and often terrible. In France before the revolution Christian kings had absolute power -- a power that came from their hereditary position as secular rulers as well as from the authority given to them by the Pope. The Catholic Church gave Christian kings a validity that they would not otherwise have had.

As a result of the close relationship between the Catholic Church and the temporal rulers of countries such as France, kings used their power backed by the weight of the church to institute laws and customs that punished Jews on a number of levels -- laws and customs that reflected the anti-Semitism of the church. Papal dictates forbid Jews to live outside of their ghettos, to work in certain professions, to own land, to mingle freely with Christians. Such dictates ensured that Jews lived in a constant state of repression, intimidation, poverty, and fear.

This was the condition in which Jews were living in the eighteenth century in France and the rest of Europe. And it must have seemed to many of them at least that this was simply the permanent state of Jewry: The way that it had always been, the way that it would always be. Life would be an unending series of terrible challenges and injustices, and if Jews ever got a little bit ahead, got some measure of financial security or partial cultural acceptance, they would become subject to exorbitant taxes or the victims of deadly pograms or of raids -- often by church officials and monastics -- to seize the property of Jews. But with the dawning of the Enlightenment came the possibility for change. Initially this idea was probably enough in and of itself: Simply the idea of change. Not necessarily change in a particular direction -- although the desire for this would quickly follow. But simply the idea of change itself. The possibility that the world in which Jews lived could be different from the world of their forebears. And then came the idea that it could in fact be better.

Napoleonic Contributions

To step away from the ideas fomenting and fermenting around the revolution itself (as well as during the decades leading up to it), it is important to note the contributions of Napoleon Bonaparte, for he helped spread the Enlightenment values of the French Revolution (and in particular its greater tolerance towards Jews) across Europe. While Napoleon was not (rather obviously!) a perfect ruler, his imperialist hunger had important beneficial effects. The legal codes and forms of governance that he developed for France were generally humane and rational. Not only did Napoleon help create the system of public education that gave children of all classes and religions access to a balanced, sophisticated education, he also pushed through land reforms that had been initiated (in a less systematic and rational fashion) by revolutionaries.

Napoleon consolidated -- for Jews as well as for other French citizens, and indeed broadly to all the people of Europe -- the idea of governmental power backed by the authority of the people themselves, not by either God or inherited status and wealth. As Napoleon pushed his armies across Europe, they took with them their ideas of democracy. As old regimes fell before him (and the Pope suffering the indignity of being arrested by Napoleon), the French emperor hammered home his ideas about the dignity of the individual -- even if that individual were a Jew.

Schechter (2003) has created a fascinating analysis of the reasons why Jews were so important to the French revolutionaries as well as Napoleon. In the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, Jews constituted less than 1% of the French population yet took up a great deal of political and cultural space. (The same might actually be said today of the United States.) Schechter argues that this is in no way coincidental but rather than for French intellectuals and political leaders during the Revolution and the First Empire Jews served the position of the "Other."

If the newly liberated and newly empowered France could find a place for Jews in its newly defined civil society then the French could see themselves as truly evolved -- as having taken the lead in Europe as the most civilized of peoples. (Something that the French have often wanted to believe of themselves...) Schechter's argument makes good sense: If the Jews had not had an important cultural significance to other French citizens it is very hard (I would even argue impossible) to understand why their position in society was of such importance in French society. The improvement in standing of Jews during and just after the Revolution cannot be understood as the result of the disappearance of anti-Semitism from French society, as the vicious treatment of Alfred Dreyfus at the end of the century.

France during the Revolution and its aftermath was not free of anti-Semitism. This mattered to the lives of Jews who still had to struggle against the bias of individuals whom they met in the course of their daily lives. But while gentile French citizens might not personally like the Jews that they met, they had a philosophical and political use for Jews in the abstract. And this created a space for the development of Haskalah as well as the development of an intellectual, secular Jewish culture that has echoes in today's Jewish milieux.

Moses Mendelssohn and the Importance of Language

While much of the groundwork for a Jewish enlightenment was done in France, there were key developments in Germany as well. Prussia was home to Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86), a prototype of the Jewish intellectual. He himself -- as both philosopher and writer -- was far more integrated into larger (gentile) society than most Jews and his own life proved to be both example and inspiration for other Jews seeking a larger life. He was one of the leaders of the movement who understood that language would play in terms both of integrating Jews into the larger society as well as in terms of helping to create an intellectual culture that was tied to Jewish history and philosophy rather then religion.

Mendelssohn translated the Torah into German and this translation was an essential text for Haskalah. This might seem contradictory: Why turn to the Torah as part of an attempt to create a more secular identity? The simple answer was that Mendelssohn's translation served as a sort of Rosetta stone: Jews knew the text of the Torah in Hebrew, so the translation of the text created a bridge between the two languages and so between the isolated world of the Jew from the ghetto and the world of the Jewish student and intellectual who could feel at home in larger German society.

Another shift in language use was also at the heart of Haskalah: The shift from Yiddish to Hebrew. While we may now associate Hebrew more closely with the religious realm, for Jews in the eighteenth century Hebrew was an intellectual language on par with Greek and Latin. Even more importantly, it was not the language of the ghetto. Any integration into larger, non-Jewish society required (at least for many Jews) the casting away of Yiddish: There was simply no possible way to transform Yiddish into a language that could be used in the gentile world. (Given this historical context of the ways in which Enlightenment Jews were eager to set aside their maternal language it is interesting to consider the attempts in the decades since World War II to re-vivify Yiddish and transform it back into a living language.)

Yiddish was a lingua franca for European Jews and so served a vital role for the Wandering Jew of the Middle Ages, the Jew who never knew when she or he would forced to move on to the next town or the next country. Having a language that could be understood essentially across the continent (although of course there were different national and regional dialects of Yiddish) was a necessity for people who had few connections to the land. Yiddish connected Jews to each other in much the same way that Latin had once connected scholars across Europe. But even as it connected one Jew to another, it separated them from non-Jews. Jews involved in Haskalah began to speak in the languages of the countries in which they lived, loosening their ties to their co-religionists as they strengthened their links to their fellow French, Germans, Spaniards, etc.

Even as the study and use of European vernaculars increased the degree of integration into secular European culture and society, the study of Hebrew along with Aramaic helped create a new body of critical religious scholarship. Freed from the exegetical form of study and learning that had long been favored -- and enforced -- by rabbis, Jewish scholars began to re-examine traditional Jewish texts, along the way creating new Hebrew and Aramaic grammars and dictionaries. This new scholarship was not the self-referential and interior in the way that rabbinical scholarship had been: This scholarship looked to history as much as religion and so paralleled other aspects of the development of a new Jewish identity.

Opposing Trajectories

As Jews became more and more integrated larger European society, many began to move farther away from a Jewish identity that drew less on religion and more on history. This deeper sense of their role in the different societies in which they had lived induced Jews to enter more fully into the contemporary politics of different European nations as they began to see themselves as part of larger polities. This sense of themselves as integrated into national politics and national governance would be challenged in terrible ways by the increasingly organized and vicious persecutions of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

As anti-Semitism rose in frequency and severity, some Jews pursued their goal of integration into society as a whole as a way of meeting resistance to them as "others" while others began to pursue the path of Zionism and Jewish national identity. In some ways this split -- assimilate or heighten Jewish identity -- paralleled an older split. As the Haskalah movement first gained in strength, those who supported it moved eagerly toward non-Jewish society while Orthodox Jews argued that any such move would undercut Jewish identity. This same choice -- to be a Jew within society or a Jew alongside but separate from society) -- at the end of the nineteenth century would lure some away from secular, modernist, European society into an acceptance of Zionism and a withdrawal from European intellectual society.

The French Revolution drew back a curtain -- as thick and impenetrable as the Iron Curtain -- that had separated Jews from the rest of French society even as the Haskalah movement helped break down barriers between Jews and non-Jewish society in the rest of Europe. For at least non-Orthodox living in the last decades of the eighteenth century and in the first decades of the nineteenth, the world was truly increasingly filled with light and possibilities: They lived in a world in which is was possible to be authentically Jewish while being a part of the wider world, speaking (in many different ways) the language of one's neighbors.

But as important were the new freedoms in this era, the rising anti-Semitism at the end of the nineteenth century (a la L'Affaire Drefyus) was equally important. It too made Jews reassess their sense of identity and, as Shindler (2007) explores, once again renegotiate what it meant to be a Jew living in Europe. Some would decide that they would continue to cast their lot with other European intellectuals (at least until they fled in the 1930s or were incinerated in the 1940s). Others would be drawn to Zionism and turn their faces and hearts away from Europe entirely, lured by the idea of a home that was apart. The Enlightenment freed Jews, but in just a few decades, it would dim, and so too would the lives of European Jews become diminished.