Enlightened Jews When One Thinks

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.

A Larger Piece of the World

The French Revolution brought about a number of changes in the lives of Jews, but most important (and this was true across Europe as the effects of the revolution and in general of Enlightenment values spread across Europe) was the way in which changes in French society, culture, and polity allowed for a greater integration of Jews into the larger society. In the segregated society that existed in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Jews had little contact with the gentile world. In this essentially closed community, Jews tended to interact only with each other and looked to the rabbi of their community for guidance in nearly all issues. Not only did rabbis serve as religious leaders, they also served as a role model for the scholarly ideal of the community. Rabbis often had civil duties and powers as well, for example, serving as judges when all the parties involved were Jewish.

In this system, the rabbi was the only conduit to a larger world. That larger world was defined by the Talmudic scholarship that boys pursued in the hope that they would be able to become rabbis in their own turn. But the rabbi could also serve as the connection between a Jewish ghetto and the surrounding Christian community. This dual raised status of rabbis made their role the most enviable in the community. But the shifts in French society that occurred in the decades just preceding and following the French Revolution created cracks in the isolation of European Jews.

The French Revolution is generally seen as an overthrow of the monarchy, and of course this is in part what happened. But the revolution was intended not simply to overthrow the Second Estate -- the nobility and royalty -- but also the First Estate -- the church and the clergy. The revolution unseated the Catholic Church from its position of power perhaps even more surely than had the Reformation, and it helped to free the country from Protestant as well as Catholic influence. But even more broadly, the revolution allowed people to understand that governments did not need the backing of God or of any church to have legitimacy and power.

Of course, the French Revolution did not materialize out of nowhere. It was in key ways the child not only of general Enlightenment values but also of the American Revolution. And it is true that the American Revolution had opened the door to the idea of a modern republic based on secular ideas. But because it was in the New World, the American Revolution had less of an impact on Europeans than did the French Revolution. Moreover, the American Revolution could in many ways be seen as at least in large measure prompted by economic forces. The language of the American Revolution was anti-monarchical, but it was not regicidal. American revolutionaries rejected the right of George III to rule over them without focusing on the fact that they were therefore rejecting the authority and idea of monarchy based on divine authority. The French revolutionaries were much more direct in their rejection of a government sanctioned by God.

While Martin Luther might have begun the Reformation by arguing for a different relation between the common person and the Christian God, Robespierre and his compatriots would argue that the primary relationship that existed for each person was with himself or herself and other citizens. The French Revolution, along with the more general ideas of the Enlightenment, helped to create a world that was fundamentally less hierarchical, a world in which each person could be the highest authority on her or his own life.

The French Revolution also compounded the message of the American Revolution. Europeans might have been able to dismiss the American experimentation with democracy as simply that -- an experiment, a single shot at an essentially aberrant form of governance. But the French Revolution -- dedicated to the same ideas of democratic representation and the sanctity of liberty (a sanctity that the French could lay even greater claim to since French citizens did not keep slaves) -- underscored the fact that the modern world would be a democratic and representative one. The American Revolution was not a singularity but rather a prototype. The world was changing.

As a result, the implications of the French Revolution were much more profound in terms of unleashing society from the strictures of Christianity. The ideas of Voltaire and his fellow philosophes not only reduced the power of Christianity but more generally reduced the power of religion in society. This reduced the prejudice against Jews while also allowing for (in some measure) a secularization of Jewish culture and society.

I shall examine this point in greater detail below -- how the revolution and the general changes in the cultural environment helped to create a secular Jewish culture -- but want to note here the importance of one particular change that occurred in French eighteenth society. Education became a function of civil society and not of the church. Secular schools allowed Jews to attend, which gave Jews access to religion outside of Talmudic teachings given by rabbis. For the first time since the Classical world, Jews had the chance to become intellectuals rather than religious scholars. (I am not arguing here that religious scholarship is not an intellectual activity but rather that it was during the Enlightenment that it became possible for Jews to become secular intellectuals, that Jews could be seen as intellectuals by other Jews independent of any knowledge that they had about traditionally important religious questions.)

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.)