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Haskalah
[Hebrew, "Enlightenment"] - A cultural movement
that originated in the late eighteenth century among Jews
influenced by
the European Enlightenment. Its most important center was
Berlin, were
Moses Mendelssohn was active. His followers called
themselves Maskilim
[Hebrew, "enlightened"]. They included Shlomo Majmon,
Naftali Herz
Wessely (N. H. Wiesel), Herz Homberg and David Friedl�nder.
They
advocated emancipation, secular and modern ideas in Jewish
life, the
modernization of their own culture and partial acculturation
(rejection
of traditional garb, certain customs and the Yiddish
language),
"productivization" (taking up professions outside trade and
crafts, and
encouragement of agriculture), and the cultivation of a
sense of
citizenship, understood as loyalty towards the state.
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Mendelssohn cultivated contacts with many of
Berlin's intellectual elites, and published appeals
addressed to the
authorities in which he demanded equal rights and the
creation of a
network of government schools for Jewish children. The
demand for equal
rights was rejected by all absolute monarchs.
The radicalism of his proposed reforms and the use of
force during
attempts to implement them led to a serious confrontation
with Orthodox
Judaism, particularly in the Polish lands. The Maskilim
failed in their
attempts to modernize Jewish traditions, and many of them
rejected
Judaism in favor of Christianity, which enabled them to
enjoy equal
rights and gain positions otherwise inaccessible to Jews.
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The Haskalah nevertheless was one of the most
important phenomena of the late eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century
Jewish culture. It launched the process of internal
modernization,
including cultural modernization and secularization, which
in turn led
enlightened Jews to join European culture and to make their
own
contributions to that culture.
Among the Polish Jews, this movement had a significant
influence on
the development of the concept of "modern assimilation". As
a result,
contemporary authors began writing in Hebrew, Yiddish and
Polish. A
group of Jews that had been educated in secular schools
(Jewish and
non-Jewish), or even in Catholic schools, contributed to the
formation
of the Polish intelligentsia. (A.C./CM)
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