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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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