Book description
At the beginning of the eighteenth century most European Jews lived
in restricted settlements and urban ghettos, isolated from the
surrounding dominant Christian cultures not only by law but also by
language, custom, and dress. By the end of the century urban, upwardly
mobile Jews had shaved their beards and abandoned Yiddish in favor of
the languages of the countries in which they lived. They began to
participate in secular culture and they embraced rationalism and
non-Jewish education as supplements to traditional Talmudic studies.
The full participation of Jews in modern Europe and America would be
unthinkable without the intellectual and social revolution that was
the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment.
Unparalleled in scale and comprehensiveness, The Jewish
Enlightenment reconstructs the intellectual and social revolution
of the Haskalah as it gradually gathered momentum throughout the
eighteenth century. Relying on a huge range of previously unexplored
sources, Shmuel Feiner fully views the Haskalah as the Jewish version
of the European Enlightenment and, as such, a movement that cannot be
isolated from broader eighteenth-century European traditions.
Critically, he views the Haskalah as a truly European phenomenon and
not one simply centered in Germany. He also shows how the republic of
letters in European Jewry provided an avenue of secularization for
Jewish society and culture, sowing the seeds of Jewish liberalism and
modern ideology and sparking the Orthodox counterreaction that
culminated in a clash of cultures within the Jewish community. The
Haskalah's confrontations with its opponents within Jewry constitute
one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of the dramatic
and traumatic encounter between the Jews and modernity.
The Haskalah is one of the central topics in modern Jewish
historiography. With its scope, erudition, and new analysis, The
Jewish Enlightenment now provides the most comprehensive
treatment of this major cultural movement.
"Feiner's magnum opus . . . offers a sweeping history of the
Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) movement in Germany, from its
beginning early in the eighteenth century to its demise at the end of
that century. . . . The first comprehensive study of the movement in
almost a century."-Journal of Modern History
Shmuel Feiner is Professor of Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University
and author of Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish
Historical Consciousness.
