by Will Durant
The lowly state of Polish Judaism was in some measure redeemed by the Hasidic movement. The founder of this “doctrine of piety” was Israel ben Eliezer, known as Baal Shem-Tob (“Master of the Good Name”), and, for short, from his initials, Besht. He wandered from place to place as a teacher of children; he lived in cheerful poverty, prayed rapturously, and made “miraculous” cures with mountain herbs. He asked his followers to pay less attention to synagogue rites and Talmudic lore, to approach God directly in humble but intimate communion, to see and love God in all forms and manifestations of nature, in rocks and trees as well as in good fortune and pain; he bade them enjoy life in the present instead of mourning the sins and miseries of the past. Sometimes his simple sayings resembled those of Christ. “A father complained to the Besht that his son had forsaken God, and asked. Rabbi, what shall I do? The Besht answered, ‘Love him more than ever.’”42
In some ways the Hasidic movement in Poland corresponded to the Moravian Brethren, the German Pietists, and the English Methodists; it agreed with these in bringing religion out of the temple and into the heart; but it rejected asceticism and gloom, and bade its adherents dance, enjoy the embraces of their spouses, and even, now and then, drink to the brim of ecstasy.
When Baal Shem-Tob died (1760) his flock was shepherded, and sometimes fleeced,43 by a succession of Zaddikim (“Righteous Men”). Orthodox Talmudists, led by the scholarly but fanatical Elijah ben Solomon of Wilna, fought the Hasidim with exhortations and excommunications, but their number increased as Poland died (1772-92), and by the end of the century they claimed 100,000 souls.44
A life so harassed on earth, and souls so fixed in heaven, could not contribute much to secular literature, science, or philosophy. Almost everywhere the Jews were excluded from the universities by the oath of Christian faith required of all students. Their Mosaic Code barred them from the practice of pictorial art, and dulled their appreciation. Writing in a Hebrew understood only by a small minority, or in a Yiddish which had not yet become a literary language, they had little stimulus to produce any literature beyond religious commentaries or popular trivialities. One memorable contribution they made to practical arts in this fallow age: Jacob Rodrigue Péreire of Bordeaux invented a sign language for the deaf and dumb, earning the praise of Diderot, d’Alembert, Rousseau, and Buffon. And one Jewish poet illuminated the gloom.
Moses Chayim Luzzatto was born in Italy (1707), of parents rich enough to give him a good education. He derived from the Latin poets, and from Italian poets like Guarini, such skill in poetic meters that he was able to give to his Hebrew verse a fluent ryhthm and delicate charm hardly known in that language since Jehuda Halevy. In his seventeenth year he composed a drama on Samson and the Philistines. Then he took to studying the Zohar, Bible of the Cabala; his imagination was caught by its mystic fancies; he turned some of them into poetry, and they turned his head with the notion that he was divinely inspired. He wrote a second Zohar, and announced that he was the Messiah promised to the Jews. The rabbis of Venice excommunicated him (1734); he fled to Frankfurt-am-Main, where the rabbis made him promise to renounce his messianic illusions; he moved to Amsterdam, where the Jewish community welcomed him; he supported himself, like Spinoza, by polishing lenses; and he resumed his cabalistic studies. In 1743 he composed a Hebrew drama, La-Yesharim Tehilla (Glory to the Virtuous), which, despite the abstractions used as dramatis personae, earned lauds from those competent to judge. Popular Ignorance, maintained by Craft and Deceit, generates Folly, which repeatedly frustrates Wisdom, and deprives Merit of its crown, until Reason and Patience at last overcome Deceit by revealing Truth; however, by Truth Luzzatto meant the Cabala. In 1744 he went to Palestine, hoping to be acclaimed as the Messiah, but he died at Acre of plague (1747), aged thirty-nine. He was the last eloquent voice of Judaic medievalism, just as
III. MOSES MENDELSSOHN
was the first major voice of a Judaism emerging from protective isolation into contact with modern thought.
Friend and opponent of Kant, friend and inspirer of Lessing, the grandfather of Felix Mendelssohn was one of the noblest figures of the eighteenth century. His father, Menahem Mendel, was a clerk and teacher in a Jewish school at Dessau. Born there on September 6, 1729, the “third Moses” grew up with such a passion for study that he suffered a lasting curvature of the spine. At fourteen he was sent to Berlin for further study of the Talmud; there he followed almost literally the Talmudic command “Eat bread with salt, drink water by measure, sleep on the hard earth, live a life of privations, and busy thyself with the Law.”45 For seven years he contented himself with a garret room, marked his weekly loaf of bread with lines for his daily allowance,46 and earned a pittance by copying documents in his elegant hand. In Berlin he pored over the works of Maimonides, found courage in the career of that “second Moses,” and learned from him and life to control his pride to modesty and cool his hot temper to gentleness and courtesy. His Berlin associates taught him Latin, mathematics, and logic; he read Locke in a Latin translation, passed on to Leibniz and Wolff, and was soon enamored of philosophy. He learned to write German with a smooth clarity rare in the literature of his country in his time.
His poverty ended when, aged twenty-one, he became tutor in the family of Isaac Bernhard, who owned a silk plant in Berlin. Four years later he was made bookkeeper, then a traveling agent of the firm, finally a partner. He kept this business relation actively to the end of his life, for he was resolved not to be dependent upon the popularity and monetary returns of his books. Probably in 1754 he met Lessing, apparently in a game of chess; so began a friendship that endured, despite philosophical differences, till Lessing’s death. On October 16, 1754, Lessing wrote to another friend: “Mendelssohn is a man of five-and-twenty, who, without any [university] education, has acquired great attainments in languages, mathematics, philosophy, and poetry. I foresee in him an honor to our nation if he is allowed to come to maturity by his co-religionists. … His candor and his philosophical spirit cause me to regard him, in anticipation, as a second Spinoza.”47 For his part Mendelssohn said that a friendly word or look from Lessing banished from his mind all grief or gloom.48
In 1755 Lessing arranged the publication of Mendelssohn’s Philosophische Gespräche, which expounded and defended both Spinoza and Leibniz. In the same year the two friends collaborated in an essay, Pope ein Metaphysiker!, in which they argued that the English poet had had no philosophy of his own, but had merely versified Liebniz. Also in 1755 Mendelssohn published Briefe über die Empfindungen (Letters on the Feelings) ; this anticipated Kant’s view that the sense of beauty is quite independent of desire. These publications won the young Jew full welcome into the not quite “serene brotherhood of philosophes” in Berlin. Through Lessing he met Friedrich Nikolai; he and Nikolai studied Greek together, and soon he was reading Plato in the original. He helped Nikolai to establish the Bibliothek der Schonen Wissenschaften und der Freien Künste (Library of Belles-Lettres and Fine Arts), and contributed to this and other periodicals articles that strongly influenced current ideas in the criticism of literature and art.
Mendelssohn now felt sufficiently secure to set up a home of his own. In 1762, thirty-three years old, he married Fromet Gugenheim, twenty-five. Both had reached the age of reason, and the union brought them much happiness. On their honeymoon he began work in competition for a prize offered by the Berlin Academy for the best essay on “Whether the Metaphysical Sciences Are Susceptible of Such Evidence as the Mathematical.” Among other contestants was Immanuel Kant. Mendelssohn’s contribution won (1763), bringing him fifty ducats and international renown.
One of the contestants was Thomas Abt, a professor in Frankfurt-am-Oder. In a long correspondence with Mendelssohn he expressed doubts as to the immortality of the soul, and mourned that the loss of that belief might undermine the moral code and deprive misfortune of its last consolation. Partly as a result of this exchange, Mendelssohn composed his most famous work: Phaidon, oder Über die Unsterb
lichkeit der Seele. Like its Platonic exemplar, it was cast in dialogue form and popular style. The soul of man (ran the argument) is clearly different from matter; we may therefore believe that it does not share the body’s fate; and if we believe in God we can hardly suppose that he would deceive us by implanting in our minds a hope without basis in truth. Moreover [as Kant was to hold] the soul has a natural drive toward self-perfection; this cannot be attained in our lifetime; God must surely allow the soul to survive the death of the body. “Without God, Providence, and immortality,” Mendelssohn felt, “all the goods of life would lose their worth in my eyes, and our earthly life would be … like wandering in wind and weather without the consoling prospect of finding cover and protection at night.”49 The demonstrations were fragile, but the style of the work delighted many readers; the charm of Plato’s dialogues seemed to have been recaptured; indeed, “the German Plato” became another name for Mendelssohn. The little book ran through fifteen editions, and was translated into nearly all European languages as well as Hebrew; it was, in its time, the most widely read nonfiction book in Germany. Herder and Goethe joined in its praise. Lavater visited the author, examined his head and face, and announced that every bump and line revealed the soul of Socrates.50
Christians of diverse sects applauded the eloquent Jew, and two Benedictine friars asked for his spiritual counsel. But in 1769 Lavater, who was as ardent a theologian as he was a phrenologist, caused a flurry by making a public appeal to Mendelssohn to become a Christian. Mendelssohn replied in Schreiben an den Herrn Diaconus Lavater (1770). He admitted defects in Judaism and Jewish life, but pointed out that such abuses develop in every religion in the course of its history; he asked Lavater to consider the hardships suffered by the Jews in Christendom, and added: “He who knows the state in which we now are, and has a humane heart, will understand more than I can express”; and he concluded: “Of the essentials of my faith I am so firmly … assured that I call God to witness that I will adhere to my fundamental creed as long as my soul does not assume another nature.”51 Lavater was moved, and humbly apologized for having issued his appeal.52 But a swarm of pamphleteers denounced Mendelssohn as an infidel, and some orthodox Jews condemned him for admitting that abuses had crept into Jewish religious usages.53 For a time the controversy generated more discussion than national politics or the decline of Frederick’s health.
Mendelssohn’s own health suffered from the turmoil; for several months in 1771 he had to refrain from all mental activity. On recovering his strength he devoted more of his time than before to the relief of his co-religionists. When some cantons in Switzerland were preparing further restrictions against the Jews he asked Lavater to interfere; Lavater did, with good effect. When the Dresden authorities planned to expel several hundred Jews Mendelssohn used his friendship with a local official to secure an accommodation.54 He began in 1778 to publish his German translation of the Pentateuch; issued in 1783, this aroused another storm. To write some of the commentaries on the text Mendelssohn had engaged Herz Homberg, who was associated with Berlin Jews quite estranged from the synagogue. Several rabbis banned the translation, but it found its way into the Jewish communities; young Jews learned German from it, and the next generation of Jews moved into active participation in German intellectual life. Mean while (1779) Lessing published his drama Nathan der Weise, which hundreds of readers interpreted as an exaltation of his Jewish friend.
Now at the height of his fame and influence Mendelssohn persuaded Marcus Herz to translate into German that Vindication of the Jews which Manasseh ben Israel had addressed to the English people in 1656. To the translation he added a preface on “The Salvation of the Jews” (1782), in which he pleaded with the rabbis to abandon their right of excommunication. He followed this in 1783 with an eloquent work called Jerusalem, oder Über religiöse Macht und Judenthum (On Religious Authority and Judaism), in which he reaffirmed his Judaic faith, called upon the Jews to come out of the ghetto and take their part in Western culture, urged the separation of church and state, condemned any compulsion of belief, and proposed that states be judged by the degree in which they relied on persuasion rather than force. Kant, now too at his zenith, wrote to the author a letter that deserves a place in the annals of friendship:
I consider this book the herald of a great reform, which will affect not alone your people but also others. You have succeeded in combining your religion with such a degree of freedom of conscience as was never imagined possible. … You have, at the same time, so clearly and thoroughly demonstrated the necessity of unlimited freedom of conscience in every religion, that ultimately our [Lutheran] Church will also be led to consider how to remove from its midst everything that disturbs or oppresses conscience.55
The book was attacked by orthodox leaders Christian or Jewish, but it contributed immensely to the liberation and Westernization of the Jews.
In 1783 Mendelssohn was only fifty-four, but he had always been frail in physique and health, and he felt that he had not much longer to live. In his final years he delivered to his children and some friends lectures defining his religious creed; these were published in 1785 as Morgenstunden, oder Vorlesungen über das Dasein Gottes (Morning Hours, or Lectures on the Existence of God). In his last year he was shocked to learn, from a book by Jacobi, that his dear friend Lessing, now dead, had long adhered to Spinoza’s pantheism. He could not believe it. He wrote a passionate defense of Lessing—An die Freunde Lessings. While taking the manuscript to the publishers he caught a cold; and in the course of that sickness he died of an apoplectic stroke, January 4, 1786. Christians joined with Jews in erecting a statue to him in Dessau, the city of his birth.
He was one of the most influential figures of his generation. Inspired by his writings and his successful crossing of religious frontiers, young Jews came out of the ghetto, and soon made their mark in literature, science, and philosophy. Marcus Herz went to the University of Königsberg as a medical student; he took several of Kant’s courses, and became the great epistemolog’s assistant and friend; it was he who, reading the Critique of Pure Reason in manuscript, stopped halfway for fear that if he continued he would go insane. Back in Berlin, he developed a large practice as a physician, and gave lectures in physics and philosophy to audiences of Christians and Jews. His wife, Henrietta, beautiful and accomplished, opened a salon which, at the turn of the century, was a leading rendezvous of intellectual Berlin; there came Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schlegel, Mirabeau fils … The resultant mixture of ideas might not have pleased Mendelssohn. Several of his children became converts to Christianity. Two of his daughters joined Henrietta Herz and others in a “Tugenbund,” or Band of Virtue, which honored “elective affinities” above marital fidelity. Henrietta carried on a liaison with Schleiermacher; Dorothea Mendelssohn left her husband to be the mistress and then loyal wife of Friedrich Schlegel, and ended as a Roman Catholic; Henrietta Mendelssohn also accepted the Roman creed; and Abraham Mendelssohn caused his children, including Felix, to be baptized as Lutherans; the orthodox rabbis claimed that their fears had been justified. These were incidental results of the new freedom; the more lasting aspects of Mendelssohn’s influence appeared in the intellectual, social, and political liberation of the Jews.
IV. TOWARD FREEDOM
Intellectually, the liberation took at this time the form of the Haskalah—a word which meant wisdom, but which came in this context to signify the Jewish Enlightenment, the revolt of a rising number of Jews against rabbinical and Talmudic domination, and their resolve to enter actively into the stream of modern thought. These rebels learned German, and some of them, especially in the families of merchants or financiers, learned French; they read German freethinkers like Lessing, Kant, Wieland, Herder, Schiller, and Goethe, and many of them delved into Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Helvétius, and d’Holbach. A division arose between liberal Jews, eager for modernity, and conservative Jews who felt that devotion to the Talmud and the synagogue was the only way to pre
serve the religious, ethnical, and ethical integrity of the Jewish people.
The Haskalah movement spread from Germany southward into Galicia and Austria, eastward into Bohemia, Poland, and Russia. In Austria it was accelerated by Joseph II’s Toleranzpatent, which invited the Jews to enter non-Jewish schools. When conservative rabbis opposed this, Naphtali Wessely, a Jewish poet of Hamburg, pleaded with them, in an eloquent Hebrew manifesto, to sanction the participation of Jews in secular education; he urged the younger generation to replace Yiddish with Hebrew and German, and to study science and philosophy as well as the Bible and the Talmud. His views were rejected by the rabbis of Austria; they were accepted by Jewish leaders in Trieste, Venice, Ferrara, and Prague. From that time to ours the Jews have contributed to science, philosophy, literature, music, and law far beyond their proportion in the population.
Intellectual and economic developments promoted Jewish emancipation. Catholic scholars like Richard Simon made rabbinical learning known to Christian students of the Bible, and the Protestant theologian Jacques Basnage wrote a friendly History of the Religion of the Jews (1707). The growth of commerce and finance brought Christians and Jews into contacts that sometimes stimulated, but often reduced, racial hostility. Jewish financiers played helpful and patriotic roles in several governments.
Christian voices now rose to propose an end to religious persecution. In 1781 Christian Wilhelm Dohm, a friend of Mendelssohn, published at his suggestion the epochal tract Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden in Deutschland (On the Civil Betterment of the Jews in Germany). The occasion for it was a plea sent to Mendelssohn by Alsatian Jews, asking him to formulate a protest against their disabilities. Dohm undertook the task, and enlarged it into a general appeal for Jewish liberation. He described in impressive detail the handicaps suffered by the Hebrews in Europe, and pointed out what a loss it was to Western civilization that it made so little use of the intellectual gifts of the Jews. “These principles of exclusion, equally opposed to humanity and politics, bear the stamp of the Dark Ages, and are unworthy of the enlightenment of our times.”56 Dohm proposed that the Jews be admitted to full freedom of worship, to educational institutions, to all occupations, and to all civil rights except, for the present, eligibility to office, for which they were not yet prepared.
