History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

the British government also intervened on its own account:

Disraeli,

believed that the Jews, by their virtues and their glorious past, were entitled to special esteem, and he devoted his tremendous audacity and imagination to securing it for them.

Disraeli preached the innate superiority of certain races long before the social Darwinists made it fashionable, or Hitler notorious.

Jewish purity had been saved by persecution, by constant movement and migration:

He took great satisfaction in both blaming the Christians for not recognizing the virtues of Judaism, and blaming the Jews for not grasping that Christianity was ‘completed Judaism’.

Disraeli’s philosemitic propaganda would not have worked on the Continent.

Nevertheless, there was in the early nineteenth century a determined attempt by learned Jews to counter the presentation of Judaism as a survival of medieval obscurantism, and to replace the repulsive image of the professing Jew, fashioned by Voltaire on a Spinozan basis, by an intellectually attractive one. The first requisite was to erect some kind of bridge between the best of rabbinical scholarship and the world of secular learning.

Leopold Zunz

who devoted the whole of an immensely long life to the refurbishment of the old-style Jewish learning and its presentation in a modern, ‘scientific’ spirit.

Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Science of Judaism.

They started from the assumption that the Jews had once made formidable contributions to the general culture, but then had lapsed into narrow religious antiquarianism. Now Jewish scholarship should come to life again.

objection to ‘Jewish science’: was it not contrary to the true spirit of Judaism?

some ways a most attractive prospect. But it was not Judaism. The pious Jew–and there could be no other–did not admit the existence of two kinds of knowledge, sacred and secular. There was only one. Moreover, there was only one legitimate purpose in acquiring it: to discover the exact will of God, in order to obey it. Hence the ‘science of Judaism’, as a dislocated academic discipline, was contrary to Jewish belief. Worse, it was the exact reversal of the true Jewish attitude to studying. As the Rabbi Hiyya put it in the fourth century AD: ‘If a man learns the Law without intending to fulfil the Law, it were better for him had he never been born.’47 A real Jew did not see Jewish history as a self-contained bit of world history, on a parallel with that of other peoples. To them, Jewish history was history.

the destruction of the Second Temple and the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt were episodes not in Jewish, but in total history,

The Jews had ceased to write history from then on because there was no history, as they conceived it, to write. It had stopped. History would be resumed with the coming of the Messiah.

Hence, though Zunz’s ‘scientific’ presentation of Jewish history and learning as a contribution to the world stock might make some impression on gentile society, it involved almost by definition a severance from a great part of Judaism. It was subjected to devastating, and in religious terms unanswerable, criticism by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-88), the brilliant spokesman of nineteenth-century Orthodoxy.

Israel was not a secular community but a divine one.

If you merge Jewish with secular history, you desacralize it and kill the living idea which is its theme.

Later in the century, the point was to be made still more decisively by Nietzsche: once it became possible to study scientifically the history of a religion, he said, it is already dead.

Yet if the logic of Hirsch’s criticism was followed, Jews would in effect be back where they started before the enlightenment. They would constantly be forced to make distinctions between two types of knowledge.

That would be a fatal barrier to Jews ever becoming accepted as a legitimate part of the general community. Was it not possible to reach some kind of half-way house?

With Heinrich Graetz (1817-91),

the Jews at last produced a historian, and on a massive scale too, who could not only be read and believed by enlightened Jews, but read–and to some extent accepted–by gentiles too.

Between 1856 and 1876 he published an eleven-volume History of the Jews which is one of the great monuments of ninet...

Graetz’s work, though of permanent importance in Jewish historical studies, did not supply an answer either to the problem of bridging Judaism and the secular world.

As history it was useful; as a philosophy it was not in the end acceptable to any group.

For the kabbalah and the hasidim he had nothing but contempt. Contemporary students of haskalah were dismissed as ‘fossilized Polish Talmudists’. He called Yiddish ridiculous. Hence he could have no real message for the great masses of eastern Jewry. But he did not satisfy the enlightened Orthodox either.

If no satisfactory solution could be found to the problem of how to relate Jewish to secular culture, was it possible to bring the practice of Jewish religion into harmony with the modern world? That too was attempted. Reform Judaism,

Like every other effort to bring Judaism into a new relationship with the world, it was primarily a German initiative.

Enlightened Jews were ashamed of their traditional services: the dead weight of the past, the lack of intellectual content, the noisy and unseemly manner in which Orthodox Jews prayed.

Hence Reform Judaism was, in the first place, an attempt to remove the taint of ridicule from Jewish forms of worship. The object was to induce a seemly religious state of mind.

The mention of the Messiah was dropped; so was a return to the Holy Land. The idea was to purify and re-energize Judaism in the same spirit as Luther’s reformation.

Reform Judaism was animated less by overwhelming conviction than by social tidy-mindedness and the desire to be more genteel. Its spirit was not religious but secular. It was well meaning but an artificial construct, like so many idealistic schemes of the nineteenth century, from Comte’s Positivism to Esperanto.

But what Reform did not do, any more than the ‘Science of Judaism’, was to solve the Jewish problem. It did not normalize the Jews because it never spoke for more than a minority. It was, in essence, an alternative to baptism and complete assimilation,

By the end of the 1840s, it was obvious that it was not going to take over Judaism, even in enlightened Germany.

One reason why Jews who wished to participate fully in the modern world without losing their Judaism failed to achieve a workable formula was that they could not agree on a language in which to express it.

The men of the Jewish enlightenment wanted to resurrect Hebrew.

their project lacked dynamism.

They saw it, rather, as being intellectually respectable, the Jewish equivalent of the Latin and Greek which was the ancient cultural heritage of Christian Europe.

Everywhere in Europe, experts were compiling grammars, putting local tongues into written form and endowing them with rules and syntax

The maskils wanted to subject Hebrew to this process.

Logically, of course, they should have picked Yiddish, a tongue which Jews actually spoke. But the maskils regarded it with abhorrence.

It stood for everything they most deplored about the ghetto and unregenerated Judaism: poverty, i...

So the maskils revived Hebrew. But they did not know what to write in it.

a hybrid presentation of the Bible, using German words in Hebrew characters.

Once Jews read German, and acquired secular culture, their interest in Hebrew declined, or vanished; many even lost their Judaism.

There was, indeed, a living if tenuous Hebrew tradition in literature. But the maskils found that distasteful too, for ideological reasons. Great medieval scholars like Maimonides had written in Arabic. But the practice of writing in Hebrew also survived in Moslem Spain, and thence it re-emerged in Renaissance Italy. Some Italian Jews continued to write beautiful Hebrew throughout the seventeenth century. Then the tradition acquired a genius: Moses Hayyim Luzzatto (1707-46).

for enlightened German Jews. On the contrary: he symbolized what they wished to repudiate and eliminate. For Luzzatto was a kabbalist and a mystic. Worse: he may well have been a secret Shabbatean,

So the living Hebrew tradition, such as it was, could not be fitted into the master-plan of the enlightenment. Their scheme to run Hebrew in tandem with German thus made no progress. Jews simply learned German, and assimilated themselves.