Krochmal believed that the Jewish enlighteners and the unreconstructed Orthodox were alike unacceptable. The first devitalized Judaism, the second made it repellent; both, in nineteenth-century conditions, produced apostasy. The trouble was that neither type of Jew had a sense of Jewish history. The enlighteners thought it was just something you learned as a child, then went on to secular, ‘adult’ history when you grew up. The Orthodox Jews ignored history altogether–as he put it, ‘there is no early or late in the Torah’.
