Moses Hirschel and Enlightenment Breslau: A City and its Jews in the Late Eighteenth Century 9783030462345

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Moses Hirschel and Enlightenment Breslau A City and its Jews in the Late Eighteenth century David Heywood Jones

Moses Hirschel and Enlightenment Breslau

David Heywood Jones

Moses Hirschel and Enlightenment Breslau A City and its Jews in the Late Eighteenth Century

David Heywood Jones Independent Scholar Berlin, Germany

ISBN 978-3-030-46234-5    ISBN 978-3-030-46235-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46235-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book simply would not have existed if it were not for a chance meeting many years ago with the philosopher, teacher and Haskalah veteran Christoph Schulte. Professor Schulte may have furnished the intellectual inspiration for my dissertation, but it was a generous three-year fellowship at the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk (ELES), foundation which provided me with the financial means to write about Moses Hirschel and Breslau. At ELES, Prof. Eva Lezzi, Prof. Walter Homolka and Prof. Anja Paschedag lent vital inspiration, input and support when needed. Special thanks to my second reader Prof. Daniel Krochmalnik, his work on Early Burial was an important source for my research. I would also like to express my gratitude to my colleagues and Prof. Sina Rauschenbach at our wonderful weekly colloquia at the University of Potsdam over the years. In particular, Julian Holter and Dr Michal Szulc presented important reality checks when the ghosts of Chanukah past threatened to swallow my research whole. My research trips to Wrocław would have been short and brutal were it not for the support from a number of institutions and academics. Andreas Reinke’s painstaking archival work from the 1990s was a light and guide for my work. The dazzling team under Marcin Wodziński at University of Wrocław offered technical support whenever they could. They generously let me stay at their visiting scholars’ rooms in the “Stefczyka” every time I was in the city. The library staff at the University Library in Breslau deserve special mention for their patience and friendly assistance. Finally, Breslau

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would not have been the same if it were not for meetings with Professor Jerzy Kos—Breslau’s resident treasure trove of information on the city’s fascinating history and archives. Finally, I wish to thank Matilda, Emil and Púca for being there. Always.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Jewish Historiography  5 Why Is Typical European Jewish Historiography Problematic?   5 Jews and Their Identities  22 Moses Hirschel: Agency, Identity and Influence  28 3 Socio-Ethnic History of Breslau 35 History of Breslau, 1740–1818  35 Breslau’s History and the Historiographical Problem  45 4 Moses Hirschel: A Critical Biography 49 Hirschel’s Early Life  50 Popular Enlightenment  55 Hirschel’s Popular Enlightenment Works  57 Hirschel’s Personal and Professional Life  67 5 Hirschel and the Orthodoxy 75 Hirschel and the Class Question  78 The Rabbinical Elite and Jewish Emancipation  87

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CONTENTS

6 Jewish Rights, Human Rights and Anti-Semitism121 Anti-Semitism in Prussia 121 Hirschel’s Response to Contemporary Anti-Semitism 146 7 Haskalah and Enlightenment in Silesia153 Enlightenment in Central Europe 153 What Is Haskalah and Who Were Maskilim? 168 Enlightenment in Breslau 181 8 Final Remarks219 Bibliography223 Index259

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Moses Hirschel is a name known to only a handful of Haskalah researchers and scholars of European Jewish history. Even then, he is usually on the periphery of their discussions, themselves on the periphery of European Enlightenment research. One can safely say, Moses Hirschel is generally treated as a footnote. Not only that, when his name does appear, his few works and actions are usually given a negative connotation. Moreover, the city and region where he lived and worked, Breslau in Silesia, fell down the rabbit hole of history when it was rechristened Wrocław and redefined as an intrinsic part of the Polish Voivodeship of Wrocław in 1945. This book is not an attempt to push a footnote into the limelight of European Haskalah research. Hirschel’s reception history and that of many of the maskilim and enlightened Jews and non-Jews in Breslau was short lived. Hirschel left no literary estate and there are scant biographical evidences left to find. But an intellectual biography of a person or a time or even a city should not merely contain a collection of data or a repetition of sources. This work is an intellectual biography of a person, a city and an epoch. The three layers are mutually inclusive and also mutually significant in that they bring to light a city which provides a superior example of the Enlightenment in Central Europe at a time of huge societal, cultural, and religious change. To agree with Moshe Zimmermann “Biography as such provides insights about a mechanism that constitutes – together with similar mechanisms (i.e. people) – the society that produces and tolerates specific characteristics. A single life…provides as much relevant information © The Author(s) 2021 D. Heywood Jones, Moses Hirschel and Enlightenment Breslau, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46235-2_1

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about a society as the single atom or molecule provides about a natural element.”1 The single life I will be discussing is at once a radical enlightener, Jew, Christian, publicist, maskil, Silesian, a Prussian and, lest we forget, European. Moses Hirschel lived in a city and province boasting substantial Catholic and Jewish populations compared to the rest of Prussia. During Hirschel’s lifetime, Breslau went from being a fiercely independent Lutheran exclave within the Catholic Austro-Hungarian Empire to an integral part of a largely centralised Germano-nationalist Prussian state. The years in which he actively published were also the years when Jews across Prussia were fighting for civic equality and the Ashkenazi religious elite in the region were fighting tooth and nail to maintain their draconian hold over the lives of their congregants. Jewish history in Central Europe is often treated by historians as a hermetically sealed sphere of activity. And this despite the large pool of primary texts from the period which show the profound interconnectedness between Jewish enlighteners, their environs and fellow intellectuals. An honest portrait of Jews in Central Europe around the time of the emancipation debates should also include discussion of the concurrent and mutually influential social, cultural and religious processes and changes happening in the non-Jewish environment. By choosing to integrate elements of Jewish history into German history, one automatically challenges the widespread notion that German history is a history of a homogenous ethnic and religious group. This is nether true of the Germans (e.g. Prussians, Breslavians, nobility, peasants, Mennonites, Jews and Master Craftsmen) nor of the Jews (e.g. Ashkenazi, Sephardim, poor and rich). As Till van Rahden explains in his biography of Jewish life in Breslau in the nineteenth century, “a German-­Jewish history which looks into plurality and difference in German society, presupposes a new understanding about integration, ethnicity and assimilation.”2 Drawing on the aforementioned statements, this book will move away from fixed or inherited notions of exclusively bipolar cultural and religious oppositions and will instead compose a historical, political and cultural collage rather than painting a sweeping narrative. Writing back in 1992, 1  Moshe Zimmermann, “Biography as a Historical Monograph,” in Sozialgeschichte der Juden in Deutschland, ed. Shulamit Volkov (Gerlingen: Bleicher, 1991), 452. 2  Till van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 17.

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Jonathan Frankel mused, perhaps prematurely, that Jewish historiography had moved from being perceived not in terms of “bipolarity but of multiplicity. Instead of the one basic conflict between centrifugality and centripetality, now a great variety of autonomous processes, independent variables, are traced as they interact in constantly new permutations.”3

3  Jonathan Frankel, “Assimilation and the Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), 16.

CHAPTER 2

Jewish Historiography

Why Is Typical European Jewish Historiography Problematic? If we can truly be said to be living in a post-modern age, then surely one can write a historical thesis without an exhaustive explanation of one’s motives or the manner in which certain presumptions informed or even shaped the subject at hand. The twentieth century’s legacy in the human sciences has left many of us with a justified scepticism of a dogmatic faith in historical narratives. Indeed, there is now an almost pathological reluctance to accept or deploy grand narratives without adding caveats and warnings for the presumed (and much-feared) naive reader. In 1979, Jean-François Lyotard famously announced that the very quintessence and definition of “postmodernity” was “incredulity toward metanarratives.”1 The fall of the shortly lived fact-value dichotomy in philosophy and post-structuralist revolutions in the approach to all texts are now already half a century old. The academy is the current chief purveyor of relativist and perspectivist world views. And yet, when one approaches Jewish Studies, one is more often than not confronted with an unreflected and uncritical approach to the grand nationalist narratives smelted in the dogmatic historicist furnaces of the nineteenth century.2 1  Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1984), xxiv. 2  Moshe Rosman, How Jewish is Jewish History? (Oxford: Littman Library, 2009), 47ff.

© The Author(s) 2021 D. Heywood Jones, Moses Hirschel and Enlightenment Breslau, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46235-2_2

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The stakes in Jewish Studies are of course much higher than for other disciplines. The State of Israel, the Jewish nation-state, is a sanctuary and home for over 50% of the world’s Jewish population. Israel’s very raison d’être and ontology is built upon Zionist narratives which presuppose both some form of transhistorical Jewish essence and an inherent, congenital, even divine right, to settle and rule over Ha’Arez. In Israel, debates about Jewish history are not limited to the hallowed halls of academic institutions. After the Oslo Accords were signed during the 1990s, there were successful public campaigns against textbooks in Israel which questioned assumptions of a clear separation between Jews and non-Jews in the diaspora.3 In contrast to general assumptions about cultural or national exclusivity, this book will explain the history of Jews as a now indivisible history of complex reciprocal influence or “social and intellectual exchange”4 with gentile nations and cultural spheres. I am proposing a processual theory of historical development which, in this sense, should be viewed as a cultural theory as opposed to a nationalist-essentialist approach. According to this view, Judaism and Jewish cultural norms and identity have been subject to constant redefinition. This approach introduces what Gotzmann claims is “a concept of culture…fundamentally opposed to Jewish history as an identity discourse designed to define stable normative patterns and a secure vision of what to understand as ‘Jewish’ in the future when ‘looking at the past.’”5 Moreover, 1000  years of documented persecution, defamation and murder in Europe remains a catalyst for apologetic, didactic and even triumphalist Jewish nationalisms. As with all other nationalist discourses, historical narratives are the basic condition for nationalist self-understanding. In short, all nations have narratives. As a traditionally supra-territorial, polyglot, culturally and socially heterogeneous people, the grand narratives of Jewish peoples in Europe were consciously deployed as a means of creating unity within the atomised trans-European communities commonly identified as Jewish. In other words, for Jews, grand narratives were 3  Michael Miller and Scott Ury, “Cosmopolitanism: The End of Jewishness?” European Review of History 17 (2010): 338. 4  Andreas Gotzmann, “Historiography as Cultural Identity” in Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness, ed. Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 519. 5  Gotzmann, “Historiography as Cultural Identity,” 521.

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and are a means of securing existential survival and are not simply a projection of a unifying political or cultural agenda. And so it should come as little surprise that the uncritical histories promulgated by many Jewish Studies historians survived the critical upheavals within nationalist discourses forced by the advent post-colonial theory. To reveal the influence Eurocentric and nationalist grand narratives had on the colonisation and subjugation of “subalterns,” post-colonial theorists attacked historicist approaches to history. They exposed the positivist roots of historical meta-narratives. In his work on the correlation between historicism in the nineteenth century and Eurocentric justifications for colonisation, Chakrabarty defines historicism as “the idea that to understand anything it has to be seen both as a unity and in its historical development.”6 That is to say, historicist approaches to history write history in terms of cohesive narratives which include an ulterior developmental trajectory (not necessarily teleological). So each narrative (a) has “some kind of unity” and (b) is something “which develops over time.”7 The problem with such narratives, as post-colonial and cultural theorists draw attention to, is the circularity of the central assumption. Namely, that historical narratives have an objective internal unity and that this unity is part of a coherent supra-historical development. Just consider the internal structure and anachronistic teleology many Zionist historians draw upon. In both cases, however, this unity and development are essentially uncritical impositions of the historian. They ignore the uniqueness and immediate contexts of the people and places they investigate as well as ignoring the particularity of historical events.8 Gotzmann succinctly explains, “The process of redefinition and criticism that shook other fields in the wake of the breakdown of colonialism left Jewish studies almost entirely untouched. Though all fought for proper representation and acknowledgment, the persistent need to defend the field and its inward perspective against the other master narratives remained characteristic.”9 In their defence, Jewish scholars working in Central Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had the added misfortune of having to defend the content of their findings and 6  Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), 6. 7  Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 23. 8  See Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 22. 9  Gotzmann, “Historiography as Cultural Identity,” 517.

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defend their right as Jews to present these findings to peers.10 Due to the need to justify their right to present any narrative in an academic setting in the first place, the conditions in which Jewish nationalist scholarship came about heavily influenced the later lack of critical reflection on the theoretical foundations of those narratives. Thus, nineteenth-century historicism and historicist approaches to Jewish history by Jewish historians remained the norm until the last decades of the twentieth century.11 Looking beyond Jewish studies, it was not until the end of the Cold War in the 1990s that more historians began writing integrative European histories.12 The period around the time of fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 brought forth completely new approaches to European historiography The two overriding political and economic master narratives gave way to competing memories from a plurality of emergent voices across the whole continent. The fall of The Wall had a huge impact on Jewish studies in the new German republic. Stefan Rohrbacher has shown in his history of Jewish studies in Germany in the twentieth century that Marxist-influenced historiography in the  German Democratic Republic (GDR) paid little attention to Jewish matters. If broached at all, Jewish themes in the GDR were merely brushed upon in studies on fascism or the Nazi period. In the Federal Republic of Germany on the other side of the Iron Curtain, historians had little interest in pursuing Jewish themes as this meant reflecting on German historians’ own role in Nazi Germany. Post-war historians in West Germany were, for the most part, still part of a “nationalist-­ conservative” milieu.13 Despite the enormous changes after the fall of The Wall, German-­ language Jewish studies still lags far behind other historical disciplines in facilitating the integration of its subject matter into broader European historical narratives. This situation led Andreas Gotzmann to claim in 2001 that, with the notable exception of histories of anti-Semitism, Jewish

10  Susannah Heschel was the first to use post-colonial theory to analyse the relationship between Jewish-Germans (ergo “colonized”) and their fellow German citizens (ergo “colonizers”), see, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998). 11  For a detailed review of the rise, influence and lasting hold historicism had on Jewish studies see: David N Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in GermanJewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Pr., 2003). 12  Dan Diner, Gedächtniszeiten (München: Beck, 2003), 12. 13  Stefan Rohrbacher, “Jüdische Geschichte,” in Wissenschaft vom Judentum, ed. Michael Brenner and Stefan Rohrbacher (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 166–67.

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history was still not an “obvious subject of historical interest” to German historians.14 Very little has changed over the past two decades.15 Andreas Brämer suggests that this research lacuna is due to German historians’ fear of Jewish themes as they yet still been unable to overcome a “past overshadowed by the Scho’ah.”16 Brämer further argues that although there has been growing interest in Jewish-German history as a sub-discipline of German history, this has, for the most part, merely discussed the relationship of Jews to non-Jewish population. When it comes to Jewish agency and its impact within and on German history, Jews are often regarded as marginal figures.17 As a further point, David Sorkin reminds us that the veritable disappearance of a German Jewry forced a caesura in historiographic reappraisals of German-Jewish histories. Sorkin claimed back in 1990 that a new appraisal of Jewish-German history has had to first wait for “the emergence of a new historiography in the United States and Israel, the major centres of post-war Jewish life and of the German-Jewish Diaspora, and the awakening of interest among Germans in the Jewish element of their own national past.”18 Thus, for Sorkin, the absence of an “organic” Jewish-­ German intelligentsia has allowed Jewish-German themes to lose the significance they once enjoyed. The aforementioned anomalies within Jewish historiography have meant that histories of Jewish historiographical approaches are slowly becoming as voluminous as histories of the Jews themselves. At present, there is simply no easy way to talk about Jewish history without first discussing at length the trajectory or perspective from which one is writing. Perhaps the most insightful publication on Jewish historiography to appear in the recent past has been Moshe Rosman’s 2007 How Jewish Is Jewish History? Rosman cogently explains how our post-modern sensibilities have allowed us to view historiographies, a priori, as competing narratives in which coherence and plausibility as well as intention are intrinsic to the 14  Andreas Gotzmann, Rainer Liedtke, Till van Rahden, introduction to Juden, Bürger, Deutsche: ed. Andreas Gotzmann, Rainer Liedtke, Till van Rahden (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 3. 15  cf., Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness, ed. Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2007); more current, Disseminating German Tradition, ed. Dan Diner and Mosche Zimmermann (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2009). 16  Andreas Brämer, Leistung und Gegenleistung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 13. 17  Brämer, Leistung und Gegenleistung, 12. 18  David Sorkin, “Emancipation and Assimilation,” LBIY 35 (1990), 25.

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reader’s understanding and acceptance of that narrative. Rosman eschews traditional historiographic meta-narratives in favour of a more dynamic definition of identity without invoking the Damoclean blade of historical relativism. Rosman was by no means the first to highlight the need for a revision of Jewish-German historiographic methodologies. In 1996, Evyatar Friesel identified a number of texts from the early 1970s19 which suggested more attention should be given to Jewish and German cultural reciprocity.20 It was not until the early 1990s, however, that counter histories and revisionist historical thinking became louder. Over a decade before Rosman, we can now also identify David Sorkin, Evyatar Friesel, Paula Hyman, Jonathan Franckel and Todd Endelman as pioneering new approaches to Jewish-German historiography.21 Shulamit Volkov, Samuel Moyn, and David N. Myers also drew attention to the need to radically revise all traditional presuppositions of Jewish-German historiography, without offering substantial revisions themselves.22 Despite calls for a paradigm shift, there has been a paucity of monographs which dare to make use of the new terms and categories urged by the historians above. This is particularly true for academics writing in German and Hebrew. Till van Rahden’s Juden und andere Breslauer published in 2000 and Frank Stern’s

19  Friesel names Ismar Schorsch, Jewish Reactions to German Anti-Semitism, 1870–1914 (New York et al.: Columbia Univ. Press, 1972); Jehuda Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised Land. The Dilemma of the German Jew, 1893–1914; from 1975; and Michael A.  Meyer, Response to Modernity (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990); see Evyatar Friesel, “The German-Jewish Encounter as a Historical Problem,” LBIY 41 (1996): 270–71. 20  Friesel, “The German-Jewish Encounter as a Historical Problem,” 271. 21  David Sorkin, “Emancipation and Assimilation. Two Concepts and their Application to German-Jewish History,” LBIY 35 (1990): 17–33; David Sorkin, “The impact of emancipation on German Jewry: a reconsideration,” in Assimilation and Community, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1992); Paula E. Hyman “The Ideological Transformation of Modern Jewish Historiography,” in The State of Jewish Studies, ed. Shaye J. D. Cohen and Edward L. Greenstein (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1990); Jonathan Frankel, “Assimilation and the Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in Assimilation and Community; Todd M.  Endelman, “The Legitimization of Diaspora Experience in Recent Jewish Historiography,” Modern Judaism 11 (1991): 195–209. 22  David N.  Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past (New York: Oxford Univ. Pr., 1995); Samuel Moyn, “German Jewry and the Question of Identity Historiography and Theory” LBIY 41 (1996); Shulamit Volkov, “Reflections on German-Jewish Historiography: A Dead End or a New Beginning?” LBIY 41 (1996).

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2002 Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht are notable exceptions from German language academia.23 The Structural Problem The structural problem of the history of German Jewry in comparison to mainstream German history is an issue which has been raised by a small but growing number of German-speaking (Jewish Studies) academics. These demands are being inspirted by the growing awareness of the interconnectedness of European histories and a widespread unease with nationalist “ethnic absolutist” approaches. Integrative or “transnational histories” are beginning to emerge in increasing numbers.24 I will now introduce a further  problem. Namely, the historiographic tools Jewish studies scholars in the German-speaking lands traditionally use. These analytic tools have more often than not either presupposed an essentialist concept of Jewish identity or have deployed meta-narratives across epochs using an essentialist model of Jewish and/or German identity. Up until the last decades of the twentieth century, one’s methodological approach to Jewish history usually meant inclusion in one of three main camps: Zionist, Nationalist or Liberal (Acculturationist/ Assimilationist) in intention.25 A method for defining Zionist thinkers is to identify historians working with a negative view of the Jewish diaspora, that is, those who negate the value of diasporic life in order to champion or justify a necessary “return” to Ha’Arez. A strict bifurcation of “Jewish and German,” “tradition and assimilation” are other defining characteristics of Zionist histories. Jonathan Frankel explains that “bipolarity” became the “paradigmatic principle which supplied these works with their underlying structure.”26 23  van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer. See also, “Von der Eintracht zur Vielfalt,” in Juden, Bürger, Deutsche, ed. Andreas Gotzmann, Rainer Liedtke and Till van Rahden (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001); Frank Stern, Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2002). 24  Heinz Kleger makes a similar argument in his “Transnationalität als Herausforderung politischer Theorie,” in Wieviel Transnationalismus verträgt die Kultur? ed. Willi Jaspar (Berlin: Köster, 2009), 12–37. 25  cf. Volkov’s 1996 discussion of “National [or] Zionist and Liberal” historiographic approaches in Volkov, “Reflections on German-Jewish Historiography,” 309–20. 26  Frankel, “Assimilation and the Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” 4.

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He later argues that a focus on bipolarity “encouraged the tendency to focus the spotlight on the extremes, thus leaving the middle ground, although certainly not out of sight, still in the shadows.”27 We can also add Gershom Scholem, Jacob Katz,28 Hillel Ben Sasson, Shmuel Ettinger and Yitzhak Baer to the list of those making no secret of their antipathy towards diaspora life—thereby maintaining an essentialist cultural bifurcation.29 Ury and Miller define the Israeli Zionist Historians as “dedicated to their search for all-embracing conceptions and community that not only created clearly defined and digestible worlds composed of Jews and ‘the nations’ but also lent shape and legitimacy to coherent conceptions of what was often thought to be the complete, undiluted nature of national communities.”30 Outside of German-language academia, there is only a small group of scholars who have written about Breslau. Namely Shmuel Feiner and Natali Naimark-Goldberg, both of whom publish in Hebrew and then translate their works to English or rewrite in English. Both historians are inclined towards essentialist or Zionist views on maskilim in Silesia.31 Natali Naimark-Goldberg consistently describes Jewish intellectuals who were not part of rabbinic circles or the Hebrew language revival as assimilationists, radicals or proponents of secularisation. She claims that the Breslau Dayan Pappenheimer “remained faithful to his religion and faith” in his opposition to Jewish enlighteners. The implication, of course, is that the other enlighteners were unfaithful—she terms other intellectuals as “imposters.”32 In a 2011 book, Shmuel Feiner and Naimark-Goldberg reinforce Zionist notions that Enlightenment was “European” and that Jewish  Frankel, “Assimilation and the Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” 6.  For example, Katz speaks of an “organic unity” (p. 8) of Jewish diaspora which cannot be questioned. He further claims that Jews “stood apart from their environments” (p. 7) and that the diaspora can be viewed as part of an essential historical Jewish character later corrupted and changed by the destruction of the national character of the Jews by maskilim in the 1780s (leading to assimilation with Christians) [pp. 234–35]: Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1993). 29  For a more nuanced view of Zionist historiography, in particular the so-called Jerusalem School, see David N Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995). 30  Miller and Ury, “Cosmopolitanism: The End of Jewishness?” 338. 31  Natalie Naimark-Goldberg and Shmuel Feiner are two of the only Israeli academics who have written about maskilim or Haskalah in Breslau. I cite the English language translations of their Hebrew work. 32  Neumark-Goldberg, “Salomon Pappenheim,” 51e. 27 28

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intellectuals were somehow outside of this phenomenon. They describe the modernisation of Jewish communities as “a process of alienation from Jewish society and religion,” a view which presupposes an essentialist theory of Jewish identity and religion.33 Much of their writings on the Haskalah could be considered a microcosm of a Hebrew language literature on the Haskalah. This literature often focuses on the Hebrew language texts from the period and discredits Jewish enlighteners who wrote in German.34 As with many of his writings in English or Hebrew, Shmuel Feiner promotes notions of an essentialist Jewish core that was “Europeanised” and corrupted. He uses the term “European Acculturation”35 when discussing the modernisation of Jews who had been living in Europe for 2000 years or more. Feiner boldly claims that “political radicalism was largely irrelevant” among the maskilim.36 Whereby, he ignores the struggles of maskilim who fought for emancipation. What Feiner forgets is that demanding civic emancipation for a non-Christian group was a radical form of political protest. Its implementation at the time would have required profound systemic change. The group loosely defined as Acculturationist (others use the term “Liberal”) were historians and scholars for whom the future of Jewish life was only conceived of within the diasporic communities with Jews acculturating to other cultures and religions. Some names include the historians Isaak Marcus Jost, Heinrich Graetz, Ludwig Philippson, among others. Arguing for a revaluation of “German-Jewish historiography” back in 1990, Arno Herzig claimed that the creation of Liberal position was an epochal shift in how German Jewish history was written. He defines the Acculturationist position—the majority position until the Weimar era in the twentieth century—as enthusiastic about “assimilation.”37 He argues 33  Shmuel Feiner, Natalie Naimark-Goldberg, Cultural Revolution in Berlin (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2011), 69. 34  Hebrew language writing is Moshe Pelli’s defining criterion of Haskalah. See Moshe Pelli, In Search of Genre: Hebrew Enlightenment and Modernity (Lanham: Univ. Press of America, 2005). 35  Shmuel Feiner. “The Pseudo-Enlightenment and the Question of Jewish Modernization” Jewish Social Studies, 3, no. 1 (1996): 62–88. www.jstor.org/stable/4467486 36  Feiner, “The Pseudo-Enlightenment,” 66. 37  It is highly unlikely that Herzig intended the term “assimilation” in its current pejorative guise (his essay is from 1990). On the term “assimilation,” see Sorkin, “Emancipation and Assimilation”; on the transgression of these strongly Manichean terms to something more

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it was a means for Jews to legitimise their calls for equal civic status.38 Although this “school” disappeared during the 1930s, the influence of these historians and their then ground-breaking approach to Jewish Studies is ubiquitous in the field today. The Epistemological Problem The second major issue preventing the integration of Jewish-German history into mainstream German history is what I call  the epistemological problem. Namely, the interpretation of Jewish-German history from the perspective of the history of ideas, or the use of history to justify nationalist, Zionist or Acculturationist-Liberal goals in the present. Whether the problem is structural or epistemological, there remains a strong case for a “radical new beginning” to Jewish-German historiography.39 Yet in 2002, Joseph Dan was still bemoaning the fact that “Postmodernity and Postzionism were successful in their criticism of the ideologies which had driven historical writing for the past two centuries, academics had yet to come up with satisfactory alternatives to these Meta-narratives.”40 A fundamental issue with ideologies which divide Jewish history into “Zionist,” “nationalist,” or “Acculturationist” and the inevitable bifurcation within those categories of Jews and non-Jews, is that each method tells us very little about the individual Jews and their immediate environments. These histories move from the historian’s concepts down to the events and, more often than not, ignore  the reciprocal influence between heterogeneous Jewish communities and their respective environments. Todd Endelman reminds us that “Ignoring the impact of broad impersonal currents simply reinforces the old Germano-centric view of the origins of Jewish modernity, in which new ideologies restructured Jewish lives.”41 One of the problems of these “top-down” approaches has been that the lives and deeds of individual writers, philosophers, theologians, business “radical” see, Klaus Hödl, “Jenseits des Nationalen: Ein Bekenntnis zur Interkulturation,” Transversal I (2004): 3–17. 38  Arno Herzig, “Zur Problematik deutsch-jüdischer Geschichtsschreibung,” in Menora (München: Piper, 1990), 212. 39  See Volkov, “Reflections on German-Jewish Historiography,” 309. 40  Joseph Dan, “Jüdische Studien ohne Gewißheiten,” in Wissenschaft vom Judentum, ed. Michael Brenner and Stefan Rohrbacher (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 62. 41  Todd Endelman, Broadening Jewish History: Towards a Social History of Ordinary Jews (Oxford: Littman Library, 2011), 33.

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people and educators under scrutiny were often subsumed under broader supra-personal historical headings and theories. Not only has this led to a sublimation of a much richer and broader history of Jewish life in Europe, one in which cultural transmission and reciprocal influence renders a far more profound and accurate insight into the reality of interconnectedness on the continent of Europe, but it also denies individual Jews agency within history. On this reading, the history of people, places and traditions have been subsumed under the history of ideas. Shulamit Volkov went as far as to say that “both approaches to Jewish history, the Liberal-ethnic as well as the National-Zionist, seem to have reached a dead end.”42 There is an intrinsic connection between acknowledging the role of individual human agency and creating histories in which the reality of the reciprocity of cultural exchange is included. An integration of Jewish-­ German history into German and European histories can only take place if the individual agency and the reciprocity of cultural influence are recognised as an historiographical category from which Jewish-German history should be investigated. This does not negate histories of anti-Semitism, or nationalist and Zionist scholarship. It does, however, problematise the emphasis on the primarily negative, meta-historical events and theories that have isolated German-speaking Jewries from their environments. There is perhaps no better example of the problems of modernist or structuralist Jewish historiography when one considers the multiple roles Moses Mendelssohn has been assigned in Jewish history. All too often, Mendelssohn’s works, beliefs and even lifestyle have been pushed into the background of more sweeping statements about Jewish history. For many Zionist and Orthodox historians and sociologists, Mendelssohn is the very symbol of and catalyst for Jewish social, religious and moral decay and assimilation in the nineteenth century. Yet, for many Acculturationist-­ Liberal or Reform historians, Mendelssohn is a hero and progenitor of Jewish religious reform and embourgeoisement. The reality, however, is very different. Mendelssohn was neither a religious reformer nor could have been described as assimilationist in any way. He certainly would not have described himself as such. He was a Fromm Jew, a popular and widely published philosopher, and a successful businessman. His home became a centrifuge for many, wildly heterogeneous, Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals from across Europe. In no way, however, did he ever openly question the essential validity of the Jewish  Volkov, “Reflections on German-Jewish Historiography,” 314.

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religious tradition as he understood it. He infamously defended the 613 mitzwot as divinely revealed and eternally valid in his 1783 Jerusalem. Mendelssohn did not believe Judaism required “modernisation” or “confessionalisation.” It was from a philosophical standpoint that Mendelssohn argued the universalist, cosmopolitan and altruistic tendencies within Enlightenment ideals were identical to the central tenets of Judaism.43 In 1994, Shulamit Volkov called Mendelssohn the first “genuine German-Jew,”44 which implied Mendelssohn embodied a new mix of cultures, ergo, a new type of culture. Whether or not Mendelssohn can be termed the first “genuine German-Jew” is superfluous to the present discussion. What is important, however, is that Mendelssohn came to embody an “emblematic figure of … hybridity.”45 David Myers defines Jewish hybridity as “Jewish identity as a hybrid creation, comprised of different strands of influence” meaning that Jewish culture was “manifestly permeable to non-Jewish influences.”46 Hybridity became a feature of Enlightenment thinking where “bifurcated” personalities were divided “into national, religious, public and private spheres.”47 In other words, the Enlightenment created new spaces for individuals to manoeuvre, the Enlightenment, according to Myers, did not “produce a single, essential identity. Rather, it broke it down, fragmented it…it mandated a radical hybridity that marks the modern Jewish condition.”48 In stark contrast to Myers’ and Volkov’s readings of Mendelssohn’s “new” identity, traditional historical narratives in Jewish history have done little justice to Mendelssohn the person.

43  Michael A Meyer, “Soll und kann eine ‘antiquierte’ Religion modern werden?,” in Die Juden in der europäischen Geschichte, ed. Wolfgang Beck (München: Beck, 1992), 69. 44  Shulamit Volkov, Die Juden in Deutschland: 1780–1918 (München: Oldenbourg, 1994), 10. [my emphasis] 45  David N.  Myers, “‘The Blessing of Assimilation’ Reconsidered,” in From Ghetto to Emancipation, ed. David N. Myers and William V. Rowe (Scranton: Univ. of Scranton Press, 1997), 24. 46  Myers, “‘The Blessing of Assimilation,” 24. 47  Myers, “The Blessing of Assimilation,” 24–25. 48  Myers, “The Blessing of Assimilation,” 24–25.

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“Essentialist” Jewish Identity Versus Plurality in Jewish Communities in the Eighteenth Century At the turn of the eighteenth century the clear majority of Jews in Europe lived in the East of the continent, German, French, Italian and Dutch Jewries were in fact a minority within world Jewry.49 These groupings in Western Europe were themselves of course also heterogeneous. Consider the internecine rivalries among Jews living in the French territories in the wake of the French Revolution. Typically identified as an “essentially” Jewish collective, the so-called Portuguese Jews from the West and the Jews living in Paris were bitterly divided. Even the groups who came from the Alsace region were not united when petitioning the king for civil rights on the eve of the Revolution.50 The Jews of Europe were divided into Sephardim and Ashkenazim, West or East Yiddish speaking, traditional or modernising kahals, wealthy or impoverished, stateless or enjoying civil privileges. One of the only unifying elements in eighteenth-century Jewry was efforts of the Ashkenazi religious establishment to unify Jews by codifying halachic convention and eliminating what they felt to be eccentric minhagim. David Sorkin explains that the Ashkenazi elite had been trying since the Reformation to reisolate Jewish kahals behind “Talmudic casuistry and mysticism” and thus lost touch “with large portions of its textual heritage as well as with Europe’s intellectual revolutions.”51 Sorkin was not the first to discuss the process of religious homogenisation among Ashkenazic communities in Central and Eastern Europe. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Israel Abrahams (1858–1925) and Salo W. Baron (1895–1989) published paradigm-busting views on Jewish history.52 Abrahams argued there was no “collective Jewish life but only of individual Jewish lives.”53 Needless to say, the Shoah and its aftermath effectively silenced these

49  See Gershon D. Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2006). 50  Michael Graetz, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996), 17ff. 51  David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2008), 3. 52  Salo Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” The Menorah Journal 14 (1928): 515–26. 53  Elliott Horowitz, “Jewish Life in the Middle Ages and the Jewish life of Israel Abrahams,” in The Jewish Past Revisited, ed. David N. Myers and David B. Ruderman (New Haven: Yale Univ. Pr., 1998), 150.

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pre-­war attempts to revise Jewish historical traditions.54 It is only in the past decade that scholars have once again begun to examine the “entangled”55 reality of life for Jews living under and beside Muslim and Christian majorities in the middle-ages. The process of Jewish religious homogenisation was most acute in Central Europe as Judaism gradually transformed from heterogenous traditions to a more formalised confession. Over the course of the eighteenth century, this newer pious religious understanding froze into what many historians later termed “traditional Judaism” and religious scholars termed the “orthodoxy.”56 This process in Central and Eastern Europe initially occurred as leaders moved to prevent increasing Jewish sectarianism. In particular, traditionalist rabbis sought to combat influential messianic movements and splinter groups associated with various Sabbatian-inspired movements. As the eighteenth century progressed, however, a newly connected religious elite became more preoccupied with maintaining a monopoly on corporate power over Jewish communities in the face of rapid political modernisation and the gradual waning of the estate system in Central Europe. Endelman has argued that it was the “integration of Jews into states increasingly built around individual rights rather than collective privileges made the survival of this undifferentiated sense of self-­ identification difficult if not impossible.”57 In other words, rapid changes to the social, cultural and political structures of Central Europe, in particular the transformation of the relationship between subjects, their respective position in the corporate system and their rulers, forced Jewish kahals to reassess their hitherto unreflected self-identity. This same crisis of identity not only forced the traditional religious elite into action, it also emboldened and inspired newly emerging networks of Jewish intellectuals and scholars collectively known as maskilim. In this context, maskilim could be said to be reacting to the threat posed to Judaism by modernisation. Namely, the threat that the newly emergent paradigm of individual rights in respect of one set of general laws  as 54  Both Baron and Abrahams may have revised traditional historical approaches, however, they both maintained strong essentialist views on Jewish identity. 55  cf. Entangled Histories, ed. Elisheva Baumgarten, Ruth Mazo Karras, and Katelyn Mesler (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 56  Gerhard Lauer, “Bücher von Kühen und andere Freuden der Seelen,” in Literatur und Theologie im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans E. Friedrich, Wilhelm Haefs and Christian Soboth (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 69. 57  Endelman, Broadening Jewish History, 21.

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opposed to  adherence to diffuse systems of corporate laws and codes would affect the collective sense of self-identification felt by the civil and religiously segregated Jewish communities. Michael A. Meyer once argued that there were no real benefits in setting definitive dates for the beginning of Jewish modernisation.58 The primary category used for debates on the first modern Jew or the first maskil or defining different maskilim generations are the categories of “integration,” “assimilation,” and “acculturation.” To use these terms comparatively, however, a historian must presuppose an essential cultural dichotomy. This is the key presupposition for diachronic studies suggesting Jews to be more or less “modern” or more or less “Enlightened,” both terms typically synonymous with non-Jewish thinking or cultures. In lieu of a satisfactory definition of Jewishness or for “Germanness” from that period, the categories of “integration” or “acculturation” are then at best analogous and at worst circular in nature. In other words, given that it is impossible to clearly identify separate “‘endogenous’ from ‘exogenous’ ingredients,”59 the usage of presupposed, hermetically segregated cultural essences is as circular an argument as it is disingenuous to the reciprocity and cultural transmission processes which determine any given social or cultural reality. From an inner-Jewish perspective, maskilim could be described as an emergent opposition to the traditional religious elite who were fighting to retain power over the lives of ordinary Jews. In  this sense,  maskilim in Central Europe were the theoretical harbingers of a new age. Many maskilim fought for the civic integration of Jews into their political environments and the cultural integration of Jews into their immediate environments. Importantly, however, these two forms of integration were never considered as means to attack or supersede a given Jewish identity. Moshe Pelli agrees, “Contrary to popular belief [he is referring to traditional Zionist or cultural nationalist narratives], a great number of the Maskilim desired a synthesis of the old and the new, a renewal of the Jewish people based on modified traditional grounds. Most Hebrew enlighteners exhibited complete faith in Judaism, the Jewish people, and Jewish culture.”60 The heterogeneous thinkers, educators, scholars, linguists, and business people 58  Michael A. Meyer, “Where Does the Modern Period of Jewish History Begin?” Judaism 24, no. 95 (1975): 329–38. 59  Amos Funkenstein, “The Dialectics of Assimilation,” Jewish Social Studies, New Series 1, no. 2 (1995): 9. 60  Moshe Pelli, In Search of Genre: Hebrew Enlightenment and Modernity (Lanham: Univ. Press of America, 2005), 19.

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who are collectively termed “maskilim” devoted their efforts to providing alternative models for Jews to live within their given political, cultural and social environments. In her study of Haskalah in Greater Poland, Nancy Sinkoff informs us that even among the traditional “Ostjuden,” maskilim there also acted to preserve Jewish identity the face of modernisation.61 She does not agree that maskilim in Eastern Europe corrupted an existing, purportedly immutable and essentialist Jewish traditional identity: While the material and social history of the Jews, their socio-economic profile, communal organization, and ways of life (food, architecture, clothing, burial patterns, demographics, etc.) are important fields of inquiry, I nonetheless maintain that no Jewish community—past or present—has sustained itself without an intellectual or ideological conception of collective selfhood. The revolution of modernity necessitated transformations in the communal self-understanding among the Jews of Europe, stimulating to define themselves in new ways, and the maskilim were the first and most articulate spokespersons of the encounter with modernity’s challenges.62

Simultaneous to their Enlightened Christian-German contemporaries from the emerging “Gebildeten [intellectual]” class or enlighteners,63 the maskilim were endeavouring to educate and improve the lives of the majority of Jews who remained poorly educated, disenfranchised and disempowered. Both maskilim and enlighteners created “a new social ­ group emerging from a decaying corporate order; its position in society dependent upon education; and its vision for the transformation of society formed, as it were, by its educational views writ large.”64 In her analysis of the Enlightenment in Breslau, Brenker defines the Late Enlightenment as the period in which scholars began to implement

61  cf. Gershon Hundert’s assessment of Jews living East of Prussia where he argues that modernisation in historiography should neither be read teleologically and nor as a programmatic movement drifting from west to east: Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century, 3. 62  Nancy Sinkoff, Out of the Shtetl (Providence: Brown University, 2004), 5–6; another title focusing on Jewry in the Polish territories is Marcin Wodziński’s, Haskalah and Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford: Littman Library, 2005). 63  I will use the uncommon English-language term rather than the German “Aufklärer” for linguistic consistency. The German term includes an obvious pedagogic element which reflects the strong educational rather than political goals of the Central European enlighteners. 64  Sorkin, “The Impact of Emancipation on German Jewry,” 186.

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the theories and knowledge from the previous half century.65 Just as Christian enlighteners had very different goals and programmes from one another, maskilim also represented chronologically, religiously, culturally and philosophically diverse goals. Agreeing with David Sorkin in his analysis of religious enlightenment, there were simply no “master narratives”66 for the Enlightenment, it is at best described as a “spectrum of competing ideologies and beliefs.”67 All subjects towards the end of the eighteenth century were subject to the whims of their monarchs or the arbitrary powers of the various corporate estates to which they belonged. The end of the eighteenth century was the beginning of the end of this corporate system in Central Europe. The maskilim and Christian enlighteners of the Late Enlightenment took it upon themselves to project the models in which future generations could adapt to a new centralised power base, in which independent corporate powers [Ständegesellschaft] would be subsumed under centralised, increasingly bureaucratic and nationalist centres of power. This change affected all groups, Andreas Reinke describes it succinctly, The effects of modernisation, which were directly linked to changes in the social, political, economic and cultural life and which ran concurrently to the transition from an estate-based to a civil society, as well as to industrialisation, and to [Prussian] state and nation-building, effected all parts of the society; albeit to different degrees and with different outcomes.68

Consider the challenge the burgeoning natural sciences, Newtonian physics, empiricism and deism were posing to organised religion at the time. Agreeing with Sorkin, “the Enlightenment posed a set of questions to which all of the religions in the German states found it necessary to provide answers.”69 In the case of Jewish-German communities where religion also served as an ethnic and political constituency marker, challenges 65   Anne Brenker, “Über Aufklärer und Aufklärungsgesellschaften in Breslau,” in Aufklärung in Schlesien im europäischen Spannungsfeld, ed. Wojciech Kunicki (Wrocław: Wydawn. Uniw. Wrocławskiego, 1996), 11. 66  Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment, 3. 67  Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment, 20. 68  Andreas Reinke, Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland: 1781–1933 (Darmstadt: Wiss. Buches, 2007), 142. 69  David Sorkin, The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought (London et  al: Vallentine-Mitchell, 2000), 4.

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to religious belief were direct threats to ethnic and corporative identity within German-speaking Jewry.

Jews and Their Identities The Concept of Hybrid Identity I will now look at the theory of identity essential to understanding Jewish history in Europe. Moshe Rosman offers three categories of meta-history which he calls “Zionist,” “Acculturationist” and “hybrid,” respectively. To define these various categories, Rosman discusses theories of exchange, mutual influence, reciprocity and assimilation.70 Using “hybrid identity” as an intellectual tool helps us to look at Jews within history as both conditioning and being conditioned by their environment—both as a group and as individuals. Working from a theory of hybridised identity circumvents traditional attempts to map out Jewish histories working from an assumed a priori definition of Jewish cultural and social homogeneity. According to Samuel Moyn, this would be a form of “ethnic absolutism” in which the Jew is a “transhistorical constant” rather than an “historical construct, always interactive with his or her contexts, defined and self-defined in, through, and sometimes against them.”71 Or, as Rosman explains, While Jews may share certain religious and ethnic markers over time and space, Judaism and Jewishness are always and everywhere primarily local constructs. Jewish collective identity should be understood mainly from a local perspective. Judaism and Jewishness are therefore not monolithic and there cannot be said to have existed one Judaism, one Jewish culture or normative, traditional, or representative types of Jewish communities. Rather, Jews are a hybrid version of whatever identity they live among.72

70  Rosman was not the first to discuss the need for a category of hybridity in Jewish historiography. He was the first to discuss the term “hybrid” alongside “Zionist and Liberal.” See also, Myers’ “The Blessing of Assimilation” from 1997. 71  Samuel Moyn, “German Jewry and the Question of Identity Historiography and Theory,” LBIY 41 (1996), 295. 72  Rosman, How Jewish is Jewish History?, 53.

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Needless to say, both the Zionist and Acculturationist approaches mentioned earlier, mutatis mutandis, presuppose an essential Jewish group identity within Ashkenazi Jewry.73 By avoiding the presupposition of an essential Jewish core, the use of hybridity as a dynamic category of identity necessarily creates a form of counter history. This model can address the abovementioned “structural problem”—the exclusion of Jewish-History from German history—by rejecting the “epistemological problem” from above—the negation of individuals and their unique environments in favour of historical narratives. Jewish Identity in Central Europe The imagined Jewish nation across Central Europe was an aspirational fiction on the part of various rabbinical authorities as well as a convenient bogey man for ruthlessly opportunist merchants, guilds and Christian demagogues. The Jewish nation has also been used as an anachronistic projection by Jewish historians since the nineteenth century. To be sure, the appearance of absolute Jewish unity was buoyed by tangible linguistic, mercantile and halachic similarities. The communities themselves, however, were enmeshed or “entangled” in very different environments. This is not to say that Jews in Europe did not have a sense of their own Jewish identity or that they did not identify with other European Jews as brethren. What I am suggesting is that at the group or national level, Jewish identity was a projection of each community in each separate environment. The idea of a historical or genetic continuity of the Jewish nation from the biblical Sinai to the mercantile homes in eighteenthcentury central Breslau, Berlin or Amsterdam is an intrinsic element within the religion, law and culture of Judaism. This desire to project a stable identity, however, is no different to other nations’ attempts to “imagine”74 their communities as a historical continuum. It is the academic’s job to analyse and account for the space between the actual lives and cultural milieu of various nations at various times and the transhistorical projections of nationalist fancy. Peter Burke has termed the investigation of this space or, in his words, “the problem of the relation between change and continuity,” as one of the central problems in the

 see Volkov, “Reflections on German-Jewish Historiography,” 314.  Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), esp. 7.

73 74

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study of history.75 Funkenstein goes further and protests that historians of Jewish history have traditionally preferred to account for the transhistorical essences rather than the specific nature of Jewishness in each place and time, Attempts to separate a stable “essence” which accounts for the continuity of the Jewish past as against a margin of changing “appearances,” or attempts to separate that which is original and therefore homegrown, autochthonous, from that which has been absorbed-these characterize not only the traditional self-perception of Jews but, in a transformed and more nuanced language, also the perception of many, if not all, Jewish historians even today.76

If we can agree to eschew essentialist models of identity when creating historical narratives in favour of “hybrid” models, how can we tie this to a discussion of a relatively obscure German-speaking publicist and businessman from Silesia in the late eighteenth century? Standing in opposition to broad impersonal and essentialist histories are the histories of individuals and their coeval environments. The hybrid identities discussed earlier require an analysis of the historical and sociological categories which support this theory of identity. Moses Hirschel as a diasporic Jew in Breslau provides an excellent model of an individual struggling to define himself in an era of tumultuous change. Echoing Meyers’ categories from above, this was an era in which new modes of identity such as the “national and religious, public and private,” became available. In his extensive study of modernity and its impact on self-identity, Anthony Giddens describes modernity as being defined by a change in how people identified themselves. He explains how the “transitions in individuals” lives have always demanded “psychic reorganisation” and that, in the case of modernity “the altered self has to be explored and constructed as part of a reflexive process of connecting personal and social change.”77 On a subjective level, he defines the self as a “reflexive project for which the individual is responsible.”78 The tumultuous social and political worlds into which individuals in late modernity were born, provided a plurality of spheres or “segments”79 for individual to identify with. Giddens describes an emergent plurality of objective concrete historical  Peter Burke, Hybrid Renaissance (Budapest: Central European Univ. Press, 2016), 5.  Funkenstein, “Dialectics of Assimilation,” 5. 77  Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 32–33. 78  Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 75. 79  Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 83. 75 76

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socio-cultural “lifeworlds”80 in which the individual and their current “subjective state” are, attached to, and expressive of, specific milieux of action. Lifestyle options are thus often decisions to become immersed in those milieux, at the expense of possible alternatives. Since individuals typically move between different milieux or locales in the course of their everyday life, they may feel uncomfortable in those settings that in some way place their own lifestyle in question.81

Moses Hirschel was a rational agent who identified with a complex nexus of identity milieus or “lifeworlds” within which, situation dependent, he placed himself. Hirschel chose to act, speak, publish and presumably socialise in diffuse voices as he struggled to place his “self” within the various milieus to which he identified. It is because of this that Hirschel presents us with a “hybridised” identity. Hybridised Individuals and Agency Attempts to sublimate individual agency in favour of broader analyses of ideas or grand historical narratives have the added disadvantage of viewing individual Jews as powerless or simply as victims of history. Moreover, the deployment of traditional meta-narratives also pushed historians to view Jewish history in Europe only in relation to Jews’ impact on their immediate community. According to Hettling and Reinke’s work on Breslau’s Jewry in the eighteenth century, this has created a “historiographic re-ghettoization.”82 To be sure, histories of anti-Semitism have been vital in cataloguing the discrimination and unique forms of hatred European Jews have experienced. However, to catalogue Jewish history in Europe as a history of pogroms and anti-Semitic attacks only tells part of that history. Moreover, 80  The concept “Lebenswelt” was originally coined by Edmund Husserl in relation to phenomenology, it encloses the totality of that which we perceive and what we remember to have perceived in any given conscious moment. Giddens borrows the term as a sociological concept from Berger and Luckmann’s sociological study The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966). 81  Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 83. 82  Manfred Hettling and Andreas Reinke, introduction to In Breslau zu Hause? Juden in einer mitteleuropäischen Metropole der Neuzeit, ed. Manfred Hettling, Andreas Reinke and Norbert Conrads (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 2003), 8.

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it both reinforces the notion of Jews as exclusively victims and gives anti-­ Semitic agitators a bigger role in history than they perhaps deserve. The intercultural reality of trade and commerce in eighteenth-century Central Europe and the bustling and densely populated streets of central Breslau challenges attempts to artificially project hermetically discrete Jewish-German and German cultural spheres to individuals. These projections reduce cultural transfer and reciprocal influence to specific cultural categories pertinent to each author’s narrow focus. There are simply no grounds to maintain Jewish particularity or a strict Jewish-Christian or Jewish-German dichotomy when discussing a German-speaking intellectual and businessman of Jewish descent who lived in Breslau in the late eighteenth century. Theory of Agency Ideas are of course mobilised by individual agents or groups of agents. This first level of this analytical theory of historical action is defined as subjective action.83 This subjective level is created by subjects who are active participants in their environments—this is defined as “culture as practice.” Culture as practise is  a dynamic construct opposed to static theories of culture which would posit culture as a mere body of “practices and beliefs” that are “handed down through generations.”84 For example,  Eberhard Wolff studied the self-integration of Jewish doctors into non-Jewish medical environments in the late eighteenth century. He termed this new hybridised identity as a form of “formed identity,” where Jews willed and actively “built-in” new elements into their self-­understanding as Jews and did not merely adapt to their non-Jewish environments.85 The agents as self-reflecting subjects act rationally and  shape their own lives and the world—or lifeworlds—around them. Simone Lässig’s work on the embourgeoisement of the Jewish economic and scholarly elite also

83  The following argument roughly follows a historiographic thesis put forward by Hettling and Reinke in their introduction to In Breslau zu Hause? 12ff. 84  See William H. Sewell Jr., “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. Victoria E. Bonello, Lynn Hunt and Richard Miernicki (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999), 40–46. 85  Eberhard Wolff, Medizin und Ärzte im deutschen Judentum der Reformära (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 244–45.

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maintains the position that certain Jews chose to become part of what was an amalgam of competing rational, political and socio-cultural systems.86 Agency generally implies an agent acting upon ideas or concepts. However, beliefs and conscious or unconscious motives should also be considered constitutive influential factors in Jewish self-definition in the late eighteenth century. Such a definition of “culture” moves away from discussions of sclerotic structures and institutions and instead moves towards “multilayered discourses of meaning that are constantly remodelled according to self-defined structures.”87 These agents are, however, embedded within an objective  world— defined as a given albeit dynamic social world created by the interaction of agents and the institutions and systems they  form. This is the level of “concrete historical socio-cultural world.” On this objective level, the subjective or psychological level of “culture as practice”  defined above becomes a sociological category or “culture as a system.” William Sewell has shown that these two realms are mutually independent and not mutually exclusive.88 That said, these levels also operate according to different logics and their interaction presupposes a hybrid theory of identity. Identity at any given time is therefore, consciously or otherwise, chosen by the agent on the subjective level and is  then posited or presupposed at the second or “objective level.” These are processes without beginning or ends. Identity is never reified as the objective level is always changing.89 The objective level can be either imposed from without or subjectively assumed as part of an adaptation process. When we read history, we necessarily read it from the objective level and not from the perspective of the subjects or events we are observing. We ourselves impose our own narratives upon the events and agents. We cannot view things “as they were” because our perspective is necessarily filtered by our own lifeworld and milieus. We should therefore acknowledge that identity is dynamic and that its constitutive elements are in a constant flux. We should also recognise that the imposition of objective criteria does not imply subjective passivity. Charles Taylor discusses “the genesis of our minds” as a dialogical and not monological process with the world around us—he uses the term “significant others” analogously with the term milieu from  Simone Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum (Göttingen: VandeHei & Ruprecht, 2004).  Gotzmann, “Historiography as Cultural Identity,” 522. 88  Sewell, “The Concept(s) of Culture,” 47. 89  see Peter Burke, Cultural Hybridity (Cambridge et al.: Polity Press, 2009). 86 87

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above.90 Taylor: “We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us.”91 In other words, our identity is created from our attempts to posit certain identities in certain contexts as a means of understanding both ourselves and to be understood in that given context by others. On this reading, historical identities are processual subjective constructions and transient objective constraints which force us to act in certain ways. The objective constraint is not necessarily how the subject has to define itself, negatively or positively, it can simply be part of the dialogical construction of identity in which the subject chooses to identify in one way or the other, in one context or another. In his work on transnationalism and the construction of identity in relation to political theory, Heinz Kleger explains the cleavage between the objective and subjective as, The difference between the subjective and objective dimensions of multiple identities is connected to the adoption of motivational knowledge. Objective identities are mostly expressed by the formal inclusionary and exclusionary rules from groups or organisations. Such formal conventions are known to the protagonist, [they] are accepted or criticised up until the point in which they are intentionally ignored or even opposed. The subjective dimension, however, is concerned with intentional acts of adapting to identities. Praxeologically speaking, protagonists are confronted with identities whilst participating in certain practices; the identities themselves only appear as part of the participation.92

I am investigating precisely this aspect of the processual and active intersection of the subjective and objective—the space between how people construct themselves and  how individuals allow themselves to be determined.

Moses Hirschel: Agency, Identity and Influence Till van Rahden’s paradigm-busting work Juden und andere Breslauer may not use the term “hybridity,” but his category of “situative ethnicity” suggests a theory of group identity synonymic with “hybrid” notions of 90  Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition” (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992), 32. 91  Taylor, Multiculturalism, 33. 92  Heinz Kleger, “Transnationalität als Herausforderung politischer Theorie,” 28.

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identity for individuals and groups.93 van Rahden showed how Jews in Breslau had multiple social and political identities. He used club and association records to show how multifaceted Jewish-German identities in Breslau in the latter half of the nineteenth century had become. van Rahden describes his project as an attempt to write a history which presupposes a “new understanding about integration, ethnicity and assimilation”94 in order to escape the “long shadow of today’s mostly liberal-Protestant paradigm of national homogeneity.” He wanted to rewrite “recent German history as a history of ethnic and religious plurality and difference.”95 The sources available to van Rahden for his nineteenth-century study are not available to eighteenth-century researchers. This is both due to a lack of developed club or association systems beyond Free Masonry. Also, almost all documentation relating to eighteenth-century Silesian Jewry and Jews in Breslau was disappeared in the final months of the Second World War.96 The sparse biographical and published works on and from Hirschel do, however, offer a glimpse of a personality trying to adjust and adapt to a period that was rapidly changing. His public disputes with the rabbinate and the state, not to mention his close publishing relationship with the Catholic Polonophile writer Johann Kausch, undoubtedly ostracised him from the more conservative circles of maskilim and enlighteners in the city. Uta Lohmann labels Hirschel “an outsider among the Jewish enlighteners in Breslau.”97 By focusing on Hirschel and his works and times, a portrait of  a “modern” freethinker98 or “outsider”99 will emerge. He was very much aware of the challenges of his times and arguably epitomises intellectuals for whom it was obvious that they had to position themselves anew in the rapidly modernising political, social and cultural landscape. 93  Klaus Hödl concurs with this point in, “Jenseits des Nationalen: Ein Bekenntnis zur Interkulturation,” Transversal, I (2004): 5–6. 94  van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer, 17. 95  van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer, 14. 96  Almost the entire War and Domains Chamber archival files for Silesia (the Prussian governmental department responsible for Jewish affairs from 1742–1806) disappeared during the siege of Breslau in 1945. 97  Uta Lohmann, David Friedländer. Reformpolitik im Zeichen von Aufklärung und Emanzipation (Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2013), 147. 98  See William Hiscott, Saul Ascher: Berliner Aufklärer (Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2016), 465; 527: “Freidenker”. 99  Hans Mayer, Außenseiter (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1981).

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In a 1981 work, Hans Mayer introduces us to the importance of “outsiders” in enriching our understanding of certain epochs. He argues that we should use their exceptional status to trace the constitutive elements of a particular system. The assumption is that if we listen to those who problematised systems or to those who foresaw or acted towards changing a given order, we can elicit a far better understanding of those epochs themselves. Mayer defines outsiders as “the leading figures of crossing boundaries.”100 In his discussion of Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, Cord Friedrich Berghahn explains that: “As a member of the Jewish nation and the république des lettres of the European Enlightenment, Mendelssohn can claim, unlike hardly any other contemporary, a different observation point, because he had the indispensable external viewpoint necessary for true Enlightenment.”101 For Berghahn, Mendelssohn was “predestined to [become] a critical observer of the society around him” because he was excluded from certain parts of the bourgeoisie [Bürgerlich] and court societies.102 Writing in 1798, Wolf Davidson (1772–1800) introduces a category of so-called menores (minor intellectuals) who he claims were important for understanding and also adding depth the majores at the time. In Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (Berlin: Felisch, 1798), Davidson lists men and women, Jewish doctors, artists, philosophers, publicists and others. Davidson not only shows the variety of enlightened and successful Jews in Prussia, but he also exposes a lacuna in modern research where these menores have been largely excluded from the discussion of a handful of “great men.” Werner Kraus contested that the “Masters” can only really be understood and that the details of their work can only come to light if we broaden the extent of our research of any given age.103 This can be fruitful as long as one approaches these menores—Krauss prefers “obscure writers”—and asks “what role did they play? Or what kind of influence did they have on the development of ideas?” Krauss argues that although we need to continue to study the masters, in order to understand them we also need to look to others.104  Mayer, Außenseiter, 16–17.  Cord-Friedrich Berghahn, Moses Mendelssohns “Jerusalem,” (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001), 4. 102  C. Berghahn, Moses Mendelssohns “Jerusalem,” 4. 103  Werner Krauss, “Das Studium der obskuren Schriftsteller des Aufklärungszeitalters,” in Die Innenseite der Weltgeschichte, ed. Helga Bergmann (Leipzig: Reclam, 1983), 179. 104  Krauss, “Das Studium der obskuren Schriftsteller des Aufklärungszeitalters,” 179. 100 101

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Discussing eighteenth-century Breslau in 2003, Gunnar Och explained that we should look at “second and third-class authors who, in an aesthetic sense, did not produce any outstanding work” but nevertheless help us understand their “cultural-historical environments.”105 He explicitly mentions a number of Jewish enlighteners discussed here: Moses Hirschel, Joel Brill (Löwe), Aron Halle-Wolfssohn, Ephraim Kuh, Esther Gad and Salomon Maimon. As Davidson, Krauss, and Och clearly recognise, the menores und majores were all reading each other’s works and were either in contact with each other or had met at some point. The Enlightenment was a complex web of interconnecting movements, ideas beliefs and projects. In order to move away from historically disingenuous narratives featuring a few brilliant individuals, one should add depth to the contexts in which their ideas emerged. It is at best an anachronism and at worst a tautology to claim that one would not be discussing Hirschel or Ephraim Kuh if it were not for Moses Mendelssohn. On the other hand, it would also be fanciful to claim that Lambert’s, Reinhardt’s, Fichte’s, Jacobi’s or Maimon’s fame is completely reliant on Kant’s shooting star. This is not saying that their ideas were not intrinsically connected. Rather, it is quite likely that we would not be discussing the Mendelssohns, Kants or Goethes if it were not for the myriad forms of reciprocal influence, discussions and arguments that inspired, influenced or disturbed them. Hirschel’s written legacy may not be as grandiose or as well received as figures such as Saul Ascher or Mendelssohn. Hirschel in the role of “outsider,” however, does offer a unique insight into the mind of a radically independent Jew. Hirschel attacked the given political and social order in which Jewish Breslavians were living. His intellectual lifeworld was fed by the then novel forum of published debate. In his time, the supranational “Republic of Letters” began to establish itself as the preferred medium for social, political and cultural discourse. Habermas agreed on the significance of the emergence and influence of this new critical “public sphere” across Europe in the eighteenth century.106 105  Gunnar Och, “Jüdische Schriftsteller im Breslau des späten 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Breslau zu Hause? Juden in einer mitteleuropäischen Metropole der Neuzeit, ed. Manfred Hettling, Andreas Reinke and Norbert Conrads (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 2003), 73. 106  Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989 [1962]).

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More specifically to Hirschel’s own region, the emergence of this new “public sphere” brought with it a new type of intellectual and a completely new forum for the dissemination of ideas and historical knowledge. Iwan-­ Michelangelo D’Aprile has argued that an effective new critical “public sphere” emerges in the German-speaking lands around 1800. His work shows how “Volksaufklärer” later became the critical journalists and historians of the nineteenth century.107 D’Aprile is implying that the Volksaufklärer were the harbingers of change. The last decades of the eighteenth century also saw the emergence of a Jewish public sphere and a Jewish Republic of Letters in Prussia. This new Jewish forum was populated by intellectuals, scholars, teachers and learned business people. In short, the same socio-demographic class or estate [Stand] populating the non-Jewish European public sphere. By its very nature, the Republic of Letters was non-denominational. Therefore, intellectual Jews and non-­ Jews were part of the same emergent phenomenon. Ready access to the new production centres of mass media changed the outlook of those who are taking part in these debates—as consumers, producers or publishers. Bronfen and Marius also made the connection between cultural discourse, identity and the impact of the instruments of mass media. They define culture as a place of conflict between representations of the world, the subject, history and so on. Therefore “political and collective identity are not pre-established givens, but discursive events.”108 In describing the relationship between political and collective subjects, they define “hybridity” as everything which denotes a mix of traditional elements and chains of significants connected to different discourses and technologies which arise as a result of collage or sampling. A national identity can form one part among many others within such forms of hybridised culture. The change in the forms of dominant mass media and reproduction technology were the decisive reason [for this change].109

107  Iwan-Michelangelo D’Aprile, Die Erfindung der Zeitgeschichte (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013), esp. 15–34. 108  Elisabeth Bronfen and Benjamin Marius “Hybride Kulturen,” in Hybride Kulturen, ed. Elisabeth Bronfen, Benjamin Marius and Therese Steffen (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1997), 11. 109  Bronfen and Marius, “Hybride Kulturen,” 14.

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To show Hirschel as an example of a consummate Jewish enlightener consciously and actively maintaining and deploying various identities, we will look a number of his texts and the contexts in which they appeared. The later chapters will employ a critical approach to cultural exchange in order to show both how hybridised some Jews’ identities in the eighteenth century had already become whilst demonstrating just how interwoven Jewish-German and German history is. Critical approaches to cultural exchange concentrate on the relationships between individuals and the institutions that dominate their lives and that set the borders and limits of interaction and acceptability. Sometimes these are relationships of relatively comfortable accommodation, while at other times, individuals resist or attempt to subvert the limitations of the cultural situation imposed by the institutions that dominate their worlds.110

But why should we listen to Hirschel the outsider, or Hirschel the Jew, or Hirschel the enlightener at all? Frank Stern has written one of the few German-language monographs on Jewish-German history to employ a  socio-cultural analysis of Jewish-German culture. He argues that if Jewish-German culture is to be accurately represented, one must listen to the voices and stories of individual Jewish-Germans. He also urges us to look at the contexts in which they lived. He writes, and it is worth quoting at length, For the most part, the topic of Jews in Germany is treated in academic publications as political history, as a history of religion or suffering or as part of the history of anti-Semitism and disastrous German nationalism. There is often a division between Jewish history and culture on the one side and German History and culture on the other. Whereas, in fact, a key marker of the German-Jewish experience is its cultural, religious, societal, economic and artistic interrelations which have been embedded in the political and social development of Europe since antiquity.111

The work will not look at this specific epoch of Jewish-German history using a figure who belonged to a minority at the edge of society, nor shall 110  James P. Helfers, Multicultural Europe and Cultural Exchange in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 2. 111  F. Stern, Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht, 14–15.

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it discuss this subject’s contribution to German history.112 Jewish-German culture and history are an integral part of German, ergo European, culture and history. Their history is not a history of “success or alternatively of downfall, but as convergence, exchange, common cultural experience and [common] identity evolution.” At the centre of this process are “the German-Jewish voices themselves.”113 The following chapters will reflect the aforementioned discussion and resist the temptation to weave a singular historical thread throughout my discussion of Hirschel and the times he lived. It is up to the readers themselves to piece together the primary source material and come to their own conclusions about Moses Hirschel, their understanding of European Jewish history or of the Haskalah.

112  Lowenstein argues the word “contribution” [Beitrag] implies Jews made conscious efforts to contribute to a German majority culture, whereas most contributions had no Jewish content and came from individuals and not the collective. Steven M.  Lowenstein: “Der jüdischen Anteile an der deutschen Kultur,” in Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte in der Neuzeit, vol. 3, ed. Steven M. Lowenstein et al. (München: C.H. Beck, 1997), 303. 113  F. Stern, Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht, 16.

CHAPTER 3

Socio-Ethnic History of Breslau

History of Breslau, 1740–1818 Shortly before Hirschel was born, Breslau’s overlords were deposed during the War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748). The once Catholic overseers of this mostly Protestant city had exchanged places with the Protestant kings of Prussia’s relatively young Hohenzollern dynasty. Breslau was once again in a process of major change as its administrative, fiscal, sectarian and military structures were adapting to Prussian rule. Under Frederick II, Prussia increased efforts to centralise and bureaucratise power within the realm. The status and legal position of the Jews in Breslau and Lower Silesia also underwent dramatic change. In short, Hirschel was born into a city that was still adapting to massive administrative, institutional, cultural and religious changes. It would not be until after the Seven Years’ War in 1763, when Hirschel was just nine, that Prussia finally sealed the borders of Lower Silesia to Hapsburgian claims. If the  mutability of institutions and belief systems is one of the key insights of Late Enlightenment thought, the milieus surrounding Moses Hirschel were composites of agents working together to propagate a particular agenda or direction for society. According to Berger and Luckman, “despite the objectivity that marks the social world in human experience, it does not thereby acquire an ontological status apart from the human

© The Author(s) 2021 D. Heywood Jones, Moses Hirschel and Enlightenment Breslau, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46235-2_3

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activity that produced it.”1 The objective environment was therefore a holistic consequence of individuals’ actions working together with others or acting as—objective environments are never static. The madness of the Second World War has meant that the once thriving Germanic city of Breslau has been largely forgotten,  particularly for English speakers. And yet, just 100 years ago, Breslau formed an intrinsic part of Wilhelmine Germany. Affectionally known as Prussia’s Arcadia, Breslau was one of the three royal or Residenz cities—along with Berlin and Königsberg—and one of the three most populous cities in Prussia and later Germany.2 The idea that Breslau would become part of an independent Poland, devoid of almost all of its German-speaking population, would have been unthinkable in the first decades of the twentieth century. Breslau (1740–1786) Taking advantage of the ascension of a female to the Austrian throne, the newly crowned king Frederick II quickly invaded Silesia. His army stood before the gates of Breslau on 31 December 1740. Some eight peaceful months later, Prussian troops finally entered the city proper and introduced Prussian law. It took a further 23  years and three wars for the annexation to be finalised. After the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763—French and Indian War in North America—Breslau had 44,000 residents, 4000 less than in 1741.3 Around 50,000 Silesians had been killed in the war.4 After the war, Silesia still remained Prussia’s richest province and its annexation increased the Prussian population by some 50%—1,160,000 new Prussian subjects in 1740. According to Kaufhold, Silesia was soon paying more taxes than all of the other Prussian provinces due to “its size, resources, and the level of economic development.”5 The annexation of Silesia raised Prussia’s geo-political as well as economic profile in Europe during the 1740s. At 1  Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967), 61. 2  Hans-Dieter Rutsch, Das preussische Arkadien: Schlesien und die Deutschen (Rowohlt: Berlin, 2014). 3  Kulak, Breslau, 148. 4  Patrick J Speelman, “Father of the Modern Age,” in The Seven Years’ War: Global Views, ed. Mark H. Danley and Patrick J. Speelman (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 525. 5   Karl H.  Kaufhold, “Friederizianische Agrar-, Siedlungs- und Bauernpolitik,” in Kontinuität und Wandel, ed. Peter Baumgart (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1990), 180.

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the time, Frederick II referred to Breslau as the “Pearl in the Prussian Crown.”6 The annexation, however, did not come without huge administrative changes as the new absolutist, centralising and bureaucratised regime got to grips with a province largely overseen by medieval governing structures. Johnson explains, The new province differed considerably from the rest of the Prussian realm. Legally, Silesia was divided into two feudal holdings, part belonging to the sovereign and part belonging to the Roman Catholic Church. Every inhabitant occupied some feudal position beneath the secular or ecclesiastical overlord. Some cities were still under the feudal control of the lay and ecclesiastical vassals (Mediat cities) while others remained directly under the Austrian (later the Prussian) bureaucracy (“excise” cities). The great vassals of the province were either important abbots, bishops, or landed aristocrats. These Grundherren were intermediaries between the sovereign and the feudal structure....In Breslau, a Mediat city, the leading members of the wool merchants’ guild and other guilds dominated municipal administration and local trade commissions.7

The introduction of Prussian state absolutism to what was Prussia’s first Mediat city meant that the City Council [Stadtrat] lost the autonomy it had  held since 1287.8 The council was renamed the Magistrat and was subordinated to the Breslauischen Kriegs- und Domänenkammer. This Breslau War and Domains Chamber was also  the department directly responsible for all Jewish affairs until 1806.9 The members of the Magistrat quickly changed from local merchants and tradespeople to mostly retired officers and bureaucrats from Berlin and Brandenburg.10 The Prussians also rapidly introduced censorship laws to proscribe all publications that did not support the new rulers. Johann Jakob Korn became the only person granted “newspaper privileges.” On 3 January 1742, the first edition of the Schlesischen Privilegierte Staats-,

6  Eduard Mühle, Breslau: Geschichte einer europäischen Metropole (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2015), 166. 7  Hubert C. Johnson, Frederick the Great and his Officials (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), 145. 8  Mühle, Breslau, 59. 9  Mühle, Breslau, 165. 10  Mühle, Breslau, 165.

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Kriegs-, und Friedenszeitung (published until 1944 as the Schlesische Zeitung) left Korn’s printing presses.11 New taxes and duties on goods and services created massive inflation which quickly helped turn parts of the populace against the new Prussian overlords.12 One of Frederick’s innovations was to scrap the Byzantine web of taxation and tax classes the Hapsburgs had applied across Silesia. He introduced a basic tax rates across all classes and estates (i.e. nobility 28%; farmers 34%)13 on their income or capital. Contrary to many German historians’ enthusiasm for Frederick II’s annexation of Silesia, Frederick actually payed little attention to the de facto trade realities of his distant provinces. As Mühle argues, the Prussian authorities raison d’état was not to help its far off provinces to grow, but to strengthen the whole of Prussia’s “defensive capabilities, the centralisation of the state’s bureaucracy, effective tax collection, and the modernisation of industry and agriculture.”14 Kaufhold also agrees, arguing that although Frederick II modernised much in the province during his reign, his policy of helping the older Prussian regions created economic stagnation in Silesia.15 More often than not, Frederick II’s fiats favoured trading and manufacturing interests from Berlin and parts of Brandenburg and Pomerania to those of East Prussia and Silesia. For example, Frederick II imposed high-tariffs on the transit trade between Poland and Saxony which led Saxony to stop importing surplus Silesian wool and for Polish traders to circumvent Silesia and  find other means to move their cattle through Central Europe.16 Frederick II also did little to help Breslau when the Hapsburg Empire imposed a trade embargo on all goods from Silesia after the annexation. This embargo effectively cut-off Breslau from access to its most profitable markets between Vienna to Galicia.17 Moreover, in efforts to further protect trade in the Mark, Frederick II refused Breslau’s requests to grow its  Kulak, Breslau, 152.  For example, the price of beer went up by 25%, see Kulak, Breslau, 151. 13   Peter Baumgart, “Schlesien als eigenständige Provinz im altpreußischen Staat: (1740–1806),” in Schlesien, ed. Norbert Conrads (Berlin: Siedler, 2002), 361. 14  Mühle, Breslau, 161. 15  For detailed look at Frederick’s unfortunate economic and trade policy making in Silesia, see Kaufhold, “Friederizianische Agrar-, Siedlungs- und Bauernpolitik,” 172–80. 16  See Johnson, Frederick the Great and his Officials, 148. 17   Rainer Sachs, “Lokalen Ursachen und Anlässe des Aufstands,” in Der Breslauer Gesellenaufstand von 1793, ed. Arno Herzig und Rainer Sachs (Göttingen: Otto Schwartz, 1987), 27. 11 12

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industrial base and expand its territory beyond the city’s walls.18 The result was a drop in the city’s population over the following 20 years and stagnation in the key wool and linen industries. The contradictions and ambiguities within Frederick II’s economic policy are most apparent when one considers his treatment of Jewish merchants within his realm. Selma Stern sums up his Jewish policy in relation to his economic trade policy as “ambiguous and erratic, illogical and inscrutable.”19 She continues, While he forbade them to trade with certain commodities in the most explicit manner, he forced them to trade other commodities domestically and abroad. While he made it very difficult for some to secure residency by imposing penalties and using chicanes, he made life easier for others by way of granting bonuses and privileges. While he forbade the collective from being involved in trade, he trusted individual Jews to manage generous and important businesses. While he warned his successors of the dangers of Jewish industry, he protected them from competition from Christian merchants by awarding concessions and monopolies.20

The state ultimately believed Jews were indispensable to trade in Silesia and the recognised that if all of the Jews were expelled the province would lose all of its trade with Polish Jews.21 The soldiers in the province also contributed to the cultural mix in the province. Through the last five decades of the eighteenth century up to 50% of the Prussian army were not Prussian or even German-speakers but mercenaries from Britain, Ireland, France or Scandinavia.22 The drafting of a large contingent of non-Silesian and non-German-speaking combatants was due to Berlin’s growing reluctance to continue drafting Silesians into the army. The population and economic output of Silesia had been steadily falling since the Prussian annexation and press-ganging young working

 Sachs, “Lokalen Ursachen und Anlässe des Aufstands,” 27.  Selma Stern, Die Zeit Friedrichs des Großen: Darstellung (Tübingen: Mohr, 1971), 137. 20  Stern, Die Zeit Friedrichs des Großen, 137. 21  Selma Stern, The Court Jew (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1950), 149. 22  “The native element in the Prussian army amounted to 50,000 out of a total of 133,000 in 1751, 70,000 out of 160,000 in 1768, and 80,000 out of 190,000 in 1786” Christopher Duffy, Friedrich der Große und Seine Armee (Stuttgart: Motorbuch, 1983), 76–77. 18 19

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men into 20-year service in the Prussian army would not have ameliorated the situation. Prussian rule promised religious tolerance. In reality, however, this only applied to the previously persecuted Calvinists. The first Calvinist services were held in Breslau a day after the city accepted Frederick II as their king.23 Pietists, Catholics and Jews were tolerated but were effectively excluded from all state or city positions of power. Prussia rescinded civic rights for Catholics immediately after the annexation.24 Before the annexation of Silesia, there were only 100,000 Catholics living in Prussia (2.4 million Protestants). The territorial expansion into Silesia and West Prussia (1773) changed this figure dramatically.25 The king and his advisors had no real plan to deal with their new Catholic subjects, let alone the relatively large Jewish population. As Wenzel describes, the King was clueless, as to how they should integrate the overwhelmingly Catholic population into subjects under a Protestant head of state. Up until that point, Catholics were only tolerated in the state under exceptional circumstances: as diplomats from foreign courts, as soldiers, and as highly specialised Lüttich weapon manufacturers or French and Italian silk producers. As normal colonist, such as the tens of thousands who had been accepted into the state, Catholics had been up until then, unwanted.26

As part of the Crown’s efforts to reduce Catholic power in the province, Catholic orders and religious institutions lost almost all their income from public tithes immediately as Frederick II quickly set about curtailing Catholic influence and capital. In 1744, Berlin centralised the discrete Jewish authorities in Breslau into a single corporate body which nevertheless remained outside the state’s general legal framework. This was, however, the first time that Jews in Breslau had received de jure corporate status from the city’s or state’s governors.27 This did not centralise or unify religious practise but merely  Mühle, Breslau, 158.  Mühle, Breslau, 145. 25  Anton Schindling, “Friedrich des Großen Toleranz und seine katholischen Untertanen” in Kontinuität und Wandel, ed. Peter Baumgart (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1990), 258. 26  Stefi Jersch-Wenzel, “Juden in Preußen—Preußische Juden?,” in Sozialgeschichte der Juden in Deutschland (Gerlingen: Bleicher, 1991), 441. 27  Leszek Zia̜tkowski, Die Geschichte der Juden in Breslau (Wrocław: Wydawn. Dolnoślas̜kie, 2000), 32. 23 24

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created central corporate body from which the Prussian authorities could now extract taxes and grant or rescind privileges. As part of this change, Frederick II ordered all Jews apart from 12 wealthy “privileged” families of Austrian-Jewish origin to leave the city immediately.28 By 1747, only 543 Jews lived within the walls of Breslau. In1737, there were only 4000 Jews in the whole of Silesia and most of them were concentrated in the town of Glogau.29 Many of the Jews who left the city simply moved across the Oder river and settled in small satellite towns considered suburbs of Breslau.30 In 1757, the 1750 Judenreglement applying in the rest of Prussia was extended to Silesia. By 1786, over 2000 Jews were living within the walls of the city.31 Although the laws from a contemporary perspective may appear discriminatory and harsh, they provided a solid legal basis for Jewish settlement within the city and a sense of security for those fortunate enough to hold certain privileges. Jewish merchants had become vital to Silesian commerce and trade and in the 1750s over two-thirds of all trade with the East was handled by Jewish merchants. Andreas Reinke also mentions Greek and Armenian traders having a share of the eastern trade in Breslau.32 In 1760, the community received permission to create their own cemetery and to build a community centre. Despite the official obstacles preventing Jews from settling and living in the province, between 1741 and Frederick’s death in 1786, the official Jewish population in Silesia doubled to 9000, with around 4000 living dispersed across rural Silesia. In 1786, Jews made up 2–3% of the population in Breslau, over 50% of the population in Zülz, 13% in Hundsfeld.33 Breslau (1787–1818) Shortly after Frederick II’s death, the new regent lifted a number of unpopular monopolies and other limitations and made huge 28  Manfred Agethen, “Die Situation der jüdischen Minderheit in Schlesien unter österreichischer und unter preußischer Herrschaft,” in Kontinuität und Wandel, ed. Peter Baumgart (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1990), 318. 29  Conrads, “Schlesiens frühe Neuzeit,” 239. 30  Zia̜tkowski, Die Geschichte der Juden in Breslau, 32. 31  Zia̜tkowski, Die Geschichte der Juden in Breslau, 34. 32  Andreas Reinke, Judentum und Wohlfahrtspflege in Deutschland: Das jüdische Krankenhaus in Breslau (Hannover: Verlag Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1999), 18–19. 33  Agethen, “Die Situation der jüdischen Minderheit…,” 324.

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simplifications to laws surrounding public tendering processes. Frederick II had failed to see the shortcomings of his paternalistic approach and had ignored the economic stagnation in the state. Johnson explains it succinctly, Frederick failed to understand the changing problems of the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat: his policies aimed to protect an ideal society of static aristocratic, bourgeois and peasant orders in an age when such a concept was becoming increasingly false. Because of his preoccupation, the revolutionary work of reform-minded bureaucrats was imperfectly supported.34

Frederick II’s successor and nephew, Frederick William II, lightened the city’s tax burden and lifted some of the trade restrictions. This allowed the city to finally take advantage of the First Polish Partition (1772) and opened up new export markets for Breslau’s manufacturing industry.35 The economic upswing coupled with a newly emergent cosmopolitan bourgeoisie had a huge impact on intellectual life in the city. Breslau’s history as a de facto autonomous city state meant that its intellectual dawn was ushered in by the emerging native bourgeoisie of teachers, publishers and civil servants. The city’s population had grown since 1740. In 1795, there were 55,888 residents and 5270 soldiers within the city walls—one-­ third of the population of Berlin at the time.36 From a social perspective, the period was also marked by the political awakening of the hitherto silent commoners in the form of social unrest. The wind of change from Paris in 1789 was slow to make its way across the continent to Breslau. Any reports on the Revolution were heavily censored and it is almost entirely absent from the pages of the newspapers and journals in the province. Despite this, there was a number of popular uprisings in the province of Silesia (across Prussia too) where the commoners appeared to have lost their fear of the state and were asserting a new self-understanding of themselves.37 The 1790s was not only the apotheosis of the bourgeois intellectual enlightenment but it was also a decade of social unrest as the lagging agricultural and social reforms led to violent  Johnson, Frederick the Great and his Officials, 248–49.  Erika Herzfeld, Preußische Manufakturen (Bayreuth: Verlag der Nation, 1994), 16–17. 36  Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang, 33. 37  The king made legal changes on 29 July 1794 to prevent further strikes and growing social unrest in The Mark: Erika Herzfeld, Preußische Manufakturen (Bayreuth: Verlag der Nation, 1994), 86. 34 35

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protests by peasants, farmers, and guilds. Although there was some unrest in the 1780s,38 violent protest and increased contempt for the state and its sclerotic system were endemic across the state in the 1790s.39 Wolfgang Neugebauer partly attributes the change in commoners’ attitudes towards the state to a new understanding of “universal” law after the ratification Allgemeine Landrecht in 1794. Shortly after the law was published, farmers in Silesia bought copies and began to openly question their masters. In many cases, they refused to work unless their demands for more rights were met.40 In one of the largest rebellions in Prussia, members of the tailor’s guild in Breslau were brutally beaten back by troops on 30 April 1793 in what amounted to an open rebellion in the city. Only the deaths of scores of protestors the imposition of the army could quell the violence.41 von Hoym and city officials in the city suspected French spies were behind the unrest.42 Von Hoym successfully argued for increased political participation for the bourgeoisie and guild groupings in the Civic Assembly to prevent such rebellions in the future.43 In October 1796, a whole village took up arms and attacked an army battalion accused of beating a fisherman whilst searching for a deserter. Again, von Hoym defused the situation before it escalated into a wider rebellion.44 The social situation in the province was not helped by Frederick William II’s closest advisor. Johann Christoph von Wöllner (1732–1800) openly promulgated a more Lutheran/Calvinist sectarian state than Frederick II. The lack of a cohesive political opposition and the diffuse nature of the

38  For example, there were strikes in Berlin in 1782 as the Jewish industrialist Paul Benedict Wolff attempted to have his workers arrested for striking in response to drastic wage cuts— his business was almost bankrupt: Herzfeld, Preußische Manufakturen, 86. 39  For a succinct summary of rebellions and conflict between the underclasses and organs of state in the 1790s see: Jürgen Kocka, Weder Stand noch Klasse: Unterschichten um 1800 (Bonn: J.H.W. Dietz, 1990), esp. 174–90. 40  Wolfgang Neugebauer, “Epochen der preußischen Geschichte Brandenburg-Preußen in der Frühen Neuzeit: Politik und Staatsbildung im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” in Handbuch der Preussischen Geschichte, ed. Wolfgang Neugebauer vol. 1. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 373. 41   Arno Herzig, “Der Breslauer Gesellenaufstand von 1793,” in Der Breslauer Gesellenaufstand von 1793, ed. Arno Herzig and Rainer Sachs (Göttingen: Otto Schwartz, 1987), 17. 42  Herzig, “Der Breslauer Gesellenaufstand von 1793,” 9–10. 43  Herzig, “Der Breslauer Gesellenaufstand von 1793,” 16. 44  Eduard Philipp, Geschichte der Stadt Breslau (Breslau: Eduard Philipp, 1831), 415.

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protestors and their plights, meant that the Enlightenment in Breslau was less democratic and deist than Enlightenment in France. Napoleon’s troops—manifested in the Bavarian-Württembergian Corps from the German-speaking states of the Rhineland Federation—arrived at the gates of Breslau on 6 January 1806. The 58,000 residents—around 2900 Jews—hoped to be defended by the 5400 soldiers in the city—2000 of whom were ethnic Poles from Poznan.45 In an effort to frustrate the enemy, General Thiel ordered the suburbs be burnt to the ground. The besieging army did not begin bombarding the city until December 10 later that year. After three weeks of heavy shelling and much destruction, the city sent the enlightener Johann Gottlieb Schummel to deliver terms in French to Napoleon’s brother Jerome.46 The high reparations demanded by the occupying forces created massive inflation, poverty and food shortages in the city.47 The troops left the city on 20 November 1808 when Napoleon made peace with Frederick William III—who had himself fled to Breslau after the occupation of Berlin. Continuing the work of the occupiers, the Prussian authorities removed much of the defensive walls and strategic army barriers and areas around the city. This immediately increased the size of the city as the centre was finally linked to the many suburban hamlets around it. Despite massive protest by the trade guilds, the city officially incorporated all of the large suburbs in 1816. In 1809, over 61% of all Silesians in the countryside were subject to the legal provisions and privileges of their local landed gentry or landed or aristocracy; this was the highest figure for any of the German-speaking lands (Pomerania 44%; Brandenburg 31%).48 After having a taste of the Code Napoléon, the bourgeoisie across Central Europe wished to hold on to some of the proto-democratic structures the French brought to their towns and cities. Breslau regained much of its autonomy and the mayor became the executive head of a much more powerful and elected Magistrat. That said, only 6.7% of the 60,000 strong 45   Stefi Jersch-Wenzel, “Rechtslage und Emanzipation,” in Emanzipation und Akkulturation: 1780–1871, ed. Michael Brenner, Stefi Jersch-Wenzel and Michael A. Meyer (München: Beck, 1996), 61. 46  Rudolf Heine, “Aus dem handschriftlichen Nachlasse des Reformpädagogen Johann Gottlieb Schummel,” Jahrbuch des Vereins für wissenschaftliche Pädagogik, no. 41 (1909): 74. 47  Mühle, Breslau, 163. 48  Arno Herzig, “Die unruhige Provinz: Schlesien zwischen 1806 und 1871,” in Schlesien, ed. Norbert Conrads (Berlin: Siedler, 2002), 468.

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population (Catholic, Protestant, or Calvinist) were entitled to vote. The conditions for voting were house ownership, an income of more than 200 Rthl. per annum and a “bourgeois” profession.49 The first major reform to affect Breslau was the rescinding of exclusive privileges for the many trade guilds when so-called economic freedom was rolled out.50 The city hoped economic freedoms would help integrate the minority groups into the city’s broader social environment. Jews and residents of the suburbs could now partake in business activity in the city without special permits.51 There was intense lobbying from Silesia’s landed aristocracy to block any agricultural reforms and there was widespread discontent within the trade and merchant guilds about the gradual civil emancipation of Silesia’s Jews. The Burgher oligarchy in Zülz where the Jewish population was over 50% tried to legally challenge Jews receiving improved civil status, and the Magistrat in Ratibor enforced an arcane medieval privilege to prevent Jews from living in the city—Privilegium de non tolerandis Judaeis. The Magistrat successfully managed to prevent the Jewish editor of a local newspaper to live in the town in 1811.52 In 1811, the city authorities stripped the guilds of their privileged position regarding tenders in Breslau. One year later, in 1812, Jews across Prussia were granted equal subject status under Prussian law—albeit as Jews and not citizens. This entitled the circa 3000 Jews living in the city at that time to pursue most professions and it also signalled the end of the punitive and exorbitant tax regime targeting Jewish subjects. Sadly, the city authorities in Breslau quickly created legislation to exclude Jews from having “Citizenship of the City of Breslau,” a privilege Jews would not receive until the 1840s.

Breslau’s History and the Historiographical Problem In typical studies of German-Jewish personalities or German-Jewish themes, there are almost always two presuppositions:

 Kulak, Breslau, 175ff: “bürgerlichen Beruf”  Herzig, “Die unruhige Provinz,” 470. 51  Herzig, “Die unruhige Provinz,” 470. 52  Herzig, “Die unruhige Provinz,” 470. 49 50

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1. There is a given German religious and cultural centre to which others are either excluded from or aspire to. 2. This German cultural centrifuge is embedded in a relatively culturally homogenous and immutable German space. The aim of the aforementioned historical background was to demonstrate how the notion of a homogenous and timeless “German” cultural centre against which all Jews in Breslau were in conflict with is an anachronistic projection of oversimplified nationalist positions—Zionist or German Nationalist. Such narratives do not adequately describe the reality of the socio-demographic or national group identities of German-speaking Christians or Jews in Silesia at the time of Moses Hirschel’s birth. I believe that both points 1 and 2 given earlier are specious and do not apply to Silesia or Breslau in the late eighteenth century. The overwhelming majority of historical works published on Silesian and Breslavian history over the past 200 years have either prioritised or projected certain nationalist narratives. Moreover, since the end of the Second World War, German historians, Polish historians and historians of Jewish history reduced their treatment of Breslau to simple Christian-­ Jewish, German-Polish and German-Jewish dichotomies.53 These histories usually had an ulterior motive of making nationalist claims to the land, its cultural heritage or using opposition to make claims about group identity. When one reads primary texts from that period, however, one is presented with a far more complex picture of the cultural, social and national identities at the time. As this chapter shows, the city was far from culturally homogenous, particularly given the fact that confessional adherence in no way presumed an identical cultural outlook. Moreover, it would be naïve to presume a stable “Prussian identity” in Breslau until several generations after the annexation. Even Protestant “Germans” were in no way a homogenous group. The strong estate system [Ständegesellschaft] in Central Europe created a cultural gulf between the bourgeoisie, nobility and the poor masses. We should also not forget the presence of thousands of non-German soldiers in the city who lived up to ten months a year in 53  Many of the most influential and widely cited German historians publishing works on Silesian and Breslavian history post 1945 were members of the NSDAP, SS or SA and had created German nationalist historical narratives in order to justify violent German expansion into the East (e.g. Walter Kuhn 1903–1983): see Ingo Haar Historiker Im Nationalsozialismus (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 272–75; 328–30.

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furlough and spent that time working menial jobs in the city and countryside around it. Even the remnants of the medieval colonists maintained a degree of cultural distinctness long into the eighteenth century. The so-­ called Kräuter people lived in a large community just beyond the city walls. They were presumably Slavic-speaking people from Saxony sent east to repopulate Silesia hundreds of years before. They distinguished themselves “from all other inhabitants here as much from their clothing as through their language, way of life and customs. These people live in the Nicolai-­ Schweidnitzer and Ohlauer suburbs, as well as other villages nearby…[they are] the leftovers from colonies from Upper Saxony.”54 In the eighteenth century, “Germany” remained an abstract cultural space which was, in any real political or constitutional sense, limited to the musings of scholarly and bourgeois circles. On this reading, pre-Romantic Germany was a cultural space rather than a political one where belonging to Germany as a cultural space was seen as a superior form of identity to the repressive, absolutist powers. In agreement with Conrad Wiedemann, Germany was a universally accessible cultural plane which had to be reached in order to “overcome the state and achieve a higher, supranational world order.”55 Germany and Germans were not identical to Prussia and Prussians and certainly not to Silesia and Silesians. Volkov concurs that using these terms in relation to certain territories might be justified when looking at “social and economic history,” but that it would be inappropriate for “cultural or intellectual history.”56 To present an honest cultural history, one needs to move beyond interpreting government decrees prima facie and move to other sources. There have only been two works in the past 120 years to look at Enlightenment in Breslau. And this despite the presence of leading German-speaking Enlightenment figures and its importance in Prussia’s social and economic history.57 In her work on the Enlightenment in Breslau, Anne Brenker 54  Johann F. Zöller, “Briefe über Schlesien auf einer Reise im Jahr 1791/92,” in Breslau in alten und neuen Reisebeschreibungen (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1991), 64. 55  Conrad Wiedemann, “The Germans’ Concern about Their National Identity in the PreRomantic Era,” in Concepts of National Identity, ed. Peter Boerner (Baden-Baden: NomosVerlag, 1986), 145. 56  Volkov, Die Juden in Deutschland: 1780–1918, 84. 57  Rudolf M. Ritscher, Versuch einer Geschichte der Aufklärung in Schlesien während des 18. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Georg-August-Universität, 1912); Anne-Margarete Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang: Realpolitik in Breslau im ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 2000).

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argues that almost all other historical works on Breslau ignored the intellectual history of the city in the eighteenth century. She further contests that other works make the assumption that Enlightenment was imported into the province.58 Brenker argues against a common historical assumption that Breslavians were a relatively homogenous group who quickly adapted to becoming Prussian subjects. Her extensive archival research led her to a very different conclusion. Namely, that the Prussian annexation led to an even stronger regional identity which was further strengthened by Breslau’s semi-autonomous political structures which persisted until the first decade of the nineteenth century.59 This is supported by much of the primary source writing at the time which invariably describes Silesians as having a distinct culture, Germanic dialect and history. For example,  some of Hirschel’s contemporaries claimed they spoke a “German tongue,”60 with Silesia as the “Fatherland” and everything beyond its borders either “Deutschland” or “Abroad.”61

 Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang, 24.  Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang, 35–36. 60  Friedrich Schulz, “Reise eines Liefländers von Riga nach Warschau durch Südpreußen über Breslau…1795,” in Breslau in alten und neuen Reisebeschreibungen ed. Heinrich Trierenberg (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1991), 71. 61  Johann Schummel, Schummels Reise durch Schlesien im Julius und August 1791 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1995), iv. 58 59

CHAPTER 4

Moses Hirschel: A Critical Biography

Moses Hirschel—scholar, Breslavian, “Haskalah extremist,”1 Jew, iconoclast, “Jewish Voltaire,”2 Protestant, convert, chess savant, religious reformer, social activist, unimportant footnote. The truth of any of these statements or indeed the order in which they could be said to apply depends very much on the author’s perspective. Indeed, Hirschel himself may have tagged himself quite differently during his lifetime with some or even all of the above. His own few works certainly offer no clear answers to this quandary. If the previous chapter described some of the historical objective conditions in Breslau, this present chapter will look at Hirschel’s subjective perspective and the manner in which he acted upon the objective world’s influence. Much comment on Hirschel and his life have used common objective identity types to describe Hirschel. Applying the new dynamic categories of identity and identity forming as argued above, we can look at Hirschel’s life in the manner in which he lived it and how he acted. Agreeing with Berger and Luckmann, there are two ways to discuss identity: “Identity is a phenomenon that emerges from the dialectic between individual and society. Identity types, on the other hand, are social products tout court,

1  Raphael Mahler, A History of Modern Jewry: 1780–1815 (London: ValentineMitchell), 182. 2  Christoph Schulte, Die jüdische Aufklärung (Munich: Beck, 2002), 95.

© The Author(s) 2021 D. Heywood Jones, Moses Hirschel and Enlightenment Breslau, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46235-2_4

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relatively stable elements of objective social reality.”3 Identity carries both elements of subjective agency and objective constraint. Hirschel’s biography explodes common identity types such as Jew, convert or apostate. There simply were no categories at the time for what we now term “secular” or “hybridised Jewish identities.” The religious and legal Jewish identity types did not include cosmopolitan or non-religious Jews who nevertheless identified as Jews. Neither the Jewish nor the Prussian authorities had any desire make accommodations for this newly emergent person.

Hirschel’s Early Life To date, published research on Moses Hirschel has been limited to sources included in the German Biographical Archive which draws on a number of sources from Hirschel’s lifetime and later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gerda Heinrich wrote the only comprehensive biography of Hirschel up until this publication.4 Possibly due to errors in Wininger’s Jewish Biography entry, almost all of the sources repeat the same incorrect information on Hirschel’s date of death as well as his conversion and family.5 Although Hirschel’s name and short biography appears in a number of books on Breslau, they invariably use the same few sources employed by Heinrich. Johann Gottlieb Schummel’s (1748–1813) short descriptions of scholars living in Breslau included five pages on Hirschel’s life up until 1801 and is perhaps the most significant primary source on Hirschel.6 Following Hirschel’s own definition of biography, a good biography requires “all the manifold concatenations of the causes and effects [on a subject].”7 The lack of information on the maskilim and the Jewish community in Breslau at the end of the eighteenth century makes it difficult to definitively work out the “causes” of Hirschel’s published works. Moreover, it is almost impossible now to discover the exact nature of his  Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, 174.  Heinrich’s biography can be found at its permanent home at haskalah.net: Moses Hirschel-Biographie, http://www.haskala.net/autoren/hirschel01/biographie.html 5  For example, Moses Hirschel entry in the Große jüdische National-Biographie, ed. Salomon Wininger (Czernowitz: Arta Druckerei, 1928), 128. 6  Johann Schummel, Breslauer Almanach, für den Anfang des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Breslau: Graßes Erben und Barth, 1801). 7  Hirschel, “Biographie des jüdischen Gelehrten und Dichters Ephraim Moses Kuh,” 25. 3 4

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relationships with a number of the leading enlighteners and maskilim in Breslau. Schummel’s widely cited Breslauer Almanach from 1801, offered brief biographical sketches of Breslau’s intelligentsia and personalities of note. That Hirschel appears in it all is a testament to both his intriguing intellectual biography as well as his notoriety within the city. Hirschel is presented in this work alongside well-known intellectuals such as Fülleborn, Bürde and Hermes, among others. Schummel presented “Enlightened” Jews, Protestants and Catholics born in Breslau as sharing equal entitlement to any Silesian genus loci. An early review in the Allgemeine Literaturzeitung raved that the work was entertaining and enlightening, it also praised Schummel’s “love of his fatherland.”8 Schummel writes that Hirschel was born in September 1754 to an army supplier with the much coveted General Privilegierte residency status.9 The father’s status, which placed him in the social elite of Jewish Breslavian society, ensured that Moses could live and work in Breslau without the constant fear of losing his residency status. Schummel claims that the young Moses was earmarked to become a Rabbi given his early aptitude and learning abilities.10 His early scepticism of positive religion, apparently brought on by Maimonides’ Moreh Nevukhim, led him to move away from religious life into his father’s business. Hirschel then moved abroad— Holland and Berlin are mentioned. After some years outside of Silesia, Hirschel returned to the city of his birth in 1773 to become an antiquarian book dealer, tutor, chess instructor, business broker and agent, and publicist. Throughout the rest of his life, Hirschel regularly defined himself as a scholar and publicist. Given that there are relatively few titles published under his name, however, one could assume that he was also

 review of Breslauer Almanach, Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung 4, no. 333 (1801): 422.  In his death notice in 1818, Hirschel’s wife Eleonore Louise Herschel claims that Moses was born (around) November 12, 1750: see Schlesische privilegierte Zeitung, 27.06.1818. 10  Schummel, Breslauer Almanach, 246. 8 9

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writing and publishing anonymously.11 After all, he regularly defined himself as a “private scholar” or “Jewish Scholar in Breslau.”12 Hirschel’s Partnership with Joseph Kausch Significant to Hirschel’s intellectual legacy was his partnership and friendship with the doctor, medical theorist and publicist Johann Joseph Kausch (1751–1825). Most of Hirschel’s publications were published in Kausch’s various collections of essays and “Nachrichten.” The two also collaborated on Ephraim Moses Kuh’s collected works and biography. In the early nineteenth century, Kausch became one of Prussia’s most respected, decorated and prestigious doctors and theorists.13 He wrote about everything from rubella, anthrax and gunshot wounds, to forensic medicine and public hygiene.14 Yet, it was his political and social texts for which he was best known before the turn of the eighteenth century.15 Almost certainly due to his published “Polonophile”16 opinions, Kausch had to flee into exile in Leipzig for 12 months after a month’s incarceration in Prussia in 1797–1798.17 The Prussian authorities believed that 11  Ludwig Geiger draws our attention to a number of passages in the Chronik von Berlin oder Berlinische Merkwürdigkeiten journal from the early 1790s which he assumed were written by Hirschel, see Ludwig Geiger, “Vor hundert Jahren: Mitteilungen aus der Geschichte der Juden Berlins,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, no. 2 (1889): 202; also an unaccredited article from the Schlesische Provnzialblätter signed “M.H”: “Was ist in einem sonderbaren Handel zweener Freunde Rechtens?,” Schlesische Provinzialblätter, July (1788): 52–59; an anonymous letter to the Schlesische Provnzialblätter on Early Burial was presumably authored by Hirschel. November (1797): 465–68. 12  This appellation appears in almost all of his works and biographic extracts. Before his conversion he signed at least some of his letters, “Moses Hirschel, Jewish Scholar in Breslau”; for example, Hirschel’s letter to Ramler, GSA 75/ 98. 13  The King of Prussia awarded Kausch the Order of the Red Eagle 3rd Class in 1823: see A. Hirsch, “Kausch, Johann Joseph,” Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 15 (1882). 14  Bibliotheca medico-chirurgica et anatomico-physiologica, ed. Wilhelm Engelmann (Hildesheim: Olms, 1848), 293. 15  His obituary in the Schlesische Provinzialblätter in 1825 makes almost no mention of his political and cultural texts and essays from before 1800, discussing instead his contributions to medicine; see C. L. Klose, “Johann Joseph Kausch: Eine biographische Skizze,” Schlesische Provinzialblätter, June (1825), 586–95. 16  See Gerhard Koselleck, “Kauschs Nachrichten über Polen,” in Reformen, Revolutionen und Reisen, ed. Gerhard Kosellek (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000), 141–58. 17   Ludwig Petry “Schlesische Stimmen um 1800 zur Polenfrage,” in Jahrbuch der Schlesischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Breslau XXI (1980): 171–87.

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Kausch—a Silesian Catholic—was unpatriotic and they suspected he sympathised with Poland at the time of the final two Partitions (1793 and 1795).18 Kausch, a friend of the enlightened Polish Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski (1770–1861), published two works in 1793 which the Prussian authorities believed were too empathic with Poland.19 Kosseleck has described Kausch’s writings on Poland as informative and an attempt to “break down prejudices.”20 To counter Prussian and Russian proposals to dissolve the Polish Commonwealth and annex its territories, Kausch published essays defending Poland as a sovereign state and championing its distinctive culture. His work also warned the bickering Polish nobility that total annexation was a distinct possibility.21 Kausch was later pardoned and he returned to Prussia where he quickly published an autobiography defending his previous publications. After one further mention of Poland in a 1798 travelogue,22 Kausch later dedicated all of his publishing efforts to medical themes.23 Hirschel and Kausch’s friendship is important as it provides a largely forgotten example of a public Jewish-Christian male friendship.24 Although much has been written on Mendelssohn’s friendship with Lessing, Mendelssohn also  had personal friendships with Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811) and Thomas Abbt (1738–1766).25 Other significant Jewish-­ Christian relationships at the time, at least in a literary sense, included Solomon Maimon and Karl Phillip Moritz (1756–1793) who worked closely together in Berlin. Male interreligious relationships were viewed as the apotheosis of Enlightenment, understood as the furtherment of tolerance and brotherly 18  For a review of the general view on Poland among Breslau’s elites, see: Lucyna Harc, “Polen und Preußen in der Beurteilung Breslauer meinungsbildender Eliten in der Aufklärungszeit,” in Deutsche und Polen in der Aufklärung und in der Romantik, ed. Ewa Szymani (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2011), 29–38. 19  Johann Kausch, Nachrichten über Polen, 2 vols. (Salzburg: Mayr, 1793). 20  See G. Koselleck, “Kauschs Nachrichten über Polen,” 142–43. 21  Kausch, “Letze Warnung für Polen,” in Nachrichten über Polen. vol. 2. (Salzburg: Mayr, 1793), 51–99. 22  Johann Kausch, Kausch‘s Briefe an den Einsiedler Gerund auf dem Riesengebürge (Berlin: Matzdorff, 1798). 23  Johann Kausch, Kausch‘s Schicksale (Leipzig: Voß, 1797). 24  Schummel, Breslauer Almanach (221–233) also mentions Kausch’s acquaintance and publishing ties to Elias D. Henschel (1758–1839), a pioneering Jewish obstetrician and publicised advocate and activist for the promotion of the small pox vaccine in Silesia. 25  See, Horst Möller, “Nicolai und Mendelssohn,” Menora 16 (2006): 97–114.

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love. Berghahn argues that these archetypical Jewish-Christian male friendships—a subcategory of the prevailing “cult of friendship” among enlighteners—were the beginning of  Christian-Jewish dialogue.26 These friendships were not just private affairs but were understood as “productive collaboration in order to promote the process of Enlightenment.”27 Often the Jewish thinkers were “almost indistinguishable from the Christian.”28 The pre-exilic texts published by Kausch in his compendia were written by German Protestants, Catholics and Jews, as well as women and Poles. His concept of Enlightenment was radically more cosmopolitan than most of his German-speaking contemporaries. His published works can be interpreted as attempts to normalise and popularise interreligious, intercultural as well as intergender relationships. He was arguing for political and social change to accommodate other groups in the main body politic. He “lived” his philosophy by befriending intellectuals from other religious and social backgrounds. The strategic partnership with Kausch gave Hirschel a platform to criticise the Jewish religious and economic elite and improve the lives of Jews without relying on rabbinical approval for his writing. For his part, Kausch also used Hirschel to offer a damning report on Catholic institutions in Silesia. He thereby escaped the criticism a Protestant or Catholic may have received for such a candid assessment. The partnership offered Hirschel access to a large readership as Kausch wrote on a broad spectrum of political, historical and social topics concerning Silesia. Kausch and his contributors mixed implicit criticism of the state and its structures with pedagogic and educational texts. In each educational text, emphasis was placed on self-development and heuristic education. Kausch and his contributors were all critical of the religious and civil authorities. Close reading of Kausch’s prologues and essays support the argument that Kausch was a radically minded reformer and enlightener and an exception to a generally non-confrontational Enlightenment in Central Europe. Both Hirschel and Kausch regularly cited French and English-language texts in their works and not just German sources. 26  Klaus L. Berghahn, “Der Freundschaftskult des 18. Jahrhunderts und die Anfänge eines christlich-jüdischen Dialogs,” Grenzen der Toleranz, ed. Klaus Berghahn (Köln: Böhlau, 2000), 83–101. 27  K. Berghahn, Grenzen der Toleranz, 93. 28  K. Berghahn, Grenzen der Toleranz, 93.

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Popular Enlightenment There was an explosion or “bombardment” of Popular Enlightenment texts from the early 1780s onwards.29 Siegert defines Popular Enlightenment as enlightened education of the common man by individuals, communitarian societies and officials with the explicit intention of elevating them to their level of rational understanding.30 Popular Enlightenment “was more concerned with mediating positive knowledge or concepts (e.g. doctrine of natural law) than changing the mentality; or with moving away from unproved inherited traditions which the unenlightened “Volk” took to be mental givens.”31 The common man in this sense should be understood as farmers, peasants, low-ranking soldiers and civil servants, as well as the growing urban underclass. Popular enlighteners wanted to apply the newly developed empirical methodologies of the Enlightenment to all aspects of life. The generation to which Hirschel belonged was the first generation to put these new abstract methodologies in to everyday practice. Anne Conrad has argued that the “common man” or “great herd” were to be educated by a new “cultural elite” whose self-appointed mission was to make the Enlightenment accessible.32 She divides the populations of the Enlightenment into two groups, an elite—corresponding to the intellectual bourgeoisie—and the “Volk” who took on the role of recipients of enlightenment.33 She describes each group as being interdependent and influenced by each other.34 The move from theoretical to practical enlightenment came hand in hand with the transition towards a “systematic empirical approach to collating and collating material.”35 Authorities across Central Europe were keen to encourage improvements to public hygiene, infant mortality, disease control, improved farming methods or whatever means would foster 29  Reinhart Siegert, “The Popular Enlightenment at its height and the break caused by the French Revolution,” in Die Genese der Volksaufklärung und ihre Entwicklung bis 1780, ed. Holger Böning and Reinhart Siegert (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1990), xlvi. 30  Siegert, “The Popular Enlightenment at its Height…,” ix–x. 31  Siegert, “The Popular Enlightenment at its Height…,” ix–x. 32  Anne Conrad, “Aufgeklärte Elite und aufzuklärendes Volk?,” in Das Volk im Visier der Aufklaerung, ed. Anne Conrad, Arno Herzig and Franklin Kopitzsch (Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 1998), 2. 33  A. Conrad, “Aufgeklärte Elite und aufzuklärendes Volk?,” 4. 34  A. Conrad, “Aufgeklärte Elite und aufzuklärendes Volk?,” 4–5. 35  Werner Krauss, Zur Anthropologie des 18. Jahrhunderts (München: Hanser, 1979), 13.

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more productive subjects. After the French Revolution, the absolutist states faced a crisis of legitimacy. Educating their subjects was thought to be a task which “promised to reward both the individual idealist’s sense of mission and the enlightened state’s struggle for efficiency and sense of responsibility.”36 The explosion of Popular Enlightenment in Central Europe was accompanied by an exponential increase in the training and professionalisation of pastors, teachers, farmers, surgeons and midwives. In other words, there was a monumental shift in the “mindset” of authorities, the intelligentsia and some of the general population.37 The rise of Popular Enlightenment arguably culminated in its own demise as the publicists, writers and scholars became journalists. Their writings were no longer published in expensive books—financed via subscription—but in newspapers and journals. The writings of the Popular Enlightenment were the first step towards professionalised journalism which became the voice of a newly active constituency, namely “civil or bourgeois society.”38 This emergent civil society was not limited to any one location. Journals, magazines and even newspapers were distributed across Central Europe and read in book shops, book clubs and in the many lodges and other meeting houses.39 Texts from England, Scotland, France, Ireland, Italy, and across German-speaking Europe were translated, disseminated and read across the Continent. In the absence of real democratic structures in Central Europe, the new intellectual space became an interface for the burgeoning civil society which remained, nevertheless, an abstract community of scholars, literati and the learned.

 Siegert, “The Popular Enlightenment,” lii.  Siegert, “The Popular Enlightenment,” lii. 38  Iwan-Michelangelo D’Aprile, Die Erfindung der Zeitgeschichte (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013), 15ff. 39  Rather than “Burgher” (feudal term) or “middle-class” (an economic term), I will use the term “bourgeois” to connotate the newly emergent but admittedly heterogenous intelligentsia. This group were economically part of the “middle-class” but should be distinguished from purely economic categories as their education, goals and political aspirations created a culturally distinct class or estate within early capitalist societies in Central Europe. Bourgeois is synonymous with the German-language usage of “Bürgerlich” towards the end of the eighteenth century: on the distinction in English, see Franco Moretti’s, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (London: Verso, 2013), 1–24. 36 37

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This line of reasoning is fundamentally at odds with nationalist German historians who promulgate a simplistic Berlin-centric claim that Enlightenment “came to Silesia from abroad.”40

Hirschel’s Popular Enlightenment Works Hirschel on Chess One of the only references to Hirschel’s father asserts that he taught the young Moses to play chess.41 Hirschel’s first known publication was a chess manual in 1784 in which he translated an older chess manual from Giaochino Greco (c.1600–c.1634). He also added a number of endgames from a popular chess master Philipp Stamma (c.1705–c.1755) to the translation. This was the first German translation of Greco’s work.42 Hirschel transcribed Greco’s work using Stamma’s novel algebraic notational form. According to one chess historian, Hirschel’s work helped to popularise this notational form as well as Stamma’s prioritisation of endgames in chess education in Central Europe. This made Hirschel’s translation “one of the most important” of his time.43 The nineteenth-century chess historian Antonius van der Linde described the “new” notational form as doing the same for chess as musical notes did for singing.44 Petzold adds that Hirschel’s inclusion of Stamma’s games in his Greco translation was a sign of Hirschel’s perspicacious grasping of the needs of his contemporary chess players.45 A testament to its popularity, Hirschel reworked and republished his chess work in 1795 at a prestigious publishing house in Leipzig.46 His  chess  works were popular as multiple citations in the Technologisches  Wörterbuch throughout the nineteenth century

 Baumgart, “Schlesien als eigenständige Provinz im altpreußischen Staat,” 437.  Schummel, Breslauer Almanach, 247. 42  Antonius van der Linde, Geschichte und Literatur des Schachspiels 1 (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1874), 193. 43  Joachim Petzold, Schach: Eine Kulturgeschichte (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1986), 183. 44  Linde, Geschichte und Literatur des Schachspiels, 358. 45  Petzold, Schach, 193–194. 46  Moses Hirschels Unterricht für Schachspieler (Leipzig: Soomerschen Buchhandlung, 1795). 40 41

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demonstrate.47 His chess works were accepted into the renowned chess library in Berlin’s chess club in 1807.48 Given its meritocratic nature, chess provided an  ideal opportunity for  Jewish intellectuals to meet with their Christian counterparts. The rational and intellectual aspects of chess were seen as beneficial to the further development of enlightened thinking. It was said that Mendelssohn and Lessing first met while playing chess.49 Nathan, the central character in Lessing’s famous Nathan the Wise (1779) meets the Muslim Saladin over a game of chess. Some ten years before the first chess clubs were founded in Prussia in 1803,50 Hirschel promoted chess as the ideal game for enlighteners to ennoble and refine the mind.51 He discussed the social side of chess as well as the benefits it had for memory and for logical and independent thought. Hirschel did not view the benefits of sharpening the mind in purely utilitarian terms. Reading his psychological and pedagogic chess treatise from 1791, it is clear that Hirschel understood human reason as teleological and divinely instituted. Whereby, reason has objective and measurable stages of development and progression. Hirschel argued that humans have a duty to develop and perfect their intellects and “animalistic” (99–100) parts planted within us by a “wise creator” (101). Hirschel’s assumption of a metaphysical teleology of human development was fitting with many of his contemporaries’ understanding of reason and God. For example, an analogous understanding of teleology is central to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History from the 1820s.52 47  Gottfried E.  Rosenthal, Technologisches Wörterbuch, vol. 8 (Stettin: Friedrich Nicolai, 1795), 334. 48  Uta Motschmann, Handbuch der Berliner Vereine und Gesellschaften 1786–1815 (Berlin: De Gruyter Akad. Forschung, 2015), 203. 49  Graetz and Brann claim that a well-known Jewish chess expert called Isaak Heß first introduced Mendelssohn to Lessing: Heinrich Graetz and Markus Brann, Geschichte der Juden vom Beginn der Mendelssohn‘schen Zeit (1750) bis in die neueste Zeit (1848) (Leipzig: Leiner, 1900), 9. 50  Motschmann. Handbuch der Berliner Vereine und Gesellschaften 1786–1815, 158. 51   Moses Hirschel, “Ueber das Schachspiel,” in Freimüthige Unterhaltungen…, ed. J. Kausch (Leipzig: Büschel, 1791), 99–141. 52  Hirschel’s understanding of duties was in contrast to the natural teleological theories from the new critical philosophy. Kant argued in his Doctrine of Virtue from his 1797 Metaphysics of Morals that developing one’s talents was an imperfect duty, thus conditional and occasional rather than perfect duties, which he argued to be categoric; see Die Metaphysik der Sitten (1797), esp. Der ethischen Elementarlehre, Akademie Ausgabe, A XXIII, 416ff.

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Hirschel is critical of the lack of enthusiasm for the game in “Deutschland” (105) compared to “England, France, Spain, Italy, and the Middle East” (101). Hirschel recommends the game to 1. Tacticians, in particular for the military; 2. For men with diverse business interests; 3. For scholars and philosophers; 4. For the youth. (107)

The chess historian Egbert Meissenburg wrote that Hirschel’s contribution to chess has been “unjustifiably” entered into his biography as a mere bibliographic appendage.53 Meissenburg concludes that Hirschel’s translations and his usage of the new notational form were innovative. His pedagogic argument that chess was an important tool to teach the youth, however, was breaking ground at the time.54 Hirschel: “You parents, who have children endowed with a small portion of reason, learn or let them learn chess, and teach them playfully how to learn to learn” (112). Early Marriage Hirschel’s work on early marriage within Jewish communities is a rare example of a German-language Enlightenment text directed specifically at Jews and Jewish communities. It also contains an appeal to Prussian lawmakers to raise the age of marriage in Prussia.55 Hirschel’s well-researched “exemplary and readable” essay uses cogent argumentation to argue against early marriage within Jewish communities.56 He specifically mentions practices to the east of Prussia where the appropriate age for marriage and procreation was 13 for boys and 12 for girls. Hirschel deploys an array of sources to argue that the benefits of marrying in one’s twenties far outweigh the perceived negative effects of remaining unmarried until then. Hirschel claims the main reason Jews married young was because of biblical prohibitions on “Onanie” (§5).

 Egbert Meissenburg, email correspondence to David Heywood-Jones, May 23, 2017.  The Neue allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek included Hirschel’s 1795 edition of his chess work in a list of ideal Christmas gift ideas for young people; review of Moses Hirschels Unterricht für Schachspieler, in Intelligenzblatt der Neuen ADB, no. 3 (1799): 30. 55  Moses Hirschel, “Ueber die allzufrühen Ehen der Jüdischen Nation,” in Freymüthige Unterhaltungen, vol. 1 ed. Johann Kausch (Leipzig: Büschel, 1790). 56   Johannes Kern, review of “Ueber die allzufrühen Ehen der jüdischen Nation,” Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek 98, no. 2 (1791): 598. 53 54

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Towards the end of the eighteenth century, masturbation [Selbstbefleckung] was considered a major public health issue across Europe in general.57 In the German-speaking lands in the 1780s, it became a major topic for discussion.58 The thinking at the time was that that masturbation transgressed natural law.59 Hirschel’s central thesis was that the offspring of young parents were a threat to the biological and social pool. He contests that the children of young parents die young or are weak and are unable to work hard. This made them “useless and unusable” subjects (§21). Young parents were simply not “ripe” (§6) or mature enough to produce healthy children. His utilitarian arguments to improve the state and its gene pool were supported by the latest medical research. He cites Johann Peter Frank’s System der medizinische Polizei and Samuel-Auguste Tissot’s L’Onanisme. Drawing on Jewish sources such as Talmud and the Torah, Hirschel also blends in quotes from Aristotle, Descartes and Joachim Heinrich Campe (1746–1818). To propose that the ideal age for men to marry was 24–25 years and 18–20 years for women (§25). Kuh Biography Together with Kausch and Karl Ramler (1725–1798), Hirschel collected, edited and helped publish a posthumous collection of Ephraim Kuh’s poetry. He was also Kuh’s first biographer60 and the texts he published on Kuh’s personal life no doubt helped promote Kuh far and wide beyond his home city of Breslau.61 Shortly after Kuh’s death on 3 April 1790, Kausch and Hirschel wrote to Karl Ramler. Ramler was one of Prussia’s  Volkmar Sigusch, Sexualitäten (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2013), 284–86.  For a detailed summary of the virulent anti-masturbation campaigns in the Germanspeaking lands, see Isabel V.  Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1997), 258–80. 59  e.g., Masturbation as a “naturwidriger Gebrauch” cf. Kant, Metaphysik der Sitten I. Kant, Akademische Ausgabe VI, 424. 60  A short Kuh biography appeared in the Schlesische Provinzialblätter in January 1791. Hirschel informed Ramler that he had sent a short article on Kuh to the same journal a few months before, April 1790—GSA 75/ 98. The article was attributed to Johann Manso. Hirschel claimed that Manso plagiarised his work. See Johann K. F. Manso, “Ueber Ephraim Kuhs Leben und Gedichte,” Schlesische Provinzialblätter 13 (1791): 23–34. 61  Other nineteenth-century biographies on Ephraim Kuh include, Meyer Kayserling, Der Dichter Ephraim Kuh (Berlin: Springer, 1864); Berthold Auerbach, Dichter und Kaufmann (Mannheim: Bassermann, 1855). 57 58

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leading poets and a former acquaintance of Kuh’s. They asked him to help edit a collection of the recently deceased Breslavian-Jewish poet’s works. Sadly, only one letter from the correspondence has been found to date.62 Hirschel wrote to Ramler on 23 April 1790 requesting his assistance to edit Kuh’s works.63 Hirschel told Ramler that Kuh had requested that Ramler edit his works because Ramler had shown Kuh much “good [will] and friendship.”64 Ramler wrote to Hirschel that although he was not a friend of Kuh’s, he would edit Kuh’s works because of his “love for the Jewish nation.”65 In lieu of more letters from the protagonists, the true nature of their relationship remains a mystery.66 Kausch used the preface to Kuh’s works to distance himself from Hirschel’s criticism of Prussia’s anti-Jewish policy. Later on, however, he agrees with Hirschel that the state is unfairly discriminating against Jewish-German subjects.67 He describes Kuh as a “Germanic” and “Deutsch” writer. More relevant than the biography itself is Hirschel’s introduction to the biography where he attacks both German and Christian anti-Semitism as well as Berlin’s ignorance of Prussia’s largest province. Hirschel writes that Kuh should be placed in the canon of Silesian poets and that Silesian intellectuals, writers and poets should also be given more respect in Deutschland (34–36). “Intolerance, fanaticism, charlatanerie, superstition, and prejudice” (30) prevented Jewish intellectuals from having any voice. It was not until the writings of “Mendelssohn, Markus Herz, Friedländer, Simon, Maimon and several other men of the Jewish nation” (31) that Jews repudiated pernicious claims about them and “teach, entertain, lecture, and improve mankind” (32). Thanks to the “century of philosophy,” the “barbaric” (37) days when the word Jew in itself was a negative term were now in the 62  Kausch wrote to Ramler in October 1787 requesting a poem for a 1789 anthology GSA 75/ 102. 63  Hirschel to Ramler GSA 75/ 98. 64  Hirschel to Ramler GSA 75/ 98. 65  Kausch, preface to Hinterlassene Gedichte, ed. Moses Hirschel, Karl W. Ramler and Johann J. Kausch (Zürich: Orell, Geßner, Füßli und Comp., 1792), 14. 66  Kayserlings’s biography also mentions a letter from Ramler to Kuh where Ramler was enthusiastic about Kuh’s poetry and suggested that the two had met, see Kayserling, Der Dichter Ephraim Kuh, 32–34. 67  Kausch similarly denies knowledge of the content of Hirschel’s submissions in the preface to his later work Nachrichten Über Schlesien, Böhmen und das vormalige Polen (xiiff).

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past. Intellectuals were now being heard regardless of their “religious opinions and beliefs” (38). Hirschel polemicises a number of incidents in Kuh’s life to criticise Kuh’s humiliation at the hands the Prussian authorities and the Jewish religious elite. Admitting that Kuh had a history of mental health issues (94) and had suffered a number of strokes in his last years (137), Hirschel nonetheless paces the blame for Kuh’s death on those two parties. Ephraim Kuh was born into the wealthy merchant family in 1731. A wunderkind of sorts, his father quickly decided he would become a rabbi. The young Kuh disappointed his father when he did not warm to religious texts or develop a taste for “scholastic dogmatic, sophistic hypotheses, subtle artificialities, and other reasonable nothings” (43). The narrative frame in the biography is Kuh’s intellectual journey from a traditional Jewish education to becoming  a free-thinking intellectual. Hirschel was arguably using Kuh’s biography to put forward his own opinions on how to improve the lives of ordinary Jews and how to set aside prejudices against Jews among his fellow Prussians. Gerda Heinrich agrees that Hirschel’s Kuh is an enlightened role model for the benefits of educational advancement.68 Hirschel’s primary concerns here and in other works are both pedagogic and political. For Hirschel, (1) education is the key to improving the lives of Jews; (2) both the Prussian state and the rabbinate must accept systematic change if Jews were to access the education required to make this improvement. He promotes these ideals using anecdotes from Kuh’s life. For example, he mentions that the Jewish community in Breslau initially refused to bury Kuh in a Jewish graveyard (147ff). Hirschel also discusses what he saw as Christian duplicity in relation to what was supposed to be a central tenet of their religion—tolerance. Most Christians refused to accept Jews as Jews and there was still widespread insistence on Jewish conversion (100–112). When Hirschel lists Kuh’s intellectual influences there are no German names. “Foreigners” (54) became Kuh’s influences and “favourites” (54). Hirschel adds that the German writers in Kuh’s youth did not have the energy later shown by “Lessing, Mendelssohn, Abbt, Jerusalem, and Nicolai” (55). Enlightenment came from France, Italy and Great Britain, and not necessarily from Berlin. Hirschel even goes as far as to claim that

 cf. Heinrich, Moses Hirschel—Biographie.

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the German language was inadequate and too “raw” in the middle of the eighteenth century to accommodate and express poetic verse (55). Hirschel’s most virulent attack on the “Christian” authorities are when he recounts the time Kuh was forced to pay a so-called Leibzoll [body tax] (86ff) on his way back to Breslau after some years abroad. The Leibzoll was a duty paid on cattle and other animals entering particular districts, regions, or cities. By forcing Jews to pay this tax, the state of Saxony was treating Jews like animals. This went against the basic Christian command to practise “brotherly love” (87). The  traumatised Kuh was forced to pay a large sum of money to avoid prison in Saxony. He returned penniless to Breslau shortly thereafter. Hirschel and Patriotism In 1790, Hirschel published an essay critiquing a new Prussian army purchasing law put forward in a 1789 pamphlet titled Patriotischer Zuruf an die Herren Stände Breslauischen Creises. De dato den 27ten Januar 1789.69 The author was the newly appointed head of the commission W. von Reichell. Reichell argued that law needed to be changed because a corrupt Jewish trader had been buying and selling supplies to the Prussian army.70 The trader had a monopoly on supply and allegedly bought supplies months advance when prices were low, only to collect and sell to the army when the prices rose. von Reichell claimed farmers had been complaining that they were getting a bad deal and the Jewish trader was corrupt. With pressure from the nobility, the state changed the purchasing system so the army would once again draw supplies from a commission run by the local nobility. In the mercantile spirit of Breslau at the time, Hirschel complains that the new commission system was just creating middle-men and that the contracts should again be put out to tender.71 Hirschel’s essay is a moral-­ economic argument for the inherent good of free trading for the society at large. He cites Rousseau and defends the idea of equality for all subjects before the law.72 He further argues that an open tendering process  I was unable to find this text in any of the archives.  W. von. Reichell, Vertheidigung wider die Critic des Moses Hirschel (Breslau: 1790). 71  Moses Hirschel, Patriotische Bemerkungen über die kleine Schrift (Breslau: Gottlieb Löwe, 1790). 72  Hirschel, Patriotische Bemerkungen über die kleine Schrift, 13–15. 69 70

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would the best option for those issuing the tender. Throughout the text, Hirschel critiques monopolies, which he felt were anti-egalitarian and harmful to business.73 Hirschel begins his philosophical argument with a vision for how society should work and what patriotism would mean to for this idealised society. Hirschel opines that true patriotism is when the wealthy or better educated help those in need (5). In a previous work from 1789, Hirschel claimed that progress could only be measured by the gradual elimination of human suffering which, in turn, should be our only goal.74 In his Patriotische Bemerkungen, he argues that although patriotism is the most “noble of our virtues” (2), the nobility were failing to help the poorer in society. Quite simply, they were helping themselves and not acting patriotically (18). They instead believed that real patriotism was having feelings for “a province, a city, a sect, a party or family” (8): The philosopher, the philanthropist, the truth seeker and patriot must always ask himself by his actions: whether he does not destroy the welfare of others who are less fortunate, or even the poor, when he promotes the welfare of some rich people? And whether, in the case of a conflict of interests, should he not decide in favour of the former? Such a decision taken according to reason and fairness, is true patriotism. (8)

Needless to say, Hirschel’s cosmopolitan concepts of patriotism and equality were not well received. von Reichell responded that “Israelites” have no right to criticise the higher classes in Prussia and, furthermore, that Jews did not have any right to talk about patriotism.75 Reichell did not answer Hirschel’s arguments for an open tendering process and instead spends much of his short text discussing the allegedly corrupt Jewish trader. Hirschel’s Patriotische Bemerkungen was widely read at the time. It was treated by his contemporaries as a cammeralist text—one of the few such examples penned by a Jewish author. As late as 27 years after its publication, Prussian legal reference books were citing Hirschel’s philosophical-­ cammeralist text and listing published refutations of Hirschel’s critique.76 73  He mentions this again in a later work, Apologie der Menschenrechte (Zürich: Orell, Geßner, Füßli und Comp., 1793), 156. 74   Moses Hirschel, “Jüdische Intoleranz und Fanatismus,” in Von Wahrheit und Freymütigkeit in schwesterlicher Umarmung, ed. Johann Kausch, vol 1. (Nürnberg, 1789), 49. 75  von. Reichell, Vertheidigung wider die Critic des Moses Hirschel, 5. 76  cf. Karl A. Kamptz, v., ed. Jahrbücher für die preußische Gesetzgebung, Rechtswissenschaft, und Rechtsverwaltung, 19/20 Editions, vol. 10 (Berlin: Jahrbücher für die preußische

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Hirschel and Catholicism in Silesia Hirschel published four letters published in one of Kausch’s compendiums in 1796.77 The first letter extols the virtues of the Prussian monarchy and its system of government in comparison to other states. Hirschel further asks readers to view the following letters with a philosophical, independent and open mind. His rationalist outlook holds that readers can weigh up various truthful opinions on certain matters and then form their own opinions. Then these opinions will invariably contain elements of the truth from other perspectives. The letters that follow, however, are as acerbic as any other works from Hirschel. One could only surmise that his introductory rationalist argument was an attempt to ameliorate any negative reception the following three letters would receive by the censor. Hirschel disagrees with a number of Kausch’s physiocratic arguments from previous chapters and criticises both the Catholic nobility in Silesia and Prussian state investment policy. Although Hirschel admits that speculation is not unproblematic, he then argues that the state needs to accept speculative—private—investment as necessary means of securing funds for development. He explains that increased Polish and Russian investment in their own indigenous industries had had a negative effect on Breslau’s exports to those markets (208ff). Either way, both Hirschel and Kausch are attacking the Prussian state: Kausch rails against Prussia’s hostile policies towards Silesia’s neighbours. Hirschel, on the other hand, complains about the lack of investment in Silesian industry. The last section of Hirschel’s second letter goes against Kausch’s opinion that it would be illegal for the Prussian state to forcibly acquire and sell-off the remaining properties owned by Catholic religious orders. Hirschel essentially argues that Catholic orders acquired the land illegally in the first place and that they have no legitimate title. In his study on Jewish anti-Catholicism in Europe, Ari Joskowicz called Hirschel’s criticisms of the Catholic nobility and religion “unprecedented for Jews” at that time.78 There is no evidence that Hirschel was publicly attacked for

Gesetzgebung usw., 1817), 369. 77  Moses Hirschel, “Vier Briefe Über Schlesien,” in Kausch’s erste Fortsetzung seiner Nachrichten über Schlesien, Böhmen und das vormalige Polen ed. Johann J. Kausch (Breslau: Gehr und Compagnie, 1796), 201–03. 78  Ari Joskowicz, The Modernity of Others: Jewish anti-Catholicism in Germany and France (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2014), 74.

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his writings. In fact, a contemporary review praised Hirschel for his interesting insights on the “Catholic theology” in Silesia.79 In the third letter, Hirschel argues that as a Jew, he is perfectly positioned to speak about the Christian confessions and that as a “more cosmopolitan than patriotic” enlightener, his writings should be considered fair (213). Mirroring his arguments against the Jewish religious elites in Breslau, Hirschel attacks what he viewed as a despotic Catholic leadership and an unenlightened flock, “The great majority of Catholics in Silesia are still blindly attached to a monastic religion, which is nothing more and nothing less than an Opus operatum; it neither has, nor will, lead to virtue or morality” (220). Kausch claimed that the state was exacerbating the social and moral decay of the Catholic subjects in Silesia. For his part, Hirschel argues that the Catholic clergy and the lack of any reform within Silesia’s Roman Church were preserving a pre-Enlightenment state in which the religion has ossified into legalism (222) and “vain ceremonies” (224). The consequences for the Catholic community were “dark superstitions, bitter poverty, outrageous immorality, the insistent hierarchical power, and a great lack of culture and industry” (223–224). In the fourth letter, Hirschel rejects Kausch’s claim that it was the government’s fault that Catholics across Silesia were poor. He instead argues that because Catholics enjoyed much of the same rights as Protestant subjects, the only explanation could be that the Catholic education system was preventing more social mobility (235–236). The combination of Kausch’s and Hirschel’s arguments problematised both the inherent evils of a confessional state and the inevitable abuses of power within semi-­ autonomous religious communities. The two points of view obviously echoed published opinions on the Jewish civic-status improvement debate. In 1781, Christian Dohm called for an end to systematic discrimination and full tolerance of Jewish subjects and their customs in his Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden. Mendelssohn acceded to most of Dohm’s points, but disagreed that religious communities should maintain their own religious jurisdiction. He also argued that only a state unaligned with any particular religion could protect all religions. Mendelssohn feared that religious clerics would invariably abuse their power. For Mendelssohn, God was the highest authority and only God can judge religious matters. For everything else, 79  Johannes A.  Martyni-Laguna, review of Vier Briefe über Schlesien, Neue allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek 45, no. 1 (1799): 173.

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for all other mundane matters, a non-denominational state system should be the only authority.80 Hirschel and Kausch were mirroring the Mendelssohn-Dohm debate by focusing on discrimination towards Prussia’s Catholic subjects and the abuse of power by their leaders and institutions. Their anti-clericalism is thus both an attack on the abuse of power by religious authorities and an implicit call for a non-denominational state. Joskowicz agrees when he surmises that “The philosopher Mendelssohn, the poet Kuh, and the polemicist Hirschel all used their criticism of Catholic institutions, rituals, and clergy to express their visions for an improved society populated by enlightened individuals.”81 That is to say, Hirschel was using the example of discriminated Catholic subjects in Silesia to argue for a more tolerant and enlightened state for all of Prussia’s subjects including its Jewish subjects. Kausch and Hirschel were therefore openly criticising the Protestant-­ Calvinist hegemony in Prussia and the despotic Hohenzollern throne supporting it. It is impossible to reconstruct what happened after the publication of this work. As far as my research shows, neither Hirschel nor Kausch ever published polemic critical texts under their names in Prussia again. Whether this was as a result of self-censorship due to Kausch’s exile and fear of further political persecution or simply professional parting of the ways cannot be confirmed.82

Hirschel’s Personal and Professional Life In recognition of his literary contributions to Silesia, Hirschel was granted an exceptional licence to marry Esther Coßmann Treuhold in her home village of Groß Wartenberg on 23 October 1797.83 They had (at least) five children:84 Johanne Mathilde Herschel born on 29 November 1798;  Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2001), esp. 36ff.  Joskowicz, The Modernity of Others, 76. 82  Hirschel, then Christian Moritz Herschel, edited and updated an alphabetical index of all Silesian towns and villages in 1818, the year of his death. The forward does not contain any of his earlier philosophical arguments: Christian Herschel, Schlesien in seinem ganzen Umfange (Breslau: Wilhelm Gottlieb Korn, 1818). 83  The state gave Hirschel a marriage licence in respect of his “progressive and useful literary knowledge.” The class of Jews Hirschel belonged to were not usually permitted to marry and settle in Prussia: Schummel, Breslauer Almanach, 248. 84  Only the Christianised names for the children could be found. 80 81

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Eduard Julius Herschel, 6 August 1800; Carl Adolph Herschel, 21 May 1804; Emilie Charlotte Herschel, May 1807–16 October 1824 (died of Tuberculosis), and Gustav Robert Herschel for whom there was no record of birth. Eduard Julius and Carl Adolph both died before Hirschel’s own death in 1818.85 Moses, Esther, Johanne, Eduard Julius and Carl Adolph, all converted to Lutheranism in the Magdalenenkirche in Breslau on 25 May 1804— Carl Adolph was just four days old.86 Moses became Carl Moritz Herschel, and Esther took the name Eleonore Louise Herschel.87 Deacon Aßig oversaw the baptism and his sermon was subsequently published.88 Two of Herschel’s witnesses were among the most well-known and influential Enlightenment figures in Silesia. The others were all part of Silesia’s bourgeois Protestant class: Carl Gotthelf Lessing—Gotthold Lessing’s younger brother and director of the Silesian mint; Willhelm Gottlieb Korn—publisher and businessman; Carl Gottlieb Held—director of the royal bank; Johann Gottlieb Schummel—rector at the Elisabeth-Gymnasium; Johann Gottlieb Bayer—Oecenom; and Christian Gottsehlig—landed leaseholder.89 As will be discussed in detail in Chap. 6 below, the Prussian government published the Vorschrift wie es mit dem Juden-Wesen in Breslau gehalten werden soll in 1790. The regulations reformed and simplified the categorisation system for Jews in Silesia and recommended that the state should found a Jewish school. The first state Jewish school in Prussia opened its doors in Breslau in 1791.90 Scraping by as a chess tutor and publicist, Hirschel applied for a job at the school.91 Hirschel wrote to the provincial governor von Hoym with what must have been a very self-confident application.92 He described himself as more 85   Eleonore Louise Herschel, “Death notice,” Schlesische Privilegierte Zeitung, June 27, 1818. 86   Almost all current sources claim Hirschel converted to Catholicism. The Magdalenenkirche was Lutheran at the time. 87  Unknown, “Hirschel’s Conversion,” Schlesische Privilegierte Zeitung, May 26, 1804. 88  Unknown, “Hirschel’s Conversion,” Schlesische Provinzialblätter May, (1804): 492. 89  Staatsarchiv Breslau Kirchenbücher Magdalenenkirche, Taufbücher, 24.05.1804 Archiwum Państwowe we Wrocławiu. 90  Andreas Reinke, “Zwischen Tradition, Aufklärung und Assimilation,” in Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte, vol. 43, no. 3 (1991): 193–214. 91  His postal address in 1790 was: “Moses Hirschel, Jewish scholar in Breslau,” Hirschel to Ramler, GSA 75/ 98. 92  Max Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipatonsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” in Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums. (Breslau: Schlesische

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“scientific” than “mercantile” and was therefore unsuited to being a merchant. He claimed the school required “orthodox” pedagogic reformers such as himself.93 Needless to say, the Board of Directors at the school turned down his application. Concurring with Heinrich’s analysis, one could surmise that after Hirschel’s public attacks on the local Ashkenazi rabbinic elite in the late-1780s, his employment at the school would have caused further rancour between the traditionalist lobby and the school’s board.94 Before the school even opened, there was a public dispute concerning teaching of the Talmud at the school. The authorities must have been concerned to keep more of the traditionalist lobbyists on their side. After all, the whole purpose of the school was to teach poorer Jews and not just the children of the already enlightened Jewish bourgeoisie. In 1796, Hirschel founded a “Commission” together with a businessman called Sessa.95 The Commission acted as a broker for new businesses or traders coming to Breslau and Silesia. His earnings were not significant. In the Jewish Community’s 1797 tax records, he was listed among the lower tax payers—he paid only 5 Rthl. in tax and 5 Rthl. in his “Servis” tax that year.96 Hirschel and Sessa parted ways in 1801. Hirschel continued alone in his role as director of his newly named “Commißions-Expedition.”97 In an unprecedented eight-page advertisement published in the Schlesische Provinzialblätter, Hirschel informed the readers that he had won approval for his enterprise from the provincial governing body. His services included finding office and trading space, as well as sourcing loans for new businesses. He also helped traders establish themselves in  local business ­networks. He further added, “All commissions which promote literature, Buchdruckerei, 1893), 41–48; 92–100; 188–97; 238–47; 331–41; 409–29; 467–83; 522–36; 565–79. Here, fn. 2, 335ff. 93  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 336. 94  Heinrich, Moses Hirschel—Biographie. 95  The only Sessa family in the Breslau archives is a Swiss Catholic family from which the nineteenth-century anti-Semitic playwright Karl Borromäus Alexander Sessa [1786–1813] came from. 96  Central Jewish Library, Warsaw 105/316 Klassifikationslisten zur Steuerleistung der Gemeindemitglieder., Festlegung der Gemeindebeiträge 1797, p. 18; p. 53. “Servis” tax was a military tax paid by Jews as they did not house soldiers in their homes like their Christian neighbours. 97  Schummel, Breslauer Almanach, 248.

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the arts and natural sciences will be taken up with great pleasure”; the advertisement is signed: “Mr M. Hirschel, Scholar in Breslau.”98 On 1 July 1799, Hirschel’s wrote his last published polemic when he petitioned the royal council in Breslau asking to leave the Jewish community without converting to a Christian religious confession. Hirschel’s petition echoed David Friedländer’s petition to the Berlin provost Wilhelm Abraham Teller (1734–1804) from earlier that year. Friedländer had written to the Enlightened privy councillor and suggested that the Jews of Berlin were ready to convert to Christianity and give up their antiquated and “embarrassing” legal system [Ceremonialgesetzen].99 His only condition, however, was that the terms allowed the converts to practise a Christianity more or less stripped of its Easter faith. The converts would practise Christian traditions but would not be obliged to consider the ritual as anything more than a custom. Therefore, the converts would not be obligated to believe in the divinity of Jesus.100 The Provost eventually turned down Friedländer’s proposal. Friedlander was attacked by Christian intellectuals, notably Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), who understood the ironic Christian-critical tones of Friedländer’s petition.101 Jewish leaders at the time did not respond. The fact that Friedländer was elected head of the Berlin community some years later is a testament to understanding among Berlin’s Jews that Friedländer was provoking the Christian authorities into action on the question of Jewish civic-status improvement rather than earnestly suggesting the end of Judaism. In an 1801 letter to the South Prussian governor, Friedländer claimed that “the simple-minded conversion to the dominant religion” should be termed “moral suicide.”102 Despite Friedlander’s obvious chutzpah, influential nineteenth-century historians of Jewish history took a

98  Hirschel, Schlesische Provinzialblätter, Supplement April (1801): 89–96. His business address is listed as Schweidenitzergasse 770 (corner of Dorotheen-Gasse). 99  David Friedländer, “Sendschreiben an Seine Hochwürden Herrn Oberconsistorialrath und Probst Teller zu Berlin (Berlin, 1799),” in David Friedländer: Ausgewählte Werke, ed. Uta Lohmann (Köln: Bohlau Verlag, 2015), 187. 100  See David Friedländer, “Sendschreiben an Seine Hochwürden…,” 212. 101  Friedrich Schleiermacher, Briefe bei gelegenheit der politisch-theologischen Aufgabe und des Sendschreibens jüdischer Hausväter (Berlin: Franke, 1799), esp. Second Letter, 20–29. 102  David Friedländer to South Prussia Governor, 6.09.1801, Generalne Dyrektorium Finansow, Wojny I Domen Departamant Prus Poludniowych I/0891, 35.

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­ ifferent view. Heinrich Graetz, for example, later called Friedländer one d of “Mendelssohn’s ape[s].”103 Hirschel’s own petition in 1799 was a request to renounce the Jewish religion and leave the Jewish corporate body as permitted under Section II, Tit. 3, §1–4 of the Allgemeines Landrecht. Hirschel’s revolutionary petition was essentially asking the state to underwrite a new form of citizenship for the Prussian realm. This new status would enable him to share all of civil entitlements bestowed upon Prussia’s Christian groupings without being attached to any religious community himself. Hirschel wrote, It was my misfortune which bore me into a religion which, after careful examination in my ripe old age, should be considered invalid and annulled. The theocratic form of government ended with the destruction of the Jewish empire and temple. It has survived until now only due to the manoeuvrings of the Pharisees and Talmudists [rabbinical sages and Rabbis], and now it is in an even more deformed and falsified state. This has brought the chagrin of all other peoples upon it, and its adherents who, in virtue of the religious understanding, cannot, or will not, fulfil all of their state obligations, are therefore denied civil rights.[…] I am hindered in converting to the Christian religion, by the church dogmas agreed and stipulated by the Nicaean Council in the 4th century, of which my limited reason cannot comprehend, and which I cannot clearly identify even in the venerable documents of Jesus and his disciples.104

Freudenthal claims Hirschel wrote that he had not left Judaism before that date out of respect for his mother who had since died. Hirschel wrote that he had lived according to the principles of “the religion of reason” which, although not the same as the teachings of Jesus, was nonetheless consummate with the values of the leading Christian theologians such as “Teller, Semler, Spalding, Zollikoffer, Jerusalem etc.”105 Echoing Spinoza’s argument from the Tractatus, Hirschel argued that the biblical God’s covenant with the Jews was a historical agreement which formed the basis for the constitution of a theocratically ordained Jewish state.106 Together with 103  Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart, vol. 11. (Leipzig: Leiner, 1900), 121. 104  Schummel, Breslauer Almanach, 249. 105  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 569–70. 106  Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise Chapter V.—Of the Ceremonial Law. In 1793, Lazarus Bendavid published his Etwas zur Charakteristik der Juden which also employed Spinoza’s argumentation that Jewish law had no validity since the destruction of

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its constitution, jurisdiction and legal provisions, the covenant lost its constituency and remit after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in the first century CE. Thus, the “ceremonial laws” or the corpus of oral Jewish law understood as Halacha were now nothing more than vacuous ritual. As an enlightened philosopher, Hirschel could no longer practise them.107 His petition essentially argues that because the Prussian state guaranteed freedom of religious confession in its own General State Laws for the Prussian States, he should be free to live in the state as an adherent of the religion of reason and enjoy the protection of the state. Furthermore, he should also be freed from the legal and financial burdens forced upon Jews. Hirschel was not only asking to be released from his official status as a Jew, he was further demanding that his de facto non-religious, modern or secularised identity be officially recognised and protected by the state. The Prussian bureaucrat (Referent Andreae) replied, Even the Reformed, Catholic, or Lutheran Christian whose personal beliefs differ to the Christian religion into which he was born or raised will continue to be judged in religious matters according to [that religion], and must submit to their juribus stolae at weddings, baptisms, burials, and other dues until he has formally embraced a different religion. Only three religions are recognised by the Prussian state at the current time….Therefore, if the supplicant wishes to enjoy the full entitlements of a Prussian State-Citizen, he must formally convert to one of those religious parties onto which those entitlements are appended—because he has declared that he will do no such thing, and this should be in no way expected of him, [and] because the Prussian State has not publicly recognised a religious party homogenous to his personal beliefs, he must, despite his differing conception of religion, nevertheless remain a member [of the Jewish corporate body].108

The state effectively refused to extend the freedom of religious belief, understood by the official as freedom to hold personal beliefs and not a personal religion, beyond the three officially recognised Christian the Second Temple, cf. Bendavid, Etwas zur Charackteristick der Juden (Leipzig: Stahel, 1793); also, Friedländer “Sendschreiben an Seine Hochwürden…,” 195ff (original pagination, 33ff). 107  This contradicts Mendelssohn’s claim that Jews are bound by the covenant and all of its laws and provisions: Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, 128–29; 130–33. 108  Schummel, Breslauer Almanach, 250.

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religions.109 According to that same law, the “Jewish Nation,” the Moravian Church, the Mennonites and Bohemian Brethren were listed as “tolerated religious societies.”110 Diethelm Klippel has argued that although the Allgemeines Landrecht speaks of “natural liberty” in two of its sections, this liberty was explicitly subject to the “requirements of the purpose of the state, the common good.”111 In fact, the “ideas of the authors of the code were not compatible with a concept of civil society based on liberty and equality…the Prussian code never intended to guarantee civil or human rights in a modern liberal sense.”112 Hirschel was arguably drawing attention to this when he requested the state recognise a new form of identity, one which would essentially create a class of citizens subject only to the civil laws of the state and who could thus be defined as citizens. This would have been a “modern” form of civil identity. Almost ten years to the day after the French Revolution, Hirschel was using legal argument to advocate a revolution in Prussia. Schummel agreed, “We live in times of bloody and bloodless revolution, M.H.is not yet 50 years of age, perhaps he will live to experience a change in the current state of affairs and, according to his wishes, become part of [that change].”113 As revealed earlier, Hirschel converted to Protestantism roughly four years after this failed petition. The state was not yet ready for a true separation of altar and throne. It was not until after the passing and ratification of the “Denominational Equality” law from 3 July 1869 that Jews could leave the Jewish community and remain Prussian citizens without converting to a Christian denomination. Christian Moritz Herschel died with “abdominal problems” on 24 June 1818. Although his death was mentioned in a number of local newspapers and journals, there were no lengthy obituaries. The era of cosmopolitan scholars and Popular Enlightenment had been replaced by crude 109  Freudenthal mentions this addition to the official rebuke which is not contained in the Schummel text: Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 570. 110  Renate Penßel, Jüdische Religionsgemeinschaften als Körperschaften des öffentlichen Rechts: Von 1800 bis 1919 (Köln: Böhlau, 2014), 317. 111   Diethelm Klippel, “Legal Reforms,” in Reform in Great Britain and Germany 1750–1850, ed. T. C. W. Blanning and Peter Wende (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 55. 112  Klippel, “Legal Reforms,” 55 113  Schummel, Breslauer Almanach, 250.

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Germanic nationalism and social conservatism in Restoration Prussia. Many of Hirschel’s enlightened friends and allies had since died. Politically speaking, the Congress of Vienna in 1814–1815 set the tone for a restoration of the pre-Napoleonic ancien régime of autocratic and clientelist government in Central and Eastern Europe. Christian Herschel was survived by his wife and three of his children. Emilie died of tuberculosis in 1824.114

 Schlesische Provinzialblätter, October (1824): 402–03.

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CHAPTER 5

Hirschel and the Orthodoxy

In 1788 and 1789, Hirschel penned two treatises where he revealed rabbinical corruption in Breslau in relation to community tax collection and admonished the rabbinical establishment for maintaining practices which he felt were an anathema to Jewish civic or social emancipation: Kampf der jüdischen Hierarchie mit der Vernunft [The Jewish Hierarchy’s Struggle with Reason; hereafter KjH] and Jüdische Intoleranz und Fanatismus in Breslau [Jewish Intolerance and Fanaticism in Breslau, hereafter JIF]. The tone used by Hirschel in these treatises had a major impact on his life in Breslau and a damning effect on his legacy as the negative portraits and comments from historians in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries demonstrate. His vitriolic, exaggerated and sporadically uncritical employment of anti-Jewish stereotypes were invectives against the Ashkenazi religious establishment (JIF, 11; KjH, 51ff). He called the religious leaders “despotic” and “tyrannical” (JIF, 54;59) and believed they advocated cultural decrepitude (KjH, 20ff). Throughout both texts, Hirschel assigns the rabbinical establishment moral responsibility for what he argues to be the depraved and corrupt state of Ashkenazi Jewry. He further claims their intransigence was the main reason why Jews had been denied civic and human rights up until then (KjH, 12ff). There were a number of contemporary reviews of these works, of which the most critical appeared in the Schlesische Provnzialblätter.1 Hirschel was 1  There is a brief review of JIF in a general review of Kausch’s Wahrheit und Freymüthigkeit…, see, Johannes Kern, review of Jüdische Intoleranz und Fanatismus in Breslau, Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek 90, no. 1 (1789): 288.

© The Author(s) 2021 D. Heywood Jones, Moses Hirschel and Enlightenment Breslau, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46235-2_5

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condemned for his “exaggerated and half-true” arguments including the thesis that everything Jews held as “holy and honourable” was merely “the deceit, swindle and machinations of selfish, megalomaniac and evil men.”2 The bulk of KjH is a 60-page translation of an essay by David Friedländer published in HaMe’assef.3 Although the reviewer doubts that education could ever help the “blind fervour” of Jewish educators, he is nevertheless positive about the Friedländer section of Hirschel’s work. He suggests that Friedländer’s translation without the polemic would have been sufficient.4 In contrast to Mendelssohn, Dohm and almost all other Enlightened, philo-Semitic protagonists in the Jewish civic emancipation debate, Hirschel laid the blame for non-Jewish belief that Jews were an innately miscreant nation at the feet of rabbinical elites. Hirschel agrees with the anti-Semites that the religious elite presided over a “state-within-a-state.”5 His tirades almost certainly prevented him from teaching at the Jewish school and ensured his ostracisation from the mainstream community and their institutions.6 His anti-clerical polemics, however, further compromised his legacy among critical historians in the nineteenth, twentieth and even the twenty-first centuries. To offer a few examples, Freudenthal calls Hirschel Breslau’s “most hated man”7 and Raphael Mahler called him the “Breslau Haskalah extremist.”8 Gerda Heinrich, although largely sympathetic to Hirschel’s intentions, still describes Hirschel’s anti-rabbinical

2  [unknown], review of Kampf der jüdischen Hierarchie mit der Vernunft, Schlesische Provinzialblätter, April (1789): 126. 3  Uta Lohmann doubts Hirschel attained Friedlander’s permission to reprint his work, Lohmann, David Friedländer, 148. 4  Andreas Gottfried Laas, review of Kampf der jüdischen Hierarchie mit der Vernunft in Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek 91, no. 1 (1790): 580. 5  Hirschel, KjH, 32; JIF 50, 73: on state-within-a-state as an anti-Semitic concept: Jonathan M Hess, “State-within- a-State,” in Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Predjudice and Persecution, ed. Richard S.  Levy, vol. 2 (Santa Barbara: Abc-Clio, 2005), 680–81. 6  Hirschel claims he was hated and persecuted in Breslau after publishing his anti-rabbinical works, Apologie 119. 7  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 96. 8  Mahler, A History of Modern Jewry, 182.

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works as “hypercritical,” describing his tone as strongly vituperative and denunciatory.9 On the other hand, Christoph Schulte claims Hirschel was a “Jewish Voltaire.”10 Indeed,  Hirschel proudly associates himself with Voltaire’s anti-clericalism in his works (KjH, 16).11 Schulte refers to Hirschel’s argument as a form of Enlightenment that was “quite brutish, purely normative, moralistic and polemic Enlightenment, which confronts the old and the new according to a good vs. evil template.” Schulte contrasts this style to Friedländer’s and Ascher’s.12 These authors are an example of a more “a calm, self-reflective and historicising Enlightenment, in which the new overcomes and abolishes the old without a moralisation.” He concludes that Hirschel’s treatment of the Talmud is a “Defamation” and not a historicisation as many Jewish contemporaries would have written.13 Some years later, Hirschel criticised his previous approach to the rabbinical establishment and his earlier style of argumentation. Four years after KjH and JIF, Hirschel admitted he was stupid enough to take the path of polemic in his writings and that “hate, oppression and persecution” from his contemporaries had been his only reward. His writings, he regrets, had not created “any real benefit.”14 His wildly exaggerated claims and tone notwithstanding, Hirschel did, however, draw attention to an emerging dichotomy between the traditional religious and conservative economic elite and a newer generation of educated, enlightened, embourgeoised Jews for whom emancipation and Enlightenment were synonymic with positive Jewish development. Beneath the layers of polemic and bitterness, there lies frustration and genuine concern for the Jewish communities in Prussia. Jewish membership of their corporate-like communities—ostensibly set up in Prussia to simplify state tax collection—was compulsory. Jews were effectively trapped within their communities. As Meyer remarks, Jewish communities

 Heinrich, Moses Hirschel—Biographie.  Schulte, Die jüdische Aufklärung, 95. 11  Hirschel obviously did not share Voltaire’s problematic opinions on Jews and Judaism. On Voltaire’s anti-Semitism and his influence on Jewish anti-clerical thought, see, Harvey Mitchell, Voltaire’s Jews and Modern Jewish Identity (London: Routledge, 2008). 12  Schulte, Die jüdische Aufklärung, 189. 13  Schulte, Die jüdische Aufklärung, 99. 14  Hirschel, Apologie, 119. 9

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in Prussia at the time “embraced all the Jews in any one place of residence—and anybody who left them, at the same time left Judaism.”15 The great mass of Jews in Central Europe enjoyed very uncertain existence with regard to residency rights, work, marriage and finding a home to raise their children. Hirschel’s purportedly exaggerated tone should also be read as a symptom of real indignation and an existential fear that must have been shared by many other Jews. Hirschel may well have been incorrect in assigning all “blame” to the rabbis for the coeval political and social woes of the Jews, he was, however, justified in saying that the Ashkenazi religious elite in Central Europe were partly complicit in preventing Jewish civic emancipation—therefore preventing the mass of Jews from receiving permanent residency status in Prussia. Some 200  years later, the Israeli historian Mordechai Breuer agrees that it was not theological wrangling that enraged the rabbinical elite, but changes in lifestyle and threats to the orthodoxy’s institutions of power. He concludes that the “Jewish orthodoxy was clearly one of the main obstacles to [Jewish] emancipation.”16

Hirschel and the Class Question Hirschel’s Voltairean attacks on the religious establishment were almost certainly inspired by his own precarious residency and financial situation. Classed as “impecunious,” the vast majority of Jews in Prussia at the time were not part of an economic or religious elite.17 Indigent Jews’ residency permits in Prussia were usually tied to more powerful religious or business figures in the urban centres. Without paying exorbitant fees to the state, ordinary Jews were not allowed to marry or have children. If they lost their jobs, they would have had to leave the city which, for most Jews, meant homelessness and destitution. For most Jews in Breslau, arguments about the rights of man or theological change were far less important than the reality of residency permits and taxation. The destinies of most Jews in Prussia were therefore subject to the authority’s caprice. Jews were essentially reliant on the favour of the Jewish economic or religious elite to whom their residency permits and livelihood were tied. To fall out of favour with any of these groups could have spelt disaster. Raphael Mahler  Michael Brenner, “The Jüdische Volkspartei” LBIY 35 (1990), 221.  Breuer, “Das Bild der Aufklärung bei der deutsch-jüdischen Orthodoxie,” 135. 17  van Rahden, “Von der Eintracht zur Vielfalt,” 15. 15 16

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was one of the first historians to identify “Social antagonisms, class struggle, and social opposition” as important but largely neglected themes for historical reflection.18 He explains this as an historiographical bias, Phenomena and institutions concerning the ruling classes among the Jewish people were presented as general, national matters, and the Jewish policy of the ruling nations with regard to each and every class of the people under their rule was not properly analysed. Thus, instead of a national history of the Jews, we have been presented by the dominant school in Jewish historiography with a history that is largely nationalistic.19

Hirschel’s attacks on the religious establishment were traditionally described as an attack on the leaders of the Jewish nation and thus on Judaism itself. From Hirschel’s perspective, his criticism was aimed at the corrupt and unjust practices of the corporate body responsible for the Jewish subjects in the city. The Connexion Between Religious Authority and Corporate Power Compared to literature on religious conflict between the emergent orthodoxy and Jewish reform movements in Central Europe and studies on Jewish plurality and identity in the medieval period, few historians “have dwelt on the problem of the confidence of authority amongst the Jews of Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”20 Chimen Abramsky discusses how there were a plurality of issues affecting relations between the rabbinates and Jewish communities. Stephen Lowenstein has published one of the few critical studies21 to look at class and economic problems within a Jewish community in Prussia.22 In an essay on Berlin, he identifies disharmonies and tensions between a plurality of various Jewish groupings which he agrees have been ignored by historians.  Mahler, A History of Modern Jewry, xi.  Mahler, A History of Modern Jewry, xi. 20  Chimen Abramsky, “The Crisis of Authority within European Jewry in the Eighteenth Century,” in Studies in Jewish Intellectual and Religious History, ed. Siegfried Stein and Raphael Loewe (Alabama: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1979), 13. 21  For a social critique European Judaism, see Endelman, Broadening Jewish History. 22  Lowenstein, “Jewish Upper Crust and Berlin Jewish Enlightenment,” 182–201; more recently and with a similar social focus, Lowenstein, “Two Silent Minorities: Orthodox Jews and Poor Jews in Berlin 1770–1823,” LBIY 36, no. 1 (1991): 3–25. 18 19

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Most histories or sociological studies of Jews in Prussia either contrast all Jews with all Christians or oppose all maskilim to traditionalist religious leaders. Lowenstein confirmed that most Jews were not wealthy and that most intellectuals were also reliant on patronage from the economic or religious elite for their residency permits.23 Lowenstein argues in a later essay that this dependency did not, however, make them the “puppets” of the elite.24 David Sorkin, on the other hand, argued that the maskilim in Berlin were “heavily influenced by the mercantile elite, whose patronage shaped their careers and political outlook.”25 Whatever the extent of the influence, one can safely assume that such a dependency also brought with it a certain amount of self-censorship when it came to criticism of the social or political institutions or personalities within the Jewish communities. After all, the lion’s share of Jewish taxation in Berlin was being paid by a small number of powerful families.26 Lowenstein mentions that Mendelssohn—whose residency status was tied to a wealthy family—Lazarus Bendavid and Ludwig Lasser were all cautious of the Jewish financial elite.27 Tension between the elite and the intellectuals was present but “muted.”28 In a rare critique of the Jewish economic elite by a Jewish intellectual,29 Bendavid openly admonished the wealthy Jews of Prussia for their superficiality in relation to the Enlightenment. Bendavid claims they were instead focused on enriching themselves and aping their wealthy Christian contemporaries.30 The religious in elite in Berlin did not enjoy the same kind of power and influence as their counterparts in Breslau and Silesia. By the 1780s, there were around 15 Jewish families in Berlin connected to the King. The houses of Itzig, Ephraim and Fliess were among the wealthiest in Prussia and had made their fortunes helping Frederick II during the Seven Years’ 23  Lowenstein, “Jewish Upper Crust and Berlin Jewish Enlightenment,” 187. Saul Ascher and David Friedländer were two notable exceptions. 24  Steven M. Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community: Enlightenment, Family, and Crisis (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), 42. 25  Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment, 209. 26  Lowenstein, “Jewish Upper Crust and Berlin Jewish Enlightenment,” 184. 27  Lowenstein, “Jewish Upper Crust and Berlin Jewish Enlightenment,” 189. 28  Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community, 38. 29  Most of Bendavid’s invective targets religious elite, whom he claims will force the Jewish bourgeoisie to leave Judaism, Etwas zur Charakteristik der Juden (Leipzig: Stahel, 1793), 45–60. 30  Bendavid, Etwas zur Charakteristick der Juden, 36–37.

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War.31 These families married almost exclusively amongst themselves. They were entirely removed from the lives of the growing Jewish underclass who lived outside the cosy economic and legal arrangements struck between the Jewish elite and the state.32 According to Battenberg, court-­ Jews and royal purveyors in Prussia took on “aristocratic lifestyles.”33 For example, due to the political and economic power wielded by the economic elite, the chief rabbi of Berlin Hirschel Levin (born in Glogau, Silesia; 1721–1800) was a largely ineffectual traditionalist voice during the inner-Jewish controversies which enveloped Jewish enlighteners during the 1780s.34 The lack of Jewish religious disciplinary enforcement in Berlin in the 1780s was exceptional. One possible explanation was the fact that the economic elite employed Enlightened Jews in the city to teach their children. This was not the case in most other cities and certainly not in other cities in Central and Eastern Europe—Frankfurt a/M, Frankfurt a/O; Prague, Pressburg (Bratislava), Posen, Vilna. In most other cities, the religious and economic elites often intermarried and worked closely together.35 For Hirschel, these two groups make up the “Jewish Hierarchy” (KjH 38). He also refers to the business elite as “aristocrats” (JIF 55). Rabbinical families—as with Haredim sects today—were dynastic in nature. They married among themselves and with the children from powerful and monied lay leaders. They strategically sent their offspring to take up positions around Central and Eastern Europe. A number of rabbinical families accumulating a lot of wealth, power and prestige. In his study on the Chief Silesian Rabbi Jonas Fränkel’s (1721–1793) earlier years in Krakow, Majer Balaban describes how attractive a rabbinical appointment was at the time: The Krakow rabbinate, whose scientific reputation, depth and thorough erudition were intrinsic to its reputation, also gave its owner an extraordinary position of power. Rich families in Malopolska therefore eagerly sought to attain this influential office for their families. In the provincial towns too, members of influential families sat on the rabbinical chairs. And so the rabbis  Nils Römer, Tradition und Akkulturation (New York: Waxmann, 1995), 23.  Römer, Tradition und Akkulturation, 22–23. 33  Battenberg, Die Juden in Deutschland vom 16. bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts, 43. 34  Schulte, Die jüdische Aufklärung, 84. 35  See Andreas Brämer, introduction to Rabbiner und Vorstand (Wien: Böhlau, 1999), esp. 11–18. 31 32

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sought to gain influence over the Jewish community leaders, and use this to gain influence over Christian leaders...It’s no surprise that in the pursuit of all municipal offices, and especially those of the rabbinate, the kind of ­corruption which favoured the municipal treasury as well as some individual citizens, played an important role.36

The key to appointments was of course one’s family connections. For example, consider the biography and genealogy Berlin’s Chief Rabbi Hirschel Levin. His background was typical of other prominent religious figures in that he came from a long line of rabbis and scholars who intermarried and who married their children to wealthy lay leaders. Levins’ father was Rabbi Aryeh Leib Loewenstamm who was rabbi of Lemberg, Amsterdam and then finally Glogau. Levin’s uncle by marriage was Jacob Emden of Altona.37 Both Rabbi Aryeh Leib Loewenstamm  and Jacob Emden  were well-known traditionalist voices during the Shabbatai Zvi controversies.38 His ancestors included Eliyahu Ba’al Shem of Chełm, Rabbi Meyer of Padua and Solomon Luria.39 Levin became Rabbi of Glogau where his children were all born. After turning down the post of Chief Rabbi in Dubno, he became Chief Rabbi of the Great Synagogue in London from 1756–1764.40 He then moved to Halberstadt and Mannheim before finally settling in Berlin from 1772–1800. In Prussia, the position of Rabbi to a community or province brought with it the advantages of residency without having to pay the hugely inflated taxes and residency fees compulsory for foreign Jewish merchants. Given the ubiquitous connexions between rabbinical establishment and their business and familial ties, it was no coincidence that Chief Rabbi for Breslau and Silesia—Joseph Jonas Fränkel (1721–1793)—was also one of 36  Balaban qualifies this statement by pointing to general corruption and lack of budgeting skills in the region: Majer Balaban, “Joseph Jonas Theomim-Fränkel, Rabbiner in Krakau (1742–1745), und seine Zeit,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, vol. 60 issue: 9/10 (1916): 385. 37  Although Emden was publicly critical of wealth and worldly possessions, he ran a number of profitable businesses. Hayoun describes Emden as being “pathological,” in his complaints about his personal finances: Maurice Hayoun, “Rabbi Ja’akov Emdens Autobiographie der Kämpfer wider die sabbatianische Häresie,” in Judentum im deutschen Sprachraum, ed. Karl E. Grözinger (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1991), 229–30. 38  Raymond Apple, “Saul Berlin (1740–1794): Heretical Rabbi,” Mendelbaum Studies in Judaica 12 (2006): 2. 39  Apple, “Saul Berlin (1740–1794),” 2. 40  Apple, “Saul Berlin (1740–1794),” 2.

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the province’s wealthiest individuals and merchants. Fränkel came from a religious family before marrying into a wealthy family in Krakow in 1740. His new family owned factories around Europe including one in Prussian Königsberg.41 He later married his own four daughters into wealthy rabbinical dynasties including one to David Fränkel’s42 son and another to the Talmudic scholar and radical Jewish Enlightener Saul Berlin (Hirschel Levin’s son).43 Around 1743, Fränkel petitioned the King to allow him take residency and an appointment as a Polish Crown Rabbi to Breslau. He promised to bring his fortune and connections with him. Despite the fact that his family already owned an export business in Breslau,44 Fränkel explicitly assured the king that he would not engage “in even the slightest bit of trading.”45 Fränkel eventually moved to Breslau “with a considerable sum of money”46 after 1745 when inter-rabbinical disputes and family feuding in Krakow made his position there untenable.47 When he finally received the position of Silesian Provincial Rabbi in 1755, he was awarded a salary of 444 Rthl. per  annum.48 Through his extensive trading of wool, linen and silk products to Poland, Lithuania and Russia, he amassed a fortune of over 100,000 Rthl.49 Despite his wealth or arguably because of it, Fränkel fought bitterly against any change to the kahal structure and against all attempts to reform education and to ease residency stipulations.50 Fränkel’s own residency status was secure after 11 June 1764 when Frederick II awarded him the much-coveted General Privileged status.51

 GSTA 1 HA Rep. 46 B 203, Fränkel an den König 1743[?].  David Fränkel was Chief Berlin Rabbi in 1740s and Mendelssohn’s religious patron. 43  Marcus Brann, Geschichte des Landrabbinats in Schlesien: nach gedr. u. ungedr. Quellen (Breslau: Jacobsohn, 1887), 38–39. 44  “Fränkel, Joseph Jonas,” in Die Rabbiner der Emanzipationszeit in den deutschen, böhmischen und großpolnischen Ländern 1781–1871 (München: K.G. Saur Verlag, 2004), 322. 45  GSTA 1 HA Rep. 46 B 203, Fränkel an den König 1743[?]. 46  Brann, Geschichte des Landrabbinats in Schlesien, 36. 47  Majer Balaban, “Joseph Jonas Theomim-Fränkel, Rabbiner in Krakau (1742–1745), und seine Zeit,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, vol. 61, 1/3 (1917): 51–71. 48  CJL 105/124, Besetzung der Rabbinerstelle mit Jonas Jos. Fränckel 1755. 49  Heppner, Jüdische Persönlichkeiten in und aus Breslau, 10. 50  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 339. 51  “Fränkel, Joseph Jonas,” in Die Rabbiner der Emanzipationszeit in den deutschen, böhmischen und großpolnischen Ländern 1781–1871 (München: K.G. Saur Verlag, 2004), 322. 41 42

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Without civic emancipation and the continuing classification of Jews as resident aliens or guests, the de facto authority of religious leaders meant that eccentric religious beliefs or public dissent could be punished with exclusion. Jews who came in conflict with their own authorities or disagreed with the policies of their leaders had little or no recourse for alternative action. If the Prussian authorities believed a certain issue was not in their remit, conversion to Christianity was, for many, the only way to extricate oneself from a personal or financial dispute with a Jewish community or religious leader. Incidentally, there were similar problems for non-Jewish guild members [Zunftmitglieder] who came into conflict with their guilds or corporate authorities. “Economic freedom” was not introduced into Prussia until 1812. Before that date, the guilds and other privileged institutions were more or less governors of their own legal and economic fiefdoms.52 Fränkel’s successor Isaiah B. Loeb Berlin (1725–1799) won a bitter fight within the community to be appointed Chief Rabbi. Although he won the vote well—18 out of 21 votes—many business and intellectual figures called for the institution of a temporary rather than lifetime appointment.53 Isaiah Berlin was a recognised Talmudic scholar who had been a successful businessman in Breslau up until his appointment as Chief Rabbi in 1793.54 He was born into a family of rabbinic scholars in Eisenstadt in Hungary. With the help of some business connections, Isaiah managed to settle in Breslau sometime before 1750. In 1755, he married Wolf Loebel Pick’s daughter. Pick was one of the wealthiest merchants in the city. As we know from innerJewish disputes throughout the 1790s, Isaiah Berlin continued Fränkel’s opposition to religious, educational, political or social change. Rabbinic Abuse of Financial Authority in Breslau Tax collection from Jewish communities differed from city to city and province to province. Up until 1787, the main community tax in Breslau— the cynically titled “Tolerance” tax55—was paid directly to the War and Domains Chamber. After that date, the state left it up to the community 52  On the role of guilds and legal heterogeneity among different professions and classes at the time, see, Kocka, Weder Stand noch Klasse, esp. 139–57. 53  Louis Ginzberg, “Berlin, Isaiah B. (Judah) Loeb: (also called Isaiah Pick, after his fatherin-law),” Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 3 (1906): 79. 54  Heppner, Jüdische Persönlichkeiten in und aus Breslau, 4. 55  Herzig, “Die Juden Breslaus im 18. Jahrhundert,” 53.

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to decide how they would raise the money and hand it over to the state. Because the Jewish elders had intimate knowledge of who earned what and who could pay what sum, they insisted they would decide how the money was raised (JIF 63). They increased the “Servis” by at least 100%. For some Jewish residents, this increase was up to 600% (JIF 64). In 1788, the elders then increased the meat tax by 1/5 Groschen per Prussian pound (JIF 64).56 By increasing the Servis and meat taxes for all citizens, wealthier members of the kahal shifted some of their tax burden onto poorer Jews. Hirschel wrote, “Still, in 1788, most of the Jews in Breslau who make use of their minds and can think for themselves are being so disproportionality lumbered with Jewish levies that they must choose between taking refuge in illicit jobs which contradict morality in order to carry the exorbitant burden, or to emigrate” (JIF 52–53). As a further provocation, Hirschel reprinted a letter he wrote to the War and Domains Chamber in August of 1787 when he complained that the kahal were abusing their new taxation powers and were unfairly punishing the less well-off. However, he also alleges that the religious and economic elite were using their discretionary powers to penalise “heterodox” Jews in the city—especially those who were working as tutors and were a “thorn in the eye” of the traditional teaching system (JIF 74ff). After another petition from Hirschel, the War and Domains Chamber wrote a letter to the kahal leadership in October 1787 requesting that they review his case. As the authorities had no jurisdiction in this particular matter, the kahal duly ignored the request and sent another warning to Hirschel several days later. Hirschel’s petitions to the city and provincial government for a change in the tax system had circumvented the Jewish community and ignored the kahal’s authority. To which extent his tirades forced his exclusion from later Haskalah works and projects will remain a mystery. It was not until the new regulations in 1790s that the War and Domains Chamber reduced the meat tax and changed the kahal structure and taxation system.57 The fact that a middle-class Jew had to bring these charges 56  On the introdcution of the meat tax to Prussia in 1745, Herzig, “Die Juden Breslaus im 18. Jahrhundert,” 53. 57  §24 of the 1790 regulations explicitly draw attention to the socially unfair nature of the “meat tax” and command it be reduced by half. The deficit would be recuperated by a general tax on the whole community. This placed the tax burden back on to the wealthier families.

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to the non-Jewish authorities before action was taken, demonstrates the complicit relationship between the economic and religious elite in the city. Due to a justified focus on the anti-Jewish policies of the Prussian state, there has been little research undertaken on the extent of corruption and abuse of power by Jewish religious and kahal authorities. The essence of Hirschel’s argument was that Jewish autonomy was increasing Jewish exceptionalism, exacerbating poverty and fuelling corruption. Both the religious and the economic elite were effectively using Jewish corporate autonomy to enrich themselves and push their own fundamentalist agenda. Ordinary Jews, and particularly enlightened Jews, were being condemned to live under the control of a group who could act with impunity and against whom they had no real means of redress. Chimen Abramsky has shown there was a crisis of authority within Ashkenazi Jewry from the latter half of the eighteenth century on as divisions between leaders and ordinary Jews emerged.58 Leaders began to accuse “ordinary Jews” of being disrespectful and no longer “paying attention to the rabbis” for a number of reasons including rabbinical misuse of the ban [Cherem] and the ascendency of court Jews to the Jewish elite. Abramsky convincingly suggests that the crisis of authority was also a result of “the sharp division between rich and poor [Jews]” and the “contempt for the ignorant masses entertained by the learned Talmudic scholars, who were often (through intermarriage) in close collaboration with the established lay leadership of the community.”59 Hirschel’s claims and activism not only demonstrate how financial and political power was used to enforce theological and religious concerns, he also brings to light how religion and religious power had been misused to protect the financial and political position of the kahal leadership. Hirschel was not alone with his scepticism of the lay and religious elites’ intentions and plans for the mass of poorer Jews beneath them. Nancy Sinkoff also mentions a case in Vilna where a Polish trained lawyer commented that the “kahal leadership was insensitive to the plight of poorer members of the community and that the kahal’s extensive debt was particularity burdensome to the lower classes.”60 To offer another example, Zalkind 58   Abramsky, “The Crisis of Authority within European Jewry in the Eighteenth Century,” 14. 59   Abramsky, “The Crisis of Authority within European Jewry in the Eighteenth Century,” 15. 60  Sinkoff, Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands, 78.

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Hourwitz moved to France in the early 1780s and became active in the civil rights debate in France after the revolution. Hourwitz was a “revolutionary, polemicist, utopian,” but he shared disdain for what he believed to be “the narrow vision of the rabbis, and his deeply held conviction that the selfishness of the lay leadership impeded the economic and intellectual well-being of his poor and oppressed co-religionists.”61

The Rabbinical Elite and Jewish Emancipation Hirschel’s begins each of his critiques of the rabbinate with an explanation of his own philosophical position. In his Voltairean-style attacks on the Jewish cleric class, Hirschel sees himself as a defender of the “divine gift of reason.” He claims the Ashkenazi religious elite were negating the power of reason with superstition and barbarity (JIF 75). Some years before Saul Ascher coined the term,62 Hirschel referred to the religious Ashkenazi elite as orthodox (KjH 22–23).63 The “orthodox” abuse reason and use it for their own ends rather than use it as a tool and guiding moral compass (KjH 24). For Hirschel, reason is a tool that enables us to work through concatenations of cause and effect on the objects of our reflection as we search for meaning and explanation (KjH 30ff). Whereas the orthodoxy held that their religion had teachings and secrets that human reason could not understand or have access to (KjH 25). Reason is thus in and of itself the highest judge or “God’s own guide” (KjH 7). Hirschel promises his readers that he will deploy it against irrationality and superstition and combat the “forgers of chains” (KjH 3; 9). He then charges the rabbinical elite with causing all the problems faced by Jews in Central Europe (KjH 8–11;12ff). For thinkers like Hirschel, cultures evolve according to a given “natural” trajectory. Following this reasoning, Jews were prevented from evolving by their religious leaders and

61  Frances Malino, “The Right to be Equal: Zalkind Hourwitz and the Revolution of 1789,” in From East and West: Jews in a Changing Europe ed. F.  Malino and D.  Sorkin (Oxford et al.: Blackwell, 1991), 87. 62  Christoph Schulte, “Saul Ascher‘s Leviathan, or the Invention of Jewish Orthodoxy in 1792,” LBIY 45, no. 1 (2000). 63  Mendelssohn first used the word “Orthodox” to describe religious Jews like himself: Breuer, “Das Bild der Aufklärung bei der deutsch-jüdischen Orthodoxie,” 131.

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that was why their culture was less evolved than other ethnic groups (KjH 19ff).64 His charges may have been exaggerated, however, Hirschel was frustrated at the apparent indifference of the rabbinical elite to the changing social and cultural landscape. They appeared to be trying to maintain medieval privileges and thinking at a time when they needed to accommodate the changing needs of their congregants. The state’s gradual push towards centralisation was dissolving the arcane semi-autonomous chartered institutions and integrating their remit and powers into central state organs.65 Stolleis discusses the Late Enlightenment period as primarily defined by the “transmission from a medieval corporate estate system into a unified coalition of subjects and the concentration of the fragmented spiritual, mundane, territorial and estate powers and authority into an internally and externally cohesive sovereign central power.”66 The removal of Jewish legal jurisdiction happened in a context in which all of the churches lost almost all of their juridical power. von Hoym’s predecessor, Samuel Freiherr von Cocceji (1679–1755), spent the late-1740s establishing a centralised court system for Silesia and Prussia. He removed ecclesiastical powers from the Catholic Church and the Huguenot consistorians across Prussia. The other important development at the time was the genesis of a new political class: “civil society” [bürgerliche Gesellschaft]. This new class began to exercise a political voice and was gradually rewarded with enfranchisement.67 The continued exclusion of Jews or their corporate bodies from the centralisation process left ordinary Jews farther outside of the state—thus further exacerbating their precarious residential status. This situation arguably suited kahal leaders who were happy to manage a community run according to its own laws. This is what Hirschel is attacking when he accuses the rabbinical elite of supporting 64  It was widely accepted that culture was progressive (teleological) whereby some cultures were more advanced than others. Mendelssohn was also a proponent but did not attach value judgments on the developmental stages: Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, 40–41 [original 21–23]. 65  Gerda Heinrich, “Akkulturation und Reform: Die Debatte um die frühe Beerdigung der Juden zwischen 1785 und 1800,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 50, no. 2 (1998): 139. 66   Michael Stolleis, “Untertan-Bürger-Staatsbürger: Bemerkungen zur juristischen Terminologie im späten 18. Jahrhundert,” in Bürger und Bürgerlichkeit im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, ed. Rudolf Vierhaus (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1981), 65. 67  Stolleis, “Untertan-Bürger-Staatsbürger,” 65.

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a “state-within-a state.” Hirschel employs the term as commonly used by Jacobian and proto-­democratic voices to describe privileged groups at the time.68 Hirschel praises Frederick II for removing legal powers such as excommunication and corporal punishment from rabbis in Prussia. He claims this led to the dawn of the Enlightenment for Jews as they were freed from the “prejudice and unleashed them from the systems of their incarcerators” (KjH 34). Despotic Discipline The tensions between the rabbinate and economic elites and the rest of the Jewish population is an aspect of Jewish communities often ignored by Zionist or nationalist historians. Together with financial standing and residential status, religious practice, clothing, language and whole range of other elements meant that Jewish communities were more heterogenous than many historians can admit.69 As cautious investigators, one should bear in mind that maskilim, rabbis and community representatives all claimed to speak for all Jews in their towns, cities, states or regions. Given the lack of writings from ordinary Jews, claims to universality of the Jewish experience should be treated with caution. The rabbinical elite claimed to speak for all Jews and they accused the maskilim and other intellectual Jews heresy. The exact degree to which intellectual opposition to the rabbis was supported by broad swathes of ordinary Jews is therefore difficult to gauge. Historians who unconsciously or intentionally support a notion of pre-Haskalah Judaism as an immutable tradition stretching back to the destruction of the Second Temple have been very supportive of these rabbinical claims. Contemporary evidence from free thinkers such as Hirschel, Saul Ascher, Lazarus Bendavid and Saul Berlin, however, suggests that sovereignty over Jewish identity was a cultural, political and sectarian struggle between a plurality of interest groups. Mordechai Breuer argues that it was changes in the way ordinary Jews lived that precipitated conflict between

 Hirschel, KjH, 32; JIF 50, 73.  For discussion of crumbling rabbinic authority in the mediaeval and early modern periods, see, ed. Daniel Frank and Matt Goldish, Rabbinic Culture and its Critics (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 2008). 68 69

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the orthodoxy and the Enlightenment and not theological wrangling.70 The orthodox correctly foresaw that changes to their lifestyle as well education, anti-rabbinical attitudes and a fall from religion were all in a “reciprocal causal relationship.”71 Hirschel’s claims that the religious elite were despotic and fanatical were not simply referencing theological matters. In addition to his discussion of more famous cases such as the Hamburg Amulet controversy,72 Hirschel discusses broader public dissatisfaction with the religious authorities. After all, the crisis within rabbinical authority was not just caused by theological or political opposition from a handful of maskilim. There was a general growing dissatisfaction with conservative church positions and disciplinary measures by the mass of unenlightened subjects across the region. Enlightened opposition to the religious authorities, however, was only possible for a small group. Both the enlighteners and conservative religious figures were in a struggle to win over, or win back, the masses. Writing in 1786, the Prussian social theorist Christian Goßler explains, True religious Enlightenment can only be found among a few persons in the higher classes, irreligion has taken the place of earlier superstition among the greater portion: and there is an evil is spreading through the people, whereby irreligion is always linked with intemperance.73

Attempts to control the growing antipathy towards rabbinical social disciplinary prohibitions extended into the minutiae of daily life. Baruch Wesel (1690–1754) received his first appointment in Breslau in 1724 and served as chief rabbi from 1744. In the 1740s, Wesel was already complaining about the use of Shabbes Goyim working for Jews on Shabbat.74 Wesel came from the wealthy Gumpertz family from Westphalia. His father, Ruben Elias, was a financial advisor to the Hohenzollern family and their chief tax collector in the Prussian exclave of Cleve and the Mark. This latter fact explains Baruch’s continued residency in Breslau after Frederick

 Breuer, “Das Bild der Aufklärung bei der deutsch-jüdischen Orthodoxie,” 132.  Breuer, “Das Bild der Aufklärung bei der deutsch-jüdischen Orthodoxie,” 134. 72  Jacob Emden was ultimately censured by non-Jewish courts for his vicious attacks on any forms of what he considered dissent [JIF 51]. 73  Goßler, Versuch über das Volk, 5. 74  Robert Liberles, Jews Welcome Coffee (Waltham: Brandeis Univ. Press, 2012), 49–50. 70 71

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II expelled most Jews from the city in 1744.75 Baruch Wesel wrote a number of responsa excoriating Jews for ordering coffee on Shabbat in coffee houses in Breslau. His responsa reveal he was secretly investigating Jews behaviour in coffee houses on Shabbat. According to Wesel, Jews would enter coffee houses on Shabbat and enquire if a cup of coffee had already been made. The server would invariably answer “yes.” The server would then proceed to make a new cup of coffee according to the Jewish patron’s usual taste.76 Wesel complained in his responsa that “the current generation took legal requirements loosely,” he called it an “unruly or disobedient generation.”77 Wesel was not the only rabbi who questioned the coffee-drinking habits of Jews. In 1783, Eleazer Fleckeles (1754–1826) delivered a sermon in Prague admonishing Jews for visiting non-Jewish homes to drink hot coffee on Shabbes.78 Recriminations were not just limited to food or Shabbat provisions. To give just a few examples, Jeremias Cohen lost his honorary rights at the Synagogue in Berlin in 1737 for wearing a wig. In 1747, Abraham Hirschel was reported to the non-Jewish authorities in Posen for shaving his beard. Gershon von Bleichröder claimed his great-grandfather had been expelled from Berlin in 1746 for procuring and possessing a book of philosophy— apparently intended for the young Moses Mendelssohn.79 These examples show how a growing number of ordinary Jews from the mid-eighteenth century onwards no longer felt bound by rabbinical authority. This discussion further demonstrates how a growing number of these Jews were also partly integrated into their non-Jewish environs and presumably had non-­ Jewish acquaintances and friends. When Hirschel discusses the fanatical religious enforcement of fundamentalist interpretations of halakhot and minhagim, he calls the enforcers the “well-fed guardians of Zion” (JIF 56). He gives the example of a wedding party in Glogau, Silesia, where the guests were jailed on the orders of a rabbi for celebrating past 9 pm (JIF 52).

 Jürgen von Kempski, “Gomperz,” Neue Deutsche Biographie, 6 (1964): 640.  Wesel’s collection of ten responsa was published in Dyhernfurth, 1755: “Meḳor Baruk,” (2d ed., Amsterdam, 1771). Gotthard Deutsch, Schulim Ochser, “Baruch Bendet Ben Reuben,” Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 12 (1906): 505. 77  Liberles, Jews Welcome Coffee, 50. 78  Liberles, Jews Welcome Coffee, 67. 79  Claudia-Ann Flumenbaum, “Von den Anfängen bis 1789, “in Juden in Berlin, ed. Andreas Nachama and Julius H. Schoeps (Berlin: Henschel, 2001), 45. 75 76

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Hirschel discusses Rabbi Lebisch (JIF 54–58) to explain how senior religious figures in Breslau reacted to what they perceived as questioning of their authority.80 As Eleazar Fleckeles and “the preeminent Talmudic scholar and halakhic decisor in Central Europe”81 Ezekiel Landau in Prague were publicly attacking Mendelssohn and Wessely (JIF 52), Rabbi Lebisch also spoke an anathema on Mendelssohn on Rosch Hashanah in 1787 at the “Polish” Krotoschiner synagogue in Breslau. Hirschel remarks that the economic elite or “Jewish aristocrats” in Breslau remained silent (JIF 55). Lebisch is further described as a religious enforcer who attacked and threatened Jews who shaved, wore wigs or powdered their hair. Lebisch once assaulted a woman for using a flame on Shabbat—he had been spying through her window. A neighbour tried to prevent the rabbi from striking the woman and was promptly brought before a beit din and fined for assaulting the rabbi. The fine was reduced drastically when the man threatened to bring Lebisch before a non-Jewish court. These are the actions of a religious policing force behaving in a fashion that was increasingly unacceptable to their congregants. The lack of civic emancipation meant that ordinary Jews were forced to either accept the whims of these religious enforcers or to convert or emigrate. As Hirschel was later made aware, public discussion of these matters or seeking redress via non-Jewish courts could lead to one’s professional and social exclusion from the kahal. In his study of rabbinical appointments during the Late Enlightenment, Carsten Wilke argues that excessive use of disciplinary measures against congregations greatly weakened support for the rabbinic elite. He claims the crisis of authority within Jewish communities was not just intellectual but was further aggravated by ordinary Jews as they began to resist rabbinical social and cultural disciplinary enforcement. He gives examples of Posen in 1803 where the chief rabbi Joseph Zaddick was still ordering unmarried mothers to be flogged. Women in Fürth were threatened with excommunication if they left home without covering their hair.82 He argues that “the defence of religious (or more to the point irreligious) 80  Freudenthal identifies Lebisch as Rabbi Jehuda Loebusch ben Mordechai; “Die erste Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 96. 81  Miller, Rabbis and Revolution, 63. 82  Carsten Wilke, introduction to Die Rabbiner der Emanzipationszeit in den deutschen, böhmischen und großpolnischen Ländern 1781–1871, ed. Michael Brocke and Julius Carlebach (München: K.G. Saur Verlag, 2004), 73.

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private freedoms against attacks by rabbis, was probably the main reason that urban communities in particular began to rescind rabbinical powers.”83 He details how communities across Central Europe stopped offering permanent Chief Rabbi contracts around the turn of the eighteenth century. Communities instead offered temporary contracts. For example: Prague (1793) Berlin (1800), Mannheim (1800), Hannover (1802), AltonaHamburg-Wandsbeck (1807), Kassel (1814), Frankfurt a/M. (1817) and Fürth (1819).84 Wilke mentions the unsuccessful attempts by liberal Jews in Breslau to prevent the reappointment of a chief rabbi after Fränkel’s death in 1793.85 The disappearance of the powerful Chief Rabbi positions was contemporaneous to the gradual disappearance of the great “Polish”’ yeshivas across Central and Eastern Europe. Yeshivas in Prague, Fürth, Altona, Metz and Frankfurt a/M, all closed their doors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Only the yeshiva in Nikolsburg was still open in 1829.86 By refusing to negotiate cultural or religious change, the rabbinical elite were effectively losing the respect of their congregations and the newly emergent intellectual opposition. The religious elite may have employed religious argumentation to prevent improvements to Jewish residential, educational or social privileges, but Jewish intellectuals were able to show that the rabbis had no interest in disputing halacha or minhagim in a learned manner. The religious authorities invariably answered most halachic challenges in denunciatory or ad hominem responses. When the rabbinical elite spoke of defending the Jewish tradition, Jewish intellectuals were able to  show that these figures were in fact defending a particular understanding of Judaism. The aforementioned argument immediately raises questions about financial and cultural heterogeneity within Jewish communities typically described as a homogenous. Katz went as far as to describe the Jewish diaspora across the whole of Europe in the eighteenth century as an organic unity.87 The tensions and problems highlighted by Hirschel suggests that greater attention should be given to diversity within Jewish communities. He writings also urges us to consider a more critical view of  Wilke, introduction, 73.  Wilke, introduction, 74. 85  Wilke, introduction, 74. 86  Miller, Rabbis and Revolution, 63. 87  Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1993), 8. 83 84

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the traditionalist religious leaders who fought to maintain absolute authority over Jewish communities in the Ashkenazi world. Heterogeneity and Diaspora In her synopsis of life for Jews in Central Europe during the Enlightenment, Marsha Rosenblit sums up the widespread historical belief that religious, social and cultural reform was forced onto harmonious Jewish communities from outside: “Either as a precondition for legal rights, or in gratitude for having received those rights, Jews felt pressed to alter their occupational structure, learn to speak the vernacular, adopt European culture and reform their religion, thus changing what it meant to be Jewish.”88 Historians generally asses Jewish modernisation in negative terms, describing change as assimilation or Jewish cultural atrophy or in theoretical– anthropological terms such as secularisation, Germanification or Europeanisation. In any case, the basic essentialist assumption is that the Enlightenment forced change on a previously immutable Judaism. Jews therefore became less Jewish and more German or European. The very idea that Jews had one language, one culture or one definition of “what it meant to be Jewish,” was never true of the Jews in Europe. Essentialist historians such as Jacob Katz, Shmuel Feiner, David Sorkin,89 Arno Herzig, Hans Otto Horch, George L. Mosse, Marion Kaplan and Shulamit Volkov uphold a Manichean conception of the Jewish and the European or the Jewish and the German. This conception betrays an implicit trans-historical Jewish essentialism which is disingenuous to both Christian and Jewish cultural development in Breslau in the late eighteenth century. It was not until 1744 that the various Jewish communities in the city were united in a central corporate body. After that time, the Breslau Jewish community was a conglomerate of different Jewish groupings with very different histories. Resident Jews in the city included envoys from the Jewish economic elite in Berlin and the descendants of the Polish ambassadors from the Council of the Four Lands who had been in the city from 88  Marsha Rozenblit, “Jewish Assimilation in Habsburg Vienna,” in Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), 225. 89  In his works on religious reform, Sorkin argues for a plurality of Jewish religious views. In his works on Jewish emancipation, however, he often upholds a binary Jewish-German or Jewish-Christian cultural distinction.

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before Prussian annexation. Before the Prussian annexation, the province was closely connected to its Eastern and southern neighbours. Reinke explains how the city’s Jewish population was culturally oriented to Bohemia, Moravia and Eastern Europe before activism by Jewish intellectuals shifted the focus towards Prussia.90 Zia ̨tkowski shows that in 1800, 29% of the Jews in Breslau came from Poland and 36% came from other cities in Silesia.91 Apart from the resident families, the city also played host to large numbers of Jews on market days. There were proxy-residents who lived in the numerous Jewish communities just beyond the walls or further afield in Zülz and Glogau.92 There were also other Jewish residents within the city walls who never received residential status. For example, Moses Turk was the Ottoman-Jewish trade envoy to Silesia.93 Prussia’s marriage, residence and financial regulations forced Jews to marry partners and employ staff and employees from other cities or regions. Their children were in turn forced to leave Breslau to live in other cities. The result was a very heterogenous community. It goes without saying that all of these groups and individuals followed slightly different traditions and presumably visited different synagogues and shtibelekh according to their affiliations. To be sure, each grouping and sub-grouping would have had different ideas of what it meant to be Jewish according to their celebration and observance of the life cycle and their contacts to gentiles. In many respects, Jews were only a unified group in the imagination of anti-Semites or in the legal jargon of government edicts and ordinances for purposes of tax collection or the “collective liability” laws.

 See Reinke, Judentum und Wohlfahrtspflege in Deutschland, ix.  Zia̜tkowski, Die Geschichte der Juden in Breslau, 36. 92  Zia̜tkowski, Die Geschichte der Juden in Breslau, 36. 93  Moses Turk was an Ottoman Jew who acted as a trade emissary for the Ottoman Empire. Despite his connections and importance for trade, the Crown repeatedly turned down his requests (via von Hoym and the Ottoman emissary Effendi in Berlin) for permanent residency in Breslau: GSTA 1 HA Rep. 46 B 203, Letters concerning Moses Turk from von Hoym 15.10.1791 and Ali Aziz Efendi 27.09.1791/30.09.1791c (in French). At least one Italian trading family (Catholics) was also refused permanent residency based on Frederick’s opinion that they did not generate enough trade. He described the Catholic applicants as “leeches”: Colmar Grünhagen, Schlesien unter Friedrich dem Großen, vol. 1 (Hildesheim: Olms, 2006 [1890]). 90 91

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In 1810, the head teacher at the Jewish school drew attention to the issue of Jewish heterogeneity and the problems it made for creating school appropriate school curricula: The Jewish nation, more than any other, is very mixed among themselves. Only a few can remain close to the places they were born and even fewer can hope to settle there. With their heads full of heterogenous beliefs and concepts which carry traces of the places they were born, they come together with others in new places where a harmony from the diversity should be created.94

Hirschel divided the city into a number of categories of Jews: the business elite, the orthodox and theologians, the poor, the heterodox and a group who had already turned their backs on the orthodoxy (KjH 34).95 If we couple this with the linguistic, cultural and residential classes discussed earlier, the idea of a united Jewish community or Jewish voice appears fanciful. Lowenstein writes about Berlin that “The world of the elite with its mansions, gardens, and new style of living was not the only social milieu in the late eighteenth-century Berlin. There were also families of modest means and poor families, as well as the weakened but still substantial traditionalist element.”96 On Jews in Prussia in general, Andreas Reinke confirms that, “Due to the fragmented political landscape and diffuse  regional social and economic  conditions  in the lands of  the Holy Roman Empire, the general living conditions of the Jewish population deviated. Not simply between the territorial states, but there were also considerable differences within the states themselves which one cannot describe as uniform.”97 The Jewish mainstream, the Jewish minority or community was a community in legal or religious jargon only. This is true within the individual urban settlements in Prussia as well as across the whole of Europe.

94  Immanuel Moritz Neumann, zur Ankündigung der den 9ten und 10ten May zu haltender öffentlicher Prüfung sämtlicher Classen der königlichen Wilhelms-Schule (Breslau: Graß und Barth, 1810), 7ff. 95  Sabattia Joseph Wolff [1756–1832] has an almost identical 4-class description of Prussian Jewry in his religious-reform-minded Freymüthige Gedanken über die vorgeschlagene Verbesserung der Juden in den Preussischen Staaten from 1792 (Halle: J.J. Gebauer). 96  Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community, 67. 97  Reinke, Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland: 1781–1933, 9.

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The notion of “a” diaspora or a singular diaspora experience was as much a projection and goal of the rabbinical elite attempting to unite Jewish communities, as it became a retroactive projection of nationalist historians. To agree with Myers, the very definition of “diaspora” is in fact pluralist in that it includes both “a sense of native culture and of displacement from it” and it “describes the struggle of cultural groups to stake out a position in the midst of a fast-moving current.”98 Just as the idea of a Jewish mainstream—which also implies a Jewish minority or Jewish sub-cultures—is imaginary, so too the idea of a fixed Christian mainstream at the time. Christians were Catholics or Protestants, Bürger or nobility, peasants or soldiers, guild members or day labourers, bourgeois or conservative, Bavarians or Prussians, Huguenot or German. In the late eighteenth century, these differences were not simply idiosyncratic but also cultural, social and legal distinctions. Schmidt decries how sociologists and historians create sweeping general narratives presupposing notions of a dominant “mainstream” which “had never existed.”99 Unless one is referring to German literature or linguistic ties, there is no real sense in talking about “mainstream” German culture in the 1790s. The same goes for the common historical assumption that there was a European culture against which a Jewish culture could be contrasted. After all, there was a Jewish presence in Europe long before Christianity established itself in the West, North and North East of the continent. van Rahden denies all dominant majority culture, he instead argues for “a plurality of constantly changing particular identities which cross influenced each other. It was beyond these particular identities that a public sphere for common identity emerged.”100According to this definition, identity is something particular and contextual and common identities only emerge in common contexts. Hirschel’s anti-rabbinical tirades are in part a genuine attempt to show Jewish identity as pluralist. On one side of the cultural coin, Hirschel describes the economic and religious elite fighting to maintain Jewish autonomy. On the other, we see the groupings of Jews who were the victims of this struggle for authority (KjH 36).

 Myers, “The Blessing of Assimilation,” 26.  Schmidt, “Zwischen Repression und Integration,” 424. 100  Till van Rahden, “Juden und die Ambivalenzen der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft in Deutschland von 1800–1933,” Transversal, no. 1 (2004): 48. 98 99

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The Ashkenazi Orthodoxy and Jewish Traditions As discussed earlier, one of Hirschel’s key religious critiques of the rabbinical elite was that they no longer represented a Judaism that spoke to all Jews. This was not a call to an abandonment of religion. In all of Hirschel’s work, he affirms God as an essential part of his life and guarantor for the beneficent teleological path of reason. His attacks on the rabbinate from a religious perspective are attacks on what he sees is an intransigent positive religion in which discipline and legalism had taken the place of religious experience and devotion. Our experience of God, “the voice of God in every person’s pure heart,” is as a priori an experience for Hirschel as knowing mathematical truths (KjH 16). The argument that the orthodoxy was a sect withing Judaism, should not suggest a more liberal Judaism had ever existed in Europe. It merely suggests that towards the end of the eighteenth century, a particular interpretation of Judaism has established itself as the authority on Jewish traditions in most Jewish communities in Central Europe. Commentators nowadays generally agree that the Modern Orthodox movements which grew out of conflicts with heterodox Jews, were themselves modern Jewish forms of identity despite the fact that these groups claim continuity with ancient Judaism.101 Moshe Samet argues that the orthodoxy as a movement did not emerge until the dispute surrounding the Reform Jewish temple in Hamburg in 1818. Traditional historians of Reform Judaism conversely claim this dispute to be the beginnings proper of the Reform “movement.”102 There were, however, a number of earlier controversies in Prussia where rabbinical authorities insisted on a particular reading of Jewish law which united against other opinions. There are several factors which contributed to the emergence of the orthodox hegemony. Primarily, the enumeration, harmonisation and norming of Jewish religious practices as codified in the Shulcan Aruch in the wake of the messianic Sabbatian movement was a leading factor in the crystallisation of a particular form of Judaism. Other factors include the use of religion to serve the narrow interests of certain dominant families to maintain their grip on power throughout the Ashkenazi world. 101  Adam Ferziger, Exclusion and Hierarchy: Orthodoxy, Nonobservance, and the Emergence of Modern Jewish Identity (Philadelphia: Penn Press, 2005), 2ff. 102  Moshe Samet, “The Beginnings of Orthodoxy,” Modern Judaism vol. 8, no. 3 (1988): 255–58.

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We must also remember that many rabbis were motivated by genuine religious conviction. In his study on rabbinical orthodoxy in Moravia, Miller argues that the legacy of “Sabbateanism made [rabbinical authorities] wary of any deviation in practice that made claims to a venerable rabbinic pedigree.” Some viewed this change to “the cloak of tradition as a threat to the integrity of the halakhic process.”103 The Orthodox historian Adam Ferziger has gone as far as to say that this fear of deviance actually created and united orthodox oppositions: “deviance causes those who reject it to solidify their connections with each other by emphasizing what they have in common.”104 Whatever the reason or combination of reasons which led to a hegemonic understanding of Judaism, this pious, traditionalist and fundamentalist understanding of Judaism became the dominant Jewish religious movement by the end of the eighteenth century. David Sorkin cogently defines Ashkenazi Judaism at the end of the eighteenth century as a form of “Baroque” Judaism. He defines this as having four main characteristics, First, the primacy of Talmud study with the method of study increasingly if not predominantly casuistic (pilpul). Second, the cultivation of the Kabbalah to the extent that it permeated the understanding of Judaism, becoming the main supporting discipline to the Talmud. Third, the neglect, bordering on ostracism, of medieval Jewish philosophy (especially Maimonides), medieval philosophical Bible exegesis, the study of Hebrew language and grammar, and the study of the Bible as an independent subject. Fourth, a cultural insularity that resulted in a disdain for the study of foreign languages and science, considering them not merely superfluous, but highly suspect.105

Although these characteristics continued through the eighteenth century, the gradual change in the cultural, religious, political and social environments began to change the way many Jews understood themselves. This spurned the religious elite into fighting to protect what they believed to be a pure form of Judaism. Adam Ferziger has shown in detail how the most prominent Ashkenazi opponents of Sabbatian movements in the mid-eighteenth century—Jacob Emden and Ezekiel Landau—used a  Miller is directly discussing Mordecai Benet: Miller, Rabbis and Revolution, 67.  Ferziger, Exclusion and Hierarchy, 7. 105  David Sorkin, “German Haskalah and Reform Catholicism,” in Sozialgeschichte der Juden in Deutschland, ed. Shulamit Volkov (Gerlingen: Bleicher, 1991), 27. 103 104

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similar tactics against Jewish enlighteners as they had against the Sabbatians.106 Both of these rabbis made explicit comparisons between maskilim and the Sabbatian movement.107 The emergence of religious sectarianism and liberalisation was in no way confined to Jewish communities. The cultural and political “confessionalisation” of religion in the wake of the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War accelerated in the eighteenth century. The Prussian authorities were forced to react to the internecine religious conflict surrounding the emergence of Pietist movements. As with the Jewish communities, tension between liberal, enthusiast or orthodox streams within the various Christian churches was commonplace. In particular, disputes between Orthodox Lutheran theologians and radical Pietism dominated Prussian religious life for most of the eighteenth century. For example, Christian Wolff was forced to leave Halle University due to Pietist opposition to his supposed liberalism. Immanuel Kant, on the other hand, did not receive a university position until late in his life because of his family’s Pietist background. Ursula Goldenbaum discusses an almost completely forgotten dispute over a bible translation between Pietist and Lutheran theologians and enlighteners where some of the protagonists were imprisoned.108 In a discussion of inner-Jewish theological disputes in the 1790s, Fülleborn reminds anti-Jewish intellectuals that disputes within Christian sects could be just as divisive and bitter. He mentions the controversial introduction of a new hymnal book in Breslau in 1798,109 when Lutheran orthodox figures and liberal Protestants fought for the banning or appropriation of the new book. The book had to be approved by all of the Stände, including 70 guild associations.110 After the annexation of Silesia—and later the annexation of South Prussia—the Prussian authorities were forced to find ways to integrate and accept Christian religious minorities such as the Moravian Brethren, 106  As well as galvanising religious opposition to the Enlightenment, Pawel Maciejko argues that the Sabbatean controversy helped early forms of Jewish cosmopolitanism to emerge: “Sabbatian Charlatans: The first Jewish cosmopolitans,” European Review of History, vol 17, no. 3. (2010): 337–60. 107  Ferziger, Exclusion and Hierarchy, 48–60. 108  Ursula Goldenbaum, “Der Skandal der Wertheimer Bibel,” in Appell an das Publikum, ed. Ursula Goldenbaum et al., vol. 2 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004), 175–508. 109  Fülleborn, Breslauische Erzähler, 660. 110  E. Philipp, Geschichte der Stadt Breslau, 418–19.

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Mennonites and the Calvinists. It goes without saying that the relatively large Catholic and Jewish populations acquired by Prussia after the Polish Partitions caused problems for the state’s centralisation plans. In his attempt to contextualise Jewish religious reform in a broader context, Gerhard Lauer argues: It was not an inherent weakness within Judaism which made the modernisation in the 18th century possible, rather, the emergent processes of religious one-upmanship were the reason that early modern Judaism came into the Enlightenment. This is all connected to the far-reaching changes which can be placed under the term confessionalisation and from which Judaism was no exception.111

Lauer continues to argue that the codification of a particular tradition had a normative influence on Judaism in Europe112 where certain type of “authentic” Judaism was forced onto the kahals. When the traditionalists transformed the tradition into “a confession, they transformed themselves into an orthodoxy.”113 In other words, the orthodoxy defended an understating of Judaism which they themselves had “invented” but nevertheless presupposed as the only tradition. Needless to say, Jewish historiography since the late nineteenth century has been mostly blind to this hypothesis. Late nineteenth- and twentieth-­ century historians have argued that by confronting the orthodoxy, the maskilim were alienating Jews from a “true” Judaism. In contrast to nineteenth-­century interpretations of Jewish religious reform, later historians no longer interpreted the orthodoxy as “obstinate” but saw them as the opposition to Jewish assimilation.114 Reform Jewish theologians during the early and mid-nineteenth century argued that the orthodoxy represented an inauthentic form of Judaism which the maskilim wanted to correct.115 Early Reform theorists were therefore countering Orthodox claims with their own claims about a certain type of “true” Judaism they believed existed before the orthodox ascension. Talya Fishman makes the interesting observation that both  Lauer, “Bücher von Kühen und andere Freuden der Seelen,” 65.  Lauer, “Bücher von Kühen und andere Freuden der Seelen,” 72. 113  Lauer, “Bücher von Kühen und andere Freuden der Seelen,” 71. 114  Jacob Katz, “Towards a Biography of the Hatam Sofer,” in, From East and West: Jews in a Changing Europe, ed. F. Malino and D. Sorkin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 225. 115  Lauer, “Bücher von Kühen und andere Freuden der Seelen,” 64–65. 111 112

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groupings were essentially offering a “myth of a credulous past” to Jews anxious about identity in the post-emancipation age.116 Neither the Orthodox belief in a community “slavishly obedient to rabbinic authority and to an intellectually monolithic halakhic corpus”117 nor the reformers conception of themselves as the answer to a medieval Judaism in which Jews “were incapable of thinking thoughts other than those dictated by the very rabbinic authorities who had kept them in a stranglehold for centuries,”118 were representative of the diversity within the diaspora throughout history. Fishman explains that “Nineteenth century ideologues of Reform Judaism unwittingly reinforced the very same [orthodox] myth while giving it a very different spin.”119 Some decades before the Reform movement took shape, opponents of the orthodoxy and “Baroque Judaism” were engaged in a theological– philosophical debate about the nature of Judaism. To oppose the orthodoxy, proto-reformers and Jewish enlighteners had to create the tools to uncover the specious narratives embedded in orthodox claims to authority. Maskilim opposition to the orthodoxy was an attempt to preserve Judaism in the face of the threats posed to it, “It was because Mendelssohn and the first generation of maskilim wanted to preserve the Jewish religions that they became enlighteners. [Jewish] Modernity did not evolve in opposition to religion, rather, it evolved out of it.”120 Maskilim attempts to confessionalise their religion eventually created a new conception of how Judaism could be confessionalised into a system. Arguably this was both as a step to help resolve the crisis of authority engulfing the Ashkenazi religious establishment as well as a reaction to the prescient need to alter certain aspects of Jewish life to facilitate integration into the bourgeoisie and improve their chances of improved civic emancipation. Gotzmann confirms this motivation when he demonstrates how the confessionalisation of Judaism was a prerequisite for integration.121 116  Talya Fishman, “Forging Jewish Memory: Besamim Rosh and the Invention of PreEmancipation Culture,” in Jewish history and Jewish memory, ed. Yosef H. Yerushalmi et al. (Hannover: Brandeis Univ. Press, 1998), 71. 117  Fishman, “Forging Jewish Memory,” 71. 118  Fishman, “Forging Jewish Memory,” 72. 119  Fishman, “Forging Jewish Memory,” 72. 120  Lauer, “Bücher von Kühen und andere Freuden der Seelen,” 76. 121  Andreas Gotzmann, “Zwischen Nation und Religion,” in Juden, Bürger, Deutsche, ed. Andreas Gotzmann, Rainer Liedtke and Till van Rahden (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 246.

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Importantly, this confessionalisation and reform of Judaism was fuelled both by outward pressure—the need to win civic emancipation—and by an inner-Jewish need to create new forms of authority in the wake of growing Jewish dissatisfaction with the religious elite which was causing emigration and conversion. Rather than viewing Jewish religious reform as a process of modernisation or as an effect of Protestant political pressure, we should consider that change was pre-empted by conscious, scholarly Jewish opposition to rabbinical authority. Many historians present external pressure as the sole catalyst for Jewish religious reform and modernisation. Such one-sided readings assume a monolithic Jewish tradition in which a hermetically distinct and homogenous Jewish totality was corrupted by the machinations of the Prussian state demanding assimilation in return for emancipation.122 George Kohler uses contemporary Jewish sources to show how the reform of Jewish and religious practices in an organised fashion was a separate process to the fight for civic emancipation: “German Jewry in the 19th century demanded political emancipation as an obvious right and not as the generous trade-off for religious reform bequeathed by beneficent rulers, where [Jews] were required to prove the modernity of Judaism.”123 The reformers, and by implication the early opponents to the Orthodoxy, were fighting an outward battle for improved civic status and an inner battle with an orthodoxy hostile towards emancipation. One of the defining characteristics of maskilim civic rights activism was that even if Jewish communities were not the targets for certain reform measures, the activists ensured that Jews and Jewish communities were not exempt from the process by appealing to non-Jewish enlighteners and legislators to aid their cause. In other words, maskilim ensured that Jews were included in the gradual centralisation and modernisation processes. Typical narratives propose that it was the centralisation and modernisation processes which inspired and forced maskilim to oppose rabbinical authority. Hirschel was not the only Jewish enlightener with harsh criticism for the orthodoxy, Lazarus Bendavid’s Charachteristik der Juden and Saul Ascher’s Leviathan both attacked the legalist and despotic nature of the 122  George Kohler, Reading Maimonides’ philosophy in 19th century Germany (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012), 4. 123  George Kohler, “Judentum begraben oder wiederbelebt?,” in Die “Wissenschaft des Judentums,” ed. Thomas Meyer and Andreas Kilcher (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2015).

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Ashkenazi establishment. Similar to Hirschel, Bendavid and Ascher were later accused of besmirching all Jews and not just the religious establishment. As discussed earlier, however, criticism of Hirschel, Bendavid and Ascher as anti-Jewish generally presupposes that the religious or economic establishment was representative of all Jews. Saul Berlin’s 1793 Talmudic criticism of coeval Talmudic understanding—Besamim Rosh—is one of the only Haskalah publications respected by Modern Orthodox scholars.124 Moshe Pelli argues that Saul Berlin was the first enlightener to broach an halachic argument for the introduction of religious reform to Judaism and was thus, according to Pelli, “instrumental in the decline of religious and halachic authority in Judaism.”125 Saul Berlin’s works notwithstanding, other enlighteners such as Hirschel, Bendavid, and Ascher did not produce religious counter-­ narratives to the orthodox hegemony. Although Cord-Friedrich Berghahn claims Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem is the starting point for the establishment for a new understanding of Jewish identity,126 Mendelssohn did not produce any concrete plans for religious reform. Hiscott argues that David Friedländer was the first to begin piecing together a cohesive reform plan to oppose the rabbinical elite.127 The creation of alternative narratives or forms of religious understanding and communal identity should be interpreted as an attempt to prevent permanent divisions within Jewry at the time. Michael Berger has called this division the “frontal crash of interpretative communities” or “the cleavage of a new interpretative community from an older one.”128 Writing from a religious perspective, Berger argues that these communities were essentially arguing about the “role of traditional Jewish law.”129 In distinction to rabbinic belief that Jews were primarily bound to rabbinic interpretation of Jewish law, diffuse maskilim definitions of a new identity were loosely based on definitions of Jews as human beings or as

 Apple, “Saul Berlin (1740–1794): Heretical Rabbi.”  Pelli, The Age of Haskalah, 171; on Saul Berlin’s works and reception see, ibid., 171–89. 126  Cord-Friedrich Berghahn argues that Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem is the first example of the human rights argument from the perspective of human rights: Moses Mendelssohns “Jerusalem,” esp. 25ff; 127  Hiscott, Saul Ascher, 314ff. 128  Michael Berger, Rabbinic Authority (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), 148. 129  Berger, Rabbinic Authority, 148. 124 125

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united as under a confession.130 These were humanist definitions which offered a radically new conception of identity compared to rabbinic definitions of selfhood as well as that of the Prussian state. This new definition implied a universal humanity to which Jews shared inalienable rights. It also created space for a confessional understanding of religion which could facilitate the integration of all subjects into a civil body within a state. This argument is a distinctly modern understanding of religious and cultural identity and how it relates to individuals as political subjects or citizens. Ury and Miller have argued that this position is the defining moment in the emergence of modern Jewry: “Jewish enlighteners (maskilim) and religious reformers not only highlighted the humanistic elements within Judaism (and the Jewish tradition), but they also glorified the Jewish people as the natural mediators between the particular and the universal in an idealised society that viewed individuals first as members of humanity, then as members of a smaller subgroup.”131 The Early Burial Controversies in Prussia The “Early Burial” controversies were one of the “earliest and most important debates on the reform of Judaism during the Enlightenment (or Haskalah).”132 From the perspective of historians and philosophers in the twenty-first century, it may seem “harsh, even unreasonable” for the Prussian officials to link “emancipation and transformation” or the demand “that Jews refashion their self-definition and their behaviour.”133 Maskilim, Jewish enlighteners and their non-Jewish allies were all agreed on the need to bargain with the state. Their opinions merely differed on how much bargaining was required before Jews could be granted equal civic status. Only anti-Semites and the Ashkenazi religious elites were against entering into even basic negotiations. Critics of the religious powers should not be judged from the perspective of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries where tolerance and democracy defined as unequivocal acceptance of a secular and multicultural society are assumed by many to be the 130  For an extension of this argument, see also K. Berghahn’s comments on Jerusalem in Grenzen der Toleranz, esp. 150–182. 131  Miller and Ury, “Cosmopolitanism: The end of Jewishness?,” 345. 132  Wolff, Medizin und Ärzte im deutschen Judentum der Reformära, 166. 133  Endelman, Broadening Jewish History, 23.

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eternal moral standard with which to investigate historical, cultural and social phenomena. The intransigence of the rabbinical elite on the issue of premature burial was a major cause of religious, cultural, social and political divide within Jewish communities across Central Europe. A detailed examination of the issue, therefore, will help explain Hirschel’s, von Hoym’s, HalleWolfssohn’s,134 Brill’s,135 Euchel’s, Bendavid’s, Ascher’s, Maimon’s antipathy towards, and despondency with, the Ashkenazi rabbinical elite in Prussia. The Early Burial controversy marked the end of intellectual discussion with the religious elite and the beginning of institutionalised opposition to the proto-Orthodoxy. During the controversy, bourgeois Jews in Breslau established their own health and burial institutions and set about building a new synagogue.136 The Gesellschaft der Brüder applied to build their own synagogue in 1798, winning approval in Febraury1800.137 It was the same in Berlin, where the maskilim set up alternative “Kehillahlike societies” to institutionalise their opposition towards the rabbinical elite and offer a refuge for maskilim who rejected the traditional kahal and sought to “appropriate” Halacha from “the exclusive authority of the rabbi.”138 Although the Breslau Early Burial debate erupted in the 1790s, the controversy had been brewing in Ashkenazi Central Europe since the early 1770s. In 1772, the Hamburg rabbi and gemstone dealer Jacob Emden became embroiled in a dispute with Moses Mendelssohn about the latter’s response to a premature burial dispute in Schwerin.139 A tradition had developed among Ashkenazi Jews where corpses were buried as soon as death was pronounced. Using the Talmud, Mendelssohn argued that there was no halachic reason not to bury the dead after waiting for 24 134  Halle-Wolfssohn published on the Early Burial controversy in vol. 7 of HaMe’assef, “Gespräch im Lande des Lebenden,” see, Schulte Die jüdische Aufklärung, 91. 135  Joel Brill (Löwe) wrote an open letter to the burial societies in Hebrew in 1793. It was published in 1794 (Freischule Verlag) and was mentioned in a discussion in Hame’assef in 1794 (page 160): Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” fn.5, 571. Hirschel Levin published a public response and rebuke of Brill’s arguments on 09.11.1794 which became the basis for the Breslau rabbinate’s defiance of Prussian law on the matter: Geiger, “Vor hundert Jahren,” 214. 136  Reinke, Judentum und Wohlfahrtspflege in Deutschland, 102. 137  Brilling, “Zur Geschichte der zweiten Brüdergesellschaft,” 8. 138  Pelli, Haskalah and Beyond, 27. 139  Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, 288–93.

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hours. For Mendelssohn, Jacob Emden and others were insisting on a custom rather than a law. Emden rejected Mendelssohn’s Talmudic argument because it was “setting a precedent for the abrogation of accepted custom on the basis of external considerations related to changes in scientific knowledge,” where Emden’s concerns even outweighed “the concept of ‘saving life’ (piquah nefesh) which is generally deemed to take precedent over all other considerations.”140 There was widespread fear of being buried alive in the late eighteenth century. Many believed that cadavers could appear dead but then reanimate. Wolff speaks of a “Scheintodpanik” across Europe between 1740 and 1850.141 Wolff claims over 50 titles concerned with vita mimina and premature burial were published between 1750 and 1800.142 In his investigation of Early Burial in relation to the Haskalah, Daniel Krochmalnik describes the fear of premature burial as one of the main “issues of the day.”143 As he explains, it was not simply a case of hysteria, but a fact of life—there were in fact many cases of people almost being buried alive. This led people to suspect that many more had indeed suffered that fate.144 To assuage public fears, legislation was passed to ensure that corpses were laid out for at least several days until putrefaction set in and death could be safely established. Purpose-built mortuaries were constructed at graveyards where the bodies could be laid out until burial. In 1775, Frederick II enacted law which obligated people to attempt to reanimate apparently dead people. Failing to attempt reanimation left the person liable for corporal punishment.145 Gerlin Rüve explains this phenomenon and the legislative reaction as an anthropological shift from unquestioned belief in people as divine beings to an organic conception of humans as embodied-spiritual beings with new definitions of life and the authority.146 Ingrid Stoessel also connects the public concern with the matter as the symptom of the effects of a loss of faith had on people’s understanding

140  Samet, “The Beginnings of Orthodoxy,” 253; Daniel Krochmalnik, “Scheintod und Emanzipation: Der Beerdigungsstreit in seinem historischen Kontext,” Trumah 6 (1997): 125–37. 141  Wolff, Medizin und Ärzte im deutschen Judentum der Reformära, 167. 142  Wolff, Medizin und Ärzte im deutschen Judentum der Reformära, 168. 143  Krochmalnik, “Scheintod und Emanzipation,” 109. 144  Krochmalnik, “Scheintod und Emanzipation,” 110. 145  Krochmalnik, “Scheintod und Emanzipation,” 111. 146  Gerlind Rüve, Scheintod (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008), 10.

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and acceptance of death.147 In other words, the legislative and cultural reaction to a medical problem became a major catalyst for how Jews and non-Jews understood themselves. It also marked a change in the authority to whom the masses deferred for issues surrounding life and death. Despite non-Jewish reaction to this mass phenomenon, the chevra kadisha—the Jewish health and burial society—continued to bury “their” dead as their custom established. Because Jews were outside of most normal legal instruments and systems, the chevra kadisha and the rabbinical elite defended the right for Jews to bury their dead in any manner they saw fit. Anti-Semites, maskilim and philo-Semites all considered the rabbinical insistence on same day burial as an “obstacle in the Jewish civilization process.”148 Although Krochmalnik argues that it was non-Jewish enlighteners who inspired maskilim to oppose the rabbis on this issue,149 the  maskilim were in fact thinkers and scholars in their own right and were aware of the harm an intransigent rabbinate would do to their political and social struggles. To agree with Krochmalnik on the ensuing process, however,  the maskilim did indeed instrumentalise the premature burial debate for their own motives.150 The inspiration for their opposition, however, was caused by both external pressure from the State and an internal-Jewish need to reduce the power of the religious elites. Hirschel bombastically describes the controversy as it re-emerged in the late 1780s as an example of rabbinical “fanaticism, intolerance, superstition and Schwärmerei” (JIF 53). The 1780s controversy spread beyond the Jewish community as maskilim appealed to the non-Jewish authorities to prevent the chevra kadisha from practising Early Burial. Mendelssohn and Isaac Euchel stirred the issue by publishing several in HaMe’assef between 1784 and 1786.151 There was open conflict with the rabbinical authorities when Marcus Herz published his thoughts on the practice in German and brought the debate to a wider, non-Jewish audience.152 The inspiration for Herz’s text was Chief Rabbi of Prague Ezekiel Landau’s defiance of a legal edict 147  Ingrid Stoessel, Scheintod und Todesangst (Köln: Forschungsstelle Robert-KochStrasse, 1983). 148  Krochmalnik, “Scheintod und Emanzipation,” 137. 149  Krochmalnik, “Scheintod und Emanzipation,” 138. 150  Krochmalnik, “Scheintod und Emanzipation,” 142. 151  Pelli, The Age of Haskalah, 209. 152  Markus Herz, An die Herausgeber des hebräischen Sammlers Über die frühe Beerdigung der Juden (Berlin: Oriental Buchdruckerei, 1787); see also, David Friedländer “Ueber die

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forbidding burial before a 48-hour hiatus in July of 1786.153 Similar laws were also passed by the authorities in Altona in 1785154 and Galicia in 1787.155 A considerable part of Herz’s work is dedicated to rational medical argumentation on the dangers of premature pronouncement of death. Herz was, after all, a medical practitioner. His religious arguments were targeted directly at the rabbinical authorities.156 Herz explained how the chevra kadisha were incorrect to defend Early Burial due to Jewish law. They were simply trying to maintain a custom peculiar to Ashkenazi rabbinic Judaism.157 Just as the Mendelssohn-Emden spat had proved a decade previously, Herz showed how the controversy was a dispute about an tendentious interpretation of a biblical analogy made by the Ashkenazi rabbis. Typical of maskilim approaches to textual authority, Herz stresses the importance of the biblical sources on Early Burial as opposed to Talmudic additions by “new rabbinical sages” (17) and “Talmudists” (18).158 Herz claimed that it was a clear “rejection of common sense” to perpetuate a long-since overhauled “prejudice based upon misunderstood parts of the Talmud and the Sophistic explanations thereof by of a few hair-splitting rabbis.”159 Ultimately, Herz et al. did not provoke the rabbis to respond using religious arguments. They did, however, grab the attention of non-Jewish authorities.160 Herz’s comments on the matter came into the public domain in 1790 when it was revealed that a banker named Abraham Moses was buried within 90 minutes of his death. It was the day before a major holiday and the family demanded a quick burial to shorten their mourning period.161 frühe Beerdigung der Juden,” Berlinsche Monatsschrift, vol 9. (Berlin: Haude und Spener, 1787), 317–313. 153  Heinrich, “Akkulturation und Reform,” 141. 154  Gaby Zürn “Tod und Judentum in der Zeit der Aufklärung,” in Das Volk im Visier der Aufklaerung, ed. Anne Conrad, Arno Herzig and Franklin Kopitzsch (Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 1998), 215–27. 155  Wolff, Medizin und Ärzte im deutschen Judentum der Reformära, 171. 156  Heinrich, “Akkulturation und Reform,” 146. 157  The Ashkenazi rabbis interpreted the biblical command not to leave an executed murderer hanging overnight as a command to bury all corpses on the day of death: Hirschel, JIF 53. 158  Deuteronomy 21:22. 159  Herz, An die Herausgeber des hebräischen Sammlers Über die frühe Beerdigung der Juden, 11. 160  Krochmalnik, “Scheintod und Emanzipation,” 144–45. 161  Geiger, “Vor hundert Jahren,” 213.

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The Early Burial Controversy in Breslau On 12 December 1793, laws were passed in The Mark to instructing pastors to wait three or four days before burial. The pastors were ordered to inform their congregants about the risk of premature burial.162 In 1794, similar acts were passed in Silesia instructing all pastors on the waiting time and the procedure they had to follow before a corpse could be buried. The controversy over Early Burial among Jews in Breslau began in early 1797 when Dr Abraham Zadig (1764–1836) won an exceptional dispensation from the burial society—he made the demand via the Prussian authorities—to allow his father’s corpse to lie for 24 hours before burial.163 Later that year, the situation worsened when an article in the Schlesische Provinzialblätter claimed that a new born baby, pronounced dead late in the evening, reanimated overnight and narrowly escaped being buried alive the following morning. According to the author, if the child had been pronounced dead earlier in the day, it would have been buried alive.164 von Hoym then added a local amendment on 6 January 1795, committing rabbis and the chevra kadisha in Breslau to follow the same legislation as non-Jewish pastors.165 The Silesian Dayan and Breslau rabbi Salomon Pappenheimer wrote to von Hoym in 1795 insisting the new amendment would cause more harm than good. He argued that Jews and their culture would need to develop more before such a law could be successfully implemented. The letter was times to coincide with von Hoym’s petitions to Berlin to include Jews in the general legal system and thus force the rabbis’ hand.166 Needless to say, the chevra kadisha took no notice of the law. Burial came under Jewish religious authority and was thus outside of the remit of the Prussian legal framework. The case of Baruch Wesel son’s reanimation, however, once again pushed the Prussian authorities to prevent any further cases. In an attempt  Heinrich, Moses Hirschel-Biographie, 141.  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 572. 164  Probably authored by Hirschel, “Neues Beyspiel von Wiederaufleben eines Scheintodten, besonders in Hinsicht auf die frühe Beerdigung der Juden.” Schlesische Provinzialblätter 26, November (1797): 465–68. 165  For legal references and discussion, see Ludwig v., Rönne, and Heinrich Simon. Die Verwaltung und Verfassung des preußischen Staates. vol. 7. (Breslau: Georg Philipp Adelholz, 1843), 70–71. 166  Pappenheimer to von Hoym, Groß Strelitz, 12 August 1795, Generalne Dyrektorium Finansow, Wojny I Domen Departamant Prus Poludniowych I/0885. 162 163

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to prevent new legislation, the chief elder of the chevra kadisha took the unusual step of writing to the Schlesische Provnzialblätter to give his version of the events.167 According to the Brotherhood, their warden, who had since been fired, left a public house in an inebriated state and hurriedly declared the child to be dead in order to return to his drinking. The child reanimated later and the warden returned to the house to witness this— apparently the child died a few days later. The elder, perhaps Hirschel Löbel,168 then explained that Jews could not be buried unless two elders from the brotherhood confirm the death and that the correct procedure for establishing death and preparing the corpse were followed. In cases of a sickness, where members of the Brotherhood were visiting the person anyway, the Brotherhood sent two wardens to establish death. The wardens waited six hours or, if too late in the day, the corpse was buried the following morning. In cases of sudden death, the body could not be buried until at least 24 hours after death— which was contrary to the three-day waiting period specified under Prussian law.169 The elder concluded by saying that that if the procedure above was carried out properly, it was unlikely that a Jew could be buried alive.170 The letter had little effect. von Hoym and the Breslau maskilim had simply lost their patience with the orthodoxy. On 10 January 1798, a group of 150 members of the religious elite and the chevra kadisha protested in Breslau. The protestors complained about being called murderers and unenlightened by doctors and professors. They claimed it was impossible to wait three days before burial and stated that they would not change their practices unless the authorities added a new provision in the Allgemeines Landesgesetz.171 Sixty members of the enlightened Jewish faction including Brill, Halle-Wolfssohn, some Jewish doctors, Lipm. Meyer and members of the General Priviligierte class appealed to the authorities to overrule the religious elite.172 von Hoym took an opportunity during a visit to Berlin in early 1798 to ask the King to decree a State Police Edict [Landes Polizei-Gesetz] which  Anhang zu den Schlesische Provinzialblätter, vol 26 (1797): 337–39.  Geiger reprints a petition from the elders to the War and Domains Chamber this is almost identical to the text in the Schlesische Provinzialblätter: Geiger, “Vor hundert Jahren,” 219. 169  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 572. 170  Anhang zu den Schlesische Provinzialblätter, vol 26 [1797], 339. 171  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 573. 172  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 573. 167 168

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would finally force the chevra kadisha in Jewish communities across the whole of Prussia to cease burying their dead as they pleased.173 The chevra kadisha had up until then successfully argued that burial was part of their religious duty over which they had sole authority. Moreover, given that Jews did not enjoy any tangible civic status, they argued that their religious practices were not subject to the general laws of the land. Shortly after von Hoym’s trip to Berlin more protests erupted. According to Freudenthal, the protestors used Lewin Hirschel’s responsa from 1794 in which L. Hirschel had rebuked Joel Brill’s religious argumentation against Early Burial.174 In a lengthy response to the Prussian state’s edict on Early Burial and Joel Brill’s responsa on the matter, Hirschel Levin defended the authority of the “Oral Torah” or Talmud and the rabbinical tradition over the “written Torah” (Pentateuch).175 On 16 February, von Hoym formalised his request: The regular early burial of bodies among the Jews is among the most nefarious practices based upon casuistic religious principles with irrational fervour and fanatical stubbornness that is still continued today. My undivided attention was drawn to this matter recently when, by lucky coincidence, a Jewish Breslavian’s (called Wesel) child escaped being buried alive. I see it as an urgent duty for humanity’s sake to prohibit this abominable custom. After learning that although neither the Bible nor the Talmud prescribe this cruel convention and that it only persists due to specious understanding of certain terms and fanatical obstinacy, I honestly believed that I could use the moderate means of reason to convince all Jewish believers of the horrible risks of being buried alive. I was further aided in this belief by a number of insightful men from this nation who had already been fighting against this [antiquated] conviction. Many members of the Breslau Jewish community announced their eagerness to get rid of the practice of early burial and wished for a community mortuary to be built at the cemetery where bodies would be laid out under purpose-based medical supervision for three days until true death could be confirmed in the safest way. But the main hordes stubbornly defied all reasonable reforms, claiming, among other things, that early burial was common in other communities, specifically in Berlin. One can assume that rational argument and common sense will not be effective in dealing with these bigoted people. This is why I believe that with an issue 173  Jahrbücher der preußischen Monarchie unter der Regierung Friedrich Wilhelms des Dritten, vol. 2. (Berlin: Johann Friedrich Unger, 1798), 113. 174  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 573. 175  Hirschel Levin, 9 November 1794, in Geiger, “Vor hundert Jahren,” 214–18.

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which bears such a strong effect on the general public mood, that it is a governmental duty to create laws which will strictly eradicate a practice that was reprehensible throughout time and which stirs feelings in everyone. I presume that [the authorities] will agree with me and thus I take the liberty to propose a General Police Law which will forbid the Jewish inhabitants of all Prussian lands from burying corpses sooner than the 3rd day after death…. The use of a General Police Law means that the matter will no longer be a an issue of conscience for each individual Jew, rather he can be pacified with the knowledge that even if it troubles his scruples, he is not in fact acting capriciously, but merely subjecting himself to his obligations toward his authorities.176

Hoym’s statements on the Early Burial debate in Breslau in the late 1790s show how his opinion on the religious elite had changed after witnessing first-hand how intransigent the traditionalist leaders were. von Hoym mentions above how emotive this issue was for the general public. He was undoubtedly aware that this was exacerbating the negative views many had about Jews in the first place. By ignoring pleas from von Hoym, the rabbis were guilty of brinksmanship towards the great mass of ordinary Jews. They were gambling that they could retain their autonomous political and legal status by refusing to accommodate any change. After receiving von Hoym’s request, the government sent a request to the Chief Silesian Rabbi on 6 March 1798 to ask if there were any explicit arguments in the Old Testament or in the “old” Talmud to justify the continued custom of immediate burial. Freudenthal had access to the documents. The government officials cited arguments in the Old Testament and Talmud based on earlier writings from Joel Brill and claimed the rabbis were employing sophistry.177 Before writing to the elders in the Breslau Jewish community, the government had already received a damming report on Early Burial practice from several Jewish doctors and Joel Brill.178 There is no indication that the community answered the government. In any case, events in early April forced the issue back into the purview of the Prussian authorities. A new burial society was formed by Jews in Breslau in late 1797 or early 1798. Abraham Zadig and a group of Jews from the Gesellschaft der Brüder 176  Jahrbücher der preußischen Monarchie unter der Regierung Friedrich Wilhelms des Dritten, 114–15. 177  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 573. 178  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 573.

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founded the society which included Dr Abraham Henschel, Joel Brill and Halle-Wolfssohn. The new burial society, which met in the rooms of the Wilhelms-Schule, had three key demands: a waiting period of at least three days before burial to establish death—the traditional rabbinical method was simply to see if the body was still breathing by holding a candle to the mouth.179 A second demand sought permission for families to wash and prepare corpses at home before placing them in a purpose-built room at the graveyard. The washing was traditionally carried out by employees of the chevra kadisha. Finally, the new society asked for the right to conduct proceedings in a more ordered and celebratory fashion, for which they wished to use a funeral coach to carry the coffin.180 By an unfortunate coincidence, Abraham’s Zadig’s son who died aged 13  days on 6 April 1798 became the first test case for the new society. Zadig notified the chevra kadisha of the death on 7 April. He informed them that he would prepare the body at home and then a member of the new society would accompany the child to the graveyard where the chevra kadisha was asked to prepare a plot for the burial.181 The chevra kadisha insisted that if Zadig wished to proceed as outlined, he could not bury the child in the graveyard. Zadig then petitioned the War and Domains Chamber to force the chevra kadisha’s hand. Zadig delivered his petition on the morning of Easter Sunday 8 April. At 4  pm that afternoon, the Chamber informed Zadig and the Elders that because child had lain dead for three days, the father’s wish for the child to bury would be carried out in accordance with Prussian law and in defiance of the Elders’ insistence otherwise.182 The document added that police or military force would be used in the execution of this law and that any resistance on behalf of the chevra kadisha would be treated as an incitement to riot.183 The burial was carried out with protest from the chevra kadisha and a police presence. The chevra kadisha then called the members of the new burial society heretics and they refused to cooperate with either the new society or the state. Another group led by Lewin Dohm and members from the Gesellschaft der Freunde was formed to act as go between to the 179  Non-Jews used same procedure at the time; however, the pulse was also checked: Stoessel, Scheintod und Todesangst, 30. 180  Jahrbücher der preußischen Monarchie, vol. 2, 241–42. 181  Jahrbücher der preußischen Monarchie, vol. 2, 242ff. 182  The correspondence with Zadig and the Elders is reprinted in full in Jahrbücher der preußischen Monarchie vol. 2, 244ff. 183  Jahrbücher der preußischen Monarchie, vol. 2, 245.

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two factions. They said it should be left to a medical doctor to decide if a body should be buried on the second or third day after death. They also proclaimed, however, that the rest of the corpse’s preparation and the burial ceremony should be left as it was.184 The chevra kadisha rebuked these suggestions, even in the knowledge that other Jewish communities were already practising these changes—Zülz and Glogau. They again stated that unless the matter was enforced by a new Allgemeines Landesgesetz, they would not budge.185 They protested that to give in on this matter would make it hard for their rabbis and the elders in the chevra kadisha to marry into other rabbinical families outside of Breslau. Later that year, on 25 September 1798, a Prussian-wide circular was distributed to all War and Domains Chambers asking police agencies to ensure that rabbis conformed with Prussian law. According to Ludwig Geiger’s assessment, however, this too had little impact.186 There were more large protests from traditionalist figures and the chevra kadisha in Breslau in 1799, demanding the state allow them to continue in the manner as they saw fit. von Hoym, however, sided with the enlightened Jews and enforced burial according to newer opinion on the matter.187 Berlin refused to pass a law under the Allgemeines Landesgesetz. By doing so they would have had to recognise Jews as having equal civic status. Halacha, Minhag and Jurisprudence Early in 1798, Zadig published Betrachtungen über das Verfahren mit verstorbenen Personen bey Christen und Juden (Breslau; Hirschberg; Lissa: Korn d. älteren, 1798). Zadig wrote that he lives among Germans who are Christians and Germans who are Jews.188 He complained that although Christian communities were now waiting for three days before burial, the bodies were left unobserved and uncovered and thus no one could witness or assist a person who did reanimate.189 However, he saves most of his  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 577.  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 577. 186  Geiger, “Vor hundert Jahren,” 219. 187  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 578. 188  [Published anonymously] Abraham Zadig, Betrachtungen über das Verfahren mit verstorbenen Personen bey Christen und Juden (Breslau; Hirschberg; Lissa: Korn d. älteren, 1798), 9. 189  Zadig, Betrachtungen über das Verfahren mit verstorbenen Personen bey Christen und Juden, 20. 184 185

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invective for the Jewish communities who he claims were also burying their dead too quickly, often within six hours.190 Zadig argues from the medical perspective, claiming that only after purification sets in could a subject’s death be established beyond doubt. He thus follows similar argumentation as maskilim before him and asked for a three-day waiting period before burial.191 In contrast to arguments from a religious perspective, Zadig and Herz were arguing from the relatively new authority of medicine. Zadig was claiming that the authority of the sciences trumped religious authority and that the law should follow medical and scientific argument rather than religious custom. One of the loudest defenders of prompt burial was the rabbi and local Dayan Salomon Pappenheimer.192 Up until that point he had been considered an enlightened rabbi. He was open to Jewish children learning worldly subjects at the Wilhelm-Schule193 and he also published a book on Hebrew synonyms.194 In 1798, Pappenheimer republished an almost entirely forgotten work from 1794 titled Apologie für die frühen Beerdigung der Juden with the title Deduktion seiner bereits heraußgegebenen Apologie für die frühen Beerdigung der Juden where he argues against both Herz and Zadig.195 As mentioned earlier, Pappenheimer submitted a number of German texts to the government during the controversy of 1798. The government, however, paid little attention to his arguments and he received caustic responses from the authorities. When he dedicated his published work to the philosophical faculty of the Royal Academy of the Sciences in Berlin, they responded with a request for more clarity in his

190  Zadig concludes that Jewish funerals should be more celebratory and that they should consider dressing corpses in a similar manner to Christians: Betrachtungen über das Verfahren mit verstorbenen Personen bey Christen und Juden, 37. 191  Zadig, Betrachtungen über das Verfahren…, 32–33. 192  See Natalie Naimark-Goldberg, “Salomon Pappenheim and His Writings: Rabbi, Maskil, Aufklärer” in The Maskil in our Time, eds. Zev Garber, Lev Hakak, Shmuel Katz (Israel: Hakibutz, 2017), 24e-57. There is some further biographical information in Ruiz’s biography of Pappenheimer’s son who was a radical enlightener and defender of the French Revolution—he later converted to Christianity: Alain Ruiz, “Auf dem Weg zur Emanzipation,” in Deutsche Aufklärung und Judenemanzipation, ed. Walter Grab (Tel-Aviv: Universität TelAviv, 1980), esp. 186–190. 193  Heinrich, “Akkulturation und Reform,” 150. 194  Heppner, Jüdische Persönlichkeiten in und aus Breslau, 695. 195  Heinrich, “Akkulturation und Reform,” 149.

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argumentation and sarcastically wished him “much success in his future spiritual musings.”196 Pappenheimer’s argumentation and motivation deserve a closer look. Aligned with counter-Enlightenment thought, Pappenheimer disputed the value of scientific knowledge over the immediate experience feeling and experience.197 Writing in German, and without extensive use of rabbinic or Tanakh sources, Pappenheimer provided one of the first philosophical arguments against Haskalah and what he perceived to be maskilim worship of reason, historicism and scientific method. Pappenheimer was arguing for a revaluation of religious experience and traditional knowledge in a clear and reasoned manner. Other rabbinical responsa on Early Burial used either arguments from the Talmud or cynically argued that delayed burial was a public health risk.198 Pappenheimer argues against the very principles upon which rationalist enlightenment thinking stood. He created a rational anti-Rationalist justification for rabbinical argumentation, giving pre-eminence to experience and traditional authority in matters relating to religious belief. Pappenheimer opposed empirical knowledge to rational reasoning. He claims the maskilim disregarded empirical knowledge and lived experience and placed too much emphasis on reasoning.199 He urges that laws and societal structures were all created using empirical knowledge and divine insight and therefore could not be perfected or altered.200 Pappenheimer is effectively accepting the maskilim charge that the rabbinic authorities are irrational. He qualifies this by putting forward a thesis of coherent irrationality which ranks experience and empirical knowledge over rational speculation and inductive reasoning.201 Nathalie Naimark-Goldberg argues that Pappenheimer was an accomplished maskil in her essay The Maskil in Our Time (Eng/Ivrit).202 Naimark-Goldberg goes as far as to claim that Pappenheimer was one of  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 577.  Meyer lists Pappenheimer as one of the first Orthodox representatives in the ReformOrthodox split: Meyer, “The Orthodox and the Enlightened,” 101. 198  Heinrich, “Akkulturation und Reform,” 141. 199  Heinrich, “Akkulturation und Reform,” 151. 200  Heinrich, “Akkulturation und Reform,” 152. 201  In 1799, Pappenheimer published an argument for the existence of God using an ontological argument: Pappenheimer, Abermaliger Verusch über den ontologischen Beweis vom Dasein Gottes auf Veranlassung des Zeitbedürfnisses (Breslau: Gehr und Compagnie, 1799). 202  Naimark-Goldberg, “Salomon Pappenheim and His Writings.” 196 197

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the leading figures of the Haskalah from the early 1790s onwards, she even compares him with Wessely. Although his work on the Hebrew revival won him some admirers, Pappenheimer’s open criticism of Haskalah projects by other Jewish intellectuals places Pappenheimer in the traditionalist camp. Pappenheimer and other supposedly “maskilic” rabbis should in fact be placed in a very different narrative. Rather than including them in the Haskalah canon, one should place them as figures in a counter Jewish Enlightenment. They were early prophets of the later Neo-Orthodoxy movement. Indeed, Pappenheimer’s work was negatively reviewed in his lifetime but was later well received by neo-orthodox figures in the second half of the nineteenth century. Most of the religious elite at that time ignored the state’s attempts to rule on Jewish affairs. They rejected maskilim claims that the Tanakh was the primary source of authority and not the Talmud. Interpretation of law from the “Oral Torah” and its veneration among the Ashkenazi elite became a central bone of contention between the various factions. In the Early Burial debate, Jewish religious figures were disregarding the Talmudic principle of “din de-malkhuta dina” [the law of the kingdom is law].203 Gil Graff explains that this principle provided “the legal framework for Jewish accommodation to modern Western society.”204 This principle was vital to understanding “the concept of the relationship of its own law to the law of the state.”205 Without a framework accommodating Jews within the general legal structure, however, the Ashkenazi elite felt no halachic reason to alter their customs to suit the position of a handful of enlightened Jews. The rabbis believed that Talmudic sources were the sole authority for Judaism. They ignored all other sources, including the Torah. They traced back nearly all law to “the Talmudic Sages; whether as interpretations of biblical commands or as Rabbinic legislation, the debate over the validity of Jewish law revolved around the authority of the Talmudic rabbis.”206 The rabbis assumed their infallibility with regard to legal authority. On the other hand, maskilim placed a strong emphasis on the 203  Gil Graff, Separation of church and state: Dina de-malkhuta dina in Jewish law (Alabama: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1985), vii. 204  Graff, Separation of Church and State, vii. 205  Graff, Separation of Church and State, vii. 206  Berger, Rabbinic Authority, 147.

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Tanakh over and above the Talmud. The maskilim felt bound by the laws of the Torah and were thus opposing and contrasting what they believed to be divine reason to Rabbinic authority.207 Moshe Samet discusses the characteristics of the early Ashkenazi orthodoxy: Orthodox Jews adopted for themselves an ultra-strict standard of observance with respect to the mitzvot, including insignificant customs, stringent measures and preventative measures whose underlying justifications are at best unclear, and occasionally even problematic, from the perspective of the halacha.208

Samet suggests that orthodox culture was partly defined by its divergence from the tradition. As with Pappenheimer’s philosophical argument above, so too other rabbis argued that their traditions had become laws and, therefore, could not be changed. They maintained observance of these new traditions regardless as to what was written in the Talmud or the Torah. The battle lines between maskilim and the religious authorities in the Early Burial debate were drawn around two religious and cultural systems. The maskilim were struggling to combine divine and scientific authority. The Ashkenazi religious elite, on the other hand, were insisting on their rights as the traditional leaders to continue as the sole legal authority over that group. The public nature of the debate led non-Jewish observers to find the rabbinical position as incompatible with the moral zeitgeist. The rabbis were effectively arguing it was their right to risk burying someone alive in order to fulfil their obligations to their interpretation of the law. What for man people appeared as a callous disregard for human life due to legalistic reasoning confirmed many of the anti-Semitic tropes deployed to prevent Jews from attaining improved civic and residential status. From the rabbinical perspective, the prohibition of Early Burial became a line over which the ever-encroaching civil state should not to cross. The enemies of the Jews were undoubtedly quite happy to defer to the religious orthodoxy on this matter. By asserting their right to judge on all Jewish affairs above and beyond the laws of the state, the rabbis were preventing civic emancipation and were further demonising Jews as  Berger, Rabbinic Authority, 148.  Samet, “The Beginnings of Orthodoxy,” 250.

207 208

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regressive and barbaric in the eyes of the general population. Abraham Zadig confirmed that rabbinical defiance on the issue of Early Burial magnified anti-Jewish resentment and hindered the chances of improved civic status.209 It was from this context that Hirschel felt empowered to write his now infamous anti-Rabbinical texts where he lampoons the rabbinical elite as irrational, intransigent and corrosive to Jewish life in Silesia.

 Zadig, Betrachtungen über das Verfahren…, 28ff.

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CHAPTER 6

Jewish Rights, Human Rights and Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism in Prussia Almost all commentators who speak of Hirschel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reduce his legacy to his vitriolic attacks on the rabbinate in Breslau. A notable exception is his biographer in the 1931 Encyclopaedia Judaica who reminded us that Hirschel fought “in the name of reason against both the Jewish orthodoxy as well as hatred of the Jews.”1 In Hirschel’s 1793 Defence of Human Rights or a Philosophical, Critical Examination of the Text: On the Physical and Moral Constitution of Jews Today [hereafter Apologie], Hirschel methodically deconstructs— “almost too critically”2—anti-Semitic tropes published two years previously in Ueber die physische und moralische Verfassung der heutigen Juden.3 Fülleborn wrote at the time that this “justification of his nation” had earned Hirschel “a great reward.”4 His work is both an indication of the spectrum of anti-Semitic and anti-Judaist argumentation at the time as 1  Josef Heller, “Moses Hirschel (Christian Moritz),” in Encyclopaedia Judaica: Das Judentum in Geschichte u. Gegenwart, ed. Jakob Klatzkin, vol. 8 (1931). 2  Ernst Christian Trapp, review of Apologie der Menschenrechte in Neue allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek vol. 21, issue: 2 (1796): 338. 3  Ueber die physische und moralische Verfassung der heutigen Juden: Stimme eines Kosmopoliten (Leipzig: Voß, 1791). Hirschel claims on pages XV–XVI that he was inspired to write by another anti-Semitic text: “Auch etwas über der Juden Fähigkeit einer bürgerlichen Verbesserung,” Der neue deutsche Zuschauer vol. 7, no. 21 (1791): 264–95. 4  Fülleborn, Breslauische Erzähler, 642. Fülleborn lauds Hirschel’s chess works but does not mention Hirschel’s anti-rabbinical texts.

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well as an insight into the enlightened cosmopolitanism and rationalism to which Hirschel and Breslau’s intelligentsia ascribed. I arrived in Berlin in July 1795 where I took a second course in my studies...I learned very little about their freedoms. According to the Sovereign’s and government’s citizenship and state laws, Jews are excluded from natural human rights; in general they are not allowed to learn any mechanical trade or craft; all attempts by the Jewish community to obtain permission to do so in support of their poorer fellow believers were rejected; moreover, although the rich Jews have the privilege of building factories for silk, cotton, leather and linens (though not without advantage for the government), they may not employ Jewish workers. Trade and public trading are also limited to certain goods, such as clothing, jewellery and some silk and cotton shops. However, to compensate for their losses, they have been graciously permitted to lend money at moderate interest rates, up to 50 pCt. is generally permitted.5 The heavenly blessing bestowed upon Adam of “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth,” is also denied to Jacob’s descendants in this kingdom, as the marriages of the Jews must be privileged by king and government, and are burdened with heavy conditions and special duties payable to the crown; such privileged parents may raise only two children as heirs to their paternal reproductive rights; their remaining children must find nourishment on foreign soil or die out. Those are the main freedoms which the Jews enjoy in this benevolent kingdom; in addition, there are also special burdens and duties which are only imposed on the Jewish communities in this kingdom...I lived in this capital for four years. The pressure on the Jews in these kingdoms completely put me off a longer stay and made me think (although honoured with a patent from the royal academy and with binding private letters with promises from His Majesty the king) of settlement far away from these kingdoms; so I made efforts to consider my journey to the Kingdom of England.6

Salomon Bennett wrote this damning report on Berlin a few years after his stay there from 1795 to 1799. Needless to say, his outsider status allowed him to be candid on Prussia’s treatment of its Jewish subjects. Bennett was a self-taught polymath and artist who left the large Jewish diaspora in the East to further his profane education. Bennett was born into a traditionalist rabbinical family in Polotsk in 1761 where he enjoyed 5  Typical interest rates in Breslau towards the end of the eighteenth century was around 5–6% on loans of up to 6000 Thaler, “Schlesiens Juden im Umgang von der Privilegien-zu Marktwirtschaft (1800),” in Jüdisches Leben zwischen Ost und West, ed. Andreas Brämer, Arno Herzig, and Krzysztof Ruchniewicz (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2014), 126. 6  Salomon Bennett, Israel‘s Beständigkeit, (Darmstadt: Philipp Diehl, 1835), 213–15.

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religious upbringing—he was born Yom-tob ben M. Ha-Rav Shelomoh.7 He used his skills as a talented graphic artist and portraitist to fund his trips around Europe.8 His caustic remarks on Prussia above were printed in a book with otherwise positive comments about his life in Copenhagen and London.9 Bennett was both surprised and repelled at the Prussian chicanery of its Jewish population. He praised Prussia’s for nevertheless producing so many intellectuals of note—he mentions Brill and Wolfssohn in Breslau as paradigms of their profession.10 Prussia was indeed anything but tolerant or enlightened towards its Jewish population. Even after the death of the anti-Semitic Frederick II, Jews remained legally outside of the feudal estate system in a corporate category of their own as “Foreign.” Among a host of other prohibitions, they were prevented to work in the civil administration.11 They were also prevented from entering all guild protected trades as well as farming and other professions in the legal and military fields. Despite over ten years of public debate and numerous reports and commissions lobbying to ameliorate life for Jews in Prussia,12 the general legal reforms of 1794 still did not change the legal or residency status of Jews in any tangible way.13 Jews in Prussia were confronted with an effectively schizophrenic state policy in relation to their presence. On the one hand, the state generated considerable income from the taxation of Jewish communities. Jews were also responsible for a disproportionate amount of Prussian foreign trade and manufacturing. The state and its landed nobility further relied on Jewish-German capital and financial services in times of war or when looking for investment. On the other hand, the state made life for ordinary Jews as difficult as possible with “crushing taxes and levies, collective  Arthur Barnett, “Solomon Bennett, 1761–1838,” Transactions vol. 17 (1951–52): 92.  On Bennet’s artistic works from Berlin, see, Kirschstein, Juedische Graphiker, 15–27. 9  Bennett claimed that London had the most humane constitution of the lands and cities he visited: Israel‘s Beständigkeit, Copenhagen 210–12; London 216ff. 10  Bennet further praises Mendelssohn, Markus Herz, Dr Marcus Bloc (medallist and coiner and the first Jew to be admitted into the Prussian Academy of the arts), Abraham Abrahamson; Prof. Giuseppe Leonini who taught Italian at gymnasia and at the Berlin military Kadettenschule and published poetry: Bennet, Israel‘s Beständigkeit, 214. 11  Barbara Strenge, Juden im preußischen Justizdienst 1812–1918 (München: Saur, 1996), 14. 12  Hiscott defines the 1780s as a decade of civil rights activism by maskilim: Hiscott, Saul Ascher, 237. 13  Strenge, Juden im preußischen Justizdienst, 14. 7 8

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liability for members of the community, far reaching employment limitations, ignoble residency and settlement legislation.”14 Furthermore, the state actively pursued policies keeping Jewish population growth in check. The state limited residency and marriage permits and effectively barred most Jews from living in most urban and rural settlements. The Jewish regulations of April 1750—which more or less stayed in place across Prussia until 1812—were egregiously punitive as they sought to limit all aspects of Jewish life and were based upon anti-Semitic prejudices. State and legal discrimination was combined with the widespread antipathy towards Jews by the non-Jewish population. During the 1780s, the state either ignored calls for civil recognition or demanded that Jews first had to transform their “corrupted character” and assimilate their practices and beliefs with those of the Protestant bourgeoisie. The state, for its part, made little legislative effort to accommodate or encourage change in a manner that was acceptable to either Jewish intellectuals or Jewish religious leaders. Prejudices towards Jews in German-speaking Europe ran so deep that, despite all evidence to the contrary, age-old anti-Semitic tropes and arguments were still used to legitimise the state’s policies. The debates surrounding Jewish civil status recognition resuscitated older pernicious antipathies which manifested in widely distributed pseudo-scholarly anti-­ Semitic pamphlets. There was also sustained academic campaigns against Jews from otherwise respected scholars such as the Hebraist and theologian Johann David Michaelis (1717–1791) in Göttingen.15 Instead of creating the basis for a broader discussion of civil rights in general, Jewish calls for civil recognition encouraged a hardening of nativist acceptance of the tyrannical form of government as well as fomenting early German Christian-centric nationalisms which identified the sectarian political status quo as inherently “German.” In contrast to sustained cosmopolitan tendencies in post-revolutionary France and United Kingdom, embourgeoisement in the German-speaking lands was complemented by nationalist interpretations of Enlightenment thought. It was from this Germano- and Christian-centric bourgeoisie that “the idea of the German

 Hiscott, Saul Ascher, 195.  On Michaelis’ racial anti-Semitism and influential opposition to Jewish civil recognition, see Jonathan M Hess, “Johann David Michaelis and the Colonial Imaginary,” Jewish Social Studies 6, no. 2 (2000): 56–101. 14 15

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nation took shape as a cultural aspiration at a time when “German” remained politically fragmented.”16 Jewish intellectuals and business elites were an intrinsic part of the genesis of the Prussian intellectual bourgeoisie. Emancipation did not mean they could earn the right to join the Prussian bourgeoisie, they were there from the very beginning anyway.17 Elements of the non-Jewish bourgeoisie did, however, begin to discriminate against Jews. This new, intellectualised, discrimination used religious or nationalist criteria to exclude Jews. This was presumably because education, knowledge and economic factors were no longer distinguishing features.18 Stefi Jersch-Wenzel terms this phenomenon a “rejection of the Enlightenment” as “Idealism and early Romanticism” instead became the new leitmotifs for the non-Jewish bourgeois class.19 Enmity towards Jews was inherent in these new ideologies and was seen as an act of defence against the then nascent free market capitalist system. Jews, it was felt, were both the harbingers of this system and its biggest beneficiaries.20 Renate Best contests that the construction of a novel German national identity was, in part, built on the negative determination of Jews as inner enemies and the French as the extra-territorial enemies.21 Volkov, on the other hand, explains this change in the terms of a German nationalist movement which was defined by the Jewish emancipation debates, Whereas older local patriotisms did not necessarily exclude Jews, modern nationalist ideologies, which were founded on romantic notions of folkish traditions and group exclusivity, excluded Jews as foreign…the German intellectual bourgeoisie, which henceforth understood itself as the national

16  David Blackbourn, “The German Bourgeoisie,” in The German Bourgeoisie, ed. David Blackbourn and Richard J. Evans (London, New York: Routledge, 1991), 2–3; on the emergence of the German nationalism from the cosmopolitan bourgeoise, see: Wolfgang Ruppert, Bürgerlicher Wandel (Frankfurt a/M: Fischer, 1988). 17  Volkov, Die Juden in Deutschland: 1780–1918, 9. 18  Manfred Hettling and Andreas Reinke, introduction to In Breslau zu Hause?, 15. 19   Stefi Jersch-Wenzel, “Rechtslage und Emancipation,” in Emanzipation und Akkulturation: 1780–1871, ed. Michael Brenner, Stefi Jersch-Wenzel and Michael A. Meyer (München: Beck, 1996), 29: “die Absage and die Aufklärung.” 20  Stefi Jersch-Wenzel, “Rechtslage und Emancipation,” 29. 21  Renate Best, “Juden und Judenbilder in der gesellschaftlichen Konstruktion einer deutschen Nation (1781–1804),” in Nation und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte, ed. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Dieter Langewiesche (Frankfurt a/M et al.: Campus, 2001), 171.

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class par excellence, increasingly identified embourgeoisement with nationalisation.22

Prussian Jews were demanding human and civil rights for all subjects in Prussia at a time when the idea of one law for all subjects was in itself a novel concept. From the middle ages up until the mid-eighteenth century, “Persons belonged to very different spheres of law according to origin, locality, stand, profession or religious order. Equality before one law was an ideal first conceived under absolutistic regimes.”23 Elements of the nativist, Protestant bourgeoisie reacted against universalist Jewish arguments by reformulating the earlier class and estate divisions into a new nationalist definition of equality which was limited to the Christian descendants of a mythical Germanic people. To be sure, wherever Jews lived in Europe at the time they faced anti-­ Semitic and anti-Judaic antagonism. That said, each region was different and the forms and causes as well as effects of the specific forms of anti-­ Semitic and anti-Judaic sentiment in each area were unique. Simply discussing the common tropes employed by anti-Semites across Europe does not necessarily help us to understand a particular era. In contrast, By shifting the focus from what antisemites said to how Jews experienced what was said, it becomes possible to avoid the chief stumbling block to measuring the strength of antisemitism from country to country: the ubiquity of antisemitic discourse. Even in the most tolerant societies and at the most tolerant times, Jew-baiters were active. The question, of course, is not their presence, but the ways in which their ideas were mobilized in concrete social and political situations.24

The 1790 Jewish Regulations for Breslau and Their Contexts  he Authors of the Regulations T The Jewish regulations in Silesia evolved differently to other parts of Prussia because it was a “new” province where wholescale reform was necessary and because enlightened cosmopolitan officials held executive  Volkov, Die Juden in Deutschland: 1780–1918, 14.  Funkenstein, “The political theory of Jewish emancipation from Mendelssohn to Herzl,” 13. 24  Endelman, Broadening Jewish History, 14. 22 23

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positions in the province. On 21 May 1790, von Hoym pushed through a new piece of legislation regulating Jewish affairs in the city of Breslau.25 The regulations were the result of years of lobbying and assessment. In 1788, Friedrich-Albert Zimmermann (1745–1815) was tasked with assembling a commission to deliver suggestions for new regulations. He wrote a history of the Jews in Silesia and carried out a census which was finished in July 1789 and submitted to the central government.26 Together with senior members of the Jewish community, Zimmermann further submitted a written assessment and suggestions for reform.27 Zimmermann offered his own opinion on Jewish civil emancipation in a draft proposal that clearly indicated the correctional-transformative intentions of the Prussian state apparatus.28 Despite his yearlong study of Jews in Silesia and his close working relationship with community elders, Zimmermann opined, the complete improvement of the Jews would appear to be impossible. Mr. v. Dohm can say what he pleases, but the greater part of the Jews still clings to their Jewish customs. They cannot be treated as the other burgher are. His food, his holy days, his compulsory prayer, his beard, etc., are in opposition to the duties and liberties of the Christian or naturalised citizenry, and as long as no improvement and enlightenment of the greater multitude comes to pass and the Jews become less stringent in their observance of their religious customs, so long will these sensible ideas not be heard. It does appear to be possible that if the Jews publicly divide themselves into sects, and the Talmudists separate themselves from the Mosaists, whereby the latter, as they are not so attached to the Jewish customs, can obtain equal rights with the Christians.29

Whether Zimmermann’s opinions were influenced by the intransigence and fundamentalism of traditionalist Jewish leaders, genuine utilitarian concerns about mass Jewish migration to Prussia, or simply crude anti-­ Semitic prejudice is now impossible to establish. In Uta Lohmann’s book on David Friedländer, she dedicates over seven pages to von Hoym and his thoughts on Jewish emancipation and the new 25  Vorschrift wie es mit dem Juden-Wesen in Breslau gehalten werden soll: d.d. 21 May 1790. (Breslau: Graßischen Schriften, 1790). 26  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 100. 27  Zimmermann’s handwritten submissions were available to Freudenthal but are now lost. 28  Andreas Reinke attributes this sentiment to von Hoym, even though he admits Zimmermann as its author: “Zwischen Tradition, Aufklärung und Assimilation,” fn. 10, 198. 29  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 189–90.

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regulations for the large Jewish population which came to Prussia after Poland’s final partition.30 In 1795, von Hoym wrote that the Jews should be given civic equality and that there should be no exceptions.31 In 1797, however, he had changed his mind and wrote that there needed to be a long period of forced acculturation and a weakening of rabbinical power before Berlin could even consider giving the Jews of South Prussia equal civic status.32 von Hoym said that the Jewish conscience should not be, “dominated by the rabbis and their army of legal scholars who, apart from [employing] doctrine and argument, more often turn to censure, punishment, contempt and persecution which even an Enlightened [Jew] would not dare to expose himself to.”33 By 1797, von Hoym was no longer convinced that Jews in South Prussia could become “useful citizens.”34 Lohmann claims that von Hoym’s change of mind was probably caused by his experiences with the controversy surrounding the opening of the Jewish school in Breslau, to which I would add the divisive consequences of the Early Burial debate in Breslau  discussed in detail in the previous chapter. Subsequent to the publication of the regulations von Hoym became embroiled in a dispute with Berlin where he tried to have Jewish collective liability removed from the statute books.35 If one has any doubts about von Hoym’s feelings for the right of Jews, one can read a small extract from his second plea for the removal of collective liability, I would therefore ask Your Excellency most sincerely, to reconsider these arguments again, as they have entirely convinced me of the necessity of lifting the laws relating to the subsidiary bondage of the Jews; which do not conform to the system adopted and approved by His Majesty, and are especially unsuitable to the Silesian Jewish example. Their individual application as regulations cannot be enforced without disadvantage or inequity.36  Lohmann, David Friedländer, 200–09.  Lohmann, David Friedländer, 204. 32  Lohmann, David Friedländer, 204. 33  Lohmann, David Friedländer, 204. 34  Lohmann, David Friedländer, 203. 35  Berlin to von Hoym 08.11.1790 (replying to a letter von Hoym had wrote in October that year). von Hoym replied again on the 27.11.1790 and then the king again rejected his request on the 17.12.1790: GSTA I Rep. 46 B Nr. 203 Wie es mit dem Juden wesen zu Breslau gehalten werden solle. 36  GSTA I Rep. 46 B Nr. 203 Wie es mit dem Juden Wesen zu Breslau gehalten werden solle. 27.11.1790, folio 35. 30 31

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Needless to say, Berlin again responded negatively and drew attention to the “degenerate national character of the Jews” and the need to protect non-Jews from their criminal activities. The official, speaking for the King, said he would wait and see if the current regulations change the Jewish “character” or if they would have to wait for some generations.37 The new regulations were intended to begin a process of “improvement and enlightenment” of Jews by means of corrective and transformative legislation. The implicit suggestion was that the state would not even consider granting full civic emancipation to the part of the Jewish community already in some manner closer to the idealised “other citizens” until more state ordained but undefined assimilation had taken place.  he 1790s Regulations in Detail: The Preamble T Reading the opening sections of the legislation makes it difficult to consider the regulations as an improvement for ordinary Jews. Indeed, the first paragraphs are punitive in nature as they again confirm the stringent limits on the number of Jews permitted to live in the city. Despite the fact that it also states how important Jewish merchants were for foreign trade, it also alludes to the damage Jewish traders would allegedly cause “Christian Merchants.” Furthermore, the preamble states that partly due to Jewish religious practice and partly owing to their general “Constitution,” Jews could still not receive “all the rights of their fellow citizens” (§Preamble). Needless to say, the regulations further confirmed that although Jews were “subjects” of the Prussian crown and “residents” of the city of Breslau who “considered Judaism as their religion” (§Preamble), their residential status was “Tolerated,” ergo, conditional. Some modern commentators are sceptical about the intentions behind these regulations and are unsure if the regulations improved the lives of Jews in Breslau.38 Jews at the time, however, were more positive in their appreciation for the regulations. In a sermon to commemorate Frederick Wilhelm II’s death in 1797, Joel Brill said that, “Royal grace and mildness blessed us Jewish inhabitants of this city with rights and freedoms of which we had never before had, where he supported an institution with his power and his prestige, and honoured that institution with his glorious name; its purpose was to share bourgeois happiness with our children and make 37  GSTA I Rep. 46 B Nr. 203 Wie es mit dem Juden Wesen zu Breslau gehalten werden solle, 17.12.1790, folio 39. 38  Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang, 254ff.

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them worthy of it.”39 Contemporary Jews would have been aware of the sections of the regulations which had a positive effect on their lives. Firstly, the new regulations simplified the classes of resident Jews in the city into three categories. The older system had five classes with eight subdivisions.40 These older regulations had the ridiculous effect that even Prussian-born members of the same family could be in a range of different classes at different time. The General-Privilegierte (henceforth GP) class was not so much a legal class in itself as a group removed from Jewish legislation by royal decree. For the most part, they enjoyed similar commercial and residency rights as wealthy Protestant merchants. They were, however, prohibited from holding any political office and there were restrictions on property ownership. There were 30 families with this classification in Breslau in 1791. A large minority of whom represented dynastic Prussian-Jewish families from Berlin who came to the city shortly after the annexation.41 In 1800, four members of the Berlin Ephraim family and two members of the Itzig family were listed as GP.42 The GP number in the city was not limited as it was a special status that could only be granted or revoked by royal decree. The definition of a family at the time included extended families, their servants, religious advisors and culinary staff who all enjoyed residency rights as long as the GP to whom they were “attached” was alive. For example, the Joseph family boasted 120 family members from all over Prussia, Silesia, Bohemia and other parts of Central Europe. On the other hand, the Heumann family had only 24 members who all came from Berlin or Breslau.43 The first new class of Jews was the so-called Stammnumeranten (henceforth SN), whose number were explicitly limited to 160 bearers. The number was taken from an amalgamation of several previous classes— “Privilegierten, Tolerierten, Fixentristen, Tagegroschenentrichtern und 39  “Trauerrede auf den Tot Friedrich Willhelm des Zweyten am 3te Dezember 1797,” Anhang zu den Schlesische Provinzialblätter, vol 26 (1797): 308. 40  Zia̜tkowski, Die Geschichte der Juden in Breslau, 34. 41  Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang, 250. 42  Stefi Jersch-Wenzel, “Bevölkerungsentwicklung und Berufsstruktur,” in Emanzipation und Akkulturation: 1780–1871, ed. Michael Brenner, Stefi Jersch-Wenzel and Michael A. Meyer (München: Beck, 1996), 71. 43  Marcus Brann, “Nahmen der in Breslau Geduldeten Juden-Familien Nebst Frauen Und Kinder,” Jahres-Bericht des jüdisch-theologischen Seminars Fraenckel’scher Stiftung Jahr 1912 (Breslau: T. Schatzky, 1913), 35–44

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Schutzgenossen.” Jewish community officials determined who would be in this class in the run-up to the announcement of the new regulations.44 SN status could only be bequeathed to one son who was subsequently allowed to marry and remain in Breslau (§1–§7). A second son could only marry if he left Breslau or received a SN from his bride to be. If a family’s line died-out, the SN number could be appointed by the community to a different family. The SN status could also be passed to a brother or nephew. In these cases, the community and War and Domains Chamber would have to assess the person’s character and wealth before permitting the transfer. The third and final official class were Jews who were simply called “Tolerated.” This class had no real residency rights independently of their occupational ties to GP or SN holders. It did not matter if they were born in Breslau or not. Most of this class were listed as servants, clerks, and messenger boys (§8). The regulations also lists 60 community officials (e.g. mikvah assistants, rabbis, mohelim, butchers and teachers) (§9) who were permitted to reside and work in the city. Outside of the regulations, there were also 619 other “extraordinary” Jews from the previous Privilegierten class who were permitted to remain in the city until their deaths (§16).45 The regulations further offered guidelines for Polish Jews from the surrounding area and the Polish border who visited the city on business. After confirming that they must pay an “Entrée” fee, it limits stays in a Jewish hostel to four weeks and declines permission for their families to join them (§18). In a continuation of Frederick II’s policy of favouring established “Polish” Jews for trade reasons, §18 also confirms the exemption of Polish “merchant Jews from Brody and elsewhere” from paying “entrée” monies (§18).46 Polish and Russian Jews were responsible for the lion’s share of Breslau’s exports. In 1784 and 1789, Polish and Russian Jews exported the “considerable” sums of 508,603 and 409,986 Rthlr., respectively, worth dyed linens, hats, socks and scarves from the city.47 The regulations

 Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 192.  The figure of 619 is not listed in the regulations, see, Zia̜tkowski, Die Geschichte der Juden in Breslau, 34. 46  Herzig, “Die Juden Breslaus im 18. Jahrhundert,” 52–53. 47  Zimmermann, Geschichte und Verfassung der Juden in der Provinz Schlesien, 40. 44 45

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further confirmed the residency status of the so-called Schammassen— descendants of the Polish-Jewish trade representatives appointed to the city of Breslau by the once powerful Council of the Four Lands which was disbanded in 1764.48 Apart from the strict numerical limitation on the number of SN’s to 160 bearers, there was a large amount of leeway given as to the definition of family or one’s relationship to a Polish trader, GP or SN. The regulations delegated the task of choosing who to remove from the city to the Jewish gate wardens on the city’s Ohlaeur, Oder and Nicolai gates, community elders, rabbis and others (§21).49 These gate wardens  were also delegated responsibility for collecting the monies from Jews in the city on business (§21). Until 1801, Jews across Prussia were still subject to collective liability [Solidarhaft]. Debt, fines or tax avoidance by one Jew or a small group of Jews had to be paid by each community’s corporate body.50 The stark difference between legislation limiting the number of Jews and de facto population growth is almost certainly evidence of a lack of rigid enforcement by the Prussian state and considerable underreporting by families and community bodies. One can also assume that corruption on the part of the city and Jewish officials was a factor. Despite the draconian legislation, the Jewish population of Silesia actually doubled to around 9000 souls between 1740 and 1786. This development was mirrored by Christians whose population went from 1 to 1.8 million in the same period.51 Around 50% of that number was Catholic. Zimmermann’s census of 1789 claims there were 2484 Jews living within Breslau’s walls— around 4.5% of the city’s population—with over 9000 for the whole of Silesia.52 Zimmermann’s figure did not reflect the whole Jewish population of Breslau because it listed the Jewish settlements just beyond the city’s walls as part of the province and not the city.53 This population trajectory continued after the 1790 regulations too. In 1810, two years before the Prussian-wide emancipation edict annulled all previous  Wodziński, Haskalah and Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland, 10.  Brenker discusses how difficult it was for the authorities to actually remove “illegal” or “criminal” Jews from the city. The so called “DeJonge” dragged on for 2 years (1790–1992), in the end only a handful of the accused had to leave the city: Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang, 257–68. 50  Heinrich, “Die Debatte um ‚bürgerliche Verbesserung‘der Juden 1781–1786,” 822. 51  Agethen, “Die Situation der jüdischen Minderheit…,” 324. 52  Zimmermann, Geschichte und Verfassung der Juden in der Provinz Schlesien, 98. 53  Zimmermann, Geschichte und Verfassung der Juden in der Provinz Schlesien, 99. 48 49

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legislation, the Jewish population of the city of Breslau was 3255—an increase of around 25% in 20 years.54 The regulations may have limited the total number of a certain class of Jews, but it also legally anchored the residential status for the majority of Jews and some of their familial entourages already resident in Breslau. This lends weight to the statement that the authors and lobbyists were keenly aware of the difficult task of changing the living conditions for Jews in the city while keeping local and regional powers, the central government in Berlin, and the virulently prejudiced non-Jewish population satisfied. “ Corrupt Jews” and Their Moral Transformation: The New Regulations Much of the new regulations could be interpreted as an altruistic attempt to improve living conditions for Jews. This was certainly how the law makers themselves adjudged it.55 They believed these regulations to be the ratification of parts of Dohm’s thesis that required Jews to transform their behaviour in exchange for equal civic status. The preamble states that the legislation was the beginning of a process of “improvement [Verbesserung]” of this “Nation” and a means of bringing Jews closer to the other citizens. The second and third divisions of the regulations are concerned with “improving” the “moral and civil constitution” of local Jews (Part II §10–§16). Rather than viewing poverty, unemployment, or the concentration of Jews in particular professions as legal or socio-economic problems, the regulations accepted the prejudiced assumption by both philo- and anti-­ Semites that the “moral and civil constitution” of Jews was in some way deficient and that it needed “improvement.” To be sure, improvement in this context is closely connected to a cultural chauvinism that assumed assimilation was the ascension or “improvement” of a lesser culture to a higher one. That said, arguments demanding improvement to a “corrupted” character were not applied to other ethnic groups or religious sects in Silesia. Only the Jews had to be improved. The social historian Schmidt has shown how the shifting of “societal, economic, and social problems” into the moral-ethical realm, where poverty and its effects were thus viewed as a problem of character rather than happenstance remained a defining feature of bourgeois discourse until

 Zia̜tkowski, Die Geschichte der Juden in Breslau, 49.  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 192.

54 55

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well into the nineteenth century.56 As is still the case today, the connection between environmental or socio-economic factors and poverty  or crime was not immediately obvious to most people at time. The state’s reaction to social problems was generally coloured with reference to the moral character of the persons or groups in question. In this sense, Jewish social problems and privations fitted neatly into a general philosophy in which socio-demographic and socio-economic issues were invariably discussed using moralistic language which focused on the purportedly deficient or virtuous “character” of the person or groups involved. During the steep rise in criminality and banditry in Prussia in the 1780s and 1790s, the discourse on crime and its perpetrators rarely left the level of moral discourse.57 The Prussian civil servants Heinrich Friedrich Diez (1751–1817)58 and Christoph Goßler (1752–1817)59 were some of the first officials to make a link between criminality and poverty. Furthermore, they were among the first and the least prejudiced to discuss their nascent sociological theses in relation to the treatment of Prussian Jews.60 Banditry and criminality by landless peasants and marauding gangs were generally seen as evidence of a fundamentally corrupt character of the classes to which the perpetrators belonged. The belief in inherent character faults, rather than social disenfranchisement or economic exclusion, was used to justify the exclusion of the poor and the landless from “civil society.” It should therefore come as no surprise that criminality, begging, or vagrancy by some Jews was automatically transferred to the “character” of all Jews. This same thinking was extended to landless peasants, day labourers, gypsies and other itinerant communities and professions. Many Jewish and non-Jewish philo-Semites agreed that the only way to remedy the inherently spoiled Jewish character was through education and a 56  Burghardt Schmidt, “Zwischen Repression und Integration,” in Zeitenwenden, ed. Jörg Deventer (Münster: LIT, 2002), 444. 57  Richard J.  Evans, Tales from the German Underworld (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1998). 58  Diez was a legal scholar and Prussian diplomat in the Near East. On Diez’s sociological theories in relation to the Jewish emancipation, see Manfred Voigts, “Heinrich Friedrich Diez (1751–1817): Kanzleydirektor, Freygeist und Freund der Juden,” in Aufklärung in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Richard Faber and Brunhilde Wehinger (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010), 175–96. 59  Goßler was an assessor and Privy Councillor to the court at Magdeburg for most of his professional life. 60  Cf. Heinrich Friedrich von Diez, Ueber Juden (Dessau; Leipzig: Buchhandlung der Gelehrten, 1783); Christoph Goßler, Versuch über das Volk (Berlin: Decker, 1786)

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simultaneous lifting of professional sanctions they believed had corrupted the Jewish character in the first place. Many philo-Semites, therefore, accepted the specious moral presupposition of inherent Jewish corruption. Both Diez and Goßler suggested that Jewish poverty and poverty in general were to blame for this corrupted character, they argued this would change if the state was willing to reform the system. This was not because they believed that Jews were inherently deviant, rather, they argued that the current legal and social system had caused these inequalities. Goßler blamed all of the supposedly inherent social ills used to deny Jews the right to equal civic status on “the political state in which they now live.” He mentions unjust laws, high taxes, and occupational limitations.61 Goßler, “The latest philosophical investigations from philanthropic philosophers have confirmed, that neither in their fundamental religious principles, nor in their character is there anything to impede Jews from becoming good townspeople and subjects.”62  ultural Imposition or Beneficent Transformation? C Despite these new theses on Jewish “corruption,” the 1790 regulations were limited to beginning a process of cultural and corporate convergence by imposing change on the Jewish corporate and administrative systems. Even if they did not go as far as Goßler recommends, the regulations nonetheless presented a radical departure from hitherto state policy. In respect of preventing infighting and corruption within Jewish corporate administration, the state prescribed changes to the political structure of the Jewish community.63 The new structure democratised the system of elections to the main representative bodies as well as limiting terms of office for the leader of the community to three years. The Silesian historian Marcus Brann believed the laws had a genuine philanthropic intention. He claims the changes created the fundamentals of the Jewish corporate structure that was later integrated into the Prussian system. Brann read the 1790s legislation as providing an important stepping stone towards the normalisation of the Jewish community.64

 Goßler, Versuch über das Volk, 86.  Goßler, Versuch über das Volk, 84. 63  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 192–93. 64  Brann, Geschichte der Gesellschaft der Brüder, 21–22. 61 62

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The regulations further decreed the appointment of two electable non-­ executive observant members to the board of the [chevra kadisha.65 The chevra kadisha received a large amount of community funds as it was not only responsible for burials and the Jewish cemetery but was also in charge of the Jewish hospital and other charitable organisations which supported widows, orphans, midwives and post-partum mothers. The aim of these edicts was to change what ordinary Jews presumably perceived to be nepotistic corporate structures in which the elders and religious leaders could act against individual Jews or enrich themselves.66 The regulations further confirmed in §10 that Jews were subject to the city court’s jurisdiction and not the opaque rulings of rabbinical courts in all legal matters apart from marriage.67 This was not uncontroversial because the rabbinical courts made binding decisions on inheritance and property rights as well as familial matters. Decisions involving trade were increasingly being made by state or city courts instead of the rabbinical courts. Jewish religious leaders claimed that these rulings were not considered halachic, thus non-binding, by religious Jews. Three community leaders, including Zacharias Kuh, unsuccessfully appealed to the state authorities to allow Jewish courts in Breslau rule on matters relating to inheritance or property disputes between “married couples, parents, children, siblings as well as their in-laws.”68 The elders argued, using the Talmud as their source of authority,69 that the use of non-Jewish tribunals on matters of inheritance was preventing “rich, foreign Jews” from marrying their children to Breslau Jews. The city was therefore losing “capital.”70 Ratifying a recommendation first made by Dohm in 1781, the community’s books were to be written in German rather than Yiddish or

65  For the history of the Chewra Kadischa and the Jewish Hospital in Breslau, see Reinke, Judentum und Wohlfahrtspflege in Deutschland, esp. 17–42. 66  Hirschel describes how rabbis and community leaders admonished and penalised Jews for their behaviour or clothing with impunity. He further discuses capricious taxation impositions on the majority of Jews by wealthier leaders, see: “jüdische Intoleranz und Fanastismus in Breslau,” 56–59; 61ff. 67  Prussia did not introduce civil marriage until 1874. 68  Petition to the king from the community elders Zacharias Kuh, Aron Abraham, Simon Schweitzer 22.11.1790 GStA I HA 46B 203, 47–50. 69  On the Talmudic passages that rabbis used to deny the authority of non-Jewish tribunals, see: Gil Graff, Separation of church and state: Dina de-malkhuta dina in Jewish law, 1750–1848 (Alabama: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1985), 25–27. 70  GStA PK. I HA 46B 203, 22.11.1790, folio 47–50.

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Hebrew and non-Jewish officials had to sign off on all accounts and accounting books for the community (§12).71 Other infringements on Jewish autonomy included the insistence that all Jews take a permanent surname within four weeks, thus abandoning the patronymic system practised by Jews (and all Scandinavians) at the time (§11). The authorities also gave the permission in §14 for the community to build a main synagogue for the whole community so “they would not be forced to hold their religious services dispersed and in small spaces, but rather openly and all together.” Perhaps a vindication of Hirschel’s attacks on the rabbinate in 1789, the regulations also sought to mitigate the financial burden placed on Jews from the city’s middle and lower classes.72 The controversial rise in the “meat tax” was halved from one Silver Groschen to six Denar or Pfennigs on each pound of meat (Prussian Pfund = circa 468 g). The authors of the new regulations claimed the older regulation was both unfair to the less well-off and that it had led to a smaller tax take.73 The reduction in excise duty was to be compensated by a means-based tax applied to the whole community. This system was to be overseen and signed off by a “Christian” observer. In both of Hirschel’s petitions to the War and Domains Chamber and his published polemic in 1789, he had suggested that “Christian oversight was needed to prevent corruption within the Jewish community.”74 In §25, levies on flour for Passover [Ostermehl] were removed. Up until then, all Jews had to pay a special tax on Passover flour which they were forced to purchase from Christian millers. Jews were neither permitted to farm nor mill flour in Prussia. To ensure fair distribution, the new law ordered the community’s Charity Officer to be in charge of distribution because he had better knowledge of the poor (§25).

71  Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (Berlin & Stettin: Friedrich Nicolai, 1781), 117ff. 72  Hirschel had petitioned the authorities to remove the “meat tax” in Breslau which he claimed was disproportionality unfair to poorer Jews, JIF, 63ff. 73  Herzig claims this tax was implemented as a “tolerance” tax—a tax for the “privilege” of being tolerated—and was first implemented in 1745 (at 2 Pfennigs p/lb), Herzig, “Die Juden Breslaus im 18. Jahrhundert,” 53. 74  Hirschel, JIF, 75ff.

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Innovative Aspects of the 1790s Legislation in the Context of General Prussian Reform Jews, Day Labourers and the Prussian Vagabond Crisis The 1790 regulations also identified the need to diversify the professional options open to Jews. Jews were prevented from working in most professions apart from trade and financial services. Apart from the 160 SNs and their entourages who were permitted to continue their professions or to choose a new “mechanical” profession, Jews were now free to work as day labourers, and it is hereby expressly stipulated that no one should put an obstacle in their way because of this. It would further please us most graciously if the Christian craftsmen volunteered to teach Jewish boys and subsequently accept them into their guilds. (§15)

Against the backdrop of a gradual social reforms from the Prussian government caused by growing urban poverty and mass rural homelessness, permission for Jews to work as day labourers was a genuine attempt to help the poorest in the community to find work and no longer burden the already troubled charity organisations. Charity, poverty and vagrancy had become major topics of discussion in enlightened circles in general during the 1780s.75 As mentioned earlier, the period was marked by a change in the discourse surrounding poverty. As more people began to accept that poverty was not something natural or inevitable, begging was gradually decriminalised and poverty was destigmatised. The humanist principle driving these changes was a new found belief that “poverty should not be accepted as a God-given fact, it should be prevented and ameliorated.”76 Johann G Busch (1728–1800) and Caspar von Voght (1752–1839) instituted ground-breaking and successful reforms to city poverty relief when they opened workhouses in Hamburg and published works on the social causes of poverty.77 Up until then, charity had been left to the purview of religious organisations and not the state. Prussia slowly began integrating charitable institutions into

75  On the emergence of discourse on poverty and its causes in Prussia see, Schmidt, “Zwischen Repression und Integration,” 420–44. 76  Ute Frevert, Krankheit als politisches Problem 1770–1880 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984), 87. 77  Schmidt, “Zwischen Repression und Integration,” 439.

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its state apparatus as schooling, health and care for the poor were gradually “made part of the state’s” sphere of responsibility.78 Gerhard Oestreich defines statehood towards the end of the eighteenth century as moving from “absolutism” to “Enlightened reform absolutism” with the gradual subsuming of “legal, church and schooling, administration and the policing”79 powers under central control and a simultaneous “de-theologisation” of the political and social infrastructure.80 The integration of new responsibilities into the central authority was accompanied by an active process of state discipline and “socio-­ educational” policies in which the state sought to homogenise and alter the social fabric with “moral and psychological structural change to people’s political, military, and economic lives.”81 Oestreich defines this as “Social Disciplining”82 in which the state used educational and social policy to construct a homogenised normality or new “political order.”83 There were myriad religious organisations under sectarian responsibility whose purpose was to look after abandoned or orphaned children, the poor and needy, the sick, widows, vagrants and others. As a sign of both the state’s intention to centralise and wrest control of these aspects of public life from religious orders and the failure of these organisations to cope with the huge growth in poverty, the city of Breslau created an Armen-Verpflegungs-Commission in the early 1780s. The Commission was charged with creating a report on the present system and to offer suggestions for state programs to alleviate poverty. The commission submitted its report 1785 and the city opened its first workhouse in a converted penitentiary in 1786.84 The institution catered to the homeless and unemployed as well as recidivist beggars and even petty criminals until such time as they became “employable.”85 Bourgeois angst and activism in relation to the poor and needy was not only limited to Protestants and Catholics. In 1780, Jewish merchants  Frevert, Krankheit als politisches Problem 1770–1880, esp. 23–28.  Gerhard Oestreich, Geist und Gestalt des frühmodernen Staates (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1969), 185. 80  Oestreich, Geist und Gestalt des frühmodernen Staates, 189. 81  Oestreich, Geist und Gestalt des frühmodernen Staates, 188. 82  Importantly Oestreich discusses this “policy” as part of a gradual process of political, social, religious and territorial reform from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. 83  Oestreich, Geist und Gestalt des frühmodernen Staates, 188. 84  Ebers, Das Armenwesen der Stadt Breslau…, 27. 85  On the four classes of inmate, see, Ebers, Das Armenwesen der Stadt Breslau…, 29. 78 79

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founded the Gesellschaft der Brüder as a charitable organisation dedicated to “doing good and exercising universal brotherly love, as derived from religion.”86 Its members were not from the religious elite in the city, however,  but were instead drawn from the pool of  enlightened merchants. Brenker explains that although poverty had become a public debate in Breslau in the 1780s, there was initially little desire for structural reform. The debate was contested between two main camps. Namely those who wanted to help the marginalised “peripheral groups” and those who discriminated against the poor on a moral level—the poor as “undeserved.”87 The Jewish population of Silesia was by no means wealthy. Around the turn of the century in Upper Silesia, circa 25% of the population were listed as peddlers. In Zülz, a city with a relatively high Jewish population (1800; 52.4%),88 43% of Jews were listed as peddlers or beggars.89 This was not a phenomenon unique to Jews in Prussia at the time. The rise in landless peasants and their increasing poverty in the second half of the eighteenth century had created a growing body of non-Jewish subjects who were effectively shut out of the reform and civil emancipations processes. The new Jewish anti-poverty and anti-Jewish vagrancy laws in the latter half of the eighteenth century forbidding homeless Jews from entering urban centres in Central Europe had little or no effect. The system itself was being  forced to  change to accommodate this new social reality.90 Herzig argues that “Jewish emancipation has to be viewed in the context of a universal emancipation in Germany, which was determined by the antinomies of bourgeois and proletarian emancipation.”91 Much like the legal status of Jews in cities, rural Christian Prussians were barred from changing professions and had no freedom to marry. Moreover, hereditary indentured servitude was not officially abolished in rural Prussia until  Brann, Geschichte der Gesellschaft der Brüder, 13.  Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang, 213–17. 88  Stefi Jersch-Wenzel, “Bevölkerungsentwicklung und Berufsstruktur,” in Emanzipation und Akkulturation: 1780–1871, ed. Michael Brenner, Stefi Jersch-Wenzel and Michael A. Meyer (München: Beck, 1996), 64. 89  Jersch-Wenzel, “Bevölkerungsentwicklung und Berufsstruktur,” 70–71. 90  Arno Herzig, “Jüdische Armenfürsorge und obrigkeitliche Armenpolitik,” in Das Volk im Visier der Aufklaerung ed. Anne Conrad, Arno Herzig and Franklin Kopitzsch (Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 1998), 200. 91  Arno Herzig, “Das Problem der jüdischen Identität in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft,” in Deutsche Aufklärung und Judenemanzipation, ed. Walter Grab (Tel-Aviv: Universität TelAviv, 1980), 243. 86 87

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Stein’s 1807 “October Edict.”92 In order to incorporate the nobility into the military, Frederick II offered the nobility continued domination over their lands and people. In Silesia, this meant that the nobility and landed gentry (1% of the population) still controlled almost all of the land outside of large urban settlements (some of the land  still belonged to religious orders).93 Antiquated feudal entitlements in Silesia, increasing food exports and government inaction caused an exponential rise in the number of homeless beggars and vagrants wandering the province. The historians Günter Vogler and Klaus Vetter describe rising poverty as the “crisis of late-feudal society.”94 The population of landless labourers in Brandenburg had more than doubled between 1750 and 1800. In that same period, the numbers of landed peasants only grew by two-fifths.95 The creation of a labour force outside of the traditional feudal indentured servitude systems and the increase in Junker land holdings was a major factor in the huge rise in homeless subjects. Richard Evans explains that “Social and economic changes endemic to Prussian society…were behind the growth in vagabondage.” He suggests that urbanisation, population growth and the growing demand for exports to industrialising Britain encouraged the landowners to “expand their demesnes, enclose common land for grain production and replace their serfs with landless labourers whom they could hire and fire at will.”96 Food prices exploded in the 1790s as the Junkers continued to export and productivity in the agricultural system collapsed due to peasant unrest and the enduring inability of the Prussian state to embrace liberal capitalism for all of its subjects. The feudal land system still gave disproportionate powers to the Junkers and landed gentry—particularly in East and West Prussia and Silesia. The emancipation of the peasantry did not occur in 92  The October edict also introduced the freedom to buy and sell fiefdoms [Landesgüter] which created mobility both among the rural nobility and the urban bourgeoise. On the edict’s effects in Silesia, see Ziekursch, Hundert Jahre schlesischer Agrargeschichte (Breslau: F. Hirt, 1915), 209–305. 93   Hanna Schissler, “The Social and Political Power of the Prussian Junkers,” in Landownership and Power in Modern Europe, ed. Ralph Gibson and Martin Blinkhorn (London: HarperCollins, 1991), 103. 94  Hagen, “The Junker’s Faithless Servants: Peasant Insubordination and the Breakdown of Serfdom in Brandenburg-Prussia,” 72. 95  Evans, Tales from the German Underworld, 26. 96  Evans, Tales from the German Underworld, 26.

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Silesia until 1806 and, even then, it only happened “after granting extraordinary concessions to the landlords at the numerically preponderant lesser peasantry’s expense.”97 By specifying “day labourers,” the authorities were admitting Jews into a new professional grouping or class in Prussia which included landless peasants. Up until then, Jews who were not permitted to live in an urban settlement had no other option but to emigrate, beg or work as travelling salesman [Hausierer]. Permitting Jews to work as day labourers was therefore a move ameliorate the growing “vagabond” problem among Jews. This corresponded to simultaneous social policy targeting non-Jewish peasants in order to limit poverty and prevent crime.98 The state projects to aid the poor, however, often came hand in hand with repressive or disciplinary measures, At the beginning of the 17th century—as in the second half of the 18th century—the urban authorities reacted to the effects of socio-economic crises (population increase, rural exodus, inflation, war, famine) and the associated social uprooting of many people with both a vigorous moral policy, as well as increased tendencies towards the exclusion and marginalisation of vagrants, beggars and prostitutes, as well as with a changed policy towards the poor, whereby social support and repression by the state authorities came hand in hand.99

In other words, aid and charity from the state came at a price. The state’s generosity was a two-way street in which utilitarian reasoning rather than altruism provided the basis for reform policy. Jews were already a marginalised grouping and thus there was little protest at the suggestion that as a “reward” for better privileges Jews would have to conform to certain idealised norms set by the state. The state may have been acknowledging the need to react to certain social phenomena, but it remained aligned to the idea that character, class or ethnic affiliation were the root causes of the issues at hand. Endelman does remind us that,

 Hagen, “The Junker’s Faithless Servants,” 74.  On rising crime and banditry outside of urban settlements in the late eighteenth century in Prussia, see: Richard Evans, “The ‘Dangerous Classes’ in Germany from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century,” in The German Underworld, ed. Richard Evans (London: Routledge, 1988), 1–28. 99  Schmidt, “Zwischen Repression und Integration,” 434. 97 98

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From the perspective of the early twenty-first-century academy, with its validation of ethnic diversity and cultural pluralism, the link between emancipation and transformation, the demand that Jews refashion their self-definition and their behaviour, seems harsh, even unreasonable. However, in the context of the period, it represented and advance, a sharp break with the pre-­ modern past, when the source of the Jew’s defect was a matter of faith and baptism the sole remedy, the only avenue to integration and acceptance.100

Today, many liberal democracies demand that prospective citizens learn how they should act and speak as part of citizenship tests. The difference to eighteenth century–Prussian policy, however, is the underlying assumption that the prospective “citizens” are inherently corrupt and, must therefore assimilate. The Transformation of Jews by Means of Occupational Transformation §15 of the regulations presents the first attempt in Prussia to open up manual trades and professions to Jews as well as the first instruction to the craft guilds to accept Jewish apprentices into their organisations. Hirschel observed in 1793, “What the theoretical work from Dohm and other great philosophers delivered on the physical and moral improvement of the Jews, Hoym has delivered in practical terms.”101 Paragraphs §16 and §17 retained the state’s right to be notified of a change of occupation and the right to deny permission to take up a new job. Zia ̨ntkowski explains that the right to notification and the right of denial are both examples of the state maintaining its own authority over the Jewish community as well a perceived need to manage this transition in an orderly way.102 Trude Maurer has drawn attention to the fact that in twentieth-century sources, the word emancipation is often used to describe state policies towards its subjects; however, at the time, emancipation was intimately connected to paternalistic state education methods in the form of “Instructive-Educational Laws” [Erziehungsgestetze] or “Instructive-­ Educational Politics” [Erziehungspolitik].103

 Endelman, Broadening Jewish History, 23.  Hirschel, Apologie der Menschenrechte, v. 102  Zia̜tkowski, Die Geschichte der Juden in Breslau, 35. 103  Maurer, Die Entwicklung der jüdischen Minderheit in Deutschland, 85. 100 101

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The law itself appears to have run into some opposition in its immediate aftermath as evidenced by a twelve-page anonymous article in the Schlesische Provinzialblätter in March 1792. Although the notice admits that the Jewish community, a number of guild masters and the city authorities had made efforts to enforce the new laws (232–233), it admonishes a number of guild masters for openly opposing the law and refusing to accept young Jewish apprentices (233).104 The author quotes from one guild’s pernicious statement, But the Jew is profit-seeking, deceitful, treacherous, always anxious to take advantage over his neighbours. It is to be feared, therefore, that the Jews, by means of falsification of goods and lowering of the prices, would destroy the trades; they would work against the interests of the buyers as well as complicating sales for the honest Christian master craftsmen. (238)

The author then explains the above obnoxious statement as having three main roots: prejudice, religious-hatred, and “professional envy” [Brotneid] (239). The author from the Schlesische Provinzialblätter was resigned to the fact that only action on behalf of the state to enforce the laws would persuade the enemies of the Jews to change their beliefs. In Battenberg’s history of the Jews, he claims that the true anti-Judaic impulses were drawn from the guilds’ fear of economic competition from the Jews. They may well have employed religious argumentation in their petitions and complaints but religion was merely instrumentalised to win legitimation for their economic concerns.105 The use of anti-Semitic tropes often bore fruit because a great swathe of the population believed them to be true. The guilds feared competition to their monopolies on trade and manual professions. There were, however, other factors such as latent belief in medieval and early modern metaphysical description of Jews as inherently “dishonourable.” Guilds were legal entities with their own rules, courts and guidelines. They more or less governed the lives of their members. Even towards the end of the eighteenth century, guild organisations in the German-speaking lands remained committed to superstitious feudal and medieval beliefs in honourable and dishonourable persons or professions. Touching someone or something considered “dishonourable” could render one  Schlesische Provinzialblätter, March (1792): 232–43.  Battenberg, Die Juden in Deutschland vom 16. bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts, 36.

104 105

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“dishonourable.” The offender could even “lose their membership of their guild, their right to trade, and their livelihood.”106 Jews, Gypsies, Turks, Heathens and Wends  (Slavic-speaking people from the Lusatia region) were considered inherently dishonourable. So too were weavers, executioners, flayers, slaughterers and a host of other professions usually associated with death, travelling or an itinerant lifestyle.107 Prohibitions for the children or even grandchildren of people from certain professions from joining certain guilds were not removed in Prussia until 1783.108 The new Allgemeines Landesgesetz of 1794 upheld a status-bound definition of honour which maintained the ban on the nobility from engaging in trade—a dishonourable field for the nobility—upon pain of losing their titles.109 The continued institutionalisation of honour system was a reflection of wider folkish and popular resentments towards Jews among the general, unenlightened population. Despite the gradual dissolution of the medieval honour system towards the end of the eighteenth century, merchant and craft guilds continued to use this anti-Semitic rhetoric. In 1816, the influential nineteenth-century anti-Semite Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773–1843) summarised the cleavage between popular and scholarly attitudes towards Jews when he claimed, “In contradiction of the antipathies of those among the people who persecute them, for the past 40 years Prussian scholars in particular have become spokespersons for the Jews.”110 These vestiges of medieval thought were in stark contrast to the growing bourgeois ideology where, “the values and the beliefs of the emerging educated public in Germany rested in the claim that honour transcended status; that civil honour, the honour of the citizen was what above all else justified the non-noble educated elite to equal rights.”111 The new bourgeois understanding of honour underwrote the gradual transition of Prussian from a status to a class-based society.112 The widespread 106  Richard Evans, Rituals of Retribution (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 54; on the decreasing importance of Honour among tradespeople see Friedrich Zunkel, “Ehre. Reputation,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, E-G, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1975), 44–48. 107  Zunkel, “Ehre. Reputation,” 16. 108   Wolfgang Oppelt, “Über die ‘Unehrlichkeit’ des Scharfrichters,” Doktorwürde, Philosophical Institute, Julius-Maximilians-Universität zu Würzburg, 1976, 3. 109  Evans, Rituals of Retribution, 137. 110   Jakob Friedrich Fries, Über die Gefährdung des Wohlstandes und Charakters der Deutschen durch die Juden (Heidelberg: Mohr u. Winter, 1816), 9. 111  Evans, Rituals of Retribution, 137. 112  Evans, Rituals of Retribution, 137; also, Zunkel, “Ehre. Reputation,” 28–35.

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anti-­Jewish resentment further demonstrates the obstacles enlightened Jews and philo-Semites faced when bringing forth new legislation or recommending changes in state or municipal policy towards Jews. The 1790 regulations were revolutionary in the sense that, for the first time in Prussian history, the guilds and other trade organisations were requested to set aside their traditions.

Hirschel’s Response to Contemporary Anti-Semitism Although most of Karl Wilhelm Grattenauer’s (1773–1838) publications dealt with legal matters, his legacy is now largely determined by two anti-­ Jewish pamphlets he wrote and published in 1791 and 1803. His 1803 pamphlet Wider die Juden113 attracted a much larger circulation than his earlier publication and cost him his job,114 but his pamphlet from 1791 made him the first “racist-anti-Semitic author in Germany” to deny Jews any claim to any civic rights.115 Only 18 at the time of publication, Grattenauer was inspired by the new Jewish regulations from May 1790. His On the Physical and Moral Constitution of the Jews Today employs classic anti-Judaist tropes in which he rails against the religious principles he believes created a corrupt and corrupting race of beings.116 There are also number of passages in which Grattenauer descends into anti-Semitic

113  Karl Grattenauer, Wider die Juden: ein Wort der Warnung an alle unsere christlichen Mitbürger, 4th ed. (Berlin: Joh. Wil. Schmidt, 1803). This work is inspired by Eisenmenger’s Entdecktes Judenthum (Frankfurt, 1700) and Ueber den Juden Staat oder über die bürgerlichen Rechte der Juden (Berlin: Schöne, 1803) Christian Paalzow (1753–1824). Berghahn claims Grattenauer was responsible for reintroducing Eisenmenger’s pseudo-legalistic vitriol to the Romantic & Restoration periods: K. Berghahn, Grenzen der Toleranz, 15. 114  A total of 13,000 copies sold and reprinted five times: Werner Bergmann, “Wider die Juden (Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Grattenauer, 1803),” in Handbuch des Antisemitismus, ed. Wolfgang Benz, vol. 6 (Berlin: De Gruyter Saur, 2013), 768. 115  Micha Brumlik, Deutscher Geist und Judenhaß das Verhältnis des philosophischen Idealismus zum Judentum (München: Luchterhand-Literaturverlag, 2000), 78–79. 116  Quotes from Ueber die physische und moralische Verfassung der heutigen Juden: Stimme eines Kosmopoliten (Leipzig: Voß, 1791). Voß in Leipzig distributed the work but the author placed “Germanien” as the place of publication. The “voice of a cosmopolitan” is referencing an anti-Semitic work from 1785: Charakteristick von Berlin: Stimme eines Kosmopoliten in der Wüsten (Philadelphia [Leipzig]: Kummer, 1785). The author, Julius Friedrich Knüppeln (1757–1840), later became a target for Saul Ascher’s polemic, see Hiscott, Saul Ascher, 466–67.

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criticism whereby even conversion to Christianity would not redeem the character of individual Jews (e.g. 19–20; 115). The bulk of this 1791 work is a casuistic and vulgar critique of Berlin and Vienna’s bourgeois Jewish populations. The change in tone and style from earlier anti-Jewish works is quite distinct. For example,  arguing against Dohm and Mendelssohn in 1783, Friedrich Traugott Hartmann’s (1749–1833) Untersuchung ob die bürgerliche Freiheit den Juden zu gestatten sei rehashed anti-Judaist canards and proposed that only  conversion could redeem individual Jews and not equal civic status.117 Eight years later, writing as a German man “who cannot hold his tongue,”118 Grattenauer developed traditional anti-Judaist positions into more pernicious criticism where he drew upon widespread popular  prejudice. Eschewing scholarly anti-Judaist positions, Grattenauer instead employed “cultural, folkish-nationalist and racist arguments to resist “cultural migration” and the civic emancipation of Jews.”119 With parallels to today’s political anti-Islam in Europe, Grattenauer’s grossly distorted view of Jews included a paranoid vision of a Jewish takeover of Berlin: “Berlin will become a true Jew City and this human-race will swallow up everything the bourgeoisie have produced through their labours and hard work” (122). A contemporary review sharply criticised Grattenauer’s tone and remarked that his argument was “not lacking in contradictions.” Grattenauer paradoxically maintained that Jews had been corrupted yet also had an essence could not change.120 The reviewer further derides Grattenauer’s comparison of Jews to “orangutans” (26) and the claims that Jews were the “bastards of humanity” (24) who should be banished. Quoting Saladin from Nathan the Wise, the reviewer admonishes Grattenauer with “Silence, Christian!”121

117  Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism 1700–1933 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), 57. 118  Grattenauer, Ueber die physische und moralische Verfassung der heutigen Juden, preface. 119   Werner Bergmann, “Frühantisemitismus,” in Handbuch des Antisemitismus: Judenfeindschaft in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Wolfgang Benz, vol. 3 (Berlin: De Gruyter Saur, 2013), 98. 120  Ernst Christian Trapp, review of Ueber die physische und moralische Verfassung der heutigen Juden, Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek vol. 112, January (1791): 294. Dohm, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, 111. 121   Trapp, review of Ueber die physische und moralische Verfassung der heutigen Juden, 294–95.

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A substantial part of Grattenauer’s logic relies recycles the anti-Jewish canard whereby Jews were tied to certain professions which they had corrupted and that this had left the Jewish character entirely degenerated (e.g.11ff). Trade and cash transactions including money-lending were still considered by large swathes of the general population as necessary evils. Medieval beliefs in honourable crafts and trades as those which produced objects rather than capital and physiocratic government policy led to a general mistrust of financial services and industrialisation. Even philo-­ Semites such as Christian Dohm agreed that financial services were a corrupting influence on the Jewish character. Dohm claimed that the tertiary services sector had “given the moral and political character of the Jews a detrimental direction.”122 Dohm was thereby confirming anti-Judaist and anti-Semitic allegations that Jews were corrupt or depraved. One of the only differences between Dohm’s position and that of the anti-Semites was that Dohm believed this corruption could be altered. According to Dohm, “the true source of Jewish depravity can be found in the hitherto oppression and limited occupational options.”123 Mendelssohn rejected the view that professions within the service industry were inherently corrupt and dishonourable.124 He argued against the notion that only one’s hands could bring forth honourable work.125 In the preface to his translation of Manasseh Ben Israel’s Rettung der Juden, Mendelssohn disagrees with Dohm, Not only those who work with their hands, but everyone who acts, conveys, initiates, or facilitates something which is useful or pleasurable to his fellow man, has never for the title of producer…some merchants speculating from

 Dohm, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, 111.  Dohm, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, 109. 124  For example, see Moses Mendelssohn, “Vorrede zur Rettung der Juden von Manasseh Ben Israel,” Moses Mendelssohns gesammelte Schriften vol. 3. (Leipzig: F.  A. Brockhaus, 1843), 177–202; David Friedländer also wrote and even more emphatic defence of the importance of trading and investment profession in his 1787 (first published 1789), “Briefe über die Moral des Handels,” in Lesebuch für alle Stände, ed. J.  F. Zöllner (Berlin: Maurer, 1789). 125  On the problems inherent in physiocratic theory and its implementation in eighteenthcentury Europe, see, Peter Bürger & Gerhard Leithäuser, “Die Theorie der Physiokraten: Zum Problem der gesellschaftlichen Funktion wissenschaftlicher Theorie,” in Wolfenbütteler Studien zur Aufklärung, ed. Günter Schulz, vol. 3 (Bremen, Wolfenbüttel: Jacobi Verlag, 1976), 355–75. 122 123

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their desks or creating plans from their armchair, produce more than the worker or tradesman who makes more noise.126

It is on this point that Moses Hirschel’s response to Grattenauer’s work marks a significant departure from other philo-Semitic texts at the time. As Hiscott agrees, the Apologie was “the first direct confrontation with an anti-Jewish text since Mendelssohn’s death by a Jewish thinker also critical of religion.”127 Preface and Introduction Hirschel’s preface and introduction set the theoretical tone for the rest of the work. This book is, for the most part, a passage-by-passage investigation and refutation of all of Grattenauer’s arguments. Hirschel begins by attacking Grattenauer’s self-professed cosmopolitanism by pointing out that cosmopolitanism is in fact the antithesis of patriotism (xxi).128 Hirschel’s thesis that Jews had an indivisible and natural claim to human rights was gaining currency among Jewish intellectuals at the time. According to Miller and Ury, Jews “in and of Europe…had a deep and intimate involvement with, if not commitment to, the transformation of European society to one in which individuals were members of humanity and not divided into specific nations.”129 Jewish intellectuals became aware that only by highlighting the “humanistic elements within Judaism (and the Jewish tradition)” could one avoid the inherent tensions and tribalism surrounding questions of identity, culture and loyalty.130 Hirschel quotes humanist and universalist passages from the New Testament to reinforce the message that Christians themselves had moved away from Jesus’ original message as preached in the Gospels (x–xi). In 126  Mendelssohn, “Vorrede zur Rettung der Juden von Manasseh Ben Israel,” 190. [emphasis in original]. Importantly, Mendelssohn argues in the preface that it would be better if Jews worked in a whole range of professions but not because he thought the tertiary sector was inherently corruptive. 127  Hiscott, Saul Ascher, 466–67. 128  Hirschel also gave his definiton of patriotism in his 1790, Patriotische Bemerkungen über die kleine Schrift (see Chap. 4). 129  Scott Ury & Michael L.  Miller, “Dangerous Liaisons: Jews and Cosmopolitanism in Modern times,” in Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies, ed. Gerard Delanty (New York: Routledge, 2012), 553. 130  Ury & Miller, “Dangerous Liaisons,” 552.

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fact, for Hirschel, Grattenauer’s entire thesis and tone was “heterogenous to the religion of Christi” (xv; xvii). After all, neither Christianity nor Judaism teach misanthropy and oppression (xxix). He further claims that charges against Jews such as the poisoning of wells were simply used as a means to cancel debts to Jewish creditors or to fill public coffers (xiii–xiv). Hirschel also discusses the Wars of Religion in France where Christians slaughtered Christians (xii–xiii). Joskowicz reminds us that by discussing the Wars of Religion, Hirschel is employing a story “without Jewish victims” thus turning it into a “part of a Jewish argument for tolerance.”131 Hirschel warns Grattenauer that without tolerance there could be a repeat of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre (1572) when inflammatory words incited Christian mobs to commit mass murder (xiii). Hirschel then builds different kind of argumentation to his contemporaries. Rather than agreeing that Jews were depraved, Hirschel instead argues that each Jew enjoys the same fundamental rights, including a right to be tolerated, as all humans. He views his own text both as a defence of Jews and of “human rights” (xxxv). Hirschel’s argument that Jews shared a natural law claim to fundamental human rights diverged from the emancipation discourse at the time which followed “anthropological-historical-­ philosophical” approaches and sought to improve “societal conditions by advancing individuals’ cultural mores.”132 Hirschel argues that to assign collective guilt to Jews is against their human rights and the proponents of such views were inhuman and unchristian (xi). On the other hand, “true Christians” were trying to advance the rights of man and equal civic status to Jews (a nation who have been oppressed and invidiously treated for thousands of years) and to make them into useful members of the state. What person (qua a masterpiece of the divine creation), who possesses even the slightest little spark of true philanthropy, true human empathy and true human value, would, could, or should have something against this? (ix)

Hirschel attacks the idea of collective liability because one cannot blame all Jews with the guilt of a small minority of Jews (xxvii): “Which nation

 Joskowic, The Modernity of Others, 73–74.  Heinrich, Moses Hirschel-Biographie.

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or religion on God’s earth does not have deficits, criminality, prejudice and superstition?” (xxvi). He further quotes Voltaire’s humanist definition of tolerance: “We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies—it is the first law of nature” (xxvii).133 Forgiveness is therefore not divine and consequently bound to a particular concept of god or a religion. Rather, the ability to forgive is a presupposition of humanity in the first place. Hirschel thereby establishes a natural law or human rights argument for Christian tolerance of Jews. Hirschel and Human Rights After the preface, the opening section of the Apologie (1–36) offers a theoretical deduction of the fundamental principles of tolerance whereby tolerance is considered a basic criterion of our collective humanity. Hirschel is essentially arguing all individuals have an indivisible right to freedom of conscience and that no one should be persecuted for their religious or political beliefs.134 In a political sense, a state’s only duty is to offer an equally good “Education” for all of its members without regard to their beliefs and opinions (34; also 182). In stark contrast to other pamphleteers who made religion central to their theses, Hirschel is not writing to defend Jews because he is a Jew. Nor is he simply exercising the “rights of mankind and my nation” to defend himself, rather, he claims to be employing “a priori and a posteriori reasoning” (xxviii–xxix). Hirschel’s innovatively took the emancipatory and egalitarian ideals introduced by Dohm and Mendelssohn and integrated them into the post-French Revolution human rights discussions of the 1790s. As a testament to his Enlightened reading, and unusual for a German-­ language publication, Hirschel’s Apologie is littered with quotes from French philosophers and writers including Voltaire, Montesquieu, Gabriel Girard, Jacques Basnage, Bayle and Diderot and d’Alambert’s Encyclopédie. He also quotes British philosophers, German philosophers, Roman historians, Lessing, Spinoza, Prussian legal texts as well as copious quotes from the New Testament. Hirschel also demonstrates his extensive knowledge of Jewish history, Hebrew and religious works including the Talmud.  Translation from A Philosophical Dictionary, vol. 6. (London: Reynell, 1824), 272.  Hirschel had previous argued that freedom of consciousness, as long as it is not damaging to the state, was a human privilege and a natural right: Hirschel, JIF, 50–51. 133 134

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He questions each and every single allegation made by Grattenauer and addresses them with a wealth of sources. He also extends his plaidoyer for human rights to women: “The female sex has just as much claim to human rights as us males, they should and must, just as much as us, be secured against all impairments” (145). Other novelties include his use of statistical reasoning to refute Grattenauer’s outlandish claims as to the number of Jews living in Berlin and the percentage of criminals among that number (151–153). His defence of human rights was later cited by a number of leading anti-Semites. In 1798, Julius Friedrich Knüppeln references Hirschel along with Friedländer, Ascher and Davidson.135 Moses Hirschel is again mentioned in Fredrich Rühs’ influential 1815 essay On Jewish claims to German Civic Rights.136 Contradicting Hirschel’s enlightened human rights thesis, Rühs insists on complete assimilation to the German Volk for any person or nation seeking to gain equal civic status. Rühs maintains that individuals only enjoy rights in relation to their Volk or nation and that the sum of these rights is that which a Volk or nation have collectively negotiated.137 Rühs attacks Hirschel’s Apologie for offering positive narratives of Jewish contributions to society and culture.138 Jakob Fries published an influential anti-Semitic work in 1816 that attacks Hirschel. Needless to say, neither Hirschel’s arguments against Grattenauer’s pamphlets, nor his endorsement of human over national rights were examined in a scholarly fashion.139 The Restoration Period after the defeat of the Napoleonic armies arguably marked the end of enlightened German thought. This period ended democratic hopes for the separation of church and state. “Nation” and “Volk” replaced “religion” and “human” in legal and scholarly discussion of Jewish rights within Prussian law. In many respects, Hirschel’s enlightened cosmopolitanism and universalism followed him into his grave in 1818.

135  Julius Friedrich Knüppeln, Über die politische, religiöse und moralische Verfassung der Juden (Hamburg: 1798), 27. 136  Friedrich Rühs, “Ueber die Ansprüche der Juden auf das deutsche Bürgerrecht,” Zeitschrift für die neuste Geschichte, die Staaten- und Volkerkunde, February (1815): 129–61. 137  Rühs, “Ueber die Ansprüche der Juden auf das deutsche Bürgerrecht,” 158. 138  On Rühs essay and its influence see: Marco Puschner, Antisemitismus im Kontext der politischen Romantik (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer Verl., 2008), 211–18. 139  Fries, Über die Gefährdung des Wohlstandes…, 6.

CHAPTER 7

Haskalah and Enlightenment in Silesia

Enlightenment in Central Europe Our current knowledge of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Breslau and Silesia are largely tainted by the post-1945 border shifts in the wake of Germany’s war of annihilation to its East. Access to archives, not to mention academics and institutes in Poland, the USSR, Belarus, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia or Hungary, were restricted for decades. This created a historiographical bias towards cities within the newly constituted Federal Republic’s borders formed in 1949. One could be forgiven for thinking that, apart from obvious and repeated references to Kant in Königsberg and degrees earned at the universities of Halle or Göttingen, the German Enlightenment towards the end of the eighteenth century was a Berlin-­ centred affair from whence its ideas emanated across Europe. The reality was far more complex. I will be arguing for three interrelated positions in this chapter. The first is in relation to the transregional nature of the enlightenment. Where I acknowledge that the so-called German Enlightenment was heavily influenced by scholars, publicists and thinkers from other Enlightenment centres beyond the borders of the German-speaking lands. That said, the Enlightenment in the German-speaking lands necessarily had its own unique characteristics and developments which, in turn, influenced other centres. A study of a small city in the late eighteenth century is thus fruitful for understanding the phenomenon of Enlightenment and its heterogeneity as a whole. © The Author(s) 2021 D. Heywood Jones, Moses Hirschel and Enlightenment Breslau, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46235-2_7

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The second position contends that the study of independent developments and Enlightenment figures in Breslau can help alter the perception that Breslau and Silesia were on the periphery of a Berlin-centric German Enlightenment. The use of “centres and peripheries” in historical narratives is problematic in relation to the spread of Enlightenment ideas in Europe. These terms are typically used to highlight a bipolar relationship between “‘the original ideas of the center’ and their ‘reception in the periphery.’”1 Gavroglou outlines three problems with using centres and peripheries: 1. There were many centres and peripheries and, moreover, depending on the subject one is discussing, a place may at one and the same time be both center and periphery. 2. A center may change into a periphery over time, and vice-versa. 3. A single country may contain both centres and peripheries, thereby making purely national distinctions of dubious use.2 The third position in this chapter will confirm that the so-called Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah was part of and co-terminus with a wider and equally heterogenous German Enlightenment.3 If we can agree that regions, topics and subjects traditionally assumed to be peripheral or subsidiary are in fact important for understanding and explaining transregional, transcultural, interconfessional phenomena, then a discussion of Jewish Enlightenment in Breslau should add to our understanding of the practical and epistemological development of Enlightenment thought in Europe. As argued earlier, Jews offer a unique “outsider” perspective on the general period as they had very different educational and religious backgrounds to the vast majority of their non-Jewish enlightened contemporaries. This is not to say that Berlin was not a locum for German-language Enlightenment or that Protestant enlighteners—or free spirits [Freigeister]— did not make up overwhelming majority of Enlightenment protagonists in 1  Kostas Gavroglou and Jed Buchwald, preface to The Sciences in the European Periphery During the Enlightenment ed. Kostas Gavroglou (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), vii. 2  Gavroglou and Buchwald, preface, vii. 3  For a discussion of the influence of Judaism, Hebrew and Jewish thought on early nonJewish Enlightenment, see: Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003).

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Central Europe.4 The history of ideas beyond Berlin, however, is not simply a reception history or a story of how Silesians integrated modular ideas from Berlin or Paris into their intellectual lifeworlds. Berlin enlighteners, German Enlighteners, Jewish-German enlighteners and their projects and goals were all party to the same zeitgeist. The different groups and their programmes can be separated into different categories, nevertheless, these categories were not mutually exclusive. The impact of “Jewish thought” and “Jewish issues” on the general German Enlightenment should neither be forgotten nor overstated, it should, however, be explained. What Is Enlightenment? Enlightenment is a nebulous term as it incorporates very diverse cultures, works, epochs, protagonists and regional nuances under its broad heading. Moses Mendelssohn was one of the most popular and widely read philosophers in Europe in the late 1770s and early 1780s. His answer to a challenge posed in Berlin’s Enlightenment Journal What Is Enlightenment? in 17835 carried a strong didactic element where he argued that Enlightenment was a means to raising moral and aesthetic standards within society by educating people to determine their own paths.6 For Mendelssohn, “culture and enlightenment” were subdivisions of Bildung or intellectual development. He considered culture to be an objective and practical concept linked to the creation of beautiful objects or working in the arts.7 Enlightenment, on the other hand, was a subjective concept connected to predispositions, drives, habits and customs. He further defines Enlightenment as being connected the ability to use reason to order matters in life according to their importance and their relation to the 4  On Protestant enlighteners and the concept of intellectual “free spiritedness” in Prussia, see, Christopher Voigt, “Freigeistigestig Publikum und protestantisch Apologetik im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Literatur und Theologie im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans E. Friedrich, Wilhelm Haefs and Christian Soboth (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 161–75. 5  Mendelssohn and others were answering a challenge from the conservative pastor Johann Zöllner (1753–1804) in the Berlinische Monatsschrift in September 1783: Moses Mendelssohn, “Ueber die Frage: was heißt aufklären?” Berlinische Monatsschrift vol. 4 (1784). 6  Joachim Whaley, “The Protestant Enlightenment in Germany,” in Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Teich Mikulas (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), 107. 7  Moses Mendelssohn, “Über die Frage: was heißt Aufklärung?,” in Was ist Aufklärung?: Thesen und Definitionen, ed. Ehrhard Bahr (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981), 4.

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vocation of man.8 Mendelssohn was ultimately concerned with Enlightenment processes and their effect on governance and public affairs. He believed that man finds his vocation and mission in his contribution to and place within society.9 Immanuel Kant’s answer to the aforementioned question suggested a more rational-empirical understanding of Enlightenment. Kant defined Enlightenment as the practical implementation of heuristic principles in the public sphere. This implementation required a re-evaluation of the hitherto epistemological foundations or given knowledge. Kant’s theory differed to Mendelssohn’s by placing a more concrete emphasis on freedom of thought within the public domain. It was underpinned by his presupposition of the autonomy of reason and the identity of epistemological and moral principles. Kant’s thesis was complementary to Mendelssohn’s in that it was a re-evaluation of hitherto systems of human thought, albeit without Mendelssohn’s presupposition of a teleological thesis of perfection.10 Moreover, both Mendelssohn and Kant demanded that people were taught to think according to a new epistemological theoretical paradigms. Neither thinker publicly advocated major political or social change.11 Kant and others believed that this new approach to education would help raise mankind from its “immaturity” as individuals applied reason to everyday phenomena. Kant famously appealed to enlighteners to simply “Have the courage to use your own understanding,” or “Sapere Aude” which he described as the “motto of the Enlightenment.”12 In distinction to Kant,  Enlighteners such as Mendelssohn remained loyal to Leibniz-Wolffian rationalist metaphysics. These systems still supported the idea that the gradual dissemination of a priori truths among the general populace would teleologically lead to some kind of salvation for  Mendelssohn, “Über die Frage: was heißt Aufklärung?,” 4.  Charles Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2007), 2. 10  For a view which does not contrast Kant and Mendelssohn’s theories, see Schulte, “Was heißt Aufklären?,” in Aufklärung in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Richard Faber and Brunhilde Wehinger (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010), 217–29. 11  On Mendelssohn’s circle and their opinons on press freedom, see: Sieg, Staatsdienst, Staatsdenken und Dienstgesinnung…, 291; also, on the general debate see, Eckart Hellmuth, “Aufklärung zur Pressefreiheit: Zur Debatte der Berliner Mittwochsgesellschaft,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 9 (1982): 215–45. 12  Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” 8 9

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mankind. This is evidenced in writings by Hirschel when he surmised that different ethnicities occupied various levels of development. Whereby he is presupposing some perfect end state to which all cultures were drawn.13 Kant and other more radical thinkers in the Late Enlightenment believed that the process of intellectual transformation and development as well as the awareness of the importance of individual self-determination were just as important as the development of a suitable cosmology. How Did Enlightenment Work? The gradual crumbling of the Church’s authority on morality and reason since the end of the confessional wars in Central Europe in the seventeenth century created space for alternative forms of reason and sources of authority. Epistemological rationale up until the beginning of the eighteenth century was that our reason, qua understanding, was an extension or tool of a divine Logos. The appearance of the natural sciences began to point to a rational sphere that no longer came from God, but one in which any God was also necessarily subservient to. Reason was therefore part of a natural and independent rational order. Kant’s “Copernican Turn” was executed in a time of shifting paradigms. It should not simply be understood as an abstract transcendental postulate but it should instead be viewed as an insight on how the world could be modelled according to our individual, intuitive and independent reason. The new critical philosophical standpoint was an explicit attack on received, unexamined knowledge and deductive reasoning. The burgeoning bourgeois class had begun to identify itself as having its own rational fundament above and beyond received church dogma and feudal norms. They saw themselves as creating new forms of knowledge as well as new mundane means to articulate these new ideas.14 Thinkers from certain regions did not always reflect the Enlightenment of that region. Individuals should not be used as the yardsticks for the plurality of simultaneous and often conflicting processes and positions. In which respect did Mendelssohn embody the core of a presumed Jewish Enlightenment and not the German philosophical Enlightenment or German aesthetic theory? Was Kant more German than Leibniz? To track and understand these heterogenous debates and movements, one needs to  For example, Apologie, 6–36.  Werner Kraus. Zur Anthropologie des 18. Jahrhunderts (München: Hanser, 1979), 12.

13 14

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use the national categories such as German or Jew or Christian with the understanding that these are merely helpful geographical or sectarian terms which facilitate the exploration of the movement of ideas and their manifestation at particular times and in particular places. The Enlightenment, in the sense of an independent and questioning approach to intellectual and societal problems, was brought to bear on all areas of life including war, medicine, education, poverty, criminality, industry, religion, the soul and morality. Enlightenment in this sense is an “epochal concept.” The “Aufklärung” or Enlightenment in the practical sense, one in which protagonists sought to apply new modes of thinking to areas of life, is Enlightenment as a programme or programmes. Using the terms “epochal” and “programmatic” independently creates a conceptual space where the heterogeneity and specificity of regional aspects of the Age of Enlightenment can be discussed without lapsing into monocausal narratives for the period. Porter and Teich juggled the transnational and superregional commonalities of the Enlightenment and its specific contexts by emphasising “the social history of culture or the sociology of knowledge…not upon the internal analysis of ideas but upon their roots, functions and deployment in specific situations by particular intelligentsias.” And so, their theory helps us to look at “…the problem of the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas across cultural boundaries.”15 The term “Aufklärung” in German carries connotations of giving explanation or to offer information or to educate. Reinhart Meyer reduced the definition of “Aufklärung” in the region to a dialectic process in which one group that needs to be enlightened is opposed to another group offering this Enlightenment. He defines it as a minority who wish to inform the majority.16 The practical or programmatic Enlightenment was at its height in the German-speaking lands towards the end of the eighteenth century. Brenker agrees that the late phase of the Enlightenment in the second half of the eighteenth century was characterised by the “practical deployment of knowledge” garnered from earlier theoretical debate. Brenker explains that “the most important city in Silesia” was eminently suited for a 15  Roy Porter, preface to Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter & Teich Mikulas (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), vii. 16  Reinhart Meyer, “Limitierte Aufklärung,” in Über den Prozeß der Aufklärung in Deutschland im 18. Jahrhundert ed. Hans E.  Bödeker and Ulrich Herrmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), 139.

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presentation of the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas as part of this “practical deployment.”17 Hirschel’s friend and fellow Breslavian Schummel offered his own definition of Enlightenment in 1791, Light in reasoning, an abundancy of correct, clear and concomitant concepts; that [and] nothing more or less is what I understand as subjective Enlightenment. For me, Enlightenment does not preclude error or discrete incorrect representations nor large gaps in our knowledge. Rather, [it merely precludes] dark, confused, inconsistent, contradictory concepts and judgements.18

The practical turn in the Enlightenment, however, was not a single programme. The practical application of new ideas and approaches to study was manifest in a plurality of Enlightenment projects including the Enlightenment as applied to religion. In Prussia, this meant that among competing Enlightenments and counter-Enlightenments, there occurred Protestant and Jewish Enlightenments. What Was the German Enlightenment? The very notion of an autochthonous, homogenous and hermetically independent German Enlightenment is a fallacy. The influence of radical anti-establishment and anti-clerical French thought, as well as British Empiricism, Dutch republicanism, Italian aesthetics not to mention pan-­ European scholars such as Spinoza and Leibniz (1646–1716), are wholesale throughout Central Europe in the last decades of the eighteenth century. The great “German” philosopher Christian Wolff (1679–1754)— one of the first widely read scholars to write in German—was born and schooled in Hapsburgian Breslau. He only later moved to Halle to study. The Late Enlightenment period in Berlin, Königsberg and Breslau was initially fuelled and inspired by translated, transliterated and interpreted ideas from beyond the borders of the German-speaking lands. In other words, the late German Enlightenment would be unthinkable without the influence of Locke, Hobbes, Berkeley, Hume, Reid, Adam Smith et al. In a 2001 essay, Harris Bor argued that the maskilim Hartwig Wessely  Brenker, “Über Aufklärer und Aufklärungsgesellschaften in Breslau,” 11.  Schummel, Schummels Reise durch Schlesien im Julius und August 1791, v.

17 18

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(1725–1805) employed an epistemology close to Locke’s19 and the influence of British thought on Mendelssohn, such as Thomas Hobbes’ contract theory20 is nuanced but ubiquitous.21 As well as being a centre for the ideas of the British economist Adam Smith,22 the University of Göttingen was one of the major educational centres for Prussian civil servants. It was also a place where Prussian students could meet students from across Central Europe. In 1786, over 80% of the students in Göttingen were “foreign” (non-Hanoverian) and came from across the German-speaking lands and beyond—only 10% of the students at Halle were non-Prussian.23 Two Göttingen alumni who studied Adam Smith under August Ludwig von Schlözer (1735–1809) and Johann Stephan Pütter (1725–1807) were the later architects of the Prussian Jewish emancipation legislation of 1812—Heinrich Reichsfreiherr vom und zum Stein (1757–1831) und Karl August Fürst von Hardenberg (1750–1822). A small group of scholarly Jews in Central Europe at that time began to look at the social, civil and political status of Jews in their region. They also began to investigate Judaism as a subject in itself. Like many of their non-­ Jewish contemporaries, Jewish scholars were also involved in a form of Religious Enlightenment. In his work on Enlightenments, Sorkin identified a number of diverse streams of Enlightenment thought. Alongside the traditional secular categories of the “philosophe and the Aufklärer” he also informs us that “the Enlightenment’s personnel included the religious enlightener—The Anglican Moderate, the Genevan enlightened Orthodox, the Prussian Lutheran theological enlightener, the Jewish maskil, the Reform Catholic in the Hapsburg empire and, for a short time, in France.” These protagonists “propagated the Enlightenment on [their] own terms, the terms of faith.”24

19  Harris Bor, “Enlightenment Values, Jewish Ethics,” in New Perspectives on the Haskalah, ed. Shmuel Feiner and David Sorkin (London: Littman Library, 2001), 58. 20  Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, 34 [original, 7–9]. 21  See Altman’s essay on Mendelssohn’s philosophy of emancipation and the influence of Adam Ferguson: Alexander Altmann, Essays in Jewish Intellectual History (Hanover: Univ. Press of New England, 1981), 154–69. 22  Hans Martin Sieg, Staatsdienst, Staatsdenken und Dienstgesinnung in BrandenburgPreußen im 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003), 348. 23  Sieg, Staatsdienst, Staatsdenken und Dienstgesinnung…, 152. 24  Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment, 21.

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By positing different categories of religious Enlightenment, Sorkin is arguing against common notions that a supra-historical process of secularism was the master narrative to the Enlightenment. He instead suggests that the epoch was characterised by a conglomerate of competing beliefs and ideologies.25 Rather than gradually disappearing from public life, religion in fact became concretised within the newly emergent state structures in Central Europe.26 Religion had been such a mainstay of German Enlightenment that Hirschel’s biographer Johann Schummel wrote that Enlightenment “incorporated the whole broad spectrum of the sciences and not merely religion and theology.”27 In a 1912 dissertation on the Enlightenment in Silesia, Rudolf Ritscher tells us how the Late Enlightenment in Silesia was a religious process in which Enlightened intellectuals fought against what he terms “materialist” developments.28 For Ritscher, conservative and orthodox religious forces fought bitterly against modernisation and not secularisation. The fact that the Enlightenment as manifest in the German-speaking lands was not inherently anti-clerical or materialist in nature was partly due to the Francophile King Frederick II who was open to Enlightenment thought. Sitting on the throne in Prussia from 1740–1786, Frederick II’s tepid policies towards church dissenters from Prussia and beyond, as well as his progressive attitude to press freedom in Prussia, helped to create a tense but ultimately convivial atmosphere between the church, the establishment and enlightened intellectuals in Prussia. Joachim Whaley agrees that “the Protestant Aufklärung is characterized by its close relationship with progressive theology and with the churches rather than by radical criticism or opposition.”29 Steven Loewenstein reminds us there was a correspondingly close relationship between Jewish intellectuals and the Jewish establishment in Berlin: 25  Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment, 20; for a discussion of Prussian Enlightenment as a form of Protestant Enlightenment, see Whaley, “The Protestant Enlightenment in Germany”; also T.  C. W.  Blanning, “The Enlightenment in Catholic Germany,” in Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Teich Mikulas (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), 118–26. 26  Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment, 20. 27  Schummel, Schummels Reise durch Schlesien im Julius und August 1791, v. [my emphasis] 28  Rudolf M. Ritscher, Versuch einer Geschichte der Aufklärung in Schlesien während des 18. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Georg-August-Universität, 1912), 72. 29  Whaley, “The Protestant Enlightenment in Germany,” 112.

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There is a remarkable parallel between the connection of the Berlin Jewish Enlightenment with the Berlin Jewish elite and the connection of the general Prussian Enlightenment with the Prussian establishment...Unlike the French Enlightenment, the Prussian Aufklärung did not have to battle a hostile state and church. Instead it benefited from the support of both King Frederick II and leading churchmen.30

 he “Late Enlightenment” in the German-Speaking Lands T During the 1770s, the intellectual and publishing centre of the German-­ speaking lands moved from Leipzig in Saxony to Prussian Berlin. The special circumstances in Berlin in the 1780s made the city a hive of intellectual activity. It was at the centre of a number of important political debates such as the calls for Jewish civic-status improvement in Prussia (1781) and the so-called Pantheism/ Spinozism controversy from 1785 onwards. Berlin was also the publishing centre for the Berlinische Monatsschrift’ (1783–1796) where Kant and a host of other critical and programmatic philosophers and thinkers published. A significant factor in the growth of the Enlightenment was the establishment of German as an intellectual lingua franca in literature, philosophy and the natural sciences. Writing in 1871, Ludwig Geiger discusses German literature in Mendelssohn’s period as being still in its “infancy” when the “German language had still not discarded its foreign, unbecoming, attire.”31 He explains that writers at the time were beset by problems with the language. There simply were no “role models” for Mendelssohn’s and Lessing’s generation.32 Geiger sees Mendelssohn’s work as important for “German philosophy and literature”33 precisely because Mendelssohn wrote at a time when there were no other role models. This linguistic turn accelerated the “democratisation” and “atomisation” of the Enlightenment in this part of Europe and was a catalyst for the emergence of German-speaking public intellectuals. As with the philosophes, writers and gentlemen scholars of other Enlightenment centres in Western Europe, they were not necessarily linked to university, court or church positions. To be a publicist or free author was an entirely new

 Lowenstein, The Berlin Jewish Community, 69.  Ludwig Geiger (1848–1919) was born in Breslau and was the son of the Reform Rabbi and theologian Abraham Geiger (1810–1874). 32  Ludwig Geiger, Geschichte der Juden in Berlin (Berlin: Guttentag, 1871), 77. 33  Geiger, Geschichte der Juden in Berlin, 77. 30 31

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profession for the bourgeoisie in Prussia.34 The emergence of these new public intellectuals, independent writers and publicists had created a novel professional genus in the German-speaking lands.35 Rudolf Vierhaus tells us that the new independent writers and publicists became the “agents of the Enlightenment” in the sense that they disseminated the ideas and structures discussed by the burgeoning bourgeoisie.36 This lends an empirical basis to a response to historians of Jewish history who claim that Jewish enlighteners were bringing “European Enlightenment” to the Jews in Central Europe. Academics who speak of Jews in Prussia as a minority,37 a sub-culture,38 or who claim that Jews learned or acculturated to “European” culture,39 or those who claim that Jewish culture was fundamentally different to proposedly homogenous “European culture” all presuppose an immutable binary distinction between all Jews and all Christians or Europeans or Germans. This implies these Jews were not Europeans and that Enlightenment transformed Jews into Germans or Europeans.40 The literary and philosophical evidence, however, points to a simultaneous embourgeoisement process for intellectual Jews and intellectual Christians. Intentionally or not, historians proposing bipolar essentialisms ignore that the European Enlightenment understood as programmatic, reformist, and empiricist movements—the core texts of which were French, British, Dutch Italian—were only just arriving in Central German-speaking Europe at that time. Bourgeois and intellectual Jews became bourgeois  Hiscott, Saul Ascher, 47.  Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803) is widely considered as the first professional writer and poets in the German language. See, W.H.  Bruford, Germany in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1959), 274. 36  Rudolf Vierhaus, “Der Aufgeklärte Schriftsteller,” in Über den Prozeß der Aufklärung in Deutschland im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans E. Bödeker and Ulrich Herrmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), 56ff. 37  Trude Maurer, Die Entwicklung der jüdischen Minderheit in Deutschland (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992), 172ff; Maurer prefers the term “minority”—Minderheit. 38  “sub-culture” is a concept usually attributed to David Sorkin’s work. 39  cf. Marion Kaplan, “Gender and Jewish History in Imperial Germany,” in Assimilation and Community, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), 205; Volkov, Die Juden in Deutschland: 1780–1918, 11; Feiner, “Towards a Historical Definition of Haskalah,” 117 etc. David Sorkin, “Preacher, Teacher, Publicist: Joseph Wolf and the Ideology of Emancipation,” in From East and West, ed. Frances Malino and David Sorkin (Oxford et al.: Blackwell, 1991), 120. 40  cf. Deborah Hertz, How Jews Became Germans (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2007). 34 35

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and intellectual enlighteners simultaneous to their Christian counterparts. The influential German Enlightenment theorist Hinske claimed the Enlightenment and enlighteners in the German-speaking lands only shared one common characteristic: intellectuals who sought to reveal new truths in the world that they would define and class, they would investigate received knowledge and, above all, they sought to uncover and rebuke superstition, fanaticism and prejudice.41 David Sorkin famously discusses the emergence of Bildung as a quintessential Late Enlightenment Leitmotif among the educated classes in the German-speaking lands. For Sorkin, Bildung became the central concept behind which both Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals rallied. The intellectuals or scholars [Gebildeten] enunciated this ideal in a new public sphere of journals, sermons and literature, and institutionalized their independent standing as a new social group emerging from a corporate order disintegrating under the diverse pressures of political centralization and economic change in a new public social world.42 The status of these intellectuals in society was “dependent upon education; and its vision for the transformation of society formed, as it were, by its educational views writ large.”43 Sorkin also explains that Bildung was a means for non-Jews to enter bourgeoisie. Many other historians of Jewish history, however, assume that all “Germans” were automatically members of the intellectual bourgeoisie. That is to say, they assume all non-Jews were inherently well read in the arts, sciences and philosophy. Shulamit Volkov wrote that a certain level of general education was a precondition for the “ascension of certain gifted individuals” to reach acculturation and be accepted by their “German partners.”44 But this same education was also necessary for non-Jews to be accepted by non-Jewish enlighteners.

41  Norbert Hinske, “Die tragenden Grundideen der deutschen Aufklärung,” in Aufklärung und Haskalah in jüdischer und nichtjüdischer Sicht, ed. Karlfried Gründer and Natan Rotenstreich (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1990), 71–72; 80–81. 42  Sorkin, “The Impact of Emancipation on German Jewry,” 183. 43  Sorkin, “The Impact of Emancipation on German Jewry,” 186. 44  Volkov, Die Juden in Deutschland: 1780–1918, 11; also George Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1985). Although Mosse’s influential work argues that “The Jews and the German masses entered social and political life at roughly the same time” (p. 8), he also claims that Jews had “no experience with German popular piety and German popular culture” (p. 5) and argues throughout the work that Jews used Bildung to “assimilate” in a failed attempt to be accepted as German by “Germans.”

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Moreover, Jews also needed to be educated to be taken seriously as an intellectual partner by Jewish intellectuals. In her study on the embourgeoisement of Jews in Central Europe, Simone Lässig does not describe the bourgeoise as representative of all Germans as a cultural or nationalist grouping. Rather, she defines the bourgeoisie as a “collective of distinctive social groupings.”45 She further explains that Jews did not acculturate to a nationalist group—and become “less” Jewish or “more” German—but they felt drawn to the “lifestyle and culture of a certain social grouping,” namely, the newly emergent bourgeoisie.46 Lässig concurs with Moretti that the nascent bourgeoisie were the harbingers of modernity due to their growing independence from the given societal order.47 Bildung was therefore a means for some Jews to transgress their social and national status as imposed by the traditionalist rabbinate or the state in the same manner that non-Jews used it to transgress their social status. The fundamental difference between the groups was the nature of the obstacles facing Jews: the traditionalist elements within Jewish communities, the Prussian state, the un-cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, the Prussian Stände and non-Jewish society in general.48 Bildung and the desire to achieve it was not limited to any one nation or religious confession. It was a means to awakening of individual self-­ determination by means of education, acquired mores and culture in order to enter the bourgeoisie.  he Translated Enlightenment Becomes the German Enlightenment T As argued earlier, Mendelssohn and other Jewish intellectuals were reading, translating and disseminating the same texts at the same time as other German-speaking enlighteners. Often overlooked as a detail, prominent German-speaking philosophers and intellectuals in the eighteenth century were all popular translators as well as writers. Christian Garve, Goethe, Mendelssohn, Johann Christoph Gottsched (b. Königsberg, 1700–1766), Johann Georg Sulzer (b. Switzerland, 1720–1779), and Christian Gellert (1715–1769), Johann Gottfried von Herder (b. Mohrungen, 1744–1803), Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), Johannes Nikolaus Tetens (b.  Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum,18.  Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum, 20–21. 47  Moretti, The Bourgeois, 1–2. 48  Blackbourn, “The German Bourgeoisie,” 2. 45 46

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Denmark 1736–1807) and Johann Georg Heinrich Feder (1740–1821) were primarily all translators. It was not until the late eighteenth century that a linguistically and conceptually autonomous “German” Enlightenment began to appear. The exponential rise in German-language translations from the mid-­ eighteenth century on brought Classic—Greek, Latin, Hebrew—and contemporary—French, English, Dutch, Italian—texts to a much wider public than ever before. A growing audience in turn meant growing returns for publishers who began to offer larger advances to writers. This money gave writers in the German-speaking lands more independence.49 Public discussion of these texts was also in German. Deist, empiricist, anti-­ clerical, republican and rationalist thought was widely disseminated and integrated into the local political, religious, social and economic discourse. This “linguistic turn” encouraged wider circles of intellectuals to become more informed in areas that were once the preserve of a small circle of specialist scholars. In particular, this linguistic “democratisation” of scholarly and published matter in the region led to a boom in the fields of anthropology, history, psychology and speculative metaphysics. A national context may provide a convenient frame for historians to work with. Once one moves beyond the geographical or linguistic categories, however, the “the nation” and “the national” were anything but straightforward concepts in Enlightenment Europe. In fact, the use of “the nation” as a concept in Enlightenment studies is often employed as a means to aid certain Enlightenment figures to become “invested with modern meaning to serve political purposes now.”50 It has become increasingly problematic to place cornerstone Enlightenment texts within narrow national contexts given that some of the most influential texts of the Enlightenment such as works from Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), Voltaire (1694–1778), Condillac (1714–1780), Diderot (1713–1784), Helvétius (1715–1771), Vico (1668–1744), Rousseau (1712–1778) and Spinoza (1632–1677) were read around the globe.51 Rousseau, Voltaire and the Marquis d’Argens (1704–1771) are all central figures in the French Enlightenment, yet all three lived and worked in different countries and  See Bruford, Germany in the Eighteenth Century, 276–82.  Withers, Placing the Enlightenment, 28ff. 51  On the global turn and the intellectual transfer of ideas beyond Europe in Enlightenment studies, see: “Approaches to Global History,” in Global Intellectual History ed. Samuel Moyn, Andrew Sartori (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2013), 3–30. 49 50

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centres at different times. Both Voltaire and the Marquis d’Argens spent many years working and publishing “French” Enlightenment texts from the comfort of Frederick II’s court in Berlin and Potsdam. Frederick II summoned Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759) to Berlin to direct the Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften [Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences], which he did in various capacities from ca. 1740–1756. The exponential increase in the translation and dissemination of key texts from Enlightenment writers, philosophes and professors from outside the German-speaking lands coincides with the explosion in German-­ language popular philosophical texts. Andreas Kennecke revealed that 1,943 new newspapers were founded in the German-speaking lands in the 19  years from 1771 to 1790. The combined total from the previous 69 years (1701–1770) was merely 1,493 publications.52 Compared to France or the United Kingdom, one could argue that Prussia came late to the pan-European Enlightenment. This is not to say, however, that Enlightenment processes in the German-Speaking lands did not develop in a unique and regionally specific way or that Enlightenment from this region did not influence on the Anglo and Francophone spheres. At least up until the final two decades of the eighteenth century, however, the Enlightenment in the German-speaking lands was an imported phenomenon. Andreas Renner argues there is a methodological problem writing Enlightenment histories drawn from sources and events within the national borders drawn in the twentieth century. Many Enlightenment scholars and publicists were committed cosmopolitans who believed the furthering of reason and reasoned thinking would overcome the obstacles ethnic, national, economic and traditional thinking had placed in the way of humanity’s progress.53 Enlightenment research that does justice to the heterogeneity of the Enlightenment should reflect the independent translation and selective adaptation processes and the manner in which they were integrated into the infrastructure of the Enlightenment.54 Renner

52   Andreas Kennecke, “Hame’assef: Die erste moderne Zeitschrift der Juden in Deutschland,” Das Achtzehnte Jahrhundert, no. 2 (1999), 179. 53  Andreas Renner, “Ad marginem: Europäische Aufklärung jenseits der Zentren,” in Orte eigener Vernunft, ed. Alexander Kraus and Andreas Renner (Frankfurt: Campus, 2008), 16. 54  Renner, “Ad marginem,” 16.

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defines the Enlightenment as a “transnational communication process on a spectrum of changing topics between like-minded people.”55 As we read earlier, Jewish intellectuals in Central Europe were at the vanguard of the dissemination of Enlightenment ideals in the region. Perhaps some members of the Jewish kahals were less enlightened or educated than some of their Protestant neighbours, but this is not irrefutable proof of two hermetically separated Enlightenment processes in Prussia. It is the tragic legacy of anti-Semitism in the German-speaking lands and the Christian- and Germano-centric intellectuals of the German Romantic and Restoration period that we believe bourgeois intellectual Jews were somehow intellectually subservient to their non-Jewish  contemporaries. For example, in his detailed study of Jewish healthcare and education in Breslau from eighteenth to twentieth centuries, Andreas Reinke argues that the evidence in Breslau demonstrates that Jews did not adapt to German healthcare or educational practices. Rather, they were pioneers in a new world order which revolutionised the manner in which people were cared for and treated.56

What Is Haskalah and Who Were Maskilim? The Haskalah and the late German Enlightenment are mutually influential concepts which differ only in the sense that the Haskalah is often used to denote various forms of Popular Enlightenment which specifically targeted Jews rather than non-Jews. There is much confusion over the terms “Enlightenment” and “Haskalah” as they not only cover very different movements but also function as umbrella terms for the age in which these ideas occurred. Christoph Schulte explained that Enlightenment or Haskalah can be understood in four different ways: . as a movement; 1 2. as a collective of people, its protagonists, and discourse; 3. as an activity—to enlighten others; and 4. the period in which it occurred.57

 Renner, “Ad marginem,”16.  Reinke, Judentum und Wohlfahrtspflege in Deutschland, 42ff. 57  See Schulte, “Was heißt Aufklären?,” 217. 55 56

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I will now discuss Enlightenment and Haskalah in relation to common confusion over the programmatic senses (1, 2 and 3) and the epochal definition (4). The exact definition of a maskil or what distinguishes Haskalah from the German Enlightenment is a matter of some debate. There is an extensive body of work discussing and disputing when the first maskilim appeared. Much of the extensive corpus on definitions of Haskalah reveals similar themes which are less helpful when it comes to discussing free thinkers such as Moses Hirschel, Esther Gad, Salomon Maimon, Henrietta Herz, Mendel Lefin of Satanow, Saul Berlin, Marcus Elieser Bloch, Saul Ascher, Lazarus Bendavid and so on. Not to mention other published Jewish medical practitioners, scientists and intellectuals outside of Berlin who may not have spent time as a guest at the Mendelssohn’s or published work in HaMe’assef. Even Mendelssohn himself was sceptical of HaMe’assef and anonymously published his work in the journal.58 Berlin was also not the only publishing centre for Jewish publications in Prussia. There were also printing presses located in Breslau and Königsberg which published works for both Hebrew and German-speaking Jews. Moreover, the first Jewish newspaper to be published in the German-­ speaking lands was published in Dyhernfurth some 40 kilometres outside Breslau. The Dyhernfurther Privilegierten Zeitung (1771–1772) was published in German with Hebrew letters. This Hebrew printing house had been established some 100 years previously by Shabbethai ben Joseph Bass (1641–1718).59 The press sold books to Jews living in Central and Eastern Europe. Some of the more important commentaries of the Shulcan Aruch were printed there.60 As the spirit of the Enlightenment gradually established a presence Central Europe, it brought new social structures including masonic lodges, scientific and artistic academies, secret societies, intellectual groups as well as new types of discursive media such as journals, newspapers, and magazines. Geographically and linguistically isolated intellectuals came together as publishing networks grew and printed material became cheaper. The momentum and dynamics of the Enlightenment also grew  Kennecke, “Hame’assef,” 182.  For a brief history of the printing house, see, Bernhard Brilling, Die jüdischen Gemeinden Mittelschlesiens: Entstehung und Geschichte (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1972), 57–62. 60  Bernhard Brilling, “Wann ist der erste hebräische Druck in Dyhernfurth erschienen?,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland (1937): 2–3; 109–12. 58 59

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over time as the diffusion of its overarching epistemological paradigms spread across the Continent. The so-called Republic of Letters was a new abstract space in which media such as journals and newspapers were disseminated through book clubs or ordered by subscription. This so-called Republic played host to the clash of ideas and promotion of new ways of thinking, living and ruling. Moving away from a strict understanding of space as geographically fixed, the Republic of Letters of the Late Enlightenment was a sociological space in which the geographical locations of activity were integrated into the relational and processual nexus of social goods and human actions taking place in multiple geographical areas and times.61 The nominally cosmopolitan enlighteners of the late eighteenth century actively contributed to and took part in what they saw as a supra-regional discussion on issues affecting all of mankind. The Republic of Letters was essentially a market place for ideas. Given its function as a sociological space—an abstract space for human intellectual interaction—debates about the origin of ideas or indeed the places in which they are purported to originate are less informative than observation of their implementation and effect. Books, journals and magazines emerged as a cheaper and quicker way to answer and instigate disputes. The printed word and distribution networks became vital in the dissemination and development of ideas. Scholars and intellectuals sent voluminous amounts of correspondence to other thinkers and intellectuals across Europe. Writing in 1790, Johann Kausch discusses how a reduction in the price of postage for academics and publishers could greatly increase literary and scholarly production. Cheaper postage costs, Kausch argues, would give authors more affordable access to the networks of correspondence through which scholars exchanged opinion and essays, nowadays, any writer who has a somewhat sizable sphere of influence finds himself with correspondence far and wide. He receives some writings in the post and he sends others as author or editor to his associates; one sends him contributions, and he sends others onwards, as result of this, his business is subject to substantial outgoings for postal services. If one wants to brave a new undertaking, one in which a lot of men partake, there will be a

 Martina Löw, Raumsoziologie (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 2001), 13.

61

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c­onsiderably large amount of correspondence until the undertaking can come about.62

Discussing the Republic of Letters both as a dynamic medium and as a means to explain Enlightenment geodispersal and the transfer of ideas, Withers explains that, “the idea of the Republic of Letters has value in explaining the Enlightenment as a dynamic entity because it allows us to see better now the connections then between social space and epistemic space and at scales above and below the nation.”63 At the same time as a surge in publishing, there was an exponential rise in the publication of educational and speculative texts by Jews in Central Europe. This is simultaneous with the period most Haskalah scholars concur was the beginning of a programmatic Haskalah—the late 1770s. In other words, concurrent with increased publication of enlightened texts from non-Jews, numerous Jewish publications and journals dealing with profane matters such as history, language, social issues or politics began to emerge. This created a new Jewish Republic of Letters [bürgerlich-­ jüdischen Öffentlichkeit]64 of sorts.65 The epochal pan-European discussion became manifest in countless national and regional projects and programmes or Enlightenments—including the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah. There are a number of categories for the traditional definitions of Haskalah or maskilim. Despite the efforts of some historians, these categories are not mutually exclusive and some historians have even represented some if not all of these positions at different times.66 Haskalah can be categorised in terms of radical and moderate Haskaliot,67 or simply generational with a first generation born before the 1750s and a second

62  Kausch, “Einige statistischlitterarische Bemerkungen…,” in Freymüthige Unterhaltungen, ed. Johann Kausch (Leipzig: Büschel, 1790), 55–56. 63  Withers, Placing the Enlightenment, 45. 64  Johannes Valentin Schwarz, “Die Anfänge der jüdischen Presse in Deutschland im späten 18. Jahrhundert,” Menora 16 (2006): 221–40; Feiner also discusses a Jewish “Republic of Letters” [Gelehrtenrepublik]: “‘Wohl euch die eurer Gedanken wegen verfolgt seid!’,” Trumah, no. 16 (2006), here 13ff. 65  Kennecke agrees on this term in relation to the Jewish Enlightenment at that time: see, “Hame’assef: Die erste moderne Zeitschrift der Juden in Deutschland,” 176–99. 66  Shmuel Feiner: The Jewish Enlightenment (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 67  For example, Moshe Pelli, Haskalah and Beyond (Lanham: Univ. Press of America, 2010).

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generation born thereafter.68 Others divide the Haskalah into categories based on the language used by the protagonists. For example, Moshe Pelli reduced Haskalah in a programmatic sense to a failed Avant Garde Hebrew language Enlightenment.69 Other definitions are concerned with the protagonists’ relationship and adherence to religion or religious change.70 The categorisation of Haskalah in all of the above cases is helpful only to the extent that readers accept the porous borders between the categories and their protagonists. All of these programmatic definitions occurred at the same time and involve similar protagonists. That said, each maskil as an individual agent had discrete foci at different times. Moshe Pelli, who ring-fences Haskalah as an exclusively Hebrew Enlightenment project, admits that there was no real “unified view” on how to proceed and that the only unifying element was the common desire to educate their brethren.71 For example, Wessely, Euchel, Mendelssohn, Satanow were all Hebrew language poets and grammarians. They all actively campaigned against the usage of Western Yiddish as the common vernacular among the Jews and further made the case for the use of Sephardic pronunciation in liturgy. John Efron claims that it was neither education nor religion nor social activism that inspired maskilim, rather, “language reform lay at the center of [maskilim] attempts to refashion Ashkenazic Jewry.”72 From this reading, one could indeed say that a number of these thinkers were part of a programmatic Hebrew language Enlightenment. At the same time, however, Mendelssohn and Wessely were also active in furthering the cause of educational reform—including German language teaching—among 68  For example, Hiscott, Saul Ascher; Michael A.  Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1967); Szulc and Brechenmacher define the second generation maskilim simply as those active after Mendelssohn’s death: Neuere deutsch-jüdische Geschichte, 89ff. 69  For example, Moshe Pelli earliest comments on Haskalah as a Hebrew enlightenment, originally published in 1979: The Age of Haskalah (Lanham: Univ. Press of America, 2006 [originally 1979]), esp. 73–90. On the avant garde nature and ultimately failed project of reanimating Hebrew, see: Andrea Schatz, Sprache in der Zerstreuung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009), esp. 255–59. 70  For example, Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment; for an argument that uses both generational tropes and religious change see Jan-Hendrik Wulf, Spinoza in der jüdischen Aufklärung (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012), 293–303. 71  Pelli, In Search of Genre, 12. 72  John M.  Efron, German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2016), 39.

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Ashkenazi Jewry. Mendelssohn, of course, was involved in a plethora of other projects too. David Sorkin’s narrow meta-narrative of Haskalah in the sense of Jewish religious Enlightenment definition remains pertinent because he did not focus on Jewish protagonists and their texts in isolation from broader intellectual currents. His discussion of the Jewish religious Enlightenment compares to similar meta-narratives on religious Enlightenments in Protestant and Catholic Europe.73 Therefore, Sorkin’s maskilim are enlighteners and his Haskalah is synonymous with Jewish religious Enlightenment. This broader context into which Sorkin places Haskalah allows for the inclusion of linguistic heterogeneity and the diverse goals and methods employed by Jewish intellectuals. David Sorkin’s enlighteners were challenging Jewish corporate structures and revaluating Jewish religious tradition according to their belief in the need for modernisation within Central European Jewry. Christoph Schulte’s review of the term “Haskalah” from 2002 offers a useful discussion of the various definitions. He provides us with two general abstract categories that capture the discrete movements within the Jewish Enlightenment. Schulte describes “Haskalah” as referring to either “epochal” or “programmatic” concepts.74 The epochal definition usually begins around 1700 and covers the emergence of individual Jewish intellectuals and scholars. Programmatic definitions of Haskalah as a “movement” are often date from around 1770. These programmatic definitions are generally concerned with the efforts of Jewish intellectuals in Central Europe to better the lot of Jewish communities’ civic rights by means of political activism and education. Programmatic Haskalah categories are useful for creating research foci for specific projects. For example, defining Haskalah as specifically Hebrew Enlightenment or as a lobby for political enfranchisement or as a secularising movement. One should be aware, however, that these categories are a

73  Friedrich Graf terms Sorkin’s approach as a “shared history” and criticises Jewish historians, particularly Shmuel Feiner for ignoring concurrent developments in Protestantism and Catholicism: Friedrich Graf, “Was heißt: ‘Religion modernisieren’?,” in Jüdische Geschichtsschreibung heute, ed. Michael Brenner and David N.  Myers (München: Beck, 2002), 131ff. 74  Christoph Schulte, “Zur Debatte um die Anfänge der jüdischen Aufklärung,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 54, no. 2 (2002): 123ff.

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historical imposition or “reading backwards” as Sorkin agrees.75 Narrow programmatic definitions are exclusive in the sense that the foci in question are presented as being representative of “Jewish thought” at the time. Other thinkers or movements are often omitted. Exclusive and narrow programmatic definitions do little to help us understand the phenomena as it was understood by its protagonists. This is particularly valid for those thinkers traditionally excluded from the Haskalah canon. To argue that certain enlightened Jewish individuals were involved in a specific project called Haskalah—to which they themselves may never subscribed to—and to claim that others were not, creates artificial distinctions within what were pan-continental processes of religious Enlightenment and political enfranchisement. There are different opinions as to what exactly constitutes the defining elements of any programmatic definition. Schulte discusses the debate surrounding calls to reform Jewish civic status in Prussia with Dohm’s Bürgerliche Verbesserung lending the Haskalah a political agenda.76 Influential works from Jacob Katz, Alexander Altmann and Moshe Pelli broadly agree that political concerns are central to any programmatic definition of Haskalah.77 Pelli further claims, however, that the founding of the Hebrew-language journal HaMe’assef signalled beginning of the Haskalah proper.78 Shmuel Feiner concentrates on processes related to religious reform and his definition of secularisation processes. Whatever the definitions, once a particular Leitmotif is employed, other intellectuals beyond those paradigms tend to disappear from view. To define Haskalah purely in a programmatic fashion is thus to remove it from a general epochal discussion of German Enlightenment and to place its protagonists in an intellectual “ghetto.” The dangers of confusing the programmatic with the epochal distinctions are apparent when historians ring-fence “Haskalah” for a specific group of carefully chosen Jewish intellectuals and then make its protagonists subservient to a non-Jewish German Enlightenment. This error is common in theses which maintain a narrow focus or emphasis a small selection of works covering inner-Jewish 75  Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment, 3. See also, Schulte, “Zur Debatte um die Anfänge der jüdischen Aufklärung,” 122; Feiner, “Towards a Historical Definition of Haskalah.” 76  Christoph Schulte, “Die Zukunft des Judentums nach der Emanzipation,” MendelssohnStudien 20 (2017): 12. 77  Schulte, “Zur Debatte um die Anfänge der jüdischen Aufklärung,” 124. 78  Pelli, “The Haskalah begins in Germany with the founding of the Hebrew journal Hame’asef.”

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affairs or authors who published in Hebrew. This limits our understanding of the intellectual influence and impact of those thinkers outside of those contexts. Not to mention the fact that it excludes thinkers, artists, and others such as later converts  to Christianity, independent thinkers, and medical professionals from a place in the discussion of Jewish intellectual history and Enlightenment. A further problem with using Haskalah in a narrow programmatic sense or as an umbrella term is the fact that Jewish intellectuals involved in the civic status improvement debates, Hebrew revivalist campaigns, or Jewish education were also involved in other projects in other regions at other times.79 In fact, many of the leading figures of the Haskalah passed through Berlin at different times and made very different contributions to Jewish intellectual, civil and social history across the Continent of Europe. As with the general Late Enlightenment in the German-speaking lands, the programmatic Haskalah was a complex of centrifugal and centripetal intellectual forces that embraced a large heterogeneous group of transnational, polyglot, and polymath protagonists over the period of 30 years. Indeed, many of the protagonists never met one another. A binary deconstruction of Haskalah into mutually inclusive programmatic and epochal rubrics is analogous to my definition of Enlightenment in Europe as process that is either epochal—a pan-European age of change underpinned by a common epistemological shift—or programmatic category—practical, regional and specific transmission of ideas. There were a number of Jewish intellectuals who do not fit neatly into Berlin-centric programmatic Haskalah meta-narratives and who are not typically listed as maskilim in the literature. Schulte reminds us when discussing Schochet’s80 and Katz’s definitions of Haskalah, “A maskil was always an Enlightened Jew, but not all Enlightened Jews were active in furthering the goals of the Haskalah.”81 The terms “maskil” or “maskila” and “enlightener” should be used to denote intellectual activity. Therefore, the Jewish enlighteners or maskilim mentioned throughout this work fit neatly into the more common term German Enlightener.82 79  Raphael Mahler speaks of a social movement with a “headquarters” in Berlin, Mahler, A History of Modern Jewry, 152ff. 80  Shochet, Der Ursprung der jüdischen Aufklärung in Deutschland. 81  Schulte, “Zur Debatte um die Anfänge der jüdischen Aufklärung,” 129. 82  Alexis Hofmeister, “Die Figur des ostjüdischen Intellektuellen und der Geist der Aufklärung,” in Orte eigener Vernunft, ed. Alexander Kraus and Andreas Renner (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2008), 160.

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Enlightenment as Modernisation or Secularisation for Jews? Reform of religion and pedagogy became central activities or modernising efforts of maskilim. Modernisation according to this definition describes efforts to alter the traditional forms of religious understanding and educational techniques.83 “Modernisation” is an epochal term. Projects to translate the Torah into German or the struggle to take control of children’s education were programmatic. The processes of modernisation are as manifold as the various programmatic efforts of individuals to alter the given order. These categories supervene upon one another, but influence was always reciprocal. Endelman suggests four interdependent tendencies within Jewish modernisation: . Emancipation: the acquisition of rights and citizenship; 1 2. Acculturation: the adoption of new modes of speech and dress; 3. Secularisation: the rejection or neglect of time-honoured religious beliefs and practices including both those sanctioned by custom and those required by law; and 4. Integration: the struggle for acceptance in non-Jewish circles.84 Jewish intellectuals with myriad personal individual motivations and goals were working independently or as part of groups under the epochal rubric or modernisation. More recent definitions of programmatic Haskalah projects allow for linguistic, religious and philosophical heterogeneity of this “movement.” These studies reinforce the notion that Haskalah was also an integral part of the Enlightenment. For example, Schulte suggests that Haskalah was a future-oriented attempt to anchor Jewish life within the shifting political and social sands of the time. He discusses these efforts as the basis for the emergence of early Jewish nationalisms. He offers three explanatory models.85 The “Mendelssohnian” model includes a vision of halachic observance and cultural openness similar to the nineteenth-century Neo-Orthodoxy movement. On the other hand, he defines the “Euchel” model as a form of “Cultural Zionism” as it was based on a common language. This is the model later employed by Jews in Russia and Israel. The Friedländer model  Szulc and Brechenmacher, Neuere deutsch-jüdische Geschichte, 90.  Endelman, Broadening Jewish History, 20. 85  See Schulte, “Die Zukunft des Judentums nach der Emanzipation,” 17ff. 83 84

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used by the Jews of Prussia, however, became “an instant success.”86 This last model promoted the education of citizens and the creation of a Jewish-­ German identity. It endorsed a reform of Jewish religious practices. All three of these developments within Jewish intellectual thought are consonant with general shifts in thinking on identity and religion across the continent in the late eighteenth century. The confusion of epochal and programmatic categories has led some leading Haskalah scholars such as Shmuel Feiner to define the Haskalah and Jewish enlightenment as a secularising movement. He maps epochal changes, gradual religious reform and modernisation across Europe onto the projects and thinking from individual maskilim.87 Even if the Enlightenment can be described as a process of secularisation, it would be contradictory to attribute a narrative of secularisation to all the Jewish protagonists within that epoch. Jewish religious reform, profane education and independence from religiously governed Jewish corporate authorities were manifestations of broader European modernisation processes.88 We must also consider the influence of Prussian corporate centralisation on the fractious Jewish communities. These processes may have displayed what we now consider secularising tendencies, but secularisation in the sense of an abandonment of religion was not part of mainstream Haskalah thought.89 To be sure, the effects of some of the publications or debates from individual thinkers altered aspects of Jewish religious life. That said, however, there is a reciprocal relationship between individual actions and the broader epochal currents, and there is a logical and categorical difference between this mutually influential activity and the historical terminology used to describe it. In the introduction to The Secularisation of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, Owen Chadwick reminds us to separate the presumed process of secularisation from a process of change in religious doctrine and practices. For Chadwick, secularisation is directly connected to and defined as a loss of one’s faith in a particular religion. Ergo, to become more secular is thus to become less religious. But this is not a reasonable  Schulte, “Die Zukunft des Judentums nach der Emanzipation,” 24.  Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment; idem., The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe. 88  Lohmann agrees that many maskilim projects were “modernisation initiatives,” David Friedländer, 121–57. 89  Shmuel Feiner, The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 24. 86 87

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interpretation of the meaning behind new religious practices or when new forms of knowledge contradict older religious doctrine or practices. In other words, adapting religious practice to new forms of knowledge is not necessarily secularising even if such change inadvertently promotes secularisation. To say that “secularization is not the same as an alteration in ideas about religion” is not to assert that “one had no effect upon the other.”90 For example, maskilim in Berlin were attacked by Ashkenazim rabbinical figures for translating parts of the Tanakh into German. They claimed the translations were an affront to the tradition and contravened Jewish law.91 Many nationalist and Zionist historians of Jewish history agree with this position and place the translations in the context of Jewish secularisation or religious reform.92 In fact, there was a broad consensus among maskilim at the time that ordinary Jews had lost touch with the texts of the Tanakh, partly because they did not understand the Hebrew. Therefore, the Torah translations could also be viewed as a religiously motivated intention to educate Jews about the meaning of the most basic elements within Jewish liturgy and religion. On this reading, the maskilim saw themselves as modernising the religious texts and education to adapt to contemporary taste, linguistic ability as well as their local culture. It was their coeval rabbinical critics who claimed they were profaning religion and modern historians who charge them with secularising Judaism.93 The use of epochal terms such as “secularisation” to describe the political, social and religious changes in Judaism assumes an essentialist view on Judaism. Whereby any deviation from the tradition as defined by the rabbinate is erroneously considered less religious or less Jewish. Changing the 90  Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), 17. 91  There is a wealth of literature on the dispute surrounding Torah translations, for example, see: Schulte, Die Jüdische Aufklärung, 60–63; 81–84. 92  e.g., Shmuel Feiner claimed that Mendelssohn’s translation of the Torah into German was an attempt “to draw Jews into European culture.” Feiner is implying that understanding the Torah in the vernacular was somehow “European,” ergo, non-Jewish while simultaneously equating Christian Prussian culture with all European culture. He ignores that Mendelssohn was an observant Jew and that most Jews in Central Europe at that time only had a basic (liturgical) knowledge of Hebrew. As fluent Yiddish speakers—a European language—they were familiar with Hebrew lettering: Feiner, “Towards a Historical Definition of Haskalah,” 187. 93  Lohmann agrees that secularisation was an accusation brought by the religious authorities and not a programmatic mission by maskilim: David Friedländer, 135–49.

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forms of one’s religion or casting off the yoke of despotic rabbinical or state power should not necessarily translate into a programme of secularisation. Following Chadwick, “Custom is part of the unspoken axioms which make up consensus in society.”94 Changes in fashion or custom are not necessarily a sign of secularisation because changes in custom reflect changes in “habits and in men’s ideas of behaviour and what is acceptable.”95 Therefore, change is influenced by impersonal changes within societies as a whole and should not necessarily be attributed to a loss of religious faith. Breslau: On the Periphery of Enlightenment but a Centre of Haskalah? Breslau had enjoyed semi-autonomy from the Catholic Hapsburg empire for centuries and, contrary to Berlin, it was located on a number of important pan-European trading routes. Decades after Prussia’s annexation, Breslau maintained a different economic, social and political outlook than Prussia’s capital. Breslau has been ignored or even dismissed as “peripheral” by modern German Enlightenment scholars. In an era when journals and books and the scholars who wrote them moved from place to place, it would seem inaccurate to propose intellectual centres and oppose them to peripheries based on quantitative analysis. In relation to scholarly learning in Europe in the late-eighteenth century, Berlin itself was peripheral if one considers that the majority of scholars completed their studies at the University Halle, Leipzig, Gottingen or Königsberg. It was in theses academic centres where many German enlighteners first encountered other intellectuals from across Europe. Berlin did not have a university until 1810. Typical of much German-language work on the Enlightenment, Hiscott claimed that Breslau was a “more or less influenced periphery.”96 Baumgart went as far as to claim that the Enlightenment was imported to Silesia— and this despite the fact that Breslau was one of Prussia’s wealthiest and most populous cities.97 Breslau may have lacked an important university but the city played host to considerable number of intellectuals.

 Chadwick. The Secularization of the European Mind…, 14.  Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind…, 14–15. 96  Hiscott, Saul Ascher, 214. 97  Baumgart, “Schlesien als eigenständige Provinz im altpreußischen Staat,” 437. 94 95

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Some of the older nation states in Europe did indeed have strong central cultural centres—France/Paris, Spain/Madrid. Politically diffuse cultural nations such as Germany or Italy were, however, polycentric. Where multiple regions and cities regions influenced the creation of centralised national cultural norms and institutions. Creating topographies of knowledge rather than geographies is a remedy to the problems of framing research as the production of knowledge in centres and the reception of ideas in peripheries. A topography charts the flow of ideas, publications and protagonists rather than working from geographical premises. A topography of the Enlightenment “stresses the independence of centres of Enlightenment by investigating the reciprocal influence between them.”98 Centres and peripheries complement each other because centres and peripheries had different roles at different times. A topography that looks at the flow of ideas is a means to investigating the networks of ideas and individual thinkers rather than qualitative or quantitative studies. For example, although Breslau is often omitted from Haskalah literature, the city had a larger percentage of Jews relevant to the non-Jewish population than Berlin. It also had the highest urban Jewish population until the 1830s.99 Furthermore, Breslau became the centre for the editorial board of the HaMe’assef journal in the 1790s. As discussed in detail earlier, it was also home to the first State Prussian Jewish boys’ school and the first State Prussian girls’ industrial school. On these points alone, it would seem questionable as to the extent Breslau could be called peripheral to Berlin’s Haskalah. The importance of the factors listed earlier in determining hubs of Haskalah is further evidenced by considering Dessau in the early years of the nineteenth century.100 Dessau played host to non-Jewish and Jewish educators and pedagogues as well as intellectual and engaged maskilim like Joseph Wolf (1762–1826).101 The influential Jewish-German journal Sulamith was also published there. Similar to Breslau, Dessau was another city where disputes between reform-minded Jews and an Ashkenaz Orthodoxy split the community in two. Similar to Breslau, Dessau is seldom mentioned as a centre of Haskalah in the literature. Nevertheless,  Renner, “Ad marginem,” 11.  Hettling and Reinke, introduction to In Breslau zu Hause?, 19. 100  Hanno Schmitt, “Die Philanthropine -Musterschulen der pädagogischen Aufklärung,” in Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichteed. Notker Hammerstein and Ulrich Herrmann, vol. 2 (München: Beck, 2005), for Dessau 263–66. 101  On Wolf’s life, see, Sorkin, Preacher, Teacher, Publicist, 107. 98 99

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David Sorkin describes Dessau witnessed the birth of a Jewish “public sphere” where the organs of communication in which a collective identity and cultural-­ political consciousness could be created for the emerging German-Jewish middle classes. These organs of communication paralleled those of the German middle-classes, and, alongside the dual-curriculum school, the temple or the synagogue with a reformed service, and numerous associations, constituted the nascent voluntary German-Jewish community.102

The German Enlightenment had a number of “centres” throughout the eighteenth century: Halle, Berlin, Breslau, Königsberg, Göttingen and Weimar. A study of “peripheral” regions and cities can render a more accurate depiction of the flow of ideas and how they were integrated into different political contexts. This is not to argue that Breslau in some way overshadowed Berlin or that more works were published there. I am merely suggesting that the concept of a “periphery-versus-centre” carries less relevance when applied to an era in which discourse, argument and intellectual activity was shared and transported across the continent through print media. The transfer of ideas in Europe in the eighteenth century was less about the local appropriation of certain schools of thought from centres than the transformation and flow of ideas in different contexts and cultures and at different times. The study of peripheries is therefore essential to understanding the Enlightenment because the Enlightenment was at once “national and local and international.”103

Enlightenment in Breslau Enlightenment Institutions and Personalities in Breslau Breslau was not just the home or birthplace of a number of well-known Enlightenment figures, it was also where many important German works and translations were published. There were major printing houses at three locations in Silesia: Breslau, Liegnitz and Glogau. There were a number of Breslavian publishers of note who published important texts or  Sorkin, Preacher, Teacher, Publicist, 119–20.  Withers, Placing the Enlightenment, 7.

102 103

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translations that were distributed across the German-speaking lands. The Korn family, the Myers, George Gottlieb Horn, Christian Friedrich Gutsch and Gottlieb Löwe were all publishers.104 Many key English and French language Enlightenment translations were first translated in Silesia before they spread across Central Europe.105 Other canonical translations published in Silesia included works from Adam Smith—translated by Christian Garve—and a modern translation of Beccaria’s works.106 The political stabilisation of Silesia after the Seven Years’ War and the gradual integration of the province into the Prussian state offered the intellectuals in the city a new cultural compass.107 Before 1740, Silesia produced few scholars or writers who were popular in early Enlightenment circles in the German Protestant region.108 The transformation of this situation in the final third of the eighteenth century was quite dramatic. In particular, the advent of the enlightened monthly  periodical Schlesische Provinzialblätter in 1785 gave Silesia a voice beyond its borders. It also provided a media hub for intellectual, scientific and medical scholars from the province. There were 200 intellectuals writing, publishing and translating in Breslau towards the end of the eighteenth century.109 The lack of more familiar names among the enlighteners, however, should not take away from the important achievements of the publishing houses. One should also consider the Silesian teachers and intellectuals who left the province to other parts of the German-speaking lands.110 Schummel offers us a cosmopolitan definition of Breslau’s genii loci in his own work on Breslau’s lumières: Every big city is in tumult, where the comings and goings of natives and foreigners never ends. Our Eberts, Wielands, Kleins, Walds, Flecks, Stephanies etc., move to Wittenberg, Leipzig, Halle, Königsberg, Berlin, Wien etc. On the other hand, a lot of foreigners settle here and, after many 104  Anna Zbikowska-Migon, “Literatur der europäischen Aufklärung…,” in Aufklärung in Schlesien im europäischen Spannungsfeld, ed. Wojciech Kunicki, vol. 2. (Wrocław: Wydawn. Uniw. Wrocławskiego, 1996), 26. 105  Zbikowska-Migon lists some of the most famous works translated and published in Silesia, “Literatur der europäischen Aufklärung,” 39–43. 106  Zbikowska-Migon “Literatur der europäischen Aufklärung,” 37. 107  Harc, “Polen und Preußen...,” 29. 108  Zbikowska-Migon, “Literatur der europäischen Aufklärung,” 23–25. 109  Harc, “Polen und Preußen…,” 29. 110  Wojciech Kunicki, preface to Aufklärung in Schlesien im europäischen Spannungsfeld, vol. 1 (Wrocław: Wydawn. Uniw. Wrocławskiego, 1996), 7.

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years, become locals. Breslau does not so much function as a biological but rather as a foster mother to its own and its adoptive children.111

Anne Brenker’s research reveals that societies, journals, book clubs and other social spaces provided the city’s intellectuals and writers with the kinds of social spaces enlighteners frequented elsewhere in Europe.112 Brenker’s work lists the societies, clubs and salons and demonstrates how they were all influenced by Enlightenment ideals related to the reform of state and urban systems and structures. This should come as no surprise given Silesia’s recent annexation and the huge structural changes wrought upon its civil, social, legal and confessional order by the regime change. Nevertheless, political and social reforms were not extended to groups beyond the hegemonic confessional or national body politic. After all, the main protagonists in almost all of the societies were “male and Protestant officials, doctors, teachers or theologians.”113 Furthermore, social boundaries between the nobility and bourgeoisie were rarely crossed. The Schlesische Provinzial-Ressource, founded in 1800, was the only society which named social integration as its explicit goal.114 There were a number of Protestant, Jewish and Catholic figures who moved between the various circles in the city. Born in Breslau, Christian Garve (1742–1798) studied theology in Frankfurt on the Oder under Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762). Garve then finished his studies at Halle and Leipzig. During his time in Leipzig, Garve distanced himself from systematic speculative philosophy and began to apply himself to so-called popular philosophy.115 In Leipzig, Garve befriended notable Enlightenment scholars and writers such as Johann August Ernesti, Christian Fürchtgott Gellert,116 Johan Joachim Eschenburg, the young Christian Willhelm Dohm, Christian Friedrich Blanckenburg and Johann

 Schummel, Breslauer Almanach, xviii.  See Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang, 77; see also, Brenker, “Über Aufklärer und Aufklärungsgesellschaften in Breslau,” 9–22. 113  Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang, 77. 114  Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang, 50. 115  Leonie Koch-Schwarzer, Populare Moralphilosophie und Volkskunde: Christian Garve (Marburg: N.G. Elwert Verlag, 1998), 49–55. 116  Gellert’s 1747 novel Die schwedische Gräfin von G*** is considered as the first prominent non-Jewish German-language book or play to feature a positive Jewish character. It was published some two years before Lessing finished Die Juden. 111 112

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Wolfgang Goethe.117 Garve was given Gellert’s chair at the University of Dresden in 1770. Unhappy with the constraints of academic life, he returned to Breslau in 1772 to concentrate on translation—with a particular focus on translations of English-language works.118 Garve maintained correspondence with his Leipzig and Dresden lecturers and acquaintances who later dispersed across other Enlightenment hubs. He remained an outward member of the Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin and was involved in a number of public disputations and correspondences with leading Enlightenment figures such as Frederick II, Johann Heinrich Campe and Immanuel Kant.119 Garve was an active member of both the Berlin Montagsklub and the Berlin Mittwochsgesellschaft—the societies where intellectual elites met in the Prussian capital.120 As a debilitating facial tumour affected his wellbeing and political pressure began to censure open discussion of reform, Garve started to host writers, teachers, politicians and officials at his home. His salons quickly became the “centre” of progressive scholarly activity in the Silesian capital.121 It was one of few spaces where Catholics and Protestants as well as the nobility and bourgeoisie could openly exchange ideas.122 Karl Georg Heinrich von Hoym (1739–1807) and Friedrich Albert Zimmermann (1745–1815) were two of the most important political figures in the province and were regular guests at Garve’s salon. As head of the War and Domains Chamber for Silesia, von Hoym was the Provincial Master and most senior ranking official in the province. From 1794 to 1798, he was also the Provincial Master of the newly annexed South  Koch-Schwarzer, Populare Moralphilosophie und Volkskunde, 65–68.  Koch-Schwarzer, Populare Moralphilosophie und Volkskunde, 68–76; Garve’s translation from Latin of Cicero’s De Officiis in 1783 earned him a commission and pension from Frederick II. 119  Koch-Schwarzer, Populare Moralphilosophie und Volkskunde: Christian Garve (1742–1798), 65–68. 120  Günter Birtsch, “Die Berliner Mittwochsgesellschaft: (1783–1798),” in Über den Prozeß der Aufklärung in Deutschland im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans E. Bödeker and Ulrich Herrmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987). 121  Koch-Schwarzer, Populare Moralphilosophie und Volkskunde, 169–174; Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang, 65–70. 122  For a review of Garve’s intellectual impact in Breslau, see: Helmut Zedelmaier, “Christian Garve und die Einsamkeit,” in Aufklärung in Schlesien im europäischen Spannungsfeld, ed. Wojciech Kunicki, vol. 1 (Wrocław: Wydawn. Uniw. Wrocławskiego, 1996), 133–49. 117 118

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Prussia. von Hoym travelled to Breslau with Zimmerman123 with orders to maintain the feudal system and to help improve the lives of the farmers and peasants. von Hoym implemented a new agricultural land leasing system for small farmers called Urbaria. These new contracts changed the nature of the peasantlanded overlord relationship in respect of payment and forced labour, thus ameliorating their economic and existential perspectives.124 These agricultural reforms were such a success in Silesia they were later rolled out in Brandenburg and the rest of Prussia.125 He also commissioned the construction of large storage facilities to manage corn and other cereal supplies to combat intermittent food shortages.126 von Hoym’s success was undoubtedly due to his policy of seeking consensus from all interest groups. He preferred gradual and moderate reform to seeking conflict with stakeholders.127 Apart from working to reform schooling in Silesia, von Hoym also encouraged new industry. This presumably led him to sympathise with Jewish merchants who, excluded from agriculture and the trade guilds, were lobbying to expand Silesia’s industrial production base. von Hoym must have been well aware of the benefits of Jewish industrialisation. As Stern reminds us, Christian investors failed to set up a single factory in Silesia without financial assistance from the government. Jews ran cotton factories, banking houses, wax bleaching plants and clothing factories at a time when most non-Jewish merchants were still trading via the accustomed networks.128 von Hoym praised Jewish factory owners and their industry to the Berlin authorities  and often defended Jews against the competitive baiting of the local merchants. He had openly campaigned against Jewish “collective liability” laws, and in 1779, he worked to remove the ban on Jews working in brewing and distillery.129 Brann found ­evidence  Gerber, Die Schlesische Provinzialblätter 1785–1849, 70–73.  Baumgart, “Schlesien als eigenständige Provinz im altpreußischen Staat,” 415. 125  On Urbaria and their implementation in Silesia, see William Hagen, “The Junker’s Faithless Servants: Peasant Insubordination and the Breakdown of Serfdom in BrandenburgPrussia,” in The German Peasantry, ed. Richard J.  Evans and William R.  Lee, (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 84–87. 126  Stephan Skalweit, “Hoym, Karl Georg Heinrich Graf von,” in Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 9 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1972). 127  For a critical look at agricultural reforms in Silesia at the time, see Ziekursch’s 1915 study: Hundert Jahre schlesischer Agrargeschichte (Breslau: F.  Hirt, 1915), esp. 199–241; 237–241 (farming rebellions), 257–263 (agrarian reform under Frederick Wilhelm III). 128  Stern, The Court Jew, 155–56. 129  Agethen, “Die Situation der jüdischen Minderheit,” 326–27. 123 124

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that von Hoym corresponded with Mendelssohn and subscribed to his Pentateuch translation.130 Frederick the Great “suspected” that Hoym had an “inclination towards the Jews.”131 Some of his other adversaries, including Friedrich Nicolai and Christian Friedrich von Blanckenburg (1744–1796), felt that Hoym was “too” sympathetic to Prussia’s Catholic minority.132 Zimmerman was an autodidact who had worked his way up through the Prussian bureaucracy. His professional break came when he accompanied von Hoym to Schlesien to take up a role in the War and Domains Chamber.133 One of his main tasks was to remap the entire province and provide information on professions, wealth, agriculture and industry.134 Among a number of other titles and roles, Zimmermann was appointed as treasurer to the Jewish community from 1774. To prevent community infighting, Zimmermann sat in on Jewish Community meetings in 1789.135 Similar to his other mapping work, Zimmermann carried out parallel censuses and mapping of Jewish affairs in the province. In the late 1780s, he carried out a census of Jews in Silesia and offered a synopsis of their economic and social state.136 As a co-editor of the Schlesische Provinzialblätter, Zimmerman was an active and influential Enlightenment figure in the province. Together with Schummel, Zimmerman lobbied effectively for the founding of a state Jewish school in Silesia.137 von Hoym also used

130  Markus Brann, Geschichte der Gesellschaft der Brüder (Breslau: S.  Schottlaender, 1880), 21. 131  Frederick II cited in Marcus Brann, Die schlesische Judenheit vor und nach dem Edikt vom 11. März 1812 (Breslau: T. Schatzky, 1913), 8–9. 132  Friedrich Nicolai et al., Editionsband: Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811) in Korrespondenz mit Johann Georg Zimmermann (1728–1795) und Christian Friedrich von Blanckenburg (1744–1796) (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001), Letter from September 1786, here: 194–95. 133  See Baumgart’s introduction to Zimmerman’s work on the history of the Jews in Silesia, Geschichte und Verfassung der Juden in der Provinz Schlesien (Hildesheim et  al.: Olms, 2007), 8. 134  Zimmermann published his mapping and findings in his 13 volume Beyträge zur Beschreibung von Schlesien (1784–1796). 135  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 99. 136  Published two years after its initial submission to the reform commission: FriedrichAlbert Zimmermann, Geschichte und Verfassung der Juden im Herzogtum Schlesien (Breslau: Gottlieb Löwe, 1791). 137  Reinke, “Zwischen Tradition, Aufklärung und Assimilation,” 203.

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Zimmermann to conduct similar mapping and investigation of the Jewish communities in South Prussia after the Second Polish Partition.138 Born to a relatively poor family in Hirschberg in Silesia in 1748, Schummel later studied Wolffian Philosophy in Halle and worked for some years as a teacher and tutor.139 Schummel became one of the key figures in the Breslau Enlightenment after arriving there from Liegnitz. In 1788, he took up a position as prorector and professor for history and philology at the Protestant Elisabeth-Gymnasium. He was also tasked with changing the entire curriculum at Breslau’s teacher training college. These changes were signed off by the institution’s president on 14 May 1789.140 Needless to say, he also instigated whole-scale pedagogic reform at the Elisabethan. He later became co-editor of the Schlesische Provinzialblätter and authored copious essays, biographies and travelogues.141 Schummel was acquainted with Moses Hirschel and, as one can infer from his work in founding the state Jewish school, he was not indifferent or hostile to the Jewish presence in the city. In a letter to the Jewish community in January 1798, Schummel wrote that although he had never met a Jew before his 40th birthday, he was amazed at their education and charity. He also remarked how he had met many well-educated Jewish women.142 Other important figures in Enlightenment Breslau include the founder, editor and main contributor to the 12-volume Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie Georg Gustav Fülleborn (1769–1803).143 Educated in Halle and influenced by the Leipzig-based anthropologist Ernst Platner (1744–1818),144 Fülleborn became professor for Latin, Greek and Hebrew 138  Ingeburg Bussenius, Die preussische Verwaltung in Süd- und Neuostprerssen (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1960), 244. 139  For an extensive biography with an emphasis on Schummel’s contribution to pedagogic reform (with the conspicuous absence of any discussion of Schummel’s connexion to intellectual Jews or the Wilhelms-Schule), see: Heine “Aus dem handschriftlichen Nachlasse des Reformpädagogen Johann Gottlieb Schummel,” 61ff. 140  Heine, “Aus dem handschriftlichen Nachlasse des Reformpädagogen Johann Gottlieb Schummel,” 62. 141  Max Hippe, “Schummel, Johann Gottlieb,” Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 33 (1891). 142  CJL 105/67, Jewish Historical Institute Gemeindeverwaltung. Eingaben. Streitsachen. Korrespondenz mit staatlichen Stellen. 1796–1800, p. 36, 40, 41. 143  See Schummel’s entry on Fülleborn in, Breslauer Almanach, 157–72. 144  See Fülleborn’s definition of philosophy in the first issue of his Beyträge, “Beyträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie Volume 1,” in Beyträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie vols. I-iv, vol. 1 (Jena: F. Frommann, 1794).

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languages at the Elisabeth-Gymnasium in 1791.145 He was in dialogue with leading philosophers from across the German-speaking lands, including the early Professor for Critical Philosophy Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757–1823).146Apart from philosophy, Fülleborn published books of poetry, novels and popular entertainment novellas, including an annotated translation of Aristotle’s Politics.147 Fülleborn was the editor and main contributor to the weekly cultural magazine the Breslauische Erzähler.148 Johann Kaspar Friedrich Manso (1759–1826) was an educator, translator and historian, who was  read widely across the German-speaking lands.149 He was appointed director of the Maria-Magdalenen-Gymnasium for the last 33 years of his life.150 Manso implemented a New Humanist curriculum at the Magdalenäum and increased the number of pupils at the school.151 The school gradually became one of the preeminent Gymnasia in the German-speaking lands.152 In 1793, Manso replaced Ludwig Gedike on the board of the recently founded Jewish Wilhelms-Schule. He worked closely with the Jewish directors to implement humanist and practical changes to the curriculum.153 Manso’s esteem for classic poetry and philosophy—the bulk of his translations were from Latin and Greek—made him a target for Goethe and Schiller’s criticism during the so-called Xenien disputes. Johann Ephraim Scheibel (1736–1809) returned to Breslau after submitting his dissertation in Halle in 1758. He was a mathematician, astronomer and physicist who became professor for mathematics and physics at the Elisabeth-Gymnasium aged only 23. He later became rector at the 145  Johann Schummel, Garve und Fülleborn: Voran eine kleine Fehde, dann Plan und Proben aus Fülleborns theatralischen Nachlaß Musik (Breslau: Gehr, 1804), 29. 146  Rheinhold was a contributor to Fülleborn’s journal: Fülleborn, Beyträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie vols. I-IV, vol. 1. 147  On their friendship see: Schummel, Garve und Fülleborn (Breslau: Gehr, 1804), 1–28. 148  Der Breslauische Erzähler (Breslau: Graßes Erben, 1800). 149  Hirschel accused Manso of publishing part of Hirschel’s Kuh biography under his own name in the Schlesische Provinzialblätter without his knowledge: Manso: “Ueber Ephraim Kuhs Leben und Gedichte,” Schlesische Provinzialblätter 13 (1791): 23–34. 150  See Konrad Lux, Johann Kaspar Friedrich Manso (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1908). 151  A school of thought which aimed at fomenting independent thought in students using Classic languages and texts. 152  Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang, 157–60. 153   Isaak Assur Francolm, zur Geschichte der königlichen Wilhelmsschule (Breslau: M. Friedländer, 1841), 24–25; Francolm incorrectly gives the date of Manso’s appointment as 1791.

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Friedrichsgymnasium in the city.154 His vast 20-volume mathematical theory work Einleitung zur mathematischen Bücherkenntniß [Breslau: 1769–1798] brought him fame across Central Europe. Daniel Hermann Hermes (1731–1807) and his eminently more famous brother Johann Timotheus Hermes (1738–1821) were both pastors at the St. Berhardin Church and later provosts at the St. Maria Magdalena church. Brenker describes Daniel and Johann as being part of the conservative Protestant circles in the city. Her research shows how they were both key figures in the social and intellectual life of the city.155 After completing theology studies in Königsberg, Johan Timotheus rose to fame outside Silesia with his hugely successful Sophies Reise von Memel nach Sachsen. This was one of the best-selling novels of the eighteenth century and was translated into a number of languages.156 During those years, he was appointed professor for theology at the Magdalenäum.157 Despite a premature death, Philipp Julius Lieberkühn (1754–1788) was an important figure in the pedagogic reform movement in Breslau and beyond.158 With a degree from Halle and experience as rector of a school in Neuruppin in the Mark, the Elisabethan rector Lieberkühn led the fight against orthodox Lutheran Protestants and the city’s authorities to reform the curriculum at Silesia’s premier Protestant gymnasium.159 In an effort to raise standards, he controversially introduced public viewing for examinations.160 Lieberkühn’s early death was a blow to the Enlightenment circles in Breslau,161 Ludwig Gedike edited his literary estate to which the added a short biography. Friedländer and Itzig in Berlin were named as subscribers to the volume.162  Günther, “Scheibel, Johann Ephraim,” Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 30 (1890).  Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang, 51–56; 156–57. 156  Erich Beyreuther, “Hermes, Johann Timotheus,” in Neue Deutsche Biographie: vol. 8 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1969), 669. 157  Konstantin Muskalla, Johann Timotheus Hermes (Breslau: Hirt, 1912). 158  Karl Ritter von Halm, “Lieberkühn, Philipp Julius,” in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 18 (1883). 159  See Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang, 166–72. 160  Lieberkühn, Nachricht von der im Elisabethanischen Gymnasium zu Breslau üblichen Censur der Schuljugend. (Breslau: Gottlieb Löwe, 1787). 161  Solomon Maimon befriended Lieberkühn and spoke highly of his talents and “humanity” when he lived in Breslau: Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, vol. 2, 244–45. 162  Ludwig Gedike (ed.) Kleine Schriften (Züllichau: Frommann, 1791), biography from 514–55. Banquier Friedländer (xi) and Banquier Itzig (xii) are listed among the numerous subscribers to this work. 154 155

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A co-witness to Hirschel’s conversion, the playwright Karl Gotthelf Lessing (1740–1812) was director of the state mint in Silesia and a close friend of Mendelssohn’s.163 Mendelssohn helped K. Lessing get a job at the Royal mint in Berlin. When he began working at the mint, he took classes in accounting from the Jewish mathematician Abraham Cassel (1710–1795). He took up his position in Breslau in 1779.164 His more famous brother Gotthold lived in Breslau from 1760 to 1765 as secretary to General Tauentzien. G. Lessing wrote Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie during his time in the city. Karl Lessing and Fülleborn were the editors and publishers of Gotthold Lessing’s literary estate. The Glogau-born Prussian official Karl Konrad Streit (1751–1826) was a founding editor of the Schlesische Provinzialblätter. From 1798, he was the director of the Breslau Theatre.165 Streit founded a book club in the city in 1775. This club became a hub for Enlightenment protagonists in the city. Members at the club could read books, newspapers, or journals. Reports suggest he had a considerable collection of works from all of the sciences as he reinvested membership fees to expand the library. He dedicated a part of his library to English language books and current journals. Both Garve and Schummel were paying members of this club.166 William Gottlieb Korn (1739–1806) took over his father’s publishing house in 1762 and turned it into a key publisher of Enlightenment texts. He was Garve’s friend and primary publisher and, according to Cienski, he helped to push Breslau into the Central European Republic of Letters.167 Korn was also witness to the Hirschel family baptism in 1804.168 He was the primary publisher of Enlightenment works in Breslau and he published works by Catholics and Jews—including Hirschel. He published the Schlesische Provinzialblätter from 1791.169 In 1786, Korn published 82  Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn (Alabama: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1973), 210.  Schummel, Breslauer Almanach, 359; On K. Lessing in general see ibid, 356–64. 165   Colmar Grünhagen, “Streit, Karl Konrad,” in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 36 (1893). 166  Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang, 58. 167  Marcin Cienski, “Der polnische Gellert in Verlagshaus Korn,” Aufklärung in Schlesien im europäischen Spannungsfeld, ed. Wojciech Kunicki (Wrocław: Wydawn. Uniw. Wrocławskiego, 1998), 225. 168  Archiwum Państwowe we Wrocławiu: Staatsarchiv Breslau Kirchenbücher Magdalenenkirche, Taufbücher, 24.05.1804. 169  The Schlesische Provinzialblätter were published by Gottlieb Löwe from 1785–1791. 163 164

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books and the house’s newspaper ran to over 1,500 pages. Back in 1763 they produced only six books and 906 pages of newspaper.170 There are very few sources discussing Korn’s politics, philosophy, or social milieu.171 Some of the only references to Korn claim he was friends with all of the intellectuals in the city. Korn spent four years as a publishing apprentice under Michael Gröll in Warsaw during the Seven Years’ War. During this time, Korn intensified the contacts with publishers and book handlers in St Petersburg, Moldavia, the Walachei. Significantly, Korn had a number of important connections with Polish publishers.172 Korn’s house became an important printer of books for Polish intellectuals and poets.173 Korn cleverly took advantage of disputes between the Saxony and the Polish crown to become a primary exporter of German-language books to Poland.174 He also commissioned translations of German Enlightenment works for the Polish market.175 Korn employed the early Polish philologist, teacher and grammarian George Samuel Bandtke (also Jerzy Samuel Bandtkie, 1768–1835) to assist with Polish-language publications in 1802.176 The printing presses and Enlightenment atmosphere of Breslau were also attractive to Polish Enlightenment figures such as Ignacy Krasicki (1735–1801) who spent time in the city.177

170  See corresponding tables in Hans Jessen, 200 Jahre Wilh. Gottl. Korn (Breslau: Wilh. Gottl. Korn Verlag, 1932), 103, 108; for further biographical information on Wilhelm Korn and the Polish, German and newspaper branches of the publishing house, see: Ulrich Schmilewski, Verlegt bei Korn in Breslau (Würzburg: Bergstadtverlag Korn, 1991), 25–31. 171  Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang, 73. 172  Barton, Erzieher, Erzähler, Evergeten, 92. 173  Jessen, 200 Jahre Wilh. Gottl. Korn, 107–108. 174  Jessen, 200 Jahre Wilh. Gottl. Korn, 107; on the reception of German Enlightenment texts in Poland, see, Jerzy Kasprzyk, Zeitschriften der polnischen Aufklärung und die deutsche Literatur (Giessen: Schmitz, 1982). 175  Korn translated a number of Christian Gellert’s works into Polish: see Cienski, “Der polnische Gellert in Verlagshaus Korn,” 223–32. 176  Jessen, 200 Jahre Wilh. Gottl. Korn, 160; Wilhelm Korn’s son Johann Gottlieb (1765–1837) continued this tradition and translated numerous works for the Polish market, see Jessen, 200 Jahre Wilh. Gottl. Korn, 159–161. 177  Krasicki was the editor and main contributor to the second Polish Encyclopaedia in 1781. He is considered to be the first Polish novelist. He edited a number of German publications for Frederick II, see, Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature (Berkeley et al.: Univ. of California Press, 1983), 176–81.

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The Catholic dissident Ignaz Aurelius Feßler (1756–1839)178 spoke of Korn’s home as a centre for literary and artistic life.179 Feßler found refuge with Korn for some months after fleeing Lemberg due to his perceived anti-Catholic opinions.180 Along with Prussia’s most illustrious Jacobin— the Breslau-born Joseph von Zerboni di Sposetti (1766–1831)—Feßler was active in establishing a new and ill-fated secret Jacobin society called the Evergeten Bund in Silesia. The Bund was a similar grouping to the Illuminati who were outlawed in Prussia in 1785.181 Feßler moved to Berlin during the mid-1790s and formed a new Enlightenment society— the Mitttwochsgesellschaft—which included Jewish members and guests.182 School Reform in Silesia From 1763, eight years of schooling was compulsory for all children aged five.183 Most of these children spent their school years in a so-called Volksschule, memorising Latin texts and catechisms.184 Gifted students would advance to learn Greek texts and would then learn Biblical Hebrew. Without tutors, only a few brilliant students could make the transition from the Volksschule to the university. Over the course of his reign, Frederick II and his ministers gradually began unifying the Catholic, Protestant and Jewish education systems. Schools were pressurised to teach more worldly subjects such as “mathematics, geography, physics, geometry, history, architecture and modern languages.”185 During the Late Enlightenment, the first Realschulen and Humanist Gymnasia186  Feßler converted to Lutheranism in 1791.  As reported in Jessen, 200 Jahre Wilh. Gottl. Korn, 132. 180  Peter F.  Barton, Erzieher, Erzähler, Evergeten: Fessler in Schlesien (Wien: H.  Böhlaus, 1980), 90–95. 181  On Zerboni’s public dispute with Hoym and his subsequent imprisonment, see Sieg, Staatsdienst, Staatsdenken und Dienstgesinnung…, 304–08. 182  On Feßler’s societies in Berlin see, Uta Motschmann, Schule des Geistes, des Geschmacks und der Geselligkeit (Hannover: Wehrhann, 2010), 116–22. 183  Bobowski, “Die Entwicklung der Breslauer Elementar- und Mittelschulen…,” 2. 184  Stanisław Salmonowicz, Preussen (Herne: Stiftung Martin-Opitz-Bibliothek, 1995), 224. 185  Kazimierz Bobowski, “Die Entwicklung der Breslauer Elementar- und Mittelschulen…,” in Breslauer Schulen ed. Maria Zwierz (Wrocław: Muzeum Architektury we Wrocławiu, 2005), 22. 186  Gedike set up and directed Berlin’s first gymnasium teaching academy in 1786 at the Friedrichswerdersche Gymnasium. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) was one of the first alumnus. 178 179

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where pupils could learn these subjects began to emerge.187 There were 42 schools in Breslau in the 1790s. The majority were so-called deutscheElementar- or Trivialschulen.188 Of the higher schools, 13 were Catholic, eight were Protestant and, after 1791, one was Jewish. The need to implement reforms for the newly annexed regions created a window of opportunity for reform-minded politicians and intellectuals to experiment in the new parts of the realm away from the “sclerotic structures” in the Prussian state.189 The authorities in Berlin formed a commission to offer recommendations on the reform of Jewish matters in November 1786. The first report from 10 July 1789 was ignored because the government felt that reforms to Jewish status would encourage other ostracised groups to seek similar privileges.190 Even considering exponential Jewish and non-Jewish population growth in Berlin from the 1790s to 1820s, there were only 800 Jewish school children in Berlin in 1827. At the same time, there were over 1,500 in Breslau with over 4,000 in Silesia in total. In Posen and Bromberg at that time, there were over 13,000.191 Silesia and South Prussia provide us with fertile microcosms of Enlightenment reform efforts as they were not entangled in some of the older reform disputes in Berlin. The increased populations of Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Jews and Protestant sects— there were also 800 Muslim Tartar families—in South Prussia all had to be accommodated by a state with little desire for structural change.192  atholic School Reform in Silesia and Prussia C The change of power and dominating religion in Silesia gave Johann Ignaz von Felbiger (1724–1788) the opportunity to reform Catholic schools.193 Educated at the Leopoldina in Breslau, Felbiger worked with Frederick II and later in the Hapsburg empire (under Marie Theresa) to reform 187  On New Humanism in the German-speaking Protestant lands see: Jens Bruning, “Die protestantischen Gelehrtenschulwesen im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte, ed. Notker Hammerstein and Ulrich Herrmann (München: Beck, 2005) 278–323. 188  Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang, 138. 189  Bussenius, Die preussische Verwaltung in Süd- und Neuostprerssen, 5. 190  Lohmann, David Friedländer, 161–75. 191  Brämer, Leistung und Gegenleistung, 470–71. 192  Bussenius, Die preussische Verwaltung in Süd- und Neuostpreussen, 29–30. 193  For brief discussion of Felbiger’s contribution to school reform in Prussia and the Hapsburgian lands, see, Baumgart, “Schlesien als eigenständige Provinz im altpreußischen Staat,” 431.

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Catholic teaching methods and curricula in all Catholic schools.194 Felbiger was also influential in attempts to enforce German-language teaching among the Polish-speaking minorities in Catholic schools in West Prussia.195 Felbiger turned to the state to enact reforms rather than discuss this with the Catholic authorities. During his reign, Frederick II stripped the Catholic Church of almost all of its powers and confiscated property and other assets from Catholic religious orders in Silesia. Frederick demoted the Jesuit University in Breslau to a school. As with Jewish institutions and corporate bodies, Berlin revoked the city of Breslau’s authority over Catholic institutions after annexation. Felbiger and Frederick II set a processual precedent for school reform which encouraged maskilim to use the state to wrestle control of schooling from religious orders and promote reform. In the “new” provinces, reformers turned to the War and Domains Chambers to bypass local lobbyists in order to reform curricula. Catholic school reform was a welcome change for at least some Catholic enlighteners who were openly critical of the Catholic establishment and its schooling system. Johann Kausch blamed the Catholic school system for the paltry number of Catholic writers, scholars and thinkers in a province where over half of the population was Catholic.196 Kausch complained there was only one Catholic writer for every 47,000 Catholic Silesians. This ratio was much greater than that of Jewish writers or even Moravian Church members. Protestants, he calculated, had a ratio of one writer to every 5382 subjects.197 J ews and Protestants: The Maskilim and School Reform Due to the close ties between reform minded politicians, teachers and professors, Breslau is an excellent example of Late Enlightenment education reform in Prussia. Schummel, Manso, Scheibel, Zimmermann, von Hoym, J.T.  Hermes, Lieberkühn and Ludwig Gedike were all actively involved in promoting school reform in Breslau’s Protestant schools.198 194  See Herbert Schönebaum, “Felbiger, Ignaz von,” in Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 5 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot), 65. 195  Salmonowicz, Preussen, 225. 196  Kausch, Ausführlichen Nachrichten über Schlesien (Mayr: Salzburg, 1794), 155–92. 197  Kausch, “Einige statistischlitterarische Bemerkungen…,” 51–54. 198  L Gedike taught at the Elisabethan and was director of the board at the Jewish WilhelmsSchule. His older brother was Friedrich Gedike, Prussia’s most famous school reformer and co-editor of the Berlinische Monatsschrift.

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Ludwig Gericke was summoned to a reform school project in Bautzen in 1793 and later became director of renowned “Leipziger Bürgerschule” in Saxony.199 The aforementioned developments and reform efforts were mirrored on the Jewish side because both school reform movements were inextricably entangled. As argued earlier, the battle for education became a central motif in some maskil thinking. The modernisation discourse within Jewish intellectual circles was driven by “religion and pedagogy.”200 As maskilic reform attempts ran into opposition from the rabbinical authorities, the proponents of reform realised that in order to reform education they would also have to remove corporate authority from the traditionalist leaders. A few years after the Pentateuch translation began, the Hebrew scholar and poet Wessely published his ground-breaking pedagogic work Words of Peace and Truth.201 His publication came just three years after the private initiative establishment of the Jewish Freischule in Berlin and was a treatise on the importance of worldly subjects in children’s education. Wessely dedicated his work to the Emperor in Vienna who had announced Jewish school reform in the Hapsburg empire in 1781. David Friedländer, whose intervention on behalf of Wessely helped to prevent him receiving a ban from the Berlin rabbinate, hurriedly translated Wessely’s work into German to help it reach a much wider audience.202 Wessely essentially argued that it was neither against Jewish law nor was it dangerous to educate Jewish boys in profane subjects. Needless to say, his work quickly drew the ire of traditionalist rabbis across Central Europe. The ensuing debates and polemics became the first battle for authority between the traditionalist rabbinical powers and reform-minded Jewish intellectuals.203 In 1782, Wessely’s work was met with an anathema in 199  The “Burgerschulen” had similar pedagogic principles as the ‚Realschulen‘; Heinrich Kämmel, “Gedike, Ludwig,” in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 8 (1878). 200  Szulc and Brechenmacher, Neuere deutsch-jüdische Geschichte, 91. 201  Divrei Shalom veEmet 1782; translated into German and published that same year by David Friedländer as Worte der Wahrheit und des Friedens and die gesammte jüdische Nation (Berlin, 1782). 202  Lohmann, David Friedländer, 137–39. 203  For a detailed discussion of the publication and rabbinical reaction to Wessely, see: Ingrid Lohmann, “Die Wessely-Affäre,” in Traditionen und Zukünfte, ed. Sigrid Blömeke et al. (Leverkusen: Verlag Barbara Budrich, 2016), 111–20.

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Prague from Yechezkel ben Yehuda Landau (1713–1793). The book was also burned after an ad hominem sermon by Rabbi David Tewel in Polish Lissa.204 The controversy brought out voices for and against Wessely from Wilna to Amsterdam and from London to Paris.205 It was discussed by Jews and non-Jews alike and it also influenced in the general discussion of “modern educational theory” in Prussia.206 One should not assume that Ashkenazic rabbis possessed the inalienable right to delineate what Jewish tradition was or how Jews should and could be educated.207 Feiner claims that “early” Haskalah thinkers such as Wessely, Satanow and Mendelssohn were not so much creating new traditions, but were instead looking to transform traditional Jewish scholarship and “revive what was already believed to exist in the Jewish literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.”208 There were other maskilim outside of Breslau who were also important pedagogic reformers. Herz Homberg (1749–1841) worked for Mendelssohn in Berlin from 1778 to 1782209 and went on to found Jewish primary schools across the Hapsburgian realm.210 The Prague-based Peter Beer (1764–1838) became an important educational theorist in the Hapsburg lands. Beer published articles and books within the Jewish Republic of Letters as identified with HaMe’assef and Sulamith.211 Menddel Lefin of Satanow was another maskil who, after leaving Berlin’s Haskalah circles in 1784, went east and tried to implement some of his new pedagogic and didactic ideas. Unusually, he promoted Yiddish as a language for teaching.212

 Schulte, Die jüdische Aufklärung, 82–83.  Ingrid Lohmann, “Die Wessely-Affäre,” 114. 206  See Ingrid Lohmann, Lehrplan und Allgemeinbildung in Preussen (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1984). 207  Breuer, “Naphtali Wessely and the Cultural Dislocations of an Eighteenth-Century Maskil,” 29. 208  Feiner, “Towards a Historical Definition of Haskalah,” 187. 209  Hiscott, Saul Ascher, 240. 210   See Dirk Sadowski, Haskalah und Lebenswelt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010). 211  Louise Hecht, Ein jüdischer Aufklärer in Böhmen (Köln: Böhlau, 2008). 212  For a discussion of Mendel Lefin’s literary impact, see Nancy Sinkoff, “Strategy and Ruse in the Haskalah of Mendl Lefin of Satanow,” in New Perspectives on the Haskalah, ed. Shmuel Feiner and David Sorkin (London: Littman Library, 2001), 86–102. 204 205

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Isaac Euchel was born in Copenhagen and lived in Berlin for some years (1767–1772) before moving to Königsberg.213 Euchel spent the next seventeen years as an academic translator of Hebrew and Yiddish and was one of the Königsberg-based founding members of HaMe’assef.214 Euchel’s presence in Königsberg added a further geographical point in the Jewish and German Enlightenment Republic of Letters. According to Mahler’s research, almost half of the 190 subscribers to the HaMe’assef in 1785 either lived in Berlin or Königsberg.215 Kant tried for some years to secure Euchel a teaching post at the university without success.216 Euchel returned to Berlin in 1792 where he was appointed Director of Publications at the Jewish Freischule.217 The need for reform was great. More limiting than the education Protestant children received, most Jewish children’s education consisted of a few short and brutal years in Chedarim where they memorised passages from the Torah in Hebrew through Yiddish.218 If a pupil was wealthy or clever enough, he could later learn Talmud at a yeshiva. Scientific books, Kabbalistic books, and any books in a language other than Yiddish or Hebrew were strictly forbidden by the rabbinical powers.219 Only the elite could afford private tutors or to send their boys to non-Jewish Gymnasia

213   “the actual architect of the Haskala”: Andreas Kenneke, Isaac Abraham Euchel (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 7. 214  Steffen Dietzsch, “Euchel, das jüdische Leben in Königsberg und die Königsberger Gelehrtenrepublik,” in Der Kulturrevolutionär der jüdischen Aufklärung (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2010). 215  Mahler, A History of Modern Jewry, 154. 216  Euchel was refused the post of Professor for Near Eastern Languages because he was Jewish (101). A Catholic applicant for a different post—Ludwig von Baczco—was also refused on sectarian grounds in 1786 (102): Dietzsch, “Euchel, das jüdische Leben in Königsberg und die Königsberger Gelehrtenrepublik.” 217  Dietzsch, “Euchel, das jüdische Leben in Königsberg…,” 104. 218  Comments by maskilim and bourgeois Jews on the pedagogic failings of traditional Jewish teaching methods are widely reported in maskilim Literatur, for lengthier narrative exposition, see, for example: Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, vol. 1  Kapitel 3, “Privaterziehung und Selbststudium; Kapitel 4: “Jüdische Schulen. Die Freude daraus Erlöst zu werden,” 28–50. 219  On the de facto ban or fear of profane learning; see: Moses Silberstein, Zeitbilder aus der Geschichte der Juden in Breslau (Breslau: Commissions-Verlag, 1890), 39–40; Maimon describes how writing a commentary to “More Newochim” prevented him from entering Berlin, Lebensgeschichte vol., 270ff. Studying the sciences, “even in Hebrew,” was a “forbidden Fruit” (vol. 2, 238).

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or boarding schools.220 Education of the masses was therefore firmly under the control of the rabbinical authorities. Any attempts to educate Jews outside of this system was viewed as an attack on the tradition and rabbinical authority. The maskilim were aware that a change in the educational systems for Jews would affect all aspects of Jewish community life. Hofmeister has summed up the diffuse goals of maskil educational reformers thus, the introduction of secular knowledge into Jewish education, replacing the traditional educational elite legitimised by religion, creation of didactic methodologies in step with contemporary non-Jewish forms, a renewal of the study of biblical texts, an emphasis on the universalist aspects of the Jewish tradition, a “reawakening” of Hebrew as a language for school, literature and commerce.221

Chicaned by the state into a limited set of professions for over a century, the Jewish bourgeoisie were acutely aware of the shifting professional and mercantile landscape in wake of gradual economic reforms. An education at a cheder did not prepare the Jewish youth for a career in trading, finance or other tertiary industry professions. Importantly, almost all texts at the time concurred that the Jewish “character” was in some way in need of Enlightened education if Jews were to be granted permanent residential status. Kausch spoke of the Jews of Bohemia as a “poor oppressed nation,” and asked, “How is it otherwise possible that their character will [not] remain corrupted until the state has taught a new generation to be better citizens using Dohmian principles.”222 The Jewish Enlightenment as a struggle for self-determination and self-­ tutelage “was not an aimless activity, it was seen as a means to ‘civic improvement,’ ergo the social ascendance of individual Jews as well as the Jewish collective.”223 Thus, education was not viewed by Jewish reformers as an abstract philosophical end in itself. Rather, they saw it as a means of 220  Jewish children were enrolled at Protestant Gymnasia including the Joachimsthalsche, Gedike’s Friedrich-Werdersche Gymnasium in Berlin, and the Hartungsche höhere Privatschule in Kassel, Davidson, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, 110–11. 221   Hofmeister, “Die Figur des ostjüdischen Intellektuellen und der Geist der Aufklärung,” 161. 222  Kausch, Ausführliche Nachrichten über Böhmen (Salzburg: Mayr, 1794), 164. 223   Hofmeister, “Die Figur des ostjüdischen Intellektuellen und der Geist der Aufklärung,” 162.

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winning over sceptical Prussian lawmakers and deflecting widespread anti-­ Jewish resentment as well as the practical means to prepare the Jewish youth for professional life. The Jewish Wilhelm-Schule in Breslau Although the Freischule in Berlin and Wilhelms-Schule in Breslau224 were at the vanguard of the maskilim educational reform projects in Prussia, the Wilhelms-Schule was the first Jewish school founded upon a royal decree.225 The Freischule in Berlin was not a state-ordained project but was founded as private initiative from David Friedländer and Isaak Daniel Itzig.226 §13 of the new Jewish laws for Silesia from 21 May 1790 called for the establishment of a school with a number of classes employing “rational teachers,” where “apart from religious customs, the children will be primarily taught pure morality, philanthropy, and the duties of subjects, with lessons in reading and writing, languages, geography, history, natural sciences etc.”227 Zimmermann was appointed to create the initial board and oversee the preparations for the school in December 1790.228 Although the community was tasked with running the school, the War and Domains Chamber had the final say on appointees to the board as well as teachers. Because the authorities means-tested pupils for the school fees, the bulk of the funding as well as the teachers’ wages were provided by the state.229

224  Other Jewish schools include Hannover 1798; Herzog-Franz-Schule Dessau 1799; Sessen 1801 (founded by Israel Jacobson [1768–1828]), Philanthropin Schule Frankfurt a/M 1804; Samsonsche Freischule Wolfenbeutel 1806; Mainz 1814, israelitische Freischule Hamburg 1815. 225  Brämer, Leistung und Gegenleistung, 51ff. 226  Jörg Fehrs was an early voice showing the connexion between Jewish Enlightenment and Jewish educational Reform: “Jüdische Erziehung und Jüdisches Schulwesen in Berlin: 1671–1942,” Mitteilungen und Materialien der Arbeitsgruppe Pädagogisches Museum 26 (1987): 145–88. 227  Vorschrift wie es mit dem Juden-Wesen in Breslau gehalten werden soll d.d. 21 May 1790 (Breslau: Graßischen Schriften, 1790), 5. 228  See Immanuel Moritz Neumann’s brief history of the Willhelms-Schule on its 20th anniversary in: zur Ankündigung der den 9ten und 10ten May… (Breslau: Graß und Barth, 1810). Biblioteka Uniwersytecka we Wroclawiu YU 1510. 229  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 196.

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The first board included Dr Isaak Jeremias Warburg (1743–1818),230 the obstetrician and researcher Dr Elias Henschel (1755–1839),231 Abraham Danziger, and the first Jewish legal graduate in Prussia, Lewin Benjamin Dohm (1754–1825) (the state refused to recognise his legal qualification).232 Ludwig Gedike sat on the board as its obligatory Protestant member. The board nominated the Berlin-based maskil Joel Löwe (also Joel Brill; 1762–1802) as the school principal. Joel Brill was born into a wealthy Berlin Jewish family which had established a private school for Jewish children after his father’s bankruptcy.233 Brill initially had a successful career as a merchant but changed professions after meeting Jewish intellectuals and scholars in the city. Brill was an school friend of the polymath Kantian Lazarus Bendavid (1762–1832).234 Bendavid became director of the Freischule in Berlin from 1806 to 1826. Brill worked closely with Isaak Satanow (1732–1805) and Moses Mendelssohn and had been one of the founders of the HaMe’assef project in its Berlin/Königsberg years. He also worked on the ongoing Biblical translations.235 Although he worked as director and head teacher of the Wilhelms-Schule until he died, he also published in German and Hebrew236 on a number of subjects ranging from Hebrew Grammar to German

230  von Hoym explicitly requested Warburg be on the board. Warburg had studied and won his title at the University of Halle, see Neumann, zur Ankundigung, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka we Wroclawiu YU 1510. 231  Henschel was a pioneering Jewish obstetrician and renowned supporter of the small pox vaccine. Schummel further lists Henschel as an honorary member of the Jena Mineralogical society: Breslauer Almanach, 221–33; Henschel was listed in each edition of Hirsch’s prestigious doctor’s encyclopaedia from the nineteenth century up until 1962: Biographisches Lexikon der hervorragenden Ärzte aller Zeiten und Völker, Haaf-Lysons (Berlin, München: Urban & Schwarzenberg, 1962), 170–71. 232  Barbara Strenge, Juden im preußischen Justizdienst 1812–1918 (München: Saur, 1996), 15. 233  [Here Joel Löwe] Literarische Beilage zu den Schlesische Provinzialblätter, March (1802): 79. His father was called Juda Löwe. His older brother Elcan travelled to Riga to work as a tutor and ended up the services of a Russian noble Rat von Lütke in St Petersburg. At the time of Brill’s death, Elcan was the Russian Imperial Censor to Riga (80). 234  Lazarus Bendavid, “Selbsbiographie,” in Bildnisse jetztlebender Berliner Gelehrten mit Ihren Selbstbiographien, ed. M. S. Löwe (Berlin, Leipzig: J.F Starcke/J.G. Mittler), 17. 235  Volkmar Fritz, “Löwe, Joel,” Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 15 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1987), 83. 236  Reinke, “Zwischen Tradition, Aufklärung und Assimilation,” 199–200.

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language and grammar.237 Upon his death, the Schlesische Provinzialblätter published a lengthy obituary and an extensive bibliography of his most significant Hebrew and German language texts.238 The doctor and writer Wolf Davidson named Brill has one of German Jewry’s important menores in his 1799 Über die Bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden.239 As a well-­ known Jewish intellectual and learned bible and Talmud expert, the school board believed Brill to be the perfect person for the job. Unsurprisingly, many traditionally minded people in the community were disturbed by a man who in “his outward appearance and behaviour was worlds away from his Polish coreligionists yet almost indistinguishable from his fellow Christian bourgeoisie, a man who did not speak Jargon but wrote and spoke a classic German.”240 Over the next months the board worked out a lesson plan for the school. It was opened with a pompous ceremony on 15 March 1791 with high-ranking officials and religious leaders from all cloths in attendance. The Chief Provincial Rabbi Joseph Fränkel was notable in his absence.241 Lessons in Hebrew, German, French, Polish, accounting, drawing, nature studies, world history, as well as moral and ethical doctrine began for 125 boys on 16 March.242 Some two years after the school opened, Gedike left to an appointment at a non-Jewish reform school in Saxony and was replaced by Manso. In the same year, Brill secured a position at the school for his fellow maskil and Biurist Aron Halle-Wolfssohn.243 Due to his extensive and eclectic bibliography, Halle-Wolfssohn was, according to Dauber, “one of the most important figures of the Haskalah after Moses Mendelssohn’s death.”244 Halle-Wolfssohn worked and published extensively in Berlin 237  For example, Joel Löwe, Nachlese zur deutschen Synonymic: Ein Programm (Breslau, 1798) see review in the literarische Beilage zu den Schlesische Provinzialblätter, May (1798): 142–45. 238  Literarische Beilage zu den Schlesischen Provinzialblätter, March (1802): 84–88. 239  Davidson, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, 110. 240  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 333–34. 241  Reinke, “Zwischen Tradition, Aufklärung und Assimilation,” 200. 242  Reinke, “Zwischen Tradition, Aufklärung und Assimilation,” 200–01. 243  The only lengths monograph on Aaron Halle-Wolfsohn is a dissertation from Jutta Strauss, “Aaron Halls-Wolfssohn: A Trilingual Life—An Exemplary Life for the interplay of Hebrew, German and Yiddish among 18th century German Jewry,” Bodleian Library Oxford [Microfilm] Deposited Thesis D186345, 1994. 244  Jeremy Dauber, Antonio’s Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2004), 164.

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during the 1780s. His oeuvre included new translations of Ruth and Esther as well as Avtalyon in 1790. Jeremy Dauber claims the latter work was the “first Hebrew textbook for students based on enlightenment principles.”245 According to a notice in Schlesische Provinzialblätter, Wolfssohn returned to Berlin when a sickness kept him from writing and teaching.246 On his return to Berlin, he worked as a tutor to the Meyerbeer children. His charges included the nineteenth century’s most successful opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864). Halle-Wolfssohn and Brill began republishing HaMe’assef in 1794 and 1795. Halle-Wolfssohn was the primary contributor.247 Halle-Wolfssohn also published a number of comic plays which satirised traditionalist Jewish mindsets and Jews from the east. Both of these plays marked his contempt for the Ashkenazi rabbinical elite.248 In 1804, Wolfssohn lampooned the Prussian anti-Semites Christian Ludwig Paalzow and Carl Grattenauer in Jeschurun, oder unparteyische Beleuchtung der dem Judenthume neuerdings gemachten Vorwürfe (Breslau: Barth, 1804).249 In a review of his literary works, Dauber claims Halle-Wolfssohn “tried to radicalize the fairly conservative dynamic of the Haskalah while simultaneously remaining ambivalent about its ultimate destination.”250 Halle-Wolfssohn and Brill became radical voices against the rabbinical authorities only after their attempts to reform Jewish education encroached on what the religious traditionalists felt was their domain.251 The inevitable conflict between Jewish religious leaders and the Wilhelms-Schule board turned into an intractable and very public dispute. von Hoym and Zimmerman were well aware of the need not to provoke the rabbinic authorities in Breslau against the school. After all, this was the one of the reasons why Moses Hirschel was prevented from working at the school. The authorities in Breslau avoided radical teachers out of 245  For a detailed review of Halle-Wolfssohn’s literary works, see the relevant chapter in Dauber, Antonio’s Devils, 164–206; for the only detailed biographical work available see Jutta Strauss’ 1994 dissertation: Aaron Halle-Wolfssohn (University of Oxford). 246  Literarische Beilage zu den Schlesischen Provinzialblätter, September (1807): 287–88. 247  Dauber, Antonio‘s Devils, 166. 248  Leichtßin und Frömmelei (Breslau: Graß, 1796). 249   For a contemporaneous review, see: Literarische Beilage zu den Schlesische Provinzialblätter, June (1804): 116–119. 250  Dauber, Antonio’s Devils, 164. 251  Jutta Strauss, “‘Do not neglect the education of your children’,” in Jüdische Erziehung und aufklärerische Schulreform, ed. Britta L.  Behm, Uta Lohmann and Ingrid Lohmann (Münster: Waxmann, 2002), 307–33.

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deference to the traditionalist element in the community. To allay the fears of sceptical parents, many of the teachers came from the traditional education system.252 Led by the Chief Rabbi Fränkel—whose application to teach Talmud at the school was rejected—the traditionalists began to publicly rail against the school’s curriculum.253 They took particular issue with the fact that non-rabbis would be teaching Talmud. A further objection was that the Talmud was not a central part of the curriculum—Talmud was initially taught to the senior classes on Sundays.254 Despite objections by maskilim, Talmud was placed on the curriculum to encourage religious children to visit the school.255 The fact that the religious elite refused to have anything to do with the school even after the state went out of its way to accommodate them is further evidence that the rabbis were less troubled by halachic reasoning than by the perceived loss of sovereignty over parts of the Jewish community. Herzig reminds us that the very creation of the school came at the expense of rabbinical authority and sovereignty.256 This school conflict exacerbated the “Early Burial” controversy which I discussed at length in Chap. 5. Traditionalist rabbis in Breslau spent years aggressively dissuading parents from sending their children to the school. The reaction by the traditionalists provoked consternation and anger from Jewish and nom-Jewish reformers alike. Brill’s obituary in 1802 states that he spent years fighting “Polish-rabbinical stupidity.”257 On the other hand, the Breslavian Jewish historian Freudenthal claimed in 1893 that Halle-Wolfssohn and Brill were too extreme and that it was their tone and agenda that enraged religious leaders and parents. Freudenthal assumes that objecting to traditional Ashkenazi authoritarian doctrine was in itself unjustified. Freudenthal suggests they should have omitted religion from the curriculum and only used the school as a place of profane education rather than religious

 Brämer, Leistung und Gegenleistung, 54–56.  Reinke, “Zwischen Tradition, Aufklärung und Assimilation,” 204. 254  The initial weekly timetable was published in the Schlesische Provinzialblätter, April (1791): 306–07. It can also be found among other documents relating to the school in the University Library in Wroclaw: Biblioteka Uniwersytecka we Wroclawiu: Signature YU 1510. 255  Reinke, “Zwischen Tradition, Aufklärung und Assimilation,” 203. 256  Arno Herzig, “Die Juden Breslaus im 18. Jahrhundert” in Breslau zu Hause?, ed. Manfred Hettling, Andreas Reinke and Norbert Conrads (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 2003), 57. 257  Literarische Beilage zu den Schlesische Provinzialblätter: March (1802): 82. 252 253

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reform.258 Freudenthal does admit that the “Polish-Talmudic scholars” in Breslau had a problem with everything “German” anyway. They fundamentally rejected dissenters who did not agree with their teaching methods which included corporal punishment and methodological “pilpul” and maintained an almost exclusive focus on the Talmud.259 It is questionable if the traditionalists in Breslau would have been satisfied with any kind of non-rabbinic school in Breslau. Ultimately, no Talmud lessons were ever held in the school. Brill claimed it was because there was no interest from the students and the rabbis claimed it was because the reform-minded maskilim were undermining the Jewish tradition—the state did not get further involved.260 Supporting Freudenthal’s suggestion that the maskil should have left religious instruction to the rabbis, Louise Hecht shows that the religious authorities did not object to the first reform school in Prague (1782) because religion was omitted from the curriculum. This solution meant the traditional teachers and rabbis maintained their position as the sole purveyors of Jewish religious understanding.261 Miller argues that Ezekiel Landau successfully campaigned for “German” Jewish schools in Bohemia and Moravia to teach only profane subjects, leaving religious instruction to traditional teachers.262 To avoid inter-confessional and inter-ethnic conflict in many regions, Catholic schools with Jewish pupils in the Hapsburgian territories were ordered to remove religious content from their curricula. This meant, at least in a de jure sense, that the Josephine government in Vienna had already instituted the rudiments of a secular schooling system.263 This was not the case in Prussia, however, where the school reform impetus came from religious enlighteners who viewed religious instruction to be an intrinsic part of the state’s educational programmes. Ludwig Gedike’s speech on the question of whether the state is obliged to provide lessons and education for Jewish youths at the school’s the 258  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 241. Brill and Wolfssohn were not important advocates of Jewish religious reform. 259  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 333–35. 260  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 428–29. 261  Lousie Hecht, “Die Prager deutsch-jüdische Schulanstalt 1782–1848,” in Jüdische Erziehung und aufklärerische Schulreform, ed. Britta L.  Behm, Uta Lohmann and Ingrid Lohmann (Münster: Waxmann, 2002), 218. 262  Michael L. Miller, Rabbis and Revolution (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2011), 69. 263  Hecht, “Die Prager deutsch-jüdische Schulanstalt 1782–1848,” 217.

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opening ceremony was an attempt to assuage religious critics fearing a secularising inclination within the school’s mission. Gedike emphasised the learnedness and religiosity of the teachers in his speech.264 Pupil numbers at the school decreased over the years as the traditionalist campaign began to affected enrolment. The decreasing revenues led to bickering between the state and the community about funding. That said, Brill and Halle-Wolfssohn earned 450 and 320 thalers, respectively; this was over 45% of the school’s entire teaching budget—the school’s total budget was 1800 Rthlr.265 Because they received salaries from the state as school director, Brill and Halle-Wolfssohn could publicly oppose the rabbinical authorities without fearing repercussions for their residency or employment status. The political conflict at the school came to an end in 1800 when von Hoym integrated the school into the general school system. Thus removing the need for any further consultation with the community.266 Needless to say, other maskilim were positive about the new Jewish pedagogic-didactic reformed schools.267 Praising the Jewish schools and their respective directors in Berlin and Breslau, Wolf Davidson explained “The education of the youth, up until now was in the hands of raw and uneducated Poles, is now being trusted to able Jewish and Christian teachers and tutors.”268  he Industrial School for Girls in Breslau T As discussed in Chap. 6, rising poverty in the German-speaking lands forced the authorities to consider new means of tackling the problem. The industrial school concept was aimed at reforming both the form and content of teaching practice to raise the intellectual as well as moral standards of the underclasses. These institutions taught applied subjects to prepare

 Reinke, “Zwischen Tradition, Aufklärung und Assimilation,” 202.  CJL 105/433, 8, Vorstand der Synagogengemeinde zu Breslau, 1790–1847. Brill’s salary was very generous when one considers that an average senior farmhand received between 24 and 35 thalers per annum: Schlesische Provinzialblätter, January (1799): 18. 266  Reinke, “Zwischen Tradition, Aufklärung und Assimilation,” 206. 267  As an expression of gratitude for the new Jewish regulations, the Jewish community in Breslau purchased a fire engine [Sprize] and offered to help extinguish fires—on Shabbat and on holidays too. This happened on at least two occasions between 1791 and 1793: Hirschel, Apologie der Menschenrechte, 183–84. 268  Davidson, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, 110. 264 265

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the children for skilled artisanal work.269 Mayer explains that “teaching children to work was considered a suitable way to fight poverty among the urban underclasses, guided by the principles of helping people to help themselves and improving the common good.”270 The children at these schools learned to read, write and do basic arithmetic as well as weaving, silk and linen manufacturing, carpet making, basket weaving and so forth.271 As a sign of the innovative nature of Silesia’s governance, the first industrial school in Prussia opened in Breslau in 1793. Its success led to the founding of industrial schools across the realm. Although a handful of industrial schools for girls opened in other German-speaking lands in the 1790s, there was no such equivalent in Prussia.272 The first Jewish “school and work institution” for girls opened in Hamburg 1798.273 That same year, von Hoym wrote to the Jewish community and announced plans to found an “Industrial School” for Jewish girls. The school was later called the Industrieschule für israelitische Mädchen.274 The curriculum was similarly structured to the boy’s industrial school in Breslau. The goal was to “accustom and prepare the next generation of the local community to productive seated jobs.”275 von Hoym explained that the community would have to contribute little finances to the school as the money would come from the province’s Haupt-Manafaktur-Kasse and that the money the children earned from their work would be given to the parents.276 Hoym appointed Tobias Hiller (d.1841) to draw up the curriculum and teach at the school. Hiller was later joined by an Aaron Freund who became the only other teacher at the school until 1806.277 Hiller was familiar to Jewish intellectual circles 269  See Christine Mayer, “Erziehung und Schuldbildung für Mädchen,” in Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte, ed. Notker Hammerstein and Ulrich Herrmann (München: Beck, 2005), 202ff. 270  Mayer, “Erziehung und Schuldbildung für Mädchen,” 202. Mayer does not mention the Breslau Girls’ Industiral school in her essay. 271  Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang, 175. 272  See Christine Mayer, “Erziehung und Schuldbildung für Mädchen,” 202. 273  Mordechai Eliav, Jüdische Erziehung in Deutschland im Zeitalter der Aufklärung und der Emanzipation (New York: Waxmann, 2001), 353. 274  Marcus Brann, 100. Jahresbericht über die Industrieschule für israelitische Mädchen (Breslau: A. Schüler, 1901), 8. 275  “Seated” because the girls learned spinning, weaving and knitting: Brann, Geschichte der Anstalt während des ersten Jahrhunderts ihres Bestehens, 8. 276  Brann, Geschichte der Anstalt während des ersten Jahrhunderts ihres Bestehens, 8. 277  Brann, Geschichte der Anstalt während des ersten Jahrhunderts ihres Bestehens, 24.

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in the city and he was also a professor for French at the Protestant Friedrich-Wilhelm and Maria-Magdalenen Gymnasia.278 One of the major innovations at the school was Hebrew lessons for the girls, a subject typically reserved for males.279 The school opened on 4 January 1801 with 25 pupils; it almost doubled in size over the following ten years. The school did not close until the twentieth century.280 Once opened, Breslau had two state Jewish schools that were conceived of and run by Jewish and non-Jewish enlighteners. The Gesellschaft der Brüder In the late eighteenth century, Freemasonry grew to be an important space for the politically disenfranchised bourgeoisie to implement limited change in the societies around them. Jews and Catholics, however, could only temporarily enter some Freemason lodges as “visiting Brothers.”281 In distinction to other societies, whose membership was confined to members with equal social standing, masonic lodges generally included members from across the social spectrum.282 Needless to say, there were no similar institutions for Jews to converse or congregate outside of the traditional chevra kadisha burial society.283 Lewin Benjamin Dohm founded the Gesellschaft in the early 1780s.284 It was conceived as a social and charitable club for the wealthier (married)

 Brann, Geschichte der Anstalt während des ersten Jahrhunderts ihres Bestehens, 11.  Girls were also enrolled at the Reform Jewish school in Dessau—founded in 1801, see, Eliav, Jüdische Erziehung in Deutschland…, 116–17. 280  Brann, Geschichte der Anstalt während des ersten Jahrhunderts ihres Bestehens, 14. 281  Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Die Politik der Geselligkeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 39. 282   Karlheinz Gerlach, “Immigranten in den Berliner Gelehrtenund Freimaurergesellschaften,” in Französische Kultur-Aufklärung in Preußen, ed. Mondot Fontius (Berlin: Spitz, 2001), 112. 283  Bernard Brilling, “Zur Geschichte der zweiten Brüdergesellschaft. Aus Breslauer Archiven (II),” Mitteilungen des Verbandes ehemaliger Breslauer und Schlesier in Israel 26 September (1969): 8. 284  As a state-approved organisation, the statutes were printed and made available to the public: Statuten der Gesellschaft der Brüder zu Breslau gestiftet im Jahr 1780, (Breslau: Grasischen Schriften. 1793). 278 279

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Jewish traders, doctors and community leaders.285 The idea was to ­create a cultural philanthropic society whose inner structure was very similar to freemason lodges.286 It was the first “jüdische Freymaurerey” organisation in Breslau287 and perhaps the first in Prussia.288 Writing in 1793, Kausch tells us that only the meeting form and philanthropic outlook were similar to Mason practice. In distinction to its Protestant counterparts, the Jewish society was transparent and did not keep secrets. Furthermore, they eschewed the ceremonial pomp “from obscure and superstitious times” which characterised Protestant lodges.289 Originally called “ahawa weacha [Love and Brotherhood],” it changed its name to the Gesellschaft der Brüder in 1790.290 It was renamed the Society for the Promotion of the Good (in Hebrew) after restructuring in 1791 but then  finally took on the name 2te Brüdergesellschaft/ Gesellschaft der Brüder.291 The society then began admitting younger, unmarried members.292 The new organisation’s mission was to encourage education for adults—distribution of journals and magazines—and Jewish youth.293 The creation of such associations and clubs was “part of the individualisation and embourgeoisation of culture” and “a constitutive structural index for the creation of a middle class.”294 The convergence of Gesellschaft’s members and teaching staff and board members at the Jewish schools suggests that the Gesellschaft was a significant lobbyist for Jewish pedagogic reform. von Hoym turned to the society for counsel before and after the new Jewish regulations of 1790.295 285  The Gesellschaft zur Förderung der hebräischen Sprache was founded in Berlin and Königsberg in 1783 with the explicit purpose of promoting Hebrew language works. On the society behind the Orientalische Buchdruckerei, see Lohmann, David Friedländer, 153–57; the Gesellschaft der Freunde was founded in Berlin 1792 and was similar to the Gesellschaft in Breslau, both in form and its membership profile and mission: Geiger, Geschichte der Juden in Berlin, 115; for a comprehensive history of the Gesellschaft der Freunde, see: Sebastian Panwitz, Die Gesellschaft der Freunde 1792–1935 (Hildesheim: Olms, 2007). 286  Markus Brann, Geschichte der Gesellschaft der Brüder. Festschrift zur Säcularfeier am 21. März 1880, Breslau 1880 (Neudruck: Breslau 1925). 287  Kausch, Ausführlichen Nachrichten über Schlesien (Salzburg: Mayr, 1794), 119. 288  Reinke, “Zwischen Tradition, Aufklärung und Assimilation,” 198. 289  Kausch, Ausführlichen Nachrichten über Schlesien, 119. 290  Brilling, “Zur Geschichte der zweiten Brüdergesellschaft,” 8. 291  Brilling, “Zur Geschichte der zweiten Brüdergesellschaft,” 8. 292  Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang, 253. 293  Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang, 253 294  van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer, 101ff. 295  Reinke, “Zwischen Tradition, Aufklärung und Assimilation,” 198–99.

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Both Lewin Benjamin Dohm—who took the name Dohm in honour of Christian Wilhelm von Dohm—and Elias Henschel296 were appointed to the first board at the Wilhelm-Schule.297 Dohm later became embroiled in a dispute with David Friedländer after he anonymously criticised Friedländer’s 1812 petition to reform Jewish religious practice. Dohm was critical of Friedländer’s suggestion to stop teaching Hebrew teaching in Jewish schools and remove it from the liturgy.298 A number of Gesellschaft members were also contributors to the HaMe’assef.299 The society began holding its own religious services in member’s private homes in the 1790s. In 1798, the society submitted a formal request to build their own synagogue, finally winning approval on 21 February 1800.300 Jewish and “Christian” Maskilim in Breslau There was more to Haskalah and Jewish intellectualism in Breslau than pedagogic and religious reform or membership of bourgeois societies. Apart from Hirschel, there were a number of other prominent Jews who did not fit into any of the neat categories typically used in Haskalah literature. Jewish converts to Christianity are a challenging topic in Jewish histories of Central Europe. If they are included in Jewish encyclopaedia, the later  achievements of the converts as Christians are usually ignored. Omitting them from the annals of Jewish history, however, is disingenuous to their intellectual development given that many converted in later life and had grown up within Jewish communities. Moreover, it is also disingenuous to their person given our ignorance of the economic, social or legal obstacles that may have motivated that person to approach the font. Conversion at the time was not simply a religious flight of fancy but a serious legal matter. It meant changing one’s status as a person from one 296  Heppner claims Henschel wrote the statutes for the Gesellschaft der Brüder, see: Aron Heppner, Jüdische Persönlichkeiten in und aus Breslau (Berlin: Schatzky, 1931), 9. 297  Heppner, Jüdische Persönlichkeiten in und aus Breslau, 8. 298  Michael A. Meyer, “The Orthodox and the Enlightened,” LBIY 25, no. 1 (1980): 101. 299  Brenker compiled a list of Gesellschaft der Brüder members and contributors/editors to Hame’assef based in Breslau from Heppner: “Menach Broese, Lewin Benjamin Dohm, Elias Henschel, Heinr. Philip Heymann, Tobias Hiller, Simon Hirsch, Josel pick Rochnowe, Ephraim Kuh, Vict. Aron Lobethal, Joel Brill Löwe, David Veit and his father.” Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang, 253. 300  Brilling, “Zur Geschichte der zweiten Brüdergesellschaft,” 8.

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corporate body to another. A conversion in Prussia brought with it the transfer of new privileges and the loss of others. It is often assumed that converts abandoned Judaism for financial gain or status, other motives such as frustration with the sclerotic and traditionalist community including misogyny and exclusion, or genuine religious conviction are rarely discussed.301 Loewenstein reminds us in his study on the Jewish elite in Berlin, There were no set models for Jews abandoning tradition, whether by neglecting kashrut and the Sabbath, mixing socially with Christians, moving from the Jewish district, or even playing the piano and collecting art. They did not have a sure idea of what could be reconciled with Judaism and what could not, since they lacked models of an acculturated type of Judaism such as Religious reform or of modernized Jewish cultural and social forms.302

The reasons for conversion were of course manifold and it is now impossible to reconstruct the exact reasons that led any Jew to convert to Protestantism. Antipathy towards converts or their historical suppression is more common among Jewish-German historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and is ubiquitous among Israeli-Zionist historians in the twentieth century. Other Jewish Enlighteners Ephraim Kuh was not the only Jewish poet in Breslau. Esther Gad was a Jewish Enlightener and maskila. She was a poet and translator who was part of elite European Enlightenment circles in Breslau, Paris, London and Berlin. Gad was born in 1767 to an army horse supplier and later General Privilegierte Raphael ben Gad (1745–1808).303 Her mother Nissel was the daughter of the Talmudist Jonathan ben Nathan Eybeschütz (1690–1764).304 Privately tutored, Gad studied music, French, Italian, 301  For broad historical look at prominent conversions among the Jewish elite in Berlin, see: Deborah Hertz, How Jews became Germans (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2007). 302  Steven M Lowenstein, “Jewish Upper Crust and Berlin Jewish Enlightenment,” in From East and West, ed. Frances Malino and David Sorkin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 201. 303  Karin Rudert, “Die Wiederentdeckung einer ‘deutschen Wollstonecraft’” Quaderni 10 (1988): 220. 304   Bernhard Brilling, “Eibenschütziana,” Hebrew Union College Annual vol. 35 (1964): 256ff.

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Classics and European philosophy. She said her older brother Isaac taught her English. Gad later became friends with the Salonnière Rahel Levin.305 One of her first recorded public acts was reading a Hartwig Wessely poem to the newly crowned Frederick William II as he entered Breslau.306 The king was, according to all accounts, very impressed by the Jewish community of Breslau and Esther Gad.307 Gad was also asked to compose a poem for the opening ceremony at the Fredrich-Wilhelm school in 1791— although it was read out by a pupil and not her.308 The poem was published with the other speeches and announcements from that day.309 Gad married a Silesian trader in 1791 and became Esther Bernard. She bore three children. Following her divorce in 1796, she left Breslau for Dresden where she rented rooms from the composer Joseph Gottlieb Naumann (1741–1801).310 She became a lifelong friend of his daughter, the writer Elisa von der Recke (1754–1833).311 Gad moved to Berlin in 1799 and attended sittings of the Mittwochsgesellschaft.312 She met her second husband in Berlin and promptly converted to Protestantism. She moved to London shortly thereafter where her husband was appointed personal physician to Prince August Frederick of Great Britain. She became friends with Christian Garve and Fülleborn and Jean Paul (1763–1825), with whom she became a lifelong correspondent.313 In 1790, Gad wrote a detailed rebuttal of Joachim Heinrich Campe’s 1790 chauvinist treatise Väterlicher Rath für meine Tochter. Her essay is probably the first text by a woman to appear in the German arguing for women’s rights. It is certainly one of the most vociferous public

 Rudert, “Die Wiederentdeckung einer ‘deutschen Wollstonecraft’,” 221.  She may have read one of her own poems too, see “Gesang und Gebet beim HuldigungsEinzuge des Königs Friedrich Wilhelms des Zweiten,” in Gedichte, an den König Friedrich Wilhelm den Zweiten, ed. Samuel G. Bürde (Breslau: Löwe, 1786), 37–44. 307  Freudenthal, “Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau,” 45. 308  Francolm, zur Geschichte der königlichen Wilhelmsschule, 15. 309  The University Library in Wrocław documentation and fliers from the school opening: Biblioteka Uniwersytecka we Wroclawiu, YU 1510; YU 1510_2. 310  In 1797, Esther Gad was one of the few female Jews paying tax to the community—2 Rthl. She is listed in the first class of the 3-class system making her a Generalpriviligierte. See, CJL 105/316, 73, Klassifikationslisten zur Steuerleistung der Gemeindemitglieder 1797. 311  Rudert, “Die Wiederentdeckung einer ‘deutschen Wollstonecraft’,” 221. 312  Rudert, “Die Wiederentdeckung einer ‘deutschen Wollstonecraft’,” 253 313  Rudert, “Die Wiederentdeckung einer ‘deutschen Wollstonecraft’,” 221. 305 306

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admonishments of a leading German Enlightenment figure.314 This essay earned her Schummel’s now famous sobriquet the “German Wollstonecraft.”315 Her political texts and contributions to literature, philosophy and translation make her an important maskila, early feminist, translator and enlightener. Karl Daniel Friedrich Bach was born the son of the Potsdam Jewish community’s senior elder in 1755. He died in Breslau  in 1829 as a Christian and director of the Breslau Art and Construction College. He traversed the continent studying at art schools in Italy, France and the German-speaking lands. Bach founded his own sketching academy using life models because the other art academies did not offer such training.316 He was a member of a number of art academies across Europe including the art academy in Düsseldorf and Berlin.317 Schummel reports he was an honorary professor at the art academy in Florence and that he had studied in Rome.318 Bach arrived in Breslau in 1792 to take up a position of director at the art academy.319 He was the editor and main contributor to the short-lived art and architectural magazine Torso, eine Zeitschrift, der alten und der neueren Kunst gewidmet published in Breslau from 1796 to 1797. He was Breslau’s most prominent artist and art theorist—he specialised in discussing and planning monuments and sculptures.320 Davidson names him in his list of menores and writes, “professor Bach in Breslau is well known as a good painter and intellectual artist, despite the fact that he took on the Christian faith, he trained his talent as a Jew.”321 The Jewish painter Raphael Biow (1771–1836) was an alumnus at Bach’s school. He was an autodidact who went to school thanks to a stipend from a wealthy Breslavian. The Prussian state architect Carl Langhans was an admirer of his house painting—he also painted the main synagogue 314  Esther Gad Bernard Domeier, “Einige Äußerungen über Hrn. Kampe’ns Behauptungen, die weibliche Gelehrsamkeit betreffend,” Kosmopolit 3, no. 6 (1798): 577–90. 315  Schummel, Breslauer Almanach, 54; Schummel lists her as “Bernard (Esther), gebohrne Gad.” 316  Schummel, Breslauer Almanach, 9. 317  See Alwin Schultz, “Bach, Karl Daniel Friedrich,” Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 1 (1875). 318  Schummel, Breslauer Almanach, 14. 319  Malgorzata Stolarska-Fronia, “Jüdische Künstler aus Breslau: Eine Einleitung,” in Jüdisches Leben zwischen Ost und West, ed. Andreas Brämer, Arno Herzig, and Krzysztof Ruchniewicz (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2014), 372–73. 320  Schummel, Breslauer Almanach, 12ff. 321  Davidson, Über die Bürgerliche Verbesserung, 105.

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in Breslau. He eventually received civic privileges in the city with the help of some wealthy patrons.322 Biow’s Breslau-born son Hermann (1804–1850) and daughter Jenny Bossard-Biow (1813–1858) were among the first commercial Daguerreotype photographers in the German-­ speaking lands. Jenny was one of the first female photographers in Europe. The Henschel brothers were all educated in the Wilhelm-Schule in Breslau.323 They later made a name for themselves as painters, portraitists and copper engravers in Berlin. After six  years in Berlin, William and August were accepted into the Berlin academy in 1812 and received a number of commissions as portraitists to Berlin’s military and religious elite.324 They were among the first pioneers of lithographic printing. In 1819, they produced one of the first books of lithographic prints in Central Europe—Szenen aus Goethes Leben. Goethe was said to have been impressed with their work.325 August and Wilhelm’s celebrity was confirmed in 1816 when they were accepted into the Gesellschaft der Freunde.326 Apart from August, the other brothers all died in Breslau in relative poverty (for reasons unknown).327 One of the few fields Jews could study at university in Central Europe was medicine and there were a number of prominent Jewish doctors in Breslau. Davidson mentions the doctors “Warburg, Henschel, Pulvermacher,328 Zadig” as highly regarded “writers and practitioners.”329 Dr Isak Jeremias Warburg (1745–1818) studied theology and medicine after which he came to Breslau in 1771. He was member of the board of the Wilhelm-Schule where his appointment was explicitly requested by

322  “202. Raphael Biow,” in Neuer Nekrolog der Deutschen, ed. Bernhard F. Voigt, vol. 14 (Weimar: Bernhard Friedrich Voigt, 1838), 527. 323   Friedrich (d. 1836), August (1783–1828), Wilhelm (1781/85–1865), Moritz (d. 1862). 324  On the date of arrival in Berlin see: Salli Kirschstein, Juedische Graphiker aus der Zeit von 1625–1825 (Berlin: Zirkel, 1918), 46. 325  Kirschstein claims that the brothers’ early contribution to lithographic printing in Central Europe was completely forgotten after their deaths, see Kirschstein, Juedische Graphiker, 54–55. 326  Kirschstein, Juedische Graphiker, 53. 327  Heppner, Jüdische Persönlichkeiten in und aus Breslau, 19. 328  Dr Joseph (ben Elia) Pulvermacher (d. 1813). 329  Davidson, Über die Bürgerliche Verbesserung, 96–97.

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von Hoym.330 He was educated at university but then chose to work for the traditional local chevra kadisha in Breslau.331 Elias Henschel (1755–1839) was a founding member of the second Gesellschaft der Brüder and was also friend of Kausch’s. Schummel describes how Henschel refused to convert despite the efforts of some Protestants.332 Born into a poor family, Henschel began his medical training as Warburg’s understudy. He eventually received a two-year scholarship of 220 thalers per annum to study medicine in Halle.333 On returning to Breslau in 1787, Henschel worked as an obstetrician. He was also a fervent advocate of the recently discovered small pox inoculation. His publications on both of these subjects won him recognition in Silesia and beyond.334 Fülleborn publicly praised Henschel’s outspoken campaign against quack-cures for small pox.335 After completing medical studies in Halle, Abraham Zadig (1764–1836) moved to Riga to complete a state exam in order to practise in Russia. According to some sources, Zadig was born in Riga and not Breslau.336 Zadig arrived in Breslau in the 1790s where he wrote a number of notable texts in  reputable journals including  in  the Archiv der Praktischen Heilkunde.337 Zadig became August Theodor Zanth after his conversion to Protestantism in Breslau’s St Elisabeth Church on 30 December 1802.338 Shortly thereafter, he moved to Russia as the personal physician to Queen Katharina of Württemberg (1783–1835). He followed her into exile in France after the end of the Napoleonic wars—she was married to Napoleon’s youngest brother Jerome. Zadig later settled in Posen where he continued to practise medicine until his death. There were two incidents in Zadig’s biography which brought him into conflict with the traditionalists in Breslau. I already spoke of the Early burial controversy in detail above. On 26 September 1800, Zadig became 330  Neumann, zur Ankündigung der den 9ten und 10ten May zu haltender öffentlicher Prüfung sämtlicher Classen der königlichen Wilhelms-Schule (Breslau: Graß und Barth, 1810), 6. 331  Heppner, Jüdische Persönlichkeiten in und aus Breslau, 45. 332  Schummel, Breslauer Almanach, 221–33. 333  Heppner, Jüdische Persönlichkeiten in und aus Breslau, 19. 334  Fülleborn, Breslauische Erzähler, 642. 335  Fülleborn, Breslauische Erzähler, 642. 336  Neues allgemeines Intelligenz-Blatt für Literatur und Kunst. 337  Fülleborn, Breslauische Erzähler, 642. 338  His five-year-old son was also baptised and took the name Carl Louis (later Karl Ludwig; 1796–1857). Schlesische Provinzialblätter, December (1797): 63–64.

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embroiled in another dispute with the traditionalists in the city.339 As a doctor and father, Zadig petitioned the King for permission to determine the time of his son’s circumcision. Zadig was presumably nervous about circumcision because he had lost an infant son two years previously. According to Jewish law, circumcision [Brit] should take place on the eight-day post-partum.340 Zadig argued that because the state guaranteed freedom of religious practice in the Allgemeines Landrecht (P.II Tit.f.§4),341 he should have the freedom to choose how to practice his religion. Particularly because he was being forced to make his son undergo a “dangerous operation”342 at such a young age. He claimed he would circumcise his son when he grew.343 The petition and ruling created some waves beyond the immediate parties because the Protestant church was also curious as to how far religious freedom could be interpreted. Zadig further threatened that without a dispensation, he would baptise his child to avoid the Brit.344 The authorities gave Zadig a positive response. They ruled that although the rabbinate was the highest and final arbiter of Jewish law, the state nevertheless adjudged the guarantee of freedom of religious practice to mean that as long as he raised his son according to his “enlightened interpretation of the Jewish religion,”345 the law would protect him from persecution by the Jewish authorities.346 The War and Domains Chamber therefore, at least on this occasion, allowed for religious plurality within the Jewish community without insisting on conversion. Solomon Maimon lived in Breslau on a number of occasions and spent his final six years living in Lower Silesia as a guest of Graf Kalkreuth at his

 Karl August Kümmel, “Historische Nachrichten,” Journal für Prediger 40 (1801): 406.  It is unclear if this petition was in relation to his son Carl Louis (born in 1796) or for another son born after Carl, but who died in his infancy. Wilhelm Teller suggests his dead son may have been apocryphal: Wilhelm Abraham Teller, “Vermischtes,” Neues Magazin für Prediger vol. 9, no. 2 (1800): 303–05. 341  Kümmel, “Historische Nachrichten,” Journal für Prediger 40 (1801), 407. 342  Teller, “Vermischtes,” 303–04. 343  Kümmel, “Historische Nachrichten,” Journal für Prediger 40 (1801): 406. 344  Teller, “Vermischtes,” 304. 345  Kümmel, “Historische Nachrichten,” Journal für Prediger 40 (1801): 407–08: “nach seinen aufgeklärten jüdischen Religionsbegriffen.” 346  The Journal for Prediger notes a similar ruling at the time in favour of a Catholic subject who requested the freedom to baptise his child whenever he pleased: Kümmel, “Historische Nachrichten,” 408. 339 340

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stately home in Siegersdorf.347 On his first journey to Breslau, Maimon met and befriended Ephraim Kuh. According to Maimon, Kuh helped to integrate him in the city and introduced him to potential sponsors.348 To help him find work, Christian Garve gave Maimon a reference and a recommendation for the affluent banker Lipmann Meier.349 Meier’s sponsorship allowed Maimon to stay in Breslau and he worked as a tutor the Zadig family. During his final years in Siegersdorf, Maimon wrote and published his Kritische Untersuchungnen über den menschlichen Geist oder das höhere Erkenntniß- und Willensvermögen (Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer, 1797). The Schlesische Provinzialblätter listed him in their literature review as “local” due to his residency in the province.350 Finally, there were also a number of other lesser known Jewish enlighteners in Breslau at the time. Menachem Mendel Broese (also Brese or Breslauer) (1761–1827) was a Hebrew language poet and writer.351 After moving to Königsberg in 1786, he joined the Association for Friends of Hebrew Literature [Verein hebräischer Literatur-Freunde] and became an active editor and contributor to the HaMe’assef journal. He returned to marry in Breslau in the late 1790s where and gave Frederick William II’s eulogy352 at the synagogue for the Gesellschaft der Brüder—he was a member there from 1795.353 As well as poetry, he also published a geographical book on Palestine in 1819 with maps in both German and Hebrew.354 This presentation of diverse groups of intellectuals committed to various Late Enlightenment projects within the city is an attempt to avoid the Berlin-centric gaze common among Enlightenment or Jewish Enlightenment researchers. The Enlightenment was a pan-Continental even pan-global conglomerate of movements and ideas, all of which aimed at challenging the given status quos. Thanks to scholarly networks and the Republic of Letters, the ideas aired in Berlin, New York, Milan, or London 347   Maimon describes living and working in Breslau in the second volume of his Lebensgeschichte, pp. 239ff. 348  Maimon, Lebensgeschichte vol. 2, 240; Auerbach claims Kuh broke the fast on Tisha B’av to drink with Maimon before the latter left Breslau for Berlin. Kuh was summoned before a Beit Din for his action and declared insane: Dichter und Kaufmann 391–93. 349  Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, vol. 2, 241–42. 350  Literarische Beilagen zu den Schlesische Provinzailblätter (1798): 315. 351  Heppner, Jüdische Persönlichkeiten in und aus Breslau, 6. 352  Partly printed in the Schlesiche Provinzialblätter, 26 (1797): 307ff. 353  Brann, Geschichte der Gesellschaft der Brüder, 55. 354  Heppner, Jüdische Persönlichkeiten in und aus Breslau, 6.

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were the same ideas being discussed in Breslau. Breslau was not simply a peripheral or lesser place of Enlightenment, it was another location where the challenges of adapting to a changing world were addressed by enlighteners—Jewish, Catholic and Protestant—using the latest thinking.

CHAPTER 8

Final Remarks

In the opening chapters, I highlighted two historiographical problems common to Haskalah and Enlightenment research. The first, or “structural” problem, is the unnecessary ghettoisation of Jewish-German history within general German or European histories. The second “epistemological” problem is a tendency among some historians to ignore primary source material in order to create sweeping historical “master-narratives.” As discussed earlier, these narratives tend to forget that Jews were individual agents acting according to myriad factors including their own will and desires. To put it simply, individual Jews in history should not have their identities summarised simply as “Jew,” because their identity was never simply “Jewish.” The Enlightenment was a heterogenous and diverse phenomenon. There was a plurality of Enlightenments, in lots of places, at different times. As Vierhaus reminds us, “The Enlightenment, especially in Germany, was by no means an unambiguous and uniform configuration; its social substrate cannot be clearly identified as a bourgeois any more than its political objective was progressive and emancipatory.”1 At the same time as the Berlin Enlightenment there was also a Breslau Enlightenment, a Jewish Enlightenment, and a Late Enlightenment in which Jews and non-Jews were active. There needs to be deeper investigations of the connections between influential Jewish publications, a number of intellectual and financially independent and engaged Jews and conflict with the rabbinate in order to 1

 Rudolf Vierhaus, introduction to Bürger und Bürgerlichkeit im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, 9.

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define and investigate Haskalah in various centres at various times. If we can forget the problematic usage of the term “centre”—it suggests peripheries—one can see that Breslau became an important city in JewishPrussian affairs during the 1790s. As discussed earlier, HaMe’assef was published there and the first Prussian state Jewish schools for boys and girls opened their doors in the city. Due to Early Burial controversy, Breslau also became the first Prussian city where enlightened Jews were forced to set up institutions to mirror the traditional community institutions that were sanctioned by the Ashkenazi rabbinate. Just as part of the Prussian state opposed improving Jewish civic status, the same was true for the Jewish religious elite at the time. As many Jews fought for improved civic status, many other Jews shunned the boon of emancipation and instead tried drag the community back to a time when their vanishing authority was unquestioned. Opposing Jews to Christians or Germans to Jews, or even Europeans to Jews, ignores the rich and engaging history of cultural and social exchange. Hirschel did not become any more “German” or “European” nor was he any less Jewish just because he chose to publicly vilify Jewish religious and political leaders. There simply was no stable “Germanness” or “Prussianness” to which one could adapt. Culture, ethnicity and cultural evolution are not modular. Israel Finestein offers us a salient definition for acculturation as “the increasing levels of similarity in the way of life between individuals (or a group) on the one hand and the larger body within which they live on the other hand. It is a mood as well as a process. It has its own momentum, whether by design or by the sheer impact of fashion.”2 Jews and Christians, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, Protestants and Catholics, Prussians and Silesians are all nebulous terms for groups of people who at certain times share more or less of the identifying characteristics usually attached to those concepts. The key to using those terms is, firstly, understanding that identity from a subjective perspective is situative. Secondly, accepting that identity as an objective concept refers to the sum of actions from rational individuals who develop those identities in harmony with their own changing beliefs and standards. These agents are also influenced, to greater or lesser degrees, by myriad external factors that further contribute to that individual’s self-understanding. 2  Israel Finestein, “Jewish emancipationists in Victorian England: self-imposed limits to assimilation,” in Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), 38.

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Beyond the individuals in history, we of course have collectives of these rational agents. Sweeping historical narratives that follow the trajectory of these collectives are often anachronistic projections of present-day concerns and theory. More rewarding histories gather diverse primary sources to create cultural histories which are both true to the characters and protagonists they investigate as well as the communities, classes or milieus they inhabited and shaped. With his antiauthoritarian attitude, novel theses and radical Enlightenment thinking, Moses Hirschel and Christian Moritz Herschel offer us an excellent opportunity to investigate the complex reciprocal relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish enlighteners in a Central European city in the Late Enlightenment period. As with other free thinkers such as Solomon Maimon, Saul Ascher or Lazaraus Bendavid, Hirschel not only attacked anti-Semites, he also turned his critical eye to the Ashkenazi religious elite. Hirschel provides us with a prototype of the later modern Jewish secular identity, with its ambivalence towards external definition. His life and works therefore demonstrate how common notions of Jewish, Christian or German identities at the time are at best simplistic, and at worst in need of correction.

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Index1

A Acculturationist, 11, 13–15, 22, 23 Allgemeines Landrecht, 43, 71, 73, 215 Anti-Semitism, 8, 15, 25, 33, 61, 77n11, 124n15, 146–152, 168 Aristotle, 60, 188 Ascher, Saul, 29, 31, 77, 87, 87n62, 89, 103, 104, 104n127, 106, 123n12, 124n14, 146n116, 149n127, 152, 163, 169, 172, 179, 196, 221 Ashkenaz, 2, 17, 23, 69, 75, 78, 86, 87, 94, 98–106, 109, 109n157, 118, 119, 172, 173, 196, 202, 203, 220, 221 Assimilation, 2, 11–13, 15, 19, 22, 29, 94, 103, 129, 133, 152

B Baer, Yitzhak, 12 Baron, Salo, 17, 18 Beer, Peter, 196 Bendavid, Lazarus, 71, 72, 80, 80n29, 80n30, 89, 103, 104, 106, 169, 200, 221 Bennett, Salomon, 122, 122n6, 123n7, 123n9 Berlin, 8, 11, 13, 18, 21, 23, 30, 32, 36–40, 42–44, 48, 51–53, 56–58, 60–62, 64, 70, 79–82, 79n22, 80n23, 80n24, 80n26, 80n27, 80n28, 83n42, 84, 84n53, 91, 91n79, 93, 95n93, 96n96, 100n108, 106, 108n152, 111, 112, 112n173, 115, 116, 122, 123n8, 123n10, 128–130, 128n35, 133, 134n60, 137n71, 139n79, 146n113, 146n114, 146n116, 147, 147n119, 148n124, 152–155, 159–162, 167, 169, 172, 175, 178, 179, 181, 182, 184, 185, 189, 190, 192–201, 205, 207–213, 216, 219

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2021 D. Heywood Jones, Moses Hirschel and Enlightenment Breslau, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46235-2

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INDEX

Berlin, Saul, 82n38, 82n39, 82n40, 83, 89, 104, 104n124, 104n125, 169 Berlin Wall, 8 Bildung, 155, 164, 165 Biow, Raphael, 212, 213 Bohemia, 95, 130, 198, 204 Brill, Joel, 6, 9, 31, 36, 106, 106n135, 111–114, 123, 129, 200–205, 209 C Calvinism, 40, 43, 45, 67 Campe, Joachim Heinrich, 60, 184, 211 Catholic, 2, 29, 35, 37, 40, 45, 53, 54, 65–67, 69, 72, 88, 95n93, 101, 160, 161, 173, 179, 183, 186, 192–194, 197, 204, 215, 217 Catholicism, 17, 40, 51, 54, 66, 95n93, 97, 139, 184, 190, 193, 207, 220 Chess, 57–59 Chevra kadisha, 108–112, 114, 115, 136, 207 Coffee, 91 Council of Four Lands, 94 Council of the Four Lands, 132 Counter history, 10 D d’Argens, Marquis, 166, 167 Davidson, Wolf, 30, 31, 152, 198, 201, 205, 212, 213 Descartes, 60 Dessau, 134n60, 180, 199, 207 Diaspora, 6, 11–13, 24, 93–97, 102, 122 Diez, Heinrich Friedrich, 134, 134n58, 134n60, 135

Dohm, Christian, 66, 67, 76, 114, 127, 133, 136, 137n71, 143, 147, 147n120, 148, 148n122, 148n123, 151, 174, 183, 200, 207, 209 Dyhernfurth, 91n76, 169 E Emden, Jacob, 82, 82n37, 90n72, 99, 106, 107, 109 Estate system, 1, 21, 32, 46, 56, 63, 88, 100, 123, 126, 148n124, 165, 189, 190 Ettinger, Shmuel, 12 Euchel, Isaac, 106, 108, 172, 176, 197 Eybeschütz, Jonathan ben Nathan, 210 F Federal Republic of Germany, 8 Feiner, Shmuel, 12, 13, 94, 160, 163, 171, 173, 174, 177, 178, 196 Fleckeles, Eleazer, 91, 92 France, 17, 44, 56, 59, 62, 65, 87, 124, 150, 160, 167, 180, 212, 214 Fränkel, Jonas Rabbi, 81–84, 82n36, 83n41, 83n42, 83n44, 83n45, 83n47, 83n51, 93, 201, 203 Frederick II, 35–38, 40, 41, 43, 80, 83, 89–91, 107, 123, 131, 141, 161, 162, 167, 184, 186, 191–194 Frederick Wilhelm II, 129 Frederick William III, 44 Free Masonry, 29, 207 French Revolution, 13, 17, 42, 55, 56, 73, 87n61, 89, 92n81, 93n86, 99n103, 116n192, 204 Friedländer, David, 29, 61, 70–72, 76, 76n3, 77, 104, 108n152, 127, 128n30, 128n31, 128n32, 128n33, 128n34, 148n124, 152,

 INDEX 

176–178, 188, 189, 193, 195, 199, 200, 208, 209 Fülleborn, Georg Gustav, 51, 100, 100n109, 121, 121n4, 187, 188, 190, 211, 214 G Gad, Esther, 31, 169, 210–212 Galicia, 38, 109 Garve, Christian, 165, 182–184, 188, 190, 211, 216 Gedicke, Ludwig, 201 Gedike, Ludwig, 189, 200, 204 Geiger, Ludwig, 52, 106n135, 109n161, 111n168, 112n175, 115, 115n186, 162, 208 Gellert, Christian, 165, 183, 184, 190, 191 Glogau, 41, 81, 82, 91, 95, 115, 181, 190 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang v., 31, 213 Goßler, Christoph, 90, 90n73, 134, 134n59, 134n60, 135, 135n61, 135n62 Göttingen, 2, 8, 9, 14, 26, 27, 38, 43, 47, 122n5, 124, 138n76, 153, 158, 160, 161, 163, 172, 181, 184, 196, 197, 207, 212 Graetz; Heinrich, 13, 17, 58, 71 Grand narratives, 5–7 Grattenauer, Karl Willhelm, 146–150, 146n113, 146n114, 147n118, 152, 202 Gypsies, 145 H Habermas, Jürgen, 31 Hamburg, 25, 31, 47, 55, 90, 93, 98, 106, 109n154, 138, 140n90, 152n135, 199, 203

261

Hame’assef, 76, 106n134, 106n135, 108, 167, 169, 171, 174, 180, 196, 197, 200, 202, 209, 216, 220 Hebrew, 10, 12, 13, 19, 99, 106n135, 116, 118, 137, 151, 154, 166, 169, 172–175, 178, 187, 192, 195, 197, 198, 200–202, 208–210 Henschel, Elias, 53, 91n79, 114, 200, 209, 213, 214 Herz, Markus, 61, 108, 108n152, 109, 109n159, 116, 123n10, 169 Herzig, Arno, 13, 14, 38, 43–45, 55, 84n55, 85n56, 94, 109n154, 122n5, 131n46, 137n73, 140, 140n90, 140n91, 203, 212 Historical narratives, 5, 6, 8, 16, 23–25, 46, 93, 154 Historicism, 5, 7, 8, 117 Historiography, 3, 8–15, 20, 22, 25, 26, 79, 101, 153, 219 Hohenzollern, 35, 67, 90 Homberg, Herz, 196 Hourwitz, Zalkind, 86–87, 87n61 Huguenots, 88, 97 Husserl, Edmund, 25 Hybrid identity, 16, 22–25, 27, 28, 32 I Islam, 18, 58, 193 Israel, 6, 9, 17, 116n192, 122n6, 123n9, 123n10, 148n124, 149n126, 176, 199, 207 J Jesus, 70, 71, 149 Jost, Marcus, 13 Junkers, 141, 141n93

262 

INDEX

K Kant, Immanuel, 31, 58, 60, 100, 153, 156, 157, 162, 184, 197 Kaplan, Marion, 94, 163 Katz, Jacob, 12, 93, 93n87, 94, 101n114, 116n192, 147n117, 174, 175 Kausch, Johann, 29, 52–54, 58–61, 64–67, 75n1, 170, 171, 194, 198, 208, 214 Königsberg, 36, 83, 153, 159, 165, 169, 179, 181, 182, 189, 197, 200, 208, 216 Kuh, Ephraim, 31, 50, 52, 60–63, 67, 136n68, 188, 209, 216 Kuh, Zacharias, 136 L Landau, Ezekiel, 92, 99, 108, 196, 204 Langhans, Carl, 212 Late Enlightenment, 20, 21, 35, 88, 92, 157, 159, 161–165, 170, 175, 192, 194, 216, 219 Lebisch, 92, 92n80 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 156, 157, 159 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 53, 58, 62, 68, 151, 162, 183, 190 Levin, Hirschel, 81–83, 211 Lewin, Hirschel, 106n135, 112, 112n175, 114, 200, 207, 209 Lieberkühn, Philipp J., 189, 194 Lifeworlds (Lebenswelten), 25–27, 31, 32, 173, 178 Lithuania, 17, 20, 83 M Mahler, Raphael, 49, 76, 76n8, 78, 79n18, 79n19, 175, 197 Maimon, Salomon, 31, 53, 61, 106, 169, 189, 197, 215, 216, 221

Maimonides, 51 Manso, Johann Kaspar, 60, 188, 194, 201 Marxism, 8 Mendelssohn, Moses, 15, 16, 30, 31, 53, 58, 61, 62, 66, 67, 71, 72, 76, 80, 83n42, 87n63, 88n64, 91, 92, 102, 104, 104n126, 106–109, 106n139, 123n10, 126n23, 147–149, 148n124, 149n126, 151, 155–157, 160, 162, 165, 169, 172, 174, 178, 186, 190, 196, 200, 201 Jerusalem, 12, 16, 30, 62, 67, 71, 72, 88n64, 104, 104n126, 105n130, 160 Messianism, 18, 98 Meta-histories, 7, 22 Meta-narratives, 7, 10, 11, 14, 25, 173, 175 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 202 Michaelis, Johann David, 124, 124n15 Moritz, Karl Phillip, 53, 67, 68, 199, 213 N Naimark-Goldberg, Natali, 12, 13, 116n192, 117, 117n202 Napoleon, 44, 74, 152, 214 Code Napoléon, 44 Nationalism, 2, 6–8, 11, 14, 15, 19, 21, 23, 46, 57, 89, 97, 124–126, 147, 165, 167, 176, 178 National Socialism, 8 NSDAP, 46 Nicolai, Friedrich, 47, 53, 58, 62, 137n71, 186 O Orthodoxy, 87, 161, 189 Orthodoxy (Christian), 100

 INDEX 

Orthodoxy (Jewish), 15, 18, 69, 78, 79, 79n22, 87n63, 90, 96, 98–105, 111, 117n197, 119, 121, 160, 193, 209 Orthodoxy, Neo, 118, 176 P Pappenheimer, Salomon, 12, 110, 110n166, 116–119, 116n192, 117n197, 117n201 Pelli, Moshe, 13, 19, 104, 104n125, 106n138, 108n151, 171, 172, 174 Philippson, Ludwig, 13 Poland, 1, 17, 20, 29, 36, 38, 39, 42, 44, 46, 52–54, 65, 83, 86, 86n60, 92–95, 128, 131, 132, 132n48, 153, 187, 191, 194, 196, 201, 203–205 Polish Partition, 42, 187 Popular Enlightenment, 55–67, 73 Post-colonialism, 7, 8 Post-colonial theory, 7 R Ramler, Karl, 52, 60, 61, 68 Republic of Letters, 31, 32, 170, 171, 190, 196, 197, 216 Rosman, Moshe, 5, 9, 10, 22 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 63, 166 Rühs, Friedrich, 152 Russia, 53, 65, 83, 131, 176, 200, 214 S Sasson, Hillel, 12 Scheibel, Johann Scheibel, 188, 189, 194 Schlesische Provinzialblätter, 52, 60, 68–70, 74, 75, 76n2, 110, 110n164, 111, 111n167, 111n168, 111n170, 130n39,

263

144, 144n104, 182, 185–188, 190, 200–203, 205, 214, 216 Scholem, Gershom, 12 Schummel, Johann Gottlieb, 44, 48, 50, 51, 53, 57, 67–69, 71–73, 159, 161, 182, 183, 186–188, 190, 194, 200, 212, 214 Sectarianism, 18, 100 Sephardim, 2, 17, 220 Sessa, Karl Borromäus Alexander, 69 Seven Years’ War, 35, 36, 80–81, 182, 191 Shoah, 17 South Prussia, 70, 100, 128, 184–185, 187, 193 Spinoza, 71, 151, 159, 166, 172 Stern, Selma, 10, 11, 33, 34, 39, 185 T Talmud, 17, 60, 69, 83, 84, 86, 92, 99, 104, 107, 109, 112, 113, 118, 119, 136, 136n69, 151, 197, 201, 203, 204, 210 Taxation, 38, 42, 45, 63, 69, 75, 77, 78, 80, 84, 85, 85n56, 85n57, 90, 95, 123, 132, 136n66, 137, 137n72, 137n73, 211 Taylor, Charles, 27, 28 Teller, Wilhelm Abraham, 70, 71, 215 Turk, Moses, 95, 95n93 U United Kingdom, 167 V Vienna, 17, 38, 74, 94n88, 147, 195 Vilna / Wilna, 81, 86 Volkov, Shulamit, 2, 10, 11, 14–16, 23, 47, 94, 99n105, 125, 125n17, 126n22, 163, 164

264 

INDEX

Voltaire, 49, 77, 77n11, 78, 87, 151, 166 von Hoym, Karl Georg, 43, 68, 88, 95n93, 106, 110–113, 110n166, 115, 127, 127n28, 128, 128n35, 143, 184–186, 192, 194, 200, 202, 205, 206, 208, 209, 214 W War and Domain Chamber, 29, 37, 84, 85, 111n168, 114, 131, 137, 184, 186, 199, 215 Warburg, Isak J., 213 Weimar, 13, 181, 213 Wesel, Baruch, 90, 91, 91n76, 110, 112

Wessely, Hartwig, 92, 118, 159, 172, 195, 196, 211 Wolff, Christian, 159 Wolfssohn, Aron (Halle), 31, 106, 106n134, 111, 114, 123, 201–203, 205 Wöllner, Johann Christoph von, 43 Z Zadig, Abraham, 110, 113–116, 114n182, 115n188, 115n189, 116n190, 116n191, 120, 120n209, 213–216 Zionism, 7, 11, 12, 14, 15, 19, 22, 23, 46, 89, 178, 210 Zionist, 6 Zülz, 41, 45, 95, 115, 140