Introduction

New Light Protestantism had been a modernizing spirituality, however, while Hasidism was a typically conservative reform movement. Its spirituality was mythical, based on the Lurianic symbol of divine sparks that had been trapped in matter during the primal catastrophe, but the Besht transformed this tragic vision into a positive appreciation of the omnipresence of God. A spark of the divine could be found in absolutely everything. There was no place where God was not: the most accomplished Hasidim became aware of this hidden divine dimension by means of the practices of concentration and attachment (devekut) to God at all times. No activity, however worldly or carnal, was profane. God was always present and available and could be experienced while Hasidim were eating, drinking, making love, or conducting business. Hasidim must show their awareness of this divine presence. From the very first, Hasidic prayer was noisy and ecstatic;
Hasidim would combine their worship with strange, violent gestures, designed to help them to put their whole selves into their prayer. They used to clap, throw their heads backward and forward, beat on the walls with their hands, and sway their bodies to and fro. The Hasid was to learn, at a level deeper than the cerebral, that his whole being must be pliable to the divine forces in his immediate environment, as a candle flame responds to every fluctuation of the wind. Some Hasidim would even turn somersaults in the synagogues, to express the overturning of the ego in its total surrender to God.
Hasidism’s innovations were rooted in the past, however, and presented as the recovery of an ancient truth. The Besht claimed that he had been instructed in the divine mysteries by Ahijah of Shilo, the teacher of the Prophet Elijah, and that he himself embodied the spirit of Elijah. The Besht and his followers were still reading scripture in the old mystical way. Instead of reading the Bible critically or to acquire information, Hasidim made their Torah study a spiritual discipline.
“I will teach you the way Torah is best taught,” the Besht used to tell his disciples; “not to feel [conscious of] oneself at all, but to be like a listening ear that hears the world of sound speaking but does not speak itself.” The Hasid had to open his heart to the text, and divest himself of ego. This transcendence of self was a form of ecstasy that demanded a disciplined reining in of a Hasid’s mental powers, very different from the wilder transports of the American revivalists. The Besht was not interested in a literal reading but looked beyond the words of the page to the divine, just as he taught his Hasidim to look through the surface of the external world and become aware of the indwelling Presence. There is a story that one day he was visited by Dov Her (1710--72), a learned Kabbalist who would succeed the Besht as leader of the Hasidic movement. The two men discussed a Lurianic text about angels, and the Besht found Dov Her’s literal exegesis correct but inadequate. He asked him to stand up, out of respect for the angels, and as soon as Dov Her rose to his feet “the whole house was suffused with light, a fire burned all around, and they [both] sensed the presence of the angels who had been mentioned.”
“The simple reading is as you say,” the Besht told Dov Her, “but your manner of studying lacked soul.” A wholly rational reading, without the attitudes and cultic gestures of prayer, would not bring a Hasid to a vision of the unseen reality to which the text pointed.
In many ways, Hasidism was the antithesis of the spirit of the European Enlightenment that was just beginning to reach Eastern Europe at the end of the Besht’s life. Where the philosophes and scientists believed that reason alone could lead to truth, the Besht promoted mystical intuition alongside the rational. Hasidism denied the separations of modernity--of religion from politics, the sacred from the profane--and adopted a holistic vision that saw holiness everywhere. Where modern science had disenchanted the world and found the cosmos empty of the divine, Hasidim experienced a sacred immanence. Even though it was a movement of the people, there was nothing democratic about Hasidism.
The Besht believed that the ordinary Hasid could not achieve union with God directly. He would find the divine only in the person of a Zaddik (“a righteous man”) who had mastered devekut, a constant mystical consciousness of God which was beyond the reach of most people. The Hasid was, therefore, wholly dependent upon his Zaddik, an attitude which Kant would have condemned as unworthy tutelage. Hasidism was thus deeply at odds with the Enlightenment, and many Hasidim would reject it when it began to penetrate Eastern Europe.
While the Besht was alive, the rabbinic establishment did not take him seriously, but Dov Her, the new leader, a learned man, was a very different proposition, and the movement spread under his leadership.
When it reached Lithuania, it came to the attention of a powerful figure: Elijah ben Solomon Zaiman (1720-97), head (gaon) of the Academy of Vilna. The Gaon was appalled by the Hasidic movement, especially its denigration of Torah study, which was his chief passion. His scholarship, however, was very different from the casuistic studies of the corrupt Polish rabbis, and had a deeply mystical cast. His sons tell us that he used to study all night with his feet in icy water to keep himself awake. For the Gaon, Torah study was a more aggressive exercise than it was for the Hasidim. He relished what he called the “effort” of study, and it seems as though this intense mental activity tipped him into a new level of awareness. When he did allow himself to sleep, the Torah penetrated his dreams and he would experience a mystical ascent to the divine. Torah study was thus an encounter with God. As his disciple, Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner (1749--1821), whom we shall meet later, explained: “he who studies Torah communes with God, for God and the Torah are one.”“ But the Gaon also made time for modern studies; he was proficient in astronomy, anatomy, mathematics, and foreign languages. He found the Hasidim heretical and obscurantist.
The conflict became acrimonious.
The Gaon’s supporters, whom the Hasidim called Misnagdim (“opponents”), would sometimes observe the rites of mourning when one of their number became a Hasid, as though he had died; the Hasidim, for their part, did not regard the Misnagdim as proper Jews. Eventually, in 1772, the Gaon excommunicated the Hasidim of Vilna and Brody; the shock of this expulsion is said to have killed Dov Her.
Toward the end of the Gaon’s life, Rabbi Shneur Zalman (1745-1813), a Hasidic leader in Ukraine and Belorussia, sought to effect a reconciliation, but the Gaon refused to speak with him. Indeed, the publication of Zalman’s book the Tanya (1791) inspired a new edict of excommunication. This was a pity. Zalman was evolving a new type of Hasidism known as Habad,” which was much closer to the spirituality of the Misnagdim, since it made rational thought the starting point of the spiritual quest. Zalman was also open to some of the Enlightenment ideals, which he tried to accommodate within a mystical framework. He believed that our rational powers alone were incapable of finding God;
if we relied only upon our senses--as the scientists and philosophers bade us do--the world did indeed seem empty of the divine. But the mystic could use his intuitive powers to break through to a different mode of perception, which revealed the immanent Presence in all phenomena. Zalman was not opposed to reason, but was simply making the old conservative point that rational thinking was not the sole mode of perception;
reason and mystical intuition should work hand-in-hand. When Jews engaged in rational speculation and in the study of modern secular subjects, Zalman argued, they became aware of the limitations of their minds and would seek to transcend them by means of ecstatic prayer.
Zalman encouraged his Habad Hasidim to propel themselves into a sense of transcendence by the violent gestures that the Besht had introduced.
Zalman himself used to roll upon the ground until he entered a tranced state, and would dance wildly like the common people. But this ecstasy was rooted in study and disciplined concentration. Habad Hasidim were taught to manage their unconscious selves by descending ever deeper into their minds until they encountered, like mystics in all the great traditions, a sacred presence in the ground of their being.
The conflict between Hasidim and Misnagdim intensified. Zalman was actually imprisoned in St. Petersburg for some years, when the Misnagdim denounced him to the Russian authorities as a troublemaker. But during the early years of the nineteenth century, the hostility began to abate. Both sides realized that they had more to fear from other quarters than from each other, and should, therefore, join forces to oppose these new threats. The most worrying development was the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, which had just begun to penetrate Eastern European Jewry and which seemed heretical to Hasidim and Misnagdim alike.
The Haskalah was the creation of Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86), the brilliant son of a poor Torah scholar in Dessau, Germany, who, at the age of fourteen, had followed his favorite teacher to Berlin. There he fell in love with modern secular learning and, at prodigious speed, mastered German, French, English, Latin, mathematics, and philosophy.
He longed to take part in the German Enlightenment, became a personal friend of Kant’s, and spent all his free time in study. His first book, Phaedon (1767), was an attempt to prove the immortality of the soul on rational grounds, and had nothing particularly Jewish about it.
Against his will, however, Mendelssohn found himself obliged to defend Judaism when he encountered Enlightenment hostility to the Jewish faith. In 1769, Johan Casper Lavater, a Swiss pastor, challenged Mendelssohn to defend Judaism in public; if he could not refute the rational proofs of Christianity, Lavater declared, he should submit to baptism. Mendelssohn was also disturbed by the anti-Semitic prejudice in a pamphlet written by a Prussian state official, Christian Wilhelm Van Dohm, On the Civic Improvement of the Condition of the Jews (1781).
In order to function effectively and competitively in the modern world, Van Dohm argued, a nation must mobilize the talents of as many people as possible, so it made sense to emancipate the Jews and integrate them more fully into society, even though they should not be granted citizenship or permitted to hold public office. The underlying assumption was that Jews were objectionable and their religion was barbaric.
Reluctantly, Mendelssohn felt bound to respond, and in 1783 he published Jerusalem, Concerning Religious Authority and Judaism. The German Enlightenment was quite positive toward religion, and Mendelssohn himself seemed to share the same serene deist faith as Locke, though it is difficult to recognize it as Judaism. Mendelssohn seemed to find the existence of a benevolent God a matter of common sense, but insisted that reason must precede faith. We could only accept the authority of the Bible after we had demonstrated its truth rationally. This, of course, totally reversed the priorities of traditional, conservative faith, which took it for granted that reason could not demonstrate the truth of the kind of myths found in the scriptures.
Mendelssohn also argued for the separation of church and state, and for the privatization of religion--a solution that was very attractive to Jews who longed to shake off the restrictions of the ghetto and become involved in mainstream European culture. By making their faith a purely personal affair, they could both remain Jewish and become good Europeans. Mendelssohn insisted that Judaism was a rational faith that was eminently suited to the temper of the times; its doctrines were based on reason. When God had revealed himself to Moses on Mount Sinai, he had brought the Jewish people a law and not a set of doctrines. Judaism was, therefore, only concerned with morality and human behavior; it left the minds of Jews entirely free.
Mendelssohn seemed to have little understanding of the mystical and mythical element in Judaism; his was the first of a number of attempts to make Judaism acceptable to the modern world by forcing it into a rationalistic mold that was alien to it--as it was alien to most religions.
Mendelssohn’s ideas were, of course, anathema to the Hasidim and Misnagdim of Eastern Europe, as well as to the more Orthodox Jews of the Western world. He was reviled as a new Spinoza, a heretic who had abandoned the faith and gone over to the gentiles. Yet this would have grieved Mendelssohn; while he clearly found much of traditional Judaism incredible and alien, he did not want to abandon the Jewish God or his Jewish identity.
He had a significant number of disciples, however. Ever since the Shabbetai Zevi affair, many Jews had shown that they longed to transcend the strictures of traditional Judaism, which they found confining. They were happy to follow Mendelssohn’s example: to mix in gentile society, study the new sciences, and keep their faith a private matter. Mendelssohn was one of the first to devise a way out of the ghetto into modern Europe that did not oblige Jews to reject their people and their own cultural heritage.
Besides engaging in the intellectual life of the Enlightenment, some of these Jewish maskillm (“enlightened ones”) began to study their own heritage from a more secular standpoint. Some of them, as we shall see, would undertake a modern, scientific exploration of Jewish history; others began to study and to write in Hebrew, the sacred tongue which among Orthodox Jews was reserved for prayer and works of devotion. Now Maskilim began to create a new Hebrew literature, secularizing this holy language. They were trying to find a modern way of being Jewish, to shed what they regarded as the superstitions of the past and to make Judaism acceptable to enlightened society.
Their ability to take part in the life of the mainstream culture, however, was seriously limited by externally imposed restrictions: Jews were given no legal recognition by the state, could not participate in political life, and were still officially a race apart. But the Maskilim had great hopes of the Enlightenment. They noted that after the American Revolution, Jews had been granted citizenship in the secular polity of the United States. When Napoleon Bonaparte, a ruler imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment, came to power in France and began to build a mighty empire, it seemed for a while that after centuries of persecution Jews would finally be granted equality and respect in Europe as well.
Liberty had been the battle cry of the French Revolution, and was the watchword of Napoleon’s government in France. To the incredulous joy of those Jews who longed to escape the ghetto, Napoleon announced that the Jews of France would become full citizens of the republic. On July 29, 18o6, Jewish businessmen, bankers, and rabbis were summoned to the Hotel de Ville in Paris, where they swore fealty to the state. A few weeks later, Napoleon convened a body of Jewish notables he called the “Great Sanhedrin”--the Sanhedrin being the Jewish governing council which had not sat since the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 ce. The mandate of this body was to give religious sanction to the resolutions of the previous assembly. Jews were ecstatic. Rabbis declared that the French Revolution was the “second law from Mount Sinai,”
“our exodus from Egypt, our modern Pesach”; “the Messianic age has arrived with this new society of liierte, egalite ,fraternite. As Napoleon’s armies swept through Europe, he introduced these egalitarian principles into every country he occupied:
the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Prussia. One principality after another was forced to emancipate its Jews.
But even during the first assembly of i8o6, Enlightenment hostility to the Jewish people surfaced in an offensive address by Louis Count Mole, Napoleon’s commissioner. He had heard that Jewish moneylenders in Alsace were evading conscription and fleecing the population. The Jewish delegates to the Assembly, therefore, had the task of revitalizing that sense of civic morality which their people had lost during the long centuries of “degrading existence.” On March 17, 1808, Napoleon imposed economic strictures on the Jews, which were later called the “Infamous Decrees.”
During the three years that they were enforced, thousands of Jewish families were ruined. As the American historian Norman Cantor points out, Napoleon offered the Jews a “Faustian bargain”: they had to sell their unique Jewish soul in exchange for emancipation. For all its inspiring talk about liberte, the modern, centralized state was unable to tolerate autonomous anomalies such as the ghetto. The enlightened polity had to be legally and culturally uniform, and Jews presented a “problem” that must be rationalized away. They must become assimilated, bourgeois Frenchmen, abandon their separate way of life, and privatize their religion: Jews as Jews had to vanish.
The French solution became the pattern of Jewish emancipation in the rest of Europe. The new toleration was an improvement on the old segregation, but it was the result not solely of the noble idealism of the Enlightenmentbut of the needs of the modern state. A similar pragmatism had, as we have seen, led to the constitutional acceptance of pluralism in the United States. If they were to respond effectively to the challenge of the modern world and build a prosperous society, governments had to use all the human resources at their disposal.
Whatever the official religion of the state, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, and secularists were all needed in the new economic and industrial programs. The fabled business acumen of the Jews was particularly desirable, and it was deemed essential to harness this asset to the benefit of the state.
The old prejudices remained, however. Except in France and Holland, the rights granted to the Jews were withdrawn after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo (1815) and the collapse of his empire. Jews were herded back into the ghettos, the old restrictions returned, and there were new pogroms.
But the needs of the modern state eventually forced one government after another to extend full citizenship to its Jews, provided that they accepted the Faustian bargain. Those states that granted equality and citizenship to Jews, such as Britain, France, Holland, Austria, and Germany, prospered; those eastern European states that did not democratize but tried to confine the benefits of modernity to an elite, fell behind. By 1870, Jewish emancipation had been achieved throughout western Europe; in eastern Europe and Russia, however, where governments used more coercive methods of abolishing Jewish separatism, millions of Jews were alienated from the modern state and clung defiantly to rabbinic and Hasidic traditions.
But in the first years after the original rights granted by Napoleon had been rescinded, many young Jews felt stranded and betrayed. They had received a good secular education, and were ready to take part in modern society, but were now prevented from doing so. Mendelssohn had shown them a way out of the ghetto, Napoleon had promised freedom, and they were unable to return to the traditional way of life. In their frustration, many German Jews converted to Christianity in order to assimilate to the mainstream culture. Others became convinced that if Judaism was to survive, they would have to take drastic action to prevent this stream of conversions.
Two related movements developed in Germany, both of which had their roots in the Jewish Enlightenment. The Maskilim believed that they could act as a bridge from the ghetto to the modern world. They could speak good German and had gentile friends, and in public seemed perfectly attuned to the European way of life. Now some of them decided to reform the religion of Judaism itself, to make it fit more easily into the modern world.
This Reform Judaism began as an almost wholly pragmatic movement and, as such, was guided entirely according to the principles of logos. Its aim, indeed, was to abolish the mythos of Judaism. Israel Jacobson (1768-1828) believed that if Judaism appeared less outlandish to the German people, this would improve the chances of emancipation. A layman and philanthropist, he established a school in Seesen, near the Garz mountains, where students studied secular as well as Jewish subjects. He also opened a synagogue where worship appeared to be more Protestant than Jewish. Prayers were said in the vernacular instead of Hebrew; there was German choral singing, a mixed choir, and a sermon in German, which was much more central to the service than before. The traditional rites were drastically reduced. In 1815, Jacobson and other laymen brought this modernized worship to Berlin, where they opened what they called private “temples” to distinguish them from the regular synagogues. In 1817, Edward Kley founded a new temple in Hamburg, where the reforms were even more revolutionary. Prayers pleading for the coming of the Messiah and the return to Zion were replaced by a prayer celebrating the brotherhood of all humanity: how could Jews pray for the restoration of a messianic state in Palestine when they wanted to become German citizens? By 1822, confirmation services, on the Protestant model, were held for girls and boys; the separate seating of men and women at services was also abandoned. The rabbis of Hamburg condemned this reform movement and even managed, by appealing to the Prussian government, to get the Berlin temples closed down. During the following years, therefore, many young Jews who might have found this reformed Judaism congenial, converted to Christianity.
But the Hamburg temple remained open and new ones were established in Leipzig, Vienna, and Denmark.
In America, the playwright Isaac Harby founded a reformed temple in Charleston. Reform would become very popular among American Jews, and, by 1870, a substantial proportion of the two hundred synagogues in the United States had adopted at least some Reform practices.
Reform Judaism belonged entirely to the modern world; it was rational, pragmatic, and strongly disposed to privatize faith. Reformers were willing--indeed, eager--to make a radical break with the past and to jettison traditional doctrines and devotions. Instead of seeing the exile as an existential calamity, the Reformers felt perfectly at home in the Diaspora.
All promoted Judaism as a religion imbued with all the virtues of modernity:
it was rational, liberal, and humane, ready to shed its archaic particularisms and become a universal faith. The Reformers had no time for the irrational, the mystical, or the mysterious. If old beliefs and values were preventing Jews from making a productive contribution to modern life, they must be eliminated. In the early days, their concerns were entirely practical, but by the 184os, Reform had begun to attract scholars and rabbis who had undertaken a critical study of Jewish history. Leopold Zunz (1794--1886), Zachariah Frankel (1801--75), Nachman Krochmal (1785--1840), and Abraham Geiger (1810-74) subjected the sacred sources of Judaism to modern scientific methods of inquiry. They formed a school, aptly known as “the Science of Judaism,” that was clearly influenced by the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. Judaism, they argued, was not a faith that had been revealed once and for all in the past; it had evolved slowly, becoming ever more rational and self-conscious in the process. Religious experiences, which had hitherto been expressed in visions, could now be conceptualized and apprehended by the critical intelligence. In other words, mythos had now been transmuted into logos.
The scholars tried to strike a careful balance among the various Jewish positions. Krochmal and Frankel agreed with traditionalists, for example, that the Torah had been revealed to Moses all at once on Mount Sinai, but enraged them by denying the divine origin of the Halakhah, the vast development and elaboration of Jewish law founded upon the Torah. Frankel argued that the Halakhah was entirely man-made, the product of reason, and that it could, therefore, be changed to meet the needs of the age.