Introduction

Krochmal argued that Jewish history showed that Judaism had always borrowed ideas from other cultures; this was how it had managed to survive.
There was, therefore, no reason why Jews could not study the modern world and adopt some of its new values. Indeed, this was the only way to stop Jews converting to Christianity in order to enjoy the benefits and challenge of modern society. Geiger believed that Mendelssohn had inaugurated a new Jewish era; Reform Judaism would liberate the faith by giving it a healthy injection of enlightenment philosophy.
But the Science of Judaism was sometimes critical of Reform. Krochmal, for example, was an observant Jew who was faithful to the old rites that the Reformers were abolishing. Frankel and Zunz both believed that there was great danger in such wholesale abolition of tradition.
In 1849, Zunz wrote an article that presented Jewish rituals as outer signs of fundamental truths. Dietary laws and the wearing of phylacteries had, over the centuries, become an essential part of the Jewish experience; without these rites, Judaism would degenerate into a system of abstract doctrines. Zunz could appreciate the crucial importance of cult, which alone made the myths and beliefs of religion comprehensible. Frankel could also see the importance of ritual in helping people to create the correct spiritual attitudes. He feared that the Reformers were becoming so rational that they were losing touch with their feelings. Reason alone could not satisfy the emotions or produce the joy and delight that traditional Judaism, at its best, had always been able to inspire. It was wrong to abolish the complex, ancient rites of Yom Kippur or to omit all mention of a messianic return to Zion, because these images had shaped Jewish consciousness and helped Jews to cultivate a sense of awe and find hope in intolerable circumstances. Some change was certainly necessary, but the Reformers often seemed insensitive to the role of emotion in worship.
Zunz and Frankel were alert to the essentially mythical component of religion and did not subscribe wholly to the modern tendency to see reason alone as the gateway to truth. Geiger, for his part, was an out-and-out rationalist, and in favor of sweeping reforms. Yet, over the years, Reform Jews have recognized the wisdom of Zunz’s and Frankel’s concerns, and have reinstated some of the traditional practices, finding that without an emotive, mystical element, faith and worship lose their soul.
Both the Reformers and the scholars of the Science of Judaism were preoccupied with the survival of their religion in a world that seemed, however benevolently, bent on destroying it. As they watched their fellow Jews rushing to the baptismal font, they were deeply concerned for the future of Judaism and were desperate to find ways of ensuring that it continued to exist. We shall find that many religious people in the modern world have shared this anxiety. In all three of the monotheistic faiths, there has been recurrent alarm that the traditional faith is in deadly danger. The dread of annihilation is one of the most fundamental of human terrors, and many of the religious movements that have arisen in the modern world have sprung from this fear of extinction. As the secular spirit took hold and as the prevailing rationalism became more hostile to faith, religious people became increasingly defensive and their spirituality more embattled.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, traditional Jews--whom the Reformers called Altglaubigen, “old believers”--had certainly begun to feel beleaguered. Even after emancipation, they continued to live as though the ghetto walls were still in place. They immersed themselves totally in the study of Torah and Talmud, and insisted that modernity was to be shunned.
gentile studies were, they believed, incompatible with Judaism. One of their leading spokesmen was Rabbi Moses Sofer of Pressburg (1763--1839). He was opposed to any change or accommodation to modernity--God, after all, did not change; he forbade his children to read Mendelssohn’s books and refused to allow them a secular education or to participate in modern society in any way. His instinctive response, in sum, was to retreat. But other traditionalists felt it necessary to take a more creative stand against the danger of secularizing, rationalizing influences.
In 1803, Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner, a disciple of the Gaon of Vilna, took a decisive step that would transform traditional Jewish spirituality, when he founded the Etz Hayyim yeshiva in Volozhin, Lithuania. Other new yeshivot were founded in the course of the century in other parts of eastern Europe:
in Mir, Telz, Slobodka, Lomza, and Novogrudok. In the past, a yeshiva (a word that derives from the Hebrew for “to sit”) had simply been a series of small rooms behind the synagogue where students studied Torah and Talmud. It had usually been administered by the local community.
Volozhin, however, was something entirely different. Here, hundreds of gifted students came from all over Europe to study with internationally famous experts. The curriculum was demanding, the hours were long, and admission to the yeshiva far from easy. Rabbi Hayyim taught Talmud according to the method he had learned from the Gaon, analyzing the text and stressing the importance of logical consistency, but in a way that yielded a spiritual encounter with the divine. It was not simply a matter of learning about the Talmud; the process of rote learning, preparation, and lively discussion was just as important as any final conclusion reached in class, because it was a form of prayer, a ritual that gave the students a sense of the sacred. It was an intense existence. The young men were isolated in a quasi-monastic community, their spiritual and intellectual lives entirely shaped by the yeshiva.
They were separated from their families and friends and immersed wholly in the world of Jewish scholarship. Some of the students were permitted to spend a little time on modern philosophy or mathematics, but such secular subjects were secondary, regarded as stealing time from the Torah.
The purpose of the new yeshivot had been to counter the threat of Hasidism; the yeshivot were distinctively Misnagdic enterprises, designed to reinstate the rigorous study of Torah. But as the century progressed, the Jewish Enlightenment came to be perceived as more of a threat, and Hasidim and Misnagdim began to join forces against the Maskilim, whom they saw as a sort of Trojan Horse, bringing the evils of secular culture within the walls of Jewish communities. Gradually, therefore, the new yeshivot became bastions of orthodoxy, whose primary task was to ward off this insidious danger. Only the study of Torah could prevent the extinction of true Judaism.
The yeshiva would become the defining institution of the ultra-Orthodox fundamentalism that would develop in the twentieth century. It was one of the first manifestations of this emergent and embattled type of religiosity, and we can learn important lessons from it.
Fundamentalism--whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim--rarely arises as a battle with an external enemy (in the case of Volozhin, this external enemy would have been gentile European culture); it usually begins, instead, as an internal struggle in which traditionalists fight their own co religionists who, they believe, are making too many concessions to the secular world. The fundamentalist will often instinctively respond to encroaching modernity by creating an enclave of pure faith, such as a yeshiva. This marks a withdrawal from the Godless world into a self-contained community where the faithful attempt to reshape existence in defiance of the changes without. It is thus essentially a defensive move. This retreat, however, has within it the potential for a future counteroffensive.
The students of such zyeshiva are likely to become a cadre, with a shared training and ideology, in their local communities. Such an enclave helps to create a counterculture, an alternative to modern society. The head of the yeshiva (the rosh yeshiva became not unlike a Hasidic Zaddik, exerting enormous influence over his students. He came to demand absolute obedience to the commandments and to tradition, which put a curb on their creativity and capacity for original thought.
The yeshiva thus evolved an ethos that was directly opposed to the modern spirit and its emphasis on autonomy and innovation.
The principal purpose of the Volozhin and its sister yeshivot was not, however, to do battle with the secular culture of Europe but to guard the souls of its young men by steeping them in the traditions of the old world.
But herein lies a paradox that would constantly recur in the history of fundamentalism.
Despite its attachment to the conservative spirit, Volozhin and the other new yeshivot were essentially modern and modernizing institutions.
They were committed to the centralization and rationalization of Talmud study. Their creation also implied the possibility of choice. In the ghetto, the traditional way of life had been unchangeable; its values and customs had been experienced as given and beyond question. No other lifestyle had been possible for Jews. But now a Jew had to make a conscious decision to enter an institution such as Volozhin and commit himself to tradition. In a world that had made religion a matter of personal choice, Volozhin was itself a voluntary institution.
Even when fundamentalists set their faces against modernity, their faith is, to an extent, modern and innovative.
Other Jews tried to steer a middle course. In 1851, eleven traditionalist members of the Frankfurt community, which was now dominated by Reform, asked the municipality for permission to form their own religious association. They invited Samuel Raphael Hirsch (1808--88) to become their rabbi. Immediately, Hirsch established secondary and elementary schools in which both Jewish and secular subjects were studied, with financial aid from the Rothschild family.
As Hirsch pointed out, it was only in the ghetto that Jews had neglected the study of philosophy, medicine, and mathematics. In the past, Jewish thinkers had sometimes taken a leading role in the intellectual life of the mainstream culture, particularly in the Islamic world. In the ghetto, Jews had been separated from nature and they had, perforce, neglected the study of the natural sciences.
Judaism, Hirsch was convinced, had nothing to fear from contact with other cultures. Jews should embrace as many modern developments as they could, but without becoming as iconoclastic as the Reformers. As a young man, Hirsch had published Nineteen Letters of Ben Uyiel (1836), which made a moving plea for more orthodox observance, but he blamed the rigid traditionalists, who shunned modernity, for the widespread defections to Christianity and to Reform. He did not subscribe to their fundamentalist literalism either. Jews, he believed, should seek out the hidden, inner meaning of the various commandments by means of careful study and research. Laws that made no rational sense could serve as reminders.
The practice of circumcision, for example, called to mind the duty to keep the body pure; the prohibition against mixing meat and milk symbolized the need to preserve the divine order in creation. All the laws must be observed because they built character and, by making Jews holy, enabled them to fulfill their moral mission to humanity. Hirsch’s middle road became known as Neo-Orthodoxy. His career shows, yet again, the voluntary nature of religious orthodoxy in the modern world.
Where once tradition had been taken for granted, now Jews had to fight and argue in order to become Orthodox.
In Egypt and Iran, Muslims had an entirely different experience of the modernizing West. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, he inaugurated a new phase in the relations of East and West. His plan was to establish a base in Suez, whence he could harass Britain’s sea-lanes to India and also, perhaps, attack the Ottoman empire from Syria. This meant that Egypt and Palestine became a theater in the war for world domination between England and France. It was a European power game, but Napoleon presented himself to the Egyptians as the bearer of progress and enlightenment. After he defeated the Mamluk cavalry in the Battle of the Pyramids on July 21, 1798, he issued a proclamation in Arabic in which he promised to liberate Egypt from foreign rule. For centuries, Mamluks from Circassia and Georgia had exploited the people of Egypt, but now this tyranny was at an end.
He was no latter-day Crusader, he assured the ulema, whom he knew to be the representatives of the indigenous Egyptians. Anybody who believed that he had come to destroy their religion should be assured that I have come to restore your rights, which have been invaded by usurpers--that I adore God more than the Mamelukes and that I respect the Prophet Muhammad and the Noble Koran. Tell them that all men are equal before God--that intelligence, virtue, and science, are the only distinctions between them.
But this liberation and science had come with a modern army. The Egyptians had just watched this extraordinary fighting machine inflict a devastating defeat upon the Mamluks; only ten French soldiers had been killed and thirty wounded, whereas the Mamluks had lost over two thousand men, four hundred camels, and fifty guns. This liberation obviously had an aggressive edge, as did the modern scientific Institut d’Egypte, whose careful researches into the history of the region had enabled Napoleon to make his proclamation in Arabic and to be reasonably conversant with the ideals and institutions of Islam.
Scholarship and science had become a means of promoting European interests in the Middle East and subjecting its peoples to French rule.
The ulema were not impressed.
“All this is nothing but deceit and trickery, they said, to entice us.
Bonaparte is nothing but a Christian, son of a Christian. They were perturbed by the prospect of infidel rule. The Koran taught that as long as men and women organized their societies according to God’s will, they could not fail, yet now the Islamic forces had been soundly defeated by a foreign power. Al-Jabarti, a sheikh of the Azhar madras ah saw the invasion as the beginning of major battles; formidable happenings; calamitous occurrences;
terrible catastrophes; the multiplication of evils, ... the disruption of time; the inversion of the natural order; the bouleversement of manmade conventions.
He was experiencing that sense of the world turned upside down which has so often accompanied the onset of modernization. For all its inflated rhetoric, al-Jabarti’s dismay was not entirely misplaced.
Napoleon’s invasion was the beginning of the Western control of the Middle East, which has indeed been a reversal, causing the people to revise many of their most fundamental beliefs and expectations.
Napoleon gave the ulema more power than they had ever had before. He wanted to make them his allies against the Turks and Mamluks, and so gave them the highest positions in government, but the ulema could not respond in the way he wished. The Egyptians had been dominated by Mamluks and Turks for so long that direct rule was an entirely alien notion. Some refused to take the posts that he offered them, preferring the consultative role they were used to. They knew nothing about defense or the imposition of law and order, and they preferred to stick to what they knew best: the administration of religious, legal, and Islamic affairs. Most of the ulema did cooperate, however; feeling they had little choice, they stepped into the vacuum and helped to restore order, acting as mediators between the government and the people, as they had always done. A few led abortive revolts against the French in October 1798 and March 1800, but these were quickly put down. They remained bewildered by the French. They could not understand Napoleon’s Enlightenment ideology of freedom and autonomy. A world of difference now divided Egyptians and Europeans. When Jabarti visited the Institut d’Egypte, he admired the enthusiasm and scholarship of the French scientists, but did not know what to make of their experiments.
He was particularly bemused by the hot-air balloon. There was no place in his mental universe for such a thing and he simply could not see it in the same way as a European, who had two hundred years of empirical science behind him.
“They have strange things and objects,” he recorded afterwards, “which show effects which our minds are too small to comprehend.”
In 1801, the British managed to throw the French out of Egypt; at this point, the British were committed to preserving the integrity of the Ottoman empire and so they returned Egypt to the Turks, making no attempt to establish British rule in Egypt. But the takeover was chaotic. The Mamluks refused to accept the new Turkish governor from Istanbul, and for over two years, Mamluks, Janissaries, and the Albanian garrison sent by the Ottomans fought each other and terrorized the population. During the confusion, a young Albanian officer called Muhammad All (1769--1849) seized control.
Weary of the confusion and disillusioned by the incompetence of the Mamluks, the ulema supported him. Under the remarkable alim Umar Makram, the ulema led a popular uprising against the Turks and sent a delegation to Istanbul requesting that Muhammad All be confirmed as pasha, or governor, of Egypt. The sultan agreed and there was huge excitement in Cairo. A French observer wrote that the enthusiasm of the crowds reminded him of the French Revolution. This was the ulema s finest hour. Muhammad All had secured their support by promising that he would make no changes in Egypt without consulting them first.
Everybody assumed that the status quo had been restored and that, after the upheavals of the previous few years, life could at last return to normal.
But Muhammad All had quite different plans. He had fought the French in Egypt and had been hugely impressed by this modern European army; he wanted an up-to-date and super-efficient army of his own, and he was determined to create a modern state in Egypt that was independent of Istanbul.
Muhammad All had no interest in the intellectual revolution that had taken place in the West. He was an uneducated man of peasant stock who only learned to read in his forties; all he required of books was that they teach him about government and military science. Like many later reformers, Muhammad All simply wanted to acquire the technology and military strength of modernity, and he was perfectly prepared to ignore the effect these changes would have on the cultural and spiritual life of the country. Nevertheless, Muhammad All was a remarkable man and his achievement was considerable When he died in 1849, he had almost single-handedly dragged Egypt, a backward, isolated province of the Ottoman empire, into the modern world.
His career provides some illuminating insights into the difficulties of bringing Western modernity to a non-Western society.
First, we must remember that the West had come to modernity gradually, under its own steam. It had taken the people of Europe and America nearly three hundred years to acquire the technology and expertise that would bring them world hegemony. But even so, it had been a wrenching, disturbing process that had involved copious bloodshed as well as spiritual dislocation. Now Muhammad Ah was attempting this highly complex transformation in a mere forty years. To achieve his objectives, he found that he had to declare what amounted to war against the people of Egypt. Egypt was in an appalling state.
Pillaging and destruction had taken their toll; the fellahin had deserted their lands and fled to Syria; taxes were heavy and arbitrary;
the Mamluks threatened to make a comeback. How was it possible to turn this wretched country into a strong, centralized state with a modern administration and a modern army? The West was so far ahead. How could Egypt hope to catch up, beat the West at its own game, and prevent further Western invasion and encroachment?
Muhammad All started to build his empire by annihilating the Mamluk leaders. In August 1805, he simply enticed their principal officers into Cairo, ambushed them, and killed all but three. The remaining beys were massacred by his son Ibrahim during the next two years, while Muhammad All dealt with the British, who were alarmed by this surprisingly effective leadership.
Finally, he acceded to pressure from the Ottoman sultan and dispatched an expedition against the Wahhabis in Arabia, who were rebelling against Ottoman hegemony. The army would be under the leadership of his son Tassan, who received his solemn investiture in a grand ceremony in Cairo.
As the procession wound through the streets of the city, Muhammad Ali’s men trapped the last Mamluk chiefs, killed them, and were then allowed to run amok, looting Mamluk houses and raping their women. One thousand Mamluks were massacred that day, and it was the end of the Mamluk caste in Egypt. Yet again, modernization had begun with an act of ethnic cleansing.
It seems that in order to bring a people into the modern world, a leader must be prepared to wade through blood. In the absence of stable, democratic institutions, violence may be the only way to achieve strong government.
Muhammad All was equally ruthless regarding the economy. He was astute enough to realize that the real basis of Western power lay in scientific methods of production. Over the years 1805 to 1814, he systematically made himself the personal owner of every acre of land in the country. He had already acquired the estates of the Mamluks; next he appropriated the holdings of the tax farmers, who had long been operating a corrupt system. Finally, he took over all the religiously endowed lands and properties (awqaf) that had declined over the years, personally undertaking to pay all outstanding obligations to the foundations. Using similarly arbitrary methods, he achieved the monopoly of every trade and industrial enterprise in the country. In just over a decade, he made himself the sole landlord, merchant, and industrialist in Egypt. The Egyptians put up with this because there were huge compensations.
After years of chaos and mismanagement, law and order had been imposed on the country; justice was administered fairly, and everybody had the right to complain directly to Muhammad All himself. He was clearly not lining his own pockets with the proceeds, but developing Egypt. His greatest achievement was the cultivation of cotton, which became a valuable export and source of revenue, giving the pasha the foreign currency he needed to buy machinery, weapons, and manufactured goods from Europe.
Yet this itself showed his dependence upon the West. The whole modernizing effort in Europe had been fueled by the need for autonomy and punctuated by declarations of independence in various fields--intellectual, economic, religious, and political. But the only way Muhammad All could make himself master of Egypt and independent of Europe was by absolute despotic control. He could not succeed unless he was able to build a strong industrial base. Accordingly, he established a sugar refinery, an arsenal, copper mines, cotton mills, iron found aries dyeing works, glass factories, and printing works. But industrialization could not be achieved all at once. Europeans had found that to man their various enterprises, more and more of the ordinary people had to acquire the efficiency and specialized skills that were required by the modern processes. But this took time. The fellahin who worked in Muhammad Ali’s factories had no technical expertise, no experience, and could not adapt to a life away from their fields. They would need education if they were to contribute to the productivity of the country, and that in itself would mean a vast, almost unthinkable social upheaval. Consequently, most of Muhammad Ali’s industrial enterprises failed.
The modernizing process was thus very difficult indeed, the problems almost insuperable. In Europe, the watchword had been innovation. But most Egyptians were still dominated by the premodern conservative spirit.