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ABSTRACT
This article charts the broad and transforming effects of the European Enlightenment and the Jewish Haskalah on Zionism and on modern Israel’s government, judiciary, and political discourse. It traces this complex legacy using a semantic distinction between two Modern Hebrew terms for the Enlightenment, haskalah and ne’orut, that illustrates their importance in the political and discursive legacies of the State of Israel. The article then explores the recent populist and nationalist assaults against some of these legacies.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Dionysis Drosos for his wonderful friendship and intellectual inspiration, to David Biale, Rachel Biale and Israel Bartal for their helpful comments, to Nathaniel Wolloch and The European Legacy’s editorial team for their patience and support, and to my research assistant, Danit Illiescu.
Notes
1. “Enlightenment” is understood here as the historical intellectual movement, culture, or cluster of ideas and some of its conceptual progeny. As to “the European Enlightenment,” it is a treacherous phrase, simplifying a plethora of national and cultural variations. I nevertheless use it here to make a clear demarcation between the Jewish Enlightenment and the Enlightenment in general.
2. Thus, in Modern Hebrew’s present-day usage, haskalah means either ‘education’ or ‘Enlightenment’. Here I will be using italicized haskalah for Enlightenment, and ‘the Haskalah’ for the Jewish Enlightenment movement.
3. The feminine forms are maskila and ne’ora.
4. Katz, Out of the Ghetto; Sorkin, Transformation of German Jewry; Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment.
5. Bartal, Jews of Eastern Europe. See also Endelman, Jews of Georgian England, 4–8.
6. Zipperstein, “Jewish Enlightenment in Odessa,” 19–36.
7. Oz and Oz-Salzberger, Jews and Words, esp. chap. 4.
8. Sorkin’s Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment is the classic study of the cohabitation of early Haskalah and religiosity. Feiner’s Origins of Jewish Secularization brings secularization back to the fore as a major Haskalah project. This focus was, in turn, criticized in Benbaji’s “Maskilim as Defenders of the Text,” 107–144.
9. Oz and Oz-Salzberger, Jews and Words.
10. Ettinger’s “Yehudim bitzvat ha-haskalah” is cited in English translation in Litvak’s, Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism, 75.
11. I owe this insight to Shlomo Avineri, who made this illuminating point in lectures on Herzl and Moses Hess.
12. Litvak reinterprets the Haskalah as a Romanticist national movement, which she deems inimical to the Enlightenment. However, the facile equation of Enlightenment with rationalism alone, now rejected by major scholarship, omits the Herderian link (along with Vico, Ferguson, and other pioneers of cultural pluralism). Litvak’s interpretation thus ignores an important recent insight into the Enlightenment’s breadth and depth.
13. For a more critical view of the maskilim’s internal discourse, discussing cases of harsh disagreement and strife between different strands of the Haskalah, see Benbaji, “Maskilim as Defenders of the Text.”
14. Biale, Hasidism.
15. Berlin, “The Achievement of Zionism”; Oz-Salzberger, “Isaiah Berlin on Nationalism,” 169–91.
16. “Today Zionism has unfortunately developed a nationalistic phase. The origins of Zionism were very civilized and Herderian,” Berlin said in 1992. Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, 71.
17. Bartal, Tangled Roots.
18. Avineri, Making of Modern Zionism.
19. Bach, Tropics of Vienna, chaps. 3–4.
20. Herzl, Old-New Land, 273. See Avineri, Herzl’s Vision; Bloom, “Influence of Austrian Humanism,” 175–92.
21. In A Tale of Love and Darkness, Amos Oz recalls his father’s words to him on the night of the United Nations’ approval of a Jewish state. “From now on, from the moment we have our own state, you will never be bullied just because you are a Jew and because Jews are so-and-sos. Not that. Never again. From tonight that’s finished here. For ever” (359).
22. Bartal,Tangled Roots; Shapira, “The Bible and Israeli Identity,” 11–41.
23. For an overview, see Shindler, Rise of the Israeli Right.
24. Weizmann, Trial and Error, esp. chap. 2; Shapira, Ben Gurion.
25. Avineri, Herzl’s Vision, 38.
26. Schochet, Oz-Salzberger, and Jones, eds., Political Hebraism; Shalev, American Zion.
27. Elboim and Brom, “Why Was Democracy Omitted,” 33–47.
28. “Proclamation of Independence,” Official Gazette, 1, 4.5.1948.
29. I discuss the Jewish case, where the nation’s Herderian Schwerpunkt includes universalist moral values, in “Isaiah Berlin on Nationalism,” 185–88.
30. Civil marriage is still illegal in Israel, although civil marriages conducted abroad are accepted. Moreover, progressive non-marital cohabitation legislation has been in place since the 1970s, providing a solution for cross-religion relationships and making Israel a pioneer of LGBTQ rights.
31. A more radical version of this argument is that Zionist historians shunned the Haskalah due to its non-Zionist components. Zalkin, “Between the Humanists and the Nationalists,” 177–92.
32. Avraham Even-Shoshan, Dictionary, vol. 2, 818–19, entry ‘na’or’. This authoritative Hebrew dictionary, first published in 1948–52, did not yet include the noun ‘ne’orut’.
33. This and the following passages draw on Oz-Salzberger and Salzberger, “Hidden German Sources of the Israeli Supreme Court,” 79–122.
34. Ibid., 114; Avnon, “Ha-tzibur ha-na’or,” 417–52.
35. For examples of this critique see Jamal, “Zionist Liberalism,” 789–823; and Mautner, “Israel’s 1977 Upheaval,” 1033–49. For a radically anti-Zionist view of Israel’s “European Enlightenment ideals of Civilization and the Superiority of Whiteness,” see Erakat, “Whiteness as Property in Israel,” 69–103.
36. Schindler, Rise of the Israeli Right.
37. Pedhatzur, Triumph of Israel’s Radical Right.
38. Social network influencers consistently use the terms ne’orut and ne’orim, without inverted commas, to denounce liberal Ashkenazim. Orthodox anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ campaigners condemn the Enlightenment as inimical to Jewish values.
39. Berlin, “Jewish Slavery and Emancipation,” 222.
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Fania Oz-Salzberger
Fania Oz-Salzberger is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Haifa’s Faculty of Law. Her books include Translating the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1995), Israelis in Berlin (Jerusalem, 2001; Frankfurt am Main, 2001), and, with Amos Oz, Jews and Words (New Haven, 2012). She is the author and editor of numerous scholarly works in the history of ideas.