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ABSTRACT
Intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin saw a totalitarian and dogmatic tendency within the Enlightenment tradition which he called “optimistic monism,” that is, the idea that personal freedom and cultural differences have to be sacrificed for universal goals and the progress of human perfection. Thus, he turned to the proponents of the “Counter-Enlightenment” in order to render the negative traits of enlightened universalism visible. Although the Haskalah would have served well as an example of a pluralistic critique of enlightened monism, it is quite surprising that Berlin hardly wrote anything about the Jewish Enlightenment or its contemporary critics. This paper argues that this is due to a misinterpretation of Moses Mendelssohn as well as to a specific Jewish version of Berlin’s own Counter-Enlightenment, which connects to his Zionism as an answer to the failure of assimilation.
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Notes
1 Berlin, “The Purpose of Philosophy,” 14.
2 Ibid., 12.
3 Mirecki/Beduhn, The Light and the Darkness; Matytstin/Edelstein, Let There Be Enlightenment.
4 It should be noted that the term “dark” also carries strong racial connotations in the tradition of Western philosophy. Berlin unconsciously drew on this tradition in the above-mentioned formulation when he combined the words “dark” and “wildly”.
5 The term “Berlin Haskalah,” which is widely used in the literature, is replaced here by “Prussian Haskalah” in order to avoid misunderstandings. The “Berlin” or “Prussian Haskalah” of Moses Mendelssohn and his friends and disciples in Berlin and Koenigsberg is to be differentiated from the Early Haskalah and especially the Haskalah movement in Galicia and Russia in the nineteenth century. Cf. Feiner, “Towards a Historical Definition.”
6 See the classic study by Gay, The Enlightenment. For a more recent discussion of the notion of “enlightenment” in different languages, see the insightful remarks by Stewart, “Preface,” xi–xiii. Stuke, “Aufklärung,” claims that the German term “Aufklärung” was a neologism of the eighteenth century.
7 Cf. Garrard, Counter-Enlightenments; Jung, “Gegenaufklärung.”
8 Cf. Piirimäe, “Berlin, Herder, and the Counter-Enlightenment;” Lifshitz, “Between Friedrich Meinecke and Ernst Cassirer.”
9 Cf. Norton, “The Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment;” Lestition, “Countering, Transposing, or Negating the Enlightenment?;” Mali, “The Invention of the Counter-Enlightenment.”
10 Cf. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment.
11 Berlin, The Age of the Enlightenment, 234.
12 Cf. Brockliss/Robertson, Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment.
13 For biographic details see Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin; Dubnov, Isaiah Berlin.
14 Cf. Mali/Wokler, Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment.
15 Lukács, The Destruction of Reason.
16 Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition.
17 Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, 70.
18 Ibid.
19 A very similar argument was made by Arendt, “Aufklärung und Judenfrage.” It would be intriguing to compare Berlin’s and Arendt’s reading of Herder.
20 Cf. Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews, 35–65.
21 Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews, 276.
22 Cited in Prager/Telushkin, Why the Jews?, 119.
23 Quoted after Robertson, The ‘Jewish Question’, 25.
24 Fichte, “A State within a State,” 309.
25 Cf. Lenhard, “Review of Christian Wilhelm Dohm.”
26 Cf. Sauder, “Aufklärung des Vorurteils.”
27 Wokler, “Isaiah Berlin’s Enlightenment,” 18.
28 Berlin, “The Achievement of Zionism,” 4–5.
29 Cf. Feiner, “Towards a Historical Definition.” For the view that the Haskalah is a Jewish version of the German Enlightenment, see Sorkin, The Berlin Haskalah. Litvak, Haskalah, has convincingly argued that the Haskalah was rather a romantic movement.
30 Etkes, “Haskalah.”
31 For this psychoanalytic concept, see Freud, “On Narcissism,” 94–95.
32 Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, 128–130.
33 Mendelssohn, An die Freunde Lessings, 30.
34 Cf. Arkush, Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment, 72–74; Berghahn, Moses Mendelssohn’s ‘Jerusalem’, 256–273.
35 Cf. Pelli, The Age of Haskalah, 48–72; Schulte, Die jüdische Aufklärung, 48–63; Schatz, “‘Peoples of Pure Speech’.”
36 Sorkin, “The Early Haskalah.”
37 Bourel, Moses Mendelsohn, 475–477.
38 Cf. Lenhard, Volk oder Religion?, 69–79.
39 Adelung, Versuch eines vollständigen grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuches, 1438.
40 Euchel, “Nachal ha-Besor,” 11.
41 Ibid., 10.
42 Cf. Kennecke, Isaac Abraham Euchel, 136–138.
43 Friedländer, Akten-Stücke, 35–36.
44 Anonymous [Friedländer], Sendschreiben, 15.
45 I discussed this aspect at length in Lenhard, Volk oder Religion?, 157–162.
46 The history of the so-called “radical Enlightenment,” a strongly anti-religious current within the Enlightenment movement, has long been untold. Cf. Israel, Radical Enlightenment; Blom, Böse Philosophen; Mulsow, Radikale Frühaufklärung in Deutschland.
47 Cf. Pelli, Haskalah and Beyond, 109–132; Schulte, Hebräische Poesie und jüdischer Volksgeist.
48 Herder, “Letter to Moses Mendelssohn,” 217.
49 Norton, “The Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment,” 644.
50 Berlin, “Two Enemies of the Enlightenment,” 21.
51 Berlin, “The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess,” 268.
52 Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, 366.
53 Ibid., 339
54 Ibid., 364.
55 Ibid., 340.
56 Ibid., 318.
57 As far as I see, the four volume-edition of Berlin’s letters contains no mention of Mendelssohn at all.
58 Arkush, Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment, 72–79.
59 Berlin, “Benjamin Disraeli,” 7.
60 Endelman, “Benjamin Disraeli,” 22.
61 Berlin, Karl Marx, 25.
62 Berlin, “The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess,” 312.
63 Ibid., 290.
64 Ibid., 299.
65 Cf. Koltun-Fromm, “Discovering Isaiah Berlin,” 185.
66 Berlin, “The Achievement of Zionism,” 2.
67 Dubnov, “Between Liberalism and Jewish Nationalism,” 324 has made a strong argument that Berlin developed a particular type of “Diaspora Zionism” whose basic premise was “that existence in exile is itself a disease, an abnormal and unhealthy situation.” This is certainly an attitude that the Haskalah would have defied vehemently.
68 Berlin, “The Achievement of Zionism,” 2.
69 Quoted after Feiner, “Towards a Historical Definition,” 214.
70 Cf. Lederhendler, “Interpreting Messianic Rhetoric;” Silver, Zionism and the Melting Pot, 26–42; Vital, The Origins of Zionism, 43–48.
71 Cf. Fleming, “Isaiah Berlin and the Holocaust.” I want to thank the anonymous reviewer for pointing out to me that Berlin’s post-factum testimonies on the subject were apologetic.
72 Dubnov, Isaiah Berlin, 172.
73 Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, 21.
74 Berlin, “The Achievement of Zionism,” 5.
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Notes on contributors
Philipp Lenhard
Philipp Lenhard is assistant professor (Wissenschaftlicher Assistent) of Jewish History and Culture at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany. His last publications were “Nation or Religion? The Emergence of Modern Jewish Ethnicity in France and Germany, 1782-1848” (2014) and “Friedrich Pollock: The Eminence Grise of the Frankfurt School” (2019).