Moses Hirschel And Enlightenment Breslau

Breslau has been almost entirely forgotten in the Anglophone sphere as a place of Enlightenment. Moreover, in the context of the Jewish Enlightenment, Breslau has never been discussed as a place of intercultural exchange between German-speaking Jewish, Protestant and Catholic intellectuals. An intellectual biography of Moses Hirschel offers an excellent case-study to investigate the complex reciprocal relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish enlighteners in a prosperous and influential Central European city at the turn of the 18th century.

Breslau ist im englischsprachigen Raum als Ort der Aufklärung fast völlig in Vergessenheit geraten. Darüber hinaus ist Breslau im Kontext der jüdischen Aufklärung nie als Ort des interkulturellen Austauschs zwischen deutschsprachigen jüdischen, protestantischen und katholischen Intellektuellen diskutiert worden. Eine intellektuelle Biographie von Moses Hirschel bietet ein hervorragendes Fallbeispiel, um die komplexen wechselseitigen Beziehungen zwischen jüdischen und nichtjüdischen Aufklärern in einer wohlhabenden und einflussreichen mitteleuropäischen Stadt an der Wende zum 18. Jahrhundert zu untersuchen. David Heywood Jones ist Schriftsteller und Forscher in Berlin, Deutschland. Zu seinen Arbeitsschwerpunkten gehören Erinnerungskulturen, Haskalah, Deutscher Idealismus und mitteleuropäische Aufklärungsgeschichte. Die Übersetzung wurde mit Hilfe von künstlicher Intelligenz (anhand einer maschinellen Übersetzung durch einen Service von DeepL.com) angefertigt. Da die anschließende Überprüfung hauptsächlich im Hinblick auf inhaltliche Gesichtspunkte erfolgte, kann sich der Text des Buches stilistisch von einer konventionellen Übersetzung unterscheiden. Springer Nature arbeitet bei der Publikation von Büchern kontinuierlich mit innovativen Technologien, um die Arbeit der Autoren zu unterstützen.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century most European Jews lived in restricted settlements and urban ghettos, isolated from the surrounding dominant Christian cultures not only by law but also by language, custom, and dress. By the end of the century urban, upwardly mobile Jews had shaved their beards and abandoned Yiddish in favor of the languages of the countries in which they lived. They began to participate in secular culture and they embraced rationalism and non-Jewish education as supplements to traditional Talmudic studies. The full participation of Jews in modern Europe and America would be unthinkable without the intellectual and social revolution that was the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. Unparalleled in scale and comprehensiveness, The Jewish Enlightenment reconstructs the intellectual and social revolution of the Haskalah as it gradually gathered momentum throughout the eighteenth century. Relying on a huge range of previously unexplored sources, Shmuel Feiner fully views the Haskalah as the Jewish version of the European Enlightenment and, as such, a movement that cannot be isolated from broader eighteenth-century European traditions. Critically, he views the Haskalah as a truly European phenomenon and not one simply centered in Germany. He also shows how the republic of letters in European Jewry provided an avenue of secularization for Jewish society and culture, sowing the seeds of Jewish liberalism and modern ideology and sparking the Orthodox counterreaction that culminated in a clash of cultures within the Jewish community. The Haskalah's confrontations with its opponents within Jewry constitute one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of the dramatic and traumatic encounter between the Jews and modernity. The Haskalah is one of the central topics in modern Jewish historiography. With its scope, erudition, and new analysis, The Jewish Enlightenment now provides the most comprehensive treatment of this major cultural movement.

The most prominent story of nineteenth-century German and French Jewry has focused on Jewish adoption of liberal middle-class values. The Modernity of Others points to an equally powerful but largely unexplored aspect of modern Jewish history: the extent to which German and French Jews sought to become modern by criticizing the anti-modern positions of the Catholic Church. Drawing attention to the pervasiveness of anti-Catholic anticlericalism among Jewish thinkers and activists from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, the book turns the master narrative of Western and Central European Jewish history on its head. From the moment in which Jews began to enter the fray of modern European politics, they found that Catholicism served as a convenient foil that helped them define what it meant to be a good citizen, to practice a respectable religion, and to have a healthy family life. Throughout the long nineteenth century, myriad Jewish intellectuals, politicians, and activists employed anti-Catholic tropes wherever questions of political and national belonging were at stake: in theoretical treatises, parliamentary speeches, newspaper debates, the founding moments of the Reform movement, and campaigns against antisemitism.

Ephraim Moses Kuh (1731-1790) was the first modern Jewish poet to be published in a Western language. He travelled widely and was a friend of Moses Mendelssohn during the Enlightenment and Haskalah. His works were complied and edited by a friend, Moses Hirschel (1754-ca1823), as Hinterlassene Gedichte von Ephraim Moses Kuh and published in Zurich in 1792 as two volumes of over 600 poems. The first 100 poems from this compilation have been translated into English and annotated in this volume. No previous English translations of Kuh's poems are known. These poems speak of love and relationships, politics and religion, and the lives of Jews in 18th-century Europe.

Throughout the eighteenth century, an ever-sharper distinction emerged between Jews of the old order and those who were self-consciously of a new world. As aspirations for liberation clashed with adherence to tradition, as national, ethnic, cultural, and other alternatives emerged and a long, circuitous search for identity began, it was no longer evident that the definition of Jewishness would be based on the beliefs and practices surrounding the study of the Torah. In The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe Shmuel Feiner reconstructs this evolution by listening to the voices of those who participated in the process and by deciphering its cultural codes and meanings. On the one hand, a great majority of observant Jews still accepted the authority of the Talmud and the leadership of the rabbis; on the other, there was a gradually more conspicuous minority of "Epicureans" and "freethinkers." As the ground shifted, each individual was marked according to his or her place on the path between faith and heresy, between devoutness and permissiveness or indifference. Building on his award-winning Jewish Enlightenment, Feiner unfolds the story of critics of religion, mostly Ashkenazic Jews, who did not take active part in the secular intellectual revival known as the Haskalah. In open or concealed rebellion, Feiner's subjects lived primarily in the cities of western and central Europe—Altona-Hamburg, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Breslau, and Prague. They participated as "fashionable" Jews adopting the habits and clothing of the surrounding Gentile society. Several also adopted the deist worldview of Enlightenment Europe, rejecting faith in revelation, the authority of Scripture, and the obligation to observe the commandments. Peering into the synagogue, observing individuals in the coffeehouse or strolling the boulevards, and peeking into the bedroom, Feiner recovers forgotten critics of religion from both the margins and the center of Jewish discourse. His is a pioneering work on the origins of one of the most significant transformations of modern Jewish history.

Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) was the premier Jewish thinker of his day and one of the best-known figures of the German Enlightenment, earning the sobriquet "the Socrates of Berlin". Mendelssohn has been treated as a symbol of the modern Jewish predicament, symbolising the conflict between Jewish tradition and secular culture.

Reform Judaism is today one of the three major branches of the Jewish faith. This is a history of the Reform movement, tracing its changing configuration and self-understanding from the beginnings of modernisation in late 18th-century Jewish thought and practice to American renewal in the 1970s.