Search

This chapter addresses the discrepancies between writing, reading, listening, and performing in two Jewish genres: biblical verse and early synagogue poetry. The continuities (scriptural canonicity, diglossia, tensions between constraint and play) are obvious. The poetics, by contrast, difffer. If we want to understand this variance, we must examine what happens in the dialogue between the scribe and his empty scroll, between the cantor and his perplexed congregation. How did they juggle the disparate privileges of sound and meaning, of private understanding and communal experience? As we shall see, in the silence that preceded the sound, and in the sound that followed, the poet’s inner and outer speech articulated diffferent poetics – sometimes disrupting, sometimes reinforcing the conventions of the holy Hebrew tongue.

Abstract According to common opinion, nineteenth-century Dutch Jewry never developed a follow-up to the German Wissenschaft des Judentums. This paper makes a case for the opposite: Dutch Jewish intellectuals not only were avid readers of Wissenschaft publications, they also used them extensively as sources of inspiration and information. The result, however, lacked the academic dimension of the German tradition. Instead, Dutch Jewish scholars consistently merged the results of critical scholarship with the edifying content of the traditional treatises they were translating and annotating. Time-bound historical truth thus served to affirm the timeless truth of Jewish ethics. It is further argued that this indeed somewhat derivative strategy was more than a mere sign of conservatism or scholarly mediocrity. The Dutch Wissenschaft soon became one of the key instruments in formulating a new Jewish civic identity in the decades following the Emancipation Decree of 1796. Working from rather than towards political equality, the Dutch Jewish scholars could afford to ignore the radical content of Jewish national philology as developed by Leopold Zunz and his German colleagues.

This contribution offers a comparative perspective on the Prague Haskalah as a movement in its own right, by briefly analysing another tradition that, like Prague, has often been presented as deeply indebted to the project of the Berlin Maskilim: the Dutch Jewish Enlightenment, which flourished during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Contrary to common opinion, which has always emphasized the German origins of the ‘Dutch Haskalah’, this ‘Haskalah’ was not imported from Berlin but had been inspired first and foremost by contemporary Dutch (Christian) enlightened discourse. Of course one Jew’s Dutch Enlightenment was not the other Jew’s Dutch Enlightenment. To illustrate this, the article briefly compares four ‘enlightened’ publications, i.e. historical biographies, by four prominent Dutch-Jewish intellectuals who operated in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Their varying treatments of Judaism’s role in (universal) history serve to illustrate the complexity of enlightened experience in the Netherlands, where the Jews had received civic equality as early as 1796, thus facing the challenge of building new communal infrastructures and forging a new, at least partly Dutch identity.

ArgumentThe Ashkenazi grammars of Hebrew written between roughly 1600 and 1800 fill a modest and largely forgotten shelf in the Jewish scholarly library. At first sight, especially when compared with the medieval Jewish and contemporary Christian Hebrew traditions, they seem to lack technical sophistication. As this paper hopes to demonstrate, however, this apparent lack of sophistication was not so much an intrinsic flaw as a deliberate choice. For the earliest Ashkenazi textbooks were not about studying grammar, but about teaching Hebrew. By adapting the existing descriptive models to the needs of the classroom and the gemeyne leytn (ordinary people), Jewish scholars and teachers in such cities as Prague, Wilhelmsdorff, and Amsterdam hoped to find and instruct new audiences. Depending on context and target audience, they either relied on Hebrew, Yiddish, or on an intricate interplay of the two for maximum success and efficiency. It was this innovative combination of didactic simplification and functional bilingualism that allowed them not only to reach a new readership, but also to equip that readership to henceforth read their Bible and prayers with unprecedented autonomy.

Ever since the late 1980s, when the Jewish communities in Europe began to rise from their ashes and reinvent themselves, ‘Jewish Europe’ has become a fashionable and productive topic. Recently, Israeli scholars have even begun to speak, with a tinge of worried envy, of contemporary European Judaism as he-ammud ha-shelishi, the ‘third pillar’ of world Jewry, which is gradually reclaiming its position as a centre of Jewish life alongside the approved strongholds of Jewish continuity in Israel and the US. Authors such as Kertesz and Konrad, established filmmakers such as Lanzmann and Szabo, and scholars such as Dan Diner and even the Israeli-American historian Saul Friedlander are usually identified as the intellectual heralds of this collective resurrection.1

As common opinion has it, the Wissenschaft des Judentums had little affinity with art and aesthetics. This article begins by relating this lack of ‘visual antenna’ to the movement’s original national-philological orientation. By scrutinising relevant passages from the writings of hard-core Wissenschaftler such as Leopold Zunz, Michael Sachs, Moritz Steinschneider, David Henriques de Castro and David Kaufmann, it then explores how traditional Jewish philologists coped with art and the visual when confronted with the non-textual, supranational dimensions of Jewish material culture, which became more and more prominent as the nineteenth century drew to a close.

This chapter draws attention to one such hitherto neglected detail: the introduction, by the movements earliest exponents, of the concept of culture into Jewish discourse, and the persistent echoes of its initial overtones in later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts. Classical philologist by training, Jewish philologist by vocation, Leopold Zunz began his career at the age of twenty-four by publishing a concise treatise named Etwas ber die rabbinische Literatur . Few scholars were ready to accept the rupture between scholarship and life, as for example Moritz Steinschneider (1816-1907), the indefatigable bibliographer who is often quoted for having said that Jewish scholarship merely served to provide what was left of Judaism with a decent burial. For Leopold Zunz and his immediate followers, culture was found and scholarship was to be pursued whenever Jewish literature met Jewish life. Keywords: Jewish culture; Judaism; Leopold Zunz; Moritz Steinschneider

This chapter examines the seminal expose 'Uber den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Judentums' , written in the early 1820s by Friedrich Hegel's Berlin disciple Immanuel Wolf. Written partly as a vindication of the new intellectual endeavour, partly as its first comprehensive research agenda, Wolf 's manifesto exploited the historical dynamic between Judenthum, Griechenthum and Christenthum in order to address the major dilemmas of his generation. Another text was written some two decades later by Leopold Zunz. Zunz had started publishing on 'judische Philologie und Literatur' as early as 1818, when 'philology' and 'literature' had still been novelties on the Jewish scholarly stage. As the chapter shows, Zunz's evaluation of Jewish-gentile interaction throughout the ages, too, was dictated to a large extent by the demands (and, by 1845, the disappointments) posed by his own environment. Keywords: Christenthum ; Griechenthum ; Immanuel Wolf; Jewish political thinking; Judenthum ; Leopold Zunz

This chapter sheds some light on at least one of those constituents by supplementing Michman's demographic analysis with a few observations from the field of intellectual history. It discusses the Michman's social solidarity, affinity with religion and support of Zionism. The chapter introduces "Jewish historicism" as an obvious, yet hitherto largely ignored, coordinate of modern Jewish self-perception in the Netherlands. It outlines how, already in the early nineteenth century, Dutch-Jewish intellectuals responded to the German Wissenschaft des Judentums 's call to formulate a new, "western"-rather than "oriental"-identity, with the help of critical historical research, and henceforth educate the Jewish masses in, to borrow Carl Schorschke's expression, "thinking with history". In 1826, when Dutch Jewish intellectuals were still steeped in the ideals of the Berlin Haskalah, the Amsterdam maskil, Samuel Mulder, also appears to have been attracted by the-much more extreme-translation strategies of the rising Wissenschaft des Judentums . Keywords: Amsterdam maskil; Dutch Jewish intellectuals; early nineteenth century; Samuel Mulder; Wissenschaft des Judentums

Though the Jewish tradition has always attached great importance to the Hebrew language of Scripture and its interpretation, (biblical) Hebrew linguistics as a discipline only arose in the early Middle Ages, particularly in Palestine and Abbasid Iraq. Arabic models served as its source of inspiration; Masoretic scholarship, which had established a definitive text of the Hebrew Bible, secured its textual basis. It was in 10th and early 11th century al-Andalus, however, that Hebrew grammar received its definitive form, which centered on the morphological and lexicographical reconstruction of the triradical Hebrew root with the help of qiyâs, analogy. In 12th century Italy and Provence, Iberian migrants took care of the dissemination of this – descriptive rather than theoretical – Andalusian canon. From the second half of the 16th century onward, we witness an outburst of Christian Hebrew scholarship throughout Western Europe, fostered by Renaissance Humanism and the Reformation, and often (partly) dependent on Latin models of description. By contrast, Jewish interest in linguistic studies dwindled. In the 18th century, Hebrew lost its prime position among the oriental languages (from 1781 onward: Semitic languages) to Arabic. Simultaneously, a renaissance of (enlightened) Jewish Hebraism took place, first of all in Germany. In 19th-century academic Hebrew studies, the impact of the historical-comparative analysis of the Indo-European languages was growing. In Jewish circles, Hebrew studies first of all served the cause of sociopolitical emancipation. One outcome of this was the revival of Hebrew as a living language and the establishing of a comprehensive, secular Hebrew public sphere (from 1880 onward).

Starting point for the following considerations is Stefan Reif’s erudite inaugural lecture Why Medieval Hebrew Studies?, originally delivered late 1999 on the occasion of his being appointed the first holder of the chair in Medieval Hebrew Studies in the University of Cambridge.1 If the title of Reif’s oration suggests a playful questioning of the importance of those studies, their disciplinary content and interdisciplinary potential, the actual text bears a rather more introductory and apologetic stamp. Rather than indulging in methodological speculation, Reif’s aim was to justify the creation of a new Cambridge chair devoted to the study of something as ‘exotic’ and particular as medieval Jewish culture. In his own words, he intended ‘to demonstrate (…) the degree to which many medieval Jewish sources are worthy of serious attention and can be intellectually stimulating, culturally inspiring, and academically challenging’ (p. 49f.).