Jewish engagement(s) with Modern Culture

Joachim Schlör

1  The challenges of modernization

Looking back at the documented history of mankind, we find in any given society individuals or smaller groups who were ahead of their contemporaries, more daring, more adventurous, more interested in the world beyond the confines of their respective communities. Modernity, understood as a conscious departure from tradition, has always been there. In the context of Jewish history, we can identify many instances where traditional customs and values have been replaced by more modern ones, from biblical times onward. In general terms, political upheaval, war, and forced emigration necessarily challenged individuals and communities to rethink traditional forms of living and to adapt to new circumstances. The Babylonian exile and the emergence of an exilic identity among those removed from Jerusalem and the Land of Israel, for example, could be usefully analysed and discussed in a context of modernisation. Given the mainly diasporic character of Jewish life and culture from the 6th century BCE on, and even more so after the destruction of the Second Temple, such periods of modernisation were often the product of an encounter-in contact, cooperation, or conflict-with the non-Jewish world: in Babylon, in Athens and Alexandria, in Rome1, from the cities along the North African coast to the centres of Jewish life under Muslim2 and Christian rule in »Sepharad« as well as in the settlements along the Rhine river in what was to become »Ashkenas«3.

Traditional Jewish communities acquired new languages4, Spanish or Middle High German, new customs, new forms of food or dress, and were influenced by different philosophical and scientific developments long before the dates that are usually noted as markers of the onset of modernity-be it 1492, with the discovery of a world beyond former conceptions of the earth, or 1789, when the French Revolution shattered the feudal societies all over Europe. Still, with this reservation, it is fair to say that the enlightenment in the late 18th century opened up the world of thought to a wider degree than ever before, and in its wake the industrial revolution with all its consequences changed the world of traditional communities, including that of the Jews, to such an extent that it makes sense to concentrate on the period that most researchers regard as modernity: from the end of the 18th through the 19th and 20th centuries, and to formulate questions that are of importance until the present day.

For the purposes of this text, we agree on some simple and basic assumptions. Culture is different from nature. Culture begins when people »do something« with nature, when they start to change the given landscape by working on it, by moving through it, by regarding, describing or studying it, by making their imprint on it. Culture, furthermore, is practice. In a narrow sense, we refer to practices such as writing, painting, making music or building houses as »cultural«. In a wider sense, practices such as inhabiting places, making clothes and dressing, eating and drinking, believing in natural or supernatural powers and giving form to such belief, in prayer and ritual, conceiving and rearing children, and educating them, are no less cultural, especially when they form part of processes of change and development-and when they become topics of reflection and forms of cultural production. In our context, »modern culture« evolves continually and offers new perspectives beyond traditional ways of living and thinking. It also needs to be noted that modernity, once set in, did not necessarily move forward unhindered. On the contrary, whenever and wherever individuals tried to depart from traditional ways of life, they met with resistance.

In the history of Judaism, the most famous case in point is the fate of Baruch Spinoza (1632?1677) who can be regarded as a precursor of later developments. Born in 1632 in Amsterdam to a Portuguese-Jewish family, the intellectually highly gifted thinker »was issued the harshest writ of herem, ban or excommunication, ever pronounced by the Sephardic community of Amsterdam«. In his works, Spinoza »denies the immortality of the soul; strongly rejects the notion of a transcendent, providential God-the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and claims that the Law was neither literally given by God nor any longer binding on Jews«.5 He clearly was an early moderniser, but his departure from traditional values and rituals was regarded as damaging for his community.

The case of Moses Mendelssohn (1729?1786) is not so completely different as one might assume, given the relative success of the Jewish enlightenment-the Haskala-that his life and work initiated. But the idea, and ensuing practice, to open the Jewish community of Berlin to the new horizons offered by the translation of the Hebrew Bible into German, the use of the German language in daily encounters, the creation of a »free school«-Jüdische Freischule, founded in 1778 by David Friedländer with Isaak Daniel Itzig and Hartwig Wessely-that offered instruction in worldly topics, and a thorough reform programme concerning synagogue services, a weakening of rabbinical authority, and the discontinuation of certain rituals, again provoked resistance within the community: »Reform«, in a way, created »Orthodoxy« as a (modern and anti-modern) response, and the path of German Jews towards modernity has been a troubled, ambivalent, and difficult one from the very start.

This can be illustrated with an example from those regions that Prussia acquired during the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century (1772?1795). When Prussian reformers, enlightened and carried on by the ideas of tolerance and a-controlled-emancipation of the minorities arrived in those regions, one of their first activities was to tear down old city walls and to make way for traffic and economic development: an act of modernization. By doing this, they unknowingly also destroyed parts of the traditional eruv6, the Sabbath border of observant Jewish communities beyond which, according to Talmudic laws, Jews were not allowed to carry things on their holy day of the week. An interesting collection of documents, kept in the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, shows how the rabbis and representatives of those communities, in the years between 1822 and 1835, applied to the authorities in Berlin to be allowed to reconstruct their eruvim, their »borders« that, for them, symbolized the continuity of a specific religious tradition and way of life. Permission then partly had been granted, but while some communities decided to re-erect the symbolic »walls« and »gates«, others opted for their abolition and thus opened the path for the members of their congregation: into modernity. In many cases, this initiated the beginning of a large-scale migration process from the smaller towns in Eastern and Central Europe-and similarly from the rural communities in South-West Germany-to the larger cities, most importantly to Berlin from where the heralds of enlightenment, the »Berliners«, had come with such promising news about a new future of emancipation and integration. Confronted with modernisation, those communities saw themselves challenged in two main areas: the tension between traditional religious practice and the culture of their host societies and, in more general terms, the relation between their existence in exile and the no less traditional longing for a return to the land of Israel.

As Rabbi David Ellenson, the eighth president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR), has argued,

the advent of modernity led to radical political and legal changes for Jewry, particularly in the West. Coercive belonging to a community was replaced by voluntary adherence to what might best be called a congregation. [...] Modernity has affected many disparate areas including new forms of Judaism, opting out, Jewish identity, marriage, gender relations and expression, interfaith dialogue, attitudes toward universalism and particularity, and so on. Modernity has stimulated assimilation but also has fostered new ways of expressing Jewish identity.7

Modernity for Jews, Ellenson argues further, »begins first and foremost when the governmental structures that formerly marked the medieval kehila (community) collapsed«. The American and French revolutions also brought with them the separation of religion and state. Ellenson's teacher, the eminent historian Jacob Katz,

contended that a major criterion for determining when modernity began was to analyze the moments when Jews began to think in cultural patterns taken from the non-Jewish world8.

We can see this development in France, shown by Frances Malino's work on the Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux9 where he describes the high degree of acculturation of their mores and manners. Similarly, Todd Endelman's book on the Jews of Georgian England10 tells how Jews began to adapt and live like non-Jewish people. But, Ellenson concludes,

if one wants to understand the essence of how modernity influenced Judaism, one has to study the developments in German Jewry. That was the only country where the changes in Jewish life were based on ideological justifications.

While this chapter will indeed concentrate on developments in Berlin, different paths to modernity need to be considered as...