Difference of a Different Kind. Iris Idelson-Shein
a relatively well-connected maskil during his lifetime, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Horowitz and his works were largely forgotten. It was only toward the end of the twentieth century that some scholarly attention began to turn to Horowitz, and two papers, by Shmuel Werses and Shmuel Feiner, were devoted to this enigmatic maskil.6 In his compelling reading of Amudey beyt Yehudah, Feiner presents Horowitz as a paradigmatic figure of the early Haskalah. A multilingual intellectual, well versed in science and rabbinic lore, he represents the new ideal type of the early maskil who combined secular learning with religious knowledge. Like other maskilim of his time, Horowitz viewed himself as part of the Jewish halakhic world, and saw the new rationalistic discourse as a means to improve and revitalize Jewish faith, not to undermine it. In his approach to non-Jewish science and philosophy, he was an adherent of early maskilic ideology, formulated by such writers as Naphtali Herz Wessely and Moses Mendelssohn, who criticized religious dogmatism and the neglect of secular knowledge on the one hand, and objected to radical skepticism on the other.7
Of course, this kind of attempt to reconcile Enlightenment and religion was not exclusive to the Jewish literary world. Similar aspirations were characteristic of a strand of Enlightenment that has been characterized by contemporary scholars as “conservative” or “religious.” In a now classic study, Jonathan Israel defines this Enlightenment as one that “aspired to conquer ignorance and superstition, establish toleration, and revolutionize ideas, education, and attitudes by means of philosophy but in such a way as to preserve and safeguard what were judged essential elements of the older structures, effecting a viable synthesis of old and new and of reason and faith.”8 Clearly, the conservative Enlightenment consisted of a cluster of national, religious, and other Enlightenments that often differed quite radically from one another. What united these various Enlightenments, however, was an intense devotion to reform, accompanied by a common concern regarding the possibility of the radicalization of Enlightenment ideals. Conservative thinkers preferred to promote their ideas carefully and gradually, and to bring about the desired reforms in European society through such means as legislation and education.
The framework of a conservative Enlightenment seems particularly conductive as a context for reading Horowitz’s work. In his corpus of writings, this early maskil expressed a deep concern regarding the radicalization of reason on the one hand, and faith on the other. Indeed, Horowitz’s preoccupation with the split within Judaism between the emerging camps of Hasidim (members of a religious movement which emphasized piety, ecstasy, and divine intervention), mitnagdim (opponents of Hasidism), and maskilim, and his fear of libertinism, Frankism, Sabbatianism, and radicalism, echo the conservative Enlightenment’s preoccupation with the problem of political instability and civil unrest. As discussed in some detail below, eighteenth-century thinkers lived in the shadow of the religious and civil wars of the early modern period, and their deep commitment to political stability is a crucial aspect of their thought. Thus too, stability, moderation, toleration, and gradual reform are recurring themes in Horowitz’s corpus of works. In the spirit of many other conservative Enlighteners, he too was acutely aware of the dangers inherent in the new ideas in philosophy and science, and he stressed that they should be consumed responsibly, like delicacies or fine spirits. “Be neither monks nor drunks,” he wrote in Amudey beyt Yehudah, “for the monk is a sinner, and the drunk—a fool.”9
Little is known about Horowitz’s biography. He was born sometime around 1734, either in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius or in Padua, and appears to have received a strictly religious upbringing.10 Later in life he served as a physician in Vilnius and in various small towns throughout Eastern Europe. Some sources identify him as one of the early Jewish students at the Padua school of medicine. Jewish physicians stood at the forefront of the early Jewish Haskalah; they were revered for their knowledge and expertise on the one hand and suspected for their enticement with secular knowledge on the other.11 A rare glimpse into Horowitz’s life is afforded by his 1793 book Megilat sdarim, which tells the story of a father, Yedidyah Halevi, who attempts to compromise between his three quarrelling sons: Ovadyah, Ḥashavyah, and Hudeyah.12 Horowitz utilized the family feud as an allegory for the late eighteenth-century schism between mitnagdic and hasidic Jewry. Through the story of the youngest son, Hudeyah, the author presents the Enlightenment as a golden mean between the two opposing camps. The Haskalah is thus depicted as a project that is beneficial, nay crucial, to the revitalization of Jewish tradition and faith. However, a closer reading of the text reveals a second, less immediately discernible allegory, through which the author delivers his own life story. The biographical details are embroidered into the image of the maskilic son, Hudeyah, whose name is in fact an anagram of the name of the author—Yehudah. Similarly to Horowitz, Hudeyah receives a strictly halakhic upbringing, but goes on to study medicine amongst “the gentiles.” As the narrative unfolds, he returns home to his family only to face his brothers’ suspicions that his secular learning has compromised his faith. It is soon revealed, however, that not only have Hudeyah’s studies not damaged his religion, but they have strengthened it to a great degree.13 Hudeyah’s travails may be understood to represent those of the Jewish maskilim in general, and those of Horowitz himself in particular, who aimed to strengthen Jewish faith and tradition through rational philosophy and science, but was suspected of heresy and radicalism in return. More specifically, the story appears to allude to the negative reception of Amudey beyt Yehudah in Vilnius. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that following the publication of the book, Horowitz was chastised by the local religious elite and forced to leave the city and settle in distant Hrodna (Grodno).14 The unfortunate episode left Horowitz bitter for many years to come. “Slanderers have maligned me,” he wrote several years before his death in 1797, “and bitter enemies have persecuted and injured me.”15
Looking back from the twenty-first century, it is difficult at first to see how Amudey beyt Yehudah, a text so intensely embedded in traditionalist Jewish writing, could have caused such commotion. The text is written in biblical Hebrew in rhymed prose, in the style of the medieval maqama, which was quite popular amongst the early maskilim.16 Only on rare occasions does Horowitz stray from this structure, as when dealing with an especially important or complex issue (e.g., AMBY, 17a, 28a–b). As befitting a traditionalist text, the first few pages of Amudey beyt Yehudah are densely packed with haskamot (rabbinic endorsements of the book). To these are added a few recommendations by the leading members of the early Haskalah, namely, Mendelssohn, Wessely, and the Dutch Jewish publisher Isaac Ha-cohen Belinfante (AMBY, [19], [23]). The inclusion of these recommendations alongside the rabbinical haskamot serves as further indication of Horowitz’s mitigative approach and his attempt to present the bourgeoning maskilic movement as part and parcel of Jewish tradition and faith. This attempt to domesticate the Enlightenment is one of the book’s most prominent and consistent motifs.
Thus, though he was one of the earliest maskilim and the target of at least one known controversy, Horowitz was no radical. In the preface to Amudey beyt Yehudah, he asserted his conservatism by reminding his readers that he was merely following in the footsteps of such great Jewish canons as Maimonides and Yehudah Ha-levi, both of whom had written books that aimed to combine Jewish theology with rationalistic philosophy (AMBY, [24]). In terms of non-Jewish sources of inspiration, Horowitz took special care not to mention any Christian authors by name in his book. The only non-Jewish thinkers cited throughout the text are classical authors such as Socrates, Plato, Galen, and Aristotle, all of whom would have been acceptable reading for an eighteenth-century Jew. And yet, there is a great cultural divide between these early authors and Horowitz’s Enlightened endeavor. Indeed, in his attempt to present his book as a continuation of Ha-levi’s project, Horowitz was merely complying with the literary norms of his fellow maskilim, who often utilized a spoonful of Jewish canon to help their modern philosophical or scientific ideas go down. In reality, however, if we are to view Horowitz’s text against its proper context, we should divert our gaze neither to Plato’s ancient Athens nor to Ha-levi’s medieval Spain, but rather to mid-eighteenth-century Europe, where savage philosophers were all the rage.
RATIONALIZING RELIGION
One of the basic assumptions underlying eighteenth-century anthropological thought was that a person’s physical constitution is a circumstantial rather than an essential