The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885). Nahum Slouschz
the Jews in Germany anticipated their political and social emancipation. That is a truth generally acknowledged. Long secluded from all foreign ideas, confined within religious and dogmatic bounds, German Judaism was a sharer in the physical and social misery of the Judaism of Slavic countries. The philosophic and tolerant ideas in vogue at the end of the eighteenth century startled it somewhat out of its torpor. In the measure in which those ideas gained a foothold in the communities, conditions, at least in the larger centres, took on a comfortable aspect, with more or less assurance of permanent well-being. The first contact of the ghetto with the enlightened circles of the day gave the impetus to a marked movement toward an inner emancipation. Associations of Maskilim ("intellectuals") were formed at Berlin, Hamburg, and Breslau. "The Seekers of the Good and the Noble" (Shohare ha-Tob weha-Tushiyah) should be mentioned particularly. They were composed of educated men familiar with Occidental culture, and animated by the desire to make the light of that culture penetrate to the heart of the provincial communities. These "intellectuals" entered the lists against religious fanaticism and casuistic methods, seeking to replace them by liberal ideas and scientific research. Two schools, headed respectively by the philosopher Mendelssohn and the poet Wessely, had their origin in this movement—the school of the Biurists, deriving their name from the Biur, a commentary on the Bible, and the school of the Meassefim, from Meassef, "Collector." [Footnote: A specimen of the Biur appeared at Amsterdam, in 1778, under the title 'Alim le-Terufah.] The former defended Judaism against the enemies from without, and combated the prejudices and the ignorance of the Jews themselves. The Meassefim took as their sphere of activity the reform of the education of the young and the revival of the Hebrew language. The two schools agreed that to elevate the moral and social status of the Jews, it was necessary to remove first the external peculiarities separating them from their fellow-citizens. A new translation of the Bible into literary German, undertaken by Mendelssohn, was to deal the death blow to the Jewish-German (jüdisch-deutsch) jargon, and the Biur, the commentary on the Bible mentioned above, produced by the co-operation of a galaxy of scholars and men of culture, was expected to sweep aside all mystic and allegoric interpretations of the Scriptures and introduce the rational and scientific method.
The results achieved by the Biurists tended beyond a doubt toward the elevation of the mass of the Jews. One of these results was, as had been hoped for, the dislodgment of the Jewish-German by the spread of the pure German. The influence wielded by the Biurists, so far from stopping with the German Jews, extended to the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe.
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In 1784–5, two Hebrew writers, Isaac Euchel and Mendel Bresslau, undertook to publish a magazine, entitled Ha-Meassef ("The Collector"), whence the name Meassefim. The enterprise was under the auspices of Mendelssohn and Wessely. A double aim was to be served. The periodical was to promote the spread of knowledge and modern ideas in the Hebrew language, the only language available for the Jews of the ghetto; and at the same time it was to promote the purification of Hebrew, which had degenerated in the Rabbinical schools. Its readers were to be familiarized with the social and aesthetic demands of modern life, and induced to rid themselves of ingrained peculiarities. Besides its success in these directions, it must be set to the credit of Ha- Meassef, that it was the first agency to gather under one banner all the champions of the Haskalah in the several countries of Europe. It supplied the link connecting them with one another. [Footnote: Properly speaking, the term Haskalah includes the notion at once of humanism and humanitarianism.]
From the literary point of view Ha-Meassef is of subordinate interest. Its contributors were devoid of taste. They offered their readers mainly questionable imitations of the works of the German romantic school. The periodical brought no new talent truly worthy of the description into notice. Whatever reputation its principal writers enjoyed had been won before the appearance of Ha-Meassef. They owed their fame primarily to the favor acquired for Hebrew letters through the efforts of Luzzatto's disciples. [Footnote: Since the appearance of La-Yesharim Tehillah by Luzzatto, imitations of it without number have been published, and for the eighteenth century alone allegorical dramas by the dozen might be enumerated.] Of the poems published in Ha-Meassef but a few deserve notice, and even they are nothing more than mediocre imitations of didactic pieces in the style of the day, or odes celebrating the splendor of contemporary kings and princes. A poem by Wessely forms a rare exception. It extols the residents of Basle, who, in 1789, welcomed Jewish refugees from Alsace. And if we turn from its poetry to its historical contributions, we find that the biographies, as of Abarbanel and Joseph Delmedigo, are hardly scientific; they occupy themselves with external facts to the neglect of underlying ideas. On the whole, Ha-Meassef was an engine of propaganda and polemics rather than a literary production, though the campaign carried on in its pages against strait-laced orthodoxy and the Rabbis did not reach the degree of bitterness which was to characterize later periods—moderation that was due to its most prominent contributors. Wessely exhorted the editors not to attack religiousness nor ridicule the Rabbis, and Mendelssohn devoted his articles to minor points of Rabbinic practice, such as the permissibility of vaccination under the Jewish law.
The French Revolution precipitated events in an unexpected way. The tone of Ha-Meassef changed. It held that knowledge and liberty alone could save the Jews. More aggressive toward the Rabbis than before, it attacked fanaticism, and gave space to trite poems, glorifying a life, for instance, in which women and wine played the prominent part (1790). Six years after its first issue, Ha-Meassef ceased to appear, not without having materially advanced the intellectual emancipation of the German Jews and the revival of Hebrew as a secular language. [Footnote: The first series of Ha-Meassef ran from 1784–1786 (Königsberg), and from 1788–1790 (Königsberg and Berlin). An additional volume began to appear in 1794, at Berlin and Breslau, under the editorship of Löwe and Wolfsohn, and was completed in 1797. The second series ran from 1809 to 1811 at Berlin, Altona, and Dessau, under Shalom Hacohen. [Trl.] ] So important was this first co-operative enterprise in Hebrew letters, that it imposed its name on the whole of the literary movement of the second half of the eighteenth century, the epoch of the Meassefim.
Two poets and five or six prose writers more or less worthy of the name of author dominated the period.
Naphtali Hartwig Wessely (born at Hamburg in 1725; died there in 1805) is considered the prince of the poets of the time. Belonging to a rather intelligent family in easy circumstances, he received a modern education. Though his mind was open to all the new influences, he nevertheless remained a loyal adherent of his faith, and occupied strictly religious ground until the end. He devoted himself with success to the cultivation of poetry, and completed the work of reform begun by the Italian Luzzatto, to whom, however, he was inferior in depth and originality.
Wessely's poetic masterpiece was Shire Tiferet ("Songs of Glory"), or the Epic of Moses (Berlin, 1789), in five volumes. This poem of the Exodus is on the model of the pseudo-classic productions of the Germany of his day; the influence of Klopstock's Messias, for instance, is striking.
Depth of thought, feeling for art, and original poetic imagination are lacking in Shire Tiferet. Practically it is nothing more than an oratorical paraphrase of the Biblical recital. The shortcomings of his main work are characteristic of all the poetry by Wessely. On the other hand, his oratorical manner is unusually attractive, and his Hebrew is elegant and chaste. The somewhat labored precision of his style, taken together with the absence of the poetic temperament, makes of him the Malherbe of modern Hebrew poetry. He enjoyed the love and admiration of his contemporaries to an extraordinary degree, and his chief poem underwent a large number of editions, becoming in course of time a popular book, and regarded with kindly favor even by the most orthodox—testimony at once to the poet's personal influence upon his co- religionists and the growing importance of the Hebrew language.
Wessely wrote also several important works on questions in Hebrew grammar and philology. The chief of them is Lebanon, two parts of which appeared, each separately, under the title Gan Na'ul ("The Locked Garden", Berlin, 1765); the other parts never appeared in print. They bear witness to their author's solid scientific attainments, and it is regrettable that their value is obscured by his style, diffuse to the point of prolixity. Besides, Wessely contributed to the German translation of the Bible,