Language:
English
Year of publication:
2023
Titel der Quelle:
Routledge Handbook on Jewish Ritual and Practice
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2023) 203-214
Keywords:
Haskalah History
Abstract:
Jewish historiography typically credits the movement known as the “Jewish Enlightenment” (Hebrew noun Haskalah/adjective maskil) with initiating the programmatic reform of Jewish practice. Although few scholars would now be content to equate the maskilic project with the social process of secularization and the general relaxation of Jewish collective discipline, academic consensus still maintains that the movement aspired to liberate Judaism from the dead hand of rabbinic authority and the anachronism of popular custom. Sidelining the fact that the Haskalah was a literary movement driven as much by aesthetic means as by ideological ends, this highly partial view rests largely on a decontextualized and naive reproduction of polemical pronouncements aimed at contemporary Jewish behavior. It is true that maskilim often expressed frustration with the benighted condition of the Jewish masses; but it is equally true that they were just as frustrated, if not more so, with the attrition of Jewish practice among upwardly mobile elites. More importantly, within the maskilic literary system, Jewish practice occupied a privileged position as an object of representation, the emotional significance of which transcended the rationalist imperative of attaching philosophically tenable “reasons” to the commandments. While deliberate interventions to update and normalize Jewish practice almost always met with failure, maskilic literature proved much more successful in encouraging the creation of a modern Jewish sensibility ambivalent about the Enlightenment project that threatened to reduce Jewishness to an idea and strip Jewish memory of its social meaning.
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