How Modern Judaism Began: Enlightenment and Emancipation
Below is a script I wrote for BimBam, a Jewish Educational Media Company.
If you want to understand how Reform, Conservative and Orthodox Judaism came to be, you need to take a step back to when they first formed. The late 1700’s is basically the first time in history when individual freedoms and choice begin to influence religious and political life. So for this there are two fancy terms worth knowing – one intellectual and one political, Enlightenment and Emancipation.
The enlightenment – what some call the ‘age of reason’ - was this idea that we have the ability to use logic and discover truth on our own – as opposed to just trusting the church on what to believe. The church’s term for these types of thoughts, and this is a bit technical, was “blasphemy.”
If the protestant reformation, which many say is the seed of the enlightenment, sought to overthrow the Catholic Church’s control of truth, the enlightenment sought to overthrow religion more broadly.
While the French Enlightenment is normally in the spotlight as it was very important for the founders of America and the English, the Enlightenment in Germany called the Aufklärung was important to the Jews as it was more friendly to religion, or rather “rational religion.” God linked with the idea of morality and ethics.
Now, Moses Mendelssohn, the star of our story, came to Berlin in the 1700’s and became one of the figures of the Enlightenment. Philosophers would gather in his home after Shabbat dinner.
He gained respect through writing about the enlightenment, and he used that respect to strongly advocate for Emancipation, which is the other movement, a political and social one. It meant Jews gaining civic rights and becoming German citizens.
Up until that point, Jews had a corporate status, so they interacted with the authorities as a group rather than as individuals. They paid their taxes as a group. They’d only go to German courts if a matter couldn’t be resolved in a Jewish court. Emancipation meant Jews being able to get any job by getting to join the guilds, and to go to any school. The hope was with Emancipation everything would be open. It was kind of a big deal.
There was an ongoing debate in Germany over whether Jews should be emancipated. Even though Jews had been there for centuries, they were viewed as outsiders because they had their own culture. Their own laws and their own language, Yiddish. Before Emancipation could happen, many Germans wanted Jews to have a better knowledge of German culture. To know its literature, its values, and its language.
So Mendelssohn translated the Bible into German using Hebrew characters. You could call it a transliteration. Jews could read a familiar text in a language they were less familiar with. It was like watching a movie you know incredibly well in English, in another language.
It was accompanied by a commentary, the Biur, which was written by Mendelssohn’s students who oversaw the project. The Biur was trying to bring enlightenment ideals into alignment with other Jewish commentary. The word for the Jewish enlightenment is the Haskalah and the Biur is what kicked it off.
So the Biur was the early project on which a lot of his students cut their teeth. It got a strong reaction. Some denounced it. Others wondered what the point was. Most ignored it. What’s important is that it sparked the Haskalah movement, the Jewish Enlightenment. Even more than the book itself, the creation of the book created a movement. And while in Germany the Haskalah was limited, its influence was far more important when it reached Eastern Europe.
Emancipation took time. Government rulings are complicated. Napoleon was good for it. Him leaving was less good. But by 1871, with the establishment of the modern German state, the Jews were formally emancipated and remained emancipated until they lost their rights under the Nazis.
So those two things – the enlightenment, and it’s philosophical concept of what it means to be human on the one hand, and the Emancipation and its promise to attain full civic rights and economic opportunities and such, are the twin phenomena that make the rise of the denominations not only possible, but desirable.
To learn about the birth of the denominations click to continue to the next video.