Moses Hirschel is a name known to only a handful of Haskalah researchers and scholars of European Jewish history. Even then, he is usually on the periphery of their discussions, themselves on the periphery of European Enlightenment research. One can safely say, Moses Hirschel is generally treated as a footnote. Not only that, when his name does appear, his few works and actions are usually given a negative connotation. Moreover, the city and region where he lived and worked, Breslau in Silesia, fell down the rabbit hole of history when it was rechristened Wrocław and redefined as an intrinsic part of the Polish Voivodeship of Wrocław in 1945.
This book is not an attempt to push a footnote into the limelight of European Haskalah research. Hirschel’s reception history and that of many of the maskilim and enlightened Jews and non-Jews in Breslau was short lived. Hirschel left no literary estate and there are scant biographical evidences left to find. But an intellectual biography of a person or a time or even a city should not merely contain a collection of data or a repetition of sources. This work is an intellectual biography of a person, a city and an epoch. The three layers are mutually inclusive and also mutually significant in that they bring to light a city which provides a superior example of the Enlightenment in Central Europe at a time of huge societal, cultural, and religious change. To agree with Moshe Zimmermann “Biography as such provides insights about a mechanism that constitutes – together with similar mechanisms (i.e. people) – the society that produces and tolerates specific characteristics. A single life…provides as much relevant information about a society as the single atom or molecule provides about a natural element.”1
The single life I will be discussing is at once a radical enlightener, Jew, Christian, publicist, maskil, Silesian, a Prussian and, lest we forget, European. Moses Hirschel lived in a city and province boasting substantial Catholic and Jewish populations compared to the rest of Prussia. During Hirschel’s lifetime, Breslau went from being a fiercely independent Lutheran exclave within the Catholic Austro-Hungarian Empire to an integral part of a largely centralised Germano-nationalist Prussian state. The years in which he actively published were also the years when Jews across Prussia were fighting for civic equality and the Ashkenazi religious elite in the region were fighting tooth and nail to maintain their draconian hold over the lives of their congregants.
Jewish history in Central Europe is often treated by historians as a hermetically sealed sphere of activity. And this despite the large pool of primary texts from the period which show the profound interconnectedness between Jewish enlighteners, their environs and fellow intellectuals. An honest portrait of Jews in Central Europe around the time of the emancipation debates should also include discussion of the concurrent and mutually influential social, cultural and religious processes and changes happening in the non-Jewish environment.
By choosing to integrate elements of Jewish history into German history, one automatically challenges the widespread notion that German history is a history of a homogenous ethnic and religious group. This is nether true of the Germans (e.g. Prussians, Breslavians, nobility, peasants, Mennonites, Jews and Master Craftsmen) nor of the Jews (e.g. Ashkenazi, Sephardim
, poor and rich). As Till van Rahden explains in his biography of Jewish life in Breslau in the nineteenth century, “a German-Jewish history which looks into plurality and difference in German society, presupposes a new understanding about integration, ethnicity and assimilation.”2
Drawing on the aforementioned statements, this book will move away from fixed or inherited notions of exclusively bipolar cultural and religious oppositions and will instead compose a historical, political and cultural collage rather than painting a sweeping narrative. Writing back in 1992, Jonathan Frankel mused, perhaps prematurely, that Jewish historiography had moved from being perceived not in terms of “bipolarity but of multiplicity. Instead of the one basic conflict between centrifugality and centripetality, now a great variety of autonomous processes, independent variables, are traced as they interact in constantly new permutations.”3
Footnotes
1
Moshe Zimmermann, “Biography as a Historical Monograph,” in Sozialgeschichte der Juden in Deutschland, ed. Shulamit Volkov (Gerlingen: Bleicher, 1991), 452.
2
Till van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 17.
3
Jonathan Frankel, “Assimilation and the Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), 16.