Moses Hirschel and Enlightenment Breslau

A City and its Jews in the Late Eighteenth Century

David Heywood Jones

• Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030462352
• Thema: Ciencias sociales
• Thema: Estudios judíos

Breslau has been almost entirely forgotten in the Anglophone sphere as a place of Enlightenment. Moreover, in the context of the Jewish Enlightenment, Breslau has never been discussed as a place of intercultural exchange between German-speaking Jewish, Protestant and Catholic intellectuals. An intellectual biography of Moses Hirschel offers an excellent case-study to investigate the complex reciprocal relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish enlighteners in a prosperous and influential Central European city at the turn of the 18th century.

© The Author(s) 2021

D. Heywood JonesMoses Hirschel and Enlightenment Breslauhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46235-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

David Heywood Jones¹ 

(1)

Independent Scholar, Berlin, Germany

 

End Abstract

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.

 

© The Author(s) 2021

D. Heywood JonesMoses Hirschel and Enlightenment Breslauhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46235-2_2

Begin Abstract

2. Jewish Historiography

David Heywood Jones¹

(1)

Independent Scholar, Berlin, Germany

End Abstract

Why Is Typical European Jewish Historiography Problematic?

If we can truly be said to be living in a post-modern age, then surely one can write a historical thesis without an exhaustive explanation of one’s motives or the manner in which certain presumptions informed or even shaped the subject at hand. The twentieth century’s legacy in the human sciences has left many of us with a justified scepticism of a dogmatic faith in historical narratives. Indeed, there is now an almost pathological reluctance to accept or deploy grand narratives without adding caveats and warnings for the presumed (and much-feared) naive reader. In 1979, Jean-François Lyotard famously announced that the very quintessence and definition of “postmodernity” was “incredulity toward metanarratives.”¹ The fall of the shortly lived fact-value dichotomy in philosophy and post-structuralist revolutions in the approach to all texts are now already half a century old. The academy is the current chief purveyor of relativist and perspectivist world views. And yet, when one approaches Jewish Studies, one is more often than not confronted with an unreflected and uncritical approach to the grand nationalist narratives smelted in the dogmatic historicist furnaces of the nineteenth century.²

The stakes in Jewish Studies are of course much higher than for other disciplines. The State of Israel, the Jewish nation-state, is a sanctuary and home for over 50% of the world’s Jewish population. Israel’s very raison d’être and ontology is built upon Zionist narratives which presuppose both some form of transhistorical Jewish essence and an inherent, congenital, even divine right, to settle and rule over Ha’Arez. In Israel, debates about Jewish history are not limited to the hallowed halls of academic institutions. After the Oslo Accords were signed during the 1990s, there were successful public campaigns against textbooks in Israel which questioned assumptions of a clear separation between Jews and non-Jews in the diaspora.³

In contrast to general assumptions about cultural or national exclusivity, this book will explain the history of Jews as a now indivisible history of complex reciprocal influence or “social and intellectual exchange”⁴ with gentile nations and cultural spheres. I am proposing a processual theory of historical development which, in this sense, should be viewed as a cultural theory as opposed to a nationalist-essentialist approach. According to this view, Judaism and Jewish cultural norms and identity have been subject to constant redefinition. This approach introduces what Gotzmann claims is “a concept of culture…fundamentally opposed to Jewish history as an identity discourse designed to define stable normative patterns and a secure vision of what to understand as ‘Jewish’ in the future when ‘looking at the past.’”⁵

Moreover, 1000 years of documented persecution, defamation and murder in Europe remains a catalyst for apologetic, didactic and even triumphalist Jewish nationalisms. As with all other nationalist discourses, historical narratives are the basic condition for nationalist self-understanding. In short, all nations have narratives. As a traditionally supra-territorial, polyglot, culturally and socially heterogeneous people, the grand narratives of Jewish peoples in Europe were consciously deployed as a means of creating unity within the atomised trans-European communities commonly identified as Jewish. In other words, for Jews, grand narratives were and are a means of securing existential survival and are not simply a projection of a unifying political or cultural agenda.

And so it should come as little surprise that the uncritical histories promulgated by many Jewish Studies historians survived the critical upheavals within nationalist discourses forced by the advent post-colonial theory. To reveal the influence Eurocentric and nationalist grand narratives had on the colonisation and subjugation of “subalterns,” post-colonial t...