AN ENLIGHTENED AVANT-GARDE

A MODERN historical consciousness awoke among the Jews in Germany even before the new Jewish historiography crystallized in the nineteenth century, and before the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement formulated and shaped its concepts of scientific study. In terms of the history of ideas, this early break with the traditional sense of the past means that the focus must be shifted somewhat from the era of nineteenth-century historicism, idealism, and romanticism to the eighteenth-century era of rationalism and enlightenment. In terms of Jewish social and cultural history, the focus shifts from the circle of young intellectuals and academics who laid the foundations for the Wissenschaft des Judentums in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century to the circles of Jewish maskilim in Germany in the 1780s and 1790s.

The maskilim were a very small group. The central core of maskilim (taking into account only the creative activists, not those who merely supported or identified with them) never numbered more than 200 throughout Germany and outside it. These were young Jewish intellectuals, most of them in their thirties, who had a two-layered culture. One was the Jewish Torah-oriented culture, which they acquired mainly through traditional education; the other was the European culture of the Enlightenment, which most of the maskilim acquired by studying on their own. They were employed in relatively marginal occupations, as tutors and clerks, and were almost wholly dependent on their employers—wealthy men from the Jewish economic élite. It was they who ensured the maskilim's legal right to residence and served as patrons of their literary activities. The group was concentrated mainly in Königsberg, Breslau, and Berlin, in the Kingdom of Prussia, and centred on a number of focal points: Moses Mendelssohn's ‘court’ in Berlin; the Hinukh Ne'arim (Freischule) school and its Hebrew printing-house there, the Orientalische Buchdruckerei; the journal Hame'asef; and the reading society Hevrat Dorshei Leshon Ever (Promoters of the Hebrew Language), founded in Königsberg. In 1787 a supra-community organizational framework, Hevrat Shoharei Hatov Vehatushiyah (Seekers of Good and Wisdom), was set up to serve as an umbrella organization for the local groups of maskilim in Germany and outside it.