Photo Credit: Jewish Press
The story of Eastern European Haskalah as compared to Western European Haskalah was different in structure, yet similar in tone. While it was less focused on the dominant gentile culture, it was just as persistent in its efforts to root out traditional Jewish culture. As for that dominant gentile culture, there was not much to aspire to in the Polish peasants or the Russian proletariat. Jewish socialist and communist factions did emerge, but they were primarily focused on political rights, although social integration was of assumed benefit as well in order to service the primary goal.
The factionalism within Haskalah points to a phenomenon we all know so well: when the Jewish soul is not preoccupied with its ultimate lifes mission service of G-d it is frenzied and displaced, and therefore absorbed with another mission, service of causes.
19th century Eastern European Jewry was absorbed in sundry movements from historical societies to political crusading, from social restructuring to Zionism, from educational reform to culture shaping. The tortured Jewish inclination to fix, to build, to innovate is on full display during the period.
This is as true today as it was then. While many secular Jews are absorbed with medical breakthroughs, political endeavors and scientific advancement, a great deal of our non-religious brethren are at the forefront of questionable activism, like securing the monkey Naruto the rights to his own photograph, or writing long-suffering articles about the sexism of the term hey guys. Jewish restlessness is apparent everywhere. The deep desire for meaning pulsates through each appeal to protect the Amur Leopard and each protest for a parents right to choose a childs gender.
As the Haskalah permeated even the most far-flung regions of Poland and Russia, the most insular communities became enraptured with the maskilic mystique. The Chofetz Chaim writes about this time: There is no house without a dead one, with a reference to the tenth plague in which each Egyptian family lost a child. For this era, there was no house without a proverbial dead one. One rabbinic figure describes how all of his siblings left the fortress of Torah observance. Another announces his decision to step down from his position as rav because his wife and children have all assimilated.
While the remaining courageous and committed Jews developed a keen sense of pride and stalwart dedication, which was needed to brave both the anti-Semitic forces without and the assimilating forces within, vast swaths of Jewry assimilated, quasi-assimilated, or simply converted during this period. Although it is difficult to properly assess, the numbers suggested are something like 50% assimilation rates in the East.
And now we return to the question we posed at the beginning of this series What happened to the Jew of old? when we wondered how the fierce and formidable Jew of our history, the Jew who withstood chronic oppression as well as sudden vicious bouts of this age-old historical malady, the Jew who had overcome countless efforts to convert and tame him, now submitted with barely a protest.
The answer is long and complex. It can be about urbanization patterns and political changes. It can be about social acceptance and the centralization of power. It can be about philosophical writings and morally bankrupt actors. It can be about emancipation efforts and educational achievements. In truth, we can hardly even assess it. It is a story too extraordinary to comprehend. We can only try to follow its maddening plot and glean what we can.
Perhaps that is best done through a personal account, which animates the actual deterioration, the messy intersection of variables so interwoven that its too reductionist to try and pull them apart for individual analysis. The story of the Haskalah is, ultimately, a human story, and therefore replete with multi-layered human behavior.
Pauline Wengeroff was born Pessele Epstein and grew up in a characteristic Jewish community in Russia. She describes her early childhood, in those insular days of the 1830s where, for shtetl Jewry, distance and the sluggish arrival of modernity preserved its isolation for but a few moments longer.
At our home the time of day was referred to by the names of the three daily services, she recounts in her memoir, Rememberings. The morning was referred to as before the davenen, afternoon was called before or after Mincheh, and dusk was between Mincheh and Maariv. With this she proudly illustrates her familys Torah-centric existence. For her father, of what importance was the life of the individual except as fruitful ground for Talmud study. For her mother, life revolved around exacting fulfillment of every Torah regulation. [my mother] gave a prize for every worm the women found [in the produce]. She lived in fear that their search would not be meticulous enough.
She describes her fathers silken caftan with its velvet stripes topped off with his regal streimel for Shabbos. She describes her mothers great joy at listening to the young men in the family immersed in their Talmud studies.
And then she describes the changes that swept through their little village, the enactment of all those abstract factors mentioned earlier. The shrinking of the Pale of Settlement that displaced her family and forced them to urbanize. The push from German Jews to educate the Russian-Jewish masses, the arrival of government authorities to enforce western costume amongst the backward Jews, and, of course, the proliferation of the written word a literary onslaught. Rav Avigdor Miller describes: Libraries have been written against the Jewish character by enemies of our people, and oceans of ink and hurricanes of speech have issued from the pens and mouths of the vilifiers of the Talmud.
The propaganda of maskilic writing was to be found everywhere. In fables that used clever metaphors to disparage the traditional Jews; in fictional serials designed to cast the old, religious grandfather as the tyrannical dictator squelching the young and in philosophical essays drawing on the words of revered figures like Maimonides to justify the study of secular education and acculturation. The one thing the maskilim were not is ignorant. Manipulating Torah writings to support an assimilationist agenda, the Haskalah thinkers drew on their own wealth of Torah learning to achieve their ambitions: the radical restructuring of Jewish culture and tradition.
Rav Reuven Grozovksy describes how, even in the yeshivos the haskalah made nests in the form of various clandestine groups and in the reading of outside literature the fire took hold even of the homes of the rabbis, where sets of Achad Haams works could now be found. Achad Haam was a popular maskil.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Paulines memoir documents how her brothers and brothers-in-law snuck novels and philosophy books into their Gemaras, taking great measures to read this material in the traditional singsong Talmudic chant so the parents would not catch on. They studied Talmud and Schiller, and they studied Schiller using the Talmudic method. Every important sentence was studied and examined, debated and analyzed out loud Fully grown men who, up until that moment, had led an almost ascetic life were blinded by the new ways the Enlightenment shattered the sacredness and destroyed many dear treasures, she writes.
And then, with the big move to the city, Pauline describes the ultimate breakdown to the traditional Jewish family the deterioration of parental authority. Quite different times began, she says. Never again did we children come under our fathers unlimited power we young people did not realize what the old people knew: that even the smallest change in external behavior would carry with it an inner revolution of the personality.
She recounts a myriad of little things. Her sister deciding to walk outside with her husband, a behavior not acceptable in this Chassidic community, which urged a level of modesty and privacy in marriage that barred public displays. Another sister choosing to wear a hooped skirt which was the rage in the 1850s, one which their mother promptly disposed of within moments. She, Pauline, forgetting the propriety of her older sisters engagements, and spontaneously hugging her intended
The incidents, which started small, spiraled into something big. Something huge. So that by the end of her life, Pauline finds herself an elderly woman who has slowly lost, willingly and unwillingly, the center fulcrum and also all the bits and pieces, the very essence of her Jewishness. She allowed her husband to convince her to dispose of her head coverings, her sheitlach, she brought treif food into her home, and ultimately, her children converted to Christianity. The baptism of my children was the heaviest blow I suffered in my entire life. But the loving heart of a mother can bear much, she writes. I grieved not just as a mother, but as a Jew, for the entire Jewish people, which was losing so many of its strong members.
Paulines is the tragic tale of countless European Jewry during this time of turmoil, excitement, hope and confusion, one which resulted in, as Pauline puts it, the destruction of so many dear treasures.
So what happened to the Jew of old?
So much happened to the Jew of old. So much, that its really impossible to say.
Go here to see the original:
The Haskalah Series Part VII: Exploring The East - The Jewish Press - JewishPress.com
- How Smart Cities Are Redesigning Human Behavior - Lakeland Connect - June 10th, 2025 [June 10th, 2025]
- HUMAN TRAFFICKING | 'That was normal behavior': Victim recalls being 'sold' by her mother, then the aftermath of abuse - The Tribune-Democrat - June 10th, 2025 [June 10th, 2025]
- Tech company unveils eerie new way to map human behavior: 'We're tokenizing the invisible ones' - The Cool Down - June 1st, 2025 [June 1st, 2025]
- Simulating Human Behavior with AI Agents - Stanford HAI - May 21st, 2025 [May 21st, 2025]
- 'Human behavior is the basis of the energy transition' - ioplus.nl - May 21st, 2025 [May 21st, 2025]
- Driverless taxi ride surprises with human-like behavior - Alton Telegraph - May 21st, 2025 [May 21st, 2025]
- VeChains Bold Vision to Tokenize Human Behavior - 99Bitcoins - May 21st, 2025 [May 21st, 2025]
- Study links most alligator attacks to risky human behavior - Gulf Coast News and Weather - Southwest Florida News - April 27th, 2025 [April 27th, 2025]
- UF study finds risky human behavior is the cause for most alligator bites - The Palm Beach Post - April 19th, 2025 [April 19th, 2025]
- Study Finds 96% of Gator Bites Are the Result of Risky Human Behavior - Gizmodo - April 19th, 2025 [April 19th, 2025]
- A Growing Pathway to Understanding Human Behavior - University of Northern Colorado - April 19th, 2025 [April 19th, 2025]
- The Rehearsal S2: Nathan Fielder Explores Human Behavior - Hollywood.com - April 19th, 2025 [April 19th, 2025]
- A Bad Rap: Most alligator bites are caused by risky human behavior, UF researchers say - WCJB TV20 - April 19th, 2025 [April 19th, 2025]
- AI humanoid robot learns to mimic human emotions and behavior - Fox News - April 19th, 2025 [April 19th, 2025]
- INTERVIEW: Dying for Sex Director Shannon Murphy on Portraying Authentic Human Behavior by Blending Comedy & Drama - The Knockturnal - April 10th, 2025 [April 10th, 2025]
- 7 Must-Read Psychology Books That Will Help You Decode Human Behavior - Times Now - April 10th, 2025 [April 10th, 2025]
- Vet shares warning against common human behavior that gives dogs anxiety - The Mirror US - March 30th, 2025 [March 30th, 2025]
- BBVA Foundation awards the psychologists who changed the way we understand and predict human behavior - WebWire - March 15th, 2025 [March 15th, 2025]
- Human behavior is driven by fifteen key motives - Earth.com - February 25th, 2025 [February 25th, 2025]
- Nature Human Behavior is back, this time touting allyship - Why Evolution Is True - February 25th, 2025 [February 25th, 2025]
- 30 Times Courtrooms Became The Stage For The Strangest Human Behavior - Bored Panda - February 3rd, 2025 [February 3rd, 2025]
- The Impact of AI on Human Behavior: Insights and Implications - iTMunch - January 23rd, 2025 [January 23rd, 2025]
- Disturbing Wildlife Isnt Fun: IFS Parveen Kaswan Raises Concern Over Human Behavior in Viral Clip - Indian Masterminds - January 15th, 2025 [January 15th, 2025]
- The interplay of time and space in human behavior: a sociological perspective on the TSCH model - Nature.com - January 1st, 2025 [January 1st, 2025]
- Thinking Slowly: The Paradoxical Slowness of Human Behavior - Caltech - December 23rd, 2024 [December 23rd, 2024]
- From smog to crime: How air pollution is shaping human behavior and public safety - The Times of India - December 9th, 2024 [December 9th, 2024]
- The Smell Of Death Has A Strange Influence On Human Behavior - IFLScience - October 26th, 2024 [October 26th, 2024]
- "WEIRD" in psychology literature oversimplifies the global diversity of human behavior. - Psychology Today - October 2nd, 2024 [October 2nd, 2024]
- Scientists issue warning about increasingly alarming whale behavior due to human activity - Orcasonian - September 23rd, 2024 [September 23rd, 2024]
- Does AI adoption call for a change in human behavior? - Fast Company - July 26th, 2024 [July 26th, 2024]
- Dogs can smell human stress and it alters their own behavior, study reveals - New York Post - July 26th, 2024 [July 26th, 2024]
- Trajectories of brain and behaviour development in the womb, at birth and through infancy - Nature.com - June 18th, 2024 [June 18th, 2024]
- AI model predicts human behavior from our poor decision-making - Big Think - June 18th, 2024 [June 18th, 2024]
- ZkSync defends Sybil measures as Binance offers own ZK token airdrop - TradingView - June 18th, 2024 [June 18th, 2024]
- On TikTok, Goldendoodles Are People Trapped in Dog Bodies - The New York Times - June 18th, 2024 [June 18th, 2024]
- 10 things only introverts find irritating, according to psychology - Hack Spirit - June 18th, 2024 [June 18th, 2024]
- 32 animals that act weirdly human sometimes - Livescience.com - May 24th, 2024 [May 24th, 2024]
- NBC Is Using Animals To Push The LGBT Agenda. Here Are 5 Abhorrent Animal Behaviors Humans Shouldn't Emulate - The Daily Wire - May 24th, 2024 [May 24th, 2024]
- New study examines the dynamics of adaptive autonomy in human volition and behavior - PsyPost - May 24th, 2024 [May 24th, 2024]
- 30000 years of history reveals that hard times boost human societies' resilience - Livescience.com - May 12th, 2024 [May 12th, 2024]
- Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Actors Had Trouble Reverting Back to Human - CBR - May 12th, 2024 [May 12th, 2024]
- The need to feel safe is a core driver of human behavior. - Psychology Today - April 15th, 2024 [April 15th, 2024]
- AI learned how to sway humans by watching a cooperative cooking game - Science News Magazine - March 29th, 2024 [March 29th, 2024]
- We can't combat climate change without changing minds. This psychology class explores how. - Northeastern University - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Bees Reveal a Human-Like Collective Intelligence We Never Knew Existed - ScienceAlert - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Franciscan AI expert warns of technology becoming a 'pseudo-religion' - Detroit Catholic - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Freshwater resources at risk thanks to human behavior - messenger-inquirer - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Astrocytes Play Critical Role in Regulating Behavior - Neuroscience News - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Freshwater resources at risk thanks to human behavior - Sunnyside Sun - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Freshwater resources at risk thanks to human behavior - Blue Mountain Eagle - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- 7 Books on Human Behavior - Times Now - March 11th, 2024 [March 11th, 2024]
- Euphemisms increasingly used to soften behavior that would be questionable in direct language - Norfolk Daily News - February 29th, 2024 [February 29th, 2024]
- Linking environmental influences, genetic research to address concerns of genetic determinism of human behavior - Phys.org - February 29th, 2024 [February 29th, 2024]
- Emerson's Insight: Navigating the Three Fundamental Desires of Human Nature - The Good Men Project - February 29th, 2024 [February 29th, 2024]
- Dogs can recognize a bad person and there's science to prove it. - GOOD - February 29th, 2024 [February 29th, 2024]
- What Is Organizational Behavior? Everything You Need To Know - MarketWatch - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- Overcoming 'Otherness' in Scientific Research Commentary in Nature Human Behavior USA - English - USA - PR Newswire - February 4th, 2024 [February 4th, 2024]
- "Reichman University's behavioral economics program: Navigating human be - The Jerusalem Post - January 19th, 2024 [January 19th, 2024]
- Of trees, symbols of humankind, on Tu BShevat - The Jewish Star - January 19th, 2024 [January 19th, 2024]
- Tapping Into The Power Of Positive Psychology With Acclaimed Expert Niyc Pidgeon - GirlTalkHQ - January 19th, 2024 [January 19th, 2024]
- Don't just make resolutions, 'be the architect of your future self,' says Stanford-trained human behavior expert - CNBC - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- Never happy? Humans tend to imagine how life could be better : Short Wave - NPR - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- People who feel unhappy but hide it well usually exhibit these 9 behaviors - Hack Spirit - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- If you display these 9 behaviors, you're being passive aggressive without realizing it - Hack Spirit - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- Men who are relationship-oriented by nature usually display these 9 behaviors - Hack Spirit - December 31st, 2023 [December 31st, 2023]
- A look at the curious 'winter break' behavior of ChatGPT-4 - ReadWrite - December 14th, 2023 [December 14th, 2023]
- Neuroscience and Behavior Major (B.S.) | College of Liberal Arts - UNH's College of Liberal Arts - December 14th, 2023 [December 14th, 2023]
- The positive health effects of prosocial behaviors | News | Harvard ... - HSPH News - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- The valuable link between succession planning and skills - Human Resource Executive - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- Okinawa's ants show reduced seasonal behavior in areas with more human development - Phys.org - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- How humans use their sense of smell to find their way | Penn Today - Penn Today - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- Wrestling With Evil in the World, or Is It Something Else? - Psychiatric Times - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- Shimmying like electric fish is a universal movement across species - Earth.com - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- Why do dogs get the zoomies? - Care.com - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- How Stuart Robinson's misconduct went overlooked for years - Washington Square News - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- Whatchamacolumn: Homeless camps back in the news - News-Register - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- Stunted Growth in Infants Reshapes Brain Function and Cognitive ... - Neuroscience News - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- Social medias role in modeling human behavior, societies - kuwaittimes - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- The gift of reformation - Living Lutheran - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]
- After pandemic, birds are surprisingly becoming less fearful of humans - Study Finds - October 27th, 2023 [October 27th, 2023]