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In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as German Jews struggled for legal emancipation and social acceptance, they also embarked on a program of cultural renewal, two key dimensions of which were distancing themselves from their fellow Ashkenazim in Poland and giving a special place to the Sephardim of medieval Spain. Where they saw Ashkenazic Jewry as insular and backward, a result of Christian persecution, they depicted the Sephardim as worldly, morally and intellectually superior, and beautiful, products of the tolerant Muslim environment in which they lived. In this elegantly written book, John Efron looks in depth at the special allure Sephardic aesthetics held for German Jewry.
Efron examines how German Jews idealized the sound of Sephardic Hebrew and the Sephardim's physical and moral beauty, and shows how the allure of the Sephardic found expression in neo-Moorish synagogue architecture, historical novels, and romanticized depictions of Sephardic history. He argues that the shapers of German-Jewish culture imagined medieval Iberian Jewry as an exemplary Jewish community, bound by tradition yet fully at home in the dominant culture of Muslim Spain. Efron argues that the myth of Sephardic superiority was actually an expression of withering self-critique by German Jews who, by seeking to transform Ashkenazic culture and win the acceptance of German society, hoped to enter their own golden age.
Stimulating and provocative, this book demonstrates how the goal of this aesthetic self-refashioning was not assimilation but rather the creation of a new form of German-Jewish identity inspired by Sephardic beauty.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400874194 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 13 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic
By John M. Efron
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-7419-4
CHAPTER 1
The Sound of Jewish Modernity
SEPHARDIC HEBREW AND THE BERLIN HASKALAH
For at least a century, historians have depicted the Berlin Haskalah as a textual, hortatory, and pedagogic revolution in Jewish intellectual life. In books, journals, manifestos, and plays, the goals of the Haskalah were written down or performed, serving as how-to guides to Jewish self-improvement. In the felicitous expression of the historian Shmuel Feiner, the figures of the Jewsh Enlightenment formed a "republic of letters." As such, the Haskalah is chiefly recalled as a literary enterprise. But there is another dimension to the Haskalah, one that has received little or no attention from scholars, and that is the Haskalah as an auditory experience. While it was intimately bound to the purely intellectual manifestations of Jewish Enlightenment thought, the auditory was also distinct in that it represented the sensory aspect of the Haskalah.
Specifically, nearly all those who were either involved in or later influenced by the Berlin Haskalah of the late eighteenth century were preoccupied with language generally but, more particularly, by the very sound Jews made when talking. The Haskalah arose amid the drive of centralizing European states to promote the standardization of the written and the spoken word. Both the command Jews had of various languages and the particular accents they possessed became important markers of social, economic, and even religious status. Because accents laid bare one's geographic origins and cultural orientation, nearly all those who wished to refashion the Jewish people turned their attention to the way Jews spoke, the sounds they uttered, and the impact of those sounds on the listener. Advocates of reform went so far as to express the belief that cognitive and moral improvement of the Jews would accompany language and accent change.
To consciously alter one's accent implies a sense of knowing exactly the way one wants to sound in the future. It requires an aural template, a sonic frame of reference, onto and against which the desired metamorphosis can take place. The Berlin Haskalah set out such a model in the course of its advocacy on behalf of the revitalization of the Hebrew language. A major concern of the maskilim on this score was the felt need to discourage Jews from uttering Hebrew with their normative Ashkenazic forms of pronunciation. Rather, for aesthetic reasons, ones deeply implicated in the way the Hebraically literate elite came to see themselves and their coreligionists, they encouraged Jews to discard their mode of speaking Hebrew and replace it with Sephardic pronunciation. The project of changing the sounds Jews made when speaking, for the purpose of enhancing the delight of listeners, was informed by a particular kind of internal Jewish orientalism, one that was characterized by phonological self-abnegation, on the one hand, and sonic celebration of an alternative mode of Jewish speech, on the other. The promotion of Sephardic Hebrew went beyond making a case for its preeminence and entailed some of the earliest Central European paeans to Sephardic culture and the superiority of Jewish life under Islam.
Expanding knowledge of Sephardic culture and traditions came about with the noticeable increase in the number of medieval Sephardic works appearing on Ashkenazic bookshelves. Across Europe in the eighteenth century, Iberian philosophical, scientific, kabbalistic, halakhic, and liturgical texts increasingly occupied and fascinated Ashkenazic intellectuals. Even among those quintessential Ashkenazic Jews, the Hasidim, Sephardic practices were incorporated into the new forms of religious observance that emerged in the wake of their pietistic revolution. Elsewhere, secret Sabbatean cells encouraged religious subversion, while kabbalists and mystics inspired by their Sephardic predecessors were to be found throughout the Ashkenazic world.
To be sure, not all Ashkenazim were Sephardic triumphalists. But paradoxically, for those who were, the turn to medieval Sepharad was one marker of the Ashkenazic path to modernity in that it expanded the intellectual canon, introducing old ideas that were now read afresh against the backdrop of a rapidly changing European world, while the exposure to Sephardic culture helped give structure and substance to Ashkenazic self-critique. The Haskalah left nothing untouched. There was disaffection expressed with the Ashkenazic educational system, the rabbis, the morality and dignity of Jews, their lack of appreciation of nature and of beauty, their appearance, and even their diet. The litany of withering self-criticism was not the end of the story, for if it represented the thesis whose antithesis was the Ashkenazic championing of Sephardic culture, the synthesis was to be the refashioning of the Ashkenazic Jews by having them emulate Sephardic manners. The ideological impulse and strategy of those advocating the Ashkenazic makeover manifested itself in an enthusiastic, largely a historical celebration of the social conditions under which the Sephardim lived, conditions held to be so propitious that they gave rise to the gloriousness of Sephardic culture, which in turn meant that such Jews had been the beneficiaries of a sensory education that had historically been unavailable to Ashkenazic Jews.
That education and the Ashkenazic myth of Sephardic superiority that was its ideological ballast began in Berlin. As it pertained to Hebrew and the way it was supposed to sound, this mode of thought began in the late eighteenth century and reached its apotheosis at the end of the nineteenth with the advent of Zionism. This view did not emerge out of nothingness, and in what follows I examine the intellectual context and scholarly debts and social networks that influenced the maskilic project of making the Jews a euphonious people. There was, to be sure, a textual Haskalah, but there was also an acoustic Haskalah.
* * *
In the beginning was Hebrew. The struggle over language use was paramount to the modern Jewish experience. That struggle was often seen as a simple battle between the proponents of Hebrew and those of Yiddish or, and this was less acute, between Hebraists and those who advocated that Jews adopt European vernaculars. But in truth, the earliest concerns had to do with Hebrew itself. The issue turned on the suppleness, indeed the very usability, of Hebrew. Already among Sephardim in the Middle Ages, authors such as Moses ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi, Maimonides, and Samuel ibn Tibbon had noted some of Hebrew's inadequacies when it came to expressing secular ideas, inadequacies that were particularly conspicuous when Hebrew was compared to Arabic. Deeply dedicated to Hebrew, they lamented that Exile had led to its abandonment as a living vernacular, and thus had it remained frozen in time.
By contrast, among Italian Hebraists of the Renaissance and thereafter, there was a feeling of greater confidence about Hebrew. For them, the language of the Bible was pure, its structure, syntax, and grammar all perfect. For distinguished rabbis such Yehuda Messer Leon, Yehuda Aryeh Modena, and, later, Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto, proper biblical Hebrew was so rich, so precious, that it was to be quarantined off from the importation of borrowed words — and the reference here was not to Gentile languages but to mishnaic Hebrew, which some authorities saw as separate from, though obviously connected to, the Hebrew of the Bible. Especially in the domain of poetry, they cautioned, only biblical Hebrew was to be used, hence their rejection of medieval liturgical poetry, known as piyyut. They considered the authors of such works to have disregarded the basic grammatical and syntactical rules of Hebrew; most unforgivably, those authors introduced foreign words instead of relying on biblical terms. The charge that maskilim and later Hebraists leveled at Yiddish, namely, that it was a corrupted language (la'agei safah), was also directed at medieval Hebrew by those who championed the singular use of biblical Hebrew. Purity, as we will see, was central to eighteenth-century notions of aesthetic beauty, and languages whose purity had been compromised were regarded as an assault on aural sensibilities.
With the Haskalah of the eighteenth century, promoters of Hebrew faced a linguistic crisis. Though most of them held Hebrew to be the original language of humanity (as did many Christians) and still considered it sacred, they also recognized its limitations thanks to its comparatively small and antiquated vocabulary. Considered incapable of expressing recently coined terms drawn from the natural sciences, technology, and philosophy, Hebrew, in its current state, was deemed quite unable to meet the needs of the modern Jew. Moreover, the problem was compounded by the fact that Jews were no longer contributing to Hebrew's vitality. The impression of the London physician Mordechai Gumpel Schnaber (1741-1797) was typical of this line of thought. In his short Hebrew encyclopedia of mathematics and natural science that appeared in 1771, Schnaber lamented that
we have lost our Holy Tongue; no one studies it and no one longs for it. If we look at all the nations around us, both near and far, [we see that they] neither rest nor remain silent and keep on composing books and expanding their languages ... why do we squander the bequest of our fathers and abandon our Holy language? We have become idle ... our language is poor and deficient because there is no one among us who knows how to call a thing byits name in Hebrew, or how to describe it, unless it is found in the Torah or Prophets, and even then there are few among us whose language is pure and whose speech, pleasant (tsekhi ha-melitsa ve-ne'imei ha-dvarim).
The polemical nature of Ashkenazic self-criticism demanded that Schnaber ignore the fact that other languages wanted for modern words as well. More pointedly, however, of Schnaber's many claims it is his desire for "pleasant"-sounding speech that goes to the heart of the auditory dimension of the Haskalah, for according to eighteenth-century linguistic theory, language that was pleasant to the ear tended also to be "pure" With the passage of time, this sentiment only strengthened. As race science and linguistic theory converged in the nineteenth century, the pleasantness (read superiority) of a language became increasingly predicated on the imagined (racial) purity of the speakers of that language.
The paradox engendered by Hebrew was that its antiquity, which endowed it with prestige, also consigned it to limited, largely liturgical use. Rectifying the problem posed in the present by Hebrew's deep past was of major concern in maskilic circles. The challenge lay in expanding and modernizing Hebrew while at the same time taking care not to compromise the deeply held belief in the purity and perfection of biblical Hebrew. In contrast to their Italian Jewish predecessors, Central and Eastern European rabbis such as Shlomo Zalman Hanau (1687-1746), Israel ben Moshe Halevi of Zamosc (1710-1772), Shlomo Pappenheim (1740-1814), and Isaac Satanow (1733-1805) regarded mishnaic Hebrew as pure Hebrew and argued that incorporating it in order to expand the possibilities of biblical Hebrew was entirely permissible. Thus the linguistic problem for Pappenheim was not caused by anything intrinsic to the language of the Bible. Rather, "it is not Hebrew that is poor ... but we whose knowledge is inadequate. We are ignorant of the many books that perished, the 'Histories of the Kings,' for instance, the 'Midrashim of the Prophets' and their like, all of which were written in Hebrew. In addition, after Hebrew ceased to be a spoken language, parts of it ... were forgotten and equally lost." We thus begin to see that the self-critique of Ashkenazic intellectuals did not spare Hebrew. However, in what would become a mantra among ideologues of all modern Jewish persuasions, chief responsibility for the sad state of affairs lay with the people. In the realm of language, it was they, not Hebrew, who were deficient.
The people did indeed need help, and it is not surprising that over the course of the eighteenth century one can detect an increasing preoccupation with Hebrew. In Germany, many scholarly and instructional books on Hebrew grammar appeared, written in both Hebrew and Yiddish, aimed at both adults and schoolchildren. The goal of course was to promote familiarity with, if not mastery of, Hebrew's grammatical rules and thus facilitate comprehension of the Bible. There was a widely held view that ignorance of Hebrew grammar had compromised Jews, and it was up to them to recapture this lost wisdom. None of the authors of these texts would have agreed with the assessment of Hebrew grammar expressed in Johann Gottfried Herder's Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1783). Herder, a man fascinated by Jews, their history, and their ancient language, and an advocate of their legal emancipation, constructed in this work a dialogue about the nature of Hebrew between Alciphron and Euthyphron, the former lamenting, "How imperfect [a language] is it! How unfixed and uncertain are the tenses of the verbs! One never knows whether the time referred to by them be today or yesterday, a thousand years ago, or a thousand years to come."
The exchange recorded by Herder echoes, to some extent, the dialogical interchange between Al Khazari and the Rabbi in Judah Halevi's twelfth-century Kuzari. Interrogating the Rabbi on all things to do with Judaism, Al Khazari asks, "Is Hebrew superior to other languages? Do we not see distinctly that the latter are more finished and comprehensive?" The Rabbi concedes that "it shared the fate of its bearers, degenerating and dwindling with them." But this was merely a consequence of the ravaging effects of Exile. The Rabbi then offers a ringing defense of Hebrew, one that the doubting Al Khazari comes to accept: "Considered historically and logically, its [Hebrew's] original form is the noblest." Among Jews, Hebrew was referred to as leshon ha-kodesh (language of holiness), or lashon elohit (language of God) and, as both names suggest, was simply considered perfect. There was no Jewish Alciphron.
That did not mean that the maskilim failed to recognize the reason for contemporary Hebrew's deficiencies. History, they maintained, had been cruel to the Jews. Most saw Exile, with its discriminatory pressures and its assimilatory power, as responsible for the overall poverty of Jewish culture and the particularly depressed state of Hebrew. They looked with envy at other nations and noted that those peoples that engaged in the full panoply of occupations and arts, and pursued philosophical and scientific endeavors, also saw their languages enriched by the sheer diversity of such experiences. The fuller the cultural and economic life of a people, the richer, more layered, and more deeply textured were its means of written and oral communication. This was precisely the view of the prolific Polish maskil Yehuda Leib Ben-Ze'ev (1764-1814).
In his account of the history of the Hebrew language, Ben-Ze'ev identifies its beginnings with Sinai (as opposed to the creation of the world) and observes that it fell into disuse with the Exile and underwent a rebirth (leda sheniyah) in medieval Spain but was lost again in early modern Ashkenaz, albeit recognizing the efforts in that era of a coterie of scholars, Jews and non-Jews alike, who strove to keep Hebrew alive. Among them were the German-Jewish Hebrew grammarian Elia Levita; the Christians Johannes Buxtorf the Elder, professor of Hebrew at Basel, and the Gottingen orientalist and biblical scholar Johann David Michaelis; and the poet Herder. While he acknowledged the efforts of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) to revitalize Hebrew, Ben-Ze'ev, who from 1787 to 1790 lived in Berlin, nonetheless lamented that the youth of his own generation had lost both interest in and facility with the language.
According to Ben-Ze'ev, the crisis became most acute after about 1500 and had continued into his day. During this time, it was not only the discrimination Jews faced from the outside world that narrowed the frame of their experience. Jews too were responsible for their low cultural level. The rise of religious mysticism, along with the neglect of Torah study and, particularly, of the rules of grammar, all conspired against the Hebrew language. Under normal social conditions, however, a different, more hopeful outcome was to be expected:
As long as a nation maintains its independence and its people live in peace in their own land, following their own political and ethical norms — wisdom and the arts multiply among them, giving rise to thinkers and artists, scientists and writers, rhetoricians, poets, and authors of books on all kinds of subjects. As a result, the language expands ... gaining the capacity to express any idea. Indeed, the beauty of the language and its perfection are then taken as an indication of the perfection of the nation.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic by John M. Efron. Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiIntroduction 1
Chapter One. The Sound of Jewish Modernity: Sephardic Hebrew and the Berlin Haskalah 21
Chapter Two. “Castilian Pride and Oriental Dignity”: Sephardic Beauty in the Eye of the Ashkenazic Beholder 53
Chapter Three. Of Minarets and Menorahs: The Building of Oriental Synagogues 112
Chapter Four. Pleasure Reading: Sephardic Jews and the German-Jewish Literary Imagination 161
Chapter Five. Writing Jewish History: The Construction of a Glorious Sephardic Past 190
Epilogue 231
Notes 239
Bibliography 291
Index 321
What People are Saying About This
"Efron's account of how German Jewry fantasied a perfect world in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived in peace and harmony in medieval Spain reveals how an entire culture generated a perfect past to help escape from an increasingly noxious present. This is an exceptionally well-researched and well-written book about a self-deception that has not vanished."—Sander L. Gilman, author of Freud, Race, and Gender"An astutely argued, beautifully wrought book by an accomplished historian. Efron provides a compelling—and also poignant—tale of German Jewry's valorization of Jewish life under Islam as a model for modern emulation. A truly impressive work of cultural archaeology."—Steven J. Zipperstein, author of Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing"Efron has written a fluid, compelling, and deeply learned account of the allure of medieval Sephardic culture and history to modernizing German Jews. His reading of how this ‘other' became constitutive of nineteenth-century German-Jewish culture is persuasive, elegant, and—no small feat—entertaining."—Elisheva Carlebach, Columbia University"Until now there has been no systematic study of the German-Jewish fascination with Sephardic culture. This superb book fills this gap. Efron truly broadens our understanding of German Jewry, taking readers on an exciting and little-known journey through the rich treasures of modern Jewish culture."—Michael Brenner, author of Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History"German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic is the definitive account of the subject. This richly documented and beautifully written book makes quite clear what the stakes were for German Jews in summoning forth the memory of Sephardic forebears. Efron is a historian at the top of his game."—David N. Myers, author of Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought