9781472905949_txt_app_IndexReference_024711_IDs

The baptismal certificate is the admission ticket into European civilisation.

Heinrich Heine

After the storm

Shabbetai Tzvi’s death, ten years after his conversion, led to a flurry of speculation amongst some of his former fans. Traditionally the Messiah could only be a descendant of King David’s royal line. But the Talmud refers in passing to another Messiah, a descendant of the Bible’s multi-colour-robed Joseph, who would be slain before David’s descendant could assume his role.1 When Tzvi died, some of his former followers assumed that he must have been the Josephite Messiah and that his death was part of the great Divine, messianic plan. A further, brief flurry of utopian expectation swept through Bohemia.

Over the years the anti-Sabbatean environment turned nasty. Sabbatean prophets continued to circulate, preaching a message of ultimate redemption and Talmudic rejection.2 The Talmudic establishment launched a counter-offensive, rooting out suspected closet Sabbateans from amongst their own number. One of the best-known, and most antagonistic, confrontations erupted between two highly regarded Talmud scholars, Jacob Emden in Germany and Jonathan Eybeschutz in Prague.

Jonathan Eybeschutz was widely regarded as one of the greatest Talmudic authorities of his generation. A child prodigy he became head of the yeshiva in Prague and in 1725 was one of a group of rabbis who formally excommunicated the Sabbatean movement in the city. The author of many highly regarded works on Talmudic law, he was on track for a glittering career, rapidly moving from one senior rabbinic post to another. When he was accused of being a Sabbatean himself his congregants and students refused to believe it.

Eybeshutz’s chief accuser was Jacob Emden. Emden’s father had battled the Sabbateans in Amsterdam and his son now took up the cudgel. But Emden, an outstanding Talmudist in his own right, had also been Eybechutz’s rival for the post of rabbi of the Three Communities of Hamburg, Altona and Wandsbek.

The confrontation began with a book that had appeared in 1724. The work promoted a quasi-kabbalistic view that was seen as heretical to traditional belief, and which accorded with Sabbatean mystical doctrine. The Sabbateans themselves claimed the work as one of theirs, and named Eybeschutz as the author. Eybeschutz denied any involvement but suspicions were not fully allayed, even when he took part in the Prague excommunication of the Sabbatean movement. Thirty years later, when Jacob Emden opened some amulets that Eybeschutz had written and found that they contained Sabbatean material, the controversy flared up anew.

The Talmudic world was divided. Accusations and counter-accusations flew. There was scarcely a Talmudist in the world who could remain neutral. There were calls to depose Eybeschutz as rabbi of the Three Communities. He was obliged to appeal to the king for support. The monarch ordered fresh elections for the rabbinic post. Eybeschutz was confirmed in his position but the question mark over whether he really was a follower of Shabbetai Tzvi never went away. His cause was certainly not helped when his son declared himself to be a Sabbatean prophet.

Jacob Emden didn’t emerge from the dispute happily either. Many people blamed him for fanning the flames of a controversy that should have been left to simmer quietly.3 He fled to Amsterdam where he spent the next few years publishing legal texts and works dedicated to denouncing Sabbatean kabbalistic doctrines, particularly publications which he considered to be propaganda to win over yeshiva students.

An odious redeemer

Even after all that had happened, the age of messianic pretenders was still not over. It wasn’t long until a far more sinister contender emerged in the person of Jacob Frank, a follower of Shabbetai Tzvi though without the charisma. As a young man Frank had been initiated into the Sabbatean movement and had spent time with a branch of the Donmeh sect of Shabbetai Tzvi’s followers in Salonika. Following a pilgrimage to the grave of Nathan of Gaza, Jacob Frank returned to his original home in Podolia, Poland, where he rounded up followers, preached a message of anarchy and thinly disguised hedonism and sought to abolish the Talmud altogether.

Jacob Frank boasted that he knew nothing of the Talmud. He described himself as an unlearned man. But it is clear from his letters that he was familiar with the Bible and kabbalah.4 He may even have known a little of the Talmud.

On one occasion a group of Sabbateans under Jacob Frank’s direction were discovered holding a secret ritual, an interpretation of a mystical Sabbatean ritual of human marriage with the Torah.5 They danced unclothed around a naked woman adorned with the ornaments of a Torah scroll. The villagers who stumbled across them at the climax of their rite were horrified. They informed the Polish authorities, the participants were arrested, Jacob Frank fled and his followers were put in prison.

Now that they had been outed as Sabbateans, Jacob Frank’s followers began to hold their rituals publicly, hoping to win recruits from the mainstream Jewish community. The local rabbis asked Jacob Emden, who, as a result of his publications and his battle with Jonathan Eybeschutz had gained a reputation as an anti-Sabbatean activist, what they should do. He suggested that, since new religions were forbidden in Poland, the rabbis should ask for help from the Church to curtail the Sabbatean activities. But Jacob Frank was no fool. He outflanked the rabbis. Twenty one of his followers prepared a manifesto in Latin, a language well understood within the Church but wholly alien to most Talmudists. The manifesto alleged that the Talmud was blasphemous, contrary to reason and against the Divine commandments. They submitted their pamphlet to the bishop, called themselves contra-Talmudists and claimed that they had been persecuted, excommunicated and falsely accused.6

The Church saw a two-pronged opportunity. Potentially, the Frankists could be a valuable weapon in the Church’s centuries old crusade against the Jews. And, handled properly, there seemed to be a good chance that Frank’s followers might be converted to the Christian faith.

The Frankists petitioned the Church to order the rabbis to attend a disputation. A key topic would be the validity of the Talmud. The rabbis, aware of the Talmud’s history, had a pretty good idea where this would end up. They managed to resist for a full year. Finally, after extreme pressure from the bishop they gave in. They turned up to the debate in Kamienic where they were horrified to be confronted by a Frankist contingent containing several of their own colleagues, who, it turned out, had always harboured secret Sabbatean beliefs.

On 17 October 1757 the bishop decided that the Frankists had won the debate. He ordered Jewish homes to be searched and all copies of the Talmud confiscated and burnt.

The burnings took place in November 1757. On the ninth of that month the bishop was suddenly taken ill and died. Everybody, Frankists, Churchmen and rabbis saw it as an omen. The burnings ceased, the Frankists took fright and Jacob Frank fled with many of his followers to Turkey where, following Shabbetai Tzvi’s example, he converted to Islam.

Meanwhile those of his followers who had remained in Poland turned back to the Church. They reminded the ecclesiastical authorities of the promises of protection the deceased bishop had given them. After some discussion the king issued a decree of royal protection. When Jacob Frank heard of it he shrugged off his conversion to Islam and returned home.

Now that they were able to live openly, Jacob Frank told his followers that it was time to follow a new path. This would involve rejecting all forms of law but only in secret. Outwardly they were to convert to Christianity. He provided a mystical justification for all this then tried to make a deal with the Church. He would present himself and all his followers for baptism, but only on condition that they could continue to live as a separate sect with their own rituals. He also demanded a further opportunity to debate as contra-Talmudists with the rabbis. One of the themes was to be the old charge of the blood libel, the accusation that the Talmud demands that Jews use the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes.

The blood libel had been undergoing something of a revival. The number of trials of Jews accused of ritual murder in Poland had been on the rise since the Counter-Reformation in the 1560s. In 1710, Jan Serafinowicz, a Jewish convert to Christianity, had published a book in which he claimed that the Talmud instructs Jews to desecrate the Host, the sacred bread used in the Mass, to deface Christian images and to use Christian blood in their rituals.

But Serafinowcz’s book didn’t have the effect he desired. The blood libel trials had begun to attract attention, the wrong kind of attention, in Rome and in Protestant Europe. The Middle Ages were over, Church leaders no longer believed the myth of the blood libel and there was little sympathy for Jacob Frank’s attempts to revive the charge. As far as the Church was concerned, the man was becoming an inconvenience.

The dispute Frank asked for did eventually take place, but nothing much came of it. In 1759 Jacob Frank, who had been born a Jew, had converted to Islam, rescinded his conversion and then founded his own religion, was baptised, along with thousands of his followers, into the Christian faith. The Talmud was to hear no more of him.

A free spirit

Many in the rabbinic camp saw the conversion of Frank and his followers as a tremendous victory. One man deeply regretted it. He may even have died of pain because of it.7 He was no Frankist and he was certainly no enemy of the Talmud. But he saw Jacob Frank and his followers as part of the mystical body of Israel, and their apostasy as the equivalent of the amputation of a limb. His name was Israel Ba’al Shem Tov, meaning the Master of The Good Name. He is usually referred to by his initials, the Besht. He is known as the founder of the deeply spiritual Hasidic movement.8 He is one of three men born in the early eighteenth century, each with radically different world views, each of whom would have a seminal and enduring influence on the story of the Talmud.

The Ba’al Shem Tov was born into a world in which magical events regularly occurred and wonder-working rabbis, Masters of the Name, travelled from village to village. They were able to heal the sick, write amulets and exorcise demons. But whilst the Ba’al Shem Tov was capable of this, and much more besides, he was no ordinary miracle-working mystic. Yes, he could prophesy the future, reveal to people their previous incarnations and understand the healing nature of plants. But what set him apart from all other wonder-working rabbis was his ability to touch souls, to bind himself up, inextricably, in the needs of others. It was his charisma, rather than any seemingly supernatural powers, which drew people to him, which created a circle of followers around him, which resulted in a hagiography of stories, legends and fables, reverently passed down amongst his acolytes.9

The Ba’al Shem Tov inspired the mystical, life-affirming movement that became known as Hasidism. It wasn’t the first deeply spiritual movement to emerge in the Jewish world but it took hold like no other. It still flourishes today, three hundred years after the Besht, perhaps even stronger than ever.

The Besht was a man of the people. This comes across clearly in the many tales in which he is found talking to innkeepers, travelling with wagon drivers, wandering through the markets, drinking and swapping stories with a group of companions in the forests. It was this simplicity which attracted followers to him. It also brought him and the first generations of his followers into conflict with those Talmudists who were not drawn to the lifestyle he advocated.

One of the fiercest critics of Hasidism, David of Makow, who married in the year that the Baal Shem Tov died, described him as ‘an ignoramus, a writer of amulets, who didn’t learn because he wasn’t able to learn, who walked through the streets and markets with a stick, pipe and tobacco’.10 We shouldn’t read too much into these words, David of Makov was a polemicist and couches his criticism of Hasidism in extreme terms, even appearing to find something shameful about sticks, pipes and tobacco. But his description of the Besht illustrates the depth of resentment that developed between the Hasidim and the mainstream.

Whatever David of Makow said, the Baal Shem Tov and his followers were deeply religious people and they held fast to all the basic principles of their faith, including the virtue of study. But the way they studied was not the way it was done in the Talmudic colleges. The Talmudists studied the Talmud as a duty and an intellectual exercise, analyzing and challenging its arguments, peering beneath its many layers to determine the theoretical roots and practical application of religious law. The Hasidim saw something else in Talmudic study. Their ultimate goal was to elevate the soul to a mystic state of union with God. This could be achieved through complex spiritual exercises, but also through simple, joyous activities like dance, song and study. As one of the Besht’s followers puts it:

When they learn Gemara (=Talmud) they clothe themselves in great fear, trembling, terror and awe of the Holy one. Their Torah (=learning) lights up their faces. When they mention the name of a tanna or any of the Talmudic authorities they imagine that person standing alive in front of them, illuminated by the heavenly chariot … . When they emerge from their learning, miracles and wonders happen to them, just as in earlier generations, they heal the sick and bring down benevolence upon all Israel.11

The traditional Talmudists, many of whom were not averse to mysticism themselves, had little interest in this sort of approach. They wouldn’t have denied that studying the Talmud was a religious activity that brought spiritual reward. But their prime motivation was to understand the law, not to become mystically enriched.

Hasidism emerged and expanded rapidly in those parts of Poland which were home to the dissenting Raskol community, which had broken away from the Orthodox Church half a century earlier. Yaffa Eliach believes that the Besht was heavily influenced by this community and may even have spent his formative years amongst them. She sees parallels between their rituals and those of the early Hasidim, for which they were roundly condemned by their opponents. These included dressing in white, whirling, dervish-like dances in which they waved white handkerchiefs, feasting on the anniversary of a parent’s death and allegiance to a deeply spiritual leader.12

There is no doubt that some of the early Hasidic practices were very alien to traditional Talmudists. It seems that they even worried some of the Hasidic leaders themselves. A nineteenth-century Hasidic leader, Menahem Mendel of Lubavitch, paid tribute to those Talmudists who had fought bitterly against the early manifestations of the movement. Had it not been for those battles, he claimed, the Talmud would have been scorched ‘by the fire of Kaballah’.13 Practical observance would have become worthless in the face of the intense fire of mystical introspection. In particular he singled out one man, Elijah of Vilna, the fiercest of all their opponents and without doubt the greatest Talmudist for many generations, for particular thanks.

The Gaon of Vilna

The title gaon hadn’t been used much since the days of Baghdad. But it had not disappeared altogether. It was still applied occasionally, to people of such sharp intellect that the designation rabbi, which means teacher, did them no justice at all.

Elijah of Vilna, or Vilnius, in Lithuania was one such man. He wasn’t a community rabbi, he didn’t head up a college, he didn’t even really have any students in the usual sense of the word; the only people who studied under him were mature, respected scholars in their own right. He’d been a child prodigy, delivered a sermon in the local synagogue at the age of six and answered probing questions on it. He spent his life in endless study, shut away from the world, rarely sleeping for more than half an hour at a time and for no more than two hours in total during a night. It is said that he spent his nights in an unheated room with his feet in a bowl of cold water so that he would stay awake. He had an unrivalled command of the Talmud, its associated literature and of kaballah. They called him the Vilna Gaon.

The enthusiasm which greeted Hasidism in its heartlands, in Polish Ukraine, wasn’t repeated in Vilna. It was a populous city, regarded as the intellectual centre of the Lithuanian Empire. Its university was one of Europe’s most respected institutions of learning. The majority of its inhabitants were Jews, and even though they were excluded from the university, they shared the city’s temperament for culture and scholarship.14 They regarded the mystical exercises of the rural Hasidim as frivolous. That’s not to say they ridiculed mysticism, the Vilna Gaon was as immersed in kabbalah as he was in Talmud. But for them mysticism was a route towards intellectual understanding, not to spiritual ecstasy.15

Elijah was an implacable opponent of the Hasidim. He saw the Hasidim as a deviant, heretical sect. As far as he was concerned their panentheistic belief that God was in everything conflicted with the traditional view of both the Talmud and the kabbalah.

Elijah condemned the Hasidim for their attitude to Talmud study and its place in religious life. The highest of all virtues, for Elijah and his followers, who became known as the misnegdim or opponents, was a life devoted to Talmud study and the lifestyle it demanded. The Hasidim didn’t deny the value of Talmud study. But it was just one of several potential routes to mystical ecstasy, alongside prayer, joy and devotion. The dispute between the Hasidim and the Vilna Gaon hinged on which was the correct form of religious worship, study of the Talmud or prayer.16

This might seem trivial to modern, secular minds. But all organized religions have had divisions at some point in their history, some have had them through the whole of their history. Often starting with apparently minor matters these disputes can escalate to a magnitude that is unfathomable to anyone not caught up in them. Religions are conservative institutions and in a conservative world all change has the power to threaten. The traditionalists had not forgotten the Sabbatean and Frankist affairs. They had no wish for anything else that disturbed their time-hallowed world view.

When Elijah was born, Vilnius was recovering from war. Its wooden dwellings had been ravaged by fire and its population decimated by plague. As a young man he would have fretted with the other Jews as the citizens of the town petitioned to have them expelled, a consequence of the king’s gift to them of trading rights. But by the time he reached middle age the city was recovering economically, low infant mortality was boosting the population of both the Jewish and Catholic communities and a new spirit of tolerance abounded, brought about by the encroaching Enlightenment. The Church, under the leadership of Bishop Massalski, stopped seeking converts, and even drove away those who sought voluntary apostasy.17 Vilna’s Jewish community became large, thriving and confident. The vast majority were opposed to the Hasidim. In the city they had the numbers, and the civic autonomy, to do something about it.

In 1772 they launched a fierce and uncompromising campaign against the Hasidim. Hasidic leaders were arrested, imprisoned and excommunicated, their writings seized and burned, Hasidic gatherings were prohibited. The Besht was dead by now but two of his most prominent followers, Schneur Zalman of Liady and Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk, travelled to meet the Vilna Gaon. They wanted to explain Hasidism to him, to defuse the conflict. The Gaon refused to see them. Not only was he unwilling to compromise, he didn’t even want to give the impression that he was open to dialogue.

The leaders of the Vilna community recognized that in Elijah they had a rare and valuable treasure in their midst. They took it upon themselves to support him. They paid him a stipend that far exceeded that of the communal doctor, and was nearly as much as that paid to the judge.18 Some people objected. Communal funds came from taxation, and many felt that they were already being taxed too heavily without taking on the support of a reclusive scholar. Complaints began to be hurled at the leaders of the community, and in particular one man, Abba Wolf, a staunch supporter of the Gaon. In 1787, Abba Wolf’s son, Hirsch, walked into the local monastery and asked to convert to Christianity. The monastery took him in, notwithstanding Bishop Massalski’s strictures. His father was distraught.

Abba Wolf went to see the Gaon Elijah. Together they concocted a plan. They bribed another convert to Christianity to befriend Hirsch in the monastery. They gave him a large sum of money and asked him to win Hirsch’s trust. Eventually, when Hirsch was confident in his new friend, they went for a walk together. Hirsch’s brothers were waiting outside. They grabbed him, dressed him in women’s clothing, threw him into a carriage and smuggled him out of the city.

Five days later the local authorities arrested Elijah and Abba. Elijah refused to answer any of their questions and was sentenced to twelve weeks in gaol. He was in prison for the festival of Sukkot, when Jews leave their homes and live in a temporary dwelling, as a reminder of the Israelites’ wanderings in the wilderness. Being in prison Elijah could not fulfil the obligation of sleeping in the temporary hut. Those incarcerated alongside him reported that for the whole week of the festival he paced up and down his cell, holding his eyes open, so as not to be guilty of the offence of sleeping in the wrong place.19

Elijah of Vilna’s legacy was not his battle against Hasidism. That was merely something he felt he had to do. His personal contribution to the life of the Talmud was intellectual, and his influence was most keenly felt in the world of Talmudic education. He had an encyclopedic command, not just of the Talmud itself but of all the sources that lay behind it, and of the commentaries and law codes that had emerged from it. Unlike those earlier Talmudists who had rejected the ‘wisdom of the Greeks’, Elijah of Vilna saw the value of science and mathematics, albeit as a way of gaining a better understanding of the Talmud. He even encouraged one of his students to translate Euclid, the classical master of geometry, into Hebrew. All in all his system of study was far more methodical and analytical than his forerunners. He laid the foundations for a new, rigorous approach to Talmud study, one which would be developed further by his outstanding disciple, Hayyim of Volozhin.

From the point of view of both the Hasidim and their opponents, the struggle had not been good for the Talmud. It had become neglected, a victim of all the quarrelling and invective. Hayyim of Volozhin bewailed the fact that in the villages the communal study houses were full of books devoted to ethical conduct but rarely contained a full edition of the Talmud.20 The focus of education had shifted from theory to behaviour, to how, not why.

The remedy lay, Hayyim believed, in reforming the educational system. The old yeshiva structure had fallen into decline. Its reliance on the charitable support of local communities had been humiliating for the students, whose subsistence had depended upon the goodwill of strangers. It had been obsessed with a technique known as pilpul, meaning sharp, or peppery. This was characterized by a search for ingenious but obscure ways of comparing and dissecting two or more pieces of text, or for setting and solving clever but irrelevant problems. In the early eighteenth century Jacob Hagiz 21 had poked fun at this trend. He asked his students: ‘According to the law a mourner must not cut his hair until his friends complain about his unkempt appearance. But what is the law where a person has no friends?’ Two hundred years earlier Jacob Landau had published a book of Talmudic riddles. He’d asked how two people could each be the other’s uncle, without any incest having been involved?22

Many people agreed that this approach, often described as hair-splitting, denigrated the Talmud; it was a way for students to show off their sharp wittedness, but it wasn’t the substance of serious learning. Hayyim wanted something better. He raised funds from people who supported his efforts and established a yeshiva in his hometown of Volozhin that would be financially independent. He abandoned the hair-splitting methods of Talmud study and introduced the techniques which characterized Elijah of Vilna’s approach, in which analysing the text and understanding its plain meaning were paramount. He created a round-the-clock system of study, so that when one group went to bed another group arose. His educational system laid the foundations for the modern Talmudic college.

In time the struggle between the Hasidim and the ‘opponents’ played itself out. As we saw earlier, Menahem Mendel of Lubavitch acknowledged that Hasidism had been saved from its own excesses by the strictures of the Vilna Gaon and his allies. A modus vivendi was achieved. There were bigger battles looming, the winds of enlightenment were starting to blow in from the west. This was no time for the two camps to irrevocably fall out. Particularly as they were about to face a new and, to the religious mind, far more insidious threat, albeit as yet unacknowledged. It was the threat of secularism.

The seeds of emancipation

The Jews were a confident, secure majority in Catholic Vilnius. Not so, five hundred miles away, in the Protestant city of Berlin. Not that they were persecuted to any great degree, after all Berlin was the heartland of the religiously tolerant Enlightenment. Indeed, full emancipation was on offer to the Jews. All they had to do was convert to the Lutheran Church. They weren’t under pressure to do so, nobody was burning their Talmuds. But who would choose to remain in a tiny minority, just 3 per cent of the population, with few political and civil rights, when they could become fully emancipated into a tolerant, reasonable, enlightened majority? Conversion, so the Lutherans reasoned, was a small price to pay.

Such reasoning didn’t go down well with Moses Mendelssohn. As a young man he had studied the Talmud, German literature, philosophy, the classics and modern languages. He’d made a name for himself as a philosopher. Unusually for a Jew, he had many friends in the German literary world and was accepted into the cultural salons frequented by Berlin’s Protestant intelligentsia.

As a philosopher Mendelssohn owed a debt to Spinoza.23 Culturally, Spinoza had helped create the conditions that spawned Mendelssohn’s thought and allowed it to propagate. Religiously however, Spinoza caused him a problem. He tried to divorce Spinoza’s philosophy from his attitudes to religion. He admired Spinoza the philosopher, felt sorry for the fate of Spinoza the religious heretic and condemned those who had hated him.24

For many years Mendelssohn concentrated on his philosophy, writing in both German and Hebrew, albeit for different audiences. His reputation grew and grew. He became known as the German Socrates. He kept away from religious disputes. Until the day in 1769 when he was confronted by a Lutheran clergyman, Johann Caspar Lavater who had translated a philosophical, Calvinist work into German. Believing that this work made out an irrefutable case for Christianity, Lavater challenged Mendelssohn either to publicly refute the work or else do what ‘Socrates would have done if faced with an irrefutable truth’, in other words concede the argument and convert.

Mendelssohn was far from convinced by the arguments in the book Lavater had translated and was deeply hurt by the personal attacks hurled at him, which intensified as the argument continued. He realized that, as the Yiddish proverb put it, he could no longer ‘dance with one backside at two weddings’. The Protestant intelligentsia would never fully accept him as an accultured German philosopher whilst he simultaneously remained intellectually wedded to Talmudic tradition. The Jews would always remain suspicious of his loyalties while he held himself aloof and supped in Berlin’s coffee houses. Mendelssohn knew he had to reconcile his two positions.

His response was twofold. He began to involve himself in the growing calls for the political emancipation of his people, arguing for a pluralistic society, for minorities to have full rights and an equal voice in German society.25 And he looked for ways to encourage the Jews, who for the main part still lived outside the city in rural, Yiddish-speaking communities, to appreciate the value of secular German culture, to speak its language and absorb its literature.

He wrote a translation of the Hebrew Bible into German, which he based on the Talmud’s interpretations. He wanted to offer Jewish students a literary, German alternative to the rather wooden, Yiddish renderings that they had used up to now, an alternative which was more substantial than the current Christian translations which, by ignoring Talmudic interpretations, failed in his view to draw out the full meaning of the text.26

Mendelssohn’s Bible translation was based on Talmudic interpretations but was far more than just that. He tried to create a synthesis between traditional, religious faith and modern, scientific reason. He wanted to harmonize contemporary science and philosophy with traditional Talmud and Bible scholarship.27

His German translation was originally published using Hebrew characters but was very quickly reprinted in German script. It became hugely popular amongst both Lutherans and Jews. Subscribers to the first edition included professors, pastors and nobles. A subscription was even taken out in the name of the King of Denmark. Mendelssohn’s use of Talmudic tradition exposed his German readers to new ways of understanding the Old Testament and it showed his Jewish readers that they had nothing to fear from examining their own heritage in the German language.

Mendelssohn is a key figure in the Haskalah, or religious enlightenment movement, an important aspect of which was to integrate traditional Talmudic and religious thought with modernity, as part of a process of cultural fusion and political emancipation. Not everyone approved of it, many traditional scholars railed against what they saw as an assault on their time honoured way of life. Mendelssohn and his colleagues had as many opponents amongst their own people as they had amongst proselytizing Churchmen.

But for every thinker who disapproved of his agenda, there was another who eulogized him. When he died, at the age of fifty six, after a life of ill health, over a thousand people, Christians and Jews, crowded into the tiny cemetery. Shops in Berlin closed out of respect. Newspapers discussed his final illness, his doctor held a press conference, his friends swapped tales about him and quoted his best-known sayings.28

Friend and foe alike saw him as a giant on the historical stage, either a hero or a villain.29 He either saved the Jews from medieval obscurity or dangled them over the yawning chasm of secularization and assimilation. It all depended upon your point of view. All his admirers wanted a piece of him; he became, in Shmuel Feiner’s words ‘a pawn to the partisans of various agendas, each waving him like a banner and adopting him for their world view’.30 Which, if nothing else, must be a testament to his greatness.

Moses Mendelssohn wasn’t Spinoza’s disciple but they do have something in common. They each stand at important crossroads along the same road in the Talmud’s encounter with modernity.

Of the three eighteenth-century figures who brought the Talmud into the modern world, the impact of the Besht and the Vilna Gaon is readily discernible, even if today the boundaries between their respective groups of followers has become somewhat blurred, at least from the outside. Each in their own way ensured the continuity and vibrancy of Talmudic life. The picture with Moses Mendelssohn is more complex. In many ways he took on a far greater challenge. The Besht and the Gaon, in their very different ways, inspired their followers. Mendelssohn sought to put in place a huge cultural shift. He didn’t wholly succeed, some of his children converted to Christianity, including his son Abraham, father of the composer Felix Mendelssohn. He became, as David Sorkin put it, a legend in his own lifetime and a symbol thereafter.

Notes

1 Sukkah 52a. The Messiah, son of Joseph, seems to be an early theme which may first occur in the Dead Sea Scrolls (see A Dying and Rising Josephite Messiah in 4Q372, David C. Mitchell, Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 2009, 18: 18). The idea doesn’t get fully developed until post-Talmudic times and its early origins need further research. The alleged reference in the pseudepigraphic work Testament of the Tribes (Testament of Benjamin 3.8) is almost certainly a later Christian interpolation.

8 Scholars now believe that the Baal Shem Tov is credited with founding a movement which already existed (Doktor, 2011). There were small groups of mystical pietists in Poland before the Besht but it was his charisma and the legends that grew up around him that propelled Hasidism into a mass movement. It is for this reason that it is reasonable to refer to him as the movement’s founder.

9 One of the most comprehensive and best-told collections of Besht stories is by Yitzhak Buxbaum Buxbaum, 2005.

10 Cited in Wilensky, 1956, p. 147.

11 Iggeret HaKodesh, printed at the back of Noam Elimelech, published 1798 by Elimelech of Lizhensk (1717–86), reprinted and retypeset Jerusalem 1995.