Haskala, a late 18th- and 19th-century intellectual movement among the Jews of central and eastern Europe that attempted to acquaint Jews with the European and Hebrew languages and with secular education and culture as supplements to traditional Talmudic studies. Though the Haskala owed much of its inspiration and values to the European Enlightenment, its roots, character, and development were distinctly Jewish. When the movement began, Jews lived mostly in pales of settlement and ghettoes and followed a form of life that had evolved after centuries of segregation and discriminatory legislation. A move toward change was initiated by a relatively few “mobile Jews” (mainly merchants) and “court Jews” (agents of various rulers and princes), whose contact with European civilization had heightened their desire to become a part of society as a whole. One of the early centres of the movement was Berlin, whence it spread to eastern Europe.
The early proponents of Haskala were convinced that Jews could be brought into the mainstream of European culture through a reform of traditional Jewish education and a breakdown of ghetto life. This meant adding secular subjects to the school curriculum, adopting the language of the larger society in place of Yiddish, abandoning traditional garb, reforming synagogue services, and taking up new occupations.
Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) symbolized the exodus of Jews from ghetto life with his German translation of the Torah (first five books of the Bible), even though the book was printed in Hebrew letters. The revival of Hebrew writing was also given impetus with the publication in 1784 of the first modern Hebrew periodical, a significant attempt to recover a sense of “classical” Jewish civilization. Though basically rationalistic, Haskala also exhibited such romantic tendencies as a desire to return to nature, a high regard for manual work, and an aspiration to revive a glorious and better past. Haskala advocated the study of Jewish history and the ancient Hebrew language as a means of reviving a Jewish national consciousness; these values and attitudes later merged with those of the Jewish nationalist movement known as Zionism. More immediately, Haskala’s call to modernize the Jewish religion provided the impetus for the emergence of Reform Judaism in Germany in the early 19th century.
Orthodox Judaism opposed the Haskala movement from the start, because its repudiation of the traditional Jewish way of life threatened to destroy the tightly knit fabric of Judaism and to undermine religious observance. There was particular distrust of a rationalistic ideology that seemed to challenge rabbinic orthodoxy and the important role of Talmudic studies in Jewish education. Nonetheless, in due course, even Orthodoxy admitted a minimum of secular studies and the use of local vernaculars. But other fears were justified, for some aspects of the Haskala did in fact lead to assimilation and a weakening of Jewish identity and historical consciousness.
The development of the movement varied with the political, social, and cultural conditions of individual countries. In Germany, Yiddish was rapidly abandoned and assimilation was widespread, but interest in Jewish history revived and gave birth to Wissenschaft des Judentums (i.e., modern critical historico-philological Jewish studies). In the Austrian Empire, a Hebrew Haskala developed that promoted Jewish scholarship and literature. The adherents of Haskala fought rabbinic orthodoxy and especially Ḥasidism, the mystical and pietistic tendencies of which were attacked bitterly. In Russia, some followers of Haskala hoped to achieve “improvement of the Jews” by collaborating with the government plan for educational reform, but the increasingly reactionary and anti-Semitic policies of the tsarist regime drove some Jews to support the revolutionary movement, others to support nascent Zionism.
Gradually, the impossibility of establishing an integral, worldwide Hebrew culture became evident, and rising anti-Semitism made many of the movement’s expectations appear unrealistic. By the end of the 19th century, some ideals of Haskala had become permanent features of Jewish life, while others were abandoned. Modern Jewry is thus unthinkable without reference to Haskala, for it created a middle class that was loyal to historical Jewish traditions and yet part of modern Western civilization.