Difference of a Different Kind. Iris Idelson-Shein

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СКАЧАТЬ his secular learning has compromised his faith. It is soon revealed, however, that not only have Hudeyah’s studies not damaged his religion, but they have strengthened it to a great degree.¹³ Hudeyah’s travails may be understood to represent those of the Jewish maskilim in general, and those of Horowitz himself in particular, who aimed to strengthen Jewish faith and tradition through rational philosophy and science, but was suspected of heresy and radicalism in return. More specifically, the story appears to allude to the negative reception of Amudey beyt Yehudah in Vilnius. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that following the publication of the book, Horowitz was chastised by the local religious elite and forced to leave the city and settle in distant Hrodna (Grodno).¹⁴ The unfortunate episode left Horowitz bitter for many years to come. “Slanderers have maligned me,” he wrote several years before his death in 1797, “and bitter enemies have persecuted and injured me.”¹⁵

      Looking back from the twenty-first century, it is difficult at first to see how Amudey beyt Yehudah, a text so intensely embedded in traditionalist Jewish writing, could have caused such commotion. The text is written in biblical Hebrew in rhymed prose, in the style of the medieval maqama, which was quite popular amongst the early maskilim.¹⁶ Only on rare occasions does Horowitz stray from this structure, as when dealing with an especially important or complex issue (e.g., AMBY, 17a, 28a–b). As befitting a traditionalist text, the first few pages of Amudey beyt Yehudah are densely packed with haskamot (rabbinic endorsements of the book). To these are added a few recommendations by the leading members of the early Haskalah, namely, Mendelssohn, Wessely, and the Dutch Jewish publisher Isaac Ha-cohen Belinfante (AMBY, [19], [23]). The inclusion of these recommendations alongside the rabbinical haskamot serves as further indication of Horowitz’s mitigative approach and his attempt to present the bourgeoning maskilic movement as part and parcel of Jewish tradition and faith. This attempt to domesticate the Enlightenment is one of the book’s most prominent and consistent motifs.

      Thus, though he was one of the earliest maskilim and the target of at least one known controversy, Horowitz was no radical. In the preface to Amudey beyt Yehudah, he asserted his conservatism by reminding his readers that he was merely following in the footsteps of such great Jewish canons as Maimonides and Yehudah Ha-levi, both of whom had written books that aimed to combine Jewish theology with rationalistic philosophy (AMBY, [24]). In terms of non-Jewish sources of inspiration, Horowitz took special care not to mention any Christian authors by name in his book. The only non-Jewish thinkers cited throughout the text are classical authors such as Socrates, Plato, Galen, and Aristotle, all of whom would have been acceptable reading for an eighteenth-century Jew. And yet, there is a great cultural divide between these early authors and Horowitz’s Enlightened endeavor. Indeed, in his attempt to present his book as a continuation of Ha-levi’s project, Horowitz was merely complying with the literary norms of his fellow maskilim, who often utilized a spoonful of Jewish canon to help their modern philosophical or scientific ideas go down. In reality, however, if we are to view Horowitz’s text against its proper context, we should divert our gaze neither to Plato’s ancient Athens nor to Ha-levi’s medieval Spain, but rather to mid-eighteenth-century Europe, where savage philosophers were all the rage.

      RATIONALIZING RELIGION

      One of the basic assumptions underlying eighteenth-century anthropological thought was that a person’s physical constitution is a circumstantial rather than an essential trait. Enlightenment anthropology was dominated by the assumption that there is nothing biologically different between Africans, Americans, and Europeans. In fact, Black Africans or Native Americans are merely Europeans in a different setting.¹⁷ This radical universalism enabled the non-European Other, and especially the savage Other, to assume an exceptional philosophical position. It allowed the philosophers of the Enlightenment to turn the non-European world into a kind of metaphysical laboratory, in which various European norms of behavior could be empirically tested. Eighteenth-century authors utilized the exotic setting as a means to discuss such issues as gender and sexuality, women’s rights, family, and class, or as a vehicle to deliver their political sympathies. But the most common norm to be tossed into the philosophical Petri dish offered by the non-European world was religion. Indeed, while it is true that the eighteenth century saw the gradual secularization of science and philosophy, it should be remembered that early Enlightenment discourse was still dominated to a great extent by religious interests and theological agendas. Throughout the greater part of the eighteenth century, religion remained a prime marker of difference between Europe and its Others, and it maintained a prominent place in anthropological descriptions, both in scientific as well as in philosophical works. It is therefore hardly surprising that religious debate was one of the primary functions of the eighteenth-century exotic. Savage idolators, American atheists, African infidels, Chinese philosophers, or Indian Brahmins served as a platform to promote various (often conflicting) religious agendas. Often, these messages were of a deistic or even atheistic nature (such as in the writings of Voltaire or Diderot); other times they were messages directed against deism, such as in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

      And indeed, it is religion that stands at the heart of Horowitz’s book. The intricate three-way dialogue offered in Amudey beyt Yehudah constitutes an ambitious attempt to justify Jewish faith, tradition, and commandments by use of reason. Horowitz’s theological use of the image of the noble savage is inspired by a belief in a kind of universal religious intuition, a natural capacity for faith that is instilled even in the wildest savages. God, he wrote in Amudey beyt Yehudah, “has granted us the means to elevate any soul from its sordid state.… And you will not find anyone who questions His existence amongst peoples of faith from India to Kush, and not one who will deny the wonders He has done in sea and in land and in desert” (AMBY, 27b–28a). This was an extremely widespread approach during the eighteenth century. As an observant David Hume wrote in 1777: “What truth [is] so obvious, so certain, as the being of a God[?]”¹⁸ Hume’s question may have been asked in irony, but many eighteenth-century thinkers would have agreed. Mendelssohn, for instance, believed that “all peoples admit the existence of God blessed be He, and even those peoples who worship other gods will admit that the greatest power and abilities are held by the Lord God.… The tales of heaven and earth are understood by all, and there is not one thing in them that cannot be understood by any man anywhere.”¹⁹ Similar notions were expressed by other maskilim such as Wessely, Isaac Satanov, or David Frisenhausen, who asserted that Christianity and Islam had already banished polytheism almost completely, since “as the pagans heard even a tincture of either of these two faiths, which are based on teachings of the law of Moses, and as they learned how easy it is to follow their commandments, they did not hesitate for a moment but tossed away their idols, which had already become repulsive in their eyes.”²⁰

      But the eighteenth century also saw a growing awareness of other modes of living and other systems of belief, and Enlightenment thinkers were required to grapple with increasing reports of idolatry or even atheism amongst non-European peoples. One popular solution was to claim that such reports were merely false, the outcome of anthropological negligence, or even intentional deception.²¹ The English maskil Abraham Tang, for example, explained that the existence of God is a universally accepted fact, and those wild atheists of which one could read in the period’s travel literature were merely figments of the travelers’ imaginations, or a simple outcome of the language barrier. In reality, claimed Tang, atheism is simply against human nature “which is instilled in every Kushite, or in every man everywhere.”²² Another means of coping with the purported atheism of non-European or ancient peoples was offered by Mendelssohn. The latter shared Tang’s skepticism concerning the reports on atheistic nations and tribes, and in his magnum opus Jerusalem (Berlin, 1783) he urged travelers to take caution when reporting the norms and behaviors of other peoples.²³ However, contrary to Tang, Mendelssohn did not view the denial of a single God an absolute impossibility. Rather, he claimed, following works of William Warburton, that idolatry is often the result of the misuse of a pictorial script such as hieroglyphs. Pictographs, explained Mendelssohn, tend to confuse men, and it is not long before the symbolic value of the sign is forgotten and the reader confuses the signifier with the signified. Thus, an eagle, a fox, or СКАЧАТЬ