Difference of a Different Kind. Iris Idelson-Shein

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СКАЧАТЬ and we may often see a philosopher or a wit run a tale-gathering in those ‘idle deserts’ as familiarly as the silliest woman or merest boy.”² Shaftesbury’s complaint notwithstanding, throughout the eighteenth century, non-Europeans began to assume a kind of philosophical prestige, and these formerly mute atheists with whom dialogue was once an impossibility began to open their mouths—and speak. The present chapter is a look at some of their conversations.

      AN ENCOUNTER IN THE WOODS

      In 1766, a Lithuanian physician by the name of Yehudah ben Mordecai Ha-levi Horowitz published in Amsterdam a book titled Amudey beyt Yehudah. The book tells of a society in crisis, split into two rival and equally corrupt camps. The first, the heretical camp, uses Jewish lore and mainly the Kabbalah as a form of magic and entertainment. The second camp, comprising materialists and libertines, uses rational philosophy to undermine religion, morality, and society. Faced with this deepening moral and religious crisis, two Jewish sages, Ittai the Gittite and Hushai the Archite, flee society and find refuge in the woods. The names of the two protagonists are derived from the biblical story of King David and his rebellious son Absalom (2 Samuel 15:19, 15:32). Ittai and Hushai were two advisors who remained loyal to the king during the rebellion. In choosing these names Horowitz refers, of course, to the characters’ loyalty to Judaism in a time of moral crisis. The sages’ time in the woods is spent in complete solitude, studying the sacred texts of Judaism and reading philosophy, until one day they encounter a savage “unabashed and nude, and collecting wet herbs for his food” (AMBY, 3a).³ The man’s first instinct is to flee back into the woods; eventually, however, he is tempted to taste a loaf of bread offered to him by Ittai, and from that moment on “the savage man followed them as a calf follows a cow” (AMBY, 3a). This encounter marks the savage’s entry into society. Initially, Hushai suggests that the man be enslaved; however, Ittai firmly objects and vows not only to acculturate the savage, but also to introduce him into society as a living moral exemplar, which will arouse the remorse and repentance of immoral men. Thus, the savage’s domestication begins. He is given the name Ira the Yaarite (“Ira of the Woods,” also from the story of David and Absalom), and promptly acquires the Hebrew language, scientific knowledge, morals, religious commandments, and proper laws.⁴ Three years go by, until one day a messenger arrives in the woods and announces that the conditions are ripe for the sages’ return into society. The men head back to the city, accompanied by their now acculturated savage, and upon their arrival begin a dialogue concerning religion, society, and philosophy. The dialogue, which dominates the greater part of the text, serves Horowitz as a platform from which to rationally justify Jewish faith and traditions and to demonstrate their compliance with the dictates of reason. In so doing, Horowitz wished to deliver a crucial blow to what he viewed as the most dire threats to contemporaneous Jewish tradition: kabbalistic mysticism, Sabbatianism, and Frankism (two influential messianic movements) on the one hand, and radicalism, skepticism, and libertinism on the other.⁵ These two forms of heresy are symbolized in the book by the two opposing camps from which the Jewish sages Ittai and Hushai flee to the woods. The sages, in turn, personify the solution to the crisis of eighteenth-century European Ashkenazi Jewry as it is perceived by Horowitz, a careful combination of tradition and reason, religious and secular studies.

      YEHUDAH HOROWITZ AND THE CONSERVATIVE ENLIGHTENMENT

      Though a relatively well-connected maskil during his lifetime, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Horowitz and his works were largely forgotten. It was only toward the end of the twentieth century that some scholarly attention began to turn to Horowitz, and two papers, by Shmuel Werses and Shmuel Feiner, were devoted to this enigmatic maskil.⁶ In his compelling reading of Amudey beyt Yehudah, Feiner presents Horowitz as a paradigmatic figure of the early Haskalah. A multilingual intellectual, well versed in science and rabbinic lore, he represents the new ideal type of the early maskil who combined secular learning with religious knowledge. Like other maskilim of his time, Horowitz viewed himself as part of the Jewish halakhic world, and saw the new rationalistic discourse as a means to improve and revitalize Jewish faith, not to undermine it. In his approach to non-Jewish science and philosophy, he was an adherent of early maskilic ideology, formulated by such writers as Naphtali Herz Wessely and Moses Mendelssohn, who criticized religious dogmatism and the neglect of secular knowledge on the one hand, and objected to radical skepticism on the other.⁷

      Of course, this kind of attempt to reconcile Enlightenment and religion was not exclusive to the Jewish literary world. Similar aspirations were characteristic of a strand of Enlightenment that has been characterized by contemporary scholars as “conservative” or “religious.” In a now classic study, Jonathan Israel defines this Enlightenment as one that “aspired to conquer ignorance and superstition, establish toleration, and revolutionize ideas, education, and attitudes by means of philosophy but in such a way as to preserve and safeguard what were judged essential elements of the older structures, effecting a viable synthesis of old and new and of reason and faith.”⁸ Clearly, the conservative Enlightenment consisted of a cluster of national, religious, and other Enlightenments that often differed quite radically from one another. What united these various Enlightenments, however, was an intense devotion to reform, accompanied by a common concern regarding the possibility of the radicalization of Enlightenment ideals. Conservative thinkers preferred to promote their ideas carefully and gradually, and to bring about the desired reforms in European society through such means as legislation and education.

      The framework of a conservative Enlightenment seems particularly conductive as a context for reading Horowitz’s work. In his corpus of writings, this early maskil expressed a deep concern regarding the radicalization of reason on the one hand, and faith on the other. Indeed, Horowitz’s preoccupation with the split within Judaism between the emerging camps of Hasidim (members of a religious movement which emphasized piety, ecstasy, and divine intervention), mitnagdim (opponents of Hasidism), and maskilim, and his fear of libertinism, Frankism, Sabbatianism, and radicalism, echo the conservative Enlightenment’s preoccupation with the problem of political instability and civil unrest. As discussed in some detail below, eighteenth-century thinkers lived in the shadow of the religious and civil wars of the early modern period, and their deep commitment to political stability is a crucial aspect of their thought. Thus too, stability, moderation, toleration, and gradual reform are recurring themes in Horowitz’s corpus of works. In the spirit of many other conservative Enlighteners, he too was acutely aware of the dangers inherent in the new ideas in philosophy and science, and he stressed that they should be consumed responsibly, like delicacies or fine spirits. “Be neither monks nor drunks,” he wrote in Amudey beyt Yehudah, “for the monk is a sinner, and the drunk—a fool.”⁹

      Little is known about Horowitz’s biography. He was born sometime around 1734, either in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius or in Padua, and appears to have received a strictly religious upbringing.¹⁰ Later in life he served as a physician in Vilnius and in various small towns throughout Eastern Europe. Some sources identify him as one of the early Jewish students at the Padua school of medicine. Jewish physicians stood at the forefront of the early Jewish Haskalah; they were revered for their knowledge and expertise on the one hand and suspected for their enticement with secular knowledge on the other.¹¹ A rare glimpse into Horowitz’s life is afforded by his 1793 book Megilat sdarim, which tells the story of a father, Yedidyah Halevi, who attempts to compromise between his three quarrelling sons: Ovadyah, Ḥashavyah, and Hudeyah.¹² Horowitz utilized the family feud as an allegory for the late eighteenth-century schism between mitnagdic and hasidic Jewry. Through the story of the youngest son, Hudeyah, the author presents the Enlightenment as a golden mean between the two opposing camps. The Haskalah is thus depicted as a project that is beneficial, nay crucial, to the revitalization of Jewish tradition and faith. However, a closer reading of the text reveals a second, less immediately discernible allegory, through which the author delivers his own life story. The biographical details are embroidered into the image of the maskilic son, Hudeyah, whose name is in fact an anagram of the name of the author—Yehudah. Similarly to Horowitz, Hudeyah receives a strictly halakhic upbringing, but goes on to study medicine amongst “the gentiles.” As the narrative unfolds, СКАЧАТЬ