Jews, the Enlightenment and Religious Toleration Some Reflections

BY DAVID SORKIN

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When pronounced in German, "Juden und Aujkldrung" has a special resonance. It was the German-speaking Jews of Central Europe who transformed the Enlightenment into a cult central to their self-definition. Only they had a "patron saint" such as Moses Mendelssohn who equally personified the "Jews" and the "Aujkldrung" and whose friendship with Lessing supplied an ideal relationship between Christians and Jews; only they created a significant Jewish version of the Aujkldrung in the eighteenth century, the Haskalah} They alone enshrined the Aujkldrung as representing a new era in their history. Elsewhere in Europe it was different. In England the Jews understood the resettlement of the seventeenth century to have incorporated them into the Whig tradition, the unfolding of English liberties since 1688.2 In France the Jews identified with the Revolution of 1789 that had granted them citizenship, and the Napoleonic Sanhedrin that had wedded them to the state. In these historic nations the symbols ofJewish self-representation were primarily political, even if the causes of resettlement and the criteria for integration patently were not. In the politically belated German nation, in contrast, culture could be the foundation for citizenship and politics. It could serve as compensation for an incomplete emancipation, consolation for an imperfect social integration, or a secure anchorage when the social and political waters turned rough. That German Jews relentlessly celebrated the cult of "Juden und Aujkldrung" goes without saying. A few examples of the historic ritual will suffice. The centenary of Mendelssohn's birth in 1829 was commemorated with sermons, articles and books. The preacher and scholar, Leopold Zunz, typically asserted

This article is dedicated to Arnold Paucker, who, as editor of the Year Book, has done so much to encourage young scholars. 'For the phrase "patron saint" see Alexander Altmann, 'Moses Mendelssohn as the Archetypal German Jew', in Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg (eds.), The Jewish Response to German Culture. From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, Hanover-London 1985, p. 18. 2 I am indebted to Dr. David Cesarani of the Wiener Library, London, for allowing me to read his unpublished paper, 'Dual Heritage or Duel of Heritages? Englishness and Jewishness in the Heritage Industry'.

David Sorkin

of Mendelssohn that: "As a man and a writer, he was at once teacher and model." 3 In 1838 the lawyer, political activist and future Vice-President of the Frankfurt Assembly, Gabriel Riesser, appealing to his fellow "Israelites" for contributions to a Lessing memorial, identified Lessing with "education of mankind, love of mankind, Enlightenment, freedom of conscience", and the "struggle against intolerance, religious animosity, intellectual oppression". He then asked.
"Whose heart beats louder over the thoughts of freedom, toleration, love of mankind, the struggle against religious animosity and moral constraint than that of the German Jew, when he is able to comprehend his position and vocation?"

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But of course Lessing's relationship with the Jews was more intimate still. The cause of the Jews inspired Lessing's muse in Nathan der Weise:
"Since Judaism had suffered longest and hardest from oppression, hatred and persecution, Lessing's muse chose it for the cornerstone of the poetic temple of reconciliation and love of mankind."

And, of course, his friendship with Mendelssohn was a model of moral relations:
"Where are we to find a purer and more sublime model than in Lessing's and Mendelssohn's friendship?"4

Such views were not limited to liberals or Reform Jews. Orthodox Jews also belonged to the subculture, participating fully in the cult by elevating the triad of Lessing, Schiller and Kant. Samson Raphael Hirsch, the patriarch of Frankfurt Neo-Orthodoxy, in 1859 claimed Schiller for Judaism.
"Are these not Jewish thoughts and perceptions with which he has penetrated the heart of the German people and for which the entire German people rises to offer Schiller its heartfelt jubilation?" 5

In 1905 a lesser Orthodox leader, Raphael Breuer, reiterated this view:

"At the moment Israel has more in common with Schiller's genius than those for whom he wrote." 6

The 1929 bicentenary of Mendelssohn's and Lessing's birth provided another opportunity, with representatives of all the competing viewpoints weighing in: Reform, Orthodox, Zionist and Right-wing veterans. It comes as no surprise that the first play the ostracised Jewish artists who comprised the Jiidischer Kulturbund performed on 1st October 1933 was Lessing's Nathan der Weise. It is also not

3 4

Leopold Z u n z , Rede gehalten bei der Feier von Moses Mendelssohns hundertjdhrigen Geburtstage, Berlin 1829. Gabriel Riesser, Einige Worte u'ber Lessings Denkmal; an die Israeliten Deutschlands gerichtet, Frankfurt a.

Main 1838. Samson Raphael Hirsch, 'Worte gesprochen bei der Schillerfeier, 1859', in idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 6 vols., Frankfurt a. Main 1912, vol. VI, p. 311. 6 Der Israelit, 46 (1905), p. 736; quoted in Mordechai Breuer, 'Das Bild der Aufklarung bei der deutsch-judischen Orthodoxie', in Wolfenbutteler Studien zur Aufklarung, 14 (1990), pp. 131-142.
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surprising that in the 1930s younger intellectuals, such as Hannah Arendt, began to question the cult oV'Juden und Aufkldrung".1 Such celebration belonged, of course, to the reception of"Juden und Aufkldrung": it was an essential part of German Jewry's self-understanding, its subculture. Yet reception-history and history are not identical. The cult long obscured the historical reality of the Aufkldrung by making its relationship to the Jews a norm. The same holds for the Jews' relationship to the Aufkldrung. The Haskalah has been subsumed to the issues of emancipation and assimilation rather than being studied in its own terms. I would like to examine both sides of that relationship before proceeding to one of the less-known points at which the two met. My purpose is to highlight the ambiguities which beset this historical turning point. I Let us look first at the Aufkldrung's relationship to the Jews. Historians have revised the subculture's view of that relationship by putting the politics back in. They have taught us, in the first place, that the role the Aufkldrung played in altering the Jews' situation was more modest than the subculture would have allowed. A few dates will be helpful. The Aufkldrung in Germany can be dated to the closing decades of the seventeenth century. Christian Thomasius's major works began to appear in the 1690s; the first of Christian Wolffs series of treatises {Vernunftige Gedanken) was published in 1719; the "moral weeklies" appeared in force in the 1720s; the University of Halle was founded in 1694, Gottingen in 1736; the Berlin Academy in 1700, the Bavarian Academy in 1759. Yet the Jews were allowed to resettle in Berlin in 1671, Anhalt-Dessau in 1672, Kurhessen in 1653. Not the Aufkldrung, but a combination of absolutist ambition and mercantilist policy brought significant numbers of Jews back into the German territories. This return constituted a virtual resettlement. Jewish residence since the Middle Ages had survived plague, persecution and expulsion in only a few areas, most notably in the West (centred around Frankfurt a. Main) and the South East. The rest of the German territories had largely been emptied of Jews.
"By 1570 the Jews had been cleared from every major German secular territory except Hesse, and from every Imperial Free City of any importance except Frankfurt." 8

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Resettlement took place during and after the Thirty Years' War as sovereigns came to regard the Jews as a source of revenue, an aid in restoring economic activity and a means to circumvent the Estates. This was an example of mercantilist practice forging ahead of mercantilist theory and law. A striking example is Brandenburg. The Peace of Westphalia had established the toleration
'Elizabeth Petuchowski. 'Zur Lessing-Rezeption in der deutsch-jiidischen Presse. Lessings 200. Geburtstag (22. Januar 1929)', in Lessing Yearbook, 14 (1982), pp. 43-59; Hannah Arendt-Stern, 'Aufklarung und Judenfrage', in Zeitschriftfor die Geschichte derjuden in Deutschland, 4 (1932), pp. 6577. "Jonathan Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550-1750, Oxford 1985, p. 23.

David Sorkin

of private worship for the three recognised religions Lutherans, Calvinists and Catholics, but not for dissenters. In 1662 Friedrich Wilhelm promulgated an edict declaring a "Christian toleration and moderation . . . so that the truth can be sought, and found, in peace"; in 1664 he extended tolerantia Ecclesiastica to Protestant sects; and in 1671 defied the Estates by declaring "that the Jews and their commerce seem not detrimental to us and the country but rather beneficial" and admitted fifty Jewish families recently expelled from Vienna. 9 Such practice ofraison d'etat, of politics independent from religion, was not legally codified until the Wollner decrees of 1788. It also went beyond mercantilist theory: in Germany and England at the time its major theorists argued that the Jews were a liability, and not an asset.10 The result of such a policy was that from 1648 to the end of the ancien regime the Court Jew became a common figure. By serving a prince or other sovereign, he was often able to establish new Jewish settlements (Berlin, Dessau) or to renew old ones (Dresden, Leipzig, Kassel, Brunswick, Halle). This resettlement represented a distinct historical stage in the development of toleration towards Jews. This was toleration the ruler granted by will. This toleration did not imply rights, such as personal freedom of religion. It also did not entail uniform rights of worship: the Peace of Westphalia had distinguished between at least three forms (public worship, private worship, domestic devotion). Such toleration, in other words, was part of a corporate society in which the ruler granted privileges to groups or individuals on the basis of political and economic expediency.l x That expediency prevailed in the admission of Jews is self-evident in the distinctions made between rich and poor. Rulers who granted admission to wealthy Jews often exempted them from Jewish law courts by placing them under personal jurisdiction. The Schutzjuden were allowed to have families and the retainers they required for their households and businesses. The sorts of privileges granted to them evolved in the course of the eighteenth century: from the original Schutzbrief giving the individual personal, untransferable privileges; to a Generalpatent that applied to a widow and children; to a Generalprivileg which gave the same rights as Christian merchants (Prussia, 1761); to a Naturalisationspatent granting citizenship without the right of political participation; to full Staatsburgerliche Rechte (in Prussia in the 1790s).12 The few who enjoyed such benefits Hoffaktoren, merchants constituted a new mercantile elite. Yet they also suffered from numerous disabilities, which taxed their purses, but, even worse, their pride.
9

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Q u o t e d in G e r h a r d Besier, ' T o l e r a n z ' , in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexicon zurpolitisch-

sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. VI, Stuttgart 1990, pp. 496-497. l0 Shmuel Ettinger, 'The Beginnings of the Change in the Attitude of European Society Towards the Jews', in Scripta Hierosolymitana, 1 (1961), pp. 211-212. Ettinger's examples are William Petty in England and Johann Joachim Becher in Germany. "Walter Grossmann, 'Religious Toleration in Germany, 16841750', in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 201 (1982), pp. 115-141; Hermann Conrad, 'Religionsbann, Toleranz und Paritat am Ende des alten Reiches', in Heinrich Lutz (ed.), Zur Geschichte der Toleranz und Religionsfreiheit, Darmstadt 1977, pp. 164-171.
12

Heinrich Schnee, Die Hqffinanz und der modeme Staat. Geschichte und System der Hoffaktoren an deutschen Furstenhofen im Zeitalter des Absolutismus, 6 vols., 19531967, vol. 3, p p . 214215.

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Those who suffered most from such disabilities were, of course, the poor. It has been estimated that in 1750 there were 60,00070,000 Jews in the areas that were to constitute Imperial Germany. Some 50-60% lived below the level of the guild masters and well over half lived a marginal existence of petty trade, begging and thievery. Mercantilist policy and raison d'etat dictated that these Betteljuden and Trodeljuden be excluded or, as in the case of Prussia in 1750, expelled. Gaining the right of residence was often unachievable, unless one was in the employ of the mercantile elite. And even those who found domicile in a village or rural hamlet often struggled to eke out a living because of occupational restrictions and other disabilities, the most humiliating being the Leibzoll, a transit tax otherwise applicable only to cattle. 13 If raison d'etat and mercantilism brought the Jews back to the Germanies and determined their legal status, then what effect did the Aufkldrung have? At what point did it impinge on the Jews? One early form was intervention by the state in communal autonomy. This belonged to the states' general effort to reduce corporate institutions in the name of administrative centralisation and fiscal independence. Jewish communal autonomy was an easy target. In some cases the original settlement privileges limited legal jurisdiction, powers of taxation and the right to admit additional Jews (e.g. Berlin). In other cases the lack of historic privileges and dependence on the ruler made the Jewish community especially vulnerable. Such encroachment, which increasingly integrated the Jews into the mechanisms of the all-pervasive bureaucratic state, can also be seen as an outgrowth of Aufkldrung political ideals. An unmediated relationship between state and subject was one goal of natural rights theory, since it was a prerequisite for the realisation of individual rights. Yet such administrative integration remained compatible with the Polizeistaat that also discriminated against the Jews. Here is an example of Aufkldrung in the service of absolutism. 14 Such administrative integration was necessary, but not sufficient to bring about the next stage in toleration emancipation. This required a different image of the Jews as well as a major reorganisation of state and society (e.g. Baden, 1809; Prussia, 1812). The Aufkldrung provided this image by creating a discourse of universal humanity. But historians have taught us we now come to the second point about the Aufkldrung that in this regard the Aufkldrer were ambivalent, indeed fundamentally so. The idea of universal humanity presumed a universal morality. Virtue was to take the place of belief as the criterion of admission. The Aufkldrer envisioned a society of virtuous men rather than a society of believers, though they might be that as well. The problem was that throughout Europe the enlighteners had grave doubts about the Jews' actual or even potential Tugend. They were torn by conflicting images of the Jews. Eighteenth-century (though
13

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Much work needs to be done on the Jewish poor in the eighteenth century. See Rudolf Glanz, Geschichte des niederenjiidischen Volkes in Deutschland, New York 1968; Azriel Shohat, Im Hilufei Tekufot, Jerusalem 1960. and see now Steven M. Lowenstein, 'Two Silent Minorities. Orthodox Jews and Poor Jews in Berlin, 1770-1823', in LBI Year Book XXXVI (1991), pp. 3-26. 14 Selma Stern, Der preussische Stoat und die Juden, 8 vols., Tubingen 1962-1975 (Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts 7, 8, 24 and 32).

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not earlier) proponents of economic utility had joined Protestant philosemites enamoured of the Bible in propagating a favourable image. But opponents of established religion used the Jews as a stick to beat the Church: from the English deists onwards the immorality of the Old Testament and, by extension, of contemporary Jews, was used to excoriate Christianity. As a result, the Aujkldrung transmuted the inherited Christian notion of the Jews' theological inferiority into a secular notion of moral inferiority. This was evident in France, where Montesquieu's positive image based on raison d'etat clashed sharply with that of Diderot, D'Holbach and Voltaire, who saw the Jews as personifications of clericalism, superstition and, especially in the case of Voltaire, irremediable corruption.15 This issue of morality was at the heart of the German Aufkldrung's attitude to the Jews. Around mid-century the elements began to appear that made possible an argument for toleration, and eventually emancipation. Cameralists recognised the Jews' economic utility. Writers such as Christian Gellert and Lessing devised the figure of the "edler Jude" who established the claim, at least in theory, to Jewish virtue. In addition, these writers and others began to promote the environmentalist argument that the Jews' faults - so obvious among the poor were the result of discrimination and disabilities rather than of national character or religion. These arguments had crystallised and were widely circulated by the 1770s.16 Yet the fundamental ambivalence remained. To take one example, Christian Gellert's 1746 novel, Leben der Schwedischen Grqfin, featured a Russian Jew who proved:
"that there are pure hearts even among that people which seems least likely to have them"

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and in addition to that:

"Perhaps many of these people would have better hearts if, with our contempt and cunning violence, we did not make them abject and deceitful in their transactions; and did not through our ideas often force them to hate our religion."

Yet in a letter Gellert could write of an old Jew he had just seen:
"an old worthy Jew, if such exists".

Gellert's "edler Jude" was a literary construct.17 The consequence of this ambivalence is that toleration and emancipation were made contingent upon regeneration. This comes to the fore in Christian Wilhelm
D o h m ' s Uber die biirgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (1781). Dohm vigorously

Ettinger, 'The Beginnings of the Change', loc. cit.; Paul H. Meyer, 'The Attitude of the Enlightenment Towards the Jews', in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 26 (1963); Arthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews, New York 1970. 16 Jacob Toury, 'Die Behandlung jiidischer Problematik in der Tagesliteratur der Aufklarung (bis 1783)', xnjahrbuch des Instituts fur deutsche Geschichte, 5, Tel-Aviv 1976, pp. 13-47. 17 Jiirgen Stenzel, 'Idealisierung und Vorurteil. Zur Figur des "edlen Juden" in der deutschen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts', in Stephane Moses and Albrecht Schone (eds. ), Juden in der deutschen Literatur, Frankfurt a. Main 1986, pp. 114-126.

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9
18

propounded the environmental argument. "The Jew is more man than Jew." The Jews were debased as a result of disabilities and restrictions; once these were removed they would improve. "Biirgerliche Verbesserung" thus meant regeneration as well as an improvement of civil status. From Dohm onwards emancipation came to be conceived as a contract in which rights were predicated upon a regeneration encompassing education, occupations and religion. Dohm had the political sagacity to see that rights had to come first: only the ennobling conditions of freedom could transform the oppressed. Others did not share this view. Most Aujkldrer thought emancipation should be a step-by-step exchange. Nor did the states follow Dohm. Jewish emancipation became an incremental process of regeneration under state tutelage. The Jews' regeneration was consequently a public issue. It was debated in the first half of the nineteenth century in respect to emancipation, in the last third of the century and during the Weimar Republic in terms of the "Judenfrage". In other words, it bedevilled Germans and German-Jews from the Aufkldrung until the bitter end. And its companion piece was, of course, the German-Jewish cult of the Aufkldrung: the more virulent the debate, the more energetic the celebration of the cult. One historian has argued in the case of France that the Enlightenment's presumption to reshape the Jews was the source of modern antisemitism.19 This claim is exaggerated. But I think we should not shrink from acknowledging the Aufkldrung's ambivalence and its consequences. The Aujkldrer had the courage to see the Jews as men. They lacked the conviction unconditionally to treat them as such.

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II So much for the Aufkldrung. What about "Juderi"? Here I would like to focus on the Jewish version of the Aufkldrung, the Haskalah. The Haskalah is generally dated from the 1770s. It is associated with such figures as Moses Mendelssohn, Naphtali Herz Wessely and David Friedlander. Its best known literary creations were the Hebrew journal Hame'asef Wessely's educational manifesto Words of Peace and Truth (Divrei Shalom ve-Emei) and Mendelssohn's German translation of the Bible (printed in Hebrew script) with a Hebrew commentary known as the Biur\ its best known institution was the Berlin Freischule (1778). Most historians regard it as an effort "to return the Jews to the world of reality" a campaign of reform in imitation of the Aufkldrung designed to gain emancipation. 20 This view makes the Haskalah primarily a response to external developments. Yet the concern with emancipation came only in the 1770s and 1780s. The Haskalah
Christian Wilhelm Dohm, Uber die biirgerliche Verbesserung derjuden, 2 vols., Berlin-Stettin 1781 1783, vol. I, p. 28. For Dohm see Robert Liberles, 'Dohm's Treatise on the Jews. A Defence of the Enlightenment', in LBI Year Book XXXIII (1988), pp. 29-42. 19 Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews, op. cit. ^Isaac Barzilay, 'The Ideology of the Berlin Haskalah', in Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research, 25 (1956), p. 1.
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began instead as an indigenous effort to renew Judaism; contact with the Aujkldrung helped give it shape; only later did it become an effort to reform the Jews. Historians have a tendency to treat the Judaism of early modern Europe as timeless, or "traditional". This was not so. It was a particular interpretation of the tradition - let us call it baroque Judaism - and like any other, had its strengths and weaknesses. Its strength was its single-minded concentration on the study of Talmud and law, which it often supported with mystical i.e., kabbalistic ideas. Its weaknesses were the method of Talmud study a casuistry often at odds with literal meaning its neglect of Hebrew, the Bible and the Jewish philosophical tradition and its cultural insularity manifest in a disdain of foreign languages and science. The Haskalah was not an attack on tradition, but instead an attempt to revise baroque Judaism. It emerged from a number of sources. There was a line of pedagogical critics from the late sixteenth century deeply dissatisfied with the curriculum of the schools, and especially the predominance of casuistry in the study of Talmud. Complementing these critics were admirers of the Sephardic Jewish schools, which systematically taught the Bible and the Hebrew language, preferred the literal to the casuistic study of Talmud, and included vernacular languages, science and mathematics. In the first half of the eighteenth century, works of various sorts appeared that contributed to a different vision of Judaism: Hebrew dictionaries and grammars; popular manuals of science in Hebrew; exegetical works that argued the indispensability of science and mathematics for a correct understanding of Bible and Talmud; study aids for medieval Jewish philosophy. In 1742 Maimonides's Guideforthe Perplexed, one of the central texts of medieval Jewish philosophy, was republished for the first time in almost two centuries.21 One work at mid-century perhaps gives a sense of what the Haskalah represented and how contact with the Aujkldrung influenced it. In 1755 Moses Mendelssohn issued a few numbers of a Hebrew journal, the Preacher of Morals (Kohelet Musar). Modelled on the "moralische Wochenschriften", it presented a fresh reading of biblical, rabbinic and medieval philosophical texts, which were explicated with the categories of Christian Wolffs philosophy. The articles embraced the Aufkldrung's ideal of the "virtuous" man who was committed to religious-metaphysical truth and the fulfilment of ethical obligations. Mendelssohn also made a plea for Hebrew, showing it to be equal to other languages by

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21

1 have discussed these at length in, 'From Context to Comparison. The German Haskalah and Reform Catholicism', in Tel-Aviver Jahrbuchjiir deutsche Geschichte, XX (1991), pp. 23-58. For early maskilic figures see Steven and Henry Schwarzschild, 'Two Lives in the Jewish Friihaufklarung. Raphael Levi Hannover and Moses Abraham WolfF, in LBI Year Book XXIX (1984), pp. 229-276. For the influence of the Sephardim see Ismar Schorsch, 'The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy', in LBI Year Book XXXIV (1989), pp. 47-53. For Hebrew publishing see Menahem Schmelzer, 'Hebrew Printing and Publishing in Germany, 1650-1750. On Jewish Book Culture and the Emergence of Modern Jewry', in LBI Year Book XXXIII (1988), pp. 369-383.

Enlightenment and Religious Toleration translating some contemporary

Thoughts).22

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English verse (Edward Young's Night

The Haskalah's alternative to baroque Judaism was, then, a reasonable understanding ofJudaism consisting of the study of Hebrew language, grammar and the Bible; a literal construction of the Talmud; a revival of medieval philosophy and philosophical exegesis; and an end to cultural insularity through the study of languages, science and mathematics. The Enlightenment also had its place, primarily in the form of science and Wolffian philosophy. The Haskalah was a new means of expounding Judaism that was entirely within the boundaries of authority and piety. As an effort at intellectual renewal it had much in common with the Protestant theologische Aufkldrung or Reform Catholicism, both of which aspired to replace scholasticism with a reasonable reading of their respective religion that utilised the new science (Newton) and philosophy (Wolff). The 1770s and 1780s brought a major change by inextricably binding the Haskalah to emancipation. The public discussion culminating in Dohm's tract, as well as Joseph IPs Toleranzpatent, politicised the Haskalah. The educational issues it addressed to renew Judaism were now enlisted to reform the Jews. Some things escaped this politicisation, at least to start with. The Berlin Freischule, founded in 1778, taught the children of the poor in the spirit of the Haskalah, offering Jewish subjects (Bible, Hebrew, Talmud), but also secular ones such as languages and arithmetic. Mendelssohn's Bible translation and commentary epitomised the Haskalah's ideal of a reasonable Judaism, making the Bible accessible by linking the best of contemporary knowledge (aesthetics and Bible study, science and philosophy) with the best of the rationalist tradition of Judaism (medieval philosophy, philosophical exegesis and grammar). Wesseley's Words of Peace and Truth (1782) caught the full force of controversy. Joseph IPs Toleranzpatent legislated compulsory education for Jewish children including secular subjects. Wessely tried to support Joseph II by showing that such a reform did not threaten Judaism but promised to enhance it: he thought that if such changes were introduced in the spirit of Haskalah they could both renew Judaism and transform the Jews. Wessely's pamphlet drew criticism from influential rabbis. In subsequent years these same rabbis criticised Mendelssohn's Biur (one claimed the difficult German made Hebrew "a maidservant to German") as well as the Freischule, whose press (Die orientalische Buchdruckerei) was placed under a ban. If the 1770s and 1780s bound the Haskalah to emancipation, the 1790s bound it to assimilation. Lax or lapsed observance among the wealthy; including apostasy and intermarriage among the young; and calls by some radical thinkers (e.g. Lazarus Ben-David, Saul Ascher) for an abrogation of the law because it was an insurmountable obstacle to emancipation - all these now became identified with the Haskalah. These were, however, a disfiguration. The Haskalah was not alone in suffering such a fate. Reform Catholicism and the theologische Aufkldrung were also politicised during the Spdtaufkldrung, becoming associated
22

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Meir Gilon, Kohelet Musar le-Mendelssohn al Reka Tekufato, Jerusalem 1979.

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with ideas and policies that were hardly in keeping with their origins. The Haskalah was an indigenous effort at religious renewal that was influenced by the Aufkldrung and diverted by emancipation. 23

Ill One little known point at which Aufkldrung and Haskalah met was the attitude of the established religions to toleration. The nineteenth century shrouded this issue in myth. Kulturprotestantismus assigned Catholics an eternal monopoly on intolerance. Catholics accused Protestants of religious indifference. German Jews asserted that Judaism had always been tolerant. The facts show otherwise. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the idea of toleration had been the preserve of heterodox sects, humanists, irenicists, proponents of raison d'etat or early enlighteners.24 In eighteenth-century Germany all three religions had to learn toleration. This was neither simple nor painless. Justifying toleration required major theological adjustments, whether in the interpretation of central beliefs (e.g. revelation) or in the understanding of Church or synagogue as an institution. Protestant theologische Aufkldrer, Reform Catholics and Jewish maskilim all made these alterations by reconciling the language of natural right and reason with belief. In general, secular practice preceded religious theory. In the Protestant case, as we have seen, some princes extended toleration in the latter half of the seventeenth century. This was in advance of the provisions of the Peace of Westphalia and made civic toleration and the privilege of private worship moot points. 23 When Protestant theologians debated the issue in the eighteenth century they were concerned with dogmatic toleration and full civic equality linked to the right of public worship. The debate turned on the understanding of revelation. One can see this in the case of a prominent opponent of toleration, Johann Melchior Goeze, the Hamburg pastor made infamous by his polemics, especially with Lessing. He construed the Lutheran concept of revelation as an exclusive claim to the entire life of the believer. Since this understanding established an absolute truth in which belief was paramount, dogma dictating ethics, it was inherently intolerant. Goeze accepted, for example, that members of other faiths might be sincere and moral, yet true Lutheran belief in Christ was the only guarantee.
"Only those who are righteous in Christ Jesus have a sincere heart in its authentic and full sense."
23

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Sorkin, 'From Context to Comparison', loc. cit. For the Maskilim and the Talmud see Moshe Pelli, 'The Attitude of the First Maskilim in Germany towards the Talmud', in LBI Year Book XXVII (1982), pp. 243-260. For a moderate Maskil see Nehama Rezler-Bersohn, 'Isaac Satanow. An Epitome of an Era', in LBI Year Book XXV (1980), pp. 81-99. 24 Henry Kamen, The Rise of Toleration, London 1967. 25 Grossmann, 'Religious Toleration in Germany', loc. cit.; Conrad, 'Religionsbann, Toleranz und Paritat', loc. cit.; Ernst Wolff, 'Toleranz nach evangelischer Verstandnis', in Lutz (ed.), Zur
Geschichte der Toleranz und Religionsfreiheit, op. cit., p p . 135-154.

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Goeze agreed that the State must grant freedom of conscience and civil toleration. He also urged brotherly love between members of different confessions. Yet he rejected the right of public worship to Calvinists in Hamburg, opposing the construction of a church. 26 Among those who made the theological argument for toleration was Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, church historian and Professor of Theology at Tubingen. Mosheim was a proponent of the "collegialist" theory of church law which made the Enlightenment's regard for individual freedom and autonomous reason integral to Christianity and the Church. Using ideas of natural law and contract theory he argued that the Church was a free society of equal members. It was distinguished from other societies merely by its divine purposes.
"A sacred society is distinguished from others not by its character and disposition but only by its object."27

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Yet he understood this to have been the work of Jesus and the Apostles. Freedom of conscience and toleration were the "clearest and most distinct injunctions of Christ and the Apostles". 28 Mosheim's interpretation of scripture and his view of the Church turned the claim of revelation into a demand for toleration. At the same time, it also legitimised reforms within the Church. Although Protestants continued the debate till the end of the century, such views were well-formulated by mid-century, and were to reverberate among Catholics and Jews. Catholic theory also followed Catholic practice, though a generation or more after the Protestants. The debate became serious in the 1780s with Joseph IPs Toleranzpatent and such incidents as the Kolner Toleranzstreit (17871789) . 29 There were two major theoretical obstacles to Catholic toleration. The first was the status of the believer: were non-Catholics wilful disbelievers who deserved punishment (i.e. formal heretics) or were they inculpable since they acted from "invincible ignorance" (i.e. material heretics)? The second was the status of the Church: was it the "sole church of salvation" or was salvation to be had elsewhere? Most Reform Catholic theologians addressed the status of the believer. They used natural rights theory to advocate civil toleration by arguing that freedom of conscience and individual rights were not to be violated since they were quintessentially Christian. Bishop Herberstein of Laibach argued in a pastoral letter of 1782, for example, that "since each individual has the inherent right to adhere to that religious group which, after conscientious examination, appears to him to be the true one", 30 God alone had the right to examine the individual's conscience. The state should tolerate all who were obedient and productive.
26

Harald Schultze, 'Toleranz und Orthodoxie. Johann Melchior Goeze in seiner Auseinandersetzung mit der Theologie der Aufklarung', inNeueZeitschriftfirsystematische Theologie, 34 (19611962), pp. 197-219.

21 26

Allgemeines Kirchenrecht der Protestanten, H e l m s t a d t 1760, p . 478. Ibid., p . 261.

^Ernst Heinen, 'Der Kolner Toleranzstreit, 1787-1789', in Jahrbuch des kolnischen Geschichtsvereins, 44 (1973), pp. 67-86.
^ B i s h o p Herberstein, Hirtenbrief an die Geistlichkeit und an das Volk der laybachischen Dioces von dem Bischofe

zu Laybach [no place] 1782, p. 57.

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Such an argument from natural right was perfectly compatible with the religious one that distinguished the heresy from the heretic. The heretic deserved love in imitation of God's love for his creatures. As the neo-Jansenist Marc Wittola put it: "Tolerance is . . . the lowest form of love." Moreover: "only he who gladly tolerates all men, including false religious relations, is a good Catholic". 31 Yet love of the heretic did not imply acceptance of the heresy. The heresy was to be corrected and indeed "love, meekness and virtue", following the example of Jesus, were the most effective means. 32 All compulsion was to be avoided, but conversion was still to be sought. Another argument for civil toleration was made by Catholic professors of canon law who used "collegialist theory". Franz Xavier Gmeiner, Professor of Canon Law at Graz, asserted the harmony of natural law and revelation.
"The laws of natural right are immutable and incapable of change; indeed, they are so holy that revelation not only cannot abolish them, but in fact must confirm them." 33

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The Church must, therefore, be based on natural law by being constituted as a free society of men. Yet Gmeiner used collegial theory to justify compulsion within the Church, rather than to abolish it. Revelation transformed this free society, giving it powers over its members, e.g. the ban, as well as justifying hierarchy, which is essential to its preservation. Yet this did not preclude toleration. Natural law informs the State, which the Church supports in promoting security and felicity (Gliickseligkeit). Toleration is in the gift of the sovereign and should be granted so long as it is not injurious to society. In addition, it would be a violation of natural right were religious differences to impinge on civil status. 34 Only a handful of extreme rationalists within Reform Catholicism grappled with the more formidable obstacle of the status of the Church or dogmatic toleration. Some argued that the Church must renounce its claim to infallibility, acknowledge that it was a human institution, grant doctrinal freedom to its adherents and tolerate those outside it.35 Others suggested that the Church relinquish its claim to a monopoly on salvation and cease trying to convert nonbelievers.36 Such radical views made little headway. The main line of Reform Catholic thinking was to justify civil toleration by altering the believer's status. The Haskalah addressed toleration tangentially; emancipation made it an issue. Toleration in Judaism turned on the concept of the "sons of Noah" (Genesis 11:16). Those who observed six prohibitions (idolatry, blasphemy, murder, adultery, theft, eating the flesh of a living animal) as well as having a
31

32

M a r c A n t o n Wittola, Schreiben eines osterreichischen Pfarrers uber die Toleranz nach den Grundsatzen der katholischen Kirche, V i e n n a 1782, p p . 5-6. Herberstein, Hirtenbrief, op. tit., p . 62.

33 M

Franz Xavier Gmeiner, Kirchenrecht, 2nd edn., Graz 1790, p. 10. Ibid., pp. 165, 235-236.
Felix A n t o n Blau, Kritische Geschichte der kirchlichen Unfehlbarkeit, Frankfurt a. M a i n 1791.

35

36

For the case of Eulogius Schneider see Wilhelm Forster, 'Die kirchliche Aufklarung bei den Benediktinern der Abtei Banz im Spiegel ihrer von 1772-1798 herausgegebenen Zeitschriften', in
Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktiner-Ordens und seiner Zweige, vol. 64 (1952), p p . 176177.

Enlightenment and Religious Toleration

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legal system to enforce them, qualified as "sons of Noah" and were to be tolerated in this world and granted a place in the world to come. Muslims had long been considered sons of Noah. For much of the Middle Ages Christians were not. They were thought to be idolaters because of the doctrine of the Trinity. 37 In the mid-eighteenth century Rabbi Jacob Emden of Altona argued against this view. He asserted that Judaism and Christianity were fundamentally similar religions of revelation and that Christianity and Islam were God's chosen instruments to eradicate idolatry and disseminate belief. Christians thus qualified as sons of Noah. Although his view was innovative, his argument rested exclusively on internal categories.38 The emancipation debate politicised these ideas. The doubts of the Aujkldrer about the Jews extended to Judaism: was Judaism a tolerant religion? If not, could Jews be emancipated? The first Maskil to use natural law was Naphtali Herz Wessely. Wessely's educational concerns brought him to a new understanding of the Noahide laws. He identified them with the secular knowledge he wanted Jews to acquire (the "teaching of man" or "human law"). Such knowledge was universally accessible to reason and the basis of society and moral order. All who possessed it were sons of Noah and deserving of toleration.39 Moses Mendelssohn took Wessely's argument a step further. On the basis of natural law he argued for a strict separation of Church and State. Using collegial theory he envisaged Judaism as a free society of equal members exercising solely the power of admonition and persuasion. Yet Mendelssohn went further still: he posited that Judaism made no claim to "an exclusive revelation of eternal truths that are indispensable to salvation". 40 He designated Judaism a "divine legislation" (and not a "revealed religion") whose truths were constantly represented to its adherents through their observance of the commandments. Such a Judaism was tolerant and compatible with a multi-religious society. In his famous Letter Concerning Toleration John Locke had called "mutual toleration" the "Characteristical Mark of the True Church". 41 That was, however, a "mutual toleration" largely among Protestants. He excluded atheists because there could be no morality without God, Catholics because of their seditious loyalty to Rome. The toleration advocated by influential members of the three faiths in Germany was similarly imperfect. All denied atheists toleration. In addition, Reform Catholics and Protestant theologische Aujkldrer shared the ambivalence of their secular counterparts when it came to the Jews. Reform Catholics relegated Jews to a separate category of "gratuitous toleration" (tolerantia gratiosa), which the sovereign granted at will and could revoke.
Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance. Jewish Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times, New York 1969; David Novak, The Image of the Non-Jew in Judaism, Toronto 1983. ^Blu Greenberg, 'Rabbi Jacob Emden. The Views of an Enlightened Traditionalist on Christianity', in Judaism, 27, No. 3 (1978), pp. 351-363. 39 Naphtali Herz Wessely, 'Divrei Shalom ve-Emet', in Mikhtavim Shonim, Vienna 1827. *Moses Mendelssohn's Gesammelte Schriften, Jubila'umsausgabe, ed. by Fritz Bamberger et al., 19 vols., Stuttgart 1971ff., vol. VIII, pp. 159-164. 41 John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, 2nd edn., London 1689.
37

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Theological Aufkldrer made toleration conditional on regeneration. Yet to stress such imperfections is to miss the point. The true significance of these arguments was their ability to embrace toleration without relativising faith. Members of all religions who opposed toleration feared that it entailed indifference, scepticism or the relativising of belief and revelation. Mosheim, Gmeiner and Mendelssohn showed that this was not the case. By reconciling faith and natural law they were able to speak a language of toleration common to believing Protestants, Catholics and Jews.

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CONCLUSION I have concentrated on the ambiguities o{ "Juden und Aufkldrung". The Aufkldrer advocated emancipation of the Jews, yet made it conditional. The Haskalah began as an effort at religious renewal, yet emancipation diverted it into social reform. The established religions advocated toleration without relativising faith, yet it was imperfect. These ambiguities are worth bearing in mind. Through its cult the German-Jewish subculture attempted to idealise "Juden und Aufkldrung". The events of the twentieth century have threatened to vilify it. "Juden und Aufkldrung" did mark a turning point in the relationship between Jews and European society, but like all historical events of importance, it cannot be painted in terms of either black or white. History requires a palette of many colours and tones. 42

An abbreviated German version of this essay was given at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, Miinchen, on the 15th July 1991, at the invitation of the C.H. Beck Verlag and the University.