Haskalah: An Overview (with Prof. Olga Litvak)

“The conventional translation, which has gotten things very confused, is enlightenment,” says Professor Olga Litvak of Cornell University. “And of course this is deeply misleading.” The word Haskalah has a solid Jewish pedigree, drawn from the biblical root sekel (intellect) and concentrated in the Book of Daniel, where a maskil is a diasporic interpreter who mediates between powers and people. The maskilim—Jewish intellectuals, mostly from Eastern Europe—chose this word deliberately. They were not looking at German or French examples. They were looking at Hebrew material.

What Haskalah Was Not

The most persistent misunderstanding is that Haskalah equals Reform Judaism. It does not. Reform Judaism began as a lay initiative in northern Germany; no maskil ever served as a rabbi for a Reform congregation. Most maskilim were deeply hostile to Reform. Shadal (Samuel David Luzzatto), for instance, fought vehemently against Geiger and the Reform movement. The confusion arose because both movements were tarred with the same brush of “assimilation” and “secularization”—words that Litvak argues are fundamentally Christian concepts misapplied to Jewish life.