Читать книгу Judaism I - Группа авторов - Страница 21

Dr. Joseph Davis of Gratz College in Philadelphia writes that between 1492 and about 1750, when Moses Mendelssohn began the Jewish Enlightenment, Jews and Judaism remained in some ways »medieval,« while in other ways, they became cautiously and even precociously »modern.«

As expulsions of Jews from European countries continued, Jewish life in 1570 was at its lowest ebb in Western Europe. Recovery in the sixteenth century was remarkable. Ottoman authorities were eager to repopulate Istanbul, which eventually had a community of 40,000 Jews. The emigration of Jews from Western Europe also helped repopulate the Jewish communities of the land of Israel. In Istanbul, Salonika, Safed, and throughout the Mediterranean, the new Jewish communities were divided into ethnic subgroups of Jews.

In Poland, Jews also found policies of religious toleration. The Protestant Reformation, and the failure of Protestants and Catholics to convince one another, made Jewish »stubbornness« seem less exceptional. The expulsions from Western Europe ran their course, and about 1570 the tide of migration began to shift.

The sixteenth and early seventeenth century was an era of rabbis who adapted Jewish law to new circumstances, publishing responsa, commentaries, and codes of Jewish law. Poland and the Ottoman Empire stood out as major centers of Talmud study and halakhic creativity. Jewish mystics and Kabbalists immigrated to the land of Israel and settled in Safed. It and Jerusalem continued to attract great scholars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Alongside of halakhah and rabbinic literature, and sometimes in tension with it, kabbalah was the second great pillar of early modern Judaism.

Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov (»Master of the Good Name«) preached a new, spiritually democratic version of Judaism. He had a religious insight of enormous importance, »No place is empty of [God].« Besides its theology of radical Divine immanence, Hasidism introduced a variety of changes into Jewish life. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were a period of crisis in Jewish theology. However, the period was also one of increased political stability, compared to the war-filled mid-seventeenth century.