Читать книгу Difference of a Different Kind - Iris Idelson-Shein - Страница 12

CHAPTER 2

“And Let Him Speak”

Noble and Ignoble Savages in Yehudah Horowitz’s Amudey beyt Yehudah

It is best to walk the course of nature, and to stray neither left nor right, for its paths are those of pleasantness, and all its lanes are those of peace.

—SHIMON BAR-ZEKHARYAH, 1788

And Hushai turned to Ittai his master and cried in anguish: have you not heard, oh master, how this man of the woods has arisen to devour my soul with his questions?

—YEHUDAH HOROWITZ, 1766

In the popular imagination of medieval Europe, Africans, Americans and other “exotic peoples” were perceived as savage and voracious beings, creatures that had been cursed by God. Hairy, four-footed, and mute, they occupied a mysterious limbo between the bestial, the demonic, and the human. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there was some attempt by more “professional” ethnographers to change this imagery and promote a less mythological view of the non-European world. However, the image of the hairy wild man endured; wild men and women appeared in folktales such as Glikl’s story of the pious Jew and his savage wife, or the myth of the hairy anchorite, and were observed by such sixteenth-and seventeenth-century explorers as Antonio Pigafetta or Henry Schooten. Other writers confronted their readers with ominous beasts, bearing the body of a man and the head of a dog, or Haitian Satanists, whose skulls could endure the sharpest blade.¹ Clearly, these were not beings with which one could engage in rational dialogue. Such dialogue was reserved to the monotheistic and “civilized” nations—Christians, Muslims, Jews, at times also Asian peoples—whose cultural and religious proximity crystallized against the context of these ruthless savages.

But this was to change during the eighteenth century. Slowly but surely, non-European peoples were relocated from the realm of folklore and demonology and introduced into the European elite of philosophers and men of science. Already in 1711, an observant Lord Shaftesbury pointed to this burgeoning intellectual trend by complaining that a “Moorish fancy, in its plain and literal sense, prevails strongly at this present time. Monsters and monster lands were never more in request, 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, he returns home to his family only to face his brothers’ suspicions that 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 a lion, which had initially been used to symbolize moral traits, slowly become deities.²⁴ This theory was shared by many of Mendelssohn’s contemporaries, such as the maskilic rabbi Elyakim ben Avraham (Hart), or the German sign-language instructor Samuel Heinicke, who doubted the possibility of delivering abstract ideas to the deaf.²⁵ But Mendelssohn went a step farther than these thinkers, claiming that even the European alphabetic script is not pure of theological hazards. Roman script, he argued, suffers from a tendency to “displa[y] the symbolic knowledge of things and their relations too openly on the surface [and] creat[e] too wide a division between doctrine and life.”²⁶ It is here that Mendelssohn identifies the advantage of Judaism over all other religions. The ceremonial aspect inherent in Judaism inscribes religious faith into the daily life of the believer, and prompts him to inquire after the spirit and purpose of his beliefs.

The question of ceremonial law is one of the core questions with which Enlightenment and particularly maskilic thought was burdened. Whereas most thinkers would have agreed that the existence of God is a universally recognized fact that can be easily deduced by use of natural reason, the reasonability of the dictates of religion was a much more complex and demanding issue. Some writers shared Mendelssohn’s view that there is reason to the commandments. Thus, for instance, Isaac Satanov wrote that while the motivation behind each and every commandment is not always immediately accessible to the mind, still the commandments are never truly contrary to reason. More radical in his commitment to the rationality of religion was Mordecai Gumpel Schnaber Levison, who claimed that the tendency to refrain from a rationalistic discussion of religious commandments leads inadvertently to epicureanism.²⁷ But other writers were less convinced. German pedagogue Joachim Heinrich Campe, whose works were extremely popular amongst the maskilim, offers a valuable example. In his 1791 rendition of story of the English “discovery” of Palau, Campe stressed that “there exists a theology of the heart [which is] independent of external expressions, and is the only one worthy of its holy name.”²⁸ Campe’s book was translated by the Polish maskil Menachem Mendel Lefin in 1818; however, Lefin chose to omit Campe’s somewhat subversive observations on Palauan religion, which bordered on deism, and made no mention of Campe’s “theology of the heart.”²⁹ And yet, no few maskilim would have agreed with Campe’s observations. Amongst these were deists such as Salomon Maimon or Ephraim Kuh, who dismissed the importance of practical religion completely.³⁰ Others exhibited a more ambivalent approach. Tang, for instance claimed that real religious practice is achieved not through the observance of ceremonial law but through the adherence to universal morals and thought.³¹

A particularly instructive example of the attempt to grapple with the reasonability of the commandments is offered by the Copenhagen-born maskil Isaac Euchel, one of the central figures of the late eighteenth-century Haskalah. In a series of fictional letters published in Ha-measef in 1789–1790, Euchel introduced his readers to the image of a Jewish Syrian traveler in Europe by the name of Meshulam ben Uriah ha-Ashtemoy [משולם בן אוריה האשתמועי]. In similar vein to Horowitz before him, Euchel utilized his naïve observer as a means to scrutinize the shortcomings of European society, such as intolerance, greed, and the marginalization of women. And yet, once again like Horowitz’s Ira, Euchel’s exotic traveler was first and foremost preoccupied with questions concerning religion. In his letters, Meshulam took a stand against religious intolerance, Jewish separatism, and the rabbinical neglect of secular knowledge. Meshulam’s observations on these matters were often subversive, at times bordering on the radical. His observations on the Marannos of Madrid offer an interesting case in point. Most of them, writes Meshulam, “do not keep the commandments at all, claiming that their sole purpose is to tie the knot of the people of Israel in Diaspora, but when they are between enemies and at a great risk, a theology of the heart should suffice—indeed, it is the essence of religion. I do not know if these things are true, because to the best of my knowledge the success of every Jewish individual has to do with the keeping of the commandments alone, and if it is possible to be whole and happy without keeping the commandments, why the Greek Socrates and the Indian Zarathustra would be as happy and as complete as any one of the people of Israel.” “Let me know my brother,” Meshulam addressed the ever absent recipient of his letters, “let me know your thoughts on this matter, because your faith is pure and whole, and your wisdom great and deep.”³²

Like Horowitz before him, then, Euchel utilized the image of the exotic critic in order to raise some extremely radical questions concerning Jewish faith. But whereas Horowitz presented these questions within the framework of a three-way dialogue, in which each and every one of the savage’s inquiries was met by a conclusive answer provided by one of the two Jewish sages, Euchel provided his readers solely with Meshulam’s epistles, and the naïve observer’s skepticism remained in effect unanswered. In this manner, Euchel’s traveler seems to serve precisely the opposite purpose of Horowitz’s savage. While Ira’s questions conveyed a methodical skepticism, which would subsequently serve as a platform for the fortification of Jewish tradition with the building blocks of science and reason, Meshulam’s reflections appear to have manifested Euchel’s genuine ambivalence toward some of the essential principles of the Jewish faith of his time.³³