The Early Modern Construction of Medieval Jewish Thought*

THE EARLY MODERN CONSTRUCTION OF MEDIEVAL JEWISH THOUGHT*

Adam Shear

In this brief essay, I outline a two-fold argument in order to offer a contribution to the general discussion of ‘early modern medievalisms’ using early modern Jewish intellectual history as a case study. First, I want to sketch the broad outlines of an argument that a particular conceptualization of medieval Jewish philosophy prevailed as the mainstream (with exceptions of course) in the early modern period from the late ﬁfteenth century through the eighteenth-century period of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), and even into the nineteenth century.1 Second, I argue that this conception of medieval Jewish philosophy might be well understood as a particular form of an ‘early modern medievalism’ that can be distinguished from medievalism as it operated in the (late) modern period. Medievalism here can be understood in both the general sense of study of and interest in the Middle Ages and also in the more speciﬁc sense of favoring or prioritizing medieval forms of thought, literature, or artistic expression.2 Much scholarship on Jewish philosophy makes a sharp distinction between a ‘medieval’ tradition which is seen as coming to a creative close sometime around the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and a ‘modern’ tradition which supposedly begins with Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) and his colleagues in the Haskalah.3 Figures from the early modern period (c. 1492–c. 1750) are often seen as uncreative followers

* I am grateful to all the conference participants for their helpful responses to my paper. 1 As I am currently at a relatively early stage of a long-term research project on the transmission of medieval Jewish philosophy in the early modern period, this essay should be seen as a preliminary programmatic and exploratory contribution. 2 As we learned through discussion at the conference in Leiden, this latter sense may be a connotation found primarily in English and in Anglo-American literary and historical study. 3 Mendelssohn was a prominent ﬁgure associated with the Haskalah, but not the leader of the movement as is commonly supposed. See Feiner S., “Mendelssohn and ‘Mendelssohn’s Disciples’: A Re-Examination,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 40 (1995) 134–167. 446 adam shear of the medieval tradition or as early exemplars of the modern (as in the case of Baruch/Benedict Spinoza).4 However, when one views the problem from the perspective of intellectual and cultural history rather than through the narrower lens of the history of philosophy, the rela- tionship of medieval and modern becomes more complex.

The Haskalah as Origin-Point for Jewish Modernity

The Haskalah can best be understood as a series of successive movements of Jewish intellectuals from the late eighteenth through the late nineteenth century that argued for a modernizing agenda of social and cultural reform for the Jews of Europe. The ﬁrst group of adherents of Haskalah, known as maskilim,5 emerged in Berlin and a few other cities in Central Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. Drawn largely from a secondary elite of young medical students, clerks and tutors with a rabbinic education, and a few rabbis, the eighteenth- century maskilim – of whom Mendelssohn became the most famous – argued for a change in the education of Ashkenazic Jewry.6 In contrast to the almost exclusive emphasis on the study of the Talmud and

4 For an example of the view that this period represented uncreative continuity with the medieval, see Davidson H., “Medieval Jewish Philosophy in the Sixteenth Century”, in Cooperman B.D. (ed.), Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: 1983) 106–145. On the transitional nature of this period, see Harvey S., “The Introductions of Early Enlightenment Thinkers as Harbingers of the Renewed Interest in the Medieval Jewish Philosophers”, in Fontaine R. – Schatz A. – Zwiep I. (eds.) Sepharad in Ashkenaz: Medieval Knowledge and Eighteenth-Century Enlightened Jewish Discourse (Amsterdam: 1997) 85–104. And see also Tirosh-Rothschild H., “Jewish Philosophy on the Eve of Modernity”, in Frank D.H. – Leaman O. (eds.), History of Jewish Philoso- phy (London: 1997) 499–573. 5 Maskilim is the plural term; maskil the singular. 6 In this period, the Ashkenazic Jewish world spanned a wide territory from Amster- dam and London in the west to the Ukraine in the east. Although there were impor- tant regional differences between ‘Eastern Ashkenaz’ (mainly the Jews living in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth before 1772) and ‘Western Ashkenaz’ (mainly the Jews living in German-speaking lands), in terms of language and religious customs, the entire area formed one Kulterbereich in most respects and Jews of early modern Europe could distinguish between ‘Ashkenazic’ Jews and other Jewish communities (e.g. ‘Sephardim,’ Italian Jews, and so forth). On the various deﬁnitions of Ashke- nazic Jewish identity in the early modern period, see Davis J., “The Reception of the Shulhan ‘Arukh and the Formation of Ashkenazic Jewish Identity”, Association for Jewish Studies Review 26 (2002) 256–276. Although Jewish Enlightenment movements emerged among non-Ashkenazic Jews in the nineteenth century, that development is beyond the scope of this essay.