Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands
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Out of the Shtetl Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands NANCY SINKOFF OUT OF THE SHTETL Program in Judaic Studies Brown University Box 1826 Providence, RI 02912 BROWN JUDAIC STUDIES Series Editors David C. Jacobson Ross S. Kraemer Saul M. Olyan Number 336 OUT OF THE SHTETL Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands by Nancy Sinkoff OUT OF THE SHTETL Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands Nancy Sinkoff Brown Judaic Studies Providence Copyright © 2020 by Brown University Library of Congress Control Number: 2019953799 Publication assistance from the Koret Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/ Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non- Commercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecom- mons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. To use this book, or parts of this book, in any way not covered by the license, please contact Brown Judaic Studies, Brown University, Box 1826, Providence, RI 02912. In memory of my mother Alice B. Sinkoff (April 23, 1930 – February 6, 1997) and my father Marvin W. Sinkoff (October 22, 1926 – July 19, 2002) CONTENTS Acknowledgments....................................................................................... ix A Word about Place Names ....................................................................... xiii List of Maps and Illustrations .................................................................... xv Introduction: Enlightening Polish Jews, Moderating the Jewish Enlightenment ....................................................................................... 1 Chapter One. In the Podolian Steppe ..................................................... 14 The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth................................................ 14 Jewish Settlement in the Noble Republic ............................................. 16 Traditional Ashkenazic Jewish Culture in the Eighteenth Century............................................................................................... 19 The Sabbatian and Frankist Challenge................................................. 23 The Heartland of Hasidism................................................................... 34 East Meets West: Mendel Lefin’s Encounter with the Berlin Haskalah............................................................................................. 45 Chapter Two. The Maskil and the Prince: Private Patronage and the Dissemination of the Jewish Enlightenment in Eastern Europe ........ 50 “The Family” and Pre-Partition Reform................................................ 57 The Polish Enlightenment and Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski............. 62 On the Eve of the First Partition........................................................... 67 Reforming Poland, Reforming Poland’s Jews ...................................... 69 Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, Lefin, and the Russian Legislation of 1804................................................................................................ 106 Chapter Three. The Battle against Hasidism and the Struggle for the Adolescent Soul...................................................................................... 113 Mendel Lefin’s Psychology .................................................................... 114 Limiting Reason in the East European Jewish Enlightenment........... 120 Training the Rational Soul .................................................................... 132 The Dangers of Enthusiasm and Imagination ..................................... 141 The Immortality of the Enlightened Soul ............................................ 161 viii contents Chapter Four. The Linguistic Boundaries of Enlightenment: Revisiting the Language Polemic in Eastern Europe .......................... 168 Wisdom and the Turn to Yiddish.......................................................... 173 Berlin Rears Its Head............................................................................. 176 Defending and Transforming Early Modern Poland .......................... 181 The Role of Yiddish in the Shifting Borders of Ashkenaz................... 198 Chapter Five. After Partition: The Haskalah in Austrian Galicia ........... 203 The Creation of Galicia ......................................................................... 205 Absolutism and Habsburg Policy for the Jews of Galicia ..................... 208 The 1789 Edict of Toleration ................................................................ 217 Joseph Perl and the Moderate Haskalah .............................................. 225 The Battle against Hasidism is Pitched................................................. 237 Haminhag kehalakhah hu (“Custom is as Binding as Law”) .................. 241 Minhag, Rabbinic Authority, and Modernity ........................................ 262 Epilogue: The Legacy of the Moderate Haskalah .................................... 271 Appendix: “Prayer against the Hasidim” .................................................. 274 Bibliography................................................................................................ 276 Index ........................................................................................................... 310 Publishers’ Preface Brown Judaic Studies has been publishing scholarly books in all areas of Judaic studies for forty years. Our books, many of which contain groundbreaking scholarship, were typically printed in small runs and are not easily accessible outside of major research libraries. We are delighted that with the support of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program, we are now able to make available, in digital, open-access, format, fifty titles from our backlist. In Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands (2003), Nancy Sinkoff examines some of the thinkers, particularly Mendel Lefin and Joseph Perl, who as part of the Jewish Enlightenment movement (Haskalah) of the nineteenth century attempted to articulate a vision and plan for how the Jews of Eastern Europe could become modern while remaining Jews. This edition contains a new preface that puts this book into the ongoing schol- arly context while also grappling with the application of the ideology of the Haskalah to contemporary events. It also contains a new bibliography. There have been typographical changes to the original text. Michael L. Satlow Managing Editor January, 2020 Nancy Sinkoff Preface, January 13, 2020 This book was originally conceived in a graduate seminar on the Berlin Haska- lah during the beginnings of the end of the Cold War. At that time, the Soviet Union and its influence overshadowed the countries of the eastern bloc, and few American historians of the Jewish past worked on Poland. Western schol- ars interested in the Enlightenment and in the Haskalah focused on Germany, France, or Russia. In Israel, East European Jewish historians and literary crit- ics, such as Jacob Goldberg, Israel Halperin, Natan Michael Gelber, Raphael Mahler, Chone Schmeruk, and Shmuel Werses—some of whom were Zionist pioneers who had immigrated to Palestine before the war, others of whom were survivors—made critically important contributions to the study of the Polish Jewish past, but their work remained little known outside of Israel. Access to Polish archives was extremely limited, which meant that scholarship, in the main, had to rely on printed or microfilmed materials, and there was limited contact between scholars in Poland and those outside the Communist bloc.1 In Communist Poland, Artur Eisenbach, a Jew who was one of the great historians of Poland who was trained in the interwar years in the Second Republic and survived World War II in the Soviet Union, toiled at the state-controlled Jewish Historical Institute; late in his life—after focusing on the Holocaust—and now settled in Israel, he returned to his sweeping narrative of Jewish emancipation in Polish lands in a book that treated the Haskalah in Poland.2 Still, in those years, the field of Polish Jewish history—the journal Gal-Ed and the schol- arship associated with the YIVO Institute notwithstanding—focused on the recent catastrophe, attempting to make sense of the genocide of Polish Jewry. The Haskalah did not garner much attention. In the 1980s, there were signs of a rapprochement between Christian and Jewish scholars of Poland that hearkened a new beginning in the study of Polish Jewry in Polish society. International conferences were held at Columbia University in 1983, at Oxford University in 1984, at Brandeis University in 1986, and in Jeru- salem at the Hebrew University in 1988.3 And then the Polish roundtable con- vened, the Berlin wall cracked, and Soviet control over eastern Europe ended, and everything—or so we all hoped—seemed to have changed. The next several decades witnessed an efflorescence of Polish Jewish Studies. In 1986, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, sponsored by the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies, started publishing state-of-the-field articles, symposia, and book reviews. International conferences, seminars, and workshops were held with scholars from Poland, Germany, the UK, the United States, and Israel. Departments of Jewish PREFACE Studies were founded at Polish universities, notably at the historic Jagiellonian University in Kraków, at Warsaw University and, most recently, at Wrocaw Univer-