The Man Who Wanted to be Tolerated
Naftali Herz Wessely’s Modern Educational Programme
As the world moved into the modern age, during the period known as the Enlightenment, the old certainties began giving way. This was particularly evident in the way people understood the world, with reason and science becoming their guiding principles, rather than the fixed dogmas of religious belief.
Jews were late to these developments, the Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment didn’t really begin until the mid-18th century. It was then, particularly in Germany, that attitudes among Jews began to shift. Many began to question aspects of their own customs and culture, taking a greater interest in the changes going on in the outside world. Some followed the example that Spinoza had set a century earlier and abandoned religion altogether. Others tried to find a midway point, seeking to become part of secular society while retaining their connection and affiliation to Judaism.
The person who did most at the time to introduce modern attitudes into Judaism, was Moses Mendelssohn. In his book Jerusalem, written in 1783, he argued that becoming part of the modern world did not mean that one had to abandon Judaism. He wanted Jews to have a greater understanding of secular society, to speak German and to have non-Jewish friends, just as he did, without compromising their religious observance. So as to help Yiddish-speaking Jews to read and speak German, he wrote a German translation of the Torah, writing the German words in Hebrew characters.
The poet, Naftali Herz Wessely had a similar outlook to Mendelssohn. An observant Jew, he moved in rabbinic circles, writing commentaries on books of the Bible and other ancient Hebrew texts. But he had strong feelings about the education Jewish children received. He believed it was inadequate, too hidebound, wedded too heavily to religion and tradition.
In 1782, the Austrian Emperor, Joseph II passed the Edict of Tolerance, giving Jews many freedoms that had not been allowed before, but requiring them to participate more fully in national life. Wessely responded enthusiastically to the Edict. He published a pamphlet advocating the reform of Jewish education, reshaping it so that children would divide their time between religious and secular studies. He called secular studies “human Torah” and said that it included modes of behaviour that covered, not just modern subjects like science, geography and history, but also etiquette and social graces. He explained that such topics were “innate primary ideas whose foundation is reason.”
Wessely’s complaint was that Jews in Europe, particularly in Germany and Poland, had no concept of what it meant to study secular subjects. They were good, pious people, who spent their lives studying religious texts but beyond that they were ignorant. They didn’t even understand the grammar of the Hebrew language in which their texts were written, they could not speak the same language as the non-Jewish people, among whom they lived, and they were ignorant of basic scientific matters. It wasn’t their fault, he said, they had been shunned by Christian society for so long, confined in ghettos, excluded from national life, that they had withdrawn into their own communities and shut themselves off from progress, ignorant of the development of new ideas and ways of thinking. However, he said, times had changed. A “great man, a saviour to mankind” had arrived, in the person of the Emperor.
Wessely eulogised the educational reforms the Emperor was demanding:
In his many good works he has not forgotten a poor people, long abused, the Jews. He gave us many good and consoling commands as a father does to his son, a teacher to his pupils and a benign ruler to his people. He has unshackled the disabling bonds by permitting the Jews to engage in all forms of cultivation of the land, to work in all crafts and to trade in all merchandise. . . . He has also observed that few among us speak the German language accurately and as a result cannot read history books, nor books on etiquette science and the arts. . . .Taking this into consideration he has commanded us upon a righteous path. He has instructed the Jews to establish schools in which to teach their children to read and write the German language. . . . to teach the children arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, history and geography. Knowledge of these subjects can only strengthen the House of Israel and mend the breaches made by preceding rulers.
Wessely’s opinions did not go down well with many religious people, particularly the rabbis. They were particularly incensed with him personally, because he had a reputation as a scholar of note, a writer who strongly defended rabbinic tradition. Yet his pamphlet was effectively an attack on traditional Jewish education, and on the underlying idea that study of Torah was the only subject of fundamental importance.
The first attack on Wessely came on the Shabbat before Passover in 1782. Traditionally this was the day on which the rabbi of a community delivered his most learned and important sermon of the year. However David Teveli, the rabbi of Lissa, in Poland, used it to launch an assault on Wessely. Teveli was especially incensed because some years earlier he had given his approbation to a scholarly commentary that Wessley had written on Pirkei Avot, an ancient ethical rabbinic tractate. Now he greatly regretted having done so. He may have feared that he would be regarded as a supporter of Wessely’s new ideas.
He started his sermon by abusing Wessely as a ‘sycophant, an evil man, a man poor of understanding, the most mediocre of mediocre of men.’ He carried on in a similar vein for quite some time until he came to the main thrust of his objection. Wessely, he maintained had misunderstood the Emperor’s edict. The idea, he said, was not that Jewish children should abandon their traditional religious education in favour of a broader, secular curriculum. The Emperor’s idea, said Teveli, was that children should devote an hour or two a day to learning the German language and science, but other than that their education should carry on as it had done. “Our children will study the sciences as an adornment; however the foundation of their education will be in accordance with the command of our ancient sages.”
Teveli’s reinterpretation of the Edict of Toleration doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The decree was far less benign than he made it out to be. It was the Emperor, not Wessely, who was demanding a change to the educational curriculum, so that Jews would play a fuller role in the economic, cultural and social life of the country. He had no interest in the continuation of Jewish religious education. The Emperor had issued his Edict primarily for Germany, to modernise the country. The difference between Wessely and Teveli was that Wessely thought this would also be a good thing for the Jews, and Teveli did not.
The attacks on Wessely did not end with Teveli. Other rabbis joined in, the most consequential being Rabbi Ezekiel Landau of Prague, one of the most respected rabbis of his generation. He went further than Teveli in condemning Wessely, describing him as a heretic, an enemy of Israel and an atheist. He probably did not really consider Wessely to be an atheist, but he genuinely felt that the Emperor’s educational reforms would result in ordinary people abandoning religion and becoming atheists.
But much as Teveli and Landau feared Wessely’s reforms and Mendelssohn’s attempts to modernise Jewish society, they were haunted by a darker shadow. It was the shadow of Spinoza. One of the outstanding intellectuals of his age, a Jew whose philosophy most rabbis hadn’t studied but who they had been told was an atheist (it wasn’t that simple), Spinoza had not made much of an impact on the life of most Jews. He was considered too extreme. But Wessely, who was a moderniser not a philosopher, a practical man and not an extremist, an observant Jew who moved in the same circles as some of the rabbis, was far more of a threat. He may not have been an atheist, but by opening a door to modernity, who knows what heresies he may have allowed to slip in. The last thing the rabbis wanted was another Spinoza turning up, even if they only had a sketchy idea of his philosophy.
The Edict of Toleration was only one of the challenges facing the traditionalists. The religious world had already been torn in two by the rise of the Hasidic movement, which was teaching a very different, more spiritual, approach to religious observance. And soon, the traditionalists would be confronted by the first of the Reformers, the people who wanted to modernise Judaism substantially.
Wessely and Mendelssohn are sometimes said to have sown the seeds of today’s pluralist Jewish world, with its varied approaches to religious observance, and expressions of Jewish identity that involve no religion at all. But even if the traditionalists had won their battle with Wessely, change would still have come. Judaism has always been dynamic in nature, responding to the needs and demands of the times. Secular education for Jews was always bound to come and Naftali Herz Wessely was one of its pioneers. For that he deserves to be better remembered today.