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The Science of Judaism - "Wissenschaft des Judentums", or as its founders called it, Chochmas Yisrael, emerged and developed as a result of the Enlightenment movement. The Enlightenment, with its negative stance towards the possessions of the past and its undermining of the foundations of tradition, created an empty void in the spiritual existence of the people. This emptiness, which undermined the national and religious uniqueness of the nation, spurred those of the Enlightenment generation to seek and explore new values for the existence of Judaism in the form of the Wisdom of Israel.
The Enlightenment was not born on the soil of the nation out of an internal aspiration for spiritual renewal. It was foreign-born, mainly subject to negative trends. Since the days of the Napoleonic Sanhedrin, a kind of secret contract had been accepted in Europe, that in exchange for granting equal rights to Jews, they had to give up their national distinctiveness. The first of the enlightened did not hesitate to destroy national and religious partitions for this purpose, which had been formed over generations as a guard for the existence of a people in exile. For the false magic of imaginary social equality, they threw away their spiritual identity, at the cost of a corrupt existence of being dependent on the table of strangers as an uninvited guest, they removed the crown of the Torah from their heads.
באין חזון - יפרע עם - Without vision, the people are unrestrained [Mishlei 29-18]. Judaism was presented shaken and naked, without a vision for the future and without faith for the present life. Bernfeld wrote about that period: "For many days then Israel was in the state of Germany without Torah and without religion, and the abandonment there was very great. The leaders of the Enlightenment taught the people that Judaism was lost and no longer had the right to exist." No wonder, therefore, that in the wake of this destructive movement from the point of view of historical Judaism, religious and national denial spread among the Jewish settlements in the West. The leaders of the second generation after Ben-Menachem turned their backs on the heritage of their fathers, and the mass conversion devoured the House of Israel in Germany with all its might.
On the one hand, the Enlightenment uprooted the accepted possessions of Judaism, and on the other hand, it did not plant any general cultural values in their place. "HaMe'assef," for example, the Enlightenment's publication, did not leave a single work of lasting value for generations, nor even one important study written in good taste and knowledge. One of the last students of the Chochmas Yisrael in the West summarizes the achievements of the Enlightenment in these words: "It did not help to raise Judaism itself, nor did it create any Jewish values whatsoever."
In these days of depletion and confusion, Chochmas Yisrael [hereby "C"Y"] was born. Its beginning lies in the foundation of the "Society for Culture and Science of Judaism" in Berlin in 1819. Already at the beginning of the appearance of the C"Y, two opposing currents were marked in it, one that persisted in the negative direction of the Enlightenment, and one that aspired to heal its ailments. These two trends ran through all the activities of C'Y of the 19th century, until finally the positive elements prevailed, although even individual negative people did not completely disappear from its school until our time. Both were already prominent from the beginning of the creation of the C"Y by two of the fathers of the aforementioned "Society for Culture and Science of Judaism": Eduard Gans and Yom-Tov Lipmann Zunz.
Gans envisioned in C"Y as paving the way for the integration of Jews into European culture. The Science of Judaism could serve as a transition from Jewish life to Gentile culture. In Gans's eyes, Europe was the be-all and end-all of human spiritual perfection. What seems to us today as a false vision was in the eyes of the leaders of the enlightened a lofty aspiration, for whose altar it is worthy to sacrifice the best qualities of the nation. Gans went to great lengths in this opinion, and even thought that it was the duty of enlightened Europe to demand self-denial from the people of Israel. He believed that Europe would be alienating its essence and its mission if it did not stand by the demand for Jews to convert their spiritual lives to its culture. Indeed, for the sake of peace, Gans adds that assimilation into European culture does not require Judaism to abolish its existence, but he did not explain how it is possible to maintain these two opposites in one subject. And indeed, his students kept his theory of assimilation in its entirety, until they lost their way to return to the sanctity of Judaism. It is true that in his method there is one positive reason for dealing with the Science of Judaism, and that is to eradicate from the study of Judaism the distortion of Christian researchers, who set themselves the goal of discovering faces in the Torah in the guise of science in order to humiliate the value of Judaism, and to raise the horn of Christianity in this. But in truth, even in this reasoning there was a more external trend than internal clarification, since its main goal was to show Europe that the Jewish people were not disqualified in terms of their faith to be absorbed into the nations of the civilized world. And so Gans recommends his method: "Religious enthusiasm has disappeared, the stability of the old Jewish values has been shaken, and new values have not been created in their place. The spirit, the subjective, which has been freed from its bonds due to the Enlightenment, must find a new connection that will be truly fruitful." That is to say, the Enlightenment severed the ties between the people and tradition, and therefore C"Y must introduce European culture in its place. Gans, therefore, tasked the C"Y with completing the cultural conversion that the Enlightenment had begun.
Zunz's method was different. At first, he too did not find his way clear before him, and he was like groping between building and contradiction, between affirmation and negation. However, over time, his positive direction took shape. At first, he said to set these goals for C"Y: First, to give the Jews themselves a true picture of their past; second, to educate his contemporaries to use the methods of scientific inquiry and to shape their lives according to its conclusions, he also hoped that science, the heritage of all nations, would remove the barrier between Judaism and humanity; third, to open the treasures of Judaism to the nations of the world. He aspired to raise the knowledge of Judaism to the level of international academic inquiry, and to refute with its help the tricks of the haters of Israel, such as Eisenmenger and his faction, who use forged sources to slander Judaism; fourth, C"Y, in his opinion, may serve as a motive for achieving civil equality for Jews. Zunz writes: "The moral and social equality of the Jews will come as a result of the equality that C"Y will acquire in the world of science."
This program still highlights traces of the Enlightenment's point of view, that the Jewish people must adapt all forms of their spiritual and cultural life to the taste of the Christian world. According to this first doctrine of Zunz, C"Y was intended to serve as a kind of bridge for achieving equal rights, in that it clarifies to the nations of the world that the people of Israel also have a great culture that qualifies them to be involved in the German nation. In accordance with this line of thought, Zunz dedicated his book on Jewish names with the aim of repealing the law of the Prussian government, which forbade Jews to be called by Christian names. Zunz tried to prove that from ancient times Jews used to call their children by the names of other nations. His main book, "The Sermons in Israel," was also composed with the aim of inducing the government to allow sermons in synagogues in the German language.
Ahad Ha'am best described the nature of this period: "The main work—of C"Y—is in searching for accusations and decrees of others against us... But our heart, our need for an internal national ideal, which will be our 'restorer of the soul' in all our troubles—what can it fill and indeed we find things that escaped fifty years ago from the pen of the father of C"Y, which will give reason to think that from the beginning of its creation this wisdom was intended more for others than for us: Equal rights of Israel—Zunz wrote then—are destined to come from the equal rights of C"Y."
During this period, Zunz strongly opposed the Torah literature, and did not stand on its great value as an important link in the evolution of the Torah. In 1818 he claimed that rabbinic literature had been in a state of decline for fifty years and had not created anything new, and predicted a quick end to it. This prophecy was not fulfilled, because his entire negative view of this literature was biased due to the influence of the Enlightenment movement.
Indeed, we must not ignore those traditional and national foundations that are revealed in Zunz's method, especially in the later period. He demanded that the Berlin community establish a school for Jewish youth, since he came to the conclusion that Jewish education is essential for the existence of the nation. Zunz also emphasized that although the concept of Judaism includes philosophy, the history of the people of Israel, Hebrew law and Hebrew literature, that is, the entirety of cultural life, nevertheless religion is the main foundation, being the cornerstone in the capital of Judaism. It is also worth noting his opinion, which was then a unique opinion in the circles of C"Y, on the Talmud. The Enlightenment, as is known, directed the arrows of its war against the Jews against the Talmudic literature, and saw it as a deviation from the path of original Judaism and a primary obstacle to the participation of Jews in European culture. For this purpose, the Enlightenment highlighted the essential difference, as it were, between the Torah of the prophets and the teachings of the Tannaim and Amoraim. Zunz was the first to stand up against this assumption, proving that there is continuity between the Written and Oral Torah, and that the Talmud is the continuation of the Bible, and one spirit and one morality connect the two. He wanted to put an end to the attitude of contempt and frivolity that was prevalent in the circles of the enlightened towards the creations of Judaism after the sealing of the Tanach until our time.
The fundamental mistake of the fathers of C"Y was that they were not content to be a society of scholars dealing with the study of Judaism, but wanted to raise C"Y to the status of a new Torah of the nation, which would take the place of the accepted Torah of Judaism. This daring aspiration was expected from the outset to be a resounding failure, since scientific research cannot replace a nation's way of life. The investigation is by its nature limited to a handful of scholars, while the Torah of Israel has become the heritage of all strata of the people. From the simple worker to the nobles of the people, all set times for the Torah, each according to his level of achievement. Moreover, the Torah shaped the spirit of the people and their way of life, and its study was not an abstract matter but in order to keep and do. In contrast, C"Y did not have any religious educational mission in its foundation. How, then, could C"Y presume to inherit the place of the Torah of Israel?
There were indeed individuals who understood these narrow boundaries of the study of the past, and therefore aspired to set for C"Y a moral national goal that could strengthen the existence of the nation. They said to raise in their investigation the pure moral idea of the Torah of Judaism, and to give it spiritual life content to the people, without connection to practical commandments. They thought that such an idea could save the Jewish youth, who had been completely cut off from the sources of Judaism, from assimilation. But in the end, they realized that even this abstract idea cannot fill the emptiness in the lives of the public and the individual, which was created due to the denial of the possessions of tradition. A people given within a vibrant foreign culture, surrounded by a foreign environment, saturated with beliefs and opinions, customs and traditions accepted and rooted, will not have the power to maintain its spiritual existence on the basis of an abstract idea alone, if there is no crystallized Jewish existence beside it.
C"Y from its beginning came into the world as the Torah of the past only. It put all its attention on our ancient spiritual world, and knowingly ignored the life of the people in the present, its spiritual and economic problems, as if it were completely devoid of Jewish reality. C"Y received from the writers of the Enlightenment the erroneous assumption that the creative power of our people has ceased for many generations, and it is therefore incumbent upon it to make a summary of the ancient Hebrew culture, in order to bestow from its ancient glory on a barren generation of its days, and to introduce it into European society by "ancestral merit."
Here we have reached one of the essential differences between the Torah scholarship in Eastern Europe and C"Y in the West. In the school of Eastern Europe there was a clear continuity between their Torah and the Torah of the early scholars. The last holders of the Torah continued the creation of the scholars of the Talmud and the owners of the Tosfos in clarifying the problems of the Halacha with the help of the same accepted measures, in which the Torah is required, that is, with the help of Gezera Shava and Kal Vachomer, comparing the cases and separating them by precise logical thought and sharp and profound analysis. If we compare the innovations of the best of the Achronim — the intention, of course, is to those who engaged in the Torah for its own sake, and not in the juggling of pilpul, which was as abundant as it was, and which the great Torah scholars warned against — if we compare their innovations to a passage in the Talmud or to a Talmudic clarification in the Tosfos, we will see that there is a great similarity between them, despite the distance of generations. The students of the ancient Halacha found faithful heirs in the literature of questions and answers of those who came after them. During the last two thousand years, there has not been a single generation that has not added its own body to the continuous Torah creation.
Not only did the Talmudic law find its continuers, but even the ancient Aggadah was woven and continued until our time. Men of heart among the writers of C"Y were impressed by the beauty of the ancient Aggadah literature, but ignored the fact that even in their own time, one of the most wonderful Aggadic masks in the world was being woven, and that is the Hasidic Aggadah, as a direct result of the ancient Hebrew Aggadah and similar to it in its religious vision, in its moral height and in its longing for a world that is all good and kindness. However, not only in the Chasidic movement alone, but even in the rabbinic world, in which the fathers of C"Y in the West exhausted all their wrath, a wonderful colorful carpet of legends and heartwarming stories was created and woven around the revered holders of the Torah. This rabbinic Aggadah is also characterized by all the same spiritual and moral characteristics of the Talmudic and Midrashic Aggadah, as they were given by one shepherd.
So we can say that in the East, Torah study took place day and night, also to stretch the thread of blue of the ancient halakha and aggadah creations. While the West dedicated its studies and discussions to the history of creation and its side effects, the East dealt with the essence of creation, adding a living and gushing link in its evolution. A typical story circulated in this regard in the circles of students of the rabbinical seminary in Berlin, founded by Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer, who aspired to plant the Eastern method of study in the West. Once, a young man from Poland came to him to ask for his advice, whether to enter his seminary, or whether it would be worthwhile for him to visit the scientific institution for reforming rabbis. To this, Rabbi Azriel replied: "If you want to know about Rashi's coat, go to the owners of "Wissenschaft des Judentums" (Science of Judaism), but if you want to know Rashi himself, study in my seminary." In this answer, there is a proper definition of the essence of the two methods. In the West, many talents were invested in extracting the accessories of the Torah and its external events, in the East, the Torah was an internal experience for its learners and keepers.
