One of the great debates during the Haskalah period of the Enlightenment was the status of women. The Moskelim, as they were called, professed admiration for reason, devotion to the idea of the ...

Recap: Last installment we discussed the religious response to Haskalah and its push for education, modernization and acculturation. The Hirschian approach, encapsulated by the phrase “Torah im derech ...

Recap: With various forces at work, the traditional, stalwart Jewish community of the Middle Ages, who resisted tremendous pressures, anti-Semitism and oppression, faces a new challenge in the 18 th ...

Publication of the first 57 volumes of “Literaria Judaica,” a 10-year B’nai B’rith “rescue project” to avert a total extinction of much Haskalah literature, was announced today by Dr. Harold Weisberg ...

The general enlightenment period in the First Reich did not immediately include the Jewish community. There were some Jewish Reform schools, dating back to around 1778, and the majority of the parents ...

In 1769, the Swiss theologian Johann Caspar Lavater publicly challenged Moses Mendelssohn, known throughout Germany to Jew and non-Jew alike as the “German Socrates,” to refute logically ...

Abraham ben Menahen Manish Rathaus, Russian pioneer of the “haskalah” movement, was a man of wealth and a patron of Hebrew literature. Power the news that matters to you. Before 2025 ends, help JTA's ...