1 Introduction: the challenges of modernity
Happiness has been a persistent theme in Jewish thought since antiquity (Tirosh-Samuelson 2003; 2009). Through their reflections on happiness, Jewish thinkers have clarified the meaning of being Jewish, the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, the content of Jewish education, and the cultural boundaries between Judaism and surrounding civilizations. In the eighteenth century, European Christian thinkers thought that ‘to live happily is to live as God intended’ and that human happiness reflects ‘the happy design and purpose of its maker’ (McMahon 2016: 202). Religion was considered the foundation of earthly happiness, but perfect happiness could only come in the afterlife with God. If so, how do Jews and observance of Judaism (i.e. particularism) fit into this understanding of happiness (i.e. universalism)?
Happiness became a hotly debated issue among Jews during the eighteenth century, and these debates reflected the change in the legal status of Jews within emerging nation-states. The ideals of the Enlightenment movement led to political revolutions that facilitated the legal emancipation of the Jews and their inclusion in European society (Sorkin 2019). After centuries of persecution, marginalization, and discriminatory legislation, Jews in Western and Central Europe were recognized as human beings who deserve to become citizens in their country of residence and accorded civil rights. Lasting roughly from 1781 to 1871, the granting of civil rights to Jews was a complex, uneven process, filled with setbacks and contentious debates about the humanity of Jews and their place in non-Jewish society.
As the debate was raging, Jews in Western and Central Europe underwent ‘a process of embourgeoisement’ (Sorkin 1987: 107), entering the bourgeoisie through commerce, finance, and industry, and to a lesser extent through the liberal professions such as law, academia, medicine, journalism, and the arts. As much as Jews began to experience economic prosperity and even social prominence, the emancipation also generated a profound identity crisis for Jews. What is Judaism, how to be Jewish, and why remain Jewish became matters of individual choice about which there could be no consensus. The result was an inevitable fragmentation as various movements – Haskalah, Reform Judaism, Positive-Historical School, Orthodoxy, Ultra-Orthodoxy, Hasidism, and Zionism – articulated conflicting visions of Jewishness. With social integration and acculturation, millions of Jews adopted secular ideologies – especially Liberalism, Socialism, Communism, and Anarchism – that promised improvement of the human condition through political, economic, and social changes. These secular ideologies manifested the emergence of the so-called ‘secular age’ in Western culture (Taylor 2007). As Jews were secularizing, Jewish beliefs and rituals were deemed irrelevant or even detrimental to the flourishing of Jews as human beings. In the modern period, the debate about Jewishness was couched as a debate about happiness: what is universal happiness, and can Jews, a particular group of human beings, experience it in this life? As in the late Middle Ages, Jews were deeply divided about the meaning of happiness.
2 Moses Mendelssohn: expanding the scope of happiness
Moses Mendelssohn (d. 1786) was the first Jewish thinker to theorize what happiness means for Jews in the modern liberal state (Morgan 1992: 14–26, 27–39). From a son of a Torah scribe who received traditional Jewish education, Mendelssohn emerged to become a leading voice of the German Enlightenment in Berlin, while remaining an observant Jew (Dahlstrom 1997; 2002; 2018; Sorkin 1996; 2011: 167–213; Finer 2010; Gottlieb and Manekin 2015; Sacks 2016). Occupying two cultural worlds simultaneously, Mendelssohn maintained that Judaism expressed the principles of the Enlightenment – human dignity, freedom of conscience, toleration and tolerance, religion of reason, rational morality, separation of private and public spheres, and attainment of universal happiness through education and self-formation (Bildung). In 1748 Johann Joachim Spalding published Reflections on the Vocation of Man in which happiness (Glückseligkeit) was defined as the ‘vocation’ or ‘destiny’ (Bestimmung) of humankind. For Enlightenment thinkers ‘the search for knowledge and truth was not limited to scholarship for its own sake; rather, it was a means for formulating an ideological agenda for an optimistic, utopian purpose – to improve man’s condition, freedom, and morality and to enhance his happiness’ (Finer 2002: 4, emphasis added). Mendelssohn agreed that happiness is the ‘vocation of humanity’, but within universal happiness he differentiated between the ‘vocation of a citizen’ and the ‘vocation of Jews’ (Pollok 2018). For Mendelssohn, Jewish religious particularism was compatible with philosophic universalism.
Mendelssohn could become one of the spokesmen of the German Enlightenment because it was profoundly religious (Sorkin 1996; 2011). Dominated by the philosophy Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (d. 1716) as interpreted by Christian Wolff (d. 1754), the German religious enlighteners maintained that the world was created by God to reveal His greatness to us, and that everything in the world was created for our own use and happiness. Like other German religious enlighteners, Mendelssohn held that human reason enhances revealed religion: even though revelation does not contain truths that are contrary to reason, revelation includes truths that are ‘above reason’ (supra rationem); these truths cannot be demonstrated by human reason but they are in harmony with it (Sorkin 2011: 1–21). The foundational beliefs of natural religion – the existence of God, God’s providence, and the immortality of soul – are compatible with human reason and Mendelssohn insisted that one could marshal theoretical arguments to validate these religious beliefs with the certainty of mathematical truths. Mendelssohn’s essay won the competition of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1761, because he defended the reigning philosophy. The honorary prize in that competition went to Immanuel Kant (d. 1804) who argued that religious beliefs could not be rationally proven but only postulated for practical reasons. Mendelssohn and Kant knew each other and responded to each other’s ideas (Guyer 2000; 2020), but their approaches were diametrically opposed: Mendelssohn defended the religious rationalism of Leibniz and Wolff, whereas Kant challenged it.
If natural religion is shared by all human beings, should not rational Jews, such as Mendelssohn, either refute the dominant variant of natural religion, namely, Christianity, or convert to Christianity? This was the gist of the challenge that Johann Kaspar Lavater (d. 1801), a Swiss theologian, posed to Mendelssohn in 1769, compelling him to publicly respond and justify his continued loyalty to Jewish religious law. Reluctantly, Mendelssohn eventually published Jerusalem: or On Religious Power and Judaism (1782) in which he articulated his theological-political conception of happiness (Gottlieb 2011). Mendelssohn argued as follows: (a) since Judaism is a rational religion that expresses the deepest convictions of the Enlightenment, Jews are entitled to become citizens of the modern state; (b) unlike Christianity, Judaism does not consist of revealed truths that the believers must dogmatically affirm to attain salvation, but only ‘revealed legislation’ that only Jews are obligated to observe; therefore, happiness for Jews involves religious practice not religious dogmas; and (c) the very practice of Judaism enhances the ‘happiness of the nation’ (Nationalglückseligkeit) (Sacks 2016: 38–44) because Judaism directs people to focus on the existence of God, protects society from indulging in idolatry and superstition, enhances social bonds that keep people together, and offers stability and continuity notwithstanding social changes and shifts in philosophical opinions (Sacks 2016: 93–121).
But what exactly does ‘enlightenment’ (Aufklärung) mean? This question was posed to the readers of the German periodical Berlinische Monatsschrift, and two members of the secret Wednesday Society (Mittwochsgesellschaft) – Mendelssohn and Kant – addressed the question. Mendelssohn’s essay ‘On the Question: What Does It Mean to Enlighten’ was published in September 1784, and Kant published his essay, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ in the December issue of the journal (Schmidt 1989). In his essay, Mendelssohn clarified the connection between happiness, enlightenment, and education. This was a neo-humanist ethos and a normative educational ideal that encompassed the education of body and mind, intellect and affects, encouraging a person toward freedom of opinion, independent judgement, and critical social comportment. Socrates was taken to be the urbane paragon of Bildung (self-cultivation) because he examined his views in public and performed intellectual virtues while criticizing social conventions. After publishing his literary bestseller, Phaedo: or On the Immortality of the Soul (1767), which updated Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, Mendelssohn was referred to as the ‘Socrates of Berlin’ because the protagonist of the dialogue, Socrates, marshalled arguments for the immortality of the soul (Pollok 2017). The very doctrine which Baruch Spinoza had rejected, Mendelssohn considered one of the ‘fundamental principles on which all religions agree, and without which felicity is but a dream, and virtue itself ceases to be virtue’ (Mendelssohn 1983: 86).
Mendelssohn’s understanding of Bildung reflected his philosophical anthropology: the soul is a simple substance that unites with the body for the duration of one’s life and survives the death of the body. As a non-extended and non-composite substance, the soul has the ‘power of representation [that] unites in itself all our concepts, desires, and inclinations’ (Guyer 2020: 148). Each of the three capacities of the soul – the cognitive capacity, the approval capacity, and the capacity for desire – has its own distinctive perfection, and Bildung is the process of perfecting these capacities. For Mendelssohn, ‘man’s destiny’ is ‘to seek truth, love beauty, will the good, and do the best’ (cited in Gottlieb 2013: 130). By including the hedonic, emotional, and aesthetic dimensions, Mendelssohn significantly expanded the Jewish understanding of happiness. Felicity of the soul is not limited to the cognition of necessary truths, as the Jewish Aristotelians held, but also includes all aspects of human mental life (i.e. sensations, perceptions, emotions, and imagination) which the soul integrates into human personal identity. The inclusion of pleasure in human happiness did not negate Mendelssohn’s religious understanding of happiness. Because the world was created by God, the most perfect being, the physical world exhibits beauty and order that human beings enjoy. Moreover, the very awareness of beauty and order enables human beings to develop their moral sensibility and act in ways conducive to happiness of the society by ‘being generous, acting justly, defending freedom and virtue’ all of which constitute ‘the innermost perfection of a thinking creature!’ (cited in Curthoys 2013: 74).
Self-cultivation through Bildung, Mendelssohn explains, is the task that God, the wisest and most benevolent being, wishes humans to pursue. Self-cultivation is not egoistic because the morally good person cares about advancing the wellbeing of fellow creatures. The concern for the wellbeing of others, so Mendelssohn argues, is precisely what Halakhah makes possible when it obligates Jews to observe divinely revealed laws. Elias Sacks put it succinctly: ‘Halakhah fosters precisely those cognitive processes that Mendelssohn links to the cultivation of virtue’ (Sacks 2023: 248). For Mendelssohn, then, living the Halakhic life facilitates happiness; but perfect happiness, he also notes, cannot be attained in the created, temporal, material world, because the created world is necessarily imperfect. For that reason, the benevolent Creator destined humans for eternal happiness (or at least making unending progress toward it) in the afterlife that transcends temporality and materiality. Divine providence assures that individuals will experience the bliss of immortality in the afterlife, and Jews, to whom God revealed the Law, can attain immortality by observing the Law. For Jews, the particularity of Halakhic life ensures the attainment of humanity’s universal destiny: happiness.
Mendelssohn creatively addressed the conundrum of modernity by showing Christian intellectuals that Jewish particularism is compatible with Enlightenment universalism, and conversely, by convincing fellow Jews that Enlightenment values must reshape Jewish culture. With other early maskilim (those involved in the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, movement), Mendelssohn helped to revive the study of medieval Jewish philosophy among European Jews: he published a new commentary on Maimonides’ Milot Ha-Higayon (Logical Terms); he issued Kohelet Musar (Preacher of Morals), a moral weekly publication that anchored Enlightenment ideals in the biblical text; and most importantly, he composed a new translation of the Bible into German (albeit it printed in Hebrew characters) with new commentaries to showcase the compatibility of Judaism and Enlightenment (Breuer and Sorkin 2018). Known as ‘The Commentary’ (Bi’ur), Mendelssohn’s Sefer Netivot Shalom (The Book of Paths of Peace) was the primary literary vehicle to make Jews into ‘educated’ or ‘cultured’ Jews who would be fit for emancipation and inclusion in modern European society. The Bible, so Mendelssohn was convinced, facilitates Enlightenment because it teaches duties to God, the cultivation of virtuous dispositions, and the enjoyment of pleasant sentiments (Gottlieb 2021: 17–124; Sorkin 1996: 53–89). Mendelssohn’s vigorous defence of enlightened Judaism was variously received: the Jews who desired emancipation and integration in European society regarded him as the thinker who made modern Judaism possible thus preserving Judaism from decay, while traditionalists who rejected emancipation and social integration considered Mendelssohn’s views the reason for the loss of Jewish legal autonomy and the estrangement of modern Jews from their ancestral tradition.
3 Theories of universal happiness: deontology versus utilitarianism
During the nineteenth century two moral theories – deontology and utilitarianism – framed conflicting conceptions of happiness. The former was articulated by Kant and the latter by the British philosophers Jeremy Bentham (d. 1832), William Godwin (d. 1836), and John Stuart Mill (d. 1878) and Henry Sidgwick (d. 1900). Jewish thinkers who reflected on the position of Jews in non-Jewish societies did so by engaging these two dominant theories.
Kant regarded happiness as the universal end of humankind: ‘all human beings have already of their own the most powerful and intimate inclination to happiness ’ (Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals 85/4, 399; Kant 2012: 14). In agreement with Aristotle, Kant held that because human beings are rational and sensible, they naturally wish for happiness (Kraut 1989; 2018). But Kant radically departed from Aristotle by insisting that happiness is not a moral end, and the pursuit of happiness is not the object of moral duty (Irwin 1996; Sherman 1997; Guyer 2016). Kant dismantled the Leibnizian-Wolffian synthesis of rationalism and empiricism which Mendelssohn defended. First, Kant argued that philosophy could not construct its objects out of its own definitions; philosophy could only reach definitions gradually through analysis of common concepts. For that reason, Kant rejected the ontological and cosmological proofs for God’s existence, which was the ground of rationalist theology of Leibniz, Wolff, and Mendelssohn. Second, rather than regarding happiness as the goal of moral life, Kant differentiated between happiness and morality. Happiness is the satisfaction of inclinations, and it concerns a physical state of affairs; happiness is a goal to be achieved in the phenomenal world that we perceive and experience through our senses. Morality, on the other hand, is rooted in the duty (Pflicht) to moral law, a duty that expresses our free will, the only thing of truly unconditional value. The moral realm does not belong to the phenomenal world but to an ideal, noumenal world in which all are treated as ends rather than as means. Third, Kant argued that morality is not about producing happiness or maximizing happiness but about acting from duty. A good will manifests itself only in doing one’s duty for its own sake. The fundamental principle of morality can be derived from the commonsense notion of the good will as the only thing of unconditional value and from the categorical imperative. Since moral law must be completely necessary, universal, and formal, it cannot make a reference to any object of desire; hence the moral law is not about the attainment of happiness but about acting from duty.
If Kant is right and values originate in humans, the ultimate value is the wellbeing of human beings; all specific values and actions should be judged by their tendency to promote happiness and prevent suffering. This was the basic insight of utilitarianism, the moral theory promoted by above-mentioned British philosophers for whom happiness, and nothing but happiness, is intrinsically good for all human beings. The aggregate happiness of all people is the highest good by which we judge the goodness of specific human actions and policies. As Bart Schulz put it, for utilitarian philosophers ‘happiness was more of a cosmic calling, the path to world progress, and whatever was deemed “utilitarian” had to be useful for that larger and inspiring end, the global minimization of pointless suffering and the global maximization of positive well-being or happiness’ (Schultz 2017: 3). ‘Utility’ was the other name of the ‘Great Happiness Principle’. Defined as experience of pleasure and the absence of pain, happiness was now seen as the motivator of human action and the standard of moral value: actions are good when they increase humanity’s net happiness, creating more pleasure than causing pain, and they are evil when they cause more pain than pleasure. And since happiness can be calculated, the ‘felicity calculus’ should be the basis of policies and laws that provide the means for achieving ‘the greatest happiness to the greatest number’. Accordingly, people need to strive to maximize utility by considering the costs and benefits of each possible choice in a specific situation. In the increasingly secular world of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, utilitarianism was the dominant approach to happiness and the good life (Philp and Varouxakis 2019).
Because the utilitarians focused on pleasure, their ‘hedonic’ conception of happiness is commonly contrasted with the ‘eudaimonic’ conception of Aristotle (Kraut 2018). But this dichotomy is only partially correct, since the utilitarian philosophers did not advocate crude hedonism, even though they insisted that pleasure is an ingredient of happiness. As William Godwin stated in Political Justice, ‘a man is of more worth than a beast; because, being possessed of higher faculties, he is capable of a more refined and genuine happiness’ (cited in Schultz 2017: 32). Godwin, Bentham, and Mill recognized that some pleasures – the pleasures of the intellect – are more worthy than pleasures of the body, and they encouraged the freedom to pursue the higher pleasures. The happy life requires political liberties (i.e. the freedom of speech and assembly) and material liberty (i.e. the freedom from poverty and disease), and achieving these freedoms requires the cultivation of virtues, especially the virtue of generosity and what Mill called ‘mental cultivation’. Generosity is an important character trait, since generous people take pleasure in the happiness of other people, while selfish people resent it; and ‘mental cultivation’, or ability to think freely, leads people to express ‘a sincere interest in the public good’ (Mill 2015: 128) . While utilitarianism encouraged people to cultivate freedom, the truly free individual knows how ‘not to expect more from life than it is capable of bestowing’ (Mill 2015: 127). And, since happiness and pleasure can only be experienced in the present life, there is no need to believe in or to postulate an afterlife. Utilitarianism promoted happiness for all by eliminating suffering of all people regardless of birth, social standing, or wealth. Through acts of kindness that show concern for those closely connected to us and for others who are more remote from us, utilitarianism envisioned a society in which people are as happy as possible and in which each person’s happiness counts equally. Consequently, the Great Happiness Principle inspired political, social, and legal reforms compatible with the principles of liberal democracy.
Jews and Judaism did not fit neatly into these theories of universal happiness. Kant, especially toward the end of his life, held a very negative view of Judaism, viewing it as ‘legalism’ that negated the autonomy of genuine morality, and utilitarianism, which was consistently secular, could not accept that the happiness of Jews differs from the happiness of other human beings. Universal happiness entails that if Jews want to be equal, they must give up their particularity, their otherness, their difference. How to be equal and different at the same time became the challenge that all Jewish thinkers had to address in the nineteenth century. The Haskalah movement followed the path paved by Mendelssohn: through Bildung Jews can enjoy universal happiness without losing their religious distinction. Kant’s philosophy was adopted variously by Liberal and Orthodox theologians: both groups maintained that Jews have a historic mission to increase universal happiness, but they differed on the function of Halakhah in the fulfillment of the mission. And utilitarianism became attractive to growing numbers of Jewish secularists who insisted that happiness depended on the betterment of the material conditions of the Jews and that the Jewish religion is irrelevant to it. Once again, the debate on happiness pertained to the meaning of Jewishness, the content of Jewish education, the relationship between religion and philosophy/science, and the relationship between Jews and non-Jews.
4 The Jewish debate on happiness
4.1 Enlightenment as the path to happiness
The advocates of the Haskalah, the maskilim, endorsed the ideal of Bildung, but unlike Mendelssohn who couched his view in the garb of Platonic dialogues, the maskilim took their cue from Maimonides’ Aristotelianism. In addition to composing new commentaries on the Guide of the Perplexed, the maskilim republished Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in Hebrew with their own commentaries (Pelli 1973; 1977). Under the title of Sefer Ha-Middot (Book of Virtues), two Jewish maskilim – Isaac Satanow (d. 1804) and Naphtali Herz Wessley (d. 1805) – republished the Hebrew translation of Aristotle’s Ethics by Meir Alguades with their own commentaries, in 1784 and in 1786, respectively. By focusing on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the maskilim promoted philosophic ethics in Hebrew as an alternative to the kabbalistic ethics, which the maskilim regarded a hindrance to social integration. In their commentaries, Satanow and Wessley introduced the Hebrew reader to contemporary science and encouraged Jews to enjoy the beauty and pleasure of the physical world. For example, Satanow agreed with Mendelssohn that the modern state is the social context within which human beings can be happiest and advocated granting civil rights to Jews. Satanow also insisted that happiness consists of sensuous pleasures:
man should enjoy worldly pleasures because God did not create pleasure in vain. He created it for enjoyment. A man should enjoy the pleasures of the flesh as well as good food. Moreover, one should always find new pleasures because the newer the pleasure, the more enjoyable it is. One should also indulge in sex because it was not created in vain. (Cited in Rezler-Bersohn 1980: 98)
Yet, the enjoyment of sensual pleasures must be balanced by Torah study and Jewish religious observance, and informed by knowledge of the sciences, including ‘the science of musar’, namely, ethics (Morlok 2020). Wessley translated these ideas into pedagogy by advocating a new curriculum for Jewish schools that would combine the ‘teachings of God’ (torat Adonai) and secular ‘teachings of man’ (torat ha-adam) that taught ‘etiquette, civility, and the duties of man and citizen’ (Sorkin 1987: 57).
In 1786, a group of maskilim created the Society for the Promotion of Goodness and Justice that put into practice the Enlightenment principles of ‘tolerance, moderation, reasonableness, a focus on practical works over metaphysics, and an incorporation of modern scientific learning into their religious worldview’ (Bor 2023: 257). Menachem Mendel Lefin (d. 1826) is an example of a Polish disciple of Mendelssohn who believed that Bildung would enable Jews to flourish in the world while remaining dutiful to God. Lefin’s Sefer Heshbon Ha-Nefesh (Book of Moral Accounting) (1808) was written as a manual for the acquisition of thirteen desired character traits through deliberate practice: ‘equanimity, patience, order, decisiveness, cleanliness, humility, righteousness, frugality, diligence, silence, cleanliness, truth, and separation’ (Bor 2023: 257). This list closely followed the moral regimen of Benjamin Franklin, which also consisted of thirteen virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. Lefin took his cue not only from Benjamin Franklin but also from John Locke (d. 1704), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (d. 1778), and Johann Bernhard Basedow (d. 1790) (Bor 2001). By introducing their ideas in Hebrew for Jewish readers, Lefin presented Jews with practical programme to flourish and thrive in the earthly world through moral self-improvement. Although Lefin highlighted human agency and responsibility, God was ever present in Lefin’s moralistic treatise in which philosophy and science were shown to enhance Jewish religious life. By the end of the nineteenth century, Lefin’s religious manual of self-improvement became a standard text in Talmudic academies in Lithuania, where the Musar tradition dominated. If musar was about conquering selfish desires, as the founder of the Musar movement, Israel Salanter (d. 1889), held, then Lefin offered a modern programme for the acquisition of moral virtues through self-discipline.
The Haskalah’s commitment to the modernization of Judaism culminated in the movement for the Scientific Study of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums). Founded in 1819, the movement sought to enhance the respectability of Jews and Judaism so that they could take rightful place in European society, especially in academia from which Jews were still excluded. Although the main contributors to Wissenschaft des Judentums (e.g. Leopold Zunz, Heinrich Graetz, Isaak Marcus Jost, and Moritz Steinschneider) did not theorize about happiness, as did Mendelssohn and his immediate followers, the movement greatly contributed to the modern Jewish discourse on happiness. First, the Wissenschaft des Judentums turned Judaism into a topic of objective, scientific analysis with the tools of the science of history and philology that claimed to recover the past ‘as it truly was’, as Leopold Ranke has urged. By examining Judaism scientifically, Wissenschaft des Judentums scholarship desacralized the literary sources of Judaism and privileged science rather than religion as the exclusive path to human flourishing. Second, in their historical reconstruction of the Jewish past, Wissenschaft scholars privileged Jewish rationalism, epitomized by Maimonides, over the ‘irrational’ forms of Judaism, namely, Kabbalah and Hasidism, thus equating the ‘essence of Judaism’ with philosophic knowledge rather than with religious observance. If the ‘essence of Judaism’ is intellectual and philosophical, the rituals of Judaism could be rendered non-essential and therefore reinterpreted, changed, or discarded. Wissenschaft scholarship thus empowered the movement for religious reforms advocated by Samuel Holdheim (d. 1860), Solomon Ludwig Steinheim (d. 1866), Abraham Geiger (d. 1874), David Einhorn (d. 1879), and Solomon Formstecher (d. 1889), among others. Liberal theologians were convinced that biblical prophets articulated a vision of universal happiness within which Jews can retain their distinctive identity.
4.2 Happiness in Jewish Liberal theology
Like Mendelssohn, Liberal Jewish theologians viewed Judaism as a natural religion whose beliefs are commensurate with the universal ideals of the Enlightenment and the social interests of the modern state (Mosse 1987). More willing to reform the practice of Judaism than was Mendelssohn, Liberal theologians admitted that traditional Jewish messianism conflicts with Enlightenment universalism; they therefore denationalized and depersonalized Jewish messianism and spoke about the messianic age (Messiazeit) as envisioned by the ancient prophets of Israel. In this view, the messianic age will not be a supernatural, eschatological event but rather the culmination of human history, a time when wisdom and peace will prevail, and humankind will get ever closer to self-betterment. In the messianic age, all humanity, including Jews, will flourish by attaining its ‘vocation’ and ‘destiny’. Jewish Liberal theologians debated whether Jewish law would still be obligatory in the universalist messianic age: the more radical reformers such as Holdheim did not see any role for Jewish law in the messianic age, whereas the more traditional ones (e.g. Geiger and Einhorn) did not go that far.
Samuel Hirsch (d. 1889) exemplifies the dominant position among the theologians of Liberal Judaism. Born into a traditional Jewish family in Dessau in 1815, S. Hirsch received traditional Jewish training before he embarked on the study of philosophy at the University of Bonn (1835–1837), the University of Berlin (1837–1838), and perhaps also at the University of Leipzig. S. Hirsch received his Rabbinic ordination from Holdheim, the radical reformer who ‘was convinced that a new age was dawning for the German Jews in which they would participate together with non-Jews in the liberal state’ (Wiese 2006: 15–16). Holding Rabbinic posts at Dessau (1838–1842), Luxemburg (1842–1866), and Philadelphia (1866–1889), S. Hirsch greatly influenced Liberal Judaism in Germany, Europe, and America. Judaism, so he insisted, consists of divine moral laws rather than irrational dogmas and the Jews were elected by God and tasked with the noble goal of serving as ‘exemplary model for all nations’. Their dispersion among the nations was part of divine providence ‘to spread Bildung, scholarship, and the divine truth of the Holy Bible’ (Wiese 2006: 15–16). Because Jews have fulfilled their universal mission, all enlightened people in the present would come to understand that ‘God has but one Will, and that He requires man to lead a free life, a human divine life’ (Wiese 2024: 18). Hirsch maintained that when Jews live exemplary religious life and reform their outdated religious practices, the German nation would
gladly recognize us as free men, as free men capable of leading others to freedom. Then we could enroll our power for the benefit of the state and humanity; then Israel and humanity will head toward a felicitous future, one so eloquently depicted by the prophets as the perfection of the humanity. (Wiese 2024: 19, emphasis added)
In contrast to Jews who converted to Christianity or became indifferent to Jewish religious life, S. Hirsch maintained that Jews should feel pride in the mission of the People of Israel: to teach humanity ‘the true religion’ and to fulfil their distinctive role in the progress of humanity. Kant’s vision of human progress undergirded S. Hirsch’s Liberal conception of universal happiness and Jewish Liberal theology in the early twentieth century in Germany and in the United States (Meyer 1969–1970).
In accord with the expectations of German society, Liberal Jewish theologians maintained that Jews must reform their religious practices, cultural style, and social ethos to deserve emancipation and benefit from social integration. At first, the reforms pertained to the public performance of the Jewish religion, namely, the liturgy and decorum of the synagogue service on the assumptions that these stylistic changes would lead to the moral advancement of the believers, but it quickly became clear that a fundamental restructuring of the tradition was needed. The dawn of the new era demanded the renewal of Judaism, rendering Judaism a ‘religion in progress’. Historical scholarship of Wissenschaft des Jundentums and the Haskalah’s critique of Rabbinic culture justified deeper reforms which were implemented by progressive rabbis who began to be appointed to Rabbinic positions throughout Germany. Philosophically, Kant’s philosophy, which was promoted by his Jewish followers such Saul Ascher (d. 1822), Lazarus Ben David (d. 1832), and David Friedländer (d. 1834) offered a Kantian approach to theorizing religion, autonomy, responsibility, and happiness. Yet, it was the push for ritual changes rather than Kant’s philosophy that generated the backlash to Liberal Judaism. The opposition to Reform Judaism was led by Samson Raphael Hirsch (d. 1888), even though he endorsed the ideology of Bildung, studied the philosophy of Kant, and even introduced a few changes in synagogue service and in the curriculum of Jewish schools. Most relevantly, it was S. R. Hirsch, as the founder of Neo-Orthodoxy, who framed the contested issues in terms of a debate on happiness. Against the reformers, he insisted that the divinely revealed Torah alone can bring universal happiness (Miller 2024).
4.3 Neo-Orthodoxy: Torah as the prescription for universal happiness
Born into a traditional Jewish family that welcomed the prospect of emancipation and appreciated the ideal of Bildung, S. R. Hirsch’s education combined traditional Jewish learning with German secular education, culminating in a PhD from the University of Bonn. His slogan, ‘Torah im derekh eretz’ (the way of the land), summarized his positive attitude toward secular culture as well as his philosophy of education. In 1836, at the beginning of his Rabbinic career, S. R. Hirsch published Nineteen Letters on Judaism (Hirsch 1969) that became ‘the manifesto of German Neo-Orthodoxy' (Gottlieb 2021: 245). Under the pseudonym of ‘Ben Uziel’, Hirsch composed a short, eloquent text written as a dialogue between Benjamin, an alienated young Jew, raised in a traditional home, and Naphtali, a young rabbi, who responds to the provocative letter by Benjamin convincing him to return to Jewish observance. In the opening chapter, Benjamin states: ‘Every religion, I believe, should bring a person nearer to his purpose. What else can this purpose but the attainment of happiness (Glückseligkeit) and perfection (Volkommenheit)’ (Hirsch 1969: 24). But if this is so, Benjamin argues, Judaism has failed, because the Torah and Rabbinic Judaism more broadly prevent one from achieving these lofty goals (Gottlieb 2021: 247–248). Through the protagonist, Naphtali, S. R. Hirsch responded to these charges: while agreeing that inner conviction has a role to play in religion and that acceptance of religion should be based on rational considerations, Naphtali asserts that Benjamin mistakenly makes happiness and perfection the basis of judging Judaism. Instead of judging Judaism by criteria external to it, so Naphtali claims, Judaism must only be judged according to its own destiny and teachings; to do otherwise is to violate the Enlightenment’s demand for intellectual honesty.
Through his protagonist, Naphtali, S. R. Hirsch claimed that Maimonides was the source of the problem because he defined perfection of the intellect as the goal of life, viewing the commandment of the Torah as means to that end. S. R. Hirsch charged that Maimonides adopted the ‘Arab-Greek’ approach to happiness and interpreted Judaism in the light of philosophical concepts that were alien to Judaism. Such inauthentic understanding of Judaism led to the abandonment of Halakhic life among Iberian Jews. S. R. Hirsch admitted that Mendelssohn did not seek the synthesis of Judaism and philosophy, but he too was mistaken because he assigned metaphysics and ethics to the ‘rational and universal’ sphere, while defining Judaism as mere obedience to ‘revealed legislation’ unrelated to the universal truths of reason. For S. R. Hirsch, while Mendelssohn correctly regarded Halakhah as eternally binding, he did not explain it in detail and therefore his followers returned to Maimonides’ view of intellectual perfection that rendered observance of the ceremonial law as dispensable (Gottlieb 2021: 251–253). In S. R. Hirsch’s analysis, the maskilim who followed Mendelssohn defined happiness as perfecting one’s capacities, especially one’s moral capacity, but many Jews in S. R. Hirsch’s own day interpreted happiness as attainment of comfort and pleasure, and viewed Jewish law as impeding their material pursuits. In other words, they adopted a simplistic or even vulgar interpretation of utilitarianism rather than the subtle views of Mendelssohn. For bourgeois Jews, so S. R. Hirsch charges, Haskalah became a code word for self-satisfied selfishness; they mocked Jewish tradition and sought liberation form Halakhah for the sake of their self-gratification and pleasure.
Against these trends, S. R. Hirsch affirmed the Rabbinic doctrine of ‘Torah from Heaven’, insisting on the nonhuman and supernatural origin of the Torah. Rejecting the historicism of Wissenschaft des Judentums, S. R. Hirsch argued that the Torah
has no development and no history; it is rather the people of the Torah which has a history. And this history is nothing else but its continuous training and striving to rise to the unchangeable, eternal height on which the Torah is set. (Hirsch 1956: 90 [vol. 1])
The Torah is not just ‘revealed legislation’ that Jews alone are required to observe, as Mendelssohn held, but ‘the unique message of God addressed to Man in his totality’ (Hirsch 1956: 92 [vol. 1]). S. R. Hirsch goes on to explain:
the Torah tells us how we should regulate, develop, and perfect our intellectual, spiritual, physical, domestic, and social relationships on earth; how to sanctify our existence as well as all our endeavors on earth, so that the Divine Glory may abide in our midst during existence here, and our happiness need not be deferred to the life beyond. (Hirsch 1956: 95 [vol. 1])
Therefore, it is Israel’s task is to manifest God’s will and power to humankind and lead humanity to attain happiness in this world. To accomplish this goal, God dispersed the Jews among the nations so that they could exemplify how to experience in this world. Venerating the divinely revealed Torah as
the source of knowledge and understanding, the foundation of life and peace, the well of salvation and strength, the absolute good and the tree of life which – if planted and tended with proper care – [the Torah] is able to bring paradise back to this world. (Hirsch 1956: 101 [vol. 1], emphasis added)
Living the life of Torah ‘transform[s] the world into a paradise of peace and salvation, of joy and inner happiness for God-serving mankind’ (Hirsch 1956: 110 [vol. 1]). Thus interpreted, S. R. Hirsch presents ‘Torah-true Judaism’ as an instrument working for all humankind because ‘the Torah is meant to regulate human life on earth with its wisdom and to transform the world into a paradise of peace and salvation of joy and inner happiness for God-serving mankind’ (Hirsch 1956: 110 [vol. 1]). The same message is stated a few pages earlier when Hirsch avers: ‘the Torah is the unique message of God addressed to Man in his totality’ (Hirsch 1956: 92 [vol. 1]).
S. R. Hirsch’s defence of traditional Judaism critiqued other alternative approaches. Contrary to Christian theology, which denigrated the earthliness of Judaism as a sign of its spiritual inferiority, S. R. Hirsch presented the life of mitzvot as the best programme to attain happiness through character training that inculcates desired virtues. In a Jewish home a child acquires ‘the virtues of truthfulness, respect for the law, altruism, charity, forbearance, forgiveness, peaceability, serenity, humility, moderation, modesty, consciousness, and happy sense of duty, and make of these integral part of his personality’ (Hirsch 2018: 105). Contrary to Kant, who denounced the legalism of Judaism, Hirsch insisted that Judaism is grounded in freedom, namely, the freedom to decide whether or not to obey the divine law: ‘the law was offered to man so that he might obey it of his own free will […]. By obeying this moral law of his own free choice, man joins the great chorus of creatures that serve God’ (Hirsch 2018: 56). Contrary to utilitarianism, S. R. Hirsch argued that happiness cannot be found in mere pleasures (embodied or mental) but in the joy that arises with the performance of divine commands and the cultivation of good character traits. And contrary to Reform Judaism and Wissenschaft des Judentums, Hirsch insists that the Torah, both Written and Oral, cannot be historicized, cannot be critiqued, and cannot be altered. S. R. Hirsch’s views would shape Modern Orthodoxy throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
4.4 Happiness as material wellbeing
While S. R. Hirsch’s outlook was shared by enlightened rabbis such as Shmuel David Luzzatto (d. 1856) in Italy, it was rejected by the Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Moses Schreiber (d. 1839) (known as Hatam Sofer) in Hungary who resisted the emancipation, denounced openness toward secular culture, and objected to any religious reforms. S. R. Hirsch too was a fierce opponent of religious reforms, and he successfully campaigned for the recognition of Orthodox institutions by the German state, thus fragmenting the unity of the German Jewry, as each Jewish ‘denomination’ would erect its own synagogues, schools, and philanthropic institutions. Emancipation was achieved in Western and Central Europe by 1871, but without social acceptance of Jews. Formally recognized now as a ‘religion’, a ‘faith’, or a ‘confession’, Judaism was privatized and domesticated: Jews could practice their religion in the private sphere, allowing the public sphere to be ‘secular’, that is, free of religion. Although the differentiation between the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres was alien to Judaism, the secularization of the public sphere enabled Jews to enter the domains from which they were previously excluded (e.g. law, government, higher education, science, medicine, arts, and more). But as the emancipatory principle triumphed in Europe, it also unleashed modern antisemitism that rejected Jews not on religious grounds, as premodern anti-Judaism did, but on the pseudo-scientific ground of racial theories. Since the 1870s, the internal debate about Jewishness could not be separated from the larger experience of European Jews due to widespread antisemitism and social rejection.
If, in Western and Central Europe, modern antisemitism emerged as a response to successful emancipation, in the Russian Empire state-sponsored traditional antisemitism was prevalent throughout the nineteenth century, and emancipation was gained only in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In the Russian Empire, the spread of the Enlightenment, the push for religious reforms, and the struggle for Jewish equality took a very different course than in the rest of Europe. In Tsarist Russia, as Eliyahu Stern explains,
[t]he state identified Jews as a foreign entity. Jews dressed in different clothes from those of other Russian subjects, they worked in circumscribed labor markets, and, for the most part, they resided in designated lands […]. Although Jews disbanded their local corporations in 1844, they were still denied basic access to land and labor markets even much later into the nineteenth century. (Stern 2018: 10)
Russian Jewish elites followed the example of the maskilim in Western Europe, defining themselves as ‘Russian of the Mosaic Faith’, but their reformist efforts did not yield the same level of social mobility nor did they result in ‘a large-scale change in Jews’ socio-economic situation’ (Stern 2018: 11); Jews in imperial Russia did not undergo a ‘process of embourgeoisement’ and did not integrate into civil society. Precisely because Russian Jews lived under poor economic conditions, they reimagined the central features of Judaism around their material distinctiveness. Since the 1870s, ‘physical wellbeing became a Jewish issue’ and Jewish identity was framed in terms of ‘land, labor, and people’, rather than in terms of ‘ritual, study, and reason’ (Stern 2018: 11, original emphasis). Given their material self-understanding, economics, labour, embodiment, gender, power, and land emerged as crucial ingredients of Jewishness and the defining factors of Jewish wellbeing, or happiness. It was the focus on their wellbeing that led Eastern European Jews to become interested in the writings of Karl Marx (which were translated into Hebrew and Yiddish) and join revolutionary movements that promised betterment of material conditions. In the second half of the nineteenth century, millions of Jews endorsed the secular ideologies of socialism, communism, or anarchism on the assumption that they will solve the ‘Jewish question’ once and for all.
In Eastern Europe, secularization manifested itself not so much in the privatization of religion, but in the endorsement of worldviews that dismissed religion altogether and explained Jewishness in strict material terms. Interestingly, the early theorists of Jewish materialism were
all theists who imparted metaphysical value to the physical world […] [who] were also deeply versed in Kabbalistic and rabbinic literature and were able to identify precisely which strands of medieval and early modern Jewish thought could be woven into a theory of Jewish materialism based on labor. (Stern 2018: 18)
Hasidism and socialism were not mutually exclusive, and there were Jews whose initial commitment to Hasidism led them to endorse socialism.
After 1870s, Jewish life throughout Europe was profoundly transformed. In the Russian Empire, the pogroms of 1881–1883, which the government failed to prevent, led more than two and a half millions impoverished Jews to migrate to America, the ‘new Promised Land’, where material happiness presumably could be found in the ‘Goldene Medine’ (Finer 2002). Going eastward rather than westwards, small groups of Zionist pioneers settled in the ancestral homeland of the Land of Israel where they aspired to create modern Jewish life in a Jewish polity that promised the wellbeing of Jews, albeit what that entailed was hotly debated. Ultra-Orthodox Jews, who denied that human efforts could bring about the messianic ideal, rejected Zionism, and so did the Liberal Jews who believed that Judaism must play a role in the attainment of universal happiness.
The latter position was exemplified by Hermann Cohen (d. 1918), the most important Neo-Kantian philosopher in Germany, who dismissed the Zionists when he quipped ‘those louts, they want to be happy’ (cited in Kaplan 2001: 16). An avid German patriot, Cohen believed in the historic mission of the Jews to spread true worship of God among the nations, and as a Liberal Jew he was convinced that universal ethics originated in Judaism rather than in Christianity. It was biblical Judaism as interpreted by the rabbis that recognized the humanity of non-Jews when it commanded ‘love your neighbour as yourself’, understanding ‘neighbour’ as ‘fellow man’ (Mitmensch) (Novak 1981). Like Samuel David Luzzatto a few decades earlier, Cohen highlighted the centrality of compassion in Jewish ethics, a feeling that emerges when we identify with the suffering of the ‘neighbour’ or a ‘fellow man’ and when we care for the weak and the marginal of the society. In compassion ‘the next man becomes fellow man’, giving rise to community and eventually to humankind. Within Jewish religious communities, especially on the Sabbath and holidays, compassion leads to the alleviation of suffering and the joy of celebrating the goodness of life (Kaplan 2001). Unlike eudaimonism that focuses on the individual, the experience of joy is social and communal, enabling Jews to ‘taste’, so to speak, the delightful expansion of the Self that will be experienced by all in the Messianic Age, the ‘the horizon for the future of mankind’ (Novak 1981: 112).
