FRIENDSHIP THAT WOULD NOT LAST

The word Haskala, signifying the Jewish Enlightenment, invokes two powerful associations. One of them, with Nathan Der Weise-Moses Mendelssohn and Lessing: a friendship, or perhaps, an illusion of friendship that would not last. The other, pointing to an ugly split within the Ashkenazic community of Europe, between the “reformed” Citizen Jew who wanted to belong, and the diehard shtetl Jew who wanted to be left alone. The new Jew was deeply ashamed of his backward kin, and the old Jew despised his renegade brother who wished to become like the goyim ha-aratzot, and thus was a blight on the collective soul of Yiddishkeit.

Here was a split soul all right, and so are my own sympathies split between the authentic religious spirit of the aesthetically-challenged old Jew and the aesthetically-refined, but spiritually-confused persona of this pleasantly-Westernized new Jew, whose detractors call him a rootless cosmopolite, thus ridiculing him for his sincere desire to be not exactly “like everybody else,” but more like the “best and finest” of them.

Moses Mendelssohn was admittedly among those “best and finest.” He was also a friend of Lessing, and a friend of Germany. And then, he died… --And Joseph died, and all his brethren, and all that generation-- (Exodus 1:6.)

Between Lessing’s Nathan der Weise and Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers… is there a parallel of some significance, I wonder?…

Between Lessing and Hitler, how did the Jews lose the friendship of Germany? Between Joseph and Moses, how had the Jews lost the friendship of Egypt? In the Biblical account, the children of Israel were fruitful, and increased abundantly… and waxed exceedingly mighty; and the land was filled with them, then there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph. (Exodus 1:7-8.) Does this passage mean that the new generation of Egyptians did not know any Jews like Joseph? Had it been otherwise, surely we would have read about them in the Bible!

Can that Scriptural parallel now be cooked to death, to make even this toughest of all riddles chewable? Is it possible that men like Mendelssohn had unwittingly opened the door to others, the cleverest and smartest, who may perhaps have been too clever for their own good, but even more so, for the good of their people?

Who is better qualified to explain all this mess than one brilliant German Jew who was born after Nathan der Weise had already been dead… Had he lived during the zenith of the Haskala, had he been the friend of Lessing and of Germany, whatever we know today as Marxism might never have been associated with the name of Karl Marx.