THE Enlightenment made a greater contribution than any other movement in intellectual history to the multifaceted and often discordant modernization of the Jews. It provided seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European thinkers with critical and secular tools, which were employed by some to formulate a doctrine of religious tolerance that paved the way for the Jewish exodus from the ghetto. Yet, paradoxically, other thinkers used the teachings of the Enlightenment to marshal secular rationalist arguments justifying the vilification of the Jews and Judaism and the denial of their political and civil rights. In the Jewish world, the Enlightenment ethos of criticism and freedom of thought created a compelling atmosphere of challenge that produced new forms of literature and thought, as well as new social and cultural utopias. At the same time, however, this ethos was perceived as a threat and was resisted by the advocates of tradition with a defensive Orthodox stance.

The Jewish version of the Enlightenment served as an impetus for the formation of circles of maskilim, members of the new Jewish intellectual élite that emerged during the eighteenth century. Judged on the basis of their acculturation, openness to European society, and adoption of new lifestyles, the maskilim were not the first modern Jews in Europe. They were, however, unquestionably the first who were conscious of being modern Jews, and the first to advocate a modernist, transformational ideology. These maskilim, the first to discover the ‘modern age’ and to make it a hallmark of their historical consciousness, are the heroes of this book. Its subject is the encounter between Clio, muse of history, and Minerva, goddess of wisdom and the symbol of enlightenment, and its plot re-creates the shifts in historical consciousness that underpin the ideology of the Haskalah.

As a historian who was born and bred in the State of Israel and is sensitive to the conflicts that pervade its society and culture, in particular to the clash of cultures currently raging within it, I have been particularly intrigued by the issue of enlightenment and by complex and contradictory attitudes towards the past. In the rhetoric and self-consciousness of the Israeli cultural conflict, the words ‘enlightenment’ and ‘Haskalah’ are regarded as derogatory terms by the Orthodox and anti-modernist camp, while they represent the bedrock of universal, secular openness to the liberals.