Page 88 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

and broad, international links of commerce and the exchange of letters (see
Katz 1993 [1957], 63–179; Manache 1996). In the context of the kehila, Jewish
public life was ordered into “a multifaceted and multilingual literary system”
(Parush 1994, 6) that anchored cultural practice, political power, and the for-
mation of Jewish subjects in relatively stable institutions of governance. This
authority was also recognizable in the hierarchical distinction between the use
of leshon ha-kodesh (the holy tongue)—the (overtly masculinized) language of
liturgy, scholarship, jurisprudence, correspondence, and “of¤cial” documents—
and Jewish vernaculars (Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, Ladino, etc.) which were re-
served for everyday spheres of oral discourse and popular writing, and which
were available to the broad masses of unlearned people (’am ha-aretz) and
women. 6
Over the course of the nineteenth century, the great age of European imperial
expansion and nation-building, corporate Jewish society became exposed to an
evolving set of promises and demands from the project of so-called Emancipa-
tion, which aimed to integrate Jewish subjects into the emerging European civil
order and to rede¤ne collective Jewish identity on the basis of principles of pri-
vate confession and voluntary association. A well-known example of the new
arrangements that de¤ned Jewish public culture in the wake of these shifts is
that of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), an intellectual and cultural move-
ment that ¤rst appeared in Germany at the close of the eighteenth century and
quickly spread across Europe. In an effort to “rescue” fellow Jews from the pri-
vations of corporate life and to bring them into conformity with the exigencies
and sensibilities of modern civil society, maskilim (adherents of the Enlighten-
ment) enacted a series of revisions to liturgical practice (out of which the Re-
form movement was born) and amendments to Talmudic scholarship and legal
reasoning, based on approaches to the Bible that incorporated the emerging aca-
demic discourses of Orientalist historiography and philology. Maskilim also
waged war on the patterns of diglossia that shaped traditional Jewish society,
by promoting the replacement of Jewish vernaculars with European languages-
of-state (German, Russian, French), and leshon ha-kodesh with a reconstructed,
“puri¤ed” Hebrew that could be extended into hitherto unfamiliar literary ter-
rains, such as with the translation of European belles lettres and leading sci-
enti¤c and philosophical works of the period (see Bartal 1993; Parush 1994,
1995).
We must be careful, however, not to presume that this public sphere of mas-
kilim, schooled in the liberal sensibilities of cosmopolitanism, tolerance, and
rational argument, de¤ned a single, centripetal force leading European Jews
from communal medievalism to modernity. Nineteenth-century Jewish mod-
ernization was, in fact, shaped by considerable differences between national and
regional contexts, competing political programs of assimilation and dissimila-
tion (such as Bundism and Zionism), and class- and cohort-speci¤c experiences,
a full accounting of which is far beyond the means of this essay. Suf¤ce it to
suggest that modern Jewish public culture, in all its variety, shares a common
location after the dismantling of the kehila, and the circulation of promises,

Communicating Authority, Consuming Tradition 77