Trying to bring the Haskalah to the United States

Mirjam Beddig

The Haskalah writers in Germany and in Eastern Europe wanted to change their co-religionists in the 18th and 19th century by educating them, getting rid of superstition and trying to turn them into “useful members of society” (Ch. W. Dohm). One of the goals lurking in the background was to achieve emancipation. Gerson Rosenzweig (1861-1914), one of the late Eastern European maskilim, emigrated to the United States at the end of the 19th century and published Talmudic and Midrashic parodies in journals that would nowadays be classified as Maskilic journals due to the topics and due to the literary style they were written in. Rosenzweig’s Hebrew journals ultimately failed because of a lack of readership, but they tell an instructive and often overlooked story of Eastern European immigrants who arrived in the United States and tried to influence the surrounding culture instead of trying to fit in.

In my paper I will present a short excerpt from one of Gerson Rosenzweig’s parodies and then I will talk about the zeitgeist of Jewish New York in the 1910s, which might explain why the journals never found as many readers as they might have found in Eastern Europe or in Eretz Israel.