A History of Zionism by Walter Laqueur

dying to become the monkeys of European civilisation (as Luzzatto put it), aping all the intellectual fashions of a rotten age. The resentment is only too intelligible; deserters from a fortress under siege - and the Jews were still subject to discrimination and even persecution - are never looked upon with favour. Of those at the time who chose baptism, many did so no doubt in the hope of material gain or social recognition; others simply grew away. But it is doubtful whether those who accepted Christianity did so only for material advantage. The sad truth which most defenders of traditional Judaism have always been reluctant to face was that it had become meaningless for many people. This was the age of the decline of traditional religion; with the disappearance of this common tie many educated Jews no longer felt any obligation, moral or other, to their community. These lapsed Jews admitted to a common ancestry and tradition. But what did this tradition amount to when compared with the overwhelming attractions of European civilisation, the Enlightenment, the classic and Romantic Movement, the unprecedented flowering of philosophy and literature, music and the arts? The crisis of religion was less acutely felt in the non-Jewish world, for both Catholicism and Protestantism showed themselves far more adaptable than orthodox Judaism to the winds of change. Even if a German ceased to believe in Christian dogma he still remained a German, whereas a non-believing Jew had no such anchor. It was not just that Judaism had nothing to put against the powerful influence of the Encyclopedists, of Kant and Hegel, Goethe and Beethoven. These, it could be argued, belonged to all mankind. The real problem was that Judaism as a religion (and few at the time regarded it as anything else) had little if any attraction for western-educated people. The last movement that had stirred the Jewish world, the messianism of Shabtai Zvi and his pupils, had long ago petered out; some of its offshoots, such as the Dönmeh in Turkey and the Frankists in Galicia, had ended up by adopting Islam and Christianity respectively. Throughout the eighteenth century the leading German rabbis had been engaged in perpetual internal strife, suspecting each other of various heresies. Rabbi Emden of Altona claimed that the amulets sold by Rabbi Eybeschütz of Hamburg to pregnant women (they were supposed to have a magic effect) included a reference to Shabtai Zvi; this was the great confrontation shaking central European Judaism for many years. With the keepers of the faith engaged in disputations of this kind, was it surprising that the Jewish readers of Voltaire had little but derision for what they regarded as the forces of obscurantism? Much of the influence of the Enlightenment was shallow and its fallacies were demonstrated only too clearly in subsequent decades. But in the clash between secularism and an ossified religion based largely on a senseless collection of prohibitions and equally inexplicable customs elaborated by various rabbis in the distant past, there was not the slightest doubt which would prevail. It was a conflict between a modern philosophy and a moribund religion.
    Both the apostates and the advocates of assimilation were later accused of seeking to emancipate themselves as individuals instead of fighting for the emancipation of their people. German Jews in particular have been severely criticised for their pusillanimity. But those who opted out (it cannot be emphasised too often) did not feel themselves at all members of a people; at most they sensed that they were members of a community of fate whose destiny had been fulfilled. Nor was assimilation confined to Germany; the idea that the Jews were no longer a people had been given official sanction by the Sanhedrin convened by Napoleon in 1807. What happened in Germany during the first half of the nineteenth century was by no means unique; it simply predated developments elsewhere in Europe by