460 A History of Judaism
exciting new world of Enlightenment philosophy but to have had little
impact on the religious lives of fellow Jews in his own time. The Gali-
cian maskil Nahman Krochmal evolved in the early nineteenth century
a distinctive idealist philosophy, based on the ideas of Vico and Herder
as well as Kant, Schelling and Hegel, in which he asserted that the mon-
otheistic God of Judaism is the Absolute Spirit in which everything
subsists (including the deities of other nations), and that each nation
(including the Jews) has a distinctive folk spirit which passes through an
organic cycle from birth to destruction. Little known in Krochmal’s life-
time, these ideas were disseminated by the members of the Wissenschaft
des Judentums movement after his death in 1840, with the publication
in 1851 of many of his writings in an edition produced by Leopold
Zunz. Equally independent was the doctor and poet Salomon Stein-
heim, a younger contemporary of Krochmal who was born in Germany
and (despite moving to Italy) wrote in German. Steinheim attacked
fiercely both Christianity and the rationalizing approach to religion
advocated by Mendelssohn, insisting both that the truths of revelation
are independent of natural reason and that they must be confirmed by
philosophy. His notion that religious experience should be subject to the
same empirical tests as other areas of human life proved uncongenial
both to traditionalists (for whom his philosophy was too rational) and
to the spirit of reform which was sweeping through German Jewry by
the time of his death in 1866, creating new denominations within Juda-
ism which were to have an impact down to the present day.^6
In a sermon in 1853, Samuel Holdheim, rabbi of the Reform congreg-
ation of Berlin from 1847 until his death in 1860, expressed the central
desire of the Reform movement for Jews to use their dispersion among
the nations to transcend the specifically national traits of traditional
Judaism as the religion just of Israel in relation to God and to bring
spiritual illumination to all mankind:
It is the destiny of Judaism to pour the light of its thoughts, the fire of its
sentiments, the fervor of its feelings upon all souls and hearts on earth.
Then all of these peoples and nations, each according to its soil and his-
toric characteristics, will, by accepting our teachings, kindle their own
lights, which will then shine independently and warm their souls. Judaism
shall be the seed- bed of the nations filled with the blessing and promise,
but not a fully grown matured tree with roots and trunk, crowned with
branches and twigs, with blossoms and fruit – a tree which is merely to be