Notes to Chapter 1 { 2791782 ; for Moravia, February 1782 ; for Hungary, March 1783 ; and, finally, for Galicia, 1789. See
Michael Graetz, “The Jewish Enlightenment,” 1 : 337 – 41.
6. David Sorkin, The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought, 111.
7. As Edward Breuer and Sorkin have shown, the early Haskalah program of cultural
renewal not only did not draw on but in fact strongly opposed the historicization of reli-
gion as practiced by the German Neologists, who had come to dominate German religious
thought by about 1760. In contrast, the later turn to social and political issues by those on the
radical fringe of maskilim was thoroughly implicated in attempts to reconceive Jewish his-
tory. See Breuer, The Limits of Enlightenment; and Sorkin, The Berlin Haskalah and Moses
Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment. On the Neologists and the importance of his-
tory in eighteenth-century German religious thought, see Peter Hanns Reill, The German
Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism, 43 – 45.
8. For an early defensive response to Bendavid, see Jacob Guttmann, “Lazarus Bendavid:
Seine Stellung zum Judentum und seine literarische Wirksamkeit.” Brief treatments of Ben-
david’s treatise can also be found in Hans-Joachim Becker, Fichtes Idee der Nation und das
Judentum, 57 – 60 ; Shmuel Feiner, Cultural Revolution in Berlin, 70 – 72 , The Jewish Enlight-
enment, 308 – 10 , and The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe,
232 – 33 ; Jonathan Hess, Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity, 157 ; Jacob Katz, Out
of the Ghetto, 132 ; Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity, 20 – 21 ; Paul Reitter, On the Ori-
gins of Jewish Self-Hatred, 17 – 18 , 133 – 34 ; Hans Joachim Schoeps, Geschichte der jüdischen
Religionsphilosophie in der Neuzeit, 40 – 41 ; Sorkin, The Berlin Haskalah, 122 – 23 ; and Max
Wiener, Jüdische Religion im Zeitalter der Emanzipation, 42. Ephraim Navon has written
incisively on the Kantian framework of Bendavid’s Etwas zur Charackteristick der Juden
“The Encounter of German Idealists and Jewish Enlighteners: 1760 – 1800.”
9. Dominique Bourel, “Eine Generation später,” 379.
10. The Itzig family was the first—and only—Jewish family to receive, in 1791 , the right
of hereditary citizenship. See Steven Lowenstein, “Jewish Upper Crust and Berlin Jewish
Enlightenment.”
11. Bourel, “Eine Generation später,” 376.
12. Mendelssohn’s relationship to traditional Judaism has been the subject of debate, in
particular between Allan Arkush and David Sorkin. Arkush argues that the mature Mendels-
sohn had in fact become a deist and remained outwardly observant for essentially strategic
reasons (Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment). Sorkin, in a study of Mendelssohn’s
entire German-Hebrew oeuvre (Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment), argues
that Mendelssohn’s position as a theological Wolffian was and remained harmonic with his
observance of Jewish law. For an incisive interpretation of Ascher, see Jonathan Hess, Ger-
mans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity, 137 – 67. Brief discussions of Ascher (and especially of
his Leviathan) can also be found in Schoeps, Geschichte der jüdischen Religionsphilosophie,
39 – 56 ; M. Meyer, Response to Modernity, 21 – 23 ; and Sorkin, The Berlin Haskalah, 122 – 23.
For a more extensive reading of Ascher’s Leviathan, see Christoph Schulte, “Saul Ascher’s
Leviathan.” Schulte highlights the Kantian rupture in Haskalah ideology (ibid., 25 – 26 ). On
the importance of Kant for Bendavid’s generation of maskilim, see M. Graetz, “The Jewish
Enlightenment,” 1 : 352 – 53.
13. Bendavid, ECJ, 65. Throughout this book all translations not otherwise attributed
are my own.