from the enlightenment to the state of israel 447
Among the interests of these maskilim in the 1820s was historical
research, coinciding in this respect with the concerns of the Jewish schol-
ars in Germany who established the Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft
der Juden in 1819. The members of the Verein had been trained in criti-
cal academic studies in German universities and sought to apply the
same techniques to the classical Jewish sources without what they saw as
the obscurantism of traditional rabbinic approaches or the hostility of
Christian scholars. The Wissenschaft des Judentums (‘Science of Juda-
ism’) to which they devoted themselves was intended to present Jewish
history in a form which made sense in modern terms, in much the same
way as Christian scholars in the same period were undertaking scientific
study of the Christian tradition. The movement was immensely produc-
tive. Both Isaak Markus Jost and (later in the nineteenth century)
Heinrich Graetz wrote vast histories of the Jews, and Leopold Zunz
wrote penetrating studies of Jewish homiletic and liturgical history. Nor
was the movement confined to Germany: by the end of the nineteenth
century, learned Jewish societies similar to the Société des Etudes Juives,
established in France in 1880 to bring critical scholarship into the Jewish
tradition, were also to be found in England and Hungary.^11
Alongside such cultural responses to the changing world were the
more political ones. Many Jews in the nineteenth century dedicated
themselves to different forms of socialism, either within European soci-
ety as a whole or on a broader world scale (like Karl Marx) or, as in the
Bund, with a distinctively Jewish programme. The Bund, the ‘General
Jewish Workers’ Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia’, was founded
in Russia in 1897 and devoted to a Jewish socialism allied to a secular,
Yiddish- speaking east European Jewish nationalism. The Bundists were
deeply opposed to the contemporary emergence of the very different
Jewish nationalism urged on the Jews of eastern Europe by Zionists.^12
Before the late nineteenth century, advocacy of a mass return to the
land of Israel was based on religious dogmas such as the messianic
expectations of Tzvi Hirsch Kalischer from Poznan ́, who persuaded the
rich philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore in England, and the Alliance
Israélite Universelle in France, to provide practical support in the found-
ing of an agricultural school near Jaffa in 1870. In the 1880s Shmuel
Mohilever, rabbi of Białystok, persuaded Baron Edmond de Rothschild
in Paris to support agricultural settlements by arguing that God pre-
ferred his children to live in their land even without proper observance
of the Torah rather than to have them keeping the Torah perfectly in
the diaspora. This religious background was not unimportant to the