Haskala Author
Saul Ascher - Biography
by William Hiscott
Saul Ascher (1767 Berlin - 1822 Berlin), Book Handler, Writer, Translator Saul Ascher is considered one of the most controversial representatives of the second generation of the Jewish Enlightenment in Berlin. During the ‘saddle period’ (Koselleck) between the French Revolution and the Carlsbad Decrees, Ascher wrote numerous philosophical, political and belletristic works as well as articles for a number of respected journals.
Ascher was born on 25 February 1767 as the first son of Anschel Jaffe and Deiche Aron. Anschel Jaffe’s family had been resident to Berlin for decades and was in possession of the protected status guaranteeing a form of citizenship for the first-born of the family. Deiche Aron’s family was well-respected in the Jewish community in Frankfurt (Oder). In 1789 Ascher married Rahel Spanier, daughter of Nathan Spanier from Bielefeld, Vorsteher of the Jewish community in Ravensberg and a successful forage trader during the Seven Years’ War. At the beginning of the winter semester in 1810, Ascher was awarded a doctorate of philosophy from the University of Halle/Saale (at the time in the Francophone Kingdom of Westphalia). Until approximately 1812, Ascher was a book handler from profession; later he was listed as a ‘writer’ in Berlin’s postal address books. On 6 December 1822 Ascher died after a long illness in Berlin.
Ascher claimed to be an autodidact; however, the depth of his writings implies a comprehensive humanistic upbringing. He spent his youth and young adulthood in the intellectual circles of the post-Mendelssohnian Enlightenment in Berlin. Ascher was acquainted with the philosopher Salomon Maimon, the medical doctor Sabbatia Joseph Wolff, Ignaz Aurelius Feßler, who is best known for his attempts to reform freemasonry, the publisher Friedrich Cotta and Heinrich Zschokke, a Swiss writer, publisher and representative of the practical Enlightenment. In his later years, Ascher was a known personality for the ‘third’ generation of Berlin’s Maskilim, among them Heinrich Heine, Eduard Gans and Leopold Zunz. It seems, however, that he was held in low esteem in these circles.
Philosophically, Saul Ascher was a headstrong advocate of the Enlightenment. In 1790 he published an obscure monograph on Kantian aesthetics, Skolien, oder Fragmente der Philosophie und der Kritik. Ascher’s other first publications dealt with topics specific to the Haskalah, the first being a pamphlet on the political emancipation of the Jews in 1788, Bemerkungen über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden veranlaßt bei der Frage: Soll der Jude Soldat werden?. In this work, motivated by the continuing debate on the amelioration of the Jews and Joseph II’s reforms in Austria in the 1780s, Ascher argues for the complete political emancipation of the Jews before they begin to take on citizenship duties, among them military service.
In 1792, Ascher published his main philosophical treatise on religion, Leviathan oder ueber Religion in Rücksicht des Judenthums. Here, Ascher attempts to refocus Jewish belief towards the principles of reason. In doing so, he strives for a radical modernization of Judaism. He questions both the validity of the halachic rituals and the power of the rabbinic orthodoxy. Following the principles of Kant’s critical philosophy, Ascher rejects Moses Mendelssohn’s defence of the concept of revelation. Instead, he argues for an “essence of Judaism” through which religion should be understood as a carrier of a religious-historical ethos (Grab). Judaism, indeed all religion, serves in this sense as a “gap-filler for reason” until a pure religion of reason takes hold via the spreading of Enlightenment thought. At the same time, Ascher is convinced that all Jews would profit enormously from a “reformation of Judaism”. Through a reformation of their religious beliefs and practices, Jews would free themselves both from both the burdens which had been placed on Judaism through the course of history and also from the Rabbinic power over individual Jews. Even though other Maskilim seemingly ignored Ascher’s work, a number of Christian and deistic periodicals gave it positive reviews, primarily due to its ultimate call for an over-arching religion of reason.
After publication of his Leviathan, Ascher seems to have turned away from the inner Jewish Enlightenment. There are, indeed, few references to any involvement on his part in the Jewish community in Berlin, save personal contacts to a small number of Maskilim. More historical evidence points towards his being active in the more general Enlightenment circles at the end of the 18th century. Nonetheless, in a period in which baptism was quickly becoming a common method for Jews to integrate themselves into the growing bourgeois society, Ascher remained a self-conscious Jew, despite his clear rejection of the traditional basis for Judaism.
Ascher’s further preoccupation with Judaism occurred ex negativo, i.e. out of the necessity to defend the Jews against anti-Judaist invectives. In a missive from 1794 addressed to Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Eisenmenger der Zweite, Ascher criticizes from a Kantian perspective the “science of Jew-hatred” propagated by Fichte in his Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die französische Revolution and his Kritik aller Offenbarung. According to Ascher, and as Johann Andreas Eisenmenger in his baroque treatise of Jew-hatred from 1700, Entdecktes Judentum, before him, Fichte attempts to “make Jew-hatred prevalent merely by piling on the recriminations against them”. At the same time, Ascher reprimands Immanuel Kant for his uncritical remarks on Judaism in his Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft.
Next to his critical writings on the evolving animosity towards the Jews, Ascher took part in the revolutionary discourse of his time. In 1799 he wrote Ideen zur natürlichen Geschichte der politischen Revolutionen, in which he defends the French Revolution under the premise that revolutions in general are events that occur within the confines of natural law, and not outside of the confines of natural law as was argued by many opponents of the French Revolution. In 1808, Ascher supported Napoleon as well by means of a glowing pamphlet, Napoleon oder über den Fortschritt der Regierung. Here, Ascher sees Napoleon as an exporteur of the practical ideals of the Enlightenment, and he praises a number of Napoleon’s efforts, among them his legal and political reforms. Both works were rather venturesome for a citizen of Prussia; for example, the publication of his work on the natural history of revolution was delayed for almost three years due to censorship problems.
In April 1810 Ascher wrote a newspaper article on a corruption scandal involving the Prussian Minister of Finance Altenstein, after which he was arrested and imprisoned for “malicious writing”. Released two weeks later, criminal proceedings against Ascher were dropped by the then newly-appointed Chancellor Hardenberg in October 1810. Subsequently, Ascher dedicated his translation of an economic treatise by the neo-mercantilist Charles Ganilh to Hardenberg. In his introduction to the translation of Des systèmes d`économie politique, Ascher describes the advantages of early capitalism and a supranational political economy. In this sense Ascher also writes dozens of journalistic pieces on developments in the Prussian economy for his own journal Welt- und Zeitgeist in 1810 and for Zschokke’s Miszellen für die neueste Weltkunde between 1807 and 1813.
Ascher also criticized the later rise of modern anti-Judaism within the framework of the romantic movement and the rise of German nationalism after the so-called War of Liberation 1813-1814 just as aggressively as he did Fichte’s Jew-hatred two decades prior. In his Germanomanie, Skizze zu einem Zeitgemälde, Ascher condemns the anti-Jewish attitudes of a number of prominent German thinkers, including Clemens Brentano, Friedrich Rühs and Ernst Moritz Arndt. Ascher speaks of these as “German aberrations”, and correctly concludes that their arguments against Jews contradict all cosmopolitan principles. As Ascher remarks later, this pamphlet caused a furore among the “fanatics in fervour of Germanomania”. In 1817 a mock copy of Ascher’s Germanomanie was ceremoniously burnt during the Wartburg festival held by the Burschenschaften. Ascher answers this provocation in a further pamphlet, Die Wartburgs-Feier im Hinblick auf Deutschlands religiöse und politische Stimmung. Here, he condemns the participants of the book-burning as suffering from “miasma of Germanomania” and strongly criticizes the nationalistic and anti-Jewish atmosphere in the post-Napoleonic years in Germany.
In 1818 Ascher translated into German The Fable of the Bees by the moral philosopher and early representative of a capitalist political economy, Bernhard de Mandeville. Next to the translation of the fable itself, Ascher wrote a philosophical commentary on the development of the economy in Prussia and Central Europe. In his commentary he argues that political economy represents the only legitimate successor to the Kantian philosophy. In contrast, Ascher argues that German Idealism represents a philosophy that clouds the real political and economic conditions of humankind. For Ascher, humankind is inherently immoral and imperfect, as Mandeville shows in his fable; nevertheless, humankind is also capable of improving itself through an intelligent and tolerant political arrangement of society.
In 1819, seemingly with the implementation of the Carlsbad Decrees, Ascher ceased publishing his writings. After his death, Heinrich Heine famously mocked the ghost of “Doctor Saul Ascher” in his Harzreise. Later, Ascher’s life and work was critically explored by Heinrich Graetz, Fritz Pinkuss and Max Wiener within the framework of the science of Judaism. Ascher also served post mortem for anti-Semitic German nationalists and later for the German fascists as an easily scapegoated figure of hate.
References:
Grab, Walter. Saul Ascher, ein jüdisch-deutscher Spätaufklärer zwischen Revolution und Restauration. In: Grab, Walter (Hg.). Jahrbuch des Instituts für Deutsche Geschichte, Bd. 6. Tel Aviv: Nateev, 1977. S. 131-180.
Littmann, Ellen. Saul Ascher: First Theorist of Progressive Judaism. In: Weltsch, Robert. (Ed.). Year Book. Leo Baeck Institute, vol. V. London, Jerusalem, New York: East and West Library (Published for the Institute), 1960. S. 107-121.
Schulte, Christoph. Saul Ascher’s Leviathan or The Invention of Jewish Orthodoxy in 1792. In: Grenville, J.A.S. (Ed). Year Book. Leo Baeck Institute, Bd. 45. London, Jerusalem, New York: Berghahn Books, 2000. S. 25-34.
