Haskala Autoren

Moses Hirschel - biography

Gerda Heinrich, translated by William Hiscott

Moses Hirschel, (1754 Breslau – ?), after 1803 Christian Moritz Herschel, Merchant, Writer

Biographical information on Hirschel is sparse. Not even the few definitively known details on his life are noted in the relevant lexica.

Moses Hirschel was born in 1754 as the son of an arms supplier in Breslau. As a child, it was determined that he become a rabbi, and for these purposes he received an education in the Talmud. However, he quickly turned to the ideas of the European Enlightenment. He proceeded to educate himself in its philosophical tenets as an autodidact, as was the case with a majority of the Maskilim of the time. After a short period as a clerk, Hirschel undertook several journeys, during which he visited Berlin and Holland among other places. From 1773 onward, Hirschel settled again in Breslau and pursued a life as a private scholar and publicist. He supported himself, albeit comfortless, through teaching chess, dealing in used books and publishing his works.[i] In the beginning of 1791 Hirschel applied for a teaching position at the Wilhelmsschule, a new school in Breslau that had been founded by Enlightenment- and reform-oriented members of the Jewish community with the support of the Prussian authorities. In his self-consciously formulated request for the position, directed at the responsible minister in Silesia, Karl Georg Heinrich von Hoym, he refers to his versatile educational background, his “scientivistic” inclinations and his particular suitability for employment at the reform-pedagogic institution at hand, “whose teachers cannot, and must not, be orthodox” [„deren Lehrer nichts weniger als Orthodoxe sein können, sein müssen.”].[ii] However, the request was rejected,[iii] among other reasons out of consideration for the large number of tradition-bound Jews and in order not to increase the existing tensions in the Jewish community. It seems as if Hirschel’s independent drive and ‘insubordination’ were irreconcilable with his goal to become employed as an educator. In 1796, together with a Breslau businessman named Sessa, Hirschel founded a commercial expedition company. In the beginning of 1801 Hirschel became the sole proprietor of the company after a split with his business partner.[iv]

The events leading up to Hirschel’s later conversion to Christianity are historically significant. A number of conflicts had been brewing since the 1780s between the Maskilim’s pursuit of emancipation and representatives of the state’s politics of assimilation. In the context of a debate triggered by David Friedländer in 1798,[v] Hirschel requested in a submission from 1 July 1799 onto the Prussian authorities in Breslau to be able to publicly renounce Judaism without converting to Christianity.[vi] The reasons for his wanting to do so did not lie only in his dissenting worldview from the tradition-oriented majority of the Jewish community, but also in a continuing conflict with the community’s elders concerning tax payments. During this conflict Hirschel even called on Christian authorities in order to elude Jewish jurisdiction.[vii] On the one hand, his attempt to renounce Judaism without converting to Christianity seems to stem from his desire to lead a self-determined existence, both free from religious paternalism on part of religious authorities, and consistent with his own intellectual independence. He acts as an advocate for a universal religion of reason without assignment to any confession.[viii] On the other hand, he clearly wants to escape the constraining social confines suffered by the Jews at the time. Here, he invokes a consequent implementation of an enlightening postulate found in the legal framework of the Allgemeine Preußische Landrecht. The separation of church and state, he argues, guarantees his ability to freely determine his individual belief structure and also protects him, as a Jew, from interference in his rights of citizenship.[ix] In a society dominated by the principle of Christian state churches, however, such autonomous, individual positions were not accepted. In Hirschel’s case, the state authorities unequivocally pointed out that the Landrecht guaranteed only the freedom of religion; the Prussian state, though, was only able to grant equal rights to those who officially belong to one of the three dominant Christian religious communities.[x] As long as Hirschel remain unconverted, so the Prussian authority’s response, he would remain a member of the Jewish community and that he would continue to be burdened and restricted accordingly. Because of this, Hirschel converted in 1803[xi] (not 1804, as some sources claim)[xii] to Roman Catholicism, taking on the name Christian Moritz Herschel, even though he was in no degree less critical of its clericalist practices than of the supposed or actual excrescences of the Jewish community.[xiii] All traces of Hirschel are lost after his conversion.

Hirschel’s intellectual profile is not conceivable without the contradictory intellectual and cultural milieus that existed at the time in the Breslau Jewish community. Here, as in other cities from the mid-18th century onwards, an increasing differentiation in social status and worldview was taking place. These developments in Breslau led to a strong polarization of viewpoints, especially since the city was then both a leading center of the Haskalah and a major refuge of orthodoxy. Tensions escalated in the 1790s during a period of embittered battles among the traditional majority of the community, a small number of Jewish reformers and the Prussian administration concerning early burial as well as secular curricula, free-thinking teachers and liberal educational methods at Breslau’s Wilhelmsschule.[xiv]

Between the end of the 1780s and the mid-1790s, Hirschel worked closely with the Silesian medical doctor and publisher Johann Joseph Kausch (1751-1825). The central motive of his earlier works concerns a radical critique of the presumptuousness of institutionalized religions and their regimentation of individuals who call for tolerance and for the freedoms of thought, opinion and religion. His critique is carried by the principles of the Enlightenment and possesses a rhetorical sharpness akin to that of Voltaire.[xv] The vehemence with which he distances himself from his own tradition is, however, problematic. Oftentimes, his euphemistic viewpoint of the Christian environment is combined with a hypercritical portrayal of Judaism.[xvi] His criticism sometimes even takes on pasquillantic[xvii] and denunciatory overtones. Hirschel finds only coarse words for the representatives of the overtly religious Jews; these seem for him to incarnate “Jewish despotism” and “hierarchical power” as well as to embody fanaticism and an inquisitorial sense of persecution.[xviii] With a seemingly unrelenting pursuit, Hirschel argues against the Talmudic-rabbinic tradition and its scholars. According to Hirschel’s arguments, these scholars obscure the “divine gift of reason” by means of superstition and barbarism.[xix] Nonetheless, Hirschel’s use of anti-Judaist stereotypes, such as the “state-in-state” charge,[xx] was especially brisant for a time in which authoritarian intervention into the community’s autonomy was not seldom. Hirschel raised such allegations, also found in his Jüdische Intoleranz und Fanatismus in Breslau, when pushing his own material interests vis-à-vis the Jewish community as well.[xxi] In his later writings Hirschel moderated his pamphletistic tone, and philosophical and content laden arguments are increasingly found in his polemics. The contradictions found in his publicistic work for tolerance, freedom of religion and intellectual and judicial-political maturity remained, however, virulent – as long as Hirschel continues, in a time of great state pressure to assimilate, to understand emancipation as the freedom from “ceremony stuff” and “the fetters of superstition and the domination of prejudice”.[xxii]

Reason as the human being’s highest good[xxiii] appears to be Hirschel’s hypostatized principle under which he places all natural and societal phenomena, despite the principle’s abstract and apodictic elements.[xxiv] In Hirschel’s earlier works, such as Kampf der jüdischen Hierarchie mit der Vernunft from 1788, his adherence to this principle leads to a naive belief in reason and to a euphoric, but illusory sense of unstoppable progress through reason. Hirschel stylizes a postulated path of nations to be “gradual revolutions towards their refinement, perfection and modification”. This path represents for Hirschel an axiom of natural law,[xxv] from which only the Jews continue to stray.[xxvi] At the time, Hirschel was not aware of Mendelssohn’s and other enlightenment thinkers’ scepticism towards such one-dimensional concepts of progress and worldviews completely centered on reason. Unlike Mendelssohn, Hirschel also proclaims an irreconcilable contradiction between reason and Jewish religion;[xxvii] in particular, between the former and the Talmudic tradition.[xxviii] In this sense, Hirschel’s enthusiasm for reason and the concept of perfectibility keeps him from developing a more acute historical understanding of his own tradition and its historical legitimacy and accomplishments. This leads to his rigid demands for the Jews to assimilate themselves into the majority society. As he writes in his work Ueber die allzufrühen Ehen der jüdischen Nation from 1790,[xxix] the Jews should renounce “early marriage”. They should also abandon the practice of “early burial”.[xxx] More significantly, he calls for the abandonment of the Talmudic-rabbinic tradition and the ritual laws. Such demands, though, provided material for anti-Judaist clichés[xxxi] and for concepts of reform geared towards destroying the cultural identity of the Jews.[xxxii]

Even though Hirschel is seemingly aware of the miserable living conditions of the majority of Jews,[xxxiii] and despite his enthusiasm towards the ideas of Mendelssohn and Dohm, his unfettered belief in reason and perfectibility causes him to negate the determinism behind such concepts in regards to the Jewish question. In this sense, he reverses the relationship between cause and effect within this historical process. For him, it is not the insufficient political constitution of the Christian states that carries the fault for the misery of the Jews, for the “theft of all citizenship rights and freedoms” and for all of the suffered wrongs,[xxxiv] but rather the insistency of the Jews to retain their rites and traditional beliefs.[xxxv] Instead, Hirschel places his trust in a historical automatism, via the predominance of reason, to push through citizenship rights for the Jews.[xxxvi]

Hirschel’s early intellectual positions reflected the assimilationist cravings of a part of the Jewish elite who were experiencing the Enlightenment philosophy as a legitimate and extensive intellectual enrichment to such a degree that they forged brilliant, but also deceptive perspectives towards themselves and society. Later, the continued failure of the Enlightenment philosophy to have a broad effect on society and every-day life shook Hirschel’s conviction that access to the education and intellectual culture of the contemporary Christian environment would bring with it the social recognition and equality for which he so longed. The change in Hirschel’s opinions seems to coincide with the publishing of Carl Wilhelm Grattenauer’s abusive anti-Jewish tract, Ueber die physische und moralische Verfassung der heutigen Juden from 1791.[xxxvii] Grattenauer’s work, which revoked the previously dominant rational consensus on the amelioration of the Jews, causes Hirschel to recognize that his true opponents are actually the fanatic Jew-haters. This change of opinion can be seen in his biography of the Jewish scholar and poet, Ephraim Moses Kuh (written 1790/91, published 1792). Here, Hirschel criticizes the conversion obsession of Christian zealots and their practices against Jews[xxxviii] as sharply as he does the Jewish religious tradition, its ceremonial restraints[xxxix] and its “scholastic dogma, sophistic hypotheses, artificially-created subtleties and other sinnvoll nothings”,[xl] the latter of which determined the intolerance of the orthodox Jews in Breslau towards a “self-thinker” such as Ephraim Kuh.[xli] Despite Kuh’s identity crisis and the deep psychological difficulties which ultimately led to his death, caused by his wandering in the various worlds and worldviews, Hirschel characterized Kuh’s difficult path between Jewish tradition and contemporary philosophical thinking as an exemplary model for Enlightenment pedagogy and intellectual advancement.[xlii]

Around this time, Hirschel revises his position on an essential point concerning the majority of his belief group, abandoning his idealist claims that the Jews, due to their antiquated religious customs, are responsible for their own misery. Instead, he calls for amelioration prior to any state demands for change on part of the Jews.[xliii] He supports this with an argument based on the history of religion, namely that no proof can be found in the original teachings of Christ of the Servitas Iudaeorum because to their beliefs.[xliv] He argues in a similar manner in his Apologie der Menschenrechte from 1793. Faced with Christian intolerance, Hirschel expresses concerns on whether he had been previously too strict with his judgments of the Jewish orthodoxy.[xlv] In the wake of Grattenauer’s furious invectives, Hirschel professes solidarity with the Jewish religion and the disparaged Jews, despite his own religious scepticism and intellectual distance to his faith.[xlvi] He demands human rights for the Jews and independent of their belief structure and constitution. He argues that these are their natural right,[xlvii] thus renewing the deterministic reasoning behind this postulate.[xlviii] With this argument, however, Hirschel overcomes the anthropological, historical-philosophical approach which dominated the then contemporary reform concepts in Germany; such concepts aimed to begin the betterment of society with the elevation of individual moral culture.[xlix] Instead, he expounds on the philosophical principle of equality based on natural law, something for which he had argued in 1790 during a controversy with the Silesian Landstände in support of the professional interests of the Jewish suppliers for the Prussian army, seeing this as a basic political interest.[l]

With his Apologie der Menschenrechte, Hirschel returns to the theoretical discussion a sense of the constitutive emancipatory approaches and the egalitarian ideas that had been elaborated upon by Mendelssohn and Dohm in the first phase of the debate on the amelioration of the Jews in the beginning of the 1780s. These same approaches had also entered into the legislative practice of revolutionary France, which subsequently stimulated the general discussion on human rights westwards of the Rhine River. In tune with these discussions, Hirschel’s Apologie der Menschenrechte can be seen as the highpoint in his publicistic résumé.

Hirschel’s writings do not only portray the work of a critic of religion and society and a significant representative of the Haskalah. They also document the wide spectrum of his intellectual pursuits ranging from theoretical works on chess[li] (for Hirschel a game determined by rational rules and one’s own abilities to play the game, a game that stood for a symbol of reason and tolerance during the 18th century), over philosophical and economic topics to geographic and cartographic publications.[lii]

[i] In his work Jüdische Intoleranz und Fanatismus in Breslau Hirschel cites a petition onto the Prussian government from 16 August 1787 claiming an unjust tax burden on part of the Jewish elders. Here, he mentions his “main sources of aliment”, namely “giving information on chess” and the “work of my pen”. He also describes his living conditions to be poor. (in: Wahrheit und Freimüthigkeit in schwesterlicher Umarmung, Erstes Bändchen, ed. by Johann Joseph Kausch, Nürnberg 1789, p. 73 and p. 63). On Hirschel’s living conditions until 1801, see: Johann Gottlieb Schummels Breslauer Almanach für den Anfang des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Erster Theil, Breslau 1801, p. 246-251. See also: Anne-Margarete Brenker, Aufklärung als Sachzwang. Realpolitik in Breslau im ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert (Hamburger Veröffentlichungen zur Geschichte Mittel- und Osteuropas. Eine Reihe des Historischen Seminars der Universität Hamburg, ed. by Arno Herzig and Frank Golczewski, vol. 8), Hamburg and Munich 2000, p. 253-254. Fn. 109, p. 304.

[ii] Cit.: Max Freudenthal, Die ersten Emancipationsbestrebungen der Juden in Breslau. Nach archivalischen und anderen Quellen dargestellt, in: Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, vol. 1/3, Breslau 1893, p. 335-336. Fn. 2.

[iii] Ibid., p. 336.

[iv] See: Schummel (cf. Fn. 1), p. 248; see also: Anne-M. Brenker (cf. Fn. 1), p. 304.

[v] See: David Friedländer, Sendschreiben an Seine Hochwürden, Hrn. Oberkonsistorialrath und Probst Teller von einigen Hausvätern jüdischer Religion, Berlin 1799. The controversy is documented in: Neue allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, vol. 57, No. 2/5, Berlin and Stettin 1891, p. 270-299.

[vi] See: Freudenthal (cf. Fn. 2), p. 569-570; See also: Schummel (cf. Fn. 1), p. 249-250.

[vii] See: Hirschel (cf. Fn. 1), p. 71-76.

[viii] See: Freudenthal (cf. Fn. 2), p. 569.

[ix] Ibid., p. 570 und Schummel (cf. Fn. 1), p. 249.

[x] Ibid., p. 250.

[xi] See: Des Hirschel Uebertritt zur christlichen Religion, in: Schlesische Provinzialblätter, 38 vol. (1803), p. 492. See also: Bibliographien zur deutsch-jüdischen Geschichte, Vol. 6 (Bibliographie zur Geschichte der Juden in Schlesien), Margret Heitmann and. Andreas Reinke, München/New Providence/London/Paris 1995, p. 129.

[xii]See: Salomon Wininger, Große Jüdische National-Biographie mit mehr als 8000 Lebensbeschreibungen namhafter jüdischer Männer und Frauen aller Zeiten und Länder, Vol. 3, Reprint Nendeln/Liechtenstein 1979, p. 128. See also: Encyclopaedia Judaica. Das Judentum in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Vol 8 (Hesse-Jerusalem), Berlin 1931, p. 99.

[xiii] See: Moses Hirschel, Vier Briefe über Schlesien, in: Kausch's erste Fortsetzung seiner Nachrichten über Schlesien, Böhmen und das vormalige Polen, Breslau 1796, p. 199-236. – Especially the third letter contains critical passages on the Roman Catholic clergy in Silesia. (Ibid., p. 222, 225, 249). See also: the positive review of this text from theologian and classical philologist Johannes Aloysius Martyni-Laguna (Carl Friedrich Martini) in: Neue allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, vol. 51, Nr. 1, Kiel 1799, p. 173-176.

[xiv] See: Freudenthal (cf. Fn. 2), s. 239-246, 331-341, 409-421, 428f., 467-483, 522-536, 570-579. See also: Andreas Reinke, Zwischen Tradition, Aufklärung und Assimilation. Die Königliche Wilhelmsschule in Breslau 1791-1848, in: Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 43/3 (1991), p. 193-214; Anne-M. Brenker (cf. Fn. 1), p. 257-259.

[xv] Voltaire was used heavily as a philosophical warrantor; see: Jüdische Intoleranz und Fanatismus in Breslau (cf. Fn. 1), p. 58, 61-62., 85; see also: Moses Hirschel, Kampf der jüdischen Hierarchie mit der Vernunft, Breslau 1788, p. 17, 99. The title page displays as a motto a quotation from one of Voltaire’s works.

[xvi] See: Jüdische Intoleranz (cf. Fn. 1), p. 51.

[xvii] Freudenthal (cf. Fn. 2) characterizes Hirschel as a man who was most hated by friends of tradition, especially due to his “excessive ranting, especially against the Talmudists” (see: p. 96-97. Fn. 3 and p. 96).

[xviii] See: Jüdische Intoleranz (cf. Fn. 1); p. 54-56 and 59-60; here, Unterrabbiner Jehuda Loebusch ben Mordechai’s comments of Hirschel as being a prototype of the “dumb, ignorant” and greedy “fat cat” are discussed. Mordechai is best-known for declaring an anathema against Mendelssohn for his German translation of the Pentateuch.

[xix] Jüdische Intoleranz, p. 75 passim. See also: Kampf der jüdischen Hierarchie mit der Vernunft, Breslau 1788, p. 90-91. passim. Both texts are full of invectiveness against Rabbis.

[xx] See: Ibid., p. 50, 73. See also: Kampf der jüdischen Hierarchie mit der Vernunft, p. 32-33.

[xxi] See: Jüdische Intoleranz, p. 61-85.

[xxii] Ibid., p. 62.

[xxiii] See Hirschel’s Apologie der Vernunft als Motiv und Maßstab aller unserer Handlungen mit Berufung auf Kant, in: Patriotische Bemerkungen über die kleine Schrift: Patriotischer Zuruf an die Herren Stände Breslauischen Creises. De dato den 27ten Januar 1789, Breslau 1790, p. 13-15. See also: Kampf der jüdischen Hierarchie mit der Vernunft, p. 3.

[xxiv] See: Ibid., p. 6.

[xxv] Ibid., p. 21, 19-21.

[xxvi] Ibid., p. 21, 29.

[xxvii] Ibid., p. 25.

[xxviii] Ibid., p. 90-92.

[xxix] See: Moses Hirschel, Ueber die allzufrühen Ehen der jüdischen Nation; physisch, politisch und pädagogisch betrachtet, in: Freymüthige Unterhaltungen über die neuesten Vorfälle unsers Zeitalters, die Sitten und Handlungsarten der Menschen; zusammengetragen von einigen teutschen und polnischen Patrioten, vol. 1, Leipzig 1790, p. 63-65, 69-73.

[xxx] Jüdische Intoleranz (cf. Fn. 1), p. 53.

[xxxi] Grattenauer argued against both “early marriage” and the ritual laws. (Cf: Carl Wilhelm Grattenauer, Ueber die physische und moralische Verfassung der heutigen Juden. Stimme eines Kosmopoliten, Germanien 1791, p. 122, p. 125-127 against early marriage; p. 22, 31, 40-46, 77, 92-93., 98, 112-113 and 116-117 against the ritual laws); as did the similarly enraged Friedrich Traugott Hartmann, Untersuchung ob die bürgerliche Freiheit den Juden zu gestatten sei, Berlin 1783, p. 29, 55, 116, 131, 133, 148, 171, 196-197.

[xxxii] Both the reform concept of 1787/92 and those prior to the edict of 11 March 1812 were determined by a pedagogic-paternalistic concept of “qualification” on part of the Prussian administration. This concept was based on the granting of citizenship rights upon the condition of complete assimilation (see: Ismar Freund, Die Emanzipation der Juden in Preußen unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Gesetzes vom 11. März 1812, vol. 2, Berlin 1912, p. 77-78., 89, 123-127, 247, 253, 349).

[xxxiii] See: Kampf der jüdischen Hierarchie mit der Vernunft, p. 9-11, 13.

[xxxiv] Ibid., p. 13.

[xxxv] Ibid., p. 8, 10-11, 13, 15, 32-33.

[xxxvi] Ibid., p. 8.

[xxxvii] Hirschel correctly characterizes Grattenauer’s tract as a Schmähschrift, “written with too much addiction to gall”, geared towards “human deception” and formulated with the “dark thoughts of the rabble that also exists among Christians” (Apologie der Menschenrechte. Oder philosophisch kritische Beleuchtung der Schrift: Ueber die physische und moralische Verfassung der heutigen Juden, Zürich 1793, Vorrede, p. XVIIf.).

[xxxviii] Hirschel, Biographie des jüdischen Gelehrten und Dichters, Ephraim Moses Kuh, in: Ephraim Moses Kuh, Hinterlassene Gedichte, ed. Carl Wilhelm Ramler, Erstes Bändchen, Zürich 1792, p. 100-110.

[xxxix] Ibid., p. 146-151.

[xl] Ibid., p. 43; see also: p. 46f.

[xli] Ibid., p. 94-99.

[xlii] See: Gunnar Och, Jüdische Leser und jüdisches Lesepublikum im 18. Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur Akkulturationsgeschichte des deutschen Judentums, in: Menora. Jahrbuch für deutsch-jüdische Geschichte. Julius H. Schoeps et al (eds.)., vol. 2, München/Zürich 1991, p. 306-309.

[xliii] See: Biographie (cf. Fn. 38), p. 31-32. Fn.

[xliv] See: Ibid., p. 30-31. Fn.

[xlv] See:. Apologie (cf. Fn. 37), Vorrede, p. XXVI.

[xlvi] Ibid., p. XXXf.

[xlvii] Ibid., p. XI.

[xlviii] Ibid., p. XXXIIf., p. 5.

[xlix] For a classical, early romantic work on aesthetics and the philosophy of history, see Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen, Berlin s. a., p. 70.

[l] See: Hirschel, Patriotische Bemerkungen (cf. Fn. 23), p. 36.

[li] Moses Hirschel, Das Schach des Herrn Giochimo Greco Calabrois und die Schachspiel Geheimniße des Arabers Philipp Stamma übersezt, verbeßert und nach einer ganz neuen Methode zur Erleichterung der Spielenden umgearbeitet, 3 Theile, Breslau 1784 (Reprint Zürich: Olms 1979 and 1987); the second edition, printed in Leipzig in 1785 was reviewed in: Weihnachts- und Neujahrsgeschenke, vorzüglich für die Jugend, in: Neue allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, vol. 42/1, Kiel 1799 (Intelligenzblatt der Neuen adB No. 3/1799, p. 30); see also: Ueber das Schachspiel, dessen Nutzen, Gebrauch und Mißbrauch, psychologisch, moralisch und scientisisch erörtert, Breslau 1791.

[lii] His Verzeichnis der schlesischen Ortschaften Schlesien in seinem ganzen Umfange ... from the 1780s or 1790s was republished in 1818 and 1823.