Eros and Enlightenment: Love Against Marriage in the East European Jewish Enlightenment

Summary

In the winter of 1810, only a few months after his fourteenth birthday, Mordecai Aaron Guenzburg departed from his parents’ house in the Lithuanian town of Salant and began his wedding journey to the house of his new in-laws in Shavel. Engaged two years earlier, at the age of twelve, Guenzburg was following in the footsteps of generations of young Jewish boys from Eastern Europe before him: engaged and married in their early teens, they left their parents’ houses to spend their years of adolescence under the roofs of their in-laws. But unlike his silent forebears, Guenzburg rebelled publicly against his early marriage, penning a devastating condemnation of Jewish marital practices in the form of an autobiographical confession. With Guenzburg, the nascent Eastern European Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah turned its sights on the Jewish family as part and parcel of its attack on the medieval practices of the Jews.

In the period from the early part of the nineteenth century to about 1870, the Haskalah was a tiny movement, persecuted by the Jewish communal authorities. Yet it was during these years, perhaps even as a result of persecution, that the maskilim or disciples of the Haskalah evolved the fundamental arguments of their movement. The ideology of the Eastern European Haskalah has been studied exhaustively by historians. A new educational system emphasizing European languages and sciences, changes in Jewish dress, moderate religious reform and a wholesale critique of the unproductive Jewish economy were all the stock-in-trade of the maskilim. But this ideology did not emerge from a vacuum; it stemmed from the personal lives and experiences of the maskilim, especially from the struggles for identity that marked their adolescent years. For it was typically during those years that they became converts to the cause. While the maskilim shamelessly borrowed their ideas often word for word from the European Enlightenment, they integrated them into a peculiarly Jewish framework, that is, into their own reality. My remarks here will therefore focus on the conjunction between ideology and identity in the early Haskalah, for what is most interesting in the thought of this movement is not so much the ideas themselves but how they resonated against the problems of Jewish adolescence: early marriage and the teen years spent in the house of one's in-laws.