Eros and the Jews by David Biale

Author:David Biale [Biale, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The need for a new knowledge of the self prompted the profusion of autobiographies that constituted one of the main literary genres of the Haskalah. Virtually every maskil felt compelled to record his personal Bildungsroman, a reconstruction of his own life, typically recounting the hero's progress from a traditional childhood to the awakening of enlightenment. The first of these was the famous autobiography of Solomon Maimon, published in Germany in 1792–93 and modeled explicitly on the Confessions of Rousseau. Several decades later, similar memoirs began to appear in Eastern Europe, typically in Hebrew, the preferred language of the Eastern European Haskalah, but occasionally in Yiddish. These memoirs follow certain conventions, in part influenced by European literary traditions, and they must be treated more as works of literature than as objective accounts.9 The maskilim also composed their memoirs long after the events described and under the influence of an already crystallized ideology, thus fulfilling Erik Erikson's dictum that autobiography is an attempt at "recreating oneself in the image of one's own method in order to make that image convincing."10

In their autobiographies, the maskilim typically present childhood as a period of innocence and of unproblematic relationship to one's biological parents. Some speak of it metaphorically as being like the Garden of Eden or as the "springtime of life." In most of the memoirs, the writers portray their parents in thoroughly positive and unambivalent terms. They describe their fathers as maskilim, although this is really a play on the traditional meaning of the word, namely, "learned in Torah," since most of the fathers were not maskilim in the sons' sense of the word. This rosy picture of the family was contrasted with the family of the in-laws, since there is a persistent "splitting" in these works between the "good parents" and the cruel outsiders.11

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