המצאת 'העת החדשה' — פרק ברטוריקה ובתודעה העצמית של ההשכלה

The modern age was one of the major and influential inventions made intentionally and consciously by a small group of new Jewish intellectuals beginning in the late 18th century known as the Maskilim. From the moment that this new 'continent' in Jewish history was discovered it became a regular feature of the modern Jew and of all modern ideologies, and it also became a principal issue of the Jewish Kulturkampf, resulting from the potential secularizing contained in the concept of the modern age. The modern age was actually invented in Europe in the 15th-16th centuries by new intellectual elites who were aware of the fracture between the present and the past and who were eager to reach new cultural horizons which were being discovered by human beings. The intellectuals of the European 18th-century Enlightenment intensified the significance of the new periodization of history even more. It was now evaluated, praised, or criticized from the ideological perspective of a post-medieval time and the belief in a progressive age. The ideal cultural, political, and social programs of the Enlightenment, and the vision of an improved, reformed, and better future, created the notion of a radical difference between present and future. Looking at the mentality, slogans, rhetoric, and attitudes of mind which were characteristic of the Jewish Enlightenment, namely the Haskala, leads us to the conclusion that they were the first Jewish inventors of the modern age, and the first who brought this message to their brethren. The Maskilim came forward, dared to present themselves on the newly created public stage, and announced the approach of the modern age. The belief in the modern age was the raison d'etre of the Maskilim. When we read the Haskala writings carefully, we are struck by their extraordinary rhetoric. We cannot avoid the powerful effect of a rhetoric full of various images that demonstrate the sense of a historical change of mind. The modern age became both a challenge and a promise for secular redemption. Anything that did not fit in with the ethos of the era, such as the Hassidic movement, was doomed to fail as an anachronism and reaction in history, and would sooner or later disappear. From the moment the modern age was invented by the Maskilim it became a central theme in modern thought, religious trends, ideologies, and social and political movements. But starting from the 1870s we witness the appearance of pessimistic and disappointed Maskilim who doubted the concept of the modern age. The pogroms in Odessa in 1871 and the outburst of antisemitism in the 1860s in Rumania and in the 1870s in Germany shook the Maskilic belief in the positive, historical turning point, and with the pogroms of the 1880s this counter-consciousness reached a new level. The post-Maskilic crisis only changed the ideological content of the concept of the modern age, without rejecting it. The modern age of the Haskala was replaced by the modern age of Jewish nationalism and Zionism. But from the moment of its creation by the Maskilim, who used the concept or belief in the modern age to legitimize and promote their program and ideology, the modern age became a general fact and produced an irreversible historical consciousness among the Jews. Terms and concepts such as 'the modern age' not only express but create historical change. When the concept was internalized, together with the sense of unavoidable modernity, it became a central theme in the Jewish modern discourse.