The maskil as lamdan: The influence of Jewish education on haskalah writing techniques

Analyses of Haskalah writing techniques conventionally emphasises the dominant European influences in Haskalah literature. In this chapter, the author examines the role of traditional Jewish relationships to the text as influences on two particular characteristics of Haskalah writing. The reconstruction of ‘interpretive strategies’ provides a key to an appreciation of the manner by which a defined interpretive community both reads texts and influences their formulation. In examining the Haskalah interpretive community approached texts, the author has adopted the fundamental attitudes towards books and language, together with modes of reading and basic cultural conceptions. The modes of textual absorption characteristic of the traditional heder and yeshivah are important for an appreciation of both Haskalah writing and reading. Haskalah literature must be read in the light of its own assumptions, just as it was originally read and understood by the interpretive community from which it emerged.