Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Who Was Modern Earliest, Ashkenazim or Sephardim?

Behind the ever-abiding divisions between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews is the widely-held belief that Ashkenazim, as leaders of the Haskalah, or Enlightenment movement of the 18th and 19th centuries, were pioneers of modernity. Now David Ruderman, a Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Pennsylvania, hurls a well-researched grenade into such presuppositions.

Ruderman, author of 2007’s highly readable and informed “Connecting the Covenants: Judaism and the Search for Christian Identity in Eighteenth-Century England” (University of Pennsylvania Press) and 2001’s “Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry’s Construction of Modern Jewish Thought” (Princeton University Press), has a new book out from the latter publisher, “Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History.”

Following up on an intuition expressed in a footnote by the historian Salo Baron, Ruderman notes that such famed 18th century Enlightenment figures as Moses Mendelssohn and Solomon Maimon pale in originality and force beside Sephardic writers of 150 years earlier, like Azariah dei Rossi, Joseph Delmedigo and Simone Luzzatto. Comparing the cultural climate of 17th century Amsterdam to Italy, Ruderman concludes: “It is clear that the Italian is less conservative, more innovative, and more daring in its formulation of Jewish thought and in its dialogue with the non-Jewish world.”

Relocating the start of “early modernity” for Jews before the “close of the fifteenth century,” Ruderman observes that the eminent 17th century scholar Leon Modena appears to have been a “dissimulator, simultaneously defending the Talmud and the rabbis while criticizing and holding them accountable for the miseries they had allegedly inflicted on the Jewish community.”

Even Simone Luzzatto will disappoint readers expecting orthodoxy or single-minded belief, since his works reflect a “skeptical bent,” says Ruderman, citing his 1651 “Socrates, or Concerning Human Knowledge.” Returning to the area which Ruderman first mined in 1992’s excellent “Preachers of the Italian Ghetto” (University of California Press), he asks pointedly: “What could have motivated this allegedly prominent spokesman of Judaism to compose a text in which his faith appears to be totally absent?”

This apparent lack of coherence may baffle some today, although Ruderman cites Leo Strauss’s lucid “Persecution and the Art of Writing” (University of Chicago Press) to the effect that persecuted so-called “dissimulators” like Luzzatto and others might be merely “speaking publicly in one voice while masking their true private opinions.” Ruderman has given readers fascinated by Jewish history much material upon which to ponder.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.