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Article: Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment)
- Article from:
- Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World
- Author:
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HASKALAH (JEWISH ENLIGHTENMENT)
HASKALAH (JEWISH ENLIGHTENMENT).
"Haskalah" is the Hebrew term for the Enlightenment movement and ideology that began in European Jewish society in the 1770s and continued until the 1880s. A proponent of the Haskalah was known as a
maskil
('an enlightened Jew'; pl.
maskilim
). The Haskalah shared many aspects of the European Enlightenments, but as a national variant of the general movement it also addressed specific Jewish concerns of the period. The Haskalah was a feature of Ashkenazic Jewish society, the branch of world Jewry with origins in medieval French and German lands whose descendents inhabited German lands, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, ...