Haskalah

The Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, took shape in Berlin around 1770 in the circle of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Maskilim argued that Jews could join European culture, learning German, science and philosophy, while remaining loyal Jews. Mendelssohn's Biur, a German translation of the Torah in Hebrew letters with a Hebrew commentary, appeared in 1780–1783. The first modern Hebrew journal, Ha-Me'assef, began in Königsberg in 1783, and Naphtali Herz Wessely's Divrei Shalom VeEmet (1782) called for secular subjects in Jewish schools.

In the 1800s the movement spread to Galicia and the Russian Empire. There maskilim such as Judah Leib Gordon, who urged Jews to "be a man in the street and a Jew at home", created modern Hebrew prose and poetry. The Haskalah prepared the ground for very different paths: Reform Judaism (the Hamburg Temple of 1818), the Neo-Orthodoxy of Samson Raphael Hirsch, Jewish secular culture, and the Hebrew revival that later fed Zionism.