ABSTRACT
The European Renaissance had been predicated on a rejection of the recent European barbarism. This negative assessment of what came to be known later as the Middle Ages motivated Renaissance and, later, Enlightenment thinkers to attempt to invent a heroic, glorious past by appropriating Greek civilization and incorporating it into the recently invented Europe.10 This process was parallel to Protestantism’s appropriation of the Hebrew Bible in ways that the Catholic Church had previously shunned. European colonialism, having learned the lessons of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, was going to impart to all the colonized a similar cultural self-hatred, calling for the adoption of enlightened European Christian culture as model. While colonialism began to rule over peoples and cultures it had othered a priori, Jews living in Europe had experienced this othering for a much longer time, albeit intermittently. The Jewish Haskala emerged within this European history of self-rejection and reinvention as an assimilationist project seeking to transform Jewish culture from something identified by post-Enlightened Europe as non-European, if not un-European, into something more in line with the newly invented image of Europe and its Enlightenment. Indeed, Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem was seen by many as an attempt to transform Judaism into a form of Enlightened Christianity, leading many of his critics to call upon him to take the extra step and convert. He did not, but his children did.11 Reform Judaism, a German innovation, would pick up the mantle of Christianizing Judaism in the middle of the nineteenth century.12
