Moses Hirschel and Enlightenment Breslau A City and Its Jews in The Late Eighteenth Century David Heywood Jones Full Chapter

Moses Hirschel and Enlightenment
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Eighteenth Century David Heywood
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Moses Hirschel
and Enlightenment
Breslau
A City and its Jews in
the Late Eighteenth century
David Heywood Jones
Moses Hirschel and Enlightenment Breslau
David Heywood Jones
Moses Hirschel
and Enlightenment
Breslau
A City and its Jews in the Late Eighteenth Century
David Heywood Jones
Independent Scholar
Berlin, Germany
ISBN 978-3-030-46234-5 ISBN 978-3-030-46235-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46235-2
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Acknowledgements
This book simply would not have existed if it were not for a chance meet-
ing many years ago with the philosopher, teacher and Haskalah veteran
Christoph Schulte. Professor Schulte may have furnished the intellectual
inspiration for my dissertation, but it was a generous three-year fellowship
at the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk (ELES), foundation which pro-
vided me with the financial means to write about Moses Hirschel and
Breslau. At ELES, Prof. Eva Lezzi, Prof. Walter Homolka and Prof. Anja
Paschedag lent vital inspiration, input and support when needed. Special
thanks to my second reader Prof. Daniel Krochmalnik, his work on Early
Burial was an important source for my research. I would also like to express
my gratitude to my colleagues and Prof. Sina Rauschenbach at our won-
derful weekly colloquia at the University of Potsdam over the years. In
particular, Julian Holter and Dr Michal Szulc presented important reality
checks when the ghosts of Chanukah past threatened to swallow my
research whole.
My research trips to Wrocław would have been short and brutal were it
not for the support from a number of institutions and academics. Andreas
Reinke’s painstaking archival work from the 1990s was a light and guide
for my work. The dazzling team under Marcin Wodziński at University of
Wrocław offered technical support whenever they could. They generously
let me stay at their visiting scholars’ rooms in the “Stefczyka” every time I
was in the city. The library staff at the University Library in Breslau deserve
special mention for their patience and friendly assistance. Finally, Breslau
v
vi Acknowledgements
would not have been the same if it were not for meetings with Professor
Jerzy Kos—Breslau’s resident treasure trove of information on the city’s
fascinating history and archives.
Finally, I wish to thank Matilda, Emil and Púca for being there. Always.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Jewish Historiography 5
Why Is Typical European Jewish Historiography Problematic? 5
Jews and Their Identities 22
Moses Hirschel: Agency, Identity and Influence 28
3 Socio-Ethnic History of Breslau 35

History of Breslau, 1740–1818 35
Breslau’s History and the Historiographical Problem 45
4 Moses Hirschel: A Critical Biography 49

Hirschel’s Early Life 50
Popular Enlightenment 55
Hirschel’s Popular Enlightenment Works 57
Hirschel’s Personal and Professional Life 67
5 Hirschel and the Orthodoxy 75

Hirschel and the Class Question 78
The Rabbinical Elite and Jewish Emancipation 87
vii
viii CONTENTS
6 Jewish Rights, Human Rights and Anti-Semitism121

Anti-Semitism in Prussia 121
Hirschel’s Response to Contemporary Anti-Semitism 146
7 Haskalah and Enlightenment in Silesia153

Enlightenment in Central Europe 153
What Is Haskalah and Who Were Maskilim? 168
Enlightenment in Breslau 181
8 Final Remarks219
Bibliography223
Index259
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Moses Hirschel is a name known to only a handful of Haskalah researchers

and scholars of European Jewish history. Even then, he is usually on the
periphery of their discussions, themselves on the periphery of European
Enlightenment research. One can safely say, Moses Hirschel is generally
treated as a footnote. Not only that, when his name does appear, his few
works and actions are usually given a negative connotation. Moreover, the
city and region where he lived and worked, Breslau in Silesia, fell down the
rabbit hole of history when it was rechristened Wrocław and redefined as
an intrinsic part of the Polish Voivodeship of Wrocław in 1945.
This book is not an attempt to push a footnote into the limelight of
European Haskalah research. Hirschel’s reception history and that of
many of the maskilim and enlightened Jews and non-Jews in Breslau was
short lived. Hirschel left no literary estate and there are scant biographical
evidences left to find. But an intellectual biography of a person or a time
or even a city should not merely contain a collection of data or a repetition
of sources. This work is an intellectual biography of a person, a city and an
epoch. The three layers are mutually inclusive and also mutually significant
in that they bring to light a city which provides a superior example of the
Enlightenment in Central Europe at a time of huge societal, cultural, and
religious change. To agree with Moshe Zimmermann “Biography as such
provides insights about a mechanism that constitutes – together with simi-
lar mechanisms (i.e. people) – the society that produces and tolerates spe-
cific characteristics. A single life…provides as much relevant information
© The Author(s) 2021 1

D. Heywood Jones, Moses Hirschel and Enlightenment Breslau,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46235-2_1
2 D. HEYWOOD JONES
about a society as the single atom or molecule provides about a natural

element.”1
The single life I will be discussing is at once a radical enlightener, Jew,
Christian, publicist, maskil, Silesian, a Prussian and, lest we forget,
European. Moses Hirschel lived in a city and province boasting substantial
Catholic and Jewish populations compared to the rest of Prussia. During
Hirschel’s lifetime, Breslau went from being a fiercely independent
Lutheran exclave within the Catholic Austro-Hungarian Empire to an
integral part of a largely centralised Germano-nationalist Prussian state.
The years in which he actively published were also the years when Jews
across Prussia were fighting for civic equality and the Ashkenazi religious
elite in the region were fighting tooth and nail to maintain their draconian
hold over the lives of their congregants.
Jewish history in Central Europe is often treated by historians as a her-
metically sealed sphere of activity. And this despite the large pool of pri-
mary texts from the period which show the profound interconnectedness
between Jewish enlighteners, their environs and fellow intellectuals. An
honest portrait of Jews in Central Europe around the time of the emanci-
pation debates should also include discussion of the concurrent and mutu-
ally influential social, cultural and religious processes and changes
happening in the non-Jewish environment.
By choosing to integrate elements of Jewish history into German his-
tory, one automatically challenges the widespread notion that German his-
tory is a history of a homogenous ethnic and religious group. This is
nether true of the Germans (e.g. Prussians, Breslavians, nobility, peasants,
Mennonites, Jews and Master Craftsmen) nor of the Jews (e.g. Ashkenazi,
Sephardim, poor and rich). As Till van Rahden explains in his biography
of Jewish life in Breslau in the nineteenth century, “a German-Jewish his-
tory which looks into plurality and difference in German society, presup-
poses a new understanding about integration, ethnicity and assimilation.”2
Drawing on the aforementioned statements, this book will move away
from fixed or inherited notions of exclusively bipolar cultural and religious
oppositions and will instead compose a historical, political and cultural
collage rather than painting a sweeping narrative. Writing back in 1992,
1
Moshe Zimmermann, “Biography as a Historical Monograph,” in Sozialgeschichte der
Juden in Deutschland, ed. Shulamit Volkov (Gerlingen: Bleicher, 1991), 452.
2
Till van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
2000), 17.
1 INTRODUCTION 3
Jonathan Frankel mused, perhaps prematurely, that Jewish historiography

had moved from being perceived not in terms of “bipolarity but of multi-
plicity. Instead of the one basic conflict between centrifugality and centrip-
etality, now a great variety of autonomous processes, independent variables,
are traced as they interact in constantly new permutations.”3
3
Jonathan Frankel, “Assimilation and the Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in
Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Jonathan Frankel
and Steven J. Zipperstein (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), 16.
CHAPTER 2
Jewish Historiography
Why Is Typical European Jewish

Historiography Problematic?
If we can truly be said to be living in a post-modern age, then surely one
can write a historical thesis without an exhaustive explanation of one’s
motives or the manner in which certain presumptions informed or even
shaped the subject at hand. The twentieth century’s legacy in the human
sciences has left many of us with a justified scepticism of a dogmatic faith
in historical narratives. Indeed, there is now an almost pathological reluc-
tance to accept or deploy grand narratives without adding caveats and
warnings for the presumed (and much-feared) naive reader. In 1979,
Jean-François Lyotard famously announced that the very quintessence
and definition of “postmodernity” was “incredulity toward
metanarratives.”1 The fall of the shortly lived fact-value dichotomy in phi-
losophy and post-structuralist revolutions in the approach to all texts are
now already half a century old. The academy is the current chief purveyor
of relativist and perspectivist world views. And yet, when one approaches
Jewish Studies, one is more often than not confronted with an unreflected
and uncritical approach to the grand nationalist narratives smelted in the
dogmatic historicist furnaces of the nineteenth century.2
1
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester:
Manchester Univ. Press, 1984), xxiv.
2
Moshe Rosman, How Jewish is Jewish History? (Oxford: Littman Library, 2009), 47ff.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46235-2_2
6 D. HEYWOOD JONES
The stakes in Jewish Studies are of course much higher than for other
disciplines. The State of Israel, the Jewish nation-state, is a sanctuary and
home for over 50% of the world’s Jewish population. Israel’s very raison
d’être and ontology is built upon Zionist narratives which presuppose
both some form of transhistorical Jewish essence and an inherent, con-
genital, even divine right, to settle and rule over Ha’Arez. In Israel,
debates about Jewish history are not limited to the hallowed halls of aca-
demic institutions. After the Oslo Accords were signed during the 1990s,
there were successful public campaigns against textbooks in Israel which
questioned assumptions of a clear separation between Jews and non-Jews
in the diaspora.3
In contrast to general assumptions about cultural or national exclusiv-
ity, this book will explain the history of Jews as a now indivisible history of
complex reciprocal influence or “social and intellectual exchange”4 with
gentile nations and cultural spheres. I am proposing a processual theory of
historical development which, in this sense, should be viewed as a cultural
theory as opposed to a nationalist-essentialist approach. According to this
view, Judaism and Jewish cultural norms and identity have been subject to
constant redefinition. This approach introduces what Gotzmann claims is
“a concept of culture…fundamentally opposed to Jewish history as an
identity discourse designed to define stable normative patterns and a
secure vision of what to understand as ‘Jewish’ in the future when ‘looking
at the past.’”5
Moreover, 1000 years of documented persecution, defamation and
murder in Europe remains a catalyst for apologetic, didactic and even tri-
umphalist Jewish nationalisms. As with all other nationalist discourses, his-
torical narratives are the basic condition for nationalist self-understanding.
In short, all nations have narratives. As a traditionally supra-territorial,
polyglot, culturally and socially heterogeneous people, the grand narra-
tives of Jewish peoples in Europe were consciously deployed as a means of
creating unity within the atomised trans-European communities com-
monly identified as Jewish. In other words, for Jews, grand narratives were
3
Michael Miller and Scott Ury, “Cosmopolitanism: The End of Jewishness?” European
Review of History 17 (2010): 338.
4
Andreas Gotzmann, “Historiography as Cultural Identity” in Modern Judaism and
Historical Consciousness, ed. Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese (Leiden: Brill,
2007), 519.
5
Gotzmann, “Historiography as Cultural Identity,” 521.
2 JEWISH HISTORIOGRAPHY 7
and are a means of securing existential survival and are not simply a projec-
tion of a unifying political or cultural agenda.
And so it should come as little surprise that the uncritical histories pro-
mulgated by many Jewish Studies historians survived the critical upheavals
within nationalist discourses forced by the advent post-colonial theory. To
reveal the influence Eurocentric and nationalist grand narratives had on
the colonisation and subjugation of “subalterns,” post-colonial theorists
attacked historicist approaches to history. They exposed the positivist
roots of historical meta-narratives. In his work on the correlation between
historicism in the nineteenth century and Eurocentric justifications for
colonisation, Chakrabarty defines historicism as “the idea that to under-
stand anything it has to be seen both as a unity and in its historical
development.”6 That is to say, historicist approaches to history write his-
tory in terms of cohesive narratives which include an ulterior developmen-
tal trajectory (not necessarily teleological). So each narrative (a) has “some
kind of unity” and (b) is something “which develops over time.”7 The
problem with such narratives, as post-colonial and cultural theorists draw
attention to, is the circularity of the central assumption. Namely, that his-
torical narratives have an objective internal unity and that this unity is part
of a coherent supra-historical development. Just consider the internal
structure and anachronistic teleology many Zionist historians draw upon.
In both cases, however, this unity and development are essentially uncriti-
cal impositions of the historian. They ignore the uniqueness and immedi-
ate contexts of the people and places they investigate as well as ignoring
the particularity of historical events.8
Gotzmann succinctly explains, “The process of redefinition and criti-
cism that shook other fields in the wake of the breakdown of colonialism
left Jewish studies almost entirely untouched. Though all fought for
proper representation and acknowledgment, the persistent need to defend
the field and its inward perspective against the other master narratives
remained characteristic.”9 In their defence, Jewish scholars working in
Central Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had
the added misfortune of having to defend the content of their findings and
6
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), 6.
7
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 23.
8
See Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 22.
9
8 D. HEYWOOD JONES
defend their right as Jews to present these findings to peers.10 Due to the
need to justify their right to present any narrative in an academic setting in
the first place, the conditions in which Jewish nationalist scholarship came
about heavily influenced the later lack of critical reflection on the theoreti-
cal foundations of those narratives. Thus, nineteenth-century historicism
and historicist approaches to Jewish history by Jewish historians remained
the norm until the last decades of the twentieth century.11
Looking beyond Jewish studies, it was not until the end of the Cold
War in the 1990s that more historians began writing integrative European
histories.12 The period around the time of fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989
brought forth completely new approaches to European historiography
The two overriding political and economic master narratives gave way to
competing memories from a plurality of emergent voices across the whole
continent. The fall of The Wall had a huge impact on Jewish studies in the
new German republic. Stefan Rohrbacher has shown in his history of
Jewish studies in Germany in the twentieth century that Marxist-influenced
historiography in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) paid little
attention to Jewish matters. If broached at all, Jewish themes in the GDR
were merely brushed upon in studies on fascism or the Nazi period. In the
Federal Republic of Germany on the other side of the Iron Curtain, histo-
rians had little interest in pursuing Jewish themes as this meant reflecting
on German historians’ own role in Nazi Germany. Post-war historians in
West Germany were, for the most part, still part of a “nationalist-
conservative” milieu.13
Despite the enormous changes after the fall of The Wall, German-
language Jewish studies still lags far behind other historical disciplines in
facilitating the integration of its subject matter into broader European
historical narratives. This situation led Andreas Gotzmann to claim in
2001 that, with the notable exception of histories of anti-Semitism, Jewish
10
Susannah Heschel was the first to use post-colonial theory to analyse the relationship
between Jewish-Germans (ergo “colonized”) and their fellow German citizens (ergo “colo-
nizers”), see, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998).
11
For a detailed review of the rise, influence and lasting hold historicism had on Jewish
studies see: David N Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in German-
Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Pr., 2003).
12
Dan Diner, Gedächtniszeiten (München: Beck, 2003), 12.
13
Stefan Rohrbacher, “Jüdische Geschichte,” in Wissenschaft vom Judentum, ed. Michael
Brenner and Stefan Rohrbacher (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 166–67.
history was still not an “obvious subject of historical interest” to German

historians.14 Very little has changed over the past two decades.15
Andreas Brämer suggests that this research lacuna is due to German
historians’ fear of Jewish themes as they yet still been unable to overcome
a “past overshadowed by the Scho’ah.”16 Brämer further argues that
although there has been growing interest in Jewish-German history as a
sub-discipline of German history, this has, for the most part, merely dis-
cussed the relationship of Jews to non-Jewish population. When it comes
to Jewish agency and its impact within and on German history, Jews are
often regarded as marginal figures.17
As a further point, David Sorkin reminds us that the veritable disap-
pearance of a German Jewry forced a caesura in historiographic reapprais-
als of German-Jewish histories. Sorkin claimed back in 1990 that a new
appraisal of Jewish-German history has had to first wait for “the emer-
gence of a new historiography in the United States and Israel, the major
centres of post-war Jewish life and of the German-Jewish Diaspora, and
the awakening of interest among Germans in the Jewish element of their
own national past.”18 Thus, for Sorkin, the absence of an “organic” Jewish-
German intelligentsia has allowed Jewish-German themes to lose the sig-
nificance they once enjoyed.
The aforementioned anomalies within Jewish historiography have
meant that histories of Jewish historiographical approaches are slowly
becoming as voluminous as histories of the Jews themselves. At present,
there is simply no easy way to talk about Jewish history without first dis-
cussing at length the trajectory or perspective from which one is writing.
Perhaps the most insightful publication on Jewish historiography to appear
in the recent past has been Moshe Rosman’s 2007 How Jewish Is Jewish
History? Rosman cogently explains how our post-modern sensibilities
have allowed us to view historiographies, a priori, as competing narratives
in which coherence and plausibility as well as intention are intrinsic to the
14
Andreas Gotzmann, Rainer Liedtke, Till van Rahden, introduction to Juden, Bürger,
Deutsche: ed. Andreas Gotzmann, Rainer Liedtke, Till van Rahden (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2001), 3.
15
cf., Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness, ed. Andreas Gotzmann and Christian
Wiese (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2007); more current, Disseminating German Tradition, ed.
Dan Diner and Mosche Zimmermann (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2009).
16
Andreas Brämer, Leistung und Gegenleistung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 13.
17
Brämer, Leistung und Gegenleistung, 12.
18
David Sorkin, “Emancipation and Assimilation,” LBIY 35 (1990), 25.
10 D. HEYWOOD JONES
reader’s understanding and acceptance of that narrative. Rosman eschews

traditional historiographic meta-narratives in favour of a more dynamic
definition of identity without invoking the Damoclean blade of historical
relativism.
Rosman was by no means the first to highlight the need for a revision
of Jewish-German historiographic methodologies. In 1996, Evyatar
Friesel identified a number of texts from the early 1970s19 which sug-
gested more attention should be given to Jewish and German cultural
reciprocity.20 It was not until the early 1990s, however, that counter histo-
ries and revisionist historical thinking became louder. Over a decade before
Rosman, we can now also identify David Sorkin, Evyatar Friesel, Paula
Hyman, Jonathan Franckel and Todd Endelman as pioneering new
approaches to Jewish-German historiography.21 Shulamit Volkov, Samuel
Moyn, and David N. Myers also drew attention to the need to radically
revise all traditional presuppositions of Jewish-German historiography,
without offering substantial revisions themselves.22 Despite calls for a para-
digm shift, there has been a paucity of monographs which dare to make
use of the new terms and categories urged by the historians above. This is
particularly true for academics writing in German and Hebrew. Till van
Rahden’s Juden und andere Breslauer published in 2000 and Frank Stern’s
19
Friesel names Ismar Schorsch, Jewish Reactions to German Anti-Semitism, 1870–1914
(New York et al.: Columbia Univ. Press, 1972); Jehuda Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised
Land. The Dilemma of the German Jew, 1893–1914; from 1975; and Michael A. Meyer,
Response to Modernity (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990); see Evyatar Friesel, “The
German-Jewish Encounter as a Historical Problem,” LBIY 41 (1996): 270–71.
20
Friesel, “The German-Jewish Encounter as a Historical Problem,” 271.
21
David Sorkin, “Emancipation and Assimilation. Two Concepts and their Application to
German-Jewish History,” LBIY 35 (1990): 17–33; David Sorkin, “The impact of emancipa-
tion on German Jewry: a reconsideration,” in Assimilation and Community, ed. Jonathan
Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1992); Paula E. Hyman
“The Ideological Transformation of Modern Jewish Historiography,” in The State of Jewish
Studies, ed. Shaye J. D. Cohen and Edward L. Greenstein (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press,
1990); Jonathan Frankel, “Assimilation and the Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in
Assimilation and Community; Todd M. Endelman, “The Legitimization of Diaspora
Experience in Recent Jewish Historiography,” Modern Judaism 11 (1991): 195–209.
22
David N. Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past (New York: Oxford Univ. Pr., 1995);
Samuel Moyn, “German Jewry and the Question of Identity Historiography and Theory”
LBIY 41 (1996); Shulamit Volkov, “Reflections on German-Jewish Historiography: A Dead
End or a New Beginning?” LBIY 41 (1996).
2002 Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht are notable exceptions from
German language academia.23
The Structural Problem

The structural problem of the history of German Jewry in comparison to
mainstream German history is an issue which has been raised by a small
but growing number of German-speaking (Jewish Studies) academics.
These demands are being inspirted by the growing awareness of the inter-
connectedness of European histories and a widespread unease with nation-
alist “ethnic absolutist” approaches. Integrative or “transnational histories”
are beginning to emerge in increasing numbers.24
I will now introduce a further problem. Namely, the historiographic
tools Jewish studies scholars in the German-speaking lands traditionally
use. These analytic tools have more often than not either presupposed an
essentialist concept of Jewish identity or have deployed meta-narratives
across epochs using an essentialist model of Jewish and/or German
identity.
Up until the last decades of the twentieth century, one’s methodologi-
cal approach to Jewish history usually meant inclusion in one of three
main camps: Zionist, Nationalist or Liberal (Acculturationist/
Assimilationist) in intention.25
A method for defining Zionist thinkers is to identify historians working
with a negative view of the Jewish diaspora, that is, those who negate the
value of diasporic life in order to champion or justify a necessary “return”
to Ha’Arez. A strict bifurcation of “Jewish and German,” “tradition and
assimilation” are other defining characteristics of Zionist histories.
Jonathan Frankel explains that “bipolarity” became the “paradigmatic
principle which supplied these works with their underlying structure.”26
23
van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer. See also, “Von der Eintracht zur Vielfalt,” in
Juden, Bürger, Deutsche, ed. Andreas Gotzmann, Rainer Liedtke and Till van Rahden
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001); Frank Stern, Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht (Berlin:
Aufbau-Verlag, 2002).
24
Heinz Kleger makes a similar argument in his “Transnationalität als Herausforderung
politischer Theorie,” in Wieviel Transnationalismus verträgt die Kultur? ed. Willi Jaspar
(Berlin: Köster, 2009), 12–37.
25
cf. Volkov’s 1996 discussion of “National [or] Zionist and Liberal” historiographic
approaches in Volkov, “Reflections on German-Jewish Historiography,” 309–20.
26
Frankel, “Assimilation and the Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” 4.
12 D. HEYWOOD JONES
He later argues that a focus on bipolarity “encouraged the tendency to

focus the spotlight on the extremes, thus leaving the middle ground,
although certainly not out of sight, still in the shadows.”27 We can also add
Gershom Scholem, Jacob Katz,28 Hillel Ben Sasson, Shmuel Ettinger and
Yitzhak Baer to the list of those making no secret of their antipathy towards
diaspora life—thereby maintaining an essentialist cultural bifurcation.29
Ury and Miller define the Israeli Zionist Historians as “dedicated to their
search for all-embracing conceptions and community that not only cre-
ated clearly defined and digestible worlds composed of Jews and ‘the
nations’ but also lent shape and legitimacy to coherent conceptions of
what was often thought to be the complete, undiluted nature of national
communities.”30
Outside of German-language academia, there is only a small group of
scholars who have written about Breslau. Namely Shmuel Feiner and Natali
Naimark-Goldberg, both of whom publish in Hebrew and then translate
their works to English or rewrite in English. Both historians are inclined
towards essentialist or Zionist views on maskilim in Silesia.31 Natali
Naimark-Goldberg consistently describes Jewish intellectuals who were not
part of rabbinic circles or the Hebrew language revival as assimilationists,
radicals or proponents of secularisation. She claims that the Breslau Dayan
Pappenheimer “remained faithful to his religion and faith” in his opposi-
tion to Jewish enlighteners. The implication, of course, is that the other
enlighteners were unfaithful—she terms other intellectuals as “imposters.”32
In a 2011 book, Shmuel Feiner and Naimark-Goldberg reinforce
Zionist notions that Enlightenment was “European” and that Jewish
27
Frankel, “Assimilation and the Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” 6.
28
For example, Katz speaks of an “organic unity” (p. 8) of Jewish diaspora which cannot
be questioned. He further claims that Jews “stood apart from their environments” (p. 7) and
that the diaspora can be viewed as part of an essential historical Jewish character later cor-
rupted and changed by the destruction of the national character of the Jews by maskilim in
the 1780s (leading to assimilation with Christians) [pp. 234–35]: Jacob Katz, Tradition and
Crisis (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1993).
29
For a more nuanced view of Zionist historiography, in particular the so-called Jerusalem
School, see David N Myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1995).
30
Miller and Ury, “Cosmopolitanism: The End of Jewishness?” 338.
31
Natalie Naimark-Goldberg and Shmuel Feiner are two of the only Israeli academics who
have written about maskilim or Haskalah in Breslau. I cite the English language translations
of their Hebrew work.
32
Neumark-Goldberg, “Salomon Pappenheim,” 51e.
intellectuals were somehow outside of this phenomenon. They describe

the modernisation of Jewish communities as “a process of alienation from
Jewish society and religion,” a view which presupposes an essentialist the-
ory of Jewish identity and religion.33 Much of their writings on the
Haskalah could be considered a microcosm of a Hebrew language litera-
ture on the Haskalah. This literature often focuses on the Hebrew lan-
guage texts from the period and discredits Jewish enlighteners who wrote
in German.34
As with many of his writings in English or Hebrew, Shmuel Feiner pro-
motes notions of an essentialist Jewish core that was “Europeanised” and
corrupted. He uses the term “European Acculturation”35 when discussing
the modernisation of Jews who had been living in Europe for 2000 years
or more. Feiner boldly claims that “political radicalism was largely irrele-
vant” among the maskilim.36 Whereby, he ignores the struggles of maskilim
who fought for emancipation. What Feiner forgets is that demanding civic
emancipation for a non-Christian group was a radical form of political
protest. Its implementation at the time would have required profound
systemic change.
The group loosely defined as Acculturationist (others use the term
“Liberal”) were historians and scholars for whom the future of Jewish life
was only conceived of within the diasporic communities with Jews accul-
turating to other cultures and religions. Some names include the histori-
ans Isaak Marcus Jost, Heinrich Graetz, Ludwig Philippson, among
others. Arguing for a revaluation of “German-Jewish historiography” back
in 1990, Arno Herzig claimed that the creation of Liberal position was an
epochal shift in how German Jewish history was written. He defines the
Acculturationist position—the majority position until the Weimar era in
the twentieth century—as enthusiastic about “assimilation.”37 He argues
33
Shmuel Feiner, Natalie Naimark-Goldberg, Cultural Revolution in Berlin (Oxford:
Bodleian Library, 2011), 69.
34
Hebrew language writing is Moshe Pelli’s defining criterion of Haskalah. See Moshe
Pelli, In Search of Genre: Hebrew Enlightenment and Modernity (Lanham: Univ. Press of
America, 2005).
35
Shmuel Feiner. “The Pseudo-Enlightenment and the Question of Jewish Modernization”
Jewish Social Studies, 3, no. 1 (1996): 62–88. www.jstor.org/stable/4467486
36
Feiner, “The Pseudo-Enlightenment,” 66.
37
It is highly unlikely that Herzig intended the term “assimilation” in its current pejorative
guise (his essay is from 1990). On the term “assimilation,” see Sorkin, “Emancipation and
Assimilation”; on the transgression of these strongly Manichean terms to something more
14 D. HEYWOOD JONES
it was a means for Jews to legitimise their calls for equal civic status.38
Although this “school” disappeared during the 1930s, the influence of
these historians and their then ground-breaking approach to Jewish
Studies is ubiquitous in the field today.
The Epistemological Problem

The second major issue preventing the integration of Jewish-German his-
tory into mainstream German history is what I call the epistemological
problem. Namely, the interpretation of Jewish-German history from the
perspective of the history of ideas, or the use of history to justify national-
ist, Zionist or Acculturationist-Liberal goals in the present. Whether the
problem is structural or epistemological, there remains a strong case for a
“radical new beginning” to Jewish-German historiography.39 Yet in 2002,
Joseph Dan was still bemoaning the fact that “Postmodernity and
Postzionism were successful in their criticism of the ideologies which had
driven historical writing for the past two centuries, academics had yet to
come up with satisfactory alternatives to these Meta-narratives.”40
A fundamental issue with ideologies which divide Jewish history into
“Zionist,” “nationalist,” or “Acculturationist” and the inevitable bifurca-
tion within those categories of Jews and non-Jews, is that each method tells
us very little about the individual Jews and their immediate environments.
These histories move from the historian’s concepts down to the events and,
more often than not, ignore the reciprocal influence between heteroge-
neous Jewish communities and their respective environments. Todd
Endelman reminds us that “Ignoring the impact of broad impersonal cur-
rents simply reinforces the old Germano-centric view of the origins of
Jewish modernity, in which new ideologies restructured Jewish lives.”41
One of the problems of these “top-down” approaches has been that the
lives and deeds of individual writers, philosophers, theologians, business
“radical” see, Klaus Hödl, “Jenseits des Nationalen: Ein Bekenntnis zur Interkulturation,”
Transversal I (2004): 3–17.
38
Arno Herzig, “Zur Problematik deutsch-jüdischer Geschichtsschreibung,” in Menora
(München: Piper, 1990), 212.
39
See Volkov, “Reflections on German-Jewish Historiography,” 309.
40
Joseph Dan, “Jüdische Studien ohne Gewißheiten,” in Wissenschaft vom Judentum, ed.
Michael Brenner and Stefan Rohrbacher (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 62.
41
Todd Endelman, Broadening Jewish History: Towards a Social History of Ordinary Jews
(Oxford: Littman Library, 2011), 33.
people and educators under scrutiny were often subsumed under broader
supra-personal historical headings and theories. Not only has this led to a
sublimation of a much richer and broader history of Jewish life in Europe,
one in which cultural transmission and reciprocal influence renders a far
more profound and accurate insight into the reality of interconnectedness
on the continent of Europe, but it also denies individual Jews agency
within history. On this reading, the history of people, places and traditions
have been subsumed under the history of ideas. Shulamit Volkov went as
far as to say that “both approaches to Jewish history, the Liberal-ethnic as
well as the National-Zionist, seem to have reached a dead end.”42
There is an intrinsic connection between acknowledging the role of
individual human agency and creating histories in which the reality of the
reciprocity of cultural exchange is included. An integration of Jewish-
German history into German and European histories can only take place
if the individual agency and the reciprocity of cultural influence are recog-
nised as an historiographical category from which Jewish-German history
should be investigated. This does not negate histories of anti-Semitism, or
nationalist and Zionist scholarship. It does, however, problematise the
emphasis on the primarily negative, meta-historical events and theories
that have isolated German-speaking Jewries from their environments.
There is perhaps no better example of the problems of modernist or
structuralist Jewish historiography when one considers the multiple roles
Moses Mendelssohn has been assigned in Jewish history. All too often,
Mendelssohn’s works, beliefs and even lifestyle have been pushed into the
background of more sweeping statements about Jewish history. For many
Zionist and Orthodox historians and sociologists, Mendelssohn is the very
symbol of and catalyst for Jewish social, religious and moral decay and
assimilation in the nineteenth century. Yet, for many Acculturationist-
Liberal or Reform historians, Mendelssohn is a hero and progenitor of
Jewish religious reform and embourgeoisement.
The reality, however, is very different. Mendelssohn was neither a reli-
gious reformer nor could have been described as assimilationist in any way.
He certainly would not have described himself as such. He was a Fromm
Jew, a popular and widely published philosopher, and a successful busi-
nessman. His home became a centrifuge for many, wildly heterogeneous,
Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals from across Europe. In no way, how-
ever, did he ever openly question the essential validity of the Jewish
42
Volkov, “Reflections on German-Jewish Historiography,” 314.
16 D. HEYWOOD JONES
religious tradition as he understood it. He infamously defended the 613

mitzwot as divinely revealed and eternally valid in his 1783 Jerusalem.
Mendelssohn did not believe Judaism required “modernisation” or “con-
fessionalisation.” It was from a philosophical standpoint that Mendelssohn
argued the universalist, cosmopolitan and altruistic tendencies within
Enlightenment ideals were identical to the central tenets of Judaism.43
In 1994, Shulamit Volkov called Mendelssohn the first “genuine
German-Jew,”44 which implied Mendelssohn embodied a new mix of cul-
tures, ergo, a new type of culture. Whether or not Mendelssohn can be
termed the first “genuine German-Jew” is superfluous to the present dis-
cussion. What is important, however, is that Mendelssohn came to embody
an “emblematic figure of … hybridity.”45 David Myers defines Jewish
hybridity as “Jewish identity as a hybrid creation, comprised of different
strands of influence” meaning that Jewish culture was “manifestly perme-
able to non-Jewish influences.”46 Hybridity became a feature of
Enlightenment thinking where “bifurcated” personalities were divided
“into national, religious, public and private spheres.”47 In other words, the
Enlightenment created new spaces for individuals to manoeuvre, the
Enlightenment, according to Myers, did not “produce a single, essential
identity. Rather, it broke it down, fragmented it…it mandated a radical
hybridity that marks the modern Jewish condition.”48
In stark contrast to Myers’ and Volkov’s readings of Mendelssohn’s
“new” identity, traditional historical narratives in Jewish history have done
little justice to Mendelssohn the person.
43
Michael A Meyer, “Soll und kann eine ‘antiquierte’ Religion modern werden?,” in Die
Juden in der europäischen Geschichte, ed. Wolfgang Beck (München: Beck, 1992), 69.
44
Shulamit Volkov, Die Juden in Deutschland: 1780–1918 (München: Oldenbourg, 1994),
10. [my emphasis]
45
David N. Myers, “‘The Blessing of Assimilation’ Reconsidered,” in From Ghetto to
Emancipation, ed. David N. Myers and William V. Rowe (Scranton: Univ. of Scranton Press,
1997), 24.
46
Myers, “‘The Blessing of Assimilation,” 24.
47
Myers, “The Blessing of Assimilation,” 24–25.
48
Myers, “The Blessing of Assimilation,” 24–25.
“Essentialist” Jewish Identity Versus Plurality in Jewish

Communities in the Eighteenth Century
At the turn of the eighteenth century the clear majority of Jews in Europe
lived in the East of the continent, German, French, Italian and Dutch
Jewries were in fact a minority within world Jewry.49 These groupings in
Western Europe were themselves of course also heterogeneous. Consider
the internecine rivalries among Jews living in the French territories in the
wake of the French Revolution. Typically identified as an “essentially”
Jewish collective, the so-called Portuguese Jews from the West and the
Jews living in Paris were bitterly divided. Even the groups who came from
the Alsace region were not united when petitioning the king for civil rights
on the eve of the Revolution.50
The Jews of Europe were divided into Sephardim and Ashkenazim,
West or East Yiddish speaking, traditional or modernising kahals, wealthy
or impoverished, stateless or enjoying civil privileges. One of the only uni-
fying elements in eighteenth-century Jewry was efforts of the Ashkenazi
religious establishment to unify Jews by codifying halachic convention and
eliminating what they felt to be eccentric minhagim. David Sorkin explains
that the Ashkenazi elite had been trying since the Reformation to reisolate
Jewish kahals behind “Talmudic casuistry and mysticism” and thus lost
touch “with large portions of its textual heritage as well as with Europe’s
intellectual revolutions.”51 Sorkin was not the first to discuss the process
of religious homogenisation among Ashkenazic communities in Central
and Eastern Europe. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Israel Abrahams (1858–1925) and Salo W. Baron (1895–1989) pub-
lished paradigm-busting views on Jewish history.52 Abrahams argued there
was no “collective Jewish life but only of individual Jewish lives.”53
Needless to say, the Shoah and its aftermath effectively silenced these
49
See Gershon D. Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 2006).
50
Michael Graetz, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,
1996), 17ff.
51
David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London
to Vienna. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2008), 3.
52
Salo Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” The Menorah Journal 14 (1928): 515–26.
53
Elliott Horowitz, “Jewish Life in the Middle Ages and the Jewish life of Israel Abrahams,”
in The Jewish Past Revisited, ed. David N. Myers and David B. Ruderman (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Pr., 1998), 150.
18 D. HEYWOOD JONES
pre-war attempts to revise Jewish historical traditions.54 It is only in the

past decade that scholars have once again begun to examine the
“entangled”55 reality of life for Jews living under and beside Muslim and
Christian majorities in the middle-ages.
The process of Jewish religious homogenisation was most acute in
Central Europe as Judaism gradually transformed from heterogenous tra-
ditions to a more formalised confession. Over the course of the eighteenth
century, this newer pious religious understanding froze into what many
historians later termed “traditional Judaism” and religious scholars termed
the “orthodoxy.”56 This process in Central and Eastern Europe initially
occurred as leaders moved to prevent increasing Jewish sectarianism. In
particular, traditionalist rabbis sought to combat influential messianic
movements and splinter groups associated with various Sabbatian-inspired
movements. As the eighteenth century progressed, however, a newly con-
nected religious elite became more preoccupied with maintaining a
monopoly on corporate power over Jewish communities in the face of
rapid political modernisation and the gradual waning of the estate system
in Central Europe. Endelman has argued that it was the “integration of
Jews into states increasingly built around individual rights rather than col-
lective privileges made the survival of this undifferentiated sense of self-
identification difficult if not impossible.”57 In other words, rapid changes
to the social, cultural and political structures of Central Europe, in par-
ticular the transformation of the relationship between subjects, their
respective position in the corporate system and their rulers, forced Jewish
kahals to reassess their hitherto unreflected self-identity.
This same crisis of identity not only forced the traditional religious elite
into action, it also emboldened and inspired newly emerging networks of
Jewish intellectuals and scholars collectively known as maskilim. In this
context, maskilim could be said to be reacting to the threat posed to
Judaism by modernisation. Namely, the threat that the newly emergent
paradigm of individual rights in respect of one set of general laws as
54
Both Baron and Abrahams may have revised traditional historical approaches, however,
they both maintained strong essentialist views on Jewish identity.
55
cf. Entangled Histories, ed. Elisheva Baumgarten, Ruth Mazo Karras, and Katelyn Mesler
(Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
56
Gerhard Lauer, “Bücher von Kühen und andere Freuden der Seelen,” in Literatur und
Theologie im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans E. Friedrich, Wilhelm Haefs and Christian Soboth
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 69.
57
Endelman, Broadening Jewish History, 21.
opposed to adherence to diffuse systems of corporate laws and codes

would affect the collective sense of self-identification felt by the civil and
religiously segregated Jewish communities.
Michael A. Meyer once argued that there were no real benefits in set-
ting definitive dates for the beginning of Jewish modernisation.58 The pri-
mary category used for debates on the first modern Jew or the first maskil
or defining different maskilim generations are the categories of “integra-
tion,” “assimilation,” and “acculturation.” To use these terms compara-
tively, however, a historian must presuppose an essential cultural dichotomy.
This is the key presupposition for diachronic studies suggesting Jews to be
more or less “modern” or more or less “Enlightened,” both terms typi-
cally synonymous with non-Jewish thinking or cultures. In lieu of a satis-
factory definition of Jewishness or for “Germanness” from that period, the
categories of “integration” or “acculturation” are then at best analogous
and at worst circular in nature. In other words, given that it is impossible
to clearly identify separate “‘endogenous’ from ‘exogenous’ ingredients,”59
the usage of presupposed, hermetically segregated cultural essences is as
circular an argument as it is disingenuous to the reciprocity and cultural
transmission processes which determine any given social or cultural reality.
From an inner-Jewish perspective, maskilim could be described as an
emergent opposition to the traditional religious elite who were fighting to
retain power over the lives of ordinary Jews. In this sense, maskilim in
Central Europe were the theoretical harbingers of a new age. Many maskilim
fought for the civic integration of Jews into their political environments and
the cultural integration of Jews into their immediate environments.
Importantly, however, these two forms of integration were never consid-
ered as means to attack or supersede a given Jewish identity. Moshe Pelli
agrees, “Contrary to popular belief [he is referring to traditional Zionist or
cultural nationalist narratives], a great number of the Maskilim desired a
synthesis of the old and the new, a renewal of the Jewish people based on
modified traditional grounds. Most Hebrew enlighteners exhibited com-
plete faith in Judaism, the Jewish people, and Jewish culture.”60 The het-
erogeneous thinkers, educators, scholars, linguists, and business people
58
Michael A. Meyer, “Where Does the Modern Period of Jewish History Begin?” Judaism
24, no. 95 (1975): 329–38.
59
Amos Funkenstein, “The Dialectics of Assimilation,” Jewish Social Studies, New Series 1,
no. 2 (1995): 9.
60
Moshe Pelli, In Search of Genre: Hebrew Enlightenment and Modernity (Lanham: Univ.
Press of America, 2005), 19.
20 D. HEYWOOD JONES
who are collectively termed “maskilim” devoted their efforts to providing

alternative models for Jews to live within their given political, cultural and
social environments. In her study of Haskalah in Greater Poland, Nancy
Sinkoff informs us that even among the traditional “Ostjuden,”
maskilim there also acted to preserve Jewish identity the face of modernisa-
tion.61 She does not agree that maskilim in Eastern Europe corrupted an
existing, purportedly immutable and essentialist Jewish traditional identity:
While the material and social history of the Jews, their socio-economic pro-
file, communal organization, and ways of life (food, architecture, clothing,
burial patterns, demographics, etc.) are important fields of inquiry, I none-
theless maintain that no Jewish community—past or present—has sustained
itself without an intellectual or ideological conception of collective selfhood.
The revolution of modernity necessitated transformations in the communal
self-understanding among the Jews of Europe, stimulating to define them-
selves in new ways, and the maskilim were the first and most articulate
spokespersons of the encounter with modernity’s challenges.62
Simultaneous to their Enlightened Christian-German contemporaries

from the emerging “Gebildeten [intellectual]” class or enlighteners,63 the
maskilim were endeavouring to educate and improve the lives of the
majority of Jews who remained poorly educated, disenfranchised and
disempowered. Both maskilim and enlighteners created “a new social

group emerging from a decaying corporate order; its position in society
dependent upon education; and its vision for the transformation of society
formed, as it were, by its educational views writ large.”64
In her analysis of the Enlightenment in Breslau, Brenker defines the
Late Enlightenment as the period in which scholars began to implement
61
cf. Gershon Hundert’s assessment of Jews living East of Prussia where he argues that
modernisation in historiography should neither be read teleologically and nor as a program-
matic movement drifting from west to east: Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth
Century, 3.
62
Nancy Sinkoff, Out of the Shtetl (Providence: Brown University, 2004), 5–6; another title
focusing on Jewry in the Polish territories is Marcin Wodziński’s, Haskalah and Hasidism in
the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford: Littman Library, 2005).
63
I will use the uncommon English-language term rather than the German “Aufklärer” for
linguistic consistency. The German term includes an obvious pedagogic element which
reflects the strong educational rather than political goals of the Central European enlighteners.
64
Sorkin, “The Impact of Emancipation on German Jewry,” 186.
the theories and knowledge from the previous half century.65 Just as
Christian enlighteners had very different goals and programmes from one
another, maskilim also represented chronologically, religiously, culturally
and philosophically diverse goals. Agreeing with David Sorkin in his analy-
sis of religious enlightenment, there were simply no “master narratives”66
for the Enlightenment, it is at best described as a “spectrum of competing
ideologies and beliefs.”67
All subjects towards the end of the eighteenth century were subject to
the whims of their monarchs or the arbitrary powers of the various corpo-
rate estates to which they belonged. The end of the eighteenth century
was the beginning of the end of this corporate system in Central Europe.
The maskilim and Christian enlighteners of the Late Enlightenment took
it upon themselves to project the models in which future generations
could adapt to a new centralised power base, in which independent corpo-
rate powers [Ständegesellschaft] would be subsumed under centralised,
increasingly bureaucratic and nationalist centres of power. This change
affected all groups, Andreas Reinke describes it succinctly,
The effects of modernisation, which were directly linked to changes in the

social, political, economic and cultural life and which ran concurrently to
the transition from an estate-based to a civil society, as well as to industriali-
sation, and to [Prussian] state and nation-building, effected all parts of the
society; albeit to different degrees and with different outcomes.68
Consider the challenge the burgeoning natural sciences, Newtonian

physics, empiricism and deism were posing to organised religion at the
time. Agreeing with Sorkin, “the Enlightenment posed a set of questions
to which all of the religions in the German states found it necessary to
provide answers.”69 In the case of Jewish-German communities where reli-
gion also served as an ethnic and political constituency marker, challenges
65
Anne Brenker, “Über Aufklärer und Aufklärungsgesellschaften in Breslau,” in
Aufklärung in Schlesien im europäischen Spannungsfeld, ed. Wojciech Kunicki (Wrocław:
Wydawn. Uniw. Wrocławskiego, 1996), 11.
66
Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment, 3.
67
Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment, 20.
68
Andreas Reinke, Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland: 1781–1933 (Darmstadt: Wiss.
Buches, 2007), 142.
69
David Sorkin, The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought (London et al:
Vallentine-Mitchell, 2000), 4.
22 D. HEYWOOD JONES
to religious belief were direct threats to ethnic and corporative identity

within German-speaking Jewry.
Jews and Their Identities
The Concept of Hybrid Identity

I will now look at the theory of identity essential to understanding Jewish
history in Europe. Moshe Rosman offers three categories of meta-history
which he calls “Zionist,” “Acculturationist” and “hybrid,” respectively. To
define these various categories, Rosman discusses theories of exchange,
mutual influence, reciprocity and assimilation.70
Using “hybrid identity” as an intellectual tool helps us to look at Jews
within history as both conditioning and being conditioned by their envi-
ronment—both as a group and as individuals. Working from a theory of
hybridised identity circumvents traditional attempts to map out Jewish
histories working from an assumed a priori definition of Jewish cultural
and social homogeneity. According to Samuel Moyn, this would be a form
of “ethnic absolutism” in which the Jew is a “transhistorical constant”
rather than an “historical construct, always interactive with his or her con-
texts, defined and self-defined in, through, and sometimes against them.”71
Or, as Rosman explains,
While Jews may share certain religious and ethnic markers over time and
space, Judaism and Jewishness are always and everywhere primarily local
constructs. Jewish collective identity should be understood mainly from a
local perspective. Judaism and Jewishness are therefore not monolithic and
there cannot be said to have existed one Judaism, one Jewish culture or
normative, traditional, or representative types of Jewish communities.
Rather, Jews are a hybrid version of whatever identity they live among.72
70
Rosman was not the first to discuss the need for a category of hybridity in Jewish histo-
riography. He was the first to discuss the term “hybrid” alongside “Zionist and Liberal.” See
also, Myers’ “The Blessing of Assimilation” from 1997.
71
Samuel Moyn, “German Jewry and the Question of Identity Historiography and
Theory,” LBIY 41 (1996), 295.
72
Rosman, How Jewish is Jewish History?, 53.
Needless to say, both the Zionist and Acculturationist approaches men-

tioned earlier, mutatis mutandis, presuppose an essential Jewish group
identity within Ashkenazi Jewry.73
By avoiding the presupposition of an essential Jewish core, the use of
hybridity as a dynamic category of identity necessarily creates a form of
counter history. This model can address the abovementioned “structural
problem”—the exclusion of Jewish-History from German history—by
rejecting the “epistemological problem” from above—the negation of
individuals and their unique environments in favour of historical narratives.
Jewish Identity in Central Europe

The imagined Jewish nation across Central Europe was an aspirational fic-
tion on the part of various rabbinical authorities as well as a convenient
bogey man for ruthlessly opportunist merchants, guilds and Christian
demagogues. The Jewish nation has also been used as an anachronistic
projection by Jewish historians since the nineteenth century. To be sure,
the appearance of absolute Jewish unity was buoyed by tangible linguistic,
mercantile and halachic similarities. The communities themselves, how-
ever, were enmeshed or “entangled” in very different environments.
This is not to say that Jews in Europe did not have a sense of their own
Jewish identity or that they did not identify with other European Jews as
brethren. What I am suggesting is that at the group or national level,
Jewish identity was a projection of each community in each separate envi-
ronment. The idea of a historical or genetic continuity of the Jewish
nation from the biblical Sinai to the mercantile homes in eighteenth-
century central Breslau, Berlin or Amsterdam is an intrinsic element
within the religion, law and culture of Judaism. This desire to project a
stable identity, however, is no different to other nations’ attempts to
“imagine”74 their communities as a historical continuum. It is the aca-
demic’s job to analyse and account for the space between the actual lives
and cultural milieu of various nations at various times and the transhis-
torical projections of nationalist fancy. Peter Burke has termed the inves-
tigation of this space or, in his words, “the problem of the relation
between change and continuity,” as one of the central problems in the
73
see Volkov, “Reflections on German-Jewish Historiography,” 314.
74
Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), esp. 7.
24 D. HEYWOOD JONES
study of history.75 Funkenstein goes further and protests that historians of

Jewish history have traditionally preferred to account for the transhistori-
cal essences rather than the specific nature of Jewishness in each place
and time,
Attempts to separate a stable “essence” which accounts for the continuity of

the Jewish past as against a margin of changing “appearances,” or attempts
to separate that which is original and therefore homegrown, autochthonous,
from that which has been absorbed-these characterize not only the tradi-
tional self-perception of Jews but, in a transformed and more nuanced lan-
guage, also the perception of many, if not all, Jewish historians even today.76
If we can agree to eschew essentialist models of identity when creating

historical narratives in favour of “hybrid” models, how can we tie this to a
discussion of a relatively obscure German-speaking publicist and business-
man from Silesia in the late eighteenth century?
Standing in opposition to broad impersonal and essentialist histories are
the histories of individuals and their coeval environments. The hybrid iden-
tities discussed earlier require an analysis of the historical and sociological
categories which support this theory of identity. Moses Hirschel as a dia-
sporic Jew in Breslau provides an excellent model of an individual strug-
gling to define himself in an era of tumultuous change. Echoing Meyers’
categories from above, this was an era in which new modes of identity such
as the “national and religious, public and private,” became available.
In his extensive study of modernity and its impact on self-identity,
Anthony Giddens describes modernity as being defined by a change in
how people identified themselves. He explains how the “transitions in
individuals” lives have always demanded “psychic reorganisation” and
that, in the case of modernity “the altered self has to be explored and con-
structed as part of a reflexive process of connecting personal and social
change.”77 On a subjective level, he defines the self as a “reflexive project
for which the individual is responsible.”78 The tumultuous social and
political worlds into which individuals in late modernity were born, pro-
vided a plurality of spheres or “segments”79 for individual to identify with.
Giddens describes an emergent plurality of objective concrete historical
75
Peter Burke, Hybrid Renaissance (Budapest: Central European Univ. Press, 2016), 5.
76
Funkenstein, “Dialectics of Assimilation,” 5.
77
Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 32–33.
78
Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 75.
79
socio-cultural “lifeworlds”80 in which the individual and their current

“subjective state” are,
attached to, and expressive of, specific milieux of action. Lifestyle options
are thus often decisions to become immersed in those milieux, at the expense
of possible alternatives. Since individuals typically move between different
milieux or locales in the course of their everyday life, they may feel uncom-
fortable in those settings that in some way place their own lifestyle in
question.81
Moses Hirschel was a rational agent who identified with a complex nexus
of identity milieus or “lifeworlds” within which, situation dependent, he
placed himself. Hirschel chose to act, speak, publish and presumably
socialise in diffuse voices as he struggled to place his “self” within the vari-
ous milieus to which he identified. It is because of this that Hirschel pres-
ents us with a “hybridised” identity.
Hybridised Individuals and Agency

Attempts to sublimate individual agency in favour of broader analyses of
ideas or grand historical narratives have the added disadvantage of viewing
individual Jews as powerless or simply as victims of history. Moreover, the
deployment of traditional meta-narratives also pushed historians to view
Jewish history in Europe only in relation to Jews’ impact on their immedi-
ate community. According to Hettling and Reinke’s work on Breslau’s
Jewry in the eighteenth century, this has created a “historiographic
re-ghettoization.”82
To be sure, histories of anti-Semitism have been vital in cataloguing the
discrimination and unique forms of hatred European Jews have experi-
enced. However, to catalogue Jewish history in Europe as a history of
pogroms and anti-Semitic attacks only tells part of that history. Moreover,
80
The concept “Lebenswelt” was originally coined by Edmund Husserl in relation to phe-
nomenology, it encloses the totality of that which we perceive and what we remember to
have perceived in any given conscious moment.
Giddens borrows the term as a sociological concept from Berger and Luckmann’s socio-
logical study The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966).
81
82
Manfred Hettling and Andreas Reinke, introduction to In Breslau zu Hause? Juden in
einer mitteleuropäischen Metropole der Neuzeit, ed. Manfred Hettling, Andreas Reinke and
Norbert Conrads (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 2003), 8.
26 D. HEYWOOD JONES
it both reinforces the notion of Jews as exclusively victims and gives anti-
Semitic agitators a bigger role in history than they perhaps deserve.
The intercultural reality of trade and commerce in eighteenth-century
Central Europe and the bustling and densely populated streets of central
Breslau challenges attempts to artificially project hermetically discrete
Jewish-German and German cultural spheres to individuals. These projec-
tions reduce cultural transfer and reciprocal influence to specific cultural
categories pertinent to each author’s narrow focus. There are simply no
grounds to maintain Jewish particularity or a strict Jewish-Christian or
Jewish-German dichotomy when discussing a German-speaking intellec-
tual and businessman of Jewish descent who lived in Breslau in the late
eighteenth century.
Theory of Agency
Ideas are of course mobilised by individual agents or groups of agents.
This first level of this analytical theory of historical action is defined as sub-
jective action.83 This subjective level is created by subjects who are active
participants in their environments—this is defined as “culture as practice.”
Culture as practise is a dynamic construct opposed to static theories of
culture which would posit culture as a mere body of “practices and beliefs”
that are “handed down through generations.”84 For example, Eberhard
Wolff studied the self-integration of Jewish doctors into non-Jewish medi-
cal environments in the late eighteenth century. He termed this new
hybridised identity as a form of “formed identity,” where Jews willed and
actively “built-in” new elements into their self-understanding as Jews and
did not merely adapt to their non-Jewish environments.85 The agents as
self-reflecting subjects act rationally and shape their own lives and the
world—or lifeworlds—around them. Simone Lässig’s work on the
embourgeoisement of the Jewish economic and scholarly elite also
83
The following argument roughly follows a historiographic thesis put forward by Hettling
and Reinke in their introduction to In Breslau zu Hause? 12ff.
84
See William H. Sewell Jr., “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn,
ed. Victoria E. Bonello, Lynn Hunt and Richard Miernicki (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1999), 40–46.
85
Eberhard Wolff, Medizin und Ärzte im deutschen Judentum der Reformära (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 244–45.
maintains the position that certain Jews chose to become part of what was
an amalgam of competing rational, political and socio-cultural systems.86
Agency generally implies an agent acting upon ideas or concepts.
However, beliefs and conscious or unconscious motives should also be
considered constitutive influential factors in Jewish self-definition in the
late eighteenth century. Such a definition of “culture” moves away from
discussions of sclerotic structures and institutions and instead moves
towards “multilayered discourses of meaning that are constantly remod-
elled according to self-defined structures.”87
These agents are, however, embedded within an objective world—
defined as a given albeit dynamic social world created by the interaction of
agents and the institutions and systems they form. This is the level of
“concrete historical socio-cultural world.” On this objective level, the sub-
jective or psychological level of “culture as practice” defined above
becomes a sociological category or “culture as a system.” William Sewell
has shown that these two realms are mutually independent and not mutu-
ally exclusive.88 That said, these levels also operate according to different
logics and their interaction presupposes a hybrid theory of identity.
Identity at any given time is therefore, consciously or otherwise, chosen by
the agent on the subjective level and is then posited or presupposed at the
second or “objective level.” These are processes without beginning or
ends. Identity is never reified as the objective level is always changing.89
The objective level can be either imposed from without or subjectively
assumed as part of an adaptation process. When we read history, we nec-
essarily read it from the objective level and not from the perspective of
the subjects or events we are observing. We ourselves impose our own
narratives upon the events and agents. We cannot view things “as they
were” because our perspective is necessarily filtered by our own lifeworld
and milieus. We should therefore acknowledge that identity is dynamic
and that its constitutive elements are in a constant flux. We should also
recognise that the imposition of objective criteria does not imply subjec-
tive passivity. Charles Taylor discusses “the genesis of our minds” as a
dialogical and not monological process with the world around us—he
uses the term “significant others” analogously with the term milieu from
86
Simone Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum (Göttingen: VandeHei & Ruprecht, 2004).
87
88
Sewell, “The Concept(s) of Culture,” 47.
89
see Peter Burke, Cultural Hybridity (Cambridge et al.: Polity Press, 2009).
28 D. HEYWOOD JONES
above.90 Taylor: “We define our identity always in dialogue with, some-
times in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in
us.”91 In other words, our identity is created from our attempts to posit
certain identities in certain contexts as a means of understanding both
ourselves and to be understood in that given context by others.
On this reading, historical identities are processual subjective construc-
tions and transient objective constraints which force us to act in certain
ways. The objective constraint is not necessarily how the subject has to
define itself, negatively or positively, it can simply be part of the dialogical
construction of identity in which the subject chooses to identify in one
way or the other, in one context or another. In his work on transnational-
ism and the construction of identity in relation to political theory, Heinz
Kleger explains the cleavage between the objective and subjective as,
The difference between the subjective and objective dimensions of multiple

identities is connected to the adoption of motivational knowledge. Objective
identities are mostly expressed by the formal inclusionary and exclusionary
rules from groups or organisations. Such formal conventions are known to
the protagonist, [they] are accepted or criticised up until the point in which
they are intentionally ignored or even opposed. The subjective dimension,
however, is concerned with intentional acts of adapting to identities.
Praxeologically speaking, protagonists are confronted with identities whilst
participating in certain practices; the identities themselves only appear as
part of the participation.92
I am investigating precisely this aspect of the processual and active inter-

section of the subjective and objective—the space between how people
construct themselves and how individuals allow themselves to
be determined.
Moses Hirschel: Agency, Identity and Influence

Till van Rahden’s paradigm-busting work Juden und andere Breslauer may
not use the term “hybridity,” but his category of “situative ethnicity” sug-
gests a theory of group identity synonymic with “hybrid” notions of
90
Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition” (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1992), 32.
91
Taylor, Multiculturalism, 33.
92
Heinz Kleger, “Transnationalität als Herausforderung politischer Theorie,” 28.
identity for individuals and groups.93 van Rahden showed how Jews in
Breslau had multiple social and political identities. He used club and asso-
ciation records to show how multifaceted Jewish-German identities in
Breslau in the latter half of the nineteenth century had become. van
Rahden describes his project as an attempt to write a history which pre-
supposes a “new understanding about integration, ethnicity and
assimilation”94 in order to escape the “long shadow of today’s mostly lib-
eral-Protestant paradigm of national homogeneity.” He wanted to rewrite
“recent German history as a history of ethnic and religious plurality and
difference.”95
The sources available to van Rahden for his nineteenth-century study
are not available to eighteenth-century researchers. This is both due to a
lack of developed club or association systems beyond Free Masonry. Also,
almost all documentation relating to eighteenth-century Silesian Jewry
and Jews in Breslau was disappeared in the final months of the Second
World War.96
The sparse biographical and published works on and from Hirschel do,
however, offer a glimpse of a personality trying to adjust and adapt to a
period that was rapidly changing. His public disputes with the rabbinate
and the state, not to mention his close publishing relationship with the
Catholic Polonophile writer Johann Kausch, undoubtedly ostracised him
from the more conservative circles of maskilim and enlighteners in the city.
Uta Lohmann labels Hirschel “an outsider among the Jewish enlighteners
in Breslau.”97 By focusing on Hirschel and his works and times, a portrait
of a “modern” freethinker98 or “outsider”99 will emerge. He was very
much aware of the challenges of his times and arguably epitomises intel-
lectuals for whom it was obvious that they had to position themselves
anew in the rapidly modernising political, social and cultural landscape.
93
Klaus Hödl concurs with this point in, “Jenseits des Nationalen: Ein Bekenntnis zur
Interkulturation,” Transversal, I (2004): 5–6.
94
van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer, 17.
95
van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer, 14.
96
Almost the entire War and Domains Chamber archival files for Silesia (the Prussian gov-
ernmental department responsible for Jewish affairs from 1742–1806) disappeared during
the siege of Breslau in 1945.
97
Uta Lohmann, David Friedländer. Reformpolitik im Zeichen von Aufklärung und
Emanzipation (Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2013), 147.
98
See William Hiscott, Saul Ascher: Berliner Aufklärer (Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag,
2016), 465; 527: “Freidenker”.
99
Hans Mayer, Außenseiter (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1981).
30 D. HEYWOOD JONES
In a 1981 work, Hans Mayer introduces us to the importance of “out-

siders” in enriching our understanding of certain epochs. He argues that
we should use their exceptional status to trace the constitutive elements of
a particular system. The assumption is that if we listen to those who prob-
lematised systems or to those who foresaw or acted towards changing a
given order, we can elicit a far better understanding of those epochs them-
selves. Mayer defines outsiders as “the leading figures of crossing
boundaries.”100 In his discussion of Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, Cord
Friedrich Berghahn explains that: “As a member of the Jewish nation and
the république des lettres of the European Enlightenment, Mendelssohn
can claim, unlike hardly any other contemporary, a different observation
point, because he had the indispensable external viewpoint necessary for
true Enlightenment.”101 For Berghahn, Mendelssohn was “predestined to
[become] a critical observer of the society around him” because he was
excluded from certain parts of the bourgeoisie [Bürgerlich] and court
societies.102
Writing in 1798, Wolf Davidson (1772–1800) introduces a category of
so-called menores (minor intellectuals) who he claims were important for
understanding and also adding depth the majores at the time. In Über die
bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (Berlin: Felisch, 1798), Davidson lists
men and women, Jewish doctors, artists, philosophers, publicists and oth-
ers. Davidson not only shows the variety of enlightened and successful
Jews in Prussia, but he also exposes a lacuna in modern research where
these menores have been largely excluded from the discussion of a handful
of “great men.” Werner Kraus contested that the “Masters” can only really
be understood and that the details of their work can only come to light if
we broaden the extent of our research of any given age.103 This can be
fruitful as long as one approaches these menores—Krauss prefers “obscure
writers”—and asks “what role did they play? Or what kind of influence did
they have on the development of ideas?” Krauss argues that although we
need to continue to study the masters, in order to understand them we
also need to look to others.104
100
Mayer, Außenseiter, 16–17.
101
Cord-Friedrich Berghahn, Moses Mendelssohns “Jerusalem,” (Tübingen: Niemeyer,
2001), 4.
102
C. Berghahn, Moses Mendelssohns “Jerusalem,” 4.
103
Werner Krauss, “Das Studium der obskuren Schriftsteller des Aufklärungszeitalters,” in
Die Innenseite der Weltgeschichte, ed. Helga Bergmann (Leipzig: Reclam, 1983), 179.
104
Krauss, “Das Studium der obskuren Schriftsteller des Aufklärungszeitalters,” 179.
Discussing eighteenth-century Breslau in 2003, Gunnar Och explained

that we should look at “second and third-class authors who, in an aesthetic
sense, did not produce any outstanding work” but nevertheless help us
understand their “cultural-historical environments.”105 He explicitly men-
tions a number of Jewish enlighteners discussed here: Moses Hirschel,
Joel Brill (Löwe), Aron Halle-Wolfssohn, Ephraim Kuh, Esther Gad and
Salomon Maimon.
As Davidson, Krauss, and Och clearly recognise, the menores und majo-
res were all reading each other’s works and were either in contact with
each other or had met at some point. The Enlightenment was a complex
web of interconnecting movements, ideas beliefs and projects. In order to
move away from historically disingenuous narratives featuring a few bril-
liant individuals, one should add depth to the contexts in which their ideas
emerged. It is at best an anachronism and at worst a tautology to claim
that one would not be discussing Hirschel or Ephraim Kuh if it were not
for Moses Mendelssohn. On the other hand, it would also be fanciful to
claim that Lambert’s, Reinhardt’s, Fichte’s, Jacobi’s or Maimon’s fame is
completely reliant on Kant’s shooting star. This is not saying that their
ideas were not intrinsically connected. Rather, it is quite likely that we
would not be discussing the Mendelssohns, Kants or Goethes if it were
not for the myriad forms of reciprocal influence, discussions and argu-
ments that inspired, influenced or disturbed them.
Hirschel’s written legacy may not be as grandiose or as well received as
figures such as Saul Ascher or Mendelssohn. Hirschel in the role of “out-
sider,” however, does offer a unique insight into the mind of a radically
independent Jew.
Hirschel attacked the given political and social order in which Jewish
Breslavians were living. His intellectual lifeworld was fed by the then novel
forum of published debate. In his time, the supranational “Republic of
Letters” began to establish itself as the preferred medium for social, politi-
cal and cultural discourse. Habermas agreed on the significance of the
emergence and influence of this new critical “public sphere” across Europe
in the eighteenth century.106
105
Gunnar Och, “Jüdische Schriftsteller im Breslau des späten 18. Jahrhunderts,” in
Breslau zu Hause? Juden in einer mitteleuropäischen Metropole der Neuzeit, ed. Manfred
Hettling, Andreas Reinke and Norbert Conrads (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 2003), 73.
106
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1989 [1962]).
32 D. HEYWOOD JONES
More specifically to Hirschel’s own region, the emergence of this new

“public sphere” brought with it a new type of intellectual and a completely
new forum for the dissemination of ideas and historical knowledge. Iwan-
Michelangelo D’Aprile has argued that an effective new critical “public
sphere” emerges in the German-speaking lands around 1800. His work
shows how “Volksaufklärer” later became the critical journalists and histo-
rians of the nineteenth century.107 D’Aprile is implying that the
Volksaufklärer were the harbingers of change. The last decades of the eigh-
teenth century also saw the emergence of a Jewish public sphere and a
Jewish Republic of Letters in Prussia. This new Jewish forum was popu-
lated by intellectuals, scholars, teachers and learned business people. In
short, the same socio-demographic class or estate [Stand] populating the
non-Jewish European public sphere. By its very nature, the Republic of
Letters was non-denominational. Therefore, intellectual Jews and non-
Jews were part of the same emergent phenomenon.
Ready access to the new production centres of mass media changed the
outlook of those who are taking part in these debates—as consumers,
producers or publishers. Bronfen and Marius also made the connection
between cultural discourse, identity and the impact of the instruments of
mass media. They define culture as a place of conflict between representa-
tions of the world, the subject, history and so on. Therefore “political and
collective identity are not pre-established givens, but discursive events.”108
In describing the relationship between political and collective subjects,
they define “hybridity” as everything which
denotes a mix of traditional elements and chains of significants connected to

different discourses and technologies which arise as a result of collage or
sampling. A national identity can form one part among many others within
such forms of hybridised culture. The change in the forms of dominant mass
media and reproduction technology were the decisive reason [for
this change].109
107
Iwan-Michelangelo D’Aprile, Die Erfindung der Zeitgeschichte (Berlin: Akademie
Verlag, 2013), esp. 15–34.
108
Elisabeth Bronfen and Benjamin Marius “Hybride Kulturen,” in Hybride Kulturen, ed.
Elisabeth Bronfen, Benjamin Marius and Therese Steffen (Tübingen: Stauffenburg,
1997), 11.
109
Bronfen and Marius, “Hybride Kulturen,” 14.
To show Hirschel as an example of a consummate Jewish enlightener

consciously and actively maintaining and deploying various identities, we
will look a number of his texts and the contexts in which they appeared.
The later chapters will employ a critical approach to cultural exchange
in order to show both how hybridised some Jews’ identities in the eigh-
teenth century had already become whilst demonstrating just how inter-
woven Jewish-German and German history is. Critical approaches to
cultural exchange
concentrate on the relationships between individuals and the institutions

that dominate their lives and that set the borders and limits of interaction
and acceptability. Sometimes these are relationships of relatively comfort-
able accommodation, while at other times, individuals resist or attempt to
subvert the limitations of the cultural situation imposed by the institutions
that dominate their worlds.110
But why should we listen to Hirschel the outsider, or Hirschel the Jew,
or Hirschel the enlightener at all? Frank Stern has written one of the few
German-language monographs on Jewish-German history to employ
a socio-cultural analysis of Jewish-German culture. He argues that if
Jewish-German culture is to be accurately represented, one must listen to
the voices and stories of individual Jewish-Germans. He also urges us to
look at the contexts in which they lived. He writes, and it is worth quoting
at length,
For the most part, the topic of Jews in Germany is treated in academic pub-
lications as political history, as a history of religion or suffering or as part of
the history of anti-Semitism and disastrous German nationalism. There is
often a division between Jewish history and culture on the one side and
German History and culture on the other. Whereas, in fact, a key marker of
the German-Jewish experience is its cultural, religious, societal, economic
and artistic interrelations which have been embedded in the political and
social development of Europe since antiquity.111
The work will not look at this specific epoch of Jewish-German history
using a figure who belonged to a minority at the edge of society, nor shall
110
James P. Helfers, Multicultural Europe and Cultural Exchange in the Middle Ages and
Renaissance (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 2.
111
F. Stern, Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht, 14–15.
34 D. HEYWOOD JONES
it discuss this subject’s contribution to German history.112 Jewish-German

culture and history are an integral part of German, ergo European, culture
and history. Their history is not a history of “success or alternatively of
downfall, but as convergence, exchange, common cultural experience and
[common] identity evolution.” At the centre of this process are “the
German-Jewish voices themselves.”113
The following chapters will reflect the aforementioned discussion
and resist the temptation to weave a singular historical thread throughout
my discussion of Hirschel and the times he lived. It is up to the readers
themselves to piece together the primary source material and come to
their own conclusions about Moses Hirschel, their understanding of
European Jewish history or of the Haskalah.
112
Lowenstein argues the word “contribution” [Beitrag] implies Jews made conscious
efforts to contribute to a German majority culture, whereas most contributions had no
Jewish content and came from individuals and not the collective. Steven M. Lowenstein:
“Der jüdischen Anteile an der deutschen Kultur,” in Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte in der
Neuzeit, vol. 3, ed. Steven M. Lowenstein et al. (München: C.H. Beck, 1997), 303.
113
F. Stern, Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht, 16.
CHAPTER 3
Socio-Ethnic History of Breslau
History of Breslau, 1740–1818

Shortly before Hirschel was born, Breslau’s overlords were deposed dur-
ing the War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748). The once Catholic over-
seers of this mostly Protestant city had exchanged places with the Protestant
kings of Prussia’s relatively young Hohenzollern dynasty. Breslau was once
again in a process of major change as its administrative, fiscal, sectarian and
military structures were adapting to Prussian rule. Under Frederick II,
Prussia increased efforts to centralise and bureaucratise power within the
realm. The status and legal position of the Jews in Breslau and Lower
Silesia also underwent dramatic change. In short, Hirschel was born into
a city that was still adapting to massive administrative, institutional, cul-
tural and religious changes. It would not be until after the Seven Years’
War in 1763, when Hirschel was just nine, that Prussia finally sealed the
borders of Lower Silesia to Hapsburgian claims.
If the mutability of institutions and belief systems is one of the key
insights of Late Enlightenment thought, the milieus surrounding Moses
Hirschel were composites of agents working together to propagate a par-
ticular agenda or direction for society. According to Berger and Luckman,
“despite the objectivity that marks the social world in human experience,
it does not thereby acquire an ontological status apart from the human

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46235-2_3
36 D. HEYWOOD JONES
activity that produced it.”1 The objective environment was therefore a

holistic consequence of individuals’ actions working together with others
or acting as—objective environments are never static.
The madness of the Second World War has meant that the once thriving
Germanic city of Breslau has been largely forgotten, particularly for
English speakers. And yet, just 100 years ago, Breslau formed an intrinsic
part of Wilhelmine Germany. Affectionally known as Prussia’s Arcadia,
Breslau was one of the three royal or Residenz cities—along with Berlin
and Königsberg—and one of the three most populous cities in Prussia and
later Germany.2 The idea that Breslau would become part of an indepen-
dent Poland, devoid of almost all of its German-speaking population,
would have been unthinkable in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Breslau (1740–1786)
Taking advantage of the ascension of a female to the Austrian throne, the
newly crowned king Frederick II quickly invaded Silesia. His army stood
before the gates of Breslau on 31 December 1740. Some eight peaceful
months later, Prussian troops finally entered the city proper and intro-
duced Prussian law. It took a further 23 years and three wars for the
annexation to be finalised.
After the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763—French and Indian War
in North America—Breslau had 44,000 residents, 4000 less than in 1741.3
Around 50,000 Silesians had been killed in the war.4 After the war, Silesia
still remained Prussia’s richest province and its annexation increased the
Prussian population by some 50%—1,160,000 new Prussian subjects in
1740. According to Kaufhold, Silesia was soon paying more taxes than all
of the other Prussian provinces due to “its size, resources, and the level of
economic development.”5 The annexation of Silesia raised Prussia’s
geo-political as well as economic profile in Europe during the 1740s. At
1
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City:
Doubleday, 1967), 61.
2
Hans-Dieter Rutsch, Das preussische Arkadien: Schlesien und die Deutschen (Rowohlt:
Berlin, 2014).
3
Kulak, Breslau, 148.
4
Patrick J Speelman, “Father of the Modern Age,” in The Seven Years’ War: Global Views,
ed. Mark H. Danley and Patrick J. Speelman (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 525.
5
Karl H. Kaufhold, “Friederizianische Agrar-, Siedlungs- und Bauernpolitik,” in
Kontinuität und Wandel, ed. Peter Baumgart (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1990), 180.
3 SOCIO-ETHNIC HISTORY OF BRESLAU 37
the time, Frederick II referred to Breslau as the “Pearl in the Prussian

Crown.”6
The annexation, however, did not come without huge administrative
changes as the new absolutist, centralising and bureaucratised regime got
to grips with a province largely overseen by medieval governing structures.
Johnson explains,
The new province differed considerably from the rest of the Prussian realm.
Legally, Silesia was divided into two feudal holdings, part belonging to the
sovereign and part belonging to the Roman Catholic Church. Every inhab-
itant occupied some feudal position beneath the secular or ecclesiastical
overlord. Some cities were still under the feudal control of the lay and eccle-
siastical vassals (Mediat cities) while others remained directly under the
Austrian (later the Prussian) bureaucracy (“excise” cities). The great vassals
of the province were either important abbots, bishops, or landed aristocrats.
These Grundherren were intermediaries between the sovereign and the feu-
dal structure....In Breslau, a Mediat city, the leading members of the wool
merchants’ guild and other guilds dominated municipal administration and
local trade commissions.7
The introduction of Prussian state absolutism to what was Prussia’s first

Mediat city meant that the City Council [Stadtrat] lost the autonomy it
had held since 1287.8 The council was renamed the Magistrat and was
subordinated to the Breslauischen Kriegs- und Domänenkammer. This
Breslau War and Domains Chamber was also the department directly
responsible for all Jewish affairs until 1806.9
The members of the Magistrat quickly changed from local merchants
and tradespeople to mostly retired officers and bureaucrats from Berlin
and Brandenburg.10 The Prussians also rapidly introduced censorship laws
to proscribe all publications that did not support the new rulers. Johann
Jakob Korn became the only person granted “newspaper privileges.” On
3 January 1742, the first edition of the Schlesischen Privilegierte Staats-,
6
Eduard Mühle, Breslau: Geschichte einer europäischen Metropole (Köln: Böhlau Verlag,
2015), 166.
7
Hubert C. Johnson, Frederick the Great and his Officials (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,
1975), 145.
8
Mühle, Breslau, 59.
9
10
38 D. HEYWOOD JONES
Kriegs-, und Friedenszeitung (published until 1944 as the Schlesische

Zeitung) left Korn’s printing presses.11
New taxes and duties on goods and services created massive inflation
which quickly helped turn parts of the populace against the new Prussian
overlords.12 One of Frederick’s innovations was to scrap the Byzantine
web of taxation and tax classes the Hapsburgs had applied across Silesia.
He introduced a basic tax rates across all classes and estates (i.e. nobility
28%; farmers 34%)13 on their income or capital. Contrary to many German
historians’ enthusiasm for Frederick II’s annexation of Silesia, Frederick
actually payed little attention to the de facto trade realities of his distant
provinces. As Mühle argues, the Prussian authorities raison d’état was not
to help its far off provinces to grow, but to strengthen the whole of
Prussia’s “defensive capabilities, the centralisation of the state’s bureau-
cracy, effective tax collection, and the modernisation of industry and
agriculture.”14 Kaufhold also agrees, arguing that although Frederick II
modernised much in the province during his reign, his policy of helping
the older Prussian regions created economic stagnation in Silesia.15 More
often than not, Frederick II’s fiats favoured trading and manufacturing
interests from Berlin and parts of Brandenburg and Pomerania to those of
East Prussia and Silesia. For example, Frederick II imposed high-tariffs on
the transit trade between Poland and Saxony which led Saxony to stop
importing surplus Silesian wool and for Polish traders to circumvent Silesia
and find other means to move their cattle through Central Europe.16
Frederick II also did little to help Breslau when the Hapsburg Empire
imposed a trade embargo on all goods from Silesia after the annexation.
This embargo effectively cut-off Breslau from access to its most profitable
markets between Vienna to Galicia.17 Moreover, in efforts to further pro-
tect trade in the Mark, Frederick II refused Breslau’s requests to grow its
11
Kulak, Breslau, 152.
12
For example, the price of beer went up by 25%, see Kulak, Breslau, 151.
13
Peter Baumgart, “Schlesien als eigenständige Provinz im altpreußischen Staat:
(1740–1806),” in Schlesien, ed. Norbert Conrads (Berlin: Siedler, 2002), 361.
14
15
For detailed look at Frederick’s unfortunate economic and trade policy making in Silesia,
see Kaufhold, “Friederizianische Agrar-, Siedlungs- und Bauernpolitik,” 172–80.
16
See Johnson, Frederick the Great and his Officials, 148.
17
Rainer Sachs, “Lokalen Ursachen und Anlässe des Aufstands,” in Der Breslauer
Gesellenaufstand von 1793, ed. Arno Herzig und Rainer Sachs (Göttingen: Otto Schwartz,
1987), 27.
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Ik heb geen leer, ik heb geen smeer,
Ik heb geen pik
Aurik-kik-kik-kik.
Met deze laatste woorden wordt het rikkikken der padden

aangeduid.
In W. G. Kern en W. Willms, Ostfriesland wie es denkt und spricht

(Norden, 1869) kan men nader bescheid vinden aangaande de
Oost-Friesche spotnamen.
Dat men verder oostwaarts in Duitschland, onder anderen in

Mecklenburg, de spotnamen ook kent, leert het Korrespondenzblatt
des Vereins für Niederdeutsche Sprachforschung, deel VIII,
bladzijde 47.
Van Groningerland zuidwaarts gaande, vinden we in Drente, waar

het Sassische bloed (de eigenaardige levensuitingen van den
Sassischen volksstam) bij de landzaten zich sterker doet gelden dan
het Friesche, de spotnamen weêr weinig bekend en weinig in
gebruik. Geheel het zelfde is het geval in Overijssel [59]en in
Gelderland. Met uitzondering van de S t e u r v a n g e r s van
Kampen en de B l a u w v i n g e r s van Zwolle, die over geheel
Noord-Nederland bekend zijn, komen de weinige Drentsche,
Overijsselsche en Geldersche spotnamen schier niet in aanmerking
bij de overtalrijke spotnamen in de Friesche en Frankische
gewesten.
Mij zijn bekend de M u g g e s p u i t e r s (of bij verkorting de

M u g g e n ) en de K l o e t e n van Meppel, de K n o l l e n van
Grolloo, de M o e s h a p p e r s van Anderen, de K o e k o e k e n van
Elp.—Een groote dichte muggezwerm omzweefde de spits van den
toren te Meppel; de burgers dachten dat het rook was, en, gedachtig
aan het spreekwoord „waar rook is, daar is vuur”, liepen ze te hoop,
haalden de brandspuit, en begonnen den vermeenden torenbrand te
blusschen. Die Meppelsche M u g g e s p u i t e r s vinden hun weêrga
in de M a n e b l u s s c h e r s van Mechelen. De andere spotnaam
van de Meppelders, K l o e t e n , hebben ze te danken aan de groote
kluiten boter, die in hunne stad door de boeren uit den omtrek, nog
tot in de tweede helft dezer eeuw, ter markt werden gebracht, en die
hoofdzakelijk hunnen weg naar Amsterdam vonden, waar ze, in den
tijd vóór de hedendaagsche boter- en kunstboter-fabrieken, onder
den naam van „Meppelder Kluiten” veelvuldig aan de kleine burgerij
gesleten werden, wijl de Drentsche boter goedkooper was dan de
Friesche en Hollandsche. Kloete is de Drentsche uitspraak van het
woord kluit.
In Overijssel ken ik de B l a u w v i n g e r s van Zwolle, de Kamper

S t e u r e n , de B r ĳ h a p p e r s van Blankenham, de K a t t e n van
Blokzijl, de R u d e k i k k e r s en de R u u s v o r e n s van
Genemuiden, de K r o g g e n van de Kuinder, de B l e i e n of
B l e i s t e e r t e n van Zwartsluis, de W i n d m a k e r s van
Hengeloo, de K w e k k e s c h u d d e r s van Delden, de
G r u p p e n d r i e t e r s van Oldenzaal, de M e e l v r e t e r s van
Borne, de S t o k v i s s c h e n , P o e p e n of G e u t e n d r i e t e r s
van Deventer.
Te Zwolle viel ten jare 1682 de toren van Sint-Michiel’s kerk in, en
werd niet weêr opgebouwd. Het klokkenspel dat in dien toren hing,
werd aan Amsterdammers verkocht, die den aanmerkelijken prijs
daarvan in louter dubbeltjes betaalden. De Zwollenaars hadden
dagen lang werk (zoo luidt de overlevering) om al die dubbeltjes uit
te tellen, om te zien of ze den vollen [60]koopprijs wel ontvangen
hadden. Ze vergisten en vertelden zich telkens, en dan moesten ze
weêr van voren af aan beginnen. Van al dit dubbeltjes tellen kregen
ze blauwe vingers. Die nu nog eenen Zwollenaar wil plagen, neemt
diens hand en beziet nauwkeurig de vingers. In den regel krijgt hij
dan onmiddellijk met de andere hand van den Zwollenaar een peuter
om de ooren.
De Kampenaars vingen oudtijds in hunne rivier eens eenen

bijzonder grooten steur. Wijl ze toch eenigen tijd later een gastmaal
wilden aanrichten, en alsdan dien visch zoo goed gebruiken konden,
werden ze te rade hem voorloopig nog wat te laten zwemmen, tot tijd
en wijle ze hem van noode zouden hebben. Maar om den steur dan
te beter weêrom te kunnen vinden en vangen, bonden ze hem een
bandje met een belletje om den hals, en zóó ging de visch weêr den
IJssel in. Men zegt dat een echte Kampenaar, als hij over de
IJsselbrug gaat, nog heden altijd in ’t water tuurt, of de steur er soms
ook nog is. „Je kunt toch maar nooit weten!”—De inwoners van het
stadje Lünen bij Dortmund in Westfalen deelen met de Kampenaars
de eer S t ö r e n (Steuren) genoemd te worden. Waarom, weet ik
niet.—De spotnaam der ingezetenen van Oldenzaal is hier boven op
bladz. 8 reeds verklaard geworden. En die nu den Oldenzaalschen
spotnaam verstaat, begrijpt ook al gemakkelijk wat die van Deventer
(de derde van de drie vermelde namen) beteekent.
De Geldersche spotnamen, weinig in getal, zijn de volgenden:

K n o t s e n d r a g e r s van Nijmegen, M e t w o r s t e n van Zutfen,
K o o l h a z e n van Lochem, M o s t e r d p o t t e n van Doesburg,
V l e e s c h e t e r s van Driel, P e p e r n o t e n van Elburg,
B o k k i n g k o p p e n van Harderwijk, H a n e k n i p p e r s van
Enspijk, K n u t t e n en H u i b a s t e n van Nunspeet, H e u g t e r s
van Uddel, K r a a i e n van Haaften en K l a d d e n van Ek en van
Ingen.
De ingezetenen van Harderwijk hebben hunnen spotnaam te danken
aan de bokkingnering (haringvisscherij, bokkinghangen en handel)
die er veelvuldig wordt uitgeoefend, en die aan de stad zekere
vermaardheid gegeven heeft. Oudtijds toen Harderwijk ook nog eene
hoogeschool rijk wan, werd er wel gefluisterd [61]dat men daar voor
geld kon verkrijgen, wat slechts door ingespannen studie
verkrijgbaar moest wezen. Hierdoor kwam het rijmke in zwang, dat
de kenmerkende bijzonderheden van Harderwijk weêrgaf in deze
woorden:
Harderwijk is een stad van negotie,

Men verkoopt er bokking en bullen van promotie.
Wat men onder de H u i b a s t e n van Nunspeet te verstaan hebbe,

zal wel niet iedereen terstond vatten. H u i b a s t e n zijn lieden die
(om het eens in de onbeschaafdste volksspreektaal te zeggen) veel
hui in hun bast (lichaam) zuipen; met andere woorden: die veel wei
drinken.
Zijn de spotnamen in het algemeen van oude dagteekening,

sommigen reeds uit de middeleeuwen afkomstig, en al komt het
zelden of nooit meer voor, dat nog hedendaags zulke namen
ontstaan en in gebruik genomen worden, toch is mij een voorbeeld
hiervan bekend. H a n e k n i p p e r s , de spotnaam der Enspijkers, is
eerst eene kwart-eeuw oud. In De Navorscher, jaargang XXVI,
bladzijde 264 schrijft J. Anspach dienaangaande: „Toen de
nieuwsbladen in ons vaderland gewaagden van de toebereidselen,
welke in de steden en ten platten lande gemaakt werden om, ieder in
zijnen trant, het kroningsfeest van onzen geëerbiedigden koning, 12
Mei 1874, waardig te vieren, werden in een artikel der Tielsche
Courant de inwoners van Enspijk als E n s p i k s c h e
H a n e n k n i p p e r s begroet, dewijl uit dit dorp in den Tielerwaard
een stem was opgegaan, die, tot opluistering der feestelijkheid,
hanen tegen elkander in ’t strijdperk wenschte te doen treden, nadat
men dit fiere pluimgedierte van zijn vederbos zou hebben ontdaan.
Uit dit voorbeeld ziet men, hoe toevallig en op wat kinderachtige
manier dergelijke spotnamen soms ontstaan.”
Tegenover den nieuwen naam van de Enspijkers staat de oude

spotnaam die aan de ingezetenen van Driel eigen is. Immers deze
naam, V l e e s c h e t e r s , dankt zijnen oorsprong aan de
omstandigheid dat de inwoners van Driel in de middeleeuwen eenen
zoogenoemden vleesch- en boterbrief hadden, eene kerkelijke
vergunning, waarbij hen werd toegestaan om ook in den vastentijd
zuivel- en vleeschspijzen te mogen gebruiken. Zie [62]hierover Kist,
Kerkelijk Archief, I, 176 en III, 469, en Buddingh, Het dorp Driel, in
den Gelderschen Volks-Almanak voor 1869.
De provincie Utrecht, tusschen Gelderland en Holland ingesloten,

maakt door haar tweeslachtig wezen op volkenkundig- en taalkundig
gebied den overgang uit van de oostelijke tot de westelijke gouwen
van ons land. En zoo mogen dan ook hier ter plaatse de spotnamen
van Utrecht genoemd worden, tusschen die van Gelderland en
Holland in. Naar mijn beste weten zijn het maar drie; te weten de
K e i s l e p e r s of K e i t r e k k e r s van Amersfoort, de
A p e l u i d e r s van IJsselstein en de B e r e n s c h i e t e r s van
Benschop. Immers „S i n t - M a a r t e n s - m a n n e n ”, zoo als men
oudtijds de inwoners van Utrecht, en ook de landzaten van het Sticht
wel noemde, maakt geen spot- of bijnaam uit; veeleer een
eerenaam.
De burgers van Amersfoort vonden eens op een heideveld, nabij

hunne stad, eenen zeer grooten keisteen, als een rotsblok. Zij
ontgroeven dien steen, en sleepten en trokken hem met veel ophef
en met groote moeite triomfantelijk naar hunne stad, waar zij hem,
als eene groote zeldzaamheid, op de Varkenmarkt ten toon stelden
en voor ’t vervolg eene vaste plaats gaven. Dit is waar gebeurd, ten
jare 1661.—En die van IJsselstein luidden eens, bij vergissing, de
doodsklok voor eenen dooden aap. Men vindt beide deze voorvallen
vermeld en uitvoerig beschreven met naam en toenaam; het eerste
in een opstel Dool om Berg in het tijdschrift Eigen Haard, jaargang
1896, bladzijde 618; het laatste in het Bijblad van De Navorscher,
jaargang IV, bladzijde XXXVIII.
Thans van ons punt van uitgang, Friesland, ons westwaarts

wendende over het Flie, naar ’t aloude Friesland bewesten Flie,
tegenwoordig Noord-Holland genoemd, vinden we ook in die gouw,
waar de bevolking in hoofdzaak zuiver Friesch, ten deele ook Friso-
frankisch van oorsprong is, de spotnamen weêr talrijk
vertegenwoordigd. Bijzonder in oudheid- of geschiedkundig opzicht,
of bijzonder uit het oogpunt der beschavingsgeschiedenis zijn de
West-Friesche spotnamen echter weinig of niet. Integendeel, het
grootste deel dier namen is nuchteren, alledaagsch, plat. [63]
Mij zijn de volgenden bekend: K w a l l e n van Texel,

T r a a n b o k k e n van de Helder, K r a a i e n van het Nieuwe-Diep,
R o o d j e s van Schagen, T u l e n , S c h a p e n (Skepen) en
B i g g e n van Wieringen, S p r e e u w e n van Winkel, R a t t e n van
Kolhorn, Z a n d p i s s e r s en S t r o o b o s s e n van de Zijp,
D o d d e n of D o t t e n (jonge spreeuwen) van Niedorp, B l a u w e
R e i g e r s van Heer-Hugo-waard, M o p p e n van Medemblik,
V ĳ g e n van Enkhuizen, K r e n t e b o l l e n , K r e n t e k o p p e n ,
W o r t e l e n en D u i v e l d r a g e r s van Hoorn, T u r k e n van
Opperdoes, G l a d o o r e n van Twisk; S p e e l m a k k e r s van
Benningbroek, B l o o t e b e e n e n en D u i v e l s h o o p e n van
Aartswoud, B o o n e n van Blokker, T h e e k i s t e n van
Binnewijzend, U i l e n van Lutjebroek, A a r d a p p e l s van Nieuw-
Bokswoud, S c h o k k e n van Hauwert, B l e i e n van Oostwoud,
G o r t z a k k e n en G o r t b u i k e n , ook K e t e l k r u i p e r s en
S t e e n e k w a k k e r s van Alkmaar, K o o l s t r u i k e n van
Langedijk, W r o e t e r s of M o l l e n van Schermerhorn, K n o o r t ,
S n i r t en S n o e k e n van de Rijp, W a t e r r o t t e n van Akersloot,
L o m p e r t s van Barsingerhorn, M o p p e n van de Beemster,
V i s c h t e v e n van Egmond aan Zee, K r a a i e n van de Graft,
G o r t b u i k e n van Graftdijk, W i l d j e s van Groot-Schermer,
R a p e n p l u k k e r s van Heiloo, K o e k e t e r s van Uitgeest,
L a n g s l a p e r s van Ursem, M u s s c h e n van Edam,
M o n n i k e n t r o e t e r s van Monnikendam, B e r e n van Warder,
P l a t p o o t e n van Purmerland, B o o n p e u l e n van den Ilp,
K o e k e t e r s en G a l g e z a g e r s van Zaandam,
K r e n t e k a k k e r s van Zaandijk, K r o o s d u i k e r s van Westzaan
en Landsmeer, E e n d e p u l l e n , K o o l e t e r s , K o o l h a n e n
en K o o l p i k k e r s (ook V o l k v a n K l a a s K o m p a a n ) van
Oostzaan, M o p p e n , O o r e b ĳ t e r s en U i l e n van Jisp,
K o e k e t e r s en Z e u r o o r e n van Koog aan de Zaan,
K o e k e t e r s en G u i t e n van Krommenie, B o o n p e u l e n ,
S t e e n e g o o i e r s en U i l e n van Wormer, G l a d o o r e n van
Wormerveer, V i n k e n van Broek in Waterland, K i p l a n d e r s ,
G o r t l a n d e r s en S p a n j a a r d e n van Assendelft,
K l a p b e s s e n van de Beverwijk, M u g g e n van Haarlem,
K o e k e t e r s van Amsterdam, en K a l v e n van Naarden.
Men zegt dat er onder de ingezetenen van Schagen steeds velen

zijn met hoogblond, naar ’t rosse zweemend hoofdhaar, [64]en dat zij
daarvan hunnen spotnaam R o o d j e s hebben verkregen. Zoo dit
eerste waar is, dan zoude deze schoone Oud-Germaansche
hoofdtooi tot een bewijs te meer verstrekken, dat de Schagers echte
Friezen zijn—’t welk trouwens ook zonder tegenspraak is.
Waarom die van Schermerhorn M o l l e n en W r o e t e r s heeten,
en die van Alkmaar G o r t z a k k e n en G o r t b u i k e n , is op
bladzijde 6 reeds medegedeeld.
De naam K o o l s t r u i k e n van den Langendijk vindt zijne gereede

verklaring hierin, dat in de vier dorpen die deze landstreek
Langendijk samenstellen, de teelt van allerlei soorten van kool de
hoofdbron van bestaan voor de ingezetenen is.
De naam van de V i s c h t e v e n van Egmond aan Zee is, even als

die van de Ts j o e n s t e r s van Molkwerum, uit den aard der zaak
en uit den aard van het woord, slechts toepasselijk op de vrouwen
van dat dorp (tot voor korten tijd nog een visschersdorp in de rechte
beteekenis des woords—thans echter niet meer.) De Egmonder
mannen, even als de Molkwerumer mannen, blijven in deze buiten
schot.
De naam van de W i l d j e s van Groot Schermer is reeds zeer oud,

en is ook zeer eigenaardig, in zoo verre dat de Groot-Schermers
zelven dezen hunnen bijnaam volstrekt niet beleedigend achten te
zijn. Zij winden zich namelijk licht op met kermishouden en andere
feestelijke gelegenheden, en dan komt het wel voor, dat ze zich
inderdaad als wilden gedragen. Reeds Leeghwater, in zijn Cleyn
Cronykxken (eerste helft der jaren 1600), zegt van hen: „De huys-
luyden van Schermer waren in mijn jonckheydt, doen ik daer eerst
ghetrouwd was, wat rouw van manieren en seden: dewelcke nu
mede al seer betemt ende manierigh zijn.” Volkomen „betemt” zijn ze
echter ook thans nog niet. Immers voor en na heeten ze W i l d j e s .
Ook de naam der K o o l e t e r s van Oostzaan dagteekent reeds van

den ouden tijd. De Zaansche geschiedschrijver Soeteboom zegt er
van in zijn werk De Nederlandsche Beroerten (Amsterdam, 1679): „’t
Oostzaner Wapen plagt eertijds (so men segt) een Buyssekool te
wesen, so ’t schijnt ontsprongen uyt de menigvuldigheyt der Kolen,
die men aldaer plagt te telen en te eten, so dat se de name voerden
van Kool-hanen en Kool-eters.” Soeteboom spreekt hier in den
verleden tijd („so dat se de name [65]voerden”); ondertusschen
voeren de Oostzaners dien naam nog heden, ruim twee eeuwen
later. Zulk een taai leven hebben die spotnamen; ze gaan eeuwen
lang, van geslacht op geslacht over. De andere spotnaam der
Oostzaners, V o l k v a n K l a a s K o m p a a n , hebben ze volgens
Dr. G. J. Boekenoogen, De Zaansche Volkstaal (Leiden, 1897) te
danken aan hunnen ouden dorpsgenoot „den beruchten Oostzaner
kaper Claes Gerritsz Compaen (geboren 1587, gestorven na 1655),
die, na jaren lang de zee onveilig te hebben gemaakt, door den
Stadhouder werd begenadigd, en in zijne geboorteplaats zijn leven
eindigde.”
De G a l g e z a g e r s van Zaandam ontleenen dezen hunnen naam

almede aan een geschiedkundig voorval. Volgens Boekenoogen (in
zijn bovengenoemd werk) „ligt de oorsprong van dezen naam in het
omzagen van de galg, waaraan de schuldigen van het Zaandammer
turfoproer (Mei 1678) hingen. Dit feit geschiedde in den nacht van 18
op 19 Augustus, 1678.”
De naam K o e k e t e r s van de Amsterdammers is al zeer oud. De

bekende, in der daad ook bestaande voorliefde der Friezen voor
alles wat zoet van smaak is (zie bl. 20) in aanmerking genomen, zoo
is deze Amsterdamsche spotnaam al mede een bewijs dat de oude
burgerij van Amsterdam, in de 16de eeuw, wier voorouders in de
middeleeuwen reeds als visschers bij den Dam in den Amstel
gezeten waren, tot den Frieschen volksstam behoorde. Trouwens,
ook uit de spreektaal der Oud-Amsterdammers, gelijk die ons door
Gerbrand Adriaensen Brederode is overgeleverd, en zelfs nog
uit de spreektaal der hedendaagsche oud-ingezetenen der Noord-
Nederlandsche hoofdstad—vooral in sommige bijzondere buurten en
wijken—blijkt dit ruimschoots.
Dat de smaak in zoetigheid, dat het koek-eten, als een teeken van
den Frieschen oorsprong der bevolking, niet enkel tot Amsterdam
beperkt is, maar zich over het geheele Westfriesche Noord-Holland
uitstrekt, blijkt uit den spotnaam K o e k e t e r s , dien evenzeer de
Zaandammers, die van de Koog, van Krommenie en die van
Uitgeest dragen. Ook de M o p p e n van Medemblik, van Hoorn, van
de Kreil, van de Beemster en van Jisp geven getuigenis in deze
zaak. [66]
In Zuid-Holland, waar het Frankische bloed, bij de oude landzaten

weêr langzamerhand, hoe verder zuidwaarts hoe meer, de overhand
verkrijgt over het Friesche—in Zuid-Holland zijn de spotnamen ook
weêr minder vertegenwoordigd. Men zoude anders wel meenen dat,
waar de bevolking van menige plaats, van Noordwijk, Katwijk en
Scheveningen, van Vlaardingen en Maassluis, van Dordrecht, enz.
zoo opmerkelijk bijzondere eigenaardigheden bezit op volk- en
taalkundig gebied, dat daar de spotlust van anders geaarde buren
zich wel zoude moeten laten gelden.
Mij zijn de volgende Zuid-Hollandsche spotnamen bekend:

H a n g k o u s e n van Hillegom, P u i e r a a r s , B l a u w m u t s e n ,
H o n d e d o o d e r s en S l e u t e l d r a g e r s van Leiden,
O o i e v a a r s , W a t e r k ĳ k e r s en B l u f f e r s van ’s-
Gravenhage, K a l f s c h i e t e r s van Delft, G a p e r s van Gouda,
R a k k e r s van Gouderak, K l o k k e d i e v e n van Oudewater,
To o v e n a a r s van Schiedam, V l e e t van Vlaardingen,
K i e l s c h i e t e r s van Rotterdam, S c h a p e d i e v e n van
Dordrecht, Z e e l e p e r s en P u i e r s van den Briel, en B l i e k e n
van Gorinchem.
Den naderen en volledigen uitleg van deze spotnamen aan anderen

overlatende, wil ik er slechts als ter loops op wijzen, dat de
eerstvermelde spotnaam der Leidenaars (tevens de meest bekende
der vier vermelde), zijnen oorsprong vindt in hunne liefhebberij om in
de talrijke wateren die hunne stad omringen, op aal te peuren of te
puieren, dat is: op eene bijzondere wijze te visschen. En de
laatstvermelde spotnaam der Leidenaars oogt op de sleutels van
Sint-Pieter, die der stede wapenschild sieren. Ook de Hagenaars
hebben hunnen spotnaam aan hun wapenschild te danken (of te
wijten), ’t welk eenen ooievaar (dat is immers een „waterkijker”)
vertoont. Van den naamsoorsprong der K a l f s c h i e t e r s van Delft
leest men in De Navorscher, jaargang III, bladzijde 373, als volgt:
„Zoo was het ook in ’t jaar 1574, toen eenige Spanjaards een
aanslag op Delft hadden willen beproeven, maar tijdig ontdekt zijnde,
van onder de muren waren geweken, waarop hun, reeds lang buiten
schot gekomen, een hagelbui van kogels achterna gezonden werd.
Slechts een kalf dat in de wei liep, werd hierdoor getroffen, en men
maakte toen dit schimpdichtje: [67]
„De vrome Delvenaren

Die schoten een vet kalf.
Als zij verdrukket waren
Ten tijde van Duc d’Alf.”
De ingezetenen van Gouderak danken hunnen spotnaam aan eene

woordspeling met den naam van hun dorp: het Rak in de Gouwe. De
To o v e n a a r s van Schiedam, die zich nog het oude gezegde:
„Twintig van Schiedam, negentien kunnen tooveren”, moeten laten
welgevallen, maken de Hollandsche weêrga uit van de Friesche
Ts j o e n s t e r s van Molkwerum; evenals de Hollandsche
B l i e k e n van Gorinchem hunne tegenhangers vinden in de
Friesche B l e i e n van de Gaastmeer. Een bootje, dat omgekeerd,
met de kiel naar boven, midden in de Maas dreef, werd door de
Rotterdammers voor een’ walvisch gehouden, waar zij hunne
geweren op afvuurden. Van daar hun spot naam. De spotnamen der
ingezetenen van de aloude stedekens Brielle en Vlaardingen
schijnen mij toe ook oud van oorsprong en oud van vorm te zijn. Ik
kan ze niet verklaren. Misschien zijn de Brielsche P u i e r s ook
puieraars op aal, en waarschijnlijk hangt de naam der Vlaardingers
wel op de eene of andere wijze samen met hun visschersbedrijf.
De inwoners van onze drie zuidelijke gewesten, Zeeland, Noord-

Brabant en Limburg, zijn almede niet rijkelijk bedeeld met
spotnamen. Ik ken slechts de S c h a v o t b r a n d e r s en
M a a n b l u s s c h e r s van Middelburg, de F l e s s c h e d i e v e n
van Vlissingen, de G a n z e k o p p e n van ter Goes, de
K o e d i e v e n , S t e e n k o o p e r s en To r e n k r u i e r s van
Zierikzee, de A a r d a p p e l k a p p e r s van Axel, de
S t r o o p l i k k e r s van Zaamslag, de P e r e n van Cadzand, de
W i n d m a k e r s van Sluis. Dan de W i e l d r a a i e r s van Heusden,
de D u b b e l t j e s s n ĳ d e r s van Os, de B r ĳ b r o e k e n van
Werkendam, de M o s t e r d p o t t e n van Woudrichem, de
H o p b e l l e n van Schijndel, de K a a i e s c h ĳ t e r s van Uden, en
de P a p b u i k e n van Sint-Oeden-Rode. Eindelijk nog in Limburg de
R o g s t e k e r s van Weert en de W a n n e v l i e g e r s van Venloo,
K u u s j (Varkens) van Helden, en L a a m m e è k e r (Lammakers)
van Sittard. Aangaande de spotnamen der Venlooërs en der
Sittarders meldt het Limburgsche tijdschrift ’t Daghet in den Oosten,
[68](Jaargang IV, bladzijde 104) het volgende: „Een snaak uit Venloo
had doen uitroepen, dat hij met behulp van twee wannen, aan zijne
schouders bevestigd, zoude van den walmuur vliegen. Toen het volk
in menigte was verzameld, vroeg hij, of ze al ooit eenen mensch
hadden zien vliegen? Neen, riep het volk. Nu, dan zult ge het heden
ook niet zien, zei de snaak, en maakte zich uit de voeten, met de
voorop ingehaalde gelden. Van daar is de spotnaam aan de burgers
van Venloo gebleven.—Het is een L a m m a k e r , zegt men van die
van Sittard. Door lammaken verstaan de Sittarder burgers (en in ’t
algemeen alle Limburgers), zich op hunne manier ten koste van
anderen vermaken.”
De M a n e b l u s s c h e r s van Middelburg heeten zoo uit de zelfde

bekende oorzaak die ook den Mechelaars hunnen gelijken spotnaam
heeft gegeven; namelijk het schijnen van de maan op den torentop,
’t welk door de burgerij voor brand werd aangezien, en getracht werd
te blusschen. Even als te Franeker, te Leiden en elders het geval is,
zoo zijn ook uit de wapenschilden van Vlissingen, Goes en Heusden,
die met eene flesch, met eene gans, en met een wiel beladen zijn,
de spotnamen van de ingezetenen dier steden ontstaan.
Zonderling is de oorsprong van den spotnaam (P e r e n ) der

Cadzanders. Met de bekende boomvrucht heeft die naam niets te
maken. Te Cadzand spreekt men elkanderen veelvuldig aan
(tijdgenooten of evenouders namelijk, en die op vertrouwelijken,
vriendschappelijken voet met elkanderen omgaan) met de woorden
„Pere! m’n ouwen!” (Pere is hier het Fransche woord père, vader.)
Juist zoo spreken de Friezen, in de zelfde omstandigheden,
elkanderen onderling wel aan met ’t woord Heite. Dit is het Friesche
woord heit, vader. Zelfs knapen en jongelingen noemen elkanderen
wel Heite, b.v. Kom Heite! giest’ mei? Kom, mijn vriend! gaat gij
mede? Ook onder het volk aan de zeekust in Holland spreekt men
op die wijze; onder anderen te Zandvoort. Als jongeling te Haarlem
studeerende, liep ik daar menig maal over de Vischmarkt, zoowel
om de verschillende mooie visschen te zien, die daar uitgestald
waren, als om het ongekunstelde volksleven gade te slaan, en de
volkstaal te hooren spreken uit den mond der Zandvoorder
visscherliên en der Haarlemsche [69]burgerluidjes. Dan gebeurde het
wel, dat deze of gene Zandvoorder vischvrouw („Dirkie, Maintje of
Mæærtje”—ik kende ze al bij namen) mij toeriep: „Vædertje! mot je
gien moaie pooanen kooape?” of „Kaik’ris vædertje! watte grooate
pooanen!” Poonen toch, die schoone visschen, met hunne fraaie,
roode vinnen en groote als gepantserde koppen, trokken steeds
bijzonder mijne aandacht. Als ik dan glimlachte, omdat ik, de
achttien-jarige, als vædertje werd toegesproken, riep zoo’n vrouw
wel: „Kaik! de borst 13 lacht!” Opmerkelijk is het toch, dat het Friesche
heite, het Hollandsche vædertje en het Vlaamsche (eigenlijk
Fransche) père, zoo geheel in den zelfden zin bij drie verschillende
stammen van ons Nederlandsche volk in gebruik is.
Ook de vertrouwelijk vriendelijke aanspraak der Cadzanders

onderling, „m’n ouwen!” vindt in Friesland hare weêrga. Immers de
Friezen, en onder dezen de Dokkumers nog het meest, spreken
elkanderen wel toe met „âlde!” als ze hunne eigene taal, of met
„oude!” als ze de basterdtaal der stedelingen gebruiken—al zijn dan
spreker en toegesprokene ook jonge lieden, in ’t algemeen zonder
dat er op den leeftijd van den toegesprokene gelet wordt.
Heite! of Vædertje! of Pere, m’n ouwen! hoe vertrouwelijk en

vriendelijk, hoe echt volkseigen en volksaardig klinkt dat!
De ingezetenen van het Limburgsche stedeke Weert heeten

R o g s t e k e r s , en dit om nagenoeg de zelfde reden die den
Dokkumers hunnen spotnaam G a r n a t e n heeft bezorgd. Men
verhaalt namelijk dat er oudtijds eens eene vrachtkar, die onder
anderen ook met eene mand rog (zeevisch) beladen was, van
Antwerpen, over de heide bij Weert, naar Roermond reed. Bij
ongeluk gleed er een van die glibberige visschen uit de mand en van
de kar, en bleef, door den voerman onbemerkt, in het breede
wagenspoor op de zandige heide liggen. Korten tijd daarna kwam
een Weertenaar langs dien weg, en zag den rog. Nog nooit had hij
zulk een vervaarlijk schijnend schepsel gezien. Hij schrikte er van:
„wat is dat?” De zaak scheen hem lang niet pluis. Hij ijlde naar ’t
stadje terug, riep alle buren en vrienden [70]bij elkanderen, en na kort
beraad trok men met man en maag er op uit, onder zijn geleide,
heidewaarts, om het vreeselijke monster te zien. Naderbij gekomen
werden allen met ontzetting aangegrepen. Maar een paar van de
dapperste mannen schepten moed. Zij hadden in de gauwigheid
ieder eene spiets meêgenomen van het raadhuis, waar op den
zolder nog zulk middeleeuwsch wapentuig werd bewaard, en staken
nu, vol doodsverachting, hun verroest wapen in het lichaam van den
visch, dien ze, nadat ze zich van zijnen dood goed en wel overtuigd
hadden, als een oorlogsbuit in zegepraal mee terug namen naar hun
stadje. Sedert heeten die van Weert R o g s t e k e r s , en ze moeten
het zich te Eindhoven, te Roermond, te Hasselt, op straat of in de
herberg, of waar ze zich maar vertoonen, laten welgevallen dat de
lieden hun naroepen, uitjouwen, zingen:
De burgerij van Weert

Was van een dooden rog verveerd!
In Zuid-Nederland, waar we enkel de Vlaamsche, de Dietsche

gewesten in aanmerking nemen, zijn de spotnamen weer rijk
vertegenwoordigd. De levendige, opgewekte, luidruchtige
gemoedsaard, die den Vlaming en den Brabander bijzonder
onderscheidt van den Hollander en den Fries, heeft zekerlijk wel
aandeel aan den oorsprong en aan het voortbestaan dezer talrijke
spotnamen, die immers wel aanleiding geven tot scherts en
vroolijkheid, maar ook evenzeer wel tot twist en tweedracht, en bij de
onbeschaafden tot schelden, kijven, vechten.
Reeds vroeg hebben de Zuid-Nederlandsche spotnamen de

opmerkzaamheid getrokken. Omstreeks het midden der jaren 1500,
en zekerlijk veel vroeger ook, waren ze daar reeds algemeen
bekend en in gebruik; immers ten jare 1560 werden ze daar reeds
door eenen volksaardigen Vlaming verzameld en in verzen te zamen
gesteld. En nog in dezen onzen tijd werden de Zuid-Nederlandsche
spotnamen in de verschillende jaargangen van Ons Volksleven, een
Zuid-Nederlandsch tijdschrift, opgesomd, en in hunnen oorsprong en
hunne beteekenis nagespoord. Daarheen, en naar andere bronnen,
allen achter dit opstel vermeld, verwijs ik dan ook den lezer die er
meer van weten wil.
Over ’t algemeen genomen stemmen de Zuid-Nederlandsche

[71]spotnamen in al hunne bijzondere kenmerkende eigenschappen
geheel overeen met de Noord-Nederlandsche. Sommigen van deze
namen zijn aan beide landsdeelen gemeen—’t is te zeggen: ze zijn
zoowel eigen aan eene Noord- als aan eene Zuid-Nederlandsche
plaats. Dat zijn bij voorbeeld: de M u g g e b l u s s c h e r s van
Turnhout en van Peer, die overeenstemmen met de
M u g g e s p u i t e r s van Meppel, ook wat aangaat het verhaaltje,
dat den oorsprong van dezen naam vermeldt. Verder de
M a n e b l u s s c h e r s van Mechelen en die van Middelburg; de
W o r t e l s van Ninove en die van Hoorn; de To o v e n a a r s van
Schiedam, met de Ts j o e n s t e r s van Molkwerum en de
To o v e r h e k s e n van Onkerzeele; de T u r k e n van Glabbeek en
die van Opperdoes, enz.
In beide landsdeelen komen de spotnamen ook veelvuldig, ja zelfs in

den regel voor in de gewestelijke of plaatselijke volkseigene
spreektaal, en kunnen soms moeilijk in de algemeene boeketaal
worden omgezet. In al te platte, soms zelfs onkiesche namen staan
de zuidelijke gewesten ook niet boven de noordelijke:
A z ĳ n z e e k e r s van Temseke, O l i e z e e k e r s van Sint-Nicolaas,
S c h ĳ t e r s van Gierle en M o s t e r d s c h ĳ t e r s van Diest. Het
bedrijf dat hoofdzaak is of van ouds was in de eene of andere plaats
heeft ook in ’t Zuiden menigvuldige aanleiding gegeven tot het
ontstaan van spotnamen: W o l s p i n n e r s van Desschel,
B e s s e m b i n d e r s van Maxenzeele, Te g e l b a k k e r s van
Stekene, P e l s m a k e r s van Meenen, P o t a t e n b o e r e n van
Esschene, P l a t t e k è è s b o e r e n van Opdorp, S a a i w e v e r s
van Hondschoten, V i s s c h e r s van Mariakerke. En niet minder in ’t
Zuiden als in ’t Noorden de bijzondere liefhebberij in de eene of
andere spijze of lekkernij, aan de ingezetenen van deze of gene
plaats eigen. In deze zaak staan boven aan de K i e k e n v r e t e r s
van Brussel. Inderdaad is een Brusselsch feestmaal niet volledig, als
er geen gebraden „kieken” op tafel is, nog heden ten dage als van
ouds; geen Nederlandsche stad waar zoo vele kippen het leven
moeten laten, als Brussel. De Brusselaars worden in hunne
liefhebberij ter zijde gestaan door de K a p o e n e t e r s van
Meessen. Verder de P a s t e i - e t e r s van Kortrijk, de
S m e e r k o e k e t e r s van Moerbeke, de P a p e t e r s van
Denterghem, de S c h e e w e i - e t e r s [72]van Winkel-Sint-Kruis, de
G o r t e t e r s van Arendonk, en nog vele anderen. Ten slotte nog in
’t algemeen de E t e r s van Hingene, en de zeer bijzondere en
zonderlinge Z a n d e t e r s van Grimbergen. Dan komen ook nog in
’t algemeen de D r i n k e r s van St-Winoks-Bergen en de
R o o d b i e r d r i n k e r s van Harelbeke.
Zie hier eene lijst van de Zuid-Nederlandsche spotnamen, mij

bekend, en die allen in den tegenwoordigen tijd nog in zwang zijn.
S i n j o r e n van Antwerpen. In dezen naam schuilt nog eene

herinnering aan den Spaanschen tijd (16e eeuw), toen Antwerpen in
grooten bloei, in macht en rijkdom was—toen Spaansche zeden
daar „in de mode” waren (als ook elders in de zuidelijke Nederlanden
—men denke aan den bekenden Spaenschen Brabander) en de
aanzienlijke, voorname en rijke Antwerpenaren den Spaanschen titel
Senor droegen. De Antwerpsche S i n j o r e n zijn in aardige
tegenstelling met de H e e r e n van Gent, die, zoo als deze
benaming schijnt aan te duiden, volkseigener in hunne taal en zeden
gebleven waren dan de Antwerpsche heeren.
K i e k e n v r e t e r s van Brussel, op blz. 71 reeds besproken.
M a n e b l u s s c h e r s van Mechelen, ook reeds nader aangeduid
op bladz. 71. H e e r e n , en ook S t r o p p e d r a g e r s van Gent,
Zotten van Brugge, P e t e r m a n n e n en K o e i s c h i e t e r s van
Leuven. Dit zijn de bekendsten. Verder nog de S c h a p e k o p p e n
van Lier, de B r e k k e n van Beersel, de K o r t o o r e n van Rethy,
de K a r l e e s p o o r d e r s van West-Meerbeek, de
P o t e e r d d a b b e r s van Ramsel, de E t e r s van Hingene, de
K a t t e n en K n i k k e r s van Meerhout, de S o e p w e i k e r s van
Mol, de G o r t e t e r s , T j o k k e r s en P i n n e k e n m a k e r s van
Arendonk, de W o l s p i n n e r s van Desschel, de
J a n h a g e l m a n n e n van Poppel, de M u g g e b l u s s c h e r s van
Turnhout, de Pieren van Liezele, de K o u t e r m o l l e n van
Kieldrecht, de M e u t e s (dat zijn nuchteren kalven) van Breendonk,
de S t r o n t b o e r e n en M e s t b l u s s c h e r s van Hoboken, de
K r a a i e n van Tisselt, de G e i t e k o p p e n van Wilrijk, de
K r u i e r s van Balen, de B o s c h k r a b b e r s van Bornhem, de
S c h ĳ t e r s van Gierle, de K è è s k o p p e n (Kaaskoppen) van
Hove, de P e z e r i k k e n en M o e s z a k k e n van Loenhout, de
[73]K n e u t e r s van Meir, de J o d e n van Oost-Malle, de
K a b a l l e n van Ruisbroek, de G i p s h e e r e n van St. Amands, de
R a k k e r s van St. Anthonius, de S l ĳ k n e u z e n van Weert in
Klein-Brabant, de S m o u s e n van West-Malle, de
V a a r t k a p o e n e n van Willebroek, de S p e e l z a k k e n van
Hoogstraten, de S t r u i v e n , H a l f h o u t e n en
M a s t e n d o p p e n van Brecht, de P i e r e n van Halle, de
D r ĳ v e r s en K l u p p e l a a r s van Zoersel.
In Belgisch Limburg vinden we de To r e n b l u s s c h e r s van

Neerpelt, en de M u g g e b l u s s c h e r s van Peer.
In Zuid-Brabant nog: de E z e l s van Schaarbeek, de T u r k e n van

Glabbeek, de K w è k e r s van Tienen, de M o s t e r d s c h ĳ t e r s
van Diest, de B a r b a r e n en S t r o o b r a n d e r s van Sint-
Quintens-Lennik, de W a t e r h e e r e n van Zout-Leeuw, de
P o o t e n v r e t e r s van Haasrode, de S o e p z a k k e n van Hever,
de H e e r e n van Malderen, de K l o t b o e r e n van Steenuffel, de
B o s c h u i l e n van Dworp, de Te l l o o r l e k k e r s van Goyck, de
H o n d e k n a g e r s van Elsene, de B o t e r m e l k z a k k e n van
Etterbeek, de K o l e n k a p p e r s van Sint-Gilles bij Brussel, de
H e e r e n van Huisingen, de P o t a t e n b o e r e n van Esschene, de
Z o t t e n van Hekelghem, de H e e r e n van Meldert, de
B e s s e m b i n d e r s van Maxenzeele, de K o e i e n van Molhem,
de Z a n d e t e r s van Grimbergen.
Uit Oost-Vlaanderen zijn de H e e r e n van Gent, de M a k e l e t e r s

en K n a p t a n d e n van Dendermonde, de K a l e f a t e r s van
Baasrode, de B o s c h u i l e n van Buggenhout, de V i s s c h e r s
van Mariakerke, de P l a t t e k è è s b o e r e n van Opdorp, de
V a r i n k d o r s c h e r s van Baardeghem, de K l o k l a p p e r s van
Belcele, de W u i t e n s van Hamme, de K l o d d e m a n n e n en
S e r g i e w e v e r s van Zele, de W o r t e l s van Ninove, de
Z o t t e n , V l i e g e n v a n g e r s en S l e k k e n t r e k k e r s van
Ronse, de B o o n e n k n o o p e r s van Oudenaarde, de
B e r g k r u i p e r s van Geeraartsbergen, de To o v e r h e k s e n van
Onkerzeele, de S c h e e w e i - e t e r s van Winkel-Sint-Kruis, de
P a l i n g s t r o o p e r s van Mendonk, de T r o t t e r s van
Desteldonk, de Z o t t e n van Wachtebeke, de
S m e e r k o e k e t e r s van Moerbeke, de S c h i n k e t e r s van
Sinaai, de B l a u w b u i k e n van Exaarde, de
P e e r d e n p r o s s e r s en O l i e z e e k e r s van Sint-Nicolaas, de
H o t t e n t o t t e n van Daknam, de A z ĳ n z e e k e r s van Temseke,
de S i k k e n [74]van Moerzeke, de W i t v o e t e n , D r a a i e r s en
A j u i n e n van Aalst, de K o o l k a p p e r s van Akkergem.
En dezen zijn van West-Vlaanderen: De Z o t t e n van Brugge, de
P a s t e i - e t e r s van Kortrijk, de B o t e r k o p p e n van Diksmuiden,
de Ta a r t e b a k k e r s en W a g e n w i e l v a n g e r s van Meenen,
de K e i k o p p e n van Poperingen, de K i n d e r s van Yperen, de
K e u n s (Konijnen) van Heist-op-Zee, de G e e r n a a r t s van
Blankenberge (zie bladz. 21 en 27), de S c h a p e n van Nieuwkerke,
de E z e l s en L a n g o o r e n van Kuren (Curen, Cuern, Cuerne),
enz.
Zie hier eene lange reeks van spotnamen, waaronder er zeker velen
zijn, merkwaardig in een geschied- en taalkundig opzicht of uit het
oogpunt der beschavings-geschiedenis. Mogen al deze namen nog
eens uitvoerig beschreven en verklaard worden in hunnen oorsprong
en beteekenis, op de wijze als ik het, in het begin van dit opstel, met
de Friesche namen heb trachten te doen.
Van den eersten van alle in deze opsomming genoemde Zuid-

Nederlandsche spotnamen, van dien der Antwerpsche S i n j o r e n
heb ik (op bladzijde 72) den oorsprong vermeld. De oorsprong van
den laatstgenoemden dezer spotnamen, die van de E z e l s of
L a n g o o r e n van Kuren, moge als tegenhanger hier ook vermeld
worden. In de Gazette van Kortrijk, en daaruit overgenomen in het
Brugsche weekblad Rond den Heerd, in het nummer van 12 April,
1888, staat dienaangaande het volgende te lezen:
„’t Was over jaren en jaren, ’k en wete niet hoevele. De pastor van Cuerne
was een allerbraafste oude man. De koster was ook allerbraafst, maar
eenvoudig en oud. En zoo doof derbij, dat hadt gij hem eenen schip
onder.…. onder zijne sleppen gegeven, hij het nog niet en zou.…. gehoord
hebben.
„Asschen-oensdag was gekomen en de menschen moesten om een

asschenkruisken gaan. Ja maar, als de pastor te wege was te beginnen,
wierd hij onpasselijk.

Moses Hirschel and Enlightenment Breslau A City and Its Jews in The Late Eighteenth Century David Heywood Jones Full Chapter

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Moses Hirschel and Enlightenment Breslau A City and Its Jews in The Late Eighteenth Century David Heywood Jones Full Chapter

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Moses Hirschel and Enlightenment

Breslau: A City and its Jews in the Late

ISBN 978-3-030-46234-5 ISBN 978-3-030-46235-2 (eBook)

3 Socio-Ethnic History of Breslau 35

4 Moses Hirschel: A Critical Biography 49

5 Hirschel and the Orthodoxy 75

6 Jewish Rights, Human Rights and Anti-Semitism121

7 Haskalah and Enlightenment in Silesia153

Moses Hirschel is a name known to only a handful of Haskalah researchers

© The Author(s) 2021 1

about a society as the single atom or molecule provides about a natural

Jonathan Frankel mused, perhaps prematurely, that Jewish historiography

Why Is Typical European Jewish

© The Author(s) 2021 5

history was still not an “obvious subject of historical interest” to German

reader’s understanding and acceptance of that narrative. Rosman eschews

The Structural Problem

He later argues that a focus on bipolarity “encouraged the tendency to

intellectuals were somehow outside of this phenomenon. They describe

The Epistemological Problem

religious tradition as he understood it. He infamously defended the 613

“Essentialist” Jewish Identity Versus Plurality in Jewish

pre-­war attempts to revise Jewish historical traditions.54 It is only in the

opposed to adherence to diffuse systems of corporate laws and codes

who are collectively termed “maskilim” devoted their efforts to providing

Simultaneous to their Enlightened Christian-German contemporaries

The effects of modernisation, which were directly linked to changes in the

Consider the challenge the burgeoning natural sciences, Newtonian

to religious belief were direct threats to ethnic and corporative identity

Jews and Their Identities

The Concept of Hybrid Identity

Needless to say, both the Zionist and Acculturationist approaches men-

Jewish Identity in Central Europe

study of history.75 Funkenstein goes further and protests that historians of

Attempts to separate a stable “essence” which accounts for the continuity of

If we can agree to eschew essentialist models of identity when creating

socio-cultural “lifeworlds”80 in which the individual and their current

Hybridised Individuals and Agency

The difference between the subjective and objective dimensions of multiple

I am investigating precisely this aspect of the processual and active inter-

Moses Hirschel: Agency, Identity and Influence

In a 1981 work, Hans Mayer introduces us to the importance of “out-

Discussing eighteenth-century Breslau in 2003, Gunnar Och explained

More specifically to Hirschel’s own region, the emergence of this new

denotes a mix of traditional elements and chains of significants connected to

To show Hirschel as an example of a consummate Jewish enlightener

concentrate on the relationships between individuals and the institutions

it discuss this subject’s contribution to German history.112 Jewish-German

Socio-Ethnic History of Breslau

History of Breslau, 1740–1818

© The Author(s) 2021 35

activity that produced it.”1 The objective environment was therefore a

the time, Frederick II referred to Breslau as the “Pearl in the Prussian

The introduction of Prussian state absolutism to what was Prussia’s first

Kriegs-, und Friedenszeitung (published until 1944 as the Schlesische

Met deze laatste woorden wordt het rikkikken der padden

In W. G. Kern en W. Willms, Ostfriesland wie es denkt und spricht

Dat men verder oostwaarts in Duitschland, onder anderen in

Van Groningerland zuidwaarts gaande, vinden we in Drente, waar

Mij zijn bekend de M u g g e s p u i t e r s (of bij verkorting de

In Overijssel ken ik de B l a u w v i n g e r s van Zwolle, de Kamper

De Kampenaars vingen oudtijds in hunne rivier eens eenen

De Geldersche spotnamen, weinig in getal, zijn de volgenden:

3 Socio-Ethnic History of Breslau 35

4 Moses Hirschel: A Critical Biography 49

5 Hirschel and the Orthodoxy 75

6 Jewish Rights, Human Rights and Anti-Semitism121

7 Haskalah and Enlightenment in Silesia153

pre-war attempts to revise Jewish historical traditions.54 It is only in the