Caplan, Marc

Senior Fellow: October–December 2021

Research Project: Dialects of Enlightenment: Language, Performance, and the Contradictions of Culture in Early Modern Jewish Literature

This project focuses on a crucial cultural moment in the history and development of modern Jewish literature: the origins of formal Jewish theatrical conventions during the last decade of the eighteenth century in the German-language culture centres of Königsberg and Berlin. Focusing primarily on the plays Reb Henoch, oder: Woß tut me damit (1793) by Isaac Euchel (1756–1804) and Laykhtzin und fremelay (1796) by Aaron Halle-Wolfssohn (ca. 1755–1835), this research considers the linguistic status of plays written between Yiddish and German as a strategy for representing fault lines among characters caught between East and West, tradition and modernity, as well as the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. As an aesthetic strategy, the linguistic clash between German and Yiddish signals the indeterminate status of Jews in a moment of social and historical—as well as linguistic—transition; the close proximity yet untranslatability or mutual incomprehensibility between Yiddish and German conveys the palpable yet unspeakable barriers confronting Jews at the first moment when a significant number of them were beginning to interact with a larger society of non-Jewish elites. As an ideological strategy, the linguistic indeterminacy of this writing indicates a widening rift between philosophical aspirations to Enlightenment (Aufklärung) and social aspirations to assimilation. What emerges in this study is not only a distinction between haskole (Haskala) and Aufklärung, but a sense, through haskole literature, of the contradictions within the Enlightenment project and the subsequent pitfalls of Enlightenment as a simultaneous source of knowledge and authority for Jews and other politically marginalised subjects.

Marc Caplan is Brownstone Visiting Professor at the Jewish Studies Program, Dartmouth College, USA.