Jewish Responses to an Age of Transition

• In Event: Seductive Modernity?: Intimacy and Culture in the 19th Century

Abstract

Technological advances have always posed a challenge to traditional ways of life. The religious elite in the Middle East and North Africa saw the nahda/haskala renaissance movements as an important element of their religious outlook. Unlike their European co-religionists who reacted to the Age of Enlightenment and modernity with disdain and ambivalence—leading to schisms between the secular, reform, and Orthodox—Jews in the Ottoman Empire regarded technological advances in the age of modernity positively.

This paper explores two major rabbinic responses to modernity as an opportunity for spiritual growth. I put Ottoman Rabbi Judah Papo (d. 1873) and Tunisian Rabbi Moshe Khalfoun (1874–1950) in conversation with one another as two religious figures grappling with an age and society in transition—both in the rise and fall of empires and in the status of Jews in the Middle East.

With thousands of works published and disseminated in Judeo-Arabic, French, and Ladino, most of which were secular in nature, both Khalfoun and Papo tackled the question of how to respond to the encroachment of non-religious texts, themes, and lived experiences into the private lives of religious Jews. Moreover, they both contemplated the impact of shifting power balances between the French and Ottoman Empires on Jews in the region. Most notably, Khalfoun looked to prophecy in his embrace of technological advances and new political realities. The establishment of the League of Nations as well as the invention of the radio and airplanes were all vehicles for peacefully unifying humanity and thus were signs pointing to the messianic era. The talk concludes with a reflection on the implications of how religious Ottoman Jews responded to modernity with open arms.

Author

• Bryan K Roby, University of Michigan