Haskalah

The Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, was an intellectual and literary movement among the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe from the 1770s through the 1880s that sought to bring secular European learning, modern Hebrew literature and educational reform to Jewish communities while preserving a distinct Jewish identity. Led initially by the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin and carried forward across Germany, Galicia and the Russian Empire by writers known as maskilim, the movement produced a substantial modern Hebrew literature, including poetry, satire, fiction and periodicals, that treated Hebrew as a living literary language rather than only a liturgical one and often satirized what its writers saw as the insularity of traditional rabbinic culture. The Haskalah's advocacy of secular education and integration into European civic life met resistance from traditional religious authorities, and its own descendants split between assimilationist paths and, later in the nineteenth century, the Hebrew-language cultural nationalism that fed into early Zionism, but the movement is generally credited with founding the modern Hebrew literary tradition.