Haskalah in Hebrew means the “Enlightenment.” It describes a period of time that began largely during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when a significant percentage of Jews people in Europe (primarily in the Russian Pale of Settlement and in Eastern Europe) broke free from ultra-Orthodox Judaism either while still in Europe or after their emigration to America, then what was Palestine, or other countries. While it bore some connection to what we generally refer to as the regular Enlightenment, it had its unique character in terms of its impact on Jewish communities and Jewish political movements at the time. Famed Jewish novelist Herman Wouk has described its impact as primary delineator between the Jewish past and "The Present." He wrote that "when the Enlightenment struck the [Jewish] ghetto," it was a "bolt which shattered old Jewry into the boil of parties it is today."(1) Its effects are still being felt to this day.

Nearly all of the Jewish achievers presented on these webpages were able to make their enormous contributions to world culture and science because they were no longer bound – either by belief or by praxis – by the strictures of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, what today is most often referred to as “Haredi Judaism”. That is not to say that none of those represented in the giftedness or genius category are not Orthodox Jews – some are or were, while many are secular and some are even outspoken militant atheists. The point is that, before the Haskalah and the Russian Revolution, a great majority of these Jews would have remained confined to the Jewish shtetl - the village life symbolized by the famous classic, “Fiddler on the Roof” or to Jewish ghettos in various parts of the world. For centuries, even to want to know more about topics like science were off-limits to most Jews and considered to be "forbidden" knowledge. It was only with the rise of the Haskalah and those who implemented it, the so-called maskilim, that this situation began to change.

Even today, Haredi Jewry, one of the fastest-growing branches of Judaism, would like to return to that way of life or something very similar to it. As Samuel Heilman has written in Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry, “To the people of the haredi yeshiva, secular educational achievements were [are] goyim nachas (2), pleasures only for the Gentiles...” Many of them would view the promoters of the Haskalah, the maskilim (often interpreted as "the enlightened" ones) as not being enlightened at all, but, at best, confused. (3) Others view the Haskalah as ushering in an era of atheistic and secularist Jewish movements that tore a large portion of the Jewish community away from its Biblical moorings. It is difficult for us to imagine today what an upheaval this created within the Jewish community at the time. (4)

In the end, the Haskalah must be viewed as a double-edged sword.

If Haredi Jews had their way, nearly all Jews today would be haredi or would at least practice some form of Orthodox Judaism and would keep themselves away from any unnecessary contact with the Gentile world. They would only study Torah and Talmud - not secular subjects like theoretical physics or economics. In that very different world, a world where no Haskalah had taken place, there would be no Jewish Nobel Prize winners, no Albert Einsteins or Richard Feynmans, no Steven Spielbergs or Jerry Seinfelds and probably few if any musical performers on the world stage on the level of an Isaac Stern or a Vladimir Horowitz.

It is difficult to imagine a world today where there would be no Jewish doctors or lawyers, no Jewish scientists, performers, or movie producers, no Jewish investors, economists nor philanthropists, no Jewish technology wizards. If all of these fields and areas of endeavor were simply goyim nachas – the domain of Gentiles bereft of a Jewish presence, the world would be a much different place, a much poorer place.

Let us be thankful that higher achievements on a world scale are not simply goyim nachas but that, in the modern era at least, the Jewish people have been free to flourish and to develop their giftedness to share with the rest of the world.

(For more background on the Haskalah as an intellectual movement, see the articles in the YIVO Encyclopedia and the Jewish Virtual Library.)