Revealers of Secrets

The Jewish Haskalah movement heralded a profound, unprecedented cultural-spiritual revolution in the Jewish world. Beginning in the German lands in the second half of the eighteenth century and subsequently spreading to central Europe, it called for reconstituting traditional Jewish society in line with maskilic values. This volume spotlights the early-nineteenth-century Galician Haskalah. Although a backwater annexed to the Austrian Empire from Poland but two generations earlier, Galicia’s impressive gallery of outstanding individuals and literary activity has granted the Galician Haskalah its place as one of the most productive, influential centers of the Haskalah movement. This collection of articles is based on lectures delivered at the "Revealers of Secrets—200 Years of Galician Haskalah" conference. Held in Jerusalem in 2013, this fifth annual conference for the study of the Haskalah movement aimed to submit the Galician Haskalah to renewed scholarly examination. Organized in five sections, the volume’s twenty-three essays by outstanding scholars portray the variegated aspects of this movement, which ranged from attempts to preserve Jewish identity by nurturing modern Jewish culture in Hebrew to radical attempts to reform traditional Jewish society.