Fora dos muros: entre a Bildung e a Revelação

Abstract

This article discusses the change of paradigms perceived in Germany’s Jewish community in the first decades of the 19th. Century, as a result of the fall of the walls which until that time separated Jews from their Christian German neighbours. The triumph of the ideas of Illuminism and the rapid penetration of these ideas in a community which longed for social integration, and which had hitherto been discriminated because of its ethnic and religious background, stimulated the adoption of new world views and new concepts of nationality and spirituality among Jews who had recently left the walls of the Ghettoes behind. One of the central passages in this change process is described by Berthold Auerbach (1812-1882) as the transformation of the idea of Revelation into Bildung – a cardinal concept in the 19th Century German culture. This seems to explain German Jews’ affinity with the humanistic culture of their time: it now appears to occupy the central role which had hitherto been reserved to religious studies.