מאיר להמן – אורתודוקסיה יהודית במבחן

הרומן רבי עקיבא על רקע התגבשותם

תקציר

During the year 1881, Dr. Markus Lehmann (1831-1890) published in his weekly Der Israelit an historical novel in installments under the name Akiba, which presented the life of the great Jewish sage. This paper deals with the novel Akiba and through it with the whole literary enterprise of Lehmann, in a way that sheds light upon the Neo-Orthodox discourse in the second half of the 19th century in Germany. The discussion within the novel will be done from an integrative point of view that looks at Akiba as a literary junction into which the old Jewish texts about Rabbi Akiba and his period are channeled, including the political and cultural ideas of Lehman’s time. The historicism of Lehmann was typical to the German Orthodoxy which coped with religious criticism in contemporary science and philosophy. These trends put religious tradition on a linear continuity of development, a matter that caused religious reformations on one hand, and an objection of the Orthodox Jewry to the historicization of Judaism. For Markus Lehmann, at the end of that historicization process, there was one option left: Assimilation. For that reason, even if his stories skipped to the far historic past of the Jewish nation, their main core aimed towards the Jewish-German present. Lehmann used the story of R. Akiba’s rising to fame as a platform on which the major issues of German Jewry in his time had been placed. Thus he dealt with issues of religion’s place in modern life, the relations with non-Jews, Jewish women’s status, etc. By these stories Lehmann did not only ask to fill the time of young Jews with ‘proper’ contents; it was a political act which sought to sprout the next generation of leadership of Orthodox Jewry at the turn of the century, and to some extent reflect the internal atmosphere among the religious leadership of the Orthodox Jewry in Germany.