Modern Jewish satire began in regions of Germany and Austro-Hungarian Galicia in the first two decades of the 19th century, later spreading to Russian territories in the 1830s and 1840s and extending into the 1860s and 1870s throughout Eastern Europe. It originated with the traditionally educated adherents of the Jewish haskalah (Enlightenment) – the maskilim (Enlightened ones) – in Ashkenazi Jewish communities. The well-known early maskils, such as Naphtali Hersch Wessely in Hamburg, who argued against Jewish community insularity, and Josef Perl in Galicia, who pilloried rabbinic authority in his satires, were typical of the persona of the satiric maskil. They were men of traditional education who were educated in the beis medresh, wrote in Hebrew and studied Torah on a high level. After being exposed in their youths to secular (European Enlightenment) through translations into Hebrew, they became oppositional to traditional religious authority and used a subversive style and essayistic form to parody unquestioning, traditional Orthodoxy and the mystical Hassidim in areas where they dominated in Eastern Europe by playing upon the accepted symbols of these communities and their patterns of reading sacred texts. Their satires were written primarily in Hebrew (Yiddish, when it was important to communicate to the masses) in the form of journalistic essays and short stories, under pseudonyms. One example of the “satiric writer” in disguise, Saul Berlin, was a German rabbi in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, who wrote “undercover” because of his status in the community. Naturally the target of his most famous satire, Ktav Yosher (1794), was the unenlightened casuistry of the rabbanut. Maskilic writings such as Berlin’s demonstrated the author’s mastery of sacred texts and rituals, and used erudition (leshon limudim, or a erudite clever tongue) in order to simultaneously mock traditional social practices and customs as unnecessary. The maskil’s use of a contemporized Hebrew as a means to express heretical ideas was already subversive. It involved the use of a religious language (loshen-koydesh) out of context, deterritorialized (to borrow a trope from Deleuze and Guattari) from its liturgical home and forced into a mobile and communicative use as a challenge to the hegemony of religious authority. Later, in the 1860s and 1870s, when maskilic authors such as Mendele Moykher Sforim (from Minsk) wrote in Yiddish in order to communicate to the masses, a further intrinsic Jewish deterritorialization of Hebrew took place, one that modernized both Hebrew and Yiddish. Instead of the traditional hierarchy of second place Yiddish serving as a mere taytsh, or translation of the sacred language, the roles of Yiddish and Hebrew were reversed. In Mendele’s writing, for example, in his novel about a maskil, Dos Vinshfingeril, one reads satiric literature in Yiddish to undermine the rabbinical authority and the privileged status of the holy tongue, Hebrew. But the way that Mendele used Yiddish was also an affront to Yiddish-speaking Hassidic communities of the Hassidim, because of his savage, pro-Enlightenment critique of them.
The goal of maskilic satire was to advocate for reform of Jewish practice and to urge its religiously observant readers to set aside excessive mysticism, community insularity and incongruities in religious interpretation in the orthodox community in favor of a greater openness toward reason, secular education, tolerance, and engagement with the outside world. It is important to note that although the maskilim advocated reform of the rabbinic authority and Jewish practices based on Enlightenment principles, they were not the same as what we think of today as Reform Judaism, the current incarnation of German Judaism, inspired by Moses Mendelssohn and Abraham Geiger, however similar these two groups’ inspirations were (for example, Maimonedes). Maskilim never conceived of anything other than the traditional orthodox communities in which they lived. The maskils and their Hebrew writings are considered the first authors of modern Hebrew literature who used a multitude of literary genres to express their points: epistolary story, fable, travelogue, autobiography and most importantly, satire. Until recently, the accepted notion has been (Joseph Klausner, et al.), that the maskilic satirists were secularizers at heart. This has been rejected by more recent scholars (Pelli, Stanislawsky, etc.), who have noted that members of the somewhat amorphous haskalah movement were not always aware of these secularizing changes that began to take place within Judaism, on the contrary, many of them indeed argued for the status quo within a Jewish setting, albeit with certain revisions. Despite the popularity of maskilic writing and satire, many maskils wrote in disguise, for fear of a community cherem (ban) against them. If they were castigated as apikorsim (apostates, from the Greek Epicurius), they would no longer have an audience, so “outing” themselves was not an option. The successes of the maskilim and their effects on Jewish community were varied, from reform in education (Orthodox schools teaching both Jewish and secular studies opened their doors in Hamburg and Halberstadt) to a change in community standards with regard to the types of work a Jew could do (within the confines of the anti-Jewish laws of the lands in which Jews dwelled). There emerged in Germany and Galicia a remarkable new belles lettres in Hebrew and later, Yiddish, and finally, a slow process toward the nationalization of Jewish communities into the lands in which they dwelled.