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Do not eulogize my father, instead I am publishing his works! By Judah Loeb Jeiteles for his father Baruch Jeiteles (Benedict; 1762–1813), scholar and Hebrew writer who strove for a synthesis of modern and traditional scholarship. In his youth he ran away from home to Berlin, but later returned and was reconciled with his teacher, R. Ezekiel Landau. He contributed poems to Ha-Me'assef (the journal of the Me'assefim) dealing with the lonely and difficult position of the enlightened intellectual in traditional society. When he eulogized R. Landau in his Emek ha-Bakha (1793) in a wholly Orthodox and traditional manner, the radical editor of Ha-Me'assef attacked him. A booklet, Sefer ha-Orev, published allegedly in Salonika in 1795 under the pen name Phinehas Hananiah Argosi de Silva, which attacks the disrespectful attitude of the Berlin radicals to rabbinical scholars, is generally considered to be Baruch's refutation of their attacks. So, too, the pamphlet, "A Discussion Between the Years 5560 and 5561" (1800 and 1801) a polemic against the Frankists in Prague, is generally attributed to him. He published four editions of Moses Mendelssohn's commentary on Maimonides' Millot ha-Higgayon, three of them in German translation in Hebrew type, and Ta'am ha-Melekh (1801), glosses to Isaac Nunez Belmonte's novellae on Maimonides' Sha'ar ha-Melekh. A sermon supporting his father's vaccination campaign was published in 1805. A man of independent means, Baruch founded a yeshivah in his house and encouraged rising Hebrew authors. In 1813 he induced leaders of the Prague community to open a hospital for wounded soldiers "of all nationalities" in the Jewish quarter. He himself died of hospital fever while caring for them.
Judah Loeb Jeiteles (1773–1838), Hebrew writer, contributed to the Ha-Me'assef and to the annuals Bikkurei ha-Ittim and Kerem Hemed, publishing poems and biblical and halakhic articles. He was also the author of an Aramaic grammar Mevo ha-Lashon ha-Aramit (1813) and a collection of poems Benei ha-Ne'urim (1821). One of the four chairmen of the Prague community, Judah supervised its German-language school. Unlike both the radical maskilim and the Orthodox, he favored a school in which secular and Jewish religious education would be united. It was mainly Judah who developed the peculiar blend of Hapsburg patriotism and awareness of the Jews as one of the nations in the empire which was characteristic of the Prague Haskalah. It found its outstanding expression in his opposition to Mordecai Manuel Noah's program for his city of refuge, Ararat (Bikkurei ha-Ittim, 7 (1826/27), 45–49), claiming that nobody would answer Noah's call because "they are all now living under the rule of benign and merciful kings who deal mercifully and benevolently with us, as with all the other nations who live together with us in harmony and friendship." In 1835 he published a Hebrew and Aramaic translation of the Austrian anthem (shir tehillah me-ammei ha-arazot). Judah was the first to use the expression "Haskalah" for the Enlightenment movement. For Anton von Schmidt's fourth edition of the Bible he translated and edited several volumes. In 1830 he settled in Vienna and edited the last two volumes of Bikkurei ha-Ittim (nos. 11 and 12) in 1831, making it of greater interest to Jewish scholarship. |
