Ha-Meassef

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ha-Me'assef title 1784

Ha-Meassef (also HaMe'assef) ( Hebrew המאסף; German: The collector ) was a Hebrew magazine founded in 1783 with the main participation of Isaac Euchel . Aaron Halle-Wolfssohn later took over the publishing house. The circle of employees, sponsors and patrons around them was called the Meassefim ( the collectors ).

The magazine appeared monthly in Königsberg from autumn 1783 , but had to be temporarily discontinued in 1785 due to financial difficulties. A fourth year did not appear again until 1787, this time in Berlin . But this time, too, the project was not very lucky, so that there was a publication break of several years between 1790 and 1794, and the magazine was only published sporadically for some time after that. In 1796 a complete year was published again, but it was to be the last by 1808. In that year the magazine was revived , now under the title The New Collector by Moses Philippson in Dessau, but could only last for a short time, so that it was finally discontinued in 1811. Some of the more recent editions were already printed in German letters. The immediate cause was Mendelssohn 's translation of the Bible. For an entire epoch Ha-Meassef was the central organ of all enlightenment efforts in German and partly also in Eastern Judaism. The subscriber lists show readers from Amsterdam to Frankfurt, Hamburg and Berlin to Copenhagen and Riga, even though the circulation never exceeded a few hundred copies.

Isaac Euchel and his colleagues, who were occasionally also supported by Naphtali Herz Wessely , had hoped for a symbiosis between the revitalized Hebrew tradition and literature on the one hand and the respective environmental culture on the other, and therefore they tried to modernize Hebrew in a targeted manner, especially through the use of the magazine "Ha-Meassef". In fact, Hebrew quickly lost ground, and the Western Jewish Enlightenment paved the way for a rapid movement of assimilation and even apostasy, which Reform Judaism was only able to partially absorb. This created a deep gap between Western and Eastern Jews.

literature

  • Heinrich Graetz : The history of the Jews , Vol. XI., Leipzig 1870
  • Simon Dubnow : World History of the Jewish People , Vol. VII and VIII, 1925 ff.
  • Rosa Dukas, article MEASSEFIM. In: Jüdisches Lexikon , Vol. IV / 1, Berlin 1927
  • Günter Stemberger : Dr history of Jewish literature. Munich 1977
  • Andreas Kennecke: The "Ha-Meassef" and its first editor Isaac Euchel . In: Michael Nagel (Ed.): Between self-assertion and persecution: German-Jewish newspapers and magazines from the Enlightenment to National Socialism . Hildesheim: Olms, 2002 ISBN 3-487-11627-8 pp. 67-81
  • Dirk Sadowski: Ha-Me'assef. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 2: Co-Ha. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02502-9 , pp. 532-534.

Web links