Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment 

Whilst religious practices of the day may not be a topic that may interest some researchers, it would be interesting to know to what extent the Haskalah movement aided or encouraged the mass Jewish migration to the USA and to South Africa.  In South Africa, many of the migrants, after landing in the country, travelled to small town and villages where they established themselves as general dealers or opened small hotels. They had to blend in with the community and learn two new languages – English and Afrikaans, and could not rely on having more than one other Jewish family within a 50 mile radius.

The Jewish Enlightenment,  or Haskalah, was an ideological and social movement that developed in Eastern Europe in the early nineteenth century and was active until the rise of the Jewish national movement in the early 1880s. Its partisans were known as maskilim. In certain senses, Haskalah was an extension of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, but it was centrally concerned with Jews’ political status and their relationship to European culture. Essentially, Haskalah sought to exploit the new possibilities of economic, social, and cultural integration that appeared to become available to Jews in the late eighteenth century with the removal of legal discrimination. ¹ 

The Haskalah in Eastern Europe was a principal expression of the processes of modernization undergone by Jews during the nineteenth century. The movement simultaneously increased the receptivity of many Jews to European civilization and led the process of Jewish cultural renewal, whose main expressions were modern literature in Hebrew and Yiddish. And after the hopes of the maskilim for integration into the surrounding society were dashed, it turned out that, imperceptibly and without meaning to do so, they had prepared the cultural infrastructure for the growth of modern Jewish nationalism.

The maskilim endeavored to organize themselves under the difficult conditions for free organization in general and for the Jews in particular during the reign of Czar Nicholas I. In many towns small groups of maskilim were established, among them the Shoharei Or ve-Haskalah ("Seekers of Light and Education") society founded by Israel Rothenberg in Berdichev, the Maskilim Society in Raseiniai, and the Maskilim Group led by the author Mordecai Aaron Guenzburg in Vilna, which established its own synagogue, Taharat ha-Kodesh, in 1846.²   Sholem Aleichem   (born Shalom Rabinowitz) is considered one of the fathers of modern Yiddish literature (along with Mendele Mocher Sforim and I.L. Peretz. He was born in Pereyaslav, the Ukraine, and moved as a child with his family to Voronkov, a neighboring small town which later served as the model for the fictitious town of Kasrilevke described in his works.  His father, a wealthy merchant, was interested in the Haskalah (Enlightenment) and in modern Hebrew literature.

In 1883, Sholem Aleichem decided to write in Yiddish   rather than in Hebrew. One of his first stories appeared in a Yiddish paper under the pseudonym “Sholem Aleichem”. He explained the pseudonym as a guise to conceal his identity from his relatives, especially his father, who loved Hebrew. In those days, Yiddish literature, greatly despised by the maskilim (enlightened) who wrote in Hebrew and the Jewish intelligentsia in Russia who spoke Russian, led Yiddish authors to write under pseudonyms or to publish their works anonymously. 

More reading

Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment by Raphael Mahler 

Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World Nancy Sinkhoff  

Modern Jewish History:  The Haskalah  by Shira Schoenberg