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This chapter examines the Galician Haskalah, which may be viewed as one segment of a Haskalah network that encompassed the maskilim of the entire Austrian empire. In their development and activity, the Galician maskilim were closely allied to the Austrian Haskalah. The militant nature of the Galician Haskalah was determined by the very process of enlightenment. In personal testimonies and biographies, the experience of becoming enlightened is described as a revelation and conversion that occurred at a young age and engendered great excitement in the heart of the maskil. Indeed, young people were the target population of the Haskalah propagandists. The chapter then explains that hasidism was an obsession among the Galician maskilim, and they would resort to almost any means to block the expansion of the ‘sect’, which before their very eyes was sweeping up the Jewish masses, even spreading to the central urban communities. Nahman Krochmal (1749–1840) was the unacknowledged leader of the Galician maskilim.

This chapter concerns Nahman Krochmal (1785–1840), a key figure in the development of Jewish spirituality in central and eastern Europe. It examines the extent to which Krochmal’s writings were influenced by the gaon of Pumbedita in Babylonia, Sherira (c.906–1006). Krochmal summed up his spiritual life and work in his incomplete study, Moreh nevukhei hazeman (‘guide of the perplexed of the time’). Its central theme is the Oral Torah, one of the pillars of rabbinic Judaism. In Krochmal’s time the Oral Torah was subjected to heavy criticism. But almost 850 years before Krochmal’s Moreh nevukhei hazeman, Sherira wrote a letter as a response to a series of questions concerning the formation of the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the Talmuds, etc., posed to him by Jacob ben Nissim on behalf of the holy community of Kairouan in North Africa.

This chapter describes “liberal supernaturalism,” which affirms both belief in God and a rejection of fundamentalism. It focuses on Nahman Krochmal, a pioneer of the Wissen schaft des Judentums movement, in which Judaism was studied in terms of its historical development. Krochmal wrote his Moreh nevukhei hazeman (“Guide for the Perplexed of the Time”), which was published in Lemberg in 1851, fifteen years after his death, by the great Jewish historian Leopold Zunz, the leading figure in the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement. Krochmal's title is directed to contemporaries and intelligent Jews in the first half of the nineteenth century. The chapter highlights how Krochmal offered guidance to Jews with the particular problem of their time, of the modern age.