Silliness and Sanctimony

Aaron Halle-Wolfsohn

1796

Act 2

Yetkhen:

And how crude he was with me! He wants to arrange with Papa to marry me! How do you like that? I’d like to meet the man who’ll force me to marry someone! No! No father can do that—I have a will of my own. Papa may do whatever he likes, but there’s no way I’m going to marry that man.

Scene 6

[Reb Henokh furiously barges into the room as Y…

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Creator Bio

Aaron Halle-Wolfsohn

1754–1835

A Prussian-born maskil from Halle, Aaron Halle-Wolfsohn joined Moses Mendelssohn’s circle in Berlin. He edited Mendelssohn’s German Bible translation and produced his own translations of and commentaries on scripture. Wolfsohn was an editor of the Hebrew journal Ha-me’asef, to which he also contributed. He embraced the educational ideas of the Enlightenment in his pioneering Hebrew primer, Avtalyon, and as a teacher at the Königliche Wilhelmsschule, a Jewish public school in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland). Wolfsohn’s Laykhtzin und fremelay has been called one of the first modern Yiddish plays, although it relies heavily on German dialogue to promote a maskilic message.

Related Guide

Haskalah and Pedagogy, 1750–1880

The first maskilim ransacked both Jewish and European tradition to find new platforms for creating and transmitting the Jewish cultural ideals they conceived. Jews enlisted diverse literary genres to call for social, educational, and economic change.

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