Haskalah

The Haskalah, often called the Jewish Enlightenment, was an intellectual movement among the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe that arose in the 1770s as its followers, the Maskilim, engaged with the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment. Its first centre was Berlin, around Moses Mendelssohn; it revived Hebrew as a literary language for secular purposes and pressed for educational and cultural reform and integration into the surrounding societies, clashing with both the rabbinic elite and radical assimilationists. Its last stage ended late in the 19th century, after the 1881 pogroms in Imperial Russia turned many Maskilim towards proto-Zionist groups such as Hibbat Zion.