HOMBERG, HERZ. Imrei Shefer [educational manual for children]

(HASKALAH).

Georg Hrascanski

Vienna

1808

Second Edition. Hebrew and Judeo-German translation face `a face. With the (presumably coerced) endorsement of Chief Rabbi Mordechai Banet of Nikolsburg

Vinograd, Vienna 256

Hertz Homberg (1749-1841) one of the pioneers of the Haskalah movement, accepted the appointment by the Austrian authorities of superintendent of Jewish schools throughout Galicia. “Homberg's official function consisted of supplying plans to destroy the very foundation of Jewish culture; his “ideology,” whose leitmotif was repugnant careerism, was that of a semi-apostate.” See R. Mahler, Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment (1985) p. 124. Distaste for Homberg and his assimilating tendencies ran so high, that his fomer comrades, architects of Haskalah such as Moses Mendelssohn and Naphtali Herz Wessely, personally censured him. S. Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment (2002) pp. 271-2