From Sacred ‘Community’ to Sacred ‘Individual’: Epigraphic Traces of the Haskalah in Jewish Epitaphs from Białystok

This paper asks two questions: What is the nature of the epigraphic traces that suggest the influence of the Haskalah’s ideology? And how do these traces depict or contribute to a portrait of Białystok’s maskilim and maskilot as remembered in their final epistolary writings—their epitaphs? The Białystok epitaphs span the entirety of the Haskalah in Russia (early 19th century to 1880) into the early decades of the 20th century. Of the approximately 50,000 Jews who died in the years 1800 to 1939 and were buried in one of Białystok’s Jewish cemeteries, only a fraction of the tombstones marking gravesites remain. The small percentage of epitaphs that are extant, however, offer such disparate features that suggest varied influences. In particular, this corpus predominantly reflects Białystok’s strong mithnagdic (traditional) community. By contrast, the impact of maskilic thought on the epitaph shifted the focus to the uniqueness of the individual, highlighting secular professional achievements and personal tragedies. Within the Białystok corpus, the following categories are used to explore the epigraphic traces of the Haskalah: (1) maskilic lexicon in the Jewish epitaph; (2) the epitaphs of known maskilim Avraham Ber Gottlober and David Tsvi Solnicki; (3) the epitaphs composed by maskil Eliezer Halberstam; (4) epitaphs focused on secular professions and vernaculars; and (5) those focused on personal tragedies.