AT THE END of the eighteenth century the maskilim firmly believed that a favourable historical shift was taking place which promised an ideal future for all humankind, including the Jews. This belief gave rise to a new sense of the past that no longer matched the traditional concept of history. The maskilim in Germany, the first consciously modern Jews, were the bearers of this new sense of the past. These young men fervently believed they had a mission to transform and regenerate Jewish society and culture in order to adapt it to the modern age and its challenges. In their opinion, the hallmarks of this new era were a modern state with an enlightened absolutist government; an open bourgeois society; rational thought; the culture and values of the Enlightenment; religious tolerance; and man's growing scientific achievements.

The new historical consciousness had emerged even before Zunz and the members of the Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Judentums had laid the foundations of modern Jewish historiography and the methodical, scientific study of Jewish history and sources. It also preceded the appearance of modern Jewish historians (Zunz, Jost, Geiger, Graetz, and others) in nineteenth-century Germany. At first maskilic awareness of the past was not expressed in original historiographic works but in somewhat less prestigious forms of writing about the past: journalism, translations and adaptations, biographies, satire, and comments about the value and role of history. The maskilic historical consciousness differed from that of Wissenschaft des Judentums. It had little relationship to the idea of science, and was neither academic nor professional. The maskilim employed their new sense of the past in their efforts to persuade traditional Jewish society that changes in various spheres of Jewish life were imperative. They used the past during the transitional stage of German Jewry, when much criticism was levelled against obsolescent concepts and social, cultural, and religious patterns that were regarded as irrational. At the same time an alternative to tradition was proposed in the form of the Haskalah—an ideology opposed not only to traditional society and its values but also to uncontrolled acculturation and assimilation with no intellectual basis.