Background
Krochmal was born to a wealthy merchant in Brody, Galicia (then part of the Austro-Hapsburg Empire).
Krochmal was born to a wealthy merchant in Brody, Galicia (then part of the Austro-Hapsburg Empire).
Krochmial received a traditional Talmud-centered education. Encouraged by his father’s connections to the west European Enlightenment of Moses Mendelssohn, he taught himself Latin, Arabic, French, and Ger-man, languages that opened doors to a broad range of medieval and modern philosophical literature.
After his marriage at the age of fourteen, he moved with his wife to the home of the bride’s parents in Zolkiew near Lvov, where Krochmal remained most of his life. He earned a reputation as a brilliant thinker and conversationalist, rejected an offer of a rabbinical post in Berlin, and attracted many leaders of the Enlightenment to his home. He returned to Brody when his wife died in 1826 and in 1838 moved to his daughter’s home in Tarnopol.
His Moreh Nevukhei hy-Zeman (“A Guide for the Perplexed of the Time,” 1851), written in Hebrew and named after the famous work of Maimonides, was edited and published posthumously by the distinguished scholar Leopold Zunz. It records his understanding of the relationship of philosophy and religion, the importance of biblical monotheism for modern philosophy, the contrast of Jewish historical development with other nations, and the evolution of the halakhah (legal aspects) and aggadah (nonlegal aspects) in rabbinic literature. Krochmal posited the God of Judiasm in Hegelian terms as an absolute Being whose spirit is unqualified cognition. As such, God is perceived only implicitly through the imagery of religion, leaving the task of an explicit understanding of the divine to philosophical reason.
History, according to Krochmal, like every other aspect of civilization, is primarily defined by a transcendent quality. A nation’s spiritual principle forms the foundation of its existence, its particular character being determined by the extent to which it dedicates itself to this principle. Following the historical philosophies of Vico and Herder, Krochmal attempted to prove empirically how the Jewish national spirit is like that of other nations, in that it follows the evolutionary three-phase cycle of growth, maturity, and death.
The Jewish nation is unique, however, in that it eternally renews itself, avoiding eventual extinction by an undying devotion to its singular, infinite, and immutable God, who restores the spiritual strength of Jewish culture in times of stagnation and decline. In Krochmal’s view, the Jewish people had already survived three distinct cycles of national historical existence: the first from Abraham to the destruction of the First Temple, the second from the rebuilding of the Second Temple to the Bar Kokhba revolt, and the third beginning at the time of the Mishnah’s codification, maturing with the development of early medieval Jewish philosophy, and declining in the late Middle Ages.
Without specific reference, Krochmal probably envisioned the dawn of a fourth cyclical renaissance in the Enlightenment movement.