Narratives of Enlightenment 123

intention and spite(mumar lehakh is)... Thus, with respect to the secular Jews (hiloni’im) of our time, although we might define their behavior as“coerced” on account their bad education, do they not know that there is such a thing as the Torah ?

Wosner, like Shapira, Herzog, and Feinstein, holds that the term tinok shenishbah describes a person almost totally ignorant of Judaism , who knows nothing or next to nothing about the obligations of Jewish observance. The label simply cannot apply to the non-observant Jews in our community who, although they may have been raised in a non­observant home environment, are hardly unaware of the“real” Judaism practiced by the Orthodox Jews all around them. Wosner does regard such persons as“apostates out of weakness” rather than “apostates out of spite,” and this is an important concession; the halakhah seeks to accommodate the human foibles of the mumar lete’avon’ while it equates the mumar lehakh’is with an idol worshiper.” Still, they are apostates. To call them“captive infants” is to exonerate them of all blame for their actions, and this is to stretch the concept beyond reasonable bounds.

Although these authorities disagree with Ettlinger, their disagreement in no way suggests that they view his invocation of the tinok shenishbah as, in Katz’a phrase,“a transparent legal fiction, born out of the necessity to justify the prevailing practice™’ among mainstream Orthodox Jews . On the contrary: they agree with him that tinok shenishbah is a valid legal metaphor, a figurative device that can at times legitimately determine the status of Jews who have fallen away from the path of observance. The question dividing them is whether this is one of those times: do these Jews , those who have thrown off the yoke of the commandments in the wake of the Enlightenment and Emancipation, qualify as a case of tinok shenishbah? As such, the argument between the two sides is essentially a reprise of the conflicting assessments of the Karaites by