THE HASKALAH MOVEMENT IN RUSSIA

BY

JACOB S. RAISIN, PH.D., D.D.

Author of “Sect, Creed and Custom in Judaism,” etc.

PHILADELPHIA

THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA

1913

TO AARON S. RAISIN

Your name, dear father, will not be found in the following
pages, for, like “the waters of the Siloam that run softly,” you
ever preferred to pursue your useful course in unassuming silence.
Yet, as it is your life, devoted entirely to meditating, learning,
and teaching, that inspired me in my effort, I dedicate this book
to you; and I am happy to know that I thus not only dedicate it to
one of the noblest of Maskilim, but at the same time offer you some
slight token of the esteem and affection felt for you by

Your Son,

JACOB S. RAISIN

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER I. THE PRE-HASKALAH PERIOD

CHAPTER II. THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION

CHAPTER III. THE DAWN OF HASKALAH

CHAPTER IV. CONFLICTS AND CONQUESTS

CHAPTER V. RUSSIFICATION, REFORMATION, AND
ASSIMILATION

CHAPTER VI. THE AWAKENING

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

TOBIAS COHN (1652-1759)

ISAAC BÄR LEVINSOHN
(1788-1860)

MAX LILIENTHAL (1815-1882)

ALEXANDER ZEDERBAUM
(1816-1893)

PEREZ BEN MOSHEH SMOLENSKIN
(1842-1885)

MOSES LÖB LILIENBLUM
(1843-1910)

PREFACE

To the lover of mankind the history of the Russo-Jewish
renaissance is an encouraging and inspiring phenomenon. Seldom has
a people made such rapid strides forward as the Russian Jews. From
the melancholy regularity that marked their existence a little more
than two generations ago, from the darkness of the Middle Ages in
which they were steeped until the time of Alexander II, they
emerged suddenly into the life and light of the West, and some of
the most intrepid devotees of latter-day culture, both in Europe
and in America, have come from among them. Destitute of everything
that makes for enlightenment, and under the dominion of a
Government which sought to extinguish the few rushlights that
scattered the shadows around them, they nevertheless snatched
victory from defeat, sloughed off medieval superstition, and,
disregarding the Dejanira shirt of modern disabilities, compelled
their countrymen to admit more than once that

Similar movements were started in Germany during the latter part
of the eighteenth century, and in Austria, notably Galicia, at the
beginning of the nineteenth, but none stirred the mind of the Jews
to the same degree as the Haskalah movement in Russia during the
last fifty years. In the former, the removal of restrictions soon
rendered attempts toward self-emancipation unnecessary on the part
of Jews, and the few Maskilim among them, satisfied with the
present, devoted themselves to investigating and elucidating the
past of their people’s history. In Russia the past was all but
forgotten on account of the immediate duties of the present. The
energy and acquisitiveness that made the Jews of happier and more
prosperous lands prominent in every sphere of practical life, were
directed toward the realm of thought, and the merciless severity
with which the Government excluded them from the enjoyment of
things material only increased their ardor for things spiritual and
intellectual.

In its wide sense Haskalah denotes enlightenment. Those who
strove to enlighten their benighted coreligionists or disseminate
European culture among them, were called Maskilim. A careful
perusal of this work will reveal the exact ideals these terms
embody. For Haskalah was not only {13} progressive, it was also
aggressive, militant, sometimes destructive. From the days of
Mordecai Günzburg to the time of Asher Ginzberg (Ahad Ha-‘Am),
it changed its tendencies and motives more than once. Levinsohn,
“the father of the Maskilim,” was satisfied with removing the ban
from secular learning; Gordon wished to see his brethren “Jews at
home and men abroad”; Smolenskin dreamed of the rehabilitation of
Jews in Palestine; and Ahad Ha-‘Am hopes for the spiritual
regeneration of his beloved people. Others advocated the levelling
of all distinctions between Jews and Gentiles, or the upliftment of
mankind in general and Russia in particular. To each of them
Haskalah implied different ideals, and through each it promulgated
diverse doctrines. To trace these varying phases from an indistinct
glimmering in the eighteenth century to the glorious effulgence of
the beginning of the twentieth, is the main object of this
book.

In pursuance of my end, I have paid particular attention to the
causes that retarded or accelerated Russo-Jewish cultural advance.
As these causes originate in the social, economic, and political
status of the Russian Jew, I frequently portray political events as
well as the state of knowledge, belief, art, {14} and morals
of the periods under consideration. For this reason also I have
marked the boundaries of the Haskalah epochs in correspondence to
the dates of the reigns of the several czars, though the
correspondence is not always exact.

Essays have been published, on some of the topics treated in
these pages, by writers in different languages: in Russian, by
Bramson, Klausner, and Morgulis; in Hebrew, by Izgur, Katz, and
Klausner; in German, by Maimon, Lilienthal, Wengeroff, and
Weissberg; in English, by Lilienthal and Wiener; and in French, by
Slouschz. The subject as a whole, however, has not been treated.
Should this work stimulate further research, I shall feel amply
rewarded. Without prejudice and without partiality, by an honest
presentation of facts drawn from what I regard as reliable sources,
I have tried to unfold the story of the struggle of five millions
of human beings for right living and rational thinking, in the hope
of throwing light on the ideals and aspirations and the real
character of the largely prejudged and misunderstood Russian
Jew.

In conclusion, I wish to express my gratitude and indebtedness
to those who encouraged me to proceed with my work after some
specimens of it had been published in several Jewish periodicals,
especially {15} to Doctor Solomon Schechter, Rabbi Max
Heller, and Mr. A.S. Freidus, for their courtesy and assistance
while the work was being written.

JACOB S. RAISIN.

E. Las Vegas, N. Mex.,

Thanksgiving Day, 1909.

CHAPTER I

THE PRE-HASKALAH PERIOD

?-1648

“There is but one key to the present,” says Max Müller,
“and that is the past.” To understand fully the growth and
historical development of a people’s mind, one must be familiar
with the conditions that have shaped its present form. It would
seem necessary, therefore, to introduce a description of the
Haskalah movement with a rapid survey of the history of the
Russo-Polish Jews from the time of their emergence from obscurity
up to the middle of the seventeenth century.

Among those who laid the foundations for the study of this
almost unexplored department of Jewish history, the settlement of
Jews in Russia and their vicissitudes during the dark ages, the
most prominent are perhaps Isaac Bär Levinsohn, Abraham
Harkavy, and Simon Dubnow. There is much to be said of each of
these as writers, scholars, and men. Here they concern us as
Russo-Jewish historians. {18} What Linnaeus, Agassiz, and Cuvier did in
the field of natural philosophy, they accomplished in their chosen
province of Jewish history.¹
Levinsohn was the first to express the opinion that the Russian
Jews hailed, not from Germany, as is commonly supposed, but from
the banks of the Volga. This hypothesis, corroborated by tradition,
Harkavy established as a fact. Originally the vernacular of the
Jews of Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev was Russian and Polish, or,
rather, the two being closely allied, Palaeo-Slavonic. The havoc
wrought by the Crusades in the Jewish communities of Western Europe
caused a constant stream of German-Jewish immigrants to pour, since
1090, into the comparatively free countries of the Slavonians.
Russo-Poland became the America of the Old World. The Jewish
settlers from abroad soon outnumbered the native Jews, and they
spread a new language and new customs wherever they established
themselves.²

Whether the Jews of Russia were originally pagans from the
shores of the Black and Caspian Seas, converted to Judaism under
the Khazars during the eighth century, or Palestinian exiles
subjugated by their Slavonian conquerors and assimilated with them,
it is indisputable that they inhabited what we know to-day as
Russia long before the {19} Varangian prince Rurik came, at the
invitation of Scythian and Sarmatian savages, to lay the foundation
of the Muscovite empire. In Feodosia there is a synagogue at least
a thousand years old. The Greek inscription on a marble slab,
dating back to 80-81 B.C.E., preserved in the Imperial Hermitage in
St. Petersburg, makes it certain that they flourished in the Crimea
before the destruction of the Temple. In a communication to the
Russian Geographical Society, M. Pogodin makes the statement, that
there still exist a synagogue and a cemetery in the Crimea that
belong to the pre-Christian era. Some of the tombstones, bearing
Jewish names, and decorated with the seven-branched Menorah, date
back to 157 B.C.E.; while Chufut-Kale, also known as the Rock of
the Jews (Sela’ ha-Yehudim), from the fortress supposed to have
been built there by the Jews, would prove Jewish settlements to
have been made there during the Babylonian or Persian
captivity.³

Though the same antiquity cannot be established for other Jewish
settlements, we know that Kiev, “the mother of Russian cities,” had
many Jews long before the eighth century, who thus antedated the
Russians as citizens. According to Joseph Hakohen they came there
from Persia in 690, according {20} to Malishevsky in 776. It is
certain that their influence was felt as early as the latter part
of the tenth century. The Russian Chronicles ascribed to Nestor
relate that they endeavored, in 986, to induce Grand Duke Vladimir
to accept their religion. They did not succeed as they had
succeeded two centuries before with the khan of the Khazars.⁴ Yet the grand duke, who had the
greatest influence in introducing and spreading Greek Catholicism,
and who is now worshipped as a saint, was always favorably disposed
toward them.

There were other places that were inhabited early by Jews. There
are traditions to the effect that Jews lived in Poland as early as
the ninth century, and under the Boreslavs (992-1278) they are said
to have enjoyed considerable privileges, carried on a lively trade,
and spread as far as Kiev. Chernigov in Little Russia (the
Ukraine), Baku in South Russia (Transcaucasia), Kalisz and Warsaw,
Brest and Grodno, in West Russia (Russian Poland), all possess
Jewish communities of considerable antiquity. In the townlet
Eishishki, near Vilna, a tombstone set in 1171 was still in
existence at the end of the last century, and Khelm, Government
Kovno, has a synagogue to which tradition ascribes an age of eight
hundred years.⁵

The Jewish population in all these communities was prosperous
and respected. Jews were in favor with the Government, enjoyed
equal rights with their Gentile neighbors, and were especially
prominent as traders and farmers of taxes. Their monoxyla, or
one-oared canoes, loaded with silks, furs, and precious metals,
issued from the Borysthanes, traversed the Baltic and the Euxine,
the Oder and the Bosphorus, the Danube and the Black Sea, and
carried on the commerce between the Turks and the Slavonians. They
were granted the honorable and lucrative privilege of directing and
controlling the mints, and that of putting Hebrew as well as
Slavonic inscriptions on their coins.⁶ In the
Lithuanian Magna Charta, granted by Vitold in 1388, the Jews of
Brest were given many rights, and about a year later those of
Grodno were permitted to engage in all pursuits and occupations,
and exempted from paying taxes on synagogues and cemeteries. They
possessed full jurisdiction in their own affairs. Some were raised
to the nobility, notably the Josephovich brothers, Abraham and
Michael. Under King Alexander Jagellon, Abraham was assessor of
Kovno, alderman of Smolensk, and prefect of Minsk; he was called
“sir” (jastrzhembets), was presented with the estates of Voidung,
{22}
Grinkov, and Troki (1509), and appointed Secretary of the Treasury
in Lithuania (1510). The other brother, Michael, was made “fiscal
agent to the king.” In the eighteenth century, Andrey Abramovich,
of the same family but not of the Jewish faith, was senator and
castellan of Brest-Litovsk.⁷ They
were not unique exceptions. Abraham Shmoilovich of Turisk is spoken
of as “honorable sir” in leases of large estates. Affras
Rachmailovich and Judah Bogdanovich figure among the merchant
princes of Livonia and Lithuania; and Francisco Molo, who settled
later in Amsterdam, was financial agent of John III of Poland in
1679. The influence of the last-named was so great with the Dutch
States-General that the Treaty of Ryswick was concluded with Louis
XIV, in 1697, through his mediation.⁸

That Russo-Poland should have elected a Jewish king on two
occasions, a certain Abraham Prochovnik in 842 and the famous Saul
Wahl⁹ in the sixteenth century, sounds
legendary; but that there was a Jewish queen, called Esterka, is
probable, and that some Jews attained to political eminence is
beyond reasonable doubt.¹⁰
Records have been discovered concerning two envoys, Saul and
Joseph, who served the Slavonic czar about 960, and an {23} interesting
story is told of two Jewish soldiers, Ephraim Moisievich and Anbal
the Jassin, who won the confidence of Prince Andrey Bogolyubsky of
Kiev, and afterwards became leaders in a conspiracy against him
(1174).¹¹ Henry, Duke of Anjou, the
successor of Sigismud August on the throne of Poland and Lithuania,
owed his election mainly to the efforts of Solomon Ashkenazi. Ivan
Vassilyevich, too, had many and important relations with Jews, and
his favorable attitude towards them is amply proved by the fact
that his family physician was the Jew Leo (1490). Throughout his
reign he maintained an uninterrupted friendship with Chozi Kokos, a
Jew of the Crimea, and he did not hesitate to offer hospitality and
protection to Zacharias de Guizolfi, though the latter was not in a
position to reciprocate such favors.¹²

In addition there are less prominent individuals who received
honors at the hands of their non-Jewish countrymen. Meïr
Ashkenazi of Kaffa, in the Crimea, who was slain by pirates on a
trip from “Gava to Dakhel,” was envoy of the khan of the Tatars to
the king of Poland in the sixteenth century. Mention is made of
“Jewish Cossacks,” who distinguished themselves on the field of
battle, and were elevated to the rank of major and colonel.¹³ {24} While the common opinion
regarding Jews expressed itself in merry England in such ballads as
“The Jewish Dochter,” and “Gernutus, the Jew of Venice,” many a
Little Russian song had the bravery of a Jewish soldier as its
burden. In everything save religion the Jews were hardly
distinguishable from their neighbors.

There are—writes Cardinal Commendoni, an
eye-witness—a great many Jews in these provinces, including
Lithuania, who are not, as in other places, regarded with
disrespect. They do not maintain themselves miserably by base
profits; they are landed proprietors, are engaged in business, and
even devote themselves to the study of literature and, above all,
to medicine and astronomy; they hold almost everywhere the
commission of levying customs duties, are classed among the most
honest people, wear no outward mark to distinguish them from the
Christians, and are permitted to carry swords and walk about with
their arms. In a word they have equal rights with the other
citizens.

A similar statement is made by Joseph Delmedigo, who spent many
years in Livonia and Lithuania as physician to Prince
Radziwill.¹⁴

In his inimitable manner Gibbon describes the fierce struggle
the Greek Catholic Church had to wage before she obtained a
foothold in Russia, but he neglects to mention the fact that
Judaism no less than paganism was among her formidable opponents.
{25}
The contest lasted several centuries, and in many places it is
undecided to this day.¹⁵ The
Khazars, who had become proselytes in the eighth century, were
constantly encroaching upon Russian Christianity. Buoyant as both
were with the vigor of youth, missionary zeal was at its height
among the two contending religions. Each made war upon the other.
We read that Photius of Constantinople sent a message of thanks to
Archbishop Anthony of Kertch (858-859) for his efforts to convert
the Jews; that the first Bishop of the Established Church (1035)
was “Lukas, the little Jew” (Luka Zhidyata), who was appointed to
his office by Yaroslav; and that St. Feodosi Pechersky was fond of
conversing with learned Jews on matters of theology.¹⁶ On the other hand, the efforts of
the Jews were not without success. The baptism of the pious Olga
marks an era in Russian Christianity, the beginning of the
“Judaizing heresy,” which centuries of persecution only
strengthened. In 1425, Zacharias of Kiev, who is reputed to have
“studied astrology, necromancy, and various other magic arts,”
converted the priest Dionis, the Archbishop Aleksey, and, through
the latter, many more clergymen of Novgorod, Moscow, and Pskov.
Aleksey became a devout Jew. He called himself Abraham {26} and his wife
Sarah. Yet, strange to say, he retained the favor of the Grand Duke
Ivan Vassilyevich, even after the latter’s daughter-in-law,
Princess Helena, his secretary Theodore Kuritzin, the Archimandrite
Sosima, the monk Zacharias, and other persons of note had entered
the fold of Judaism through his influence.

The “heresy” spread over many parts of the empire, and the
number of its adherents constantly grew. Archbishop Nikk complains
that in the very monastery of Moscow there were presumably
converted Jews, “who had again begun to practice their old Jewish
religion and demoralize the young monks.” In Poland, too,
proselytism was of frequent occurrence, especially in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. The religious tolerance of Casimir IV
(1434-1502) and his immediate successors, and the new doctrines
preached by Huss and Luther, which permeated the upper classes of
society, rendered the Poles more liberal on the one hand, and on
the other the Jews more assertive. We hear of a certain nobleman,
George Morschtyn, who married a Jewess, Magdalen, and had his
daughter raised in the religion of her mother. In fact, at a time
when Jews in Spain assumed the mask of Christianity to escape
persecution, Russian and {27} Polish Christians by birth could choose,
with little fear of danger, to lead the Jewish life. It was not
till about the eighteenth century that the Government began to
resort to the usual methods of eradicating heresy. Katharina
Weigel, a lady famous for her beauty, who embraced Judaism, was
decapitated in Cracow at the instigation of Bishop Peter Gamrat. On
the deposition of his wife, Captain Vosnitzin of the Polish navy
was put to death by auto-da-fé (July 15, 1738). The eminent
“Ger Zedek,” Count Valentine Pototzki, less fortunate than his
comrade and fellow-convert Zaremba, was burnt at the stake in Vilna
(May 24, 1749), and his teacher in the Jewish doctrines, Menahem
Mann, was tortured and executed a few months later, at the age of
seventy. But these measures proved of little avail. According to
Martin Bielski, the noted historian, Jews saved their proselytes
from the impending doom by transporting them to Turkey. Many of
them sought refuge in Amsterdam. For those who remained behind
their new coreligionists provided through collections made for that
purpose in Russia and in Germany. To this day these Russian and
Polish proselytes adhere steadfastly to their faith, and whether
they migrate to America or Palestine to escape the persecution
{28}
of their countrymen, they seldom, if ever, indulge in the
latitudinarianism into which many of longer Jewish lineage fall so
readily when removed from old moorings.¹⁷

That the Russian Jews of the day were not altogether
unenlightened, that they not only practiced the Law devoutly, but
also studied it diligently, and cultivated the learning of the time
as well, we may safely infer from researches recently made. Cyril,
or Constantine, “the philosopher,” the apostle to the Slavonians,
acquired a knowledge of Hebrew while at Kherson, and was probably
aided by Jews in his translation of the Bible into Slavonic.
Manuscripts of Russo-Jewish commentaries to the Scriptures, written
as early as 1094 and 1124, are still preserved in the Vatican and
Bodleian libraries, and copyists were doing fairly good work at
Azov in 1274.

Jewish scholars frequented celebrated seats of learning in
foreign lands. Before the end of the twelfth century traces of them
are to be found in France, Italy, and Spain. That in the eleventh
century Judah Halevi of Toledo and Nathan of Rome should have been
familiar with Russian words cannot but be attributed to their
contact with Russian Jews. However, in the case of these two
scholars, {29} it may possibly be ascribed to their great
erudition or extensive travels. But the many Slavonic expressions
occurring in the commentaries of Rashi (1040-1105), and employed by
Joseph Caro (ab. 1140), Benjamin of Tudela (ab. 1160), and Isaac of
Vienna (ab. 1250), lend color to Harkavy’s contention, that Russian
was once the vernacular of the Russian Jews, and they also argue in
favor of our contention, that these natives of the “land of
Canaan”—as the country of the Slavs was then called in
Hebrew—came into personal touch with the “lights and leaders”
of other Jewish communities. Indeed, Rabbi Moses of Kiev is
mentioned as one of the pupils of Jacob Tam, the Tosafist of France
(d. 1170), and Asheri, or Rosh, of Spain is reported to have had
among his pupils Rabbi Asher and Master (Bahur) Jonathan from
Russia. From these peripatetic scholars perhaps came the martyrs of
1270, referred to in the Memorbuch of Mayence. It was Rabbi
Moses who, while still in Russia, corresponded with Samuel ben Ali,
head of the Babylonian Academy, and called the attention of Western
scholars to certain Gaonic decisions. Another rabbi, Isaac, or
Itshke, of Chernigov, was probably the first Talmudist in England,
and his decisions were regarded as authoritative on certain
{30}
occasions. These and others like them wrote super-commentaries on
the commentaries of Rashi and Ibn Ezra, the most popular and
profound scholars medieval Jewry produced, and made copies of the
works of other authors.¹⁸

Soon the Russo-Polish Jews established at home what they had
been compelled to seek abroad. Hearing of the advantages offered in
the great North-East, German Jews flocked thither in such numbers
as to dominate and absorb the original Russians and Poles. A new
element asserted itself. Names like Ashkenazi, Heilperin, Hurwitz,
Landau, Luria, Margolis, Schapiro, Weil, Zarfati, etc., variously
spelled, took the place, through intermarriage and by adoption, of
the ancient Slavonic nomenclature. The language, manners, modes of
thought, and, to a certain extent, even the physiognomy of the
earlier settlers, underwent a more or less radical change. In some
provinces the conflict lasted longer than in others. To this day
not a few Russian Jews would seem to be of Slavonic rather than
Semitic extraction. As late as the sixteenth century there was
still a demand in certain places for a Russian translation of the
Hebrew Book of Common Prayer, and in 1635 Rabbi Meïr
Ashkenazi, who came from Frankfort-on-the-Main to {31} study in
Lublin, and was retained as rabbi in Mohilev-on-the-Dnieper, had
cause to exclaim, “Would to God that our coreligionists all spoke
the same language—German.”¹⁹
Even Maimon, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, mentions
one, by no means an exception, who did not “understand the Jewish
language, and made use, therefore, of the Russian.”²⁰ But by the middle of the
seventeenth century the amalgamation was almost complete. It
resulted in a product entirely new. As the invasion of England by
the Normans produced the Anglo-Saxon, so the inundation of Russia
by the Germans produced the Slav-Teuton. This is the clue to the
study of the Haskalah, as will appear from what follows.

Russo-Poland gradually became the cynosure of the Talmudic
world, the “Aksanye shel Torah,” the asylum of the Law, whence
“enlargement and deliverance” arose for the traditions which the
Jews carried with them, through fire and water, during the dreary
centuries of their dispersion. It became to Jews what Athens was to
ancient Greece, Rome to medieval Christendom, New England to our
early colonies. With the invention and importation of the
printing-press, the publication and acquisition of the Bible, the
Talmud, and most of {32} the important rabbinic works were
facilitated. As a consequence, yeshibot, or colleges, for the study
of Jewish literature, were founded in almost every community. Their
fame reached distant lands. It became a popular saying that “from
Kiev shall go forth the Law, and the word of God from Starodub.”
Horodno, the vulgar pronunciation of Grodno, was construed to mean
Har Adonaï, “the Mount of the Lord.” A pious rabbi did not
hesitate to write to a colleague, “Be it known to the high honor of
your glory that it is preferable by far to dwell in the land of the
Russ and promote the study of the Torah in Israel than in the land
of Israel.”²¹
Especially the part of Poland ultimately swallowed up by Russia was
the new Palestine of the Diaspora. Thither flocked all desirous of
becoming adepts in the dialectics of the rabbis, “of learning how
to swim in the sea of the Talmud.” It was there that the voluminous
works of Hebrew literature were studied, literally “by day and by
night,” and the subtleties of the Talmudists were developed to a
degree unprecedented in Jewish history. Thither was sent, from the
distant Netherlands, the youngest son of Manasseh ben Israel, and
he “became mighty in the Talmud and master of four languages.”
Thither came, from Prague, the afterwards {33} famous
Cabbalist, author, and rabbi, Isaiah Horowitz (ab. 1555-1630), and
there he chose to remain the rest of his days. Thither also went,
from Frankfort, the above-mentioned Meïr Ashkenazi, who,
according to some, was the first author of note in White
Russia.

From everywhere they came “to pour water on the hands and sit at
the feet” of the great ones of the second Palestine.²²

For Jewish solidarity was more than a word in those days.
“Sefardim” had not yet learned to boast of aristocratic lineage,
nor “Ashkenazim” to look down contemptuously upon their Slavonic
coreligionists. It was before the removal of civil disabilities
from one portion of the Jewish people had sowed the seed of
arrogance toward the other less favored portion. Honor was accorded
to whom it was due, regardless of the locality in which he happened
to have been born. Glückel von Hameln states in her
Memoirs that preference was sometimes given to the decisions
of the “great ones of Poland,” and mentions with pride that her
brother Shmuel married the daughter of the great Reb Shulem of
Lemberg.²³ With open arms, Amsterdam,
Frankfort, Fürth, Konigsberg, Metz, Prague, and other
communities renowned for wealth and {34} learning, welcomed the acute
Talmudists of Brest, Grodno, Kovno, Lublin, Minsk, and Vilna,
whenever they were willing or compelled to consider a call. The
practice of summoning Russo-Polish rabbis to German posts was
carried so far that it aroused the displeasure of the Western
scholars, and they complained of being slighted.²⁴

The reverence for Slavonic learning was strikingly illustrated
during the years following the Cossack massacres, when many
Russo-Polish rabbis fled for safety to foreign lands. Frankfort,
Fürth, Prague, and Vienna successively elected the fugitive
Shabbataï Horowitz of Ostrog as their religious guide. David
Taz of Vladimir became rabbi of Steinitz in Moravia; Ephraim
Hakohen was called to Trebitsch in Moravia and to Ofen in Hungary;
David of Lyda, to Mayence and Amsterdam, and Naphtali Kohen, to
Frankfort-on-the-Main in 1704, and later to Breslau. No less
personages than Isaac Aboab and Saul Morteira welcomed the
merchant-Talmudist Moses Rivkes of Vilna when he sought refuge in
Amsterdam, and they entrusted to him the task of editing the
Shulhan ‘Aruk, his marginal notes to which, the Beër
ha-Golah, have ever since been printed with the text. In
addition to rabbis, Lithuania and other provinces furnished
{35}
teachers for the young, melammedim, who exerted considerable
influence upon the people among whom they lived. Their opinions, we
are told, were highly valued in the choice of rabbis.²⁵

It must not be supposed that supremacy in the Talmud was secured
at the cost of secular knowledge, or what was then regarded as
such. Their familiarity with other branches of study was not
inferior to that of the Jews in better-known lands. Not a few of
the prominent men united piety with philosophy, and thorough
knowledge of the Talmud with mastery of one or more of the sciences
of the time. Data on this phase of the subject might have been much
more abundant, had not the storm of persecution suddenly swept over
the communities, destroying them and their records. What we still
possess indicates what may have been lost. The Ukraine was famous
for its scholars. Among them was Jehiel Michael of Nemirov, reputed
to have been “versed in all the sciences of the world.”²⁶ Several of them were poets and
grammarians. Poems of a liturgical character are still extant in
which they bemoan their plight or assert their faith hopefully.
Such were the poems of Ephraim of Khelm, Joseph of Kobrin, Solomon
of Zamoscz, and Shabbataï Kohen. The last, eminent as a
Talmudist, {36} the author of commentaries on the
Shulhan ‘Aruk approved by the leading rabbis of his
generation, is also known as a very trustworthy historian. His
Megillah ‘Afah, written in classic Hebrew, is a valuable
source of information on the critical period in which he lived. He
won the esteem of the Polish nobility by his secular attainments.
To judge from his correspondence, he must have been on intimate
terms with Vidrich of Leipsic.²⁷ Of
the grammarians, Jacob Zaslaver wrote on the Massorah, and
Shabbataï Sofer was the author of annotations and
treatises.²⁸ Our
taste in poetry and grammar is no longer the same, but the polemic
and apologetic writings of those days, called forth by the
discussions between Rabbanites and Karaites and by the constant
attacks of Christianity, are still of uncommon interest. Specimens
of the former kind are the polemics of Moses of Shavli, which
caused consternation in the camp of the Karaites. Of the apologetic
writings should be mentioned the reply, in Polish, of Jacob Nahman
of Belzyc to Martin Chekhovic (Lublin, 1581), and the Hizzuk
Emunah of the Karaite Isaac ben Abraham of Troki. In the latter
the weakness of Christianity and the strength of Judaism are
pointed out with trenchancy never before reached. The work stirred
{37}
up heated discussions among the various Christian sects, with the
tenets of which the author was intimately acquainted. It was
translated into Latin (1681, 1705), Yiddish (1717), English (1851),
and German (1865, 1873). Voltaire says that all the arguments used
by free-thinkers against Christianity were drawn from it.²⁹

In philosophy, mathematics, and medicine, the three main
branches of medieval knowledge, many Slavonian Jews attained
eminence. Devout Karaites as well as diligent Talmudists found
secular learning a diversion and a delight. For the lovers of
enlightenment Italy, especially Padua, was the centre of
attraction, as France and Spain had been before, and Germany,
particularly Berlin, became afterwards.³⁰ Towards the middle of the
sixteenth century we find young Delacrut at the University of
Bologna, the philosopher and Cabbalist, known for his commentaries
to Gikatilla’s Sha’are Orah (Cracow, 1600) and Ben Avigdor’s
Mar’eh ha-Ofanim (1720), and his translation of Gossuin’s
L’image du monde (Amsterdam, 1733). His famous disciple
Mordecai Jaffe (Lebushim) spent ten years in the study of astronomy
and mathematics before he occupied the rabbinate of Grodno
(1572)³¹ At the request of Yom-Tob Lipman
Heller, Joseph {38} ben Isaac Levi wrote a commentary on
Maimuni’s Moreh Nebukim, which was published with the
former’s annotations, Gibe’at ha-Moreh (Prague, 1611).
Deservedly or not, Eliezer Mann was called “the Hebrew Socrates”;
and many a Maskil in his study of mathematics turned for guidance
to Manoah Handel of Brzeszticzka, Volhynia, author and translator
of several scientific works, who rendered seven Euclidean
propositions into Hebrew.³²

Polyglots they were compelled to be by force of circumstances.
When the exotic Judeo-German finally asserted itself as the
vernacular, the language in which they wrote and prayed was still
the ancient Hebrew, with which every one was familiar, and
commercial intercourse with their Gentile neighbors was hardly
feasible without at least a smattering of the local Slavonic
dialect. “Look at our brethren in Poland,” exclaims Wessely many
years later in his address to his countrymen. “They converse with
their neighbors in good Polish…. What excuse have we for our
brogue and jargon?” He might have had still better cause for
complaint, had he been aware that the Yiddish of the Russo-Polish
Jews, despite its considerable Slavonic admixture, was purer German
than that of his contemporaries in Germany, even as the English of
our New England {39} colonies was superior to the Grub Street
style prevalent in Dr. Johnson’s England, and the Spanish of our
Mexican annexations to the Castilian spoken at the time of
Coronado. But we are here concerned with their knowledge of foreign
languages. We shall refer only to the
Hebrew-German-Italian-Latin-French dictionary Safah Berurah
(Prague, 1660; Amsterdam, 1701) by the eminent Talmudist Nathan
Hannover.³³

In medicine Jews were pre-eminent in the Slavonic countries, as
they were everywhere else. They were in great demand as court
physicians, though several had to pay with their lives “for having
failed to effect cures.” Doctor Leo, who was at the court of Moscow
in 1490, was mentioned above. Jacob Isaac, the “nobleman of
Jerusalem” (Yerosalimska shlyakhta), was attached to the court of
Sigismund, where he was held in high esteem. Prince Radziwill’s
physician was Itshe Nisanovich, and among those in attendance on
John Sobieski were Jonas Casal and Abraham Troki, the latter the
author of several works on medicine and natural philosophy.³⁴

Medieval Jewish physicians were prone to travel, and those of
Russo-Poland were no exception. We find them in almost every part
of the civilized {40} world, and their number increases with the
disappearance of prejudice. Some were noted Talmudists, such as
Solomon Luria and Samuel ben Mattathias. Abraham Ashkenazi
Apotheker was not only a compounder of herbs but a healer of souls,
for the edification of which he wrote his Elixir of Life
(Sam Hayyim, Prague, 1590). To the same class belong Moses
Katzenellenbogen and his son Hayyim, who was styled Gaon. In 1657
Hayyim visited Italy. He was welcomed by the prominent Jews of
Mantua, Modena, Venice, and Verona, but he preferred to continue
the practice of his profession in his home town Lublin.³⁵ Nor may we omit the names of
Stephen von Gaden and Moses Coën, because of their high
standing among their colleagues and the honors conferred upon them
for their statesmanship. Stephen von Gaden, who with Samuel Collins
was physician-in-ordinary to Czar Aleksey Mikhailovich, was
instrumental in removing many disabilities from the Jews of Moscow
and in the interior of Russia. Moses Coën, in consequence of
the Cossack uprising, escaped to Moldavia, and was made court
physician by the hospodar Vassile Lupu. But for Coën, Lupu
would have been dethroned by those who conspired against him. To
his loyalty may probably be attributed the {41} kind
treatment Moldavian Jews later enjoyed at the hands of the prince.
Coën also exposed the secret alliance between Russia and
Sweden against Turkey, and his advice was sought by the doge of
Venice.³⁶

The personage who typifies best the enlightened Slavonic Jew of
the pre-Haskalah period is Tobias Cohn (1652-1729). He was the son
and grandson of physicians, who practiced at Kamenetz-Podolsk and
Byelsk, and after 1648 went to Metz. After their father’s death, he
and his older brother returned to Poland, whence Tobias, in turn,
emigrated first to Italy and then to Turkey. In Adrianople he was
physician-in-ordinary to five successive sultans. In the history of
medicine he is remembered as the discoverer of the plica
polonica, and as the publisher of a Materia Medica in three
languages. To the student of Haskalah he is interesting, because he
marks the close of the old and the beginning of the new era. Like
the Maskilim of a century or two centuries later, he compiled and
edited an encyclopedia in Hebrew, that “knowledge be increased
among his coreligionists.” His acquaintance with learned works in
several ancient and modern languages of which he was master,
enabled him to write his magnum opus, Ma’aseh Tobiah,
{42}
with tolerable ease. This work is divided into eight parts, devoted
respectively to theology, astronomy, pharmacy, hygiene, venereal
diseases, botany, cosmography, and chemistry. It is illustrated
with several plates, among them the picture of an astrolabe and one
of the human body treated as a house. From the numerous editions
through which it passed (Venice, 1707, 1715, 1728, 1769), we may
conclude that it met with marked success.³⁷

To understand the raison d’Être of the Haskalah
movement, it may not be superfluous to cast a glance at the inner
social and religious life of the Slavonic Jews during pre-Haskalah
times. The labors of the farmer are crowned with success only when
nature lends him a helping hand. His soil must be fertile, and
blessed with frequent showers. Nor would the Maskilim have
accomplished their aim, had the material they found at hand been
different from what it was.

The Jews in the land of the Slavonians were fortunate in being
regarded as aliens in a country which, as we have seen, they
inhabited long before those who claimed to be its possessors by
divine right of conquest. If their position was precarious, their
sufferings were those of a conquered nation. {43} As the whim
and fancy of the reigning prince, knyaz, varied, they were induced
one day to settle in the country by the offer of the most
flattering privileges, and the next day they were expelled, only to
be requested to return again. Now their synagogues and cemeteries
were exempt from taxation, now an additional poll-tax or land-tax
was levied on every Jew (serebshizna); one day they were allowed to
live unhampered by restrictions, then they were prohibited to wear
certain garments and ornaments, and commanded to use yellow caps
and kerchiefs to distinguish them from the Gentiles (1566).

But all this was the consequence of political subjugation.
Judged by the standard of the times, they were veritable freemen,
freer than the Huguenots of France and the Puritans of England.
They were left unmolested in the administration of their internal
affairs, and were permitted to appoint their own judges, enforce
their own laws, and support their own institutions. Forming a state
within a state, they developed a civilization contrasting strongly
with that round about them, and comparing favorably with some of
the features of ours of to-day. Slavonic Jewry was divided into
four districts, consisting of the more important communities
{44}
(kahals), to which a number of smaller ones (prikahalki) were
subservient. These, known as the Jewish Assemblies (zbori
zhidovskiye), met at stated intervals. As in our federal
Government, the administrative, executive, and legislative
departments were kept distinct, and those who presided over them
(roshim) were elected annually by ballot. These roshim, or elders,
served by turns for periods of one month each. The rabbi of each
community was the chief judge, and was assisted by several inferior
judges (dayyanim). For matters of importance there were courts of
appeal established in Ostrog and Lemberg, the former having
jurisdiction over Volhynia and the Ukraine, the latter over the
rest of Jewish Russo-Poland. For inter-kahal litigation, there was
a supreme court, the Wa’ad Arba’ ha-Arazot (the Synod of the Four
Countries), which held its sessions during the Lublin fair in
winter and the Yaroslav fair in summer. In cases affecting Jews and
Gentiles, a decision was given by the judex Judaeorum, who
held his office by official appointment of the grand duke.

So far their system of self-government appears almost a
prototype of our own. The same is true of their municipal
administration. The rabbi, who had the deciding vote in case of a
dead-lock, stood {45} in the same relation to them as the mayor
holds to us, only that his term of office, nominally limited to
three years, was actually for life or during good behavior. Yet the
power vested in him was only delegated power. A number of
selectmen, or aldermen, guarded the rights of the community with
the utmost jealousy, and tolerated no innovation, unless previously
sanctioned by them. There were also several honorary offices, with
a one-year tenure, which none could fill who had not had experience
in an inferior position. The chief duties attached to these offices
were to appraise the amount of taxation, pay the salaries of the
rabbi, his dayyanim, and the teachers of the public schools,
provide for the poor, and, above all, intercede with the
Government.³⁸

Still more interesting and, for our purpose, more important were
their public and private institutions of learning. Jews have always
been noted for the solicitous care they exercise in the education
of the young. The Slavonic Jews surpassed their brethren of other
countries in this respect. At times they wrenched the tender bond
of parental love in their ardor for knowledge. With a republican
form of government they created an aristocracy, not of wealth or of
blood, but of intellect. The education {46} of girls
was, indeed, neglected. To be able to read her prayers in Hebrew
and to write Yiddish was all that was expected of a mother in
Israel. It was otherwise with the boys. Every Jew deemed himself in
duty bound to educate his son. “Learning is the best
merchandise”—Torah iz die beste sehorah—was the
lesson inculcated from cradle to manhood, the precept followed from
manhood to old age. All the lullabies transmitted to us from
earliest times indicate the pursuit of knowledge as the highest
ambition cherished by mothers for their sons:

To have a scholarly son or son-in-law was the best passport to
the highest circles, a means of rising from the lowliest to the
loftiest station in life.

It is no wonder, then, that schools abounded in every community.
At the early age of four the child was usually sent to the heder
(school; literally, room), where he studied until he was ready for
the yeshibah, the higher “seat” of learning. {47} The
melammedim, teachers, were graded according to their ability, and
the school year consisted of two terms, zemannim, from the first
Sabbath after the Holy Days to Passover and from after Passover to
Rosh ha-Shanah. The boy’s intellectual capacities were steadily, if
not systematically, cultivated, sometimes at the expense of his
bodily development. It was not unusual for a child of seven or
eight to handle a difficult problem in the Talmud, a precocity
characteristic to this day of the children hailing from Slavonic
countries. Their ‘illuyim (prodigies) might furnish ample material
for more than one volume of les enfants
célèbres.

Nor were the children of the poor left to grow up in ignorance.
Learning was free, to be had for the asking. More than this,
stringent measures were taken that no child be without instruction.
Talmud Torahs were founded even in the smallest kehillot
(communities), and the students were supplied, not only with books,
but also with the necessaries of life. Communal and individual
benefactors furnished clothes, and every member (ba’al ha-bayit)
had to provide food and lodging for an indigent pupil at least one
day of each week. The “Freitisch” (free board) was an inseparable
adjunct to every school. Poor young men were not regarded
{48}
as “beggar students.” They were looked upon as earning their living
by study, even as teachers by instructing. To pray for the dead or
the living in return for their support is a recent innovation, and
mostly among other than Slavonic Jews. It is a custom adopted from
medieval Christianity, and practiced in England by the poor
student, who, in the words of Chaucer,

For a faithful and vivid description of the yeshibot we cannot
do better than transcribe the account given in the pages of the
little pamphlet Yeven Mezulah in which Nathan Hannover,
mentioned above, has left us a reliable history of the Cossack
uprisings and the Kulturgeschichte of his own time.

I need bring no proof for the statement that nowhere was the
study of the Law so universal as in Russo-Poland. In every
community there was a well-paid dean (rosh yeshibah), who, exempt
from worry about a livelihood, devoted himself exclusively to
teaching and studying by day and by night. In every kahal, many
youths, maintained liberally, studied under the guidance of the
dean. In turn, they instructed the less advanced, who were also
supported by the community. A kahal of fifty [families] had to
provide for at least thirty such. They boarded and lodged in the
homes of their patrons, and frequently received pocket-money in
addition. Thus there was hardly a house in which the Torah
{49}
was not studied, either by the master of the house, a son, a
son-in-law, or a student stranger. They always bore in mind the
dictum of Rabba, “He who loves scholars will have scholarly sons;
he who welcomes scholars will have scholarly sons-in-law; he who
admires scholars will become learned himself.” No wonder, then,
that every community swarmed with scholars, that out of every fifty
of its members at least twenty were far advanced, and had the
morenu (i.e. bachelor) degree.

The dean was vested with absolute authority. He could punish an
offender, whether rich or poor. Everybody respected him, and he
often received gifts of money or valuables. In all religious
processions he came first. Then followed the students, then the
learned, and the rest of the congregation brought up the rear. This
veneration for the dean prompted many a youth to imitate his
example, and thus our country was rendered full of the knowledge of
the Law.

What became of the students when they were graduated? Let us
turn once more to Hannover’s interesting narrative. The “fairs” of
those days were much more than opportunities for barter; they
afforded favorable and attractive occasions for other objects.
Zaslav and Yaroslav during the summer, Lemberg and Lublin in the
winter, were “filled with hundreds of deans and thousands of
students,” and one who had a marriageable daughter had but to
resort thither to have his worries allayed. Therefore, “Jews and
Jewesses attended these bazaars in magnificent attire, and [each
season] {50} several hundred, sometimes as many as a
thousand, alliances were consummated.”

That the rabbi, living in a strange land and recalling a
glorious past, should have indulged in a bit of exaggeration in his
sorrowful retrospect, is not more than natural; and that his
picture on the whole is true is proved by similar schools which
existed in Russia till recently. The descriptions of these
institutions by Smolenskin as well as writers of less repute are
graphic and intensely interesting. They constituted a unique world,
in which the Jewish youth lived and moved until he reached man’s
estate. In later years, when Russian Jewry became infected, so to
speak, with the Aufklärungs-bacilli, they became the nurseries
of the new learning. But in the earlier time, too, a spirit of
enlightenment pervaded them. The study of the Talmud fostered in
them was regarded both as a religious duty and as a means to an
end, the rabbinate. Even in the Middle Ages Aristotle was a
favorite with the older students, and Solomon Luria complained that
in the prayer books of many of them he had noticed the prayer of
Aristotle, for which he blamed the liberal views of Moses
Isserles!⁴⁰

Another typically, though not exclusively, Slavonic Jewish
institution was the study-hall, or bet {51} ha-midrash.
As the synagogues gradually became Schulen (schools), so, by a
contrary process, the bet ha-midrash assumed the function of a
house of prayer. Its uniqueness it has retained to this day. It was
at once a library, a reading-room, and a class-room; yet those who
frequented it were bound by the rigorous laws of none of the three.
There were no restrictions as to when, or what, or how one should
study. It was a place in which originality was admired and research
encouraged. As at a Spartan feast, youth and age commingled, men of
all ages and diverse attainments exchanged views, and all benefited
by mutual contact.

Those whose position precluded devotion to study availed
themselves at least of the means for mutual improvement at their
disposal. They organized societies for the study of certain
branches of Jewish lore, and for the meetings of these societies
the busiest spared time and the poorest put aside his work. It was
a people composed of scholars and those who maintained scholars,
and the scholars, in dress and appearance, represented the
aristocracy, an aristocracy of the intellect.

Such was the pre-Haskalah period. From the meagre data at our
disposal we are justified in concluding, that, left undisturbed,
the Slavonic Jews {52} would have evolved a civilization
rivalling, if not surpassing, that of the golden era of the Spanish
Jews. But this was not to be. Their onward march met a sudden and
terrific check. Hetman Chmielnicki at the head of his savage hordes
of Russians and Tatars conquered the Poles, and Jews and Catholics
were subjected to the most inhuman treatment. The descendants of
those who, in 1090, had escaped the Crusaders fell victims in 1648
to the more cruel Cossacks. About half a million Jews, it is
estimated, lost their lives in Chmielnicki’s horrible massacres.
The few communities remaining were utterly demoralized. The
education of the young was neglected, both sacred and secular
branches of study were abandoned. And when the storm calmed down,
they found themselves deprived of the accumulations of centuries,
forced, like Noah after the deluge, but without his means, to start
again from the very beginning. Indeed, as Levinsohn remarks, the
wonder is that, despite the fiendish persecution they endured,
these unfortunates should have preserved a spark of love of
knowledge. Yet a little later it was to burst into flame again and
bring light and warmth to hearts crushed by “man’s inhumanity to
man.”

(Notes, pp. 305-310.)

CHAPTER II

THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION

1648-1794

The storm of persecution that had been brewing in the sixteenth
century, and which burst in all its fury by the middle of the
seventeenth century, was allayed but little by the rivers of blood
that streamed over the length and breadth of the Slavonic land.
Half a million Jewish victims were not sufficient to satisfy the
followers of a religion of love. They only whetted their insatiable
appetite. The anarchy among the Gentiles increased the misery of
the Jews. The towns fell into the hands of the Lithuanians, Poles,
Russians, and Tatars successively, and it was upon the Jews that
the hounds of war were let loose at each defeat or conquest.
Determined to exterminate each other, they joined forces in
exterminating the Jews. When Bratzlav, for instance, was destroyed
by the Tatars, in 1479, more than four hundred of its six hundred
Jewish citizens were slain. When the city was attacked by the
Cossacks {54} in 1569, the greater number of the
plundered and murdered were Jews. The same happened when
Chmielnicki gained the upper hand in Bratzlav in 1648, again when
the Russians slaughtered all the inhabitants in 1664, and when the
Tatars plotted against their victorious enemy, Peter the
Great.¹ Swedish attacks without and popular
uprisings within rendered the Polish pan (dubbed among Jews poriz,
rowdy or ruffian) as reckless as he was irresponsible. The Jew
became for him a sponge to be squeezed for money, and a clown to
contribute to his brutal amusements. The subtle and baneful
influence of the Jesuits succeeded, besides, in introducing
religion into politics and making the Jew the scapegoat for the
evils of both. The Judaeus infidelis was the target of abuse
and persecution. It was only the fear that the Government’s
exchequer might suffer that prevented his being turned into a
veritable slave. His condition, indeed, was worse than slavery; his
life was worth less than a beast’s. It was frequently taken for the
mere fun of it, and with impunity. An overseer once ordered all
Jewish mothers living on the estate to climb to the tree-tops and
leave their little ones below. He then fired at the children, and
when the women fell from the trees at the horrible sight, he
presented {55} each with a piece of money, and thanked
them for the pleasure they had afforded him.²

In the cities, though the pan’s excesses were bound to be
somewhat bridled there, the lot of the Jews was equally gloomy.
They were treated like outlaws, were forbidden to engage in all but
a few branches of trade or handicraft, or to live with Christians,
or employ them as servants. In 1720 they were prohibited to build
new synagogues or even repair the old ones. Sometimes the
synagogues were locked “by order of …” until a stipulated amount
of money bought permission to reopen them. We of to-day can hardly
imagine what pain a Jew of that time experienced when he hastened
to the house of God on one of the great Holy Days only to find its
doors closed by the police!

Their status was no better in Lithuania and Great Russia. The
accession of Ivan IV, the Terrible (1533-1584), dealt their former
comparative prosperity a blow from which it has not recovered to
this day. As if to remove the impression of liberalism made by his
predecessor and obliterate from memory his amicable relations with
Doctor Leo, de Guizolfi, and Chozi Kolos, this monster czar, with
the fiendishness of a Caligula, but lacking the accomplishments of
his heathen prototype, delighted {56} to invent tortures for
inoffensive Jews. He expelled them from Moscow, and deprived them
of the right of travel from place to place. During his occupancy of
Polotsk he ordered all Jews residing there either to become
converts to Greek Catholicism or choose between being drowned in
the Dwina and burnt at the stake.

But even the removal of the terrible czar and the dawn of the
century of reason and humanitarianism failed to effect a change for
the better in the condition of the Slavonic Jews. For a while it
appeared as if the Zeitgeist might penetrate even into
Russo-Poland, and the Renaissance and the Reformation would not
pass over the eastern portion of Europe without beneficent results.
In Lithuania Calvinism threatened to oust Catholicism, science and
culture began to be pursued, and Jewish and Gentile children
attended the same schools. The successors of Ivan IV were men of
better breeding, and the praiseworthy attempts of Peter the Great
to introduce Western civilization are known to all.³ But Slavonic soil has never been
susceptible to the elevating influences that have transformed the
rest of Europe. Every reformatory effort was nipped in the bud. The
lot of the Jews accordingly grew from bad to worse. In 1727 they
were expelled {57} from the Ukraine and other provinces, and
they were recalled, “for the benefit of the citizens,” only at the
instance of Apostol, the hetman of the very Cossacks that had
massacred them in 1648. Baruch Leibov was burned alive in St.
Petersburg, in 1738, for having dared “insult the Christian
religion by building a synagogue in the village of Zvyerovichi,” an
offence that was aggravated by the suspicion that he had converted
the Russian Captain Vosnitzin to Judaism. The same fate was, in
1783, meted out to Moses, a Jewish tailor, for refusing to accept
Christianity, and in 1790 a Jew was quartered in Grodno, though the
king had declined to sign his death warrant. In some places Jews
had to contribute towards the maintenance of churches, and in
Slutsk the law, enacted there in 1766, remains unrevoked to this
day. Elizabeta Petrovna did not imitate Ivan III. When she
discovered that Sanchez, her physician, was of the Jewish
persuasion, she discharged him without notice, after eighteen years
of faithful service. Similarly, when the Livonian merchants
remonstrated, maintaining that the exclusion of Jews from their
fairs was fraught with disastrous consequences to the commerce of
the country, she is reported to have replied, “From the enemies of
Christ I will not receive even a benefit.”⁴

But worse things were yet to come, the worst since Chmielnicki’s
massacres. The bitterness of both Poles and Russians against the
Jews grew especially intense as the days of the rozbior, the
Partition of Poland, drew near (1794). The Poles, forgetting the
many examples of loyalty and self-sacrifice shown by Jews in times
of peace and war, suspected them of being treacherous and
unreliable; while the Russians, though denying the patriotism of
their own Jews, persisted in the accusation that Polish Jews spent
money lavishly in fomenting rebellion and anarchy. The pupils of
the Jesuits found great delight in attacks upon the Jews, which
frequently culminated in riot and bloodshed and the payment of
money by Jews to Catholic institutions. “What appalling
spectacles,” exclaims a Christian writer, “must we witness in the
capital [Warsaw] on solemn holidays. Students and even adults in
noisy mobs assault the Jews, and sometimes beat them with sticks.
We have seen a gang waylay a Jew, stop his horses, and strike him
till he fell from the wagon. How can we look with indifference on
such a survival of barbarism?” The commonest manifestations of
hatred and superstition, however, were, as in other countries, the
charge that Jews were magicians, using the black art to avenge
{59}
themselves on their persecutors, and that they used Christian blood
for their observance of the Passover. The latter crime, the
imputing of which was sternly prohibited by an edict of the liberal
Bathory, in 1576, was so frequently laid at their door, that in the
short period of sixty years (1700-1760) not less than twenty such
accusations were brought against them, ending each time in the
massacre of Jews by infuriated mobs. Even more shocking, if
possible, was the frequent extermination of whole communities by
the brigand bands known as Haidamacks. They added the “Massacre of
Uman” (1768) to the Jewish calendar of misfortunes, the most
terrible slaughter, equalled, perhaps, only by that of Nemirov in
1648.⁵

That all this should have left a marked impression on the
mentality and intellectuality of the Jews, is little to be wondered
at. The marvel is that they should have maintained their
superiority over their surroundings, and continued to be a
law-abiding and God-fearing people. While among the Russians and
Poles the nobles who learned to read or write formed a rare
exception, there was hardly one among the Jews, the very lowliest
of them, who could not read Hebrew, and even translate it into the
vernacular. Maimon tells us that in his early youth {60} he became
the family tutor of “a miserable farmer in a still more miserable
village,” who yet was ambitious of giving his children an education
of some kind.

Fortunately for the Jews of those times—says a
writer—their civilization was by far superior to that of the
Christians. The rabbi, though in no way inferior to the priest
mentally, was immeasurably above him morally. The students of the
yeshibot, despite their exclusive devotion to the study of the
Talmud, yet were better equipped for intellectual work, were of
broader minds and better manners, than the pupils of the Jesuits.
And the Jewish ba’ale battim, with an education as good as that of
the Gentile shlyakhta, had a more ennobling and elevating object in
life.⁶

It is remarkable how quickly they recuperated from the blows
they received. In 1648 thousands of people were killed, whole
communities exterminated, Volhynia, Podolia, and a great part of
Lithuania utterly ruined. In 1660, in those very places, we hear
again of Jewish settlements, with synagogues and schools and a
system of education of the kind described in the preceding chapter,
and we hear of the Council of Lithuania struggling to re-establish
and cement the shattered foundation of their self-government. Yet
all their efforts improved the demoralized condition of the country
but {61} little. As always in national crises, the
individual was sacrificed to the community, and deprived of the few
rights remaining to him. The kehillot became brutally oppressive.
There were no longer men of the stamp of Abraham Rapoport, Solomon
Luria, Mordecai Jaffe, and Meïr Katz, to put their feet on the
neck of tyranny. Without special permission no one could buy or
sell, or move from one place to another, or learn a trade or
practice a profession. Rabbinism became synonymous with rigorism,
the coercion of untold customs became unbearable, and the spirit of
Judaism was lost in a heap of innumerable rites. The Jew’s every
act had to be sanctioned by religion. He knew of the outward world
only from the heavy taxes he paid in order to be allowed to exist,
and from the bloody riots with which his people was frequently
visited.

What could result from such a state of affairs but poverty,
material and spiritual, with all the suffering it engenders? Those
at the head of the kehillot, being responsible solely to the
Government, often had to deliver the full tale of bricks like the
Jewish overseers in Egypt, though no straw was given to them. On
one occasion Rabbi Mikel of Shkud was arrested because the kahal
could not pay the thousand gulden it owed. In 1767, the whole kahal
of {62} Vilna went to Warsaw to protest against
intolerable taxation. Such protests were usually of little avail.
On the other hand, a few powerful families throve at the expense of
their oppressed coreligionists. This aroused a spirit of animosity
and a clamor for the abolition of the kahal institution. Jewish
autonomy was more and more encroached upon. Rabbinates were bought
and sold, and the aid of the Government was invoked in religious
controversies. A question regarding the preferable form of prayer
was submitted to the decision of Paul I. In 1777, Prince Radziwill
decided who should officiate as rabbi in so important a centre of
Judaism as Vilna,⁷ and in
1804 the Government issued a “regulation” depriving the kahal of
its judicial functions altogether.

What was even more disastrous was the spiritual poverty of the
masses. Seldom have the awful warnings of the great lawgiver been
fulfilled so literally as during the eighteenth century:

And upon them that remain of you, I will send a faintness into
their hearts in the land of their enemies; and the sound of a
shaken leaf shall chase them; and they shall flee as fleeing from a
sword; and they shall fall, when none pursueth. And they shall fall
one upon another, as it were before a sword, when none {63} pursueth:
and ye shall have no power to stand before your enemies (Lev. 26:
36-37).

But the Lord shall give thee there a trembling heart, and
failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind. And thy life shall hang in
doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear day and night, and thou
shalt have none assurance of thy life (Deut. 29: 65-66).

Having learned from sad experience that there was no crime their
foes were incapable of perpetrating, they gave credence to every
rumor as to an established fact. A report that boys and girls were
to be prohibited from marrying before a certain age resulted in
behalot (panics), during which children of the tenderest ages were
united as husband and wife (1754, 1764, 1793). Mysticism became
rampant. “Messiah” after “Messiah” “revealed” himself as the one
promised to redeem Israel from all his troubles. Love of God began
to be tinged with fear of the devil, and incantations to take the
place of religious belief. The Zohar and works full of
superstition, such as the Kab ha-Yashar, Midrash
Talpiyot, and Nishmat Hayyim, the first studied by men,
the others by both sexes, but mostly by women, prepared their minds
for all sorts of mongrel beliefs. “In no land,” says Tobias Cohn,
“is the practice of summoning up devils and spirits by means of the
Cabbalistic {64} abracadabra so prevalent, and the belief
in dreams and visions so strong, as in Poland.”⁸ All this, though it strengthened
religious fervor in some, undermined it in others. Sects came into
being, struggled, and, having brought added misery upon their
followers, disappeared. Jewish criminals escaped justice by
invoking the power of the Catholic priesthood and promising to
become converted to Christianity.⁹ And
now and then even Talmudists left the fold, as, for instance, Carl
Anton, the Courland pupil of Eybeschütz, who became professor
of Hebrew at Hamsted, and wrote numerous works on Judaism. Others
hoped to win the favor of the Gentiles by preaching a mixture of
Judaism and Catholicism. In many places, especially in the Ukraine,
the seat of learning that had suffered most from the ravages of the
Cossacks, the state of morals sank very low, owing to the teaching
of Jacob Querido, the self-proclaimed son of the pseudo-Messiah
Shabbataï Zebi, “that the sinfulness of the world can be
overcome only by a super-abundance of sin.” This paved the way for
the last of the long list of Messiahs, Jacob (Yankev Leibovich)
Frank of Podolia. His experiences, adventures, and hairbreadth
escapes, his entire career, beginning with his return from his
travels in Turkey, {65} through his conversion to Catholicism
(1759), to the day of his death as “Baron von Offenbach,” would
furnish material for a stirring drama. As if to counteract this
demoralizing tendency, a new sect, known as Hasidim, originating in
Lithuania and headed by Judah Hasid of Dubno and Hayyim Malak,
taught its devotees to hasten the advent of the Messiah by doing
penance for the sins of Israel. They were so firmly convinced of
the efficacy of fasts and prayers that they went to Jerusalem by
hundreds to witness the impending redemption (ab. 1706). But the
ascetic Hasidim and the epicurean Frankists were alike doomed to
disappear or to be swallowed up by a new Hasidism, combining the
teachings and aspirations of both, the sect founded by Israel Baal
Shem, or Besht (ab. 1698-1759), and fully developed by Bar of
Meseritz and Jacob Joseph of Polonnoy.

Time was when all writers on the subject, usually Maskilim,
thought it their duty to cast a stone at Hasidism. They described
it as a Chinese wall shutting the Jews in and shutting the world
out. It is becoming more and more plainly recognized and admitted,
that it was, in reality, an attempt at reform rendered imperative
by the tyranny of the kahal, the rigorism of the rabbis, the
superciliousness {66} of the learned classes, and the
superstition of the masses. Its aim was to bring about a deep
psychologic improvement, to change not so much the belief as the
believer. It insisted on purity rather than profundity of thought.
Unable to remove the galling yoke, it gave strength to its wearers
by prohibiting sadness and asceticism, and emphasizing joy and
fellowship as important elements in the fabric of its theology.

Hasidism was thus a plant the seeds of which had been sown by
the various sects. Like the former Hasidim, or even the Assideans
of nearly two thousand years before, their latter-day namesakes
rigidly adhered to the laws of Levitical purification, and, to a
certain extent, led a communistic life. In addition they accepted,
in a modified form, certain customs and beliefs of the Catholic
church that had been adopted by the followers of Frank. The prayers
to the saints (zaddikim), the conception of faith as the fountain
of salvation, even the belief in a trinity consisting of the
Godhead, the Shekinah, and the Holy Ghost, these and other exotic
doctrines introduced by the Cabbala took root and grew in the
vineyard of Hasidism.¹⁰

The founder of the sect has an interesting history. In his
childhood he gave no evidence of future {67} greatness.
His education was of a low order, but his feeling heart and
sympathetic soul won him the esteem of all that knew him. The woods
possessed the same charm for him as for Wordsworth or Whitman. With
the latter especially he seems to have much in common. While a
child, he absented himself frequently from the narrow and noisy
heder, and spent the day in the quiet of the neighboring woods.
When he grew up, he accepted the menial position of a school usher.
His office was to go from house to house, arouse the sleeping
children, dress them, and bring them to heder. But the time soon
came when humble and obscure Israel “revealed” himself to the
world. Owing to his tact and knowledge of human nature, combined
with the conditions of the times, his teachings spread rapidly. He
was speedily crowned with the glory of a “good name” (Baal Shem
Tob), and in the end he was immortalized.

From such a man we can expect only originality, not profundity.
Indeed, his whole life was a protest against the subtleties of the
Talmudists and the ceremonies, meaningless to him, which they
introduced into Judaism. His object was to remove the petrified
rabbinical restrictions (gezerot) and develop the emotional side of
the Jew in their stead. {68} He was primarily a man of action, and had
little love for the rabbis, their passivity, world-weariness, and
pride of intellect. It is said that when he “overheard the sounds
of eager, loud discussions issuing from a rabbinical college,
closing his ears with his hands, [he] declared that it was such
disputants who delayed the redemption of Israel from captivity.”
Men like these, who study the Law for the sake of knowing, not of
feeling, cannot claim any merit for it. They deserve to be called
“Jewish devils.” Only he is worthy of reward who is virtuous rather
than innocent, who does what he is afraid to do, who, as Jacob
Joseph of Polonnoy puts it, “acquires evil thoughts and converts
them into holy ones.” No asceticism for him. All kinds of human
feelings deserve our respect, for it is not the body that feels but
the soul, and the soul, “being a part of God on high, cannot
possibly have an absolutely bad tendency.” Men may not be
heresy-hunters and fault-finders, for none is free from heresy and
faults himself: the face he brings to the mirror, he finds
reflected in it. Yea, even the followers of Abraham possess evil
propensities, and noble qualities frequently belong to the
disciples of Balaam himself.¹¹

These democratic principles put the most {69} ignorant Jew
in Russia on an equality with the erudite Lithuanian. No wonder
that they obtained such strong hold on the people of the Ukraine,
the province shorn of all its glory. Hasidism invaded Podolia and
Volhynia, swept over Galicia and Hungary, and found adherents even
in many a large community in Western Russia and Prussia. It brought
cheer and happiness in its wake, and rendered the unfortunate Jew
forgetful of his misery. Gottlober maintains that the inspiring
melodies of the Hasidic hymns were largely responsible for the
spread of the movement, even as Moody attributed the success of his
revivals to the singing of Sankey. For, as Doctor Schechter has it,
“the Besht was a religious revivalist in the best sense, full of
burning faith in his God and his cause; convinced of the value of
his teaching and his truth.”¹²

One province there was to which the Besht could not penetrate,
at least not without a long siege and great losses. In Lithuania
the inroads of Hasidism were strenuously opposed, and its advance
disputed step by step. The Lithuanian Jews, to whom the Talmud was
as dear as ever, could not countenance a movement sprung, as they
believed, from the seed sown by Shabbataï Zebi, an opponent of
the Talmud, and by Jacob Frank, at whose instigation the
{70}
Bishop of Kamenetz ordered the Talmud to be publicly burnt.¹³

The opponents (Mitnaggedim) of Hasidism were headed by a leader
who was as typical an exponent of the cause he espoused as the
Besht was of his. Among the students of Jewish literature since the
close of the Talmud, few have surpassed, or even equalled, Elijah
of Vilna (1720-1797). Not inappropriately he was called Gaon and
Hasid, for in mental and moral attainments he was unique in his
generation. As the Besht was noted in his early life for dulness
and indifference, so Elijah was remarkable for diligence and
versatility. His life, like the Besht’s, became the nucleus of many
wonderful tales, which his biographer narrates with painstaking
exactness. They present the picture of a man diametrically
different from Israel Baal Shem Tob. Every year, we are told, added
to the marvellous development of the young intellectual giant. When
he was six years old, none but Rabbi Moses Margolioth, the renowned
Talmudist and author, was competent enough to teach him. At seven,
he worsted the chief rabbi of his native city in a Talmudic
discussion. At nine, there was nothing in Jewish literature with
which he was not familiar, and he turned to other studies to
satisfy {71} his craving for knowledge. And at
thirteen, he was acknowledged by his fellows as the greatest of
Talmudists.¹⁴ He
had neither guide nor teacher. All unaided he discovered the path
of truth. He held neither a rabbinical nor any other public office.
He was as retiring as the Besht was aggressive. Nevertheless his
word was law, and his influence immense. The centenary of his death
(1897) was celebrated among all classes with the solemnity which
the memories of “men of God” inspire.¹⁵

Now, this Gaon of Vilna, or Hagra, was perhaps no less
dissatisfied with prevailing conditions than the Besht, but his
remedy for them was as different as the two personalities were
unlike. He did not desire to abolish the Talmud, but rather to
render it more attractive, by making its acquisition easier and
putting its study on a scientific basis. Even in Lithuania, the
citadel of the Talmud, the development of Talmudic learning had
been hampered. In accordance with a Talmudic principle, mankind is
continually degenerating, not only physically, but morally and
mentally as well. It holds that if “the ancients were angels, we
are mere men; if they were but men, we are asses.” This high regard
for antiquity produced a belief in the infallibility of the rabbis
on the part of the {72} Mitnaggedim, similar to that in their
zaddikim by the Hasidim. No scholar of a later generation dared
disagree with the statement of a rabbi of a previous generation.
But as authorities sometimes conflict with each other, the
Talmudists regarded it their duty to reconcile them or to prove, in
the words of the ancient sages, that “these as well as those are
the words of the living God.” Similarly, the popes declared that,
despite their contradictions, the Biblical translations of Sixtus V
and Clement VIII were both correct.

It is true that Lithuanian Talmudists were not always the slaves
of authority which they ultimately became. A study of the works of
the early Slavonian rabbis, before and after Rabbi Polack, shows
that they were free from unhealthy awe of their predecessors, and
sometimes were audaciously independent. Neither Solomon Luria
(Maharshal), Samuel Edels (Maharsha), or Meïr Lublin (Maharam)
refrained from criticising and amending whenever they deemed it
necessary. But in the course of time the casuistic method,
originally a mere pastime, became the approved method of study, and
produced what is known as pilpul. Scholars wasted days and nights
in heaping Ossa upon Pelion, in reconciling difficulties which no
{73}
logic could harmonize. Here the Gaon found the first and most
urgent need for reform. The Talmudists, he declared, were not
infallible. Every one may interpret the Mishnah in accordance with
reason, even if the interpretation be not in keeping with the
traditional meaning as construed by the Amoraim.¹⁶

His views on religion were equally liberal. The same process of
reasoning which, spun out to its logical conclusion, led to pilpul
in the schools, produced, when turned into the channel of religion,
the over-piety culminating in the Shulhan ‘Aruk. This
remarkable book, with the euphonious name The Ready Table,
prescribed enough regulations to keep one busy from early morning
till late at night. The Jews found themselves bound hand and foot
by ceremonial trammels and weighted down by a burden of innumerable
customs. The spirit of freedom that had animated Slavonian Judaism
during the Middle Ages had fled. The breadth of view that had
marked the decision of many of its rabbis was gone.¹⁷ Judaism was a mere mummy of its
former self. Here, too, the Gaon came to the rescue. Rightly or
wrongly, he “established the importance of Minhagim [religious
ceremonies] according to their antiquity or primitivism, regarding
{74}
those which have originated since the codification of the
Shulhan ‘Aruk as not binding at all; those which have been
adopted since the Talmudic period to be subject to change by common
consent; while those of the Bible and in the Talmud were to him
fundamental and unalterable.”¹⁸

But the Gaon’s influence on the Haskalah movement by far
surpassed his influence on the study of the Talmud or on the
ceremonials of the synagogue. Many, in point of fact, regard him as
the originator of the movement. As he was the first to oppose the
authority of the Talmudists, so he was the first to inveigh against
the educational system among the Jews of his day and country. The
mania for distinction in rabbinical learning plunged the child into
the mazes of Talmudic casuistry as soon as he could read;
frequently he had not read the Bible or studied the rudiments of
grammar. The Gaon insisted that every one should first master the
twenty-four books of the Bible, their etymology, prosody, and
syntax, then the six divisions of the Mishnah with the important
commentaries and the suggested emendations, and finally the Talmud
in general, without wasting much time on pilpul, which brings no
practical result. “These few lines,” says a writer, “contain a more
thorough course of study {75} than Wessely suggested in his Words of
Peace and Truth. Though they did not entirely change the system
in vogue—for great is the power of habit—they produced
a wholesome effect, which was visible in a short time among the
people.” Furthermore, the Gaon exhorted the Talmudists to study
secular science, since, “if one is ignorant of the other sciences,
one is a hundredfold more ignorant of the sciences of the Torah,
for the two are inseparably connected.” He set the example by
writing, not only on the most important Hebrew books, Biblical,
Talmudic, and Cabbalistic, but also on algebra, geometry,
trigonometry, astronomy, and grammar.¹⁹ And
his example served as an impetus and encouragement to the Maskilim
in spreading knowledge among their coreligionists.

Such was the man who led the crusade against the converts to
Hasidism. But even he could not stem the current. In their despair,
the Lithuanian Jews turned to their coreligionists in Germany, and
implored their assistance in eradicating, or at least suppressing,
the threatened invasion. The great learning and literary ability of
the “divine philosopher, Rabbi Moses ben Menahem” (Mendelssohn,
1729-1786), were appealed to for help. Not a stone was left
unturned to crush the {76} new sect (kat), so called. Volumes of the
Toledot Ya’akob Yosef, in which Rabbi Jacob Joseph of
Polonnoy set forth the principles of the Besht, were burnt in the
market-place in Vilna. Intermarriage, social intercourse of any
kind, was prohibited between Hasidim and Mitnaggedim. In Vilna,
Grodno, Brest, Slutsk, Minsk, Pinsk, etc., the ban was hurled
against the dissenters by the most prominent rabbis. Israel was
divided into two hostile camps.²⁰ But
soon everything was changed. Hasidim and Mitnaggedim discovered
that while they were fighting each other, a common enemy was
undermining the ground on which they stood. The Haskalah was
steadily drawing recruits from both, and it threatened ultimately
to become more dangerous to both than they were to each other.

From the South had come the impulse of religious revivalism
through the followers of the Besht, and the North was showing signs
of awakening through the reforms of the Gaon. At the same time a
ray of enlightenment from the West pierced through the night. To
make the regeneration of Slavonic Judaism complete, the element of
estheticism had to be added to emotionalism and reason. From the
warm South came Besht, from the studious North Hagra, and Rambman
(Mendelssohn) {77} made his appearance from the enlightened
West. The triumvirate was complete.

Not that Mendelssohn ever visited or resided in Russo-Poland.
But the gentle, cultured little savant of Berlin, with whose lips,
Carlyle tells us, Socrates spoke like Socrates in German as in no
other modern language, “for his own character was Socratic,” was at
no period of his life wholly cut off from influencing Slavonic Jews
and from being influenced by them. As a lad Mendelssohn was
instructed by Israel Moses Halevi of Zamoscz (ab. 1700-1772). This
teacher of his, who is credited with several inventions, and of
whom Lessing says, in a letter to Mendelssohn, that he was “one of
the first to arouse a love for science in the hearts of Jews,”
imbued him with love for philosophy. When Mendelssohn emerged from
obscurity, and, despite ill-health and ignorance, attained culture
and breeding, his associate, who was with him the most important
factor in German Haskalah, was the renowned Naphtali, or Hartwig,
Wessely, whose grandfather Joseph Reis had been among the fugitives
from the Cossack massacres in 1648. And when he became famous, and
took his place among the greatest of his age, he still sought
diversion and instruction among the Slavonian {78} Jews, and
boasted of being a descendant of one of them, Moses Isserles of
Cracow. As formerly with the Talmud, the Haskalah seemed, at the
time of Mendelssohn, to be moving from the East westward, through
the agency of the Slavonic Jews pouring perennially into Germany.
Positions, from the lowly melammed’s to the honorable chief rabbi’s
in prominent communities, were filled almost exclusively by them.
The cause of Judaism seems to have been entrusted to them. Ezekiel
Landau, whose tactful intercession helped greatly to establish
peace between the Emden-Eybeschütz factions, was rabbi of
Prague for almost forty years (1755-1793); the equally prominent,
but at first somewhat less liberal Phinehas Horowitz was rabbi and
dean in Frankfort-on-the-Main for over thirty years (1771-1805);
his brother Shmelke, regarded as a saint, was chief rabbi of
Moravia (1775). Another Horwitz, Aaron Halevi, was rabbi of Berlin,
one of those who favored Mendelssohn’s translation of the
Pentateuch; while the cultured and profound Talmudist Raphael
Hakohen, whose grandson, Gabriel Riesser, became the greatest
champion of Jewish emancipation Germany has yet produced, was
offered the rabbinate of Berlin (1771). He declined the post, and
finally became chief rabbi {79} (1776-1803) of the united congregations
of Altona, Hamburg, and Wandsbeck. It is also recorded that Samuel
ben Avigdor, the last rabbi of Vilna, held the rabbinate of
Königsberg,²¹ and
there certainly must have been many more who, because of their
inferior positions, cannot be so easily traced. Besides, Germany,
as we have seen, was the common fatherland of the greater part of
both Slavonic and Teutonic Jews. It never remained a terra
incognita to the former for any length of time. Its proximity
to Russia, the business relations between the Jews of the two
countries, intermarriage, and, with a few insignificant exceptions,
the identity of language, made the Jews of both countries come into
closer contact than was possible with any other Jews. For the
studious, Germany possessed the attraction which the “land of
universities” exerts upon seekers after knowledge the world over.
To whom, indeed, could the profound and abstruse speculations of
Leibnitz and Kant make a stronger appeal than to the Jew who had
been initiated into metaphysical abstractions from his very
childhood? It is no wonder, then, that immigration from
Russo-Poland into Germany was constantly on the increase, until,
under Alexander II, the advancement of Russian civilization put a
stop in a measure to {80} these roamings, to be resumed under
Alexander III and Nicholas II.

The Russo-Polish youth, therefore, found himself quite at home
in the country of Mendelssohn, and thither, in case of necessity,
he would go. In the eleventh century Jews had gone from Germany to
Poland. In the eighteenth they retraced their steps from Poland to
Germany. Outnumbering by far those who went there from choice or by
invitation, were those compelled to go in search of a livelihood.
“When I reached the age of twenty, peaceful and comfortable in my
father’s house, I began to hope that henceforth I should pursue my
studies uninterrupted. But all at once my father lost his fortune,
and I was forced to go somewhere to provide for myself. So I became
a melammed in Berlin.” This piece of autobiography in the preface
to a Talmudic treatise by Reuben of Zamoscz might have been written
by many others, too. But there were also the goodly number led
thither by thirst for knowledge, whose remarkable abilities
attracted the admiration of Jew and Gentile alike. Wessely the poet
and Linda the mathematician more than once expressed surprise at
the amount of learning many of the poor immigrants were found to
possess.²²

Among these immigrants were two who may justly be regarded as
the conducting medium through which the Haskalah currents were
transmitted from Germany to Russo-Poland: Solomon Dubno, the
indefatigable laborer in the province of Jewish science, and
Solomon Maimon, the brilliant but unfortunate philosopher, both of
them teachers in the house of Mendelssohn.

Solomon Dubno (1738-1813) was all his life a bee in search of
flowers, to turn their sweetness into honey. Having exhausted the
knowledge of his Volhynian instructors, he went to Galicia, where
he became proficient in Hebrew grammar and Biblical exegesis.
Thence, attracted by its rich collection of books, he left for
Amsterdam, where he spent five years in study and research. Finally
he settled in Berlin, and earned a livelihood by teaching among
others the children of Mendelssohn. The gentle disposition and
profound learning of the Polish emigrant made a favorable
impression on the Berlin sage, who invited him to participate in
his translation of the Bible, which revolutionized the Judaism of
the nineteenth century more than the Septuagint that of the first
century. The result was the Biur (commentary), which he,
together with his countryman, Aaron Yaroslav, also a {82} teacher,
wrote on several books of the Bible. Comparatively few of Dubno’s
works have been published, but judging from such as are known we
may safely pronounce him a master of the Massorah and a scholar of
unusual attainments. Of his poems Delitzsch says that they are “in
the truest sense Hebrew in expression, Biblical in imagery and
subject-matter, medieval in rhyme and rhythm, and in general
genuinely Jewish in manner of treatment,”—laudation which
this exacting critic bestowed on no other Hebrew poet of his time.
It was mainly through the endeavors of Dubno that Mendelssohn’s
Pentateuch, later regarded with suspicion, was everywhere bought
and studied eagerly.²³

One better known to the outside world than Dubno, and who has
engraved his name forever on the history of theology and
philosophy, was Solomon Maimon (Nieszvicz, Lithuania,
1754—Niedersiegersdorf, Silesia, 1800). In his famous
autobiography is mirrored the lot of hundreds of his countrymen
who, like him, left their homes and hearths, their nearest and
dearest, and led a wretched and miserable existence, all because
they were anxious to be ma’amike be-hakmah (“delvers in
knowledge”), as he himself might have said, and avail themselves of
the opportunities for acquiring {83} the truth and wisdom
unattainable in their own land.

But Maimon was doomed to suffer abroad even more than at home.
He was one of those unfortunates whose sufferings are regarded as
well-deserved. His exceptional ability was never to develop to its
fullest capacity. Great injustice has been done to him, not only by
the rabid orthodox, who denied him a grave in their cemetery, but
even by the enlightened historian Graetz. Fortunately he left
behind him his Lebensgeschichte, among the best of its kind
in German literature, in which, with the frankness of a Rousseau,
he described the events of his short and checkered career.²⁴

From this admirable work, in which he neither hides his follies
nor flaunts his talents, we learn that Maimon possessed rare
virtues. His sympathy for the poor, his ready helpfulness even at
the sacrifice of himself, rendered him as uncommon in moral action
as in philosophic speculation. To the English reader a striking
parallelism suggests itself between him and his contemporary Oliver
Goldsmith. Both were afflicted with generosity above their
fortunes; both had a “knack at hoping,” which led frequently to
their undoing; neither could subscribe easily to the “decent
formalities of rigid virtue”; and, as {84} of the
latter we may also say of the former, in the language of a
reviewer, “He had lights and shadows, virtues and
foibles—vices you cannot call them, be you never so
unkind.”

As Goldsmith came to London, so came Maimon to Berlin, “without
friends, recommendation, money, or impudence.” His only luggage was
two manuscripts: a commentary on the works of Maimuni, whose name
he had adopted, and to whom he paid divine reverence; and a
treatise in which he attempted to rationalize the recondite
doctrines of the Cabbala, and which he always kept by him “as a
monument of the struggle of the human mind after perfection in
spite of all hindrances which were put in its way.” The little
bundle, which, to the zealot Jewish elders of that community,
seemed sufficient indication that Maimon was tainted with heresy,
and that his intentions were to devote himself to the study of
science and philosophy, proved a great impediment to entering
Berlin; and when, after a long, incredible struggle, he was finally
admitted, he found himself incapable of earning a livelihood. In
his childlike naïveté he was betrayed by the very
persons upon whom he relied most. All this could not deaden his
love for knowledge and truth. By chance he obtained Wolff’s
Metaphysics, {85} and this marked a new epoch in his life.
“Not only the sublime science in itself,” says he, “but also the
order and mathematical method of the celebrated author, the
precision of his explanations, the exactness of his reasoning, and
the scientific arrangement of his expositions—all this
kindled a new light in my mind.”

So profound a thinker could not for long be a mere pupil.
Wolff’s argument a posteriori for the existence of God, in
accordance with his philosophic hobby, the “principle of sufficient
reason,” displeased him wholly. A Hebrew letter to Mendelssohn, in
which he shook the foundation of the Metaphysics by means of
his irrefutable ontology, won him the admiration of the Berlin
sage, who invited him to become his daily guest.

Maimon’s intellect unfolded from day to day, until, some time
afterwards, he astonished the philosophic world by his great work,
Die Transcendentale Philosophie (Berlin, 1790), in reference
to which Kant wrote to his beloved disciple Marcus Herz: “A mere
glance at it enabled me to recognize its merits, and showed me,
that not only had none of my opponents understood me and the main
problem so well, but very few could claim so much penetration as
Herr Maimon in profound inquiries {86} of this sort.” He demolished
the prevalent Leibnitzo-Wolffian system in it, and proved that even
the Kantian theory, though irrefutable from a dogmatic point of
view, is exposed to severe attacks from the skeptic’s point of
view.

Thenceforth he became a leading figure in philosophic
controversy. In 1793 he published Ueber die Progresse der
Philosophie; in 1794, Versuch einer neuen Logik, and
Die Kategorien des Aristoteles, and, three years later,
Kritische Untersuchungen über den menschlichen Geist
(Berlin, 1797), wherein he originated a speculative, monistic
idealism, which pervaded not only philosophy, but all sciences
during the first half of the nineteenth century, the system by
which Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel were influenced. According to
Bernfeld, he was the greatest Jewish philosopher since the time of
Spinoza, with whose depth of reasoning he combined an ease and
straightforwardness of illustration characteristic of Benjamin
Franklin.²⁵

With all this he remained an ardent lover of the Talmud to the
last. In fact, his philosophy is distinctively Jewish. Like
Spinoza, he exhibited the effects of the Cabbala and of rabbinic
speculation, with which he had been familiar from childhood. The
honor of the Talmudic sages was always dear {87} to him, and
he never mentioned them without expressing profound respect.
Persecuted though he was by his German coreligionists, he never
bore them a grudge. As a man he loved them as brothers, but as a
philosopher he could not subscribe to their views implicitly. But
for friends and benefactors his affection was unusually strong.
With what love he talks of Mendelssohn in the chapter dedicated to
him in his autobiography, even though “he could not explain the
persistency of Mendelssohn and the Wolffians generally in adhering
to their system, except as a political dodge, and a piece of
hypocrisy, by which they studiously endeavored to descend to the
mode of thinking common to the popular mind!” His devotion to his
wife was not diminished even after he had been compelled to divorce
her because of his supposed heretical proclivities. “When the
subject [of his divorce] came up in conversation, it was easy,”
says his biographer,²⁶ “to
read in his face the deep sorrow he felt: his liveliness then faded
away sensibly. By and by he would become perfectly silent, was
incapable of further entertainment, and went home earlier than
usual.” Of his Russo-Polish brethren he speaks in the highest
terms. He cannot bestow too much praise on their care for the poor
and the sick, and {88} he always hoped once more to see his
native land, to whose king he dedicated his Transcendental
Philosophy. “For,” says he, “the Polish Jews are, indeed, for
the most part not enlightened by science; their manners and way of
life are still rude, but they are loyal to the religion of their
fathers and to the laws of their country.”²⁷

It is because I regard him as the greatest Maskil of his time
that I have dwelt on Maimon at such length. Mendelssohn’s
philosophy, if he had an original system, has long since passed
into oblivion; Maimon’s will be studied as long as Spinoza,
Leibnitz, and Kant are in vogue. His importance to us does not lie
in the circumstance that his autobiography—”that wonderful
bit of Autobiography,” as George Eliot speaks of it, or “that
curious and rare book,” as Dean Milman calls it—and the
pictures drawn of him by Berthold Auerbach and Israel
Zangwill²⁸ have made him the hero of some of
the world’s best biographies and novels. Over and above this, he is
the prototype of his unfortunate countrymen during the days of
transition. He embodied the aspiration, courage, and
disappointments of them all, and if, as Carlyle said, “the history
of the world is the history of its great men,” Maimon’s life should
be studied by all interested in {89} the Kulturkampf of the
Russo-Polish and of the German Jews in the eighteenth century.

What could he not have accomplished, he to whom Kant and Goethe,
Schiller and Körner paid tributes of unstinted praise, had he
not been doomed to suffer and to starve. Only at the last moment,
before he was silenced forever, was he able to say, Ich bin
ruhig (“I am at peace”). Yet, in spite of the difficulties and
impediments besetting him at every step, his promise of greatness
and usefulness was not belied. In the Introduction to his
commentary on Maimuni’s Guide to the Perplexed (Gibe’at
ha-Moreh), in which he attempted to reconcile his master’s
system with that of modern philosophy—even as the master had
tried to reconcile Judaism with Aristotelianism—he gave a
brief sketch of the development of modern thought. This part of his
work was assiduously studied by his compatriots. Among his
unpublished writings was found a work on mathematical physics,
Ta’alumot Hokmah, and in his Talmudic treatise, Heshek
Shelomoh, he inserted a dissertation, Ma’aseh Hosheb, on
arithmetic, like a skilful physician putting a healing, though to
some it may appear a repelling, balm into a delicious, attractive
capsule.

The story of Maimon, as I have said, is the story of many of the
peripatetic apostles of Haskalah, and his experience was more or
less also theirs. Issachar Falkensohn Behr (or Bär Falkensohn,
1746-1796?), without funds, friends, or rudimentary knowledge of
the subjects necessary for admission into a public school, left his
native city of Zamosez with the determination to enter the
university of “Little Berlin,” as Königsberg was called. Too
poor to carry out his plan, he tramped to Berlin. Through the
influence of his relatives and countrymen, Israel Moses Halevi and
Daniel Jaffe, he was introduced to Mendelssohn, and was enabled to
devote himself systematically to the study of German, the alphabet
of which he had learned from Wolff’s treatise on mathematics, and
to French, Latin, physics, philosophy, and medicine. In a very
short time he mastered them all, especially German. His Gedichte
eines polnischen Juden (Mitau and Leipsic, 1772) caused no
little stir among the poets. Lessing and Goethe, close observers of
symptoms of enlightenment among the Jews, expressed themselves
differently as to the real merit of the collection; but both
concurred with Boie, who, writing to Knebel, the friend of Goethe,
remarked concerning them, “You are right; the {91} Jewish
nation promises much after it is once awakened.”²⁹

For one reason or another we find that some Slavonic Jewish
youths preferred other places to Berlin for the pursuit of their
studies. Such were Benjamin Wolf Günzberg and Jacob
Liboschüts. The former was probably the only Jew at the
Göttingen University. It was from there that he inquired of
Jacob Emden “whether it was permissible to dissect on the Sabbath,”
and his thesis for the doctor’s degree was De medica ex
Talmudicis illustrata (Göttingen, 1743).³⁰ Liboschüts studied at the
University of Halle. After graduation, finding that as a Jew he
could not settle in St. Petersburg, he established himself in
Vilna, where he became celebrated as a diplomat, philanthropist,
and, more especially, expert physician. When Professor Frank was
asked who would take care of the public health in his absence, he
is reported to have said, Deus et Judaeus, “God and the Jew”
[Liboschüts]!

In their deep-rooted love for learning, they sometimes ventured
even beyond the German boundaries, into countries whose language
and customs had little in common with theirs. Padua continued to be
the resort of Russo-Polish Jews that it had {92} been before
1648. Moses Hayyim Luzzatto found an ardent admirer and zealous
propagandist of his principles in the young medical student
Jekuthiel Gordon (ab. 1729), who wrote concerning his master to
friends in Vienna and Vilna.³¹
Judah Halevi Hurwitz (d. 1797), whose work ‘Ammude Bet
Yehudah (Amsterdam, 1765) was highly recommended by Mendelssohn
and Wessely, was a graduate of the same famous institution. In
addition to his medical and philosophic attainments, he wrote a
number of poems, and he was among the first to translate fables
from German into Hebrew.³²

The story of Zalkind Hurwitz (1740-1812), “le fameux,” as he was
called by a French writer, is interesting. Starting, as usual, by
going to Berlin, and succeeding, as usual, in gaining the
friendship of Mendelssohn, he then visited Nancy, Metz, and
Strasburg, and finally settled in Paris. Like Doctor Behr, he had
to resort to peddling as a means for a livelihood. The rudiments of
French he acquired from any book he chanced to obtain.
Nevertheless, he soon became proficient in the language of his
adopted country, and wrote his excellent Apologie des juifs,
which, crowned by the Academy of Metz and quoted by Mirabeau, was
largely instrumental in removing the disabilities of the Jews in
France. {93} Clermont-Tonnerre, the advocate of Jewish
emancipation, said of him, Le juif polonais seul avait
parlé en philosophe. He was suggested as a member of the
Sanhedrin convoked by Napoleon in 1807. Though for some reason he
never enjoyed the honor of membership in it, he was, nevertheless,
the ruling spirit in the august assembly, and later generations
have paid him the homage he deserves.³³

Where Hurwitz failed, another of his countrymen was to succeed.
Judah Litvack (1776-1836) removed from Berlin to Amsterdam, became
prominent among the Dutch mathematicians, and wrote a Dutch work,
Verhandeling over de Profgetallen Gen. ii (Amsterdam, 1817),
which appeared in a second edition four years after the first. The
author was elected a member of the Mathesis Artium Genetrix
Society, and appointed one of the deputation sent to the Sanhedrin
(February 12, 1807), before which he delivered a discourse in the
German language.

The “distant isles of the sea,” the British Islands,
Russo-Polish Jews seem to have frequented ever since the
Restoration, probably contemporaneously with the settlement of the
Spanish Jews. The famous mystic Hayyim Samuel Jacob Falk, one of
the many Baal-Shems who flourished in {94} Podolia at
the beginning of the eighteenth century, settled in London before
1750, and became the subject of many wonder stories. Sussman
Shesnovzi, apparently a countryman of his, describes him, in a
letter to Jacob Emden, as “standing alone in his generation by
reason of his knowledge of holy mysteries.” That this was the
opinion of many and prominent personages may be inferred from the
fact that among his callers were such distinguished visitors as the
Marchese de Crona, Baron de Neuhoff, Prince Czartorisky, and the
Duke of Orleans. The confidence of such as these brought Falk a
considerable fortune, a large part of which he bequeathed to a
charity fund, the interest of which the overseers of the United
Synagogue still distribute annually among the poor.³⁴ Shortly before “Doctor” Falk’s
death (1782), there settled in London Phinehas Phillips of
Krotoschin, the founder of the Phillips family, which has furnished
two Lord Mayors to the city of London.

It was not merely because of its business facilities that
England appealed to the Slavonic Jews. Baruch Shklover, or Schick
(1740-1812), went thither to study medicine, and it was from
English literature that he selected the material for his Keneh
ha-Middah (Prague, 1784; Shklov, 1793), on trigonometry.
{95}
It would appear that the first Hebrew book, Toledot Ya’akob,
printed for a Jew in England, was, as the name of the author,
Eisenstadt, suggests, that of a Slavonic Jew. Although a
silversmith by profession, Israel Lyons (d. 1770) was appointed
teacher of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge. He acquired
repute as a Hebrew scholar, and published, in 1757, the
Scholar’s Instructor, or Hebrew Grammar (4th ed.,
1823), and in 1768 a treatise printed by the Cambridge Press,
Observations and Inquiries Relating to Various Parts of
Scripture History. In the same chosen field labored Hyman
Hurwitz (1770-1844), the friend of Coleridge, who founded the
Highgate Academy (1799), and wrote an Introduction to Hebrew
Grammar, Vindica Hebraica, and Hebrew Tales,
which were translated into various languages. He finally became
professor of Hebrew in University College, London.

A younger contemporary of Abrahamson, the Jewish German
medallist, was Solomon (Yom Tob) Bennett (1780-1841), the engraver
of Polotsk, who spent a number of years at Copenhagen and Berlin in
perfecting himself in his art. Among his works is a highly praised
bas-relief of Frederick II, which was much admired by the
professors of {96} the Academy. An ardent lover of liberty,
of which there was little more in Germany at that time than in
Russia, he left for England, where he spent the remaining years of
his life, in Bristol. Besides being an artist and an engraver he
was a profound theologian, anxious to defend the cause of Judaism
against enemies within and without. The enemy within he attacked in
his cutting criticism of Solomon Cohen’s Rudiments of
Religion, and the enemy outside, in his other work, The
Constancy of Israel (Nezah Yisraël, London, 1809).
He also wrote expositions on many important Biblical topics, such
as sacrifices (1815) and the Temple (1824). Having pointed out the
defects of the Authorized Version (1834), he was ambitious of
publishing a complete revised translation of the Bible. Specimens
appeared in 1841. Death intervened and frustrated his plans. As
Schick was the first Jew to translate from English into Hebrew, so
Bennett was the first after Manasseh ben Israel to write in English
in behalf of his people.³⁵

If the contributions of Slavonic Jews to Latin, German, French,
Dutch, and English literature were not less considerable at that
time than those of the Jews residing in the countries where these
languages were respectively used as media, they {97} excelled
them in Hebrew literature. In the renaissance of the holy tongue,
they played the most important part from the first. The striving
for knowledge, not for the purpose of obtaining a coveted
privilege, but for its own sake, became an irresistible passion,
and it was accompanied by an unquenchable desire to disseminate
knowledge among the masses, to make learning and wisdom common
property. The Hebrew language being the best vehicle for the
purpose, it was soon impressed into the service of Haskalah. The
pioneer Maskilim learned to handle it with ease and clearness that
would do credit to a modern writer in a much more developed
European language.

From the middle of the fifteenth to the latter part of the
eighteenth century, Hebrew literature consisted, if a few scattered
books on philosophy, mostly translations from the Arabic, are
excepted, mainly of Talmudic disquisitions, written in the rabbinic
dialect and in a euphuistic style. Besides the great Maimuni, there
were few able or willing to write Hebrew “as she should be spoke.”
The early German Maskilim, in trying to escape the Scylla of
Rabbinism, fell victims to the Charybdis of Germanism. They
possessed originality neither of style nor of sentiment, neither of
rhyme nor of {98} reason. Hebrew poetry was an adaptation of
current German poetry. The very best the period produced, the
Mosaïde of Wessely, was influenced by and largely an
imitation of Klopstock and others. Like English classic poetry, it
is pretty in form but poor in spirit. The element of nationality,
or distinctiveness, the life-giving and soul-uplifting element in
all poetry, as Delitzsch justly maintains it to be, was lacking in
the German Maskilim, anxious for naturalization as they were. It
was the Slavonic Maskilim who mastered Hebrew in its purity, as it
had not been mastered since the day of Judah Halevi. In those days
of transition the diligent student can find, in germ, what was
later to develop into the resplendent poetical flowers produced by
the Lebensohns, the Gordons, Dolitzky, Schapiro, Mane, and
Bialik.

The Slavonic contributors to the Meassef, the first Hebrew
literary periodical (1784-1811), were not conspicuous in number,
but if quality can compensate for quantity, they made up for it by
the value of their articles. Dubno and Maimon enriched the early
issues, the one with poetry, the other with philosophy; and when it
began to struggle for its existence, and was on the point of giving
up the ghost, Shalom Cohen (1772-1845) came to {99} the rescue,
and, as editor, prolonged its existence by a few years. Among the
best articles in the Meassef are those of Isaac Halevi Satanov
(1733-1805). This “conglomeration of contrasts,” whom Delitzsch
regards as the restorer of Hebrew poetry to its primitive beauty
and purity, was the embodiment of the period in which he lived. “He
was,” we are told, “a thorough master of Jewish traditional lore,
and at the same time a most advanced thinker, a profound physicist,
and an inspired poet; a master of the old school and at the same
time the founder of the new school, the national-classical, of
Hebrew poetry.” His pure and precise style, his good-natured,
Horace-like, delicate, yet unmistakable, humor, he showed in a
series of books bearing the name of Asaf, which still must be
counted among the gems of Hebrew literature.³⁶

Satanov was greatly in favor of expanding the Hebrew language,
but the first to borrow expressions from the Talmud literature or
coin words of his own was Mendel Levin, also of Satanov, Podolia
(1741-1819), the friend of Mendelssohn while in Berlin, the
inspirer of Perl and Krochmal while in Brody, the companion of
Zeitlin and Schick while in Mohilev. The Meassefim, the
{100} name generally applied to all who
participated in the publication of the Meassef, were shocked by
what they regarded a profanation of the sacred tongue. Their idea
was that Hebrew was to be utilized as a means of introducing
Western civilization. Afterwards it was to be relegated once more
to the holy Ark. To Levin Hebrew had a far higher significance. Not
only should Western civilization be introduced into Jewry through
its means, but Hebrew itself should be so perfected as to take a
place by the side of the more modern and cultivated languages. It
should find adequate expressions for the new thoughts and ideas
which the new learning would introduce into it directly or
indirectly. The medieval translations from the Arabic should be
retranslated into the new Hebrew, he held, and he furnished an
example by recasting the first part of Maimuni’s Moreh
Nebukim. His modernized version, lucid and fluent, printed
alongside of Ibn Tibbon’s, presents a striking contrast to the
stiffness and obscurity of the Provençal scholar’s. Levin
was also the first to write in the Yiddish, or Judeo-German,
dialect, for the instruction of the masses, which made him the butt
of more than one satire. But what was generally regarded as a
degrading task was fraught with the greatest {101}
consequences to the Haskalah. To this day Yiddish has continued an
important medium for disseminating culture among Russian Jews, both
in the Old World and in the New.³⁷

The century remarkable among other things for encyclopedia
enterprises,—Chambers’ Encyclopedia in England, the
Universal Lexicon in Germany, and that wonderful and
monumental work, the Encyclopédie in
France—saw, before its close, a similar attempt, in
miniature, in Hebrew and by a Slavonic Maskil. Whether the Hebrew
encyclopedist was influenced by the example of Dr. Tobias Cohn’s
Ma’aseh Tobiah mentioned above, or was unconsciously imbued
with the prevailing tendency of the times, it is impossible to
tell. In any event, he resorted to the same means, and presented
the Jewish world with a volume containing a little of every science
known, under the innocent name The Book of the Covenant
(Sefer ha-Berit, Brünn, 1797).

The book appeared anonymously. This, the author assures us, was
due not to humbleness of spirit, but to a vow. His diligence and
constant application had greatly impaired his eyes. He vowed that
if God restored his sight, and enabled him to finish his task, he
would publish the book {102} without disclosing his authorship. God
hearkened unto his prayers, and the work was soon completed. But an
unforeseen trouble arose. His book was ascribed “by some to the
sage of Berlin, by others to the Gaon of Vilna, and by many to the
united efforts of a coterie of scholars, for it could not be
believed that so many and diverse sciences could be mastered by one
person.” Moreover, the author was censured for being afraid to come
out openly and boldly as a champion of Haskalah.³⁸ In spite of obstacles and
strictures, the book met with success surpassing the author’s
expectations. It found its way not only into Russia, Poland, and
Germany, but even into France, Italy, England, Holland, and
Palestine. An edition of two thousand copies was entirely
exhausted, unusual at a time when books were costly and money was
scarce, and another edition was issued. What Phinehas Elijah
(Hurwitz) of Vilna had sown in tears, he lived to reap in joy.

There was a crying need in Russia for a work of the sort. In
Germany the very Government encouraged organizations and
publications aiming at enlightenment. Accordingly, a Society for
the Promotion of the Good and the Noble was started, and the
Meassef was published. In Russo-Poland {103} not even
a Hebrew printing-press was permitted, and certainly no periodical
publications would have been tolerated. Phinehas Elijah, therefore,
grasped the opportunity, and showed himself equal to it. His aim
was, like that of the French encyclopedists, to lead his readers
“through nature to God.” He gives an account of the various
sciences, natural and philosophical, as a prolegomenon to the study
of theology, even of the mystic teachings of Vital’s Gates of
Holiness. Withal he evinces a sound intellect and refined, if
rudimentary, taste. He decries the “ancestor worship” that rendered
the Jew of his day a fossil specimen of an extinct species. The
present is superior to the past, “a dwarf on a giant’s shoulder
seeth farther than doth the giant himself.” He ridicules the base
and degrading habit of dedicating books to “benefactors, friends,
lovers, parents, men, or women.” His work was written for the glory
of God, and he dedicates it to eternal, all-conquering truth.³⁹

All these Maskilim, so many hands reaching out into the light,
were both the cause and the consequence of the longing for
enlightenment characteristic at all times of the Slavonic Jew.
Graetz and his followers among the latter-day Maskilim delighted in
calling them “they that walk in darkness.” {104} Facts,
however, prove that at no time before Nicholas I was education per
se regarded with the least suspicion, though the Talmud was given
the preference. As in the pre-Haskalah period, the greatest
Talmudists deemed it a sacred duty to perfect themselves in some
branch of secular science. When, in 1710, a terrible plague broke
out in his native town, Rabbi Jonathan of Risenci (Grodno) vowed
that, “if he were spared, he would disseminate a knowledge of
astronomy among his countrymen.” To fulfil the vow he went to
Germany (1725), where, though blind, he devoted himself assiduously
first to the acquisition of astronomy, then to writing on it.⁴⁰ Baruch Yavan of Volhynia, who
more than any one exposed the impostures of Jacob Frank, “spoke and
wrote Hebrew, Polish, German, and probably French,” and his
accomplishments and address won him the admiration of Count
Brühl, the virtual ruler of Poland, and the favor of the
highest officials at St. Petersburg. His associate in the righteous
fight, Bima Speir of Mohilev, was also possessed of a thorough
command of the language of Russia, and was well posted in its
literature, history, and politics. The Pinczovs, descendants of
Rabbi Polack, connected with the most {105} eminent
rabbinical families, and themselves famous for piety and erudition,
produced many works on mathematics and philosophy. Mendelssohn’s
translation of the Pentateuch was at first hailed with joy, and was
recommended by the most zealous rabbis. Doctor Hurwitz of Vilna did
not hesitate to dedicate his ‘Ammude Bet Yehudah to Wessely,
who was more popular in Russo-Poland than in Germany. The whole
edition of his Yen Lebanon, which fell flat in the latter
country, though offered gratis, was sold when introduced into the
former.⁴¹ Joseph Pesseles’ correspondence
concerning Dubno, with David Friedländer, the disciple of
Mendelssohn (1773), proves the high esteem in which the
liberal-minded savants of Berlin were held in Russia. The rabbis of
Brest, Slutsk, and Lublin gave laudatory recommendations to Judah
Löb Margolioth’s popular works of natural science, which form
a little encyclopedia by themselves. Margolioth was the grandson of
Mordecai Jaffe, himself rabbi successively at Busnov, Szebrszyn,
Polotsk, Lesla, and Frankfort-on-the-Oder (d. 1811). The writings
of Baruch Schick of Shklov, referred to above, were accorded the
same welcome. His translation of Euclid and his treatises on
trigonometry, astronomy (‘Ammude ha-Shamayim), and
{106} anatomy (Tiferet Adam) won the
admiration of rabbis as well as laymen. Epitaphs of the day contain
the statement that the deceased was not only “at home in all the
chambers of the Torah,” but also in “philosophy and the seven
sciences.” And this, exaggerated though it may be, must be seen to
contain a kernel of the truth, when we recall that among Maimon’s
intimate friends was the rabbi of Kletzk, Lithuania; that in the
humble dwelling of his father there were works on historical,
astronomical, and philosophical subjects; that the chief rabbi of a
neighboring town, Rabbi Samson of Slonim, who, according to
Fünn, “had in his youth lived for a while in Germany, learned
the German language there, and made himself acquainted in some
measure with the sciences,” continued his study of the sciences,
and soon collected a fair library of German books.⁴² Saadia, Bahya, Halevi, Ibn Ezra,
Crescas, Bedersi, Levi ben Gerson (whom Goldenthal calls the Hebrew
Kant), Albo, Abarbanel, and others whose works deserve a high place
in the history of Jewish philosophy, were on the whole fairly
represented in the libraries, and diligently studied in the
numerous yeshibot and batte midrashim.

Thus the enlightenment which dawned upon {107} France,
Germany, and England cast a glow even on the Slavonic Jews, despite
the Chinese wall of disabilities that hemmed them in.
Unfortunately, this only helped to render them dissatisfied with
their wretched lot, without affording them the means of
ameliorating it. While the Jews in Western Europe profited and were
encouraged by the example of their Christian neighbors; while, in
addition to their innate thirst for learning, they had everywhere
else political and civil preferments to look forward to, in
Russo-Poland not only were such outside stimuli absent, but the
Slavonic Jews had to struggle against obstacles and hindrances at
every step. No such heaven on earth could be dreamed of there. The
country was still in a most barbarous state. Those who wished to
perfect themselves in any of the sciences had to leave home and all
and go to a foreign land, and had to study, as they were bidden to
study the Talmud, “lishmah,” that is, for its own sake. This is the
distinguishing feature between the German and Slavonic Maskilim
during the eighteenth century. The cry of the former was, “Become
learned, lest the nations say we are not civilized and deny us the
wealth, respect, and especially the equality we covet!” The latter
were humbly seeking after the truth, either {108} because
they could better elucidate the Talmud, or because, as they held,
it was their truth, of which the nations had deprived them
during their long exile.⁴³
They were unlike their German brethren in another respect. Almost
all of them were “self-made men,” autodidacts in the truest sense.
Lacking the advantages of secular schools, they culled their first
information from scanty, antiquated Hebrew translations. Maimon
learned the Roman alphabet from the transliteration of the titles
on the fly-leaves of some Talmudic tracts; Doctor Behr, from
Wolff’s Mathematics. But no sooner was the impetus given
than it was followed by an insatiable craving for more and more of
the intellectual manna, for a wider and wider horizon. “Look,” says
Wessely, “look at our Russian and Polish brethren who immigrate
hither, men great in Torah, yet admirers of the sciences, which,
without the guiding help of teachers, they all master to such
perfection as to surpass even a Gentile sage!”⁴⁴ Such self-education was, of
course, not without unfavorable results. Never having enjoyed the
advantage of a systematic elementary training, the enthusiasts
sometimes lacked the very rudiments of knowledge, though engaged in
the profoundest speculations of philosophy. “As our mothers in
{109} Egypt gave birth to their children
before the mid-wife came,” writes Pinsker somewhat later,⁴⁵ “even so it is with the
intellectual products of our brethren: before one becomes
acquainted with the grammar of a language, he masters its classic
and scientific literature!”

Steadily though slowly, brighter, if not better, days were
coming. “Thought once awakened shall not again slumber.” As Carlyle
says of the French of that period, it became clear for the first
time to the upturned eyes of the Jews, “that Thought has actually a
kind of existence in other kingdoms [than the Talmud]; that some
glimmerings of civilization had dawned here and there on the human
species.” They begin to try all things; they visit Germany, France,
Denmark, Holland, even England; learn their literatures, study in
their universities, and contribute their quota to the apologetic,
controversial, scientific, and philosophic investigations “with a
candor and real love of improvement which give the best omens of a
still higher success.” Fortune, indeed, has cast them also into a
cavern, and they are groping around darkly. But this prisoner, too,
is a giant, and he will, at length, burst forth as a giant into the
light of day.

(Notes, pp. 310-314.)

CHAPTER III

THE DAWN OF HASKALAH

1794-1840

A glimmer of light pierced the Russian sky at the accession of
Catherine II (1762-1796). This “Semiramis of the North,” the
admirer of Buffon, Montesquieu, Diderot, and, more especially,
Voltaire, whose motto, N’en croyez rien, she adopted,
endeavored, and for a while not without success, to introduce into
her own country the spirit of tolerance which pervaded France. Her
ukases were intended for all alike, “without distinction of
religion and nationality.” Her regard for her Jewish citizens she
showed by allowing them to settle in the interior, establish
printing-presses (January 27, 1783), and become civil and
Government officers (April 2, 1785). In the edict promulgated by
Governor-General Chernyshev it is stated that “religious liberty
and inviolability of property are hereby granted to all subjects of
Russia and certainly to the Jews; for the humanitarian {111}
principles of her Majesty do not permit the exclusion of the Jews
alone from the favors shown to all, so long as they, as faithful
subjects, continue to employ themselves, as hitherto, with commerce
and trade, each according to his vocation.” That she remained true
to her promise, we see from the numerous privileges enjoyed by many
Jews, who began to frequent Moscow and St. Petersburg and reside
there for business purposes.

Paul (1796-1801), too, was kindly disposed toward the Jews, and
permitted them to live in Courland; and when Alexander I
(1801-1825) became czar, their hopes turned into certainty.
Alexander I did, indeed, appear a most promising ruler at his
accession. The theories he had acquired from Laharpe he fully
intended to apply to practical life. Like Catherine, he wished to
rule in equity and promote the welfare of his subjects irrespective
of race or creed. He ordered a commission to investigate the status
of the Russian Jews (December 9, 1802). The result was the
polozheniye (enactment) of December 9, 1804, according to which
Jews were to be eligible to one-third of all municipal offices;
they were to be permitted to establish factories, become
agriculturists, and either attend the schools and colleges of the
empire {112} on the same footing as subjects of the
Christian faith, or, if they desired, found and maintain schools of
their own. The approach of the great Usurper and the crushing
defeat the Russians sustained at the battle of Friedland (June 4,
1808) also favored the advance of the Jews. As the short, but
troublous, reign of Paul and his wars with Turkey, Persia, Prussia,
Poland, and Sweden had impoverished the country and depleted the
treasury, the shrewd Alexander was not averse from appealing to
Jews for help. Of course, as in many more enlightened countries and
in more modern times, most of the privileges were merely paper
privileges. Few of them ever went into effect. The noble intentions
of the enlightened rulers were steadily thwarted by bigoted
councillors and jealous merchants. Every favor shown the Jews
aroused a storm of protests, which resulted in numerous
infringements. The Jews were compelled to pay for the good
intentions of Catherine with a double tax (June 25, 1794), and,
during Paul’s reign, without the emperor’s knowledge, a law was
enacted requiring of Jews double payment of the guild license. In
spite of all efforts, the Jews, instead of being emancipated
politically, were burdened with additional discriminations.¹

Had not the wheel of progress suddenly stopped revolving,
Russian Jews might have constituted one of the most useful as well
as most intellectual elements in the vast empire. As it was, the
kindly intention of czar or czarina sufficed to arouse them from
the asthenia to which they were reduced for want of freedom. The
times were rife with excitement, and the Jewish atmosphere with
expectancy. The mighty changes which were taking place in Russia
and Poland; the dismemberment of the latter; the annexation of
Balta (1791), Lithuania (1794), and Courland (1797) to the former;
the short-lived yet potent German rule in Byelostok (1793-1807),
and the rude but memorable contact with France (1807-1812), these
and many other important happenings in a brief span of time had a
telling effect upon the diverse races under the dominion of Russia,
and among them not the least upon the Jewish race. Everywhere the
desire for “liberty, equality, and fraternity” began to manifest
itself. In Courland, the most German of Russian provinces, Georg
Gottfried Mylich, a Lutheran pastor at Nerft, made a touching
appeal (ab. 1787) in German on behalf of the Jews, insisting that
the word Jew “should not be taken to indicate a class of people
different from us, but only a {114} different religious body;
and as regards his nationality, it should not hinder him from
obtaining citizen’s rights and liberties equal to those of the
people of Sleswick, the Saxons, Danes, Swedes, Swiss, French, and
Italians, who also live among us.” In Poland, Tadeusz Czacki, the
historian, wrote his Discourse on the Jews (Rosprava o
Zhydakh, Vilna, 1807), in which he deplores that Jews
“experienced indulgence rarely, oppression often, and contempt
nearly always” under the most Christian governments, and suggests a
plan for reforming their condition. But the main appeal for freedom
came, as might have been expected, from the Jews themselves.
Contemporaneous with, if not before, Michel Beer’s Appel
à la justice des nations et des rois, a Lithuanian Jew,
during his imprisonment in Nieszvicz on a false charge, wrote a
work in Polish on the Jewish problem,² while
in 1803 Löb, or Leon, Nebakhovich, an intimate friend of Count
Shakovskoy, published The Cry of the Daughter of Judah
(Fopli Docheri Yudeyskoy), the first defence of the Russian
Jew in the Russian language. The followers of the religion of love
are implored to love a Jew because he is a Jew, and they are
assured that the Jew who preserves his religion undefiled can be
neither a bad man nor a bad citizen.

But the Jews did not wait for their dreams to be realized. They
threw themselves into the swirl of their country’s ambition, as if
they had never received anything other than the tenderness of a
devoted mother at her hands. They were “kindled in a common blaze”
of patriotism with the rest of the population. That in spite of all
accusations to the contrary they remained loyal to Poland, is amply
proved by the history of that unfortunate country. The
characteristic kapota of the Polish Jew, his whole garb, including
the yarmulka (under cap), is simply the old Polish costume, which
the Jews retained after the Poles had adopted the German form of
dress.³ “When, in the year 1794,” says
Czacki, “despair armed the [Polish] capital, the Jews were not
afraid of death, but, mingling with the troops and the populace,
they proved that danger did not terrify them, and that the cause of
the fatherland was dear to them.” With the permission of Kosciusko,
Colonel Joselovich Berek, later killed at the battle of Kotzk
(1809), formed a regiment of light cavalry consisting entirely of
Jews, which distinguished itself especially at the siege of Warsaw.
Most of the members perished in defence of the suburb of Praga. In
the agony of death, Rabbi Hayyim longed for good tidings, that
{116} he might die in peace. And when the
fight was over, Zbitkover expended two barrels of money, one filled
with gold ducats and one with silver rubles, for the live and dead
soldiers who were brought to him.⁴
Indeed, Prince Czartorisky was so convinced of their patriotism,
that he always advocated the same rights for the Polish Jews as
were claimed for the Polish Gentiles, entrusted his children to the
care of Mendel Levin of Satanov, and instructed his son, Prince
Ladislaus, always to remain their friend.⁵

But when, in spite of struggle and sacrifice, the doom “finis
Poloniae” was sounded, and a large portion of the once powerful
empire was incorporated into Russia, we find the Jews bearing their
sorrow patiently, and willingly performing their duties as subjects
to their new masters. Their attachment to their czar and country
was not shaken in the least when, in 1812, Napoleon made them
flattering promises to secure their services in his behalf. Rabbi
Shneor Zalman, the eminent leader of the Lithuanian Hasidim,
hearing of the invasion of the French army, spent many days in
prayer and fasting for the success of the Russians, and fled on the
Sabbath day, not to be contaminated by contact with the “godless
French.” When Napoleon {117} was finally defeated, the event was
celebrated both at home and in the synagogue, and Russian soldiers
were everywhere welcomed by Jews with gifts and good cheer.⁶ Lilienthal relates that the Jews
succeeded in intercepting a courier who carried the plan of
operations of the French army, and Alexander declared in a dispatch
that Jews had opened the eyes of the Russians, and the Government,
therefore, felt itself bound to them by eternal gratitude.⁷ It is to this proof of patriotism
that some attribute Alexander’s interest in the Jews and his order
that three deputies should reside in St. Petersburg to represent
them in Russia, and in Poland a committee consisting of three
Christians and eight Jews should be appointed to devise ways and
means of ameliorating their condition.⁸

The times were promising in other respects. In that critical
period, the Government, reposing but little confidence in Russian
merchants, whose business motto was “No swindle, no sale,” allowed
several Jews to become Government contractors (podradchiki). These,
while rendering valuable services, amassed considerable fortunes.
Notwithstanding the law restricting Jewish residence to the Pale of
Settlement, Catherine II speaks of Jews who resided in St.
Petersburg for many years, and {118} lodged in the house of a
priest, who had been her confessor. Moreover, Jews contributed not
a little to the liberal policy of Alexander I. Among them were
Eliezer Dillon of Nieszvicz (d. 1838), who was honored by the
emperor with a gold medal “for faithful and conscientious
services,” and was given an audience by his Majesty, at which he
pleaded the cause of his coreligionists;⁹
Nathan Notkin, who mitigated the possible effect of Senator
Dyerzhavin’s baneful opinions concerning Jews, as expressed in his
report (Mnyenie, September, 1800), and who suggested the
establishment of schools for children and for adults in
Yekaterinoslav and elsewhere; Abraham Peretz, the personal friend
of Speransky, Dyerzhavin, and Potemkin, and a brilliant financier,
whose high standing enabled him to be a power for good in the
councils concerning Jews;¹⁰ and
his father-in-law, Joshua Zeitlin (1724-1822). Zeitlin was a rare
phenomenon, reminding one of the golden days of Jewish Spain. His
knowledge of finance and political economy won him the admiration
of Prince Potemkin, the protection of Czarina Catherine, and the
esteem of Alexander I, who appointed him court councillor (nadvorny
sovyetnik). But his mercantile pursuits did not hinder him from
study, and his {119} high living did not interfere with his
high thinking. His palatial home at Ustye, in Mohilev, became a
refuge for all needy Talmudists and Maskilim, whom he helped with
the liberality of a Maecenas; he conducted an extensive
correspondence on rabbinic literature, and for many years supported
Doctor Schick and Mendel Levin. For Doctor Schick he built a
laboratory, and filled his library with rare manuscripts and works
on Jewish and secular subjects.¹¹

Even among the conservative Talmudists signs of improvement were
not wanting. The Gaon became the centre of a group of enlightened
friends and disciples, who continued in his footsteps after his
death. His son, Rabbi Abraham, who published and edited many of his
works, a task requiring no small amount of acumen and Talmudic
erudition,¹² was
also the author of books on geography, mathematics, and physics.
His pupils, such as Doctor Schick and Rabbi Benjamin and Rabbi
Zelmele, influenced their contemporaries either directly, by
bringing them in touch with the new learning, or indirectly, by
reforming the school system and the method of Talmud study.¹³ Of Rabbi Zelmele, who like his
master became the hero of a wonder-biography written by his
disciple Ezekiel Feivel {120} of Plungian, we are told that he
regarded grammar as indispensable to a thorough knowledge of the
Bible and the Talmud, pleaded for a return to the order of study
prescribed in the Pirke Abot, and complained that, owing to
the neglect of Aramaic, the benefits of comparative philology were
lost and unknown. He declared also that while he believed in all
the Bible contains, the stories in the Talmud are, for the most
part, legends and parables used for the purpose of
illustration.¹⁴

Towering above all the disciples of the Gaon, the most outspoken
in behalf of enlightenment is Manasseh of Ilye (1767-1831). At a
very early age he attracted the attention of Talmudists by his
originality and boldness. In his unflinching determination to get
at the truth, he did not shrink from criticising Rashi and the
Shulhan ‘Aruk, and dared to interpret some parts of the
Mishnah differently from the explanation given in the Gemara. With
all his admiration for the Gaon, but for whom, he claimed, the
Torah would have been forgotten, he also had points of sympathy
with the Hasidim, for whose leader, Shneor Zalman of Ladi, he had
the highest respect. Like many of his contemporaries, he determined
to go to Berlin. He started on his way, but was stopped at
Königsberg {121} by some orthodox coreligionists, and
compelled to return to Russia. This did not prevent his perfecting
himself in German, Polish, natural philosophy, mechanics, and even
strategics. On the last subject he wrote a book, which was burnt by
his friends, “lest the Government suspect that Jews are making
preparations for war!” But it is not so much his Talmudic or
secular scholarship that makes him interesting to us to-day. His
true greatness is revealed by his attempts, the first made in his
generation perhaps, to reconcile the Hasidim with the Mitnaggedim,
and these in turn with the Maskilim. He spoke a good word for
manual labor, and proved from the Talmud that burdensome laws
should be abolished. His Pesher Dabar (Vilna, 1807) and
Alfe Menasheh (ibid., 1827, 1860) are monuments to the
advanced views of the author. In the Hebrew literature of his time,
they are equalled only by the ‘Ammude Bet Yehudah and the
Hekal ‘Oneg of Doctor Hurwitz.¹⁵

This short period of enlightenment and tolerance, inaugurated by
a semblance of equality, indicates the native optimism of the
Slavonic Jew. For a while a cessation of hostilities was evident in
the camp of Israel. The reforms introduced by the Gaon, and
propagated by his disciples, began to {122} bear
fruit. Hasidism itself underwent a radical change under the
leadership of Rabbi Shneor Zalman of Ladi (1747-1813) and Jacob
Joseph of Polonnoy, who, unlike their colleagues of the Ukraine,
were learned in the Talmud and familiar with the sciences. Protests
by Hasidim themselves against the irreverent spirit that developed
after the death of the Besht, had in fact been heard before. The
saintly and retiring Abraham Malak (d. 1780) had denounced, in no
uncertain terms, the gross conception held by the Hasidim of the
sublime teachings of their own sect. He drew a beautiful picture of
the ideal zaddik, who is “so absorbed in meditation on the Divine
wisdom that he cannot descend to the lower steps upon which
ordinary people stand.”¹⁶ But
the more active Rabbi Shneor, or Zalman Ladier, as he was usually
called, insisted on putting the zaddik on a par with the rabbi,
whose duty it is not to work miracles but to teach righteousness.
Assuming for his followers the name HaBaD, the three letters of
which are the initials of the Hebrew words for Wisdom, Reason, and
Knowledge, he furthered the cause of enlightenment in the only way
possible among his adherents.¹⁷ How
well he succeeded may be inferred from the fact, trivial though it
be, that the {123} biography of the Besht, The Praises
of the Besht (Shibhe ha-Besht), by Dob Bär,
published in Berdichev (1815), omits many of the legends about the
Master included in the version published the same year in Kopys.
The omission can be explained only on the ground that the editor,
Judah Löb, who was the son of the author, did not wish to give
offence, or he had outgrown the credulity of his father.¹⁸

The feeling of tolerance manifested itself also in the Jewish
attitude towards the Gentiles. “O that we were identified with the
nations of our time, created by the same God, children of one
Father, and did not hate each other because we are at variance in
some views!” This exclamation of Doctor Hurwitz¹⁹ found an echo in the works of the
other Maskilim that wrote in Hebrew, but more especially of those
who used a European language. They were deeply interested in
whatever marked a step forward in their country’s civilization. The
opening of a gymnasium in Mitau (1775) was a joyful occasion, which
inspired Hurwitz’s Hebrew muse, and at the centennial celebration
of the surrender of Riga to Peter the Great (July 4, 1810), the
craving of the Jewish heart, avowed in a German poem, was expressed
“in the name of the local {124} Hebrew community to their Christian
compatriots.” The last stanza runs as follows:

This desire for naturalization brought with it an attempt at
“Russification.” To show the beauty of the Russian language, Baruch
Czatzskes of Volhynia translated some of the poems of Khersakov
into Hebrew, and others published manuals for the study of Russian
and Polish.²¹
Among the first books issued from the newly-established
printing-press in Shklov, the centre of Jewish wealth, refinement,
and culture at that time, was the Zeker Rab with a German
translation (1804). In an appendix thereto the Shklov Maskilim
announced their intention to publish a weekly, the first in the
Hebrew tongue. Yiddish was also resorted to as a medium for
educating the masses, and as early as 1813 some Vilna Jews applied
to the Government for permission to publish a paper in that
language, though it was not until ten years later (1823-1824) that
a Yiddish periodical, Der Beobachter an der Weichsel, appeared in
Warsaw. Nor do {125} we hear of any opposition to the
Government decrees, issued probably at the request of Dillon,
Notkin, Peretz, or Nebakhovich, that the elders of the kahals in
and after 1808, and the rabbis of the congregations in and after
1812, be conversant with either Russian, German, or Polish. This
sudden Russification of the Jews amounted sometimes to no more than
a superficial imitation of Russian civilization, which pious rabbis
as well as liberal-minded men like Schick, Margolioth, Ilye, and
Hurwitz, felt impelled to call a halt to. Jews, especially the
rich, aped the Polish pans. Their wives dressed in Parisian gowns
of the latest fashion, and their homes were conducted in a manner
so luxurious as to arouse the envy of the noblemen. Israel waxed
fat and kicked. Their greatest care was to become wealthy; they
pampered their bodies at the expense of the impoverishment of their
souls, and some feared that “with the passing away of the elder
generation there would not remain a man capable of filling the
position of rabbi.”²²

The privilege of attending public schools and colleges further
stimulated the Russification of the Jews. As soon as these
institutions of learning were thrown open to them, numerous Jewish
youths made headway in all branches taught, especially in
{126} medicine. That Alexander’s benign decree
of November 10, 1811, issued through the Secretary of State
Speransky, was not always executed by his officials goes without
saying. Simeon Levy Wolf, one of the first Russo-Jewish graduates,
was denied his degree of doctor of jurisprudence in Dorpat unless
he embraced Christianity.²³
When, in 1819, some of the Vilna graduates applied for the
privilege of not paying the double tax, they were told that they
must first renounce their faith, an exception being made only in
favor of Arthur Parlovich. Still the number of Jewish graduate
physicians was on the increase. Osip Yakovlevich Liboschüts,
who was the son of the famous physician of Vilna, took his doctor
degree at Dorpat (1806), became court physician in St. Petersburg,
where he founded a hospital for children, and wrote extensively in
French on the flora of his country.²⁴ The
medical institute of Vilna (1803-1833), afterwards transferred to
Kiev, became the centre of attraction for the Russian Jewry. Padua,
Berlin, Königsberg, Göttingen, Copenhagen, Halle,
Amsterdam, Cambridge, and London were for a third of a century
replaced by the home of the Gaon and of Doctor Liboschüts. The
first students were recruited from the bet ha-midrash, and they
frequently joined, {127} as in former days, knowledge of the Law
with the practice of their chosen profession. Such were Isaac
Markusevich, whose annotations to the Shulhan ‘Aruk (ab.
1830) were published fifty years later;²⁵ Joseph Rosensohn, the promising
Talmudist who became rabbi of Pyosk at the age of nineteen;²⁶ and Kusselyevsky of Nieszvicz, a
stipendiary of a Polish nobleman and a great favorite with
Professor Frank. Because of his proficiency, he was exempted from
serving as a vratch (interne), and for his piety and learning he
was addressed by Jews and Gentiles as “rabbi.”²⁷

With what dreams such happenings filled the Jewish heart! “Thank
God,” writes a merchant of the first guild in reply to an inquiry
from distant Bokhara, “thank God, we dwell in peace under the
sovereignty of our czar Alexander, who has shown us his mercy, and
has put us in every respect on an equality with all the inhabitants
of the land.”²⁸ But
a rude awakening was soon to make the Jews aware that their visions
of better days were still far from realization. In 1815, Alexander
I formed the acquaintance of Baroness Krüdener, and since
then, to the satisfaction of Prince Galitzin, “with what giant
strides the emperor advanced in the pathway of religion!” His
humanitarian deeds gave way {128} to a profound religious mysticism. He
experienced a revulsion of feeling toward reforms in his vast
empire, and, as always, the Jews were the first victims of an
ill-boding change. The kindly monarch who, at Paris, had said to a
Russo-Jewish deputation, J’enleverai le joug de vos
épaules, began to make their yoke heavier than he had
found it. The enlightened czar, who, in striking a medal
commemorating the emancipation of the Jews of his empire, had
anticipated Napoleon by a year, suddenly became a bigoted tyrant,
whose efforts were devoted to converting the same Jews to
Christianity. He who had claimed that his greatest reward would be
to produce a Mendelssohn, now resorted to various expedients, to
render education unpalatable to the Jews. The Jewish assemblymen,
who, in 1816, soon after the Franco-Russian war, had been convoked
to St. Petersburg, were not allowed to meet; and when, two years
later, they did meet, their every attempt was baffled by the
Government. Jews were expelled systematically from St. Petersburg
(1818). They were forbidden to employ Christians as servants (May
4, 1820), to immigrate into Russia from abroad (August 10, 1824),
and reside in the towns and villages of Mohilev and Vitebsk
(January 13, {129} 1825). Several years after the double
poll and guild tax had been abolished in Courland (November 8,
1807), it was restored with an additional impost on meat from
cattle slaughtered according to the Jewish rite (korobka). All this
impoverished the Jews to such an extent that they were forced to
sell the cravats of their praying shawls (taletim), in order to
defray the expense of a second deputation to St. Petersburg.²⁹

Had Alexander I been satisfied with merely restricting the Jews’
rights, the favorable attitude towards enlightenment we have
noticed above would probably have remained unaltered.
Unfortunately, Alexander became a fanatic conversionist. It was a
time when missionary zeal became endemic, and Baroness
Krüdener’s influence was strengthened. The Reverend Lewis Way,
having founded (1808) the London Society for Promoting Christianity
among the Jews, made a tour through Europe, everywhere urging the
Gentiles to enfranchise the Jews as an inducement to them to
embrace Christianity, the only means of hastening the advent of the
Apostolic millennium. His Mémoires sur l’état des
israélites presented to the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle
(October 11, 1818) and his visit to Russia resulted in an imperial
{130} ukase (March 25, 1817) organizing a
Committee of Guardians for Israelitish Christians (Izrailskiye
Christyanye). The members of this association were to be granted
land in the northern or southern provinces of Russia and to enjoy
special privileges. The bait proved tempting, and, as a
consequence, some prominent Maskilim, too weak to resist the
allurements, precipitated themselves into the Greek Catholic fold.
Abraham Peretz, financier and champion of Jews’ rights, consented
to be converted, as also Löb Nebakhovich, the dramatist, whose
plays were produced in the Imperial theatre of St. Petersburg and
performed in the presence of the emperor.³⁰ Equally bad, if not worse, for
the cause of Haskalah was the conduct of those who, disdaining, or
unable, to profess the new religion, discarded every vestige of
traditional Judaism, and deemed it their duty to set an example of
infidelity and sometimes immorality to their less enlightened
coreligionists. What Leroy-Beaulieu says of Maimon, “that type of
the most cultured Jew to be found before the French Revolution,”
might more justly be applied to many a less prominent Maskil after
him: “Despite his learning and philosophy he sank deeper than the
most degraded of his fellow-men, because in repudiating
{131} his ancestral faith he had lost the
staff which, through all their humiliations, served as a prop even
to the most debased of ancient Jews.”³¹

Haskalah thus having become synonymous with apostasy or
licentiousness, we can easily understand why the unsophisticated
among the Russian Jews were so bitterly opposed to it from the time
the sad truth dawned upon them, until, under Alexander II, their
suspicions were somewhat dissipated. Previous to the latter part of
the reign of Alexander I the “struggle groups” in Russian Jewry
were at first Frankists and anti-Frankists, and afterwards Hasidim
and Mitnaggedim. It was a conflict, not between religion and
science, but between religion and what was regarded as
superstition. Secular instruction, far from being opposed, was, as
we have seen, sought and disseminated. Long after the pious element
in Germany had been aroused to the dangers that lurked in the wake
of their “Aufklärung,” and had begun to endeavor to check its
further progress by excommunication and other methods, the Russian
Jews remained “seekers after light.” They might have condemned a
Maskil, they had not yet condemned Haskalah. Mendelssohn’s German
translation was welcomed in Russia at its first appearance no less
than in {132} Germany, but when some of the children
of Rabbi Moses ben Menahem embraced the Christian faith, and their
father, as was natural, was suspected of skepticism, the
Biur and the Meassefim were pronounced, like libraries by
Sir Anthony Absolute, to be “an evergreen tree of diabolical
knowledge.” So also with Wessely’s Epistles, which were destroyed
in public, together with Polonnoy’s Toledot Ya’akob Yosef.
Haskalah itself was not impugned, and as theretofore translations
and original works on science were encouraged, and the wish was
entertained that “many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be
increased.”³²

But the latest experiences in their own country put Haskalah in
a very different light from that in which they were wont to regard
it. Formerly the opposition to it had been limited to the very land
that gave it birth. Because of their determination to study,
Solomon Maimon was denied admission to Berlin, Manasseh of Ilye was
stopped in Königsberg, and Abba Glusk Leczeka, better known as
“the Glusker Maggid,” the subject of a poem by Chamisso, was
persecuted everywhere. It was Rabbi Levin, of Berlin, who
prohibited the publication of Wessely’s works, and insisted that
the author be expelled from the city.³³ It
was Rabbi Ezekiel {133} Landau of Prague who, though approving
of Wessely’s Yen Lebanon, opposed the translation of the
Pentateuch by Mendelssohn, while Rabbi Horowitz of Hamburg
denounced it in unmeasured terms, admonishing his hearers to shun
the work as unclean, and approving the action of those persons who
had publicly burnt it in Vilna (1782). Moses Sofer of Pressburg
adopted as his motto, “Touch not the works of the Dessauer”
(Mendelssohn),³⁴ and
seldom allowed an opportunity to pass without denouncing the
Maskilim of his country. Now the clarion note of anti-Haskalah,
sounded by these luminaries in Israel, found an echo among the Jews
in Russia. They had discovered, to their great sorrow, that like
Elisha ben Abuya, the apostate in the Talmud, “those who once
entered the paradise [of enlightenment] returned no more.” The very
name of the seat of Haskalah was an abomination to the pious. To be
called “Berlinchick” or “Deitschel” was tantamount to being called
infidel and epicurean, anarchist and outlaw. The old instinct of
self-preservation, which turned Jews from lambs into lions, holding
their ground to the last, asserted itself again. As the Talmudic
rabbis excluded certain books from the Canon, as the study of even
the Jewish philosophers was later proscribed {134} by
certain French rabbis, so the Russian rabbis laid the ban upon
whatever savored of German “Aufklärerei.”

Thus began the bitter fight against Haskalah, in which Hasidim
and Mitnaggedim, forgetting their differences, joined hands, and
stood shoulder to shoulder. For, after all, was not Judaism in both
these phases endangered by the new and aggressive enemy from the
West? And did not the two have enough in common to become one in
the hour of great need? Hasidism, in fact, was Judaism
emotionalized, and since, beginning with Rabbi Shneor Zalman of
Ladi, it, too, advocated the study of the Talmud, the distinction
between it and Mitnaggedism was hardly perceptible. The study of
the Zohar and Cabbala was equally cultivated by both; Isaac Luria
and Hayyim Vital were equally venerated by both, and hero worship
was common to both. The Ascension of Elijah (Gaon) is as
full of miracles as The Praises of the Besht. It is no
wonder, then, that the animosities, which reached their acme during
the last few years of the Gaon’s life, were weakened after his
death, and that the compromise, pleaded for by Doctor Hurwitz and
Manasseh Ilye, was somehow effected. But it was otherwise with the
Haskalah. “Verily,” says the {135} zaddik Menahem Mendel of
Vitebsk, “verily, grammar is useful; that our great ones indulged
in the study thereof I also know; but what is to be done since the
wicked and sinful have taken possession of it?” In the same manner
does Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin inveigh against the followers of
Mendelssohn, because of the latitudinarian habits of the Maskilim,
who “despise the counsel of their betters, and go after the
dictates of their hearts.”³⁵
Both saw in Haskalah a deadly foe to their dearest ideals, a blight
upon their most cherished hopes, and, like Elizabeta Petrovna, they
would not derive even a benefit from the enemies of their
religion.

Still, Alexander I approached his object only tentatively.
Haskalah during his reign was like the Leviathan in the Talmud
legend which resembled an island, so that wayfarers approached it
to moor under its lee and find shelter in its shade, but as soon as
they began to walk and cook on it, it would turn and submerge them
in the stormy and bottomless sea. The Jews were invited or induced
to forsake their religion, and only the less discerning were caught
in the snare. It remained for the “terrible incarnation of
autocracy,” Nicholas I (1825-1855), or, as his Jewish subjects
called him, Haman II, to fill their cup of woe to overflowing
{136} and employ every available means to
convert them to his own religion.

Nicholas’s one aim was “to diminish the number of Jews in the
empire,” but not by expulsion, the means employed by Ferdinand and
Isabella. He knew too well their value as citizens to allow them to
migrate. He would diminish their numbers by forced baptism.
Baptized Jews were exempted from the payment of taxes for three
years; Jewish criminals could have their punishment commuted or
could obtain a pardon by ceasing to be Jews. But as these
inducements could naturally appeal only to comparatively few, more
stringent measures were resorted to. Hitherto the Jews had been
excused from military service, paying an annual sum of money for
the privilege. On September 7, 1827, an ukase was issued requiring
them not only to pay the same amount as theretofore, but also to
serve in the army; and while Christians had to furnish only seven
recruits per thousand, and only at certain intervals, the Jews had
to contribute ten recruits for each thousand, and that at every
conscription. The only exception was made in the case of the
Karaites, who, according to Nicholas’s decision, had emigrated from
Palestine before the {137} Christian era, and could not therefore
have participated in the crucifixion of Jesus. Jews found outside
of their native towns without passports, and those in arrears with
their taxes, frequently even those who, having lagged behind in
their payment to the Government, eventually discharged their
obligations, were to be seized and sentenced to serve in the army,
and this meant a lifetime, or at least twenty-five years, of the
most abject slavery imaginable. This grievous measure caused the
utmost misery. No Jewish youth leaving home could be sure of
returning and seeing his dear ones again. The scum of the Jewish
population (poimshchiki, or “catchers”) made it their profession to
ensnare helpless young men or poor itinerant students suspected of
the Haskalah heresy, destroy their passports, and deliver them up
as poimaniki (recruits), to spare the rich who paid for the
substitutes. To form an idea of the time we need but read some of
the numerous folk-songs of that day. Here is one of many:

Yet this was not all. Knowing that it is easier to convert the
children than their elders, the Government of Nicholas I,
out-Heroding Herod, inaugurated a system so cruel as to fill with
terror and pity the heart of the most ferocious barbarian. Infants
were torn from their mothers, boys of the age of twelve, sometimes
of ten and eight, were {139} herded like cattle, sent to distant
parts of Russia, and there distributed as chattels among the
officers of the army. Many of these Cantonists, as they were
called, either died on the way, or were killed off when they
resisted conversion. Those who survived sometimes returned to
Judaism, and formed the nucleus of Jewish settlements in the
interior of Russia. These “soldiers of Nicholas” (Nikolayevskiye
soldati), with their uncouth demeanor and devoted, though ignorant,
adherence to the faith of their fathers, furnished much material
for the folk-songs of the time and the novelists of the somewhat
happier reigns of Nicholas’s successors.³⁶

One of these Cantonists, the first to give a description of the
life of his fellow-sufferers, was Wolf Nachlass, or Alexander
Alekseyev. For many years he remained faithful to the religion of
his forefathers, though he had been pressed into the service at the
age of ten. About 1845 he changed his views, became an ardent Greek
Catholic, and converted five hundred Cantonists, to the great
delight of Nicholas I, who thanked him in person for his zeal. He
lost his leg, and during the long illness that followed Nachlass
settled in Novgorod, and wrote several works on Jewish customs and
on missionary topics.

Less horrifying, but equally aiming at disintegration, was
Nicholas’s scheme of colonization. What better means was there for
“diminishing the number of Jews” than to scatter them over the
wilderness of Russia and leave them to shift for themselves? This,
of course, was necessarily a slow process and one involving some
expense, but it was fraught with great importance not only for the
Russian Church, but for Russian trade and agriculture as well.

“Back to the soil!” Was not this the cry of the romantic
Maskilim in Germany, in Galicia, and particularly in Russia? And
have not country life and field labor been depicted by them in the
most glowing colors? Here was an opportunity to save the honor of
the Jewish name and also ameliorate the material condition of the
Russian Jews. The permission given to them by Alexander I to
establish themselves as farmers in the frigid yet free Siberian
steppes was greeted with enthusiasm by all. Nicholas’s ukase was
hailed with joy. Elias Mitauer and Meyer Mendelssohn, at the head
of seventy families from Courland, were the first to migrate to the
new region (1836), and they were followed by hundreds more. Indeed,
the exodus assumed such proportions that the Christians in the
parts {141} of the country abandoned by the
colonists complained of the decline in business and the
depreciation of property. The movement was heartily approved by the
rabbis; the populace, its imagination stimulated, began to dream
dreams and see visions of brighter days, and all gave vent to their
hopefulness in songs of gladness and gratitude, in strains like
these:³⁷

Alas, this joy was of short duration! Very soon Nicholas became
suspicious of his Siberian colonization {142} scheme,
that it was in reality a philanthropic measure, and in place of
saving the Jew’s soul it only promoted his physical well-being.
This suspicion grew into a conviction when he learned that the
Jewish community at Tomsk, still faithful to the heritage of
Israel, applied for permission to appoint a spiritual leader. The
autocrat, therefore, signed an ukase checking settlement in the
hitherto free land, depriving honest men of the privilege enjoyed
by the worst of criminals, and enrolling the children of those
already there among the military Cantonists (January 5, 1837).

Then began real misery. Believing at first that the czar’s
intentions were sincere, many Jews had sold their hut and land and
left for Siberia. No sooner were they there than they were sent, on
foot, to Kherson. The decree of the “little father” was executed
in—no other phrase can describe it so well—Russian
fashion. The innocent Jews who had come to Siberia by invitation
were seized, treated as vagabonds, and deported to their
destination. Want and suffering produced contagious diseases, and
many became a burden to the Jews of Kremenchug and such Christians
as could not witness unmoved the infernal comedy played by the
defender of the Greek Catholic Church. {143} Help
could be rendered only secretly, and those who dared complain were
severely punished.

At the same time that this was taking place in the wilderness of
Siberia, a phenomenon of rare occurrence was to be witnessed in the
very heart of the Jewish Pale, in Lithuania. Aroused by the
wretched condition of his coreligionists, Solomon Posner
(1780-1848) determined to erect cloth factories exclusively for
Jews. He sent to Germany for experts to teach them the trade. These
Jewish workingmen proved so industrious and intelligent that before
the end of three years they surpassed their teachers in mechanical
skill. But this attempt of Posner was only prefatory to the greater
and more arduous task he set himself. It was nothing less than the
establishment of a colony in which some of the most Utopian
theories would be applied to actual life. Ten years after Robert
Owen founded his communistic settlement at New Harmony, Indiana,
several hundred robust Russian Jews settled on some of the
thousands of acres in Lithuania that were lying fallow for want of
tillers. With these farmers Posner hoped to realize his Utopia. He
provided every family with sufficient land, the necessary
agricultural implements, as well as with horses, cows, etc., free
of charge, for a {144} term of twenty-five years. In return,
the members of the community pledged themselves to use simple
homespun for their apparel, black on holidays, gray on week-days,
not to indulge in the luxuries of city life, and to avoid trading
of any sort. As time passed, Posner opened coeducational technical
schools for the children and batte midrashim for adults, and soon
the homesteads presented the appearance of progressive and
flourishing farms. Posner’s successful effort attracted the
admiration of Prince Pashkevich, and was both a living protest
against the accusation of Nicholas that Jews were unfit to be
farmers and an eloquent plea for the unfortunate victims of a
capricious tyrant in Siberia and Kherson.³⁸

In his efforts to curb the stiff-necked Jews by all manner of
fiendish persecution, Nicholas did not neglect to try the efficacy
of some of the plans advocated by Lewis Way. Undismayed by the
failure of the Committee of Guardians for Israelitish Christians,
in which Alexander I had put so much confidence, a “Jewish
Committee,” all the members of which were Christians, was organized
by imperial decree (May 22, 1825). This committee established, in
1829, a school at Warsaw where Christian divinity students were to
be instructed {145} in rabbinical literature and in
Judeo-German, in order to be fully equipped for missionary work
among the Jews. It appointed Abbé Luigi Chiarini to
translate, or rather expose, the Babylonian Talmud, to which
undertaking the Government contributed twelve thousand thalers.

To do his work thoroughly, the abbé deemed it advisable
to write a preliminary dissertation, presenting his aim and views.
This he did in his Theory of Judaism (Théorie du
judaisme, Paris, 1830). He endeavored to show how worthless,
injurious, and immoral were the teachings of the Talmud. Only by
discarding them would the Jews qualify themselves to enjoy the
right of citizenship. He proved, to his own satisfaction, that
ritual murder was enjoined in the Talmud, and this he did at a time
when many a community was harassed by this fiendish accusation.
When early death cut short the abbé’s effort (1832), the
Government, still persisting in its plans, engaged the services of
Ephraim Moses Pinner of Posen, who published specimens of his
intended translation in his Compendium (Berlin, 1831). But
the fickle or restless emperor seems to have tired of the plan, or
perhaps he found Pinner too Jewish for his purposes. Of the
twenty-eight volumes planned, only {146} one, which was dedicated to
Nicholas, appeared during the decade following Chiarini’s death,
and the work was abandoned entirely.³⁹

The crusade against the Talmud, thus headed and backed by the
Government, now broke out in all its fury. Anti-Talmudic works in
English, French, and German were imported into Russia, translated
into Hebrew, and scattered among the people. The Old Paths,
by Alexander McCaul, a countryman and colleague of Lewis Way, but
surpassing him in zeal for the conversion of Jews, was translated
into Hebrew and German (Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1839) for the
edification of those who knew no English. Jews themselves, either
out of revenge or because they sought to ingratiate themselves with
the high authorities, joined the movement, and openly came out
against the Talmud in works modelled after Eisenmenger’s
Entdecktes Judenthum. Such were Buchner, author of
Worthlessness of the Talmud (Der Talmud in seiner
Nichtigkeit, 2 vols., Warsaw, 1848), and Temkin, who wrote
The Straight Road (Derek Selulah, St. Petersburg,
1835). The former was instructor in Hebrew and Holy Writ in the
rabbinical seminary in Warsaw; the latter was a zealous convert to
the Greek Catholic faith, who spared {147} no effort to make Judaism
disliked among his former coreligionists.

All these desperate attempts proved of no avail. Judaism was
practiced, and the Talmud was studied during the reign of Nicholas
I more ardently than ever before. Their sacred treasures attacked
by the Government without and by renegades and detractors within,
the Russian Jews nevertheless clung to them with a tenacity
unparalleled even in their own history. Danzig’s Life of Man
(Hayye Adam, Vilna, 1810), containing all Jewish ritual
ceremonies, was followed out to the least minutiae. Despite the
poverty of the Jews and the comparatively exorbitant price the
publisher had to charge for the Talmud, and, aside from the many
sets of former editions in the country and those continually
imported, and in addition to the Responsa, commentaries, Midrashim,
and other works directly and indirectly bearing on it, more than a
dozen editions of the Talmud had appeared in Russia alone since the
ukase of Catherine II (October 30, 1795) permitting Russian Jews to
publish Hebrew works in their own country. This ukase had been
intended originally to exclude seditious literature from Russia,
but what was unfavorable for the rebellious Poles proved, in a
measure, very beneficial {148} to the law-abiding Jews. Under the
supervision of a censor, and with but slight interruptions, the
Jews published their own books, and in 1806 Slavuta, in Volhynia,
saw the first complete edition of the Talmud on Russian soil. Then
followed another edition in the same place (1808-1813), a third in
Kopys (1816-1828), and a fourth in Slavuta (1817-1822), and several
others elsewhere.

The story of the Vilna-Grodno edition of the Talmud is
interesting as well as illuminating. It depicts the relation of the
Jews among themselves and to the Government. Begun in 1835, at
Ozar, near Grodno, an imperial ukase directed the removal of the
work to Vilna, the metropolis of Russo-Poland. When the publishers,
Simhah Ziml and Menahem Mann Romm, had completed their work in the
new quarters, the copies of the book were destroyed by incendiaries
(1840). After some time, an effort was made by Joseph Eliasberg and
Mattathias Strashun to continue the publication, but the Warsaw
censor prohibited its importation into Poland, where the bulk of
the subscribers lived. To add to the calamity, a feud broke out
between the head of the Slavuta publishing company, Moses Schapira
(1758-1838), and the Vilna publishers. The publication of the
Talmud had {149} always been supervised by the prominent
rabbis of the land, and their authorization was necessary to make
an edition legal. This the rabbi never granted unless the previous
edition was entirely disposed of. The Slavuta publishers claimed
that their edition had not been sold out when the Vilna publishers
started theirs. The litigation continued for some time, and was
finally decided in favor of the Vilna firm. The publishers of
Slavuta, however, having the Polish rabbis and zaddikim on their
side, continued to publish the Talmud, regardless of the protests
of Rabbi Akiba Eger and the “great ones” of Lithuania. But a
terrible misfortune befell the Slavuta publishers. On account of
some accusation, the two brothers engaged in the business were
deported to Siberia, and their father, the head of the
establishment, died of a broken heart. This cleared the field for
the Romms of Vilna, who continue to prosper to this day, and have
now the greatest Hebrew publishing house in the world. “It is the
finger of God,” the pious ones said, and studied the Talmud with
increased devotion.⁴⁰

The numerous Talmud editions indicate the demand for the work,
and the multiplicity of yeshibot explains the cause of the demand.
We have seen how the yeshibot destroyed by Chmielnicki {150} were
re-established soon after the massacres ceased. Their number
increased when the Hasidic movement threatened to render the
knowledge of the Talmud unpopular; and when the Maskilim, too, made
them a target for their attacks, there was hardly a town in which
such institutions were not to be found. But surpassing all the
yeshibot of the nineteenth century, if not of all centuries, was
the Yeshibah Tree of Life (Yeshibat ‘Ez Hayyim) in the townlet of
Volozhin. There the cherished hopes of the Gaon were finally
realized. Within its walls gathered the elect of the Russo-Jewish
youth for almost a century.

The founder of this famous yeshibah was Rabbi Hayyim Volozhin,
the greatest of the Gaon’s disciples (1749-1821). A prominent
Talmudist at twenty-five, he, nevertheless, left his business and
household at that age, and went to Vilna to become the humble pupil
of the Gaon, whose method he had followed from the beginning. When
he felt himself proficient enough in his studies, he returned to
his native place, and founded (1803) the Tree of Life College, with
an enrollment of ten students, whom he maintained at his own
expense. But soon the fame of the yeshibah and its founder spread
far and wide, and students flocked to it from {151} all
corners of Russia and outside of it. In response to Rabbi Hayyim’s
appeal contributions came pouring in, a new and spacious
school-house was erected, and Volozhin became a Talmudic Oxford. To
be a student there was both an indication of superiority and a
means to proficiency. Rabbi Hayyim did away with the “Tag-essen,”
or “Freitisch” custom, and introduced a stipendiary system in its
stead, thus fostering the self-respect of the students. But they
did not as a rule require much to satisfy them with their lot. They
came to Volozhin “to learn,” and they well knew the Talmudic
statement, that “no one can attain eminence in the Torah unless he
is willing to die for its sake.”

Rabbi Hayyim was succeeded by his son Rabbi Isaac, who united
knowledge of secular subjects with profound Talmudic erudition, was
active in worldly affairs, and played a prominent part in the
Jewish history of his day. He was of the leading spirits who, in
1842, attended the rabbinical conference at St. Petersburg convoked
by Nicholas I. The number of students increased under his
leadership, according to Lilienthal, to three hundred. But Rabbi
Isaac became so engrossed in public affairs that he found he could
no longer do justice to his position. His two sons-in-law,
therefore, took his {152} place, and when the older died, in 1854,
Rabbi Naphtali Zebi Judah Berlin (1817-1893) entered on his useful
career, unbroken for forty years, as the dean of the greatest seat
of learning in the Diaspora. Under his administration the Tree of
Life College reached both the height of its prosperity and the end
of its existence (1892).⁴¹

Thus all the schemes and machinations of the Russian Government
respecting the Jews proved ineffectual. Nicholas I, with the
possible exception of Ivan the Terrible, the greatest autocrat in
Russian history, at whose wish seemingly insuperable obstacles were
instantly removed, the wink of whose eye was sufficient to kill or
revive the millions of his crouching slaves—Nicholas I, with
all his herculean strength, yet found himself helpless in the
presence of a handful of wretched Jews. Furious at his defeat, he
expressed the intention to reduce all Jews to Governmental
servitude or to make them, like the Cossacks, lifelong soldiers.
Being advised to postpone the execution of this plan and to employ
less severe measures meanwhile, he issued the Exportation Law of
1843, ordering the expulsion of Jews from the fifty-vyerst boundary
zone and from the villages within the Pale, thereby {153} depriving
fifty thousand families at once of their homes and their
support.

Those from the country—writes a Russo-Jewish eye-witness
of the scenes following the enforcement of this inhuman
law—move first to the neighboring cities, and increase the
existing poverty, rendering the difficulty of finding profitable
employment still greater. God only knows how it will end when the
congestion increases still further…. I must also inform
you—he proceeds—that these past four months several
imperial commissioners have visited the frontier towns on the
Lithuanian border, from which the Jews are to be banished, in order
that the value of the real estate may be estimated. But how is the
valuation calculated? Even one who is acquainted with the venality
and unscrupulousness of Russian officers cannot form a correct idea
of how this business is conducted. If a man has no connection with
those in authority, or cannot obtain powerful intercession, or is
unable to give heavy bribes, his property is valued at perhaps five
per cent, or is set at so low a figure as to make the appraisal
differ little from downright robbery. We, however, are used to such
measures, for when they banished us some time past from certain
districts of the city of Brest-Litovsk, where for centuries
celebrated scholars of our people dwelt, nothing better was done by
the crown to compensate us for our houses.⁴² The same occurred at the
expulsion from St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Nikolayev, Alexandrov,
Sebastopol, etc., but as it did not affect so large a mass, nor
injure us to so great an extent, we bore the injury silently. Alas,
this is not the case at present. We should gladly quit the country,
gladly should we emigrate to America, Texas, and especially to
Palestine under English protection, if, on the one {154} hand, we
had the means and, on the other, the Government would permit
us.⁴³

This Exportation Law of Nicholas I, the result of a lawsuit
between a Jew and a nobleman living on the eastern frontier, which
had been decided by the supreme court in favor of the former,
aroused much excitement in every civilized country of Europe. It
was before anti-Semitism was in flower, and the people of the time
were more responsive even than during the later Kishinev massacres.
Indignation meetings were held. Both Jews and Gentiles, not only
abroad, but even in Russia, protested. Prayers were offered for the
unfortunate. Crémieux in France and Rabbi Philippson in
Germany appealed to the public. All to no effect. Grief was
especially manifest among English Jews, always the first to feel
when their fellow-Jews in other countries suffer, and Grace
Aguilar, like Rachel weeping over her children, lamented over her
Russian brethren:

At this critical period, Moses Montefiore, encouraged by his
success in refuting the blood accusation at Damascus, and
stimulated by the many petitions he had received from Russia,
Germany, France, Italy, England, and America, undertook the
philanthropic mission of interceding with the czar on behalf of his
coreligionists. It is natural to suspect that no trouble is
entirely undeserved; it is but human to sympathize with our
friends, and yet regard their suffering as a judgment rather than a
misfortune. But Montefiore’s trip to Russia dispelled the last
trace of suspicion against the Russian Jews. In spite of their
poverty, he saw numerous charitable and educational institutions in
every city he visited. He found the Jewish men to be the cream of
Russia. “He had the satisfaction,” Doctor Loewe, his secretary,
tells us, “of seeing among them many well-educated wives, sons, and
daughters; their dwellings were scrupulously clean, the furniture
plain but suitable for the purpose, and the appearance of the
family healthy.” To all his pleadings Count Uvarov returned but a
single answer: “The Russian Jews are different from other Jews;
they are orthodox, and believe in the Talmud”⁴⁴—a reason for persecution in
Holy Russia!

Montefiore’s visit to Russia, from which so {156} much had
been hoped, did not improve the situation in the least. For all his
strenuous efforts, he was compelled to leave the Jews as destitute
as he had found them. Nay, they might truthfully have said to the
Moses of England what their ancestors had said to the Moses of
Egypt, “Since thou didst come to Pharaoh, the hardness of our lot
has increased.” From the first of May (1844) they were not allowed
to continue to earn the pittance necessary to maintain life, as,
for instance, by the slavish labor of breaking stones on the
highways, with which three hundred families had barely earned dry
bread.⁴⁵ The great love and respect shown
to the uncrowned king of Israel proved to the czar’s officials the
existence of some artful design on the part of the Jews, and
convinced them especially of the disloyalty of Montefiore. The
latter, they maintained, was scheming to set himself up as the
Jewish czar. Hence every movement of his was closely watched, every
word he uttered carefully noted, and not a few Jews were left with
memorable tokens for doing homage to the English baronet. Their
disabilities were not removed, their condition was not improved,
the hopes they entertained resolved themselves into pleasant dreams
followed by a sad awakening.⁴⁶

Yet, though his visit did not, as Sir Moses had anticipated,
“raise the Jews in the estimation of the people,” it was not
without beneficent effect on the Jews themselves. It cemented the
“traditional friendship” which has always existed between
Anglo-Jews and Russo-Jews more than between any sets of Jews of the
dispersion. It disclosed to the latter that there were happier Jews
and better countries than their own; that there were men who
sympathized with them as effectively as could be. Above all, it
convinced them that a Jew may be highly educated and wealthy, and
take his place among the noble ones of the earth, and still remain
a faithful Jew and a loyal son of his persecuted people. “I leave
you,” Sir Moses called to them at parting, “but my heart will ever
remain with you. When my brethren suffer, I feel it painfully; when
they have reason to weep, my eyes shed tears.” Had Montefiore’s
visit resulted merely in arousing his brethren’s
self-consciousness, he had earned a place in the history of
Haskalah, for self-consciousness is the most potent factor in the
culture of mankind.

Jews from other lands also came to the rescue of their Russian
coreligionists. Jacques Isaac Altaras, the ship-builder of
Marseilles, petitioned the {158} czar to allow forty thousand Jewish
families to emigrate to Algeria. Rabbi Ludwig Philippson, editor of
the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, appealed to his countrymen
to help the Russian Jews to settle in America, Australia, Africa,
anywhere away from Russia. But all attempts were ineffectual.
Though Count Kissilyef assured Montefiore that the czar “did not
wish to keep them [the Jews], five or six hundred thousand might
leave altogether,” emigration was next to impossible. Russia was
constantly playing the game of the cat with the mouse. Her nails
were set and her eyes fixed upon her prey, and yet she made it
appear to the outside world that she was anxious about the welfare
of the Jews. For Russian tactics have always been, and still are,
the despair of the diplomat, a labyrinth through which only they
who hold the clue can ever hope to find their way.

The condition of the Jews in Russo-Poland was, if possible, even
worse than in Lithuania and Russia proper. Nothing, in fact, but
the auto-da-fé was needed to give it the stamp of medieval
Spain. As before the division of Poland, the Poles suspected the
Jews of disloyalty to Poland, while the Russians suspected them of
disloyalty to Russia. Hitherto too proud to soil his hand with a
manual {159} or mercantile pursuit, the Polish pan,
now that the glory of his country had departed, and he was deprived
of his lordly estates, began to engage in business of all kinds,
and, finding in the Jewish trader a rival with whose skill and
diligence he could seldom compete, he became embittered against the
entire race. This was the cause of the innumerable restrictions,
the extortion, and exploitation in Russo-Poland, which surpassed
those of Russia proper.

The Jewish archives—said Doctor Marcus Jastrow, then Rabbi
in Warsaw—were humorously known as “California” or the
“Mexican Gold Mines.” Jews had to pay at every step. They had to
pay a Tagzettel [daily tax] for permission to stay in Warsaw, which
permission, however, did not include the luxury of breathing. The
latter had to be purchased with an additional ten kopecks per
capita. The income from these taxations amounted to over a million
and a half, but in spite of all this the Jews were regarded as
parasites, as leeches feasting upon the life-blood of their
Christian compatriots.⁴⁷

Such is the background upon which the picture of Haskalah is to
be drawn—black enough to throw into relief the faintest ray
of light. The Russian Jews, during the reign of Nicholas I, found
themselves in a position possible only in Russia. They were not
allowed to emigrate, nor suffered to stay. {160} In 1823
they were expelled from the farms, and had to crowd into the
cities; in 1838 they were expelled from the cities, and forced to
go back to the country. Then Siberia was opened to them, but when
it was found that even the land of the outcasts was hailed as a
place of refuge by the Jews, they were told to go to Kherson. At
last arrangements were perfected to allow them to colonize
Lithuania—all at once even this was interdicted. They had
been conquered with the Poles, yet were left unprotected against
the Poles. Could they help suspecting the tyrant of what he really
intended to do—of seeking to diminish their numbers by
conversion? Is it surprising that when he determined to open public
schools and establish rabbinical seminaries, Jews looked upon
these, too, as the sugared poison with which he intended to
extirpate Judaism? Or can we blame them for being determined to the
last to baffle him? Nicholas did not understand the great lesson
taught by the history of the Jews and inculcated in the old
song,

All that tyranny could inflict, the Russian Jews endured. Yet
their number was not diminished. {161} No coercion could make them
leave, in a body, the old paths they were wont to tread. Nicholas’s
so-called reforms only encouraged a reaction, and the more he
afflicted the Jews, the more they multiplied and grew. The behalot
of 1754, 1764, and 1793 were repeated in 1833 and 1843; the
missionary propaganda only strengthened the devotion of the
faithful; and the denial of the means of support only increased the
stolidity of the sufferers. And if, like some stepchildren, they
were first beaten till they cried, and then beaten because they
cried, like some stepchildren they rapidly forgot their lot in the
happiness of home and the studies of the bet ha-midrash, and could
sing⁴⁸ without bitterness even of the
behalah-days, when

(Notes, pp. 314-317.)

CHAPTER IV

CONFLICTS AND CONQUESTS

1840-1855

The charges brought against the Jews of Russia by henchmen of
the czar were grave, indeed, only they did not contain a particle
of truth. In Russia itself, not only Jews and non-Russians but even
many Christians testified to the innocence of the Jews, and
protested against their oppressors. Bibikov, the Governor-General
of Podolia and Volhynia; Diakov, the Governor-General of Smolensk;
and Surovyetsky, the noted statesman, all write in terms of such
praise of their unfortunate countrymen of the Jewish faith that
their statements would sound exaggerated, were it not that many
other unprejudiced Russians confirm their views.¹ The fact that Nicholas thought the
Jews reliable as soldiers speaks against the imputation that they
were mercenary and unpatriotic. Neither was the conventional
accusation, that they were a people of petty traders, applicable to
the Jews in Russia. {163} Laborers of all kinds were very common
among them. It was they, in fact, who rendered all manner of
service to their Gentile neighbors, from a cobbler’s and
blacksmith’s to producing the most exquisite objets d’art
and gold and silver engraving. They were equally well represented
among the clerks and bookkeepers, and the bricklayers and
stone-cutters. They took up with the most laborious employments, if
only they furnished them with an honest even though scanty
livelihood.²

But most unfounded of all was the allegation that Jews were
opposed to education. The Memoirs of Madame Pauline
Wengeroff indicate that even among the very strict Jews of her time
children were not denied instruction in the German, Polish, and
Russian literatures. We have seen how they availed themselves of
the permission, granted to them by Alexander I, to attend the
schools and universities of the empire. Nor did they fail to open
schools of their own. No sooner was the Franco-Russian war over
than Joseph Perl of Galicia founded a school in Tarnopol (1813),
then under the Russian Government, and two years later he drew upon
his own resources to build a school-house large enough to
accommodate the great, steadily growing number of students. In 1822
{164} we hear of a school that had been in
existence for some time in Uman (the Ukraine). It had been
established by Meïr Horn, Moses Landau, and Hirsh Hurwitz, all
of whom were indefatigable laborers in the cause of Haskalah in the
Ukraine. Perl’s school was the pattern and model for a multitude of
other schools, among them the one founded by Zittenfeld (1826) in
Odessa, in the faculty of which were Simhah Pinsker, Elijah Finkel,
the grandson of Elijah Gaon, and Abraham Abele, the eminent
Talmudist. In 1836 a girls’ department was added to it, and when
Lilienthal visited Odessa (ab. 1843) it had an attendance of from
four to five hundred pupils of both sexes, the annual expense being
twenty-eight thousand rubles. A similar school was opened in
Kishinev by Stern, and in the early “forties” there was hardly a
Jewish community of note without one or more of such Jewish public
institutions. Several well-to-do Maskilim not only founded but,
like Perl, also maintained such schools, and gave instruction in
some or all of the subjects taught in them.³

The “forties” began auspiciously for Haskalah in Russia. On
January 15, 1840, the Riga community, amid pomp and rejoicing,
opened the first {165} Jewish school affiliated with a
university. The teaching staff consisted of three Jews and one
Christian, with Doctor Max Lilienthal (1815-1882), the young,
highly recommended, and recently chosen local rabbi, as its
principal. In the same year, the indefatigable Basilius Stern
succeeded in forming a committee, of which Hayyim Efrusi and Moses
Lichtenstadt were members, to deliberate on founding rabbinical
seminaries in Russia. In 1841, forty-five delegates, representing
the six chief committees of the Lovers of Enlightenment, assembled
in Vilna, and thence issued an appeal in which they adopted as
their platform the elevation of the moral standards of adults by
urging them to follow useful trades and discouraging the Jewish
proclivity to business as much as possible; a reform of the
prevailing system of the education of the young; the combating, if
possible the eradication, of Hasidism, the fountainhead, as they
thought, of ignorance and superstition; the establishment of
rabbinical seminaries, after the model of those in Padua and
Amsterdam, to supply congregations with educated rabbis. It was
further agreed that a Consistory be created, to supervise Jewish
affairs and establish schools and technical institutes wherever
necessary. To these main {166} points were added several others of
minor importance. The Maskilim of Besascz insisted that steps be
taken to stop the prevailing custom of premature marriages. Those
of Brest proposed that Government aid be invoked to compel Jews to
dress in the German style, to use authorized text-books in the
hadarim, and interdict the study of the Talmud except by those
preparing themselves for the rabbinate.⁴

Even in Vilna and Minsk, towns which later put themselves on
record as opposed to Government schools, the Jews yielded gladly to
the innovations of such Maskilim as S. Perl, G. Klaczke, I. Bompi,
and the distinguished philanthropist David Luria, who took the
initiative in transforming the educational system of these cities.
Under the superintendence of Luria, the Minsk Talmud Torah became a
model institution; the training conferred there on the poor and
orphaned surpassed that given to the children of the rich in their
private schools. This aroused jealousy in the parents of the
latter, and at their request Luria organized a merchants’ school,
for the wealthier class. He then established what he called Midrash
Ezrahim, or Citizens’ Institute, in which he met with such success
that he attracted the attention of the {167}
authorities, and received a special acknowledgment from the
czar.⁵

Russian Jewry was astir with new life. In many places secular
education was divorced for the first time from rabbinical
speculation. Knowledge became an end in itself, and learning
increased greatly. An investigation by Nicholas I convinced all who
were interested that though the Talmud remained the chief subject
of study, the number of educated Jews was far greater than commonly
supposed. The upliftment of the masses was the beau-ideal of every
Maskil, and Hebrew and even the much-despised Yiddish were employed
to effect it. Ignorance was regarded as the bane of life, and
enlightenment as the panacea for all the ills to which their
downtrodden brethren were heirs. As their pious coreligionists
deemed it the universal duty to be well-versed in the Talmud, so
the Maskilim thought it incumbent upon everybody to be highly
cultured. No obstacle was great enough to discourage them. They
were willing martyrs to the goddess of Wisdom, at whose shrine they
worshipped, and whose cult they spread in the most adverse
circumstances.

Had the Government not interfered with the efforts of the
Maskilim, or had it chosen a {168} commission from among the
Russian Jews themselves, among whom, as soon became evident to
Nicholas himself, there were more than enough to do justice to an
educational inquiry, the Haskalah movement would have continued to
spread, notwithstanding the obstacles put in its way. But Nicholas
was determined to reduce the number of Jews also by “re-educating”
them in accordance with his own ideas. Every attempt made by the
Jews to educate themselves was, therefore, checked. Even the noble
efforts of Luria were stopped, his schools were closed, and his
only rewards were “a gold medal from the czar and a short poem by
Gottlober.”

In Germany, since the time of Mendelssohn, the study of the
Talmud had been on the wane. The great yeshibot formerly existing
in Metz, Frankfort, Hamburg, Prague, Fiirth, Halberstadt, etc.,
disappeared, and the reforms introduced in the synagogue and the
numerous converts to Christianity impressed the outside world with
the idea that Judaism among German Jews was writhing in the agony
of death. If the same disintegrating elements were introduced among
the Russian Jews, the Government believed that they would
ultimately come over to the Greek Catholic Church of their
{169} own accord. Hence it was anxious to
learn the secret of this power and beamed graciously on several
learned Jews of Germany.

David Friedländer (1750-1834) was then considered the
legitimate successor of Mendelssohn, whose friend he had been for
more than twenty years. He resembled his master in many respects,
though he lacked both his genius and his sympathy. Mendelssohn
translated the Pentateuch and the Psalms into German,
Friedländer translated the Haftarot (selections from the
Prophets) and the prayer book. Mendelssohn encouraged the
publication of the Meassef; he did likewise, and contributed
several articles to the journal. But, unlike his master, or, as he
claimed, like his master in secret, he held exceedingly
latitudinarian views on Judaism. In his later years he advocated
abolishing the study of Hebrew in the schools and discarding it
from the prayer book. He even rejoiced that by attending the
services in Protestant churches many Jewish families were becoming
acquainted with the religion he himself would have accepted on
certain conditions.⁶

It was to Friedländer that Bishop Malchevsky, actuated, as
he maintained, by a desire to render the Jews worthy of the
enjoyment of civil rights, {170} applied for suggestions, in 1816,
when the missionary zeal of Alexander I was first aroused. He
responded in a pamphlet, On the Improvement of the Israelites in
the Kingdom of Poland,⁷ in
which he declared that the quickest way of “civilizing” the Jews
would be to deprive their rabbis of power and influence, to force
them to dress in the German fashion, and use the Polish language,
to admit them to the public schools and other educational
institutions, and, above all, to abrogate the laws discriminating
between them and their Gentile countrymen.

Friedländer’s advice regarding the removal of civil
disabilities was never executed, but his other suggestions were
followed out with more vigor than was necessary or good. To do away
with the rabbis, and consequently with the Talmud, was just what
was desired. It was partly with this end in view that Alexander I
permitted, that is, commanded, the establishment of the rabbinical
seminary in Warsaw. But when it was found that, although the
seminary students were provided with all necessaries, and
notwithstanding the decree that six years from the date of its
opening none but seminary graduates would be eligible to the
rabbinical office, few students availed themselves of the
opportunity afforded, and none obtained {171}
positions, the whole plan fell into disfavor.⁸
The Government, nevertheless, remained as stubbornly determined as
ever, and unable to turn all the children into Cantonists, it
decided to have those who remained at home gradually converted by
means of a method worked out by the Minister of Education, Uvarov.
They were forced to attend what became known as Government schools,
though maintained exclusively with Jewish funds. In order to win
the confidence of the Jews for the project, Doctor Lilienthal,
whose speech at the dedication of the Riga School secured him a
diamond ring as a token of the czar’s approval, was sent from St.
Petersburg on a mission of investigation, more especially of
persuasion.

For more than three years Lilienthal was one of the most popular
personages in Europe. The eyes of all who had the amelioration of
the lot of the Russian Jew at heart, it may be said the eyes of the
civilized world, were fixed upon him as an epoch-maker in the
history of the Jews. Nature had formed him, physically and
mentally, to be a leader among his people, and his training and
temperament made it easy for him to ingratiate himself into the
favor of the great. It seemed that he was {172} just the
man to be the successful executor of the czar’s plan.

The Maskilim, above all, hailed him as the champion of the cause
of Haskalah. He was their Moses or Ezra, the God-sent redeemer of
their benighted brethren out of the quagmire of fanaticism. From
various cities numerous urgent appeals came to him to hasten the
execution of his great plan. Wherever he went, he was
enthusiastically received, a truly royal welcome was extended to
him. The Vilna community appropriated five thousand rubles for the
school fund, and pledged itself to raise more if it were found
necessary; and he was invited also to Minsk by the kahal of the
city.

Unfortunately, Lilienthal’s tactics exposed him to suspicion,
and the seed of discord was soon sown between him and his former
admirers. He tried to serve two masters, the czar and the Jews, and
he alienated both. The pious regarded him as a mere tool in the
hands of the Government, for, they maintained, education without
emancipation leads to conversion. The enlightened element also
lost confidence in one who, instead of boldly attacking
superstition, preferred, while in Minsk, to identify himself not
only with the Mitnaggedim, but even with the Hasidim. He was also
too headstrong {173} and too vain of his achievements.
Benjamin Mandelstamm, who, as he tell us in his letters, considered
Lilienthal “as wise as Solomon and as enterprising as Moses,”
complains a little later of his arrogance, and at the last speaks
of him with contempt. His assumed superiority grieved the Maskilim,
and their former enthusiasm was rapidly replaced by hatred and
persecution. He found it necessary to put himself under the
protection of the police while in Minsk, and when he returned to
Vilna his reception was far less hearty than it had been
before.

In order to regain the confidence of the Russian Jews,
Lilienthal obtained a permit from the Minister of Education to call
an assembly of prominent Jews at St. Petersburg, to decide for
themselves how to better the condition of the existing schools and
to consider the practicability of establishing rabbinical
seminaries. For he, too, like the Maskilim, considered the rabbis
the chief menace to Haskalah. Rabbinical authority was supreme, and
if the rabbis could be won over, all would be gained. The
bell-wethers once secured, the flocks were sure to follow. It took
a long time for Lilienthal, and still longer for the Maskilim, to
find out that what they regarded as the cause was in reality the
{174} consequence. Eight years later
Lilienthal himself admitted the sad truth, that the rabbinical
seminaries in Russia could not effect the coveted end. “It must not
be lost sight of,” says he in his Sketches of Jewish Life in
Russia⁹ “that the Russian Jews live
strictly in accordance with our received laws, and they are
sufficiently learned in them to know that the many cases of
conscience which are of constant occurrence cannot be decided
understandingly by any one who has but a superficial knowledge of
the Talmud and of the decisions of the later doctors of the Law,
but that it requires the study of an entire lifetime to become
thoroughly acquainted with those stupendous monuments of learning
and deep research in the great concerns of life.”

After several busy months at St. Petersburg and frequent
consultations with Count Uvarov, Lilienthal returned to Vilna, and
two weeks later he published his circular letter, Maggid
Yeshiiah (The Announcer of Good Tidings)¹⁰ The “good tidings” were that an
imperial ukase (June 22, 1842) would convene a council of
distinguished Jews at St. Petersburg, to deliberate how to
“re-educate” the Jews. Accordingly, in the early part of April,
1843, the notables, from different places and with diametrically
opposed views, assembled in the Russian {175} capital.
Representing the Jews, there were Rabbi Isaac Volozhin, the dean of
the Tree of Life Yeshibah, perhaps the strongest man present; Rabbi
Menahem Mendel Shneersohn of Lubavich, leader of the Hasidic reform
sect; Joseph Heilprin, the financier and banker of Berdichev, and
Bezalel (Basilius) Stern, principal of the Jewish public schools of
Odessa. Representing the Government were Count Uvarov, Chevalier
Dukstaduchinsky, and others, with de Vrochenko, Minister of State,
as chairman and Lilienthal as secretary. Montefiore of England,
Crémieux of France, and Rabbi Philippson of Germany had been
invited, but they failed to come. The council decided to open
Jewish public schools in every city where Jews reside, and also two
rabbinical seminaries, the one in Vilna, the other in Zhitomir, the
former being considered the Jewish metropolis of the northwestern
part, the latter, of the southwestern part, of Russia. They also
proposed to do away with the Judeo-Polish garb, and suggested
certain alterations in the prayer book.

The delegates met, deliberated, and disbanded, but the tidings
announced in Lilienthal’s epistle did not prove to be good. In one
of the fables of Kryloff, the Russian Æsop, we are told that
once a {176} swan, a pike, and a crab, decided to
make a trip together. No sooner had they started than, in
accordance with their nature, the swan began to fly, the pike to
shuffle along, the crab to crawl backward. It was so with the
delegation of 1843. Rabbi Isaac, the rabid Mitnagged, could find
but little to admire in the proposals of Rabbi Menahem Mendel, the
ardent Hasid, and both were bitterly opposed to the view preached
by Doctor Lilienthal, that the salvation of the Jews and Judaism
would be brought about by a system of education adopted in
accordance with an ukase by Nicholas. Stern, too, had little use
for Lilienthal, whom he declared to be ignorant of the condition of
Russian Jews and incapable of working in their behalf. From such
discord nothing good could come. The fact is, that the few
resolutions mentioned had been drawn up beforehand by the
Government officials, and the time and trouble and expense which
the council involved were, à la Russe, for appearance
sake. Finding his efforts an utter failure, Lilienthal went to
Odessa with letters of recommendation from Uvarov to Vorontzov, the
patron of Stern, and was elected rabbi of that enlightened and
wealthy community. But, for some inexplicable reason, he suddenly
left the city on the plea of visiting friends in {177} Germany,
and went to the United States, where he remained to the end of his
life, and became one of the leading rabbis and communal workers
among his coreligionists whose lines had fallen in pleasanter
places than the fortunes of those he had left behind in
Russia.¹¹

For Lilienthal’s disillusionment came apace, and he finally
recognized the error of his ways. In his book, My Travels in
Russia, published both in English and in German, he admits that
the opponents of the schools he advocated were after all in the
right. Education without emancipation was indeed the straightest
road to conversion. Witness the thirty thousand Jewish apostates in
St. Petersburg and Moscow alone, most of whom hailed from the
Baltic provinces, where the Jews were more cultured, but not less
oppressed, than their brethren.

Those men—says he—who have acquired from study an
idea of the rights of man, and that the Jew ought to enjoy the same
privileges as every other citizen; those men who tried, by the
knowledge they had obtained, to open for themselves better
prospects in life, and now saw every hope frustrated by laws
inimical to them only as Jews, ran, from mere despair, into the
bosom of the Greek Church. The harassing care for a living, the
terrible difficulties in surmounting them forced them, in an hour
of distress, to deny their faith. I always compared them with the
Anusim [forced converts] of Spain. Among them there is no
{178} religious indifference, as is the case
in Western Europe and Germany; and I have met with many converted
Jews there, who, with tears in their eyes, complained of
heart-burnings and pangs of conscience; and they look upon
themselves as eternally lost. Those tears will show a heavy balance
against Czar Nicholas, when, bereft of his earthly power, he stands
before the eternal tribunal.

The other charge—he says again after refuting several
accusations of the kind stated above—the other charge, that
the Jews are averse to secular studies, rests upon an equally
erroneous foundation. For even in Germany Jewish parents have at
length found out that it is absolute folly to let their sons devote
themselves to the study of science, since they never can hope for
obtaining the least office; and since many a one, after the best
years of his youth are passed, tired of waiting, and fearful of not
having in his old age any means of support, finds in the baptismal
font the last anchor of his shattered hopes. How much more must
this consideration have weight in Russia? Nicholas, instead of
encouraging the Jews to study, ordered, on the contrary, that all
such of them as held offices and insignia of distinction under
Alexander should either resign or become apostates. I know myself
several collegiate councillors and men attached to the court, who
went to the synagogue on the Day of Atonement with the insignia of
the order of St. Anna around their neck, and prayed there with
devotion and fervor, who still were forced into apostasy. Such
instances are not calculated to encourage Jewish parents to let
their children study; and it is but too true that many whose
inclination led them to study were carried thereby into the bosom
of the Christian Church.¹²

After almost half a decade of indefatigable labor, Lilienthal
finally came to understand the Russian State policy, “to assign a
plausible reason for every act done by the Government, in order to
stand justified in the estimation of Europe, whilst they, by
throwing dust in the eyes of the public, conceal their true
purpose.” The laws which seemed favorable to the Jews, and
apparently aimed at promoting culture among them, went hand in hand
with laws of the most rigorous character. It is true that the Jews
were not the only unfortunates whom the fanatic autocrat wished to
Russify, that is, compel to see the pure light of Greek Orthodoxy.
But they, of course, suffered the most. The slightest laws were
enforced by the chinovniks (officials) with the knout and the
leaden lash. When the Judeo-Polish gaberdine, the long side-curls
(peot), and the wig or turban (knup) fell into disfavor with the
Government, the miserable offender caught by an officer seldom
saved himself with the mere sacrifice of knup, coat, peot, and
beard. And when the time arrived for the execution of the more
important laws, such as the Exportation Act of April 20, 1843, no
fiendish ingenuity could surpass the cruelty of the Cossacks. This
ukase more than any other, it is claimed, embittered {180}
Lilienthal against Russia, and caused him to flee to where he could
say as one awakening from a nightmare: “The horrible hatred against
the Jews in Russia is nothing more to me than a hazy remembrance.
My soul is no longer oppressed by frightful pictures of tyranny and
persecution.”¹³ He
was in the land of the free!

The Lilienthal tragedy thus came to a premature close. The hero
disappeared at the beginning of the play. He had the potency, but
he lacked the conditions, for producing great results. His German
birth and training, the very qualities which recommended him to the
Government, operated against him when he came to deal with Russian
Jews. Yet he succeeded in giving a strong impetus to the Haskalah
movement, and builded better than he knew. The statement in his
address at the dedication of the Riga school,¹⁴ “This hour we may call the hour
of the renaissance of the mental education of Israel,” which reads
like an oratorical platitude, was not entirely visionary. The real
history of Haskalah in Russia commences with Lilienthal.

Time helped greatly to restore, even to deepen, the affection of
the Maskilim for Lilienthal. A modern critic speaking of “life and
literature” in {181} Hebrew, pictures him in glowing colors,
and finishes his description thus:

I have presented to you, reader, a man of deep culture, known
and respected in the highest circles, and yet inseparably connected
with his race and religion, and ready to offer his life for their
welfare; a man who worked with might and main for others at the
sacrifice of his own comfort and advancement; an orator whose
exalted phrases shattered the pillars and foundations of ignorance
and superstition; a hero who in time of peril was proof against the
arrows and missiles of the enemy, and who did not relax his hand
from the flag. But what was the fruit he reaped? Mostly ingratitude
and persecution, a heart lacerated with despair, a soul writhing
under the pangs of frustrated hopes. Such a personality with its
fine shades, and with the poetry of the artist superimposed, would
afford splendid material for the hero of a novel—a hero to
captivate the eye and heart of the reader by his nobility and
grandeur.¹⁵

For a long time Russian officialdom discussed the question,
whether the establishment of exclusively Jewish schools would prove
beneficial, but nobody doubted the efficacy of rabbinical
seminaries. Yet it was these latter institutions that evoked the
strongest protests from the Jews. The advocates of Haskalah
gradually came to recognize the truth, which Lilienthal admitted
afterwards, that for a Russian rabbi a thorough knowledge of the
Talmud was absolutely indispensable. But it was with the
{182} object of discouraging such knowledge
that the seminaries had been suggested by Uvarov, and it was this
study that was almost entirely ignored in them. What congregation,
many of whose members were profound Talmudists, would accept a
rabbi to whom unvocalized Hebrew was a snare and a stumbling-block?
Moreover, the whole atmosphere of the seminaries was Christian,
nay, military. Not a few members of their faculties or boards of
governors were discharged police officers or superannuated
soldiers, and at the head of the seminary in Vilna, the metropolis
of Russian Jewry, stood an apostate Jew! They became, as it were,
infirmaries of the bureaucracy, where, at the expense of the Jews,
it could stow away anyone who had proved a failure or was no longer
useful. The Government also undertook to provide the graduates with
positions, patronage which rendered the students insolently
independent of their coreligionists, and encouraged some of them to
indulge in a modus vivendi distasteful to their future
flocks. The graduates, therefore, proved failures as rabbis, and
the Government was forced to provide for them by appointing them as
teachers.¹⁶

If this was the case with the rabbinical seminaries, we can
easily imagine the state of the subordinate {183} schools.
The Christian principals were coarse and uneducated as a rule, and
did their best to prejudice the children against their religion.
Scattered all over the Pale were to be found Jews competent to fill
positions not only as teachers in inferior grades but as professors
in the universities. Yet Lilienthal was advised (1841) to advertise
for three hundred teachers in Germany. Finally the Government
decided to employ Jews as teachers of Hebrew only, the least
important subject in the curriculum; for instruction in the secular
branches none but Christians were eligible. No Jews were allowed to
become rectors in their own schools, and their salaries were so
small that they could not support themselves without teaching an
additional class, which was prohibited. A Jew might, indeed, become
an “honorable overseer” (pochotny blyustityel), to mediate between
pupils and parents, but the title was the only pay attached to the
office. Respectable parents, therefore, kept their children at
home, or rather in the heder, and many a child’s name was on the
roll of attendance who was not even aware of the existence of the
school. “Every year in the autumn,” relates a writer a quarter of a
century later, “there was a kind of compulsory recruiting of Jewish
children for the Government {184} school, accompanied sometimes by
struggles between the victims and their enemies,—scenes
without a parallel, in some respects, in the civilized world. I
remember how poor mothers and sisters wept with despair when some
boy of the family was carried off or enlisted by the officers to be
a pupil of a Government school.” Like the poimaniki, the poor and
the orphaned were compelled, or induced, to fill the class-rooms
shunned by the rich and respectable, and though the Government not
only condemned the ancient Hebrew institutions, but declared the
twenty thousand teachers who imparted instruction in them to be
outlaws and criminals, the melammedim pursued their vocation as
ever, and the hadarim, Talmud Torahs, yeshibot, and batte midrashim
swarmed with students of the prohibited learning.¹⁷

Nicholas was paid measure for measure, and the cunning of his
ministers was made of no avail by the shrewdness of his Jewish
subjects. The report of the Minister of Education, at the end of
1845, shows incredible progress. It states that since the ukase of
November 13, 1844, i.e. in the course of a single year, more
than two thousand schools of different grades were established in
various cities of the Pale, with more than one hundred and eighty
{185} thousand pupils, not including the
technical schools in Odessa, Riga, Kishinev, Vilna, and Uman, with
their hundreds of students! The truth was that, instead of the
reported Russification, there had set in a vigorous reaction, which
rendered the position more critical. Both sides had become
desperate.¹⁸
Some Maskilim, emboldened by the interest the Government evinced in
their efforts, had resorted to all manner of means to accomplish
their object, and frequently allied themselves with the oppressors.
The Slavuta publishing house, it is claimed, was closed, and the
Schapiras met with their tragic end, because “as printers they
scrupulously abstained from publishing Haskalah literature.”
Maskilim were employed by the authorities as tax collectors, and
these, as is ever the case with rapacious farmers of taxes, besides
executing the harsh laws of the tyrant, looked also to their own
aggrandizement, and harassed their pious coreligionists in all ways
conceivable. Many of them even hindered the colonization movement,
because, if allowed to mature, it would deprive them of their
income.¹⁹ In addition to this, the Jews
were now burdened, through the instrumentality of the Maskilim,
with a tax on the candles lighted on Sabbath eve, yielding annually
over one million rubles, the {186} greater part of which went
into the coffers of greedy officials. Another tax, also for the
maintenance of the newly-organized Government schools, was
levied—one kopeck and a half per page!—on text-books,
whether imported from abroad or published in Vilna or Zhitomir, and
the text-books were published with unnecessarily large type and
wide margins to increase the number of pages. The abridgment and
translation of Maimuni’s Mishneh Torah (St. Petersburg,
1851), superintended by Leon Mandelstamm, cost the Russian Jews
tens of thousands of rubles, notwithstanding the expenditure of two
or three millions on their own educational institutions, and at a
time when every kopeck was needed for the support of the host of
victims of fire, famine, and cholera, which ravaged many a city.
Hence the reaction became more and more formidable. The cry grew
louder and louder, Znaty nye znayem, shkolles nye zhelayem!
(“We want no schools!”). The opposition, which began in the latter
years of Alexander I, reached its culmination in the last decade of
the reign of Nicholas I. “Israel,” laments Mandelstamm, “seems to
be even worse than formerly; he is like a sick person who has
convalesced only to relapse, and the physicians are beginning to
despair.” It was a struggle {187} not unlike that all over Europe at
the beginning of the Renaissance, a struggle between liberty and
authority, between this world and other-worldliness, between the
spirit of the nineteenth century and that of the millenniums which
preceded it.

Here is a description, by Morgulis, of the struggles and
conquests of the new, small, but zealous, group of Maskilim in
Russia at about that time:²⁰

Those upon whom the sun of civilization and freedom happened to
cast a ray of light, showing them the path leading to a new life,
were compelled to study the European literatures and sciences in
garrets, in cellars, in any nook where they felt themselves secure
from interference. Neither unaffiliated Jews nor the outer world
knew anything about them. Like rebels they kept their secrets unto
themselves, stealthily assembling from time to time, to consider
how they might realize their ideal, and disclose to their brethren
the fountainhead of the living waters out of which they drank and
drew new youth and life. Whatever was novel was accepted with
delight. They looked with envy upon the great intellectual progress
of their western brethren. Fain would they have had their Jewish
countrymen recognize the times and their requirements, but they
could not give free utterance to their thoughts. On the contrary,
they found it expedient to assume the mask of religion in order to
escape the suspicion of alert zealots, and gain, if possible, new
recruits. In many places societies were founded under the name of
Lovers of the New Haskalah, the members of which observed such
secrecy that even their kinsmen and those among whom they
{188} dwelt were unaware of their existence.
If through the discovery of some forbidden book any of them
happened to be detected, he never betrayed his friends. Such a one
was usually compelled to marry, so that, being burdened with family
cares, he might desist from his unpopular pursuits.

From which it would appear that though the opposition to
Haskalah in Russia was by no means as violent as had been the
opposition to enlightenment in France, for instance, or even among
the Jews of Germany and Austria,²¹ it
was a bitter and stubborn conflict between parents and children in
the adjustment of old ideals to a new environment.

Aside from the hindrances which Haskalah encountered because of
Nicholas’s conversionist policy, it was greatly hampered by the
geographical distribution of the Jews. Here again the czar defeated
his own end by segregating the three or four million of his Jewish
subjects in certain districts, technically called the Pale, the
greatest ghetto the world has ever known. It was a Judea in itself.
The Jews there seldom came in contact with outside civilization.
The languages they used were Hebrew as the literary tongue, Yiddish
among themselves, and the local Slavonic dialect with their
non-Jewish neighbors. Russian was strange, not only to the great
majority of Jews, but to the Russians themselves. {189} It was
merely the State language, and even the Government officials fell
back on their mother tongue whenever they were at liberty to do so.
It was this that made it very difficult for the Jews to be
Russified.

But even if Russification had been a much easier process,
Russian civilization was hardly worth the having.²² To become Russified would have
meant not only religious but also intellectual suicide. Whatever
was good in the Russia of that day was an importation. The language
was scarcely beyond the barbarous state. Its literature possessed
neither original nor adopted writings, no profound philosophical
systems, no Rousseau or Goethe, no Franklin or Kant, not even any
practical information with which to reward the student. The best
writers were Kryloff, Pushkin, Zhukovsky, and Dyerzhavin. The
prices of books were so high as to make them unattainable.
Karamzin’s History of the Russian Empire sold at fifty-five
rubles per copy. The royal library, which had been founded by the
Jewish court physician Sanchez, contained only eight Russian books
during the reign of Alexander I, and not many more were added by
his successor. The dramatic art developed by the Jewish playwright
Nebakhovich remained for a long time {190} in the same state as when
he ceased his work.²³ If
Russia was the most powerful, it continued to be the most fanatical
and uncivilized country in Europe. All who had occasion to visit
and study it during the first half of the nineteenth century
testify to its deplorable intellectual status. According to a very
ingenious and observing writer, quoted by Buckle in his History
of Civilization, it consisted of but two ranks, the highest and
the lowest, or the nobility and the serfs: Les marchands, qui
formaient une classe moyenne, sont en si petit nombre qu’il ne
peuvent marquer dans l’état; d’ailleurs presque tous sont
étrangers. The higher classes were distinguished for “a
total absence of all rational tastes on literary topics.”

Here [in Russia]—the same writer continues—it is
absolutely mauvais genre to discuss a rational
subject—pure pédanterie to be caught upon any
topics beyond dressing, dancing, and a jolie tournure.
Military prowess is ranked far above scholarly attainment, and a
man in a uniform, no matter how depraved, takes precedence of one
in plain clothes, whatever his achievements. All the energies of
the nation are turned towards the army. Commerce, the law, and the
civil employments are held in no esteem; all young men of any
consideration betake themselves to the profession of arms. Nothing
astonished them more than to see the estimation in which the civil
professions, and especially the bar, are held in Great
Britain.²⁴

How different was the position of the Jews in other countries,
especially in Germany! Culture streamed upon them from all sides.
As their numbers were small, and as they lived, in most cases, in
the larger cities of the empire, their contact with the Christian
world was immediate and continuous. And then the irresistible
fascination of German literature, and the easy, almost
imperceptible transition from the Judeo-German to the
Teutonic-German! All this and many minor allurements were potent
enough to draw even the heretofore callous German Jews out of their
isolation, and their Germanization by the middle of the nineteenth
century was an established fact. No wonder, then, that, unlike
Russian Jewry, the German Jews experienced an unprecedented
revolution; that the difference between the Mendelssohnian
generation and the next following was almost as great as that
between the modern American Jew and his brother in the Orient. No
wonder, also, that when Haskalah finally took root in Russia, it
was purely German for fifty years and more; that Nicholas’s
vigorous attempts, instead of making the Slavonic Jews better
Russians, merely helped to make those he “re-educated” greater
admirers of Germany. The most puissant autocrat of Russia
unwittingly contributed {192} to the downfall of Russian autocracy,
and Gregori Peretz, the Dekabrist, son of the financier who became
converted under Alexander I, was the first of those who were to
endeavor, with book and bomb, to break the backbone of tyranny
under Nicholas II.²⁵

Till about the “sixties,” then, the Russo-Jewish Maskilim were
the recipients, and the German Jews were the donors. The German
Jews wrote, the Russian Jews read. Germany was to the Jewish world,
during the early Haskalah movement, what France, according to
Guizot, was to Europe during the Renaissance: both received an
impetus from the outside in the form of raw ideas, and modified
them to suit their environment. Berlin was still, as it had been
during the days of Mendelssohn and Wessely, the sanctuary of
learning, the citadel of culture. In the highly cultivated German
literature they found treasures of wisdom and science. The poetical
gems of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and Herder captivated their
fancy; the philosophy of Kant and Fichte, Schelling and Hegel
nourished their intellect. Kant continued to be the favorite guide
of Maimon’s countrymen, and in their love for him they interpreted
the initials of his name to mean “For my soul panteth after
thee.”²⁶

But more efficacious than all other agencies was Mendelssohn’s
German translation of the Bible, and the Biur commentary
published therewith. Renaissance and Reformation, those mighty,
revolutionary forces, have entered every country by side-doors, so
to say. The Jewish Pale was no exception to the rule. What
Wycliffe’s translation did for England, and Luther’s for Germany,
Mendelssohn’s did for Russian Jewry. Like the Septuagint, it marked
a new epoch in the history of Jewish advancement. It is said that
Mendelssohn’s aim was chiefly to show the grandeur of the Hebrew
poetry found in the Bible, but by the irony of fate his translation
displayed to the Russian Jew the beauty and elegance of the German
language. To the member of the Lovers of the New Haskalah,
surreptitiously studying the Bible of the “Dessauer,” the Hebrew
was rather a translation of, or commentary on, the German, and
served him as a bridge to cross over into the otherwise hardly
accessible field of German literature.

The cities on the borders of Russia were the first strongholds
of Haskalah, and among them, as noted before, few struggled so
intensely for their intellectual and civil emancipation as those in
the provinces of Courland and Livonia. Though their {194} lot was
not better than that of their coreligionists, yet, having formerly
belonged to Germany, and being surrounded by a people whose culture
was superior to that of the rest of Russia, they were the first to
adopt western customs, and were surpassed only by the Jews in
Germany in their desire for reform. Their strenuous pleadings for
equal rights were, indeed, ineffectual, but this did not lessen
their admiration for the beauties of civilization, nor blind them
to its benefits. “Long ago,” remarks Lilienthal, “before the
peculiar Jewish dress was prohibited, a great many could be seen
here [in Courland] dressed after the German fashion, speaking pure
German, and having their whole household arranged after the German
custom. The works of Mendelssohn were not trefah pasul
[unclean and unfit], the children visited the public schools, the
academies, and the universities.”²⁷

The beautiful city of Odessa, on the Black Sea, at that time
just out of its infancy and full of the virility and aspiration of
youth, was also in the full glare of the German Haskalah movement.
With its wide and straight streets, its public and private parks,
and its magnificent structures, it presents even to-day a marked
contrast to other Russian cities, and the Russians, not without
pride, {195} speak of it as “our little Paris.” In
the upbuilding of this southern metropolis Jews played an
exceedingly important part. For, as regards the promotion of trade
and commerce, Russia had outgrown the narrow policy of Elizabeta
Petrovna, and did not begrudge her Jews the privilege of taking the
lead. The “enemies of Christ” were permitted, even invited, to
accomplish their “mission” also in Odessa, and thither they
accordingly came, not only from Volhynia, Podolia, and Lithuania,
but also from Germany, Austria, and especially Galicia. Erter,
Letteris, Krochmal, Perl, Rapoport, Eichenbaum, Pinsker, and Werbel
became better known in Russia than in their own land. As the
Russo-Polish Jews had carried their Talmudic learning back to the
countries whence they originally received it, so the Galician Jews,
mostly hailing from the city of Brody, where Israel Zamoscz, Mendel
Levin, Joseph Hakohen, and others had implanted the germs of
Haskalah, now reimported it into Russia. The Jews of Odessa were,
therefore, more cultured than other Russian Jews, not excepting
those of Riga. Prosperous in business, they lavished money on their
schools, and their educational system surpassed all others in the
empire. In 1826 they had the best public school for boys, in 1835
{196} a similar one for girls, and in 1852
there existed fifty-nine public schools, eleven boarding schools,
and four day schools. The children attended the Richelieu Lyceum
and the “gymnasia” in larger proportion than children of other
denominations, and they were among the first, not only in Russia,
but in the whole Diaspora, to establish a “choir-synagogue” (1840).
“In most of the families,” says Lilienthal, “can be found a degree
of refinement which may easily bear comparison with the best French
salon.” Even Nicholas I found words of praise for the Odessa Jews.
“Yes,” said he, “in Odessa I have also seen Jews, but they were
men”; while the zaddik “Rabbi Yisrolze” declared that he saw “the
flames of Gehennah round Odessa.”²⁸

Warsaw, too, was a beneficiary of Germany, having been occupied
by the Prussians before it fell to the lot of the Russians. It was
there that practically the first Jewish weekly journals were
published in Yiddish and Polish, Der Beobachter an der Weichsel,
and Dostrzegacz Nadvisyansky (1823). There was opened the first
so-called rabbinical seminary, with Anton Eisenbaum as principal,
and Cylkov, Buchner, and Kramsztyk as teachers. The public schools
were largely attended, {197} owing to the efforts of Mattathias
Rosen, and a year after a reformed synagogue had been organized in
Odessa another was founded in Warsaw, where sermons were preached
in German by Abraham Meïr Goldschmidt.

But Riga on the Baltic, Odessa on the Black Sea, and Warsaw on
the Vistula were outdone by some cities in the interior. Haskalah
lovers multiplied rapidly, and were found in the early “forties” in
every city of any size in the Pale. “The further we go from Pinsk
to Kletzk and Nieszvicz,” writes a correspondent in the
Annalen,²⁹ “the more we lose sight of the
fanatics, and the greater grows the number of the enlightened.”
With the establishment of the rabbinical seminaries in Zhitomir
(1848), this former centre of Hasidism became the nursery of
Haskalah. The movement was especially strong in Vilna, the
“Jerusalem of Lithuania,” as Napoleon is said to have called it.
From time immemorial, long before the Gaon’s day, it had been
famous for its Talmudic scholars. “Its yeshibot,” says Jacob Emden
in the middle of the eighteenth century, “were closed neither by
day nor by night; many scholars came home from the bet ha-midrash
but once a week. They surpassed their brethren in Poland and in
Germany in learning and {198} knowledge, and it was regarded of much
consequence to secure a rabbi from Vilna.” Now this “city and
mother in Israel” became one of the pioneers of Haskalah, all the
more because, in addition to the public schools and the rabbinical
seminary, the Jews were admitted to its university on equal terms
with the Gentiles. “Within six years,” exclaims Mandelstamm, “what
a change has come over Vilna! Youths and maidens, anxious for the
new Haskalah, are now to be met with everywhere, nor are any
ashamed to learn a trade.” The schools exerted a salutary influence
on the younger generation, and the older people, too, began to view
life differently, only that they were still reluctant to discard
their old-fashioned garb. There also, in 1847, the leading Maskilim
started a reform synagogue, which they named Taharat ha-Kodesh, the
Essence of Holiness.³⁰

It should not be forgotten that, if Lilienthal met with mighty
opposition, he also had powerful supporters. There were many who,
though remaining in the background, strongly sympathized with his
plan. Indeed, the number of educated Jews, as proved by an
investigation ordered by Nicholas I, was far greater than had been
commonly supposed. Not only in the border towns, but even in the
interior {199} of the Pale, the students of German
literature and secular science were not few, and Doctor Loewe
discovered in Hebron an exceptional German scholar in the person of
an immigrant from Vilna.³¹ The
tendency of the time is well illustrated by an anecdote told by
Slonimsky, to the effect that when he went to ask the approval of
Rabbi Abele of Zaslava on his Mosde Hokmah, he found that
those who came to be examined for ordination received their award
without delay, while he was put off from week to week. Ill at ease,
Slonimsky approached the venerable rabbi and demanded an
explanation: “You grant a semikah [rabbinical diploma] so readily,
why do you seem so reluctant when a mere haskamah [recommendation]
is the matter at issue?” To his surprise the reason given was that
the rabbi enjoyed his scientific debates so much that he would not
willingly part with the young author.

Stories were told how the deans of the yeshibot were frequently
found to have mastered the very books they confiscated because of
the teachings they inculcated. Before the reign of Nicholas I drew
to its end, Haskalah centres were as numerous as the cities wherein
Jews resided. In Byelostok the Talmudist Jehiel Michael Zabludovsky
was lending {200} German books to young Slonimsky, the
future inventor and publicist; in Vlotslavek Rabbi Joseph Hayyim
Caro was writing and preaching in classic German; in Zhagory,
Hayyim Sack helped Leon Mandelstamm (1809-1889), the first Jewish
“candidate,” or bachelor, in philology to graduate from the St.
Petersburg University (1844) and the assistant and successor of
Lilienthal, in the expurgation and German translation of Maimuni’s
Mishneh Torah. When, in 1857, Mandelstamm resigned, he was
followed by Seiberling, for fifteen years the censor of Jewish
books in Kiev, upon whom a German university conferred the doctor’s
degree. The poverty-stricken Wolf Adelsohn, known as the Hebrew
Diogenes, formed a group of Seekers after Light in Dubno, while
such wealthy merchants as Abraham Rathaus, Lilienthal’s secretary
during his campaign in Berdichev, Issachar Bompi, the bibliophile
in Minsk, Leon Rosenthal, financier and philanthropist in
Brest-Litovsk, and Aaron Rabinovich, in Kobelyaki (Poltava),
promoted enlightenment by precept and example. In Vilna, Joseph
Sackheim’s young son acted as English interpreter when Montefiore
was entertained by his father, and Jacob Barit, the incomparable
“Yankele Kovner” (1793-1833) another of Montefiore’s {201} hosts,
was master of Russian, German, and French, and aroused the
admiration of the Governor-General Nazimov by his learning and his
ability.

Yes, the Jews began to pay, if they had ever been in debt, for
the good that had for a while been bestowed upon them by Alexander
I. Alexander Nebakhovich was a well-known theatrical director, his
brother Michael was the editor of the first Russian comic paper
Yeralash, and Osip Rabinovich showed marked ability in serious
journalism. In 1842 died Abraham Jacob Stern, the greatest inventor
Russia had till then produced; and, as if to corroborate the
statement of the Talmud, that when one sun sets another rises, the
Demidoff prize of two thousand five hundred rubles was the same
year awarded to his son-in-law, Hayyim Selig Slonimsky (HaZas,
1810-1904) of Byelostok, for the first of his valuable inventions.
Stern’s genius was surpassed, though in a different direction, only
by that of Elijah Vilna. His first invention was a calculating
machine, which led to his election as a member of the Warsaw
Society of the Friends of Science (1817) and to his being received
twice by Alexander I (1816, 1818), who bestowed upon him an annual
pension of three hundred and {202} fifty rubles. This
invention was followed by another, “a topographical wagon for the
measurement of level surfaces, an invention of great benefit to
both civil and military engineers.” He also constructed an improved
threshing and harvesting machine and a sickle of immense value to
agriculture.³²

But it is scarcely possible, nor would it be profitable, to
enumerate either the places or the persons who were, so to speak,
inoculated with the Haskalah virus. In Grodno, Kovno, Lodz, Minsk,
Mohilev, Pinsk, Zamoscz, Slutsk, Vitebsk, Zhagory, and other
places, they were toiling zealously and diligently, these
anchorites in the desert of knowledge. Among them were men of all
classes and callings, from the cloistered Talmudist to the worldly
merchant. The path of Haskalah was slowly yet surely cleared. The
efforts of the conservative Maskilim were not devoid of some good
results, nor even were those of Nicholas, though aimed at
Christianizing rather than civilizing, entirely wasted. With all
their shortcomings, and though producing but few rabbis acceptable
to Russo-Jewish congregations, the seminaries in Warsaw, Zhitomir,
and Vilna were powers for enlightenment. In them the future
prominent scientists, scholars, and litterateurs were reared, and
there the {203} foundations were laid for the activities
of Goldfaden, Gurland, Harkavy, Kantor, Landau, Levanda,
Mandelkern, Paperna, Pumpyansky, Rosenberg, Steinberg, and others.
Their fate was that of Mendelssohn’s Bible translation. The end
became a means, the means, an end. But they not only “brought
forth” great men, they rendered no less important a service in
“bringing out” those already great. Had it not been for their
professorships, men like Abramovitsch, Lerner, Plungian, Slonimsky,
Suchastover, and Zweifel, who were not blessed with worldly goods
like Fünn, Katzenellenbogen, Luria, or Strashun, would
probably have sought in private teaching or petty trading a source
of subsistence, and Judaism in general and Russian Jewry in
particular would have sustained a considerable loss. They helped to
prepare the soil, even to implant the germ, and

As the history of this period is incomplete without an
acquaintance with the lives of some of the Maskilim who sowed the
seeds that burst into blossom under the favorable conditions of the
“sixties,” I shall select, as specimens out of a multitude, the
{204} two who, more than any others, furthered
the cause of Haskalah, Isaac Bär Levinsohn and Mordecai Aaron
Günzburg.³³

Isaac Bär Levinsohn of Kremenetz, Volhynia (RiBaL,
1788-1860), was for many years a name to conjure with, not only
among the Maskilim of all shades, but also among their opponents.
Long before he reached man’s estate, he had entered upon the career
to which he was to dedicate his life. Even in those times of
numerous child prodigies, Levinsohn was distinguished for his
intellectual precocity. At the age of three he was ripe for the
heder. At nine he was the author of a work on Cabbala. At ten he
mastered the Talmud, and knew the entire Hebrew Bible by heart. But
what singled him out among his classmates was his passionate love
of secular knowledge. The son of Judah Levin, an erudite merchant
who knew Hebrew and Polish to perfection, the grandson of Jekuthiel
Solomon, famed for wealth and refinement, he evinced unusual
ability in selecting and retaining what was good and true in
everything he read. At fourteen he was familiar with the
literatures of several nations, so that during the Franco-Russian
war (1812) he easily secured an appointment as interpreter and
secretary in the {205} local police department. But excessive
study caused ill-health, and at the suggestion of his physicians he
went to Brody in Galicia, a fortunate incident in the otherwise
solitary and gloomy life of the future reformer, for next to
Germany Galicia played an important part in the Haskalah movement
in Russia. There he met Joseph Perl, the noted educator; Doctor
Isaac Erter, the immortal satirist; M.H. Letteris, the
distinguished poet; S.L. Rapoport, one of the first and profoundest
of Jewish historians, and Nahman Krochmal, the saintly philosopher.
Into this circle of “shining ones” Levinsohn was introduced, and
each and all left an impression, some greater, some less, upon his
plastic soul. It was there and then, in the congenial company of
friends of about his own age, that Levinsohn determined to devote
himself to improving the educational system of his people and began
to plan his work on Learning in Israel (Te’udah
be-Yisraël), which procured for its author the foremost
place in the history of the Haskalah movement.

The book was finished in 1823, but, owing to Levinsohn’s
pecuniary circumstances, it remained unpublished till 1828.
Meanwhile it circulated in manuscript among the leading Maskilim of
Russia, {206} Austria, and Germany, and established
its author’s reputation wherever it was read. Levinsohn was one of
those who understand the persuasive power of the still small voice
of sweet reasonableness. He knew that a few convincing arguments
couched in gentle language will accomplish more for the furtherance
of an ideal than the trumpet call of a hundred clamoring militants,
and Haskalah will make headway only when it can prove itself to be
a help, and not a hindrance, to religion. Accordingly, he aimed to
show that the Tanaim, Amoraim, Saboraim, Geonim, and rabbis of
later generations were versed in the sciences, were familiar with
foreign history, and interested in the affairs of the world. But
these he quotes only as exemplars of broad-mindedness, they must no
longer be regarded as authorities in secular knowledge. “Art and
science,” he says, “are steadily progressing…. To perfect
ourselves in them we must resort to non-Jewish sources.” This was a
bold statement for those times, however mildly expressed. The
Te’udah became a bone of contention. It was torn and burnt
by fanatics, exalted to the skies by friends. The new apostle of
enlightenment was forced to leave the city and reside for a while
in Berdichev, Nemirov, Ostrog, and Tulchin. But wherever
{207} he went, his tribulation was sweetened
by the enthusiasm of his admirers and the consciousness that his
toil was not entirely wasted. In Warsaw and in Vilna his name was
great, and Nicholas presented him with a thousand rubles as a mark
of appreciation of the book, the fly-leaf of which bears the
inscription “To science.”

In the midst of his more serious studies Levinsohn diverted
himself occasionally with lighter composition, in which many an
antiquated custom served as the butt for his biting satire. In his
youth he had a penchant for poetry, and his poem on the flight, or
expulsion, of the French from Russia was complimented by the
Government. His muse dealt with ephemeral themes, but his bons
mots are current among his countrymen to this day. A novel sort
of plagiarism was the fashion of the time. Authors attributed their
work to others, instead of claiming the product of others as their
own. Levinsohn’s Hefker Welt, in Yiddish, and Sayings of
the Saints and Valley of the Dead, in Hebrew, belong to
this category. But the deep student did not persist long in this
species of diversion. Wittgenstein, the field-marshal, and
professors at the Lyceum of his town, supplied him with books, and
he, an omnivorous reader, plunged {208} again into his graver work,
the result of which was the little book since translated into
English, Russian, and German, Efes Dammim (No
Blood!). As the name indicates, it was intended as a defence
against the blood, or ritual murder, accusation. It was the right
word in the right time and place. In Zaslav, Volhynia, this
monstrous libel had been revived, and popular fury rose to a high
pitch. Several years later the Damascus Affair stirred the Jewish
world to determined action, designed to stamp it out once for all.
To wage war against this superstitious belief seems to have fallen
to the lot of several of Levinsohn’s family. In 1757, when it
asserted itself in Yampoly, Volhynia, his great-uncle, by the
unanimous consent of the Council of the Four Countries, was sent to
Rome to intercede with the Pope. After six years of pleading, he
returned to his native land with a signed statement addressed to
the Polish king and nobles, which declared the accusation to be
utterly false. Another uncle of his had performed a similar task in
1749. True scion of a noble family, Levinsohn followed in their
wake, and his effort was declared to be a “sharp sword forged by a
master, to fight for our honor.”

Everything was against Levinsohn when he {209} started
on his third great work, The House of Judah (Bet
Yehudah). He found himself poor, sick, and alone, and deprived
of his fine library. In those days, and for a long time before and
afterwards, Hebrew authors were paid in kind. In return for their
copyright they received a number of copies of their books, which
they were at liberty to dispose of as best they could. Now, while
Levinsohn’s copies of his Bet Yehudah were still at the
publisher’s, a fire broke out, and most of them were consumed.

The Te’udah be-Yisraël had been prompted by a desire
to prove the compatibility of modern civilization with Judaism.
Levinsohn’s object in writing his Bet Yehudah was the
reverse. The impetus came from without the Jewish camp. The book
represents the author’s views on certain Jewish problems propounded
by his Christian friend, Prince Emanuel Lieven, just as
Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem was written at the instigation of
Lavater. Though there is a similarity in the causes that produced
the two books, there is a marked difference in their methods.
Mendelssohn treats his subject as an impartial non-Jewish
philosopher might have done. He is frequently too reserved, for
fear of offending. Levinsohn, in Greek-Catholic Russia,
{210} is strictly frank. He is conscious of
the difficulties under which he is laboring. To discuss religion in
Russia is far from agreeable. “It is,” he says, “as if a master,
pretending to exhibit his skill in racing, were to enter into
competition publicly with his slave … and at the same time wink
at him to slacken his speed.” Of one thing he is certain: Judaism
is a progressive religion. It had been and might be reformed from
time to time, but this can and must be only along the lines of its
own genius. To improve the moral and material condition of the Jews
by weaning them away from the faith of their fathers (as was tried
by Nicholas) will not do. On the contrary, make them better Jews,
and they will be better citizens.

The Bet Yehudah may justly be called the connecting link
between the Te’udah, which preceded it, and
Zerubbabel, which followed it. The latter, though written in
Hebrew, was really intended exclusively for the Gentile world, as
the former had been mainly for the Jewish world. It is a
continuation, but not yet a conclusion, of the self-assigned task
of Levinsohn. The Talmud, we have seen, was at that time the object
of assaults of zealous Christians and disloyal Jews, and hostile
works against Judaism were the order of the day. Most {211} of them,
however, like the fabulous snake, vented their poison and died. It
was different with McCaul’s poignant diatribe against the cause of
Judaism and the honor of the Talmud, which had been translated into
many languages. Montefiore, while in Russia, urged Levinsohn to
defend his people against their traducers, and the bed-ridden sage,
almost blind and hardly able to hold a pen, finally consented. What
Zerubbabel accomplished, can be judged from the fact that in
the second Hebrew edition of McCaul’s Old Paths (1876) are
omitted many of the calumnies and aspersions of the first edition,
published in 1839.

Levinsohn’s life was a continuous struggle against an insidious
disease, which kept him confined to his bed, and prevented him from
accepting any prominent position. But though, as he said, he had
“neither brother, wife, child, nor even a sound body,” he impressed
his personality upon Russian Jewry as no one else, save the Gaon,
had before him. His breadth of view and his sympathetic disposition
gradually won him the respect and love of all who knew him. The
zaddikim Abraham of Turisk and Israel Rasiner were his lifelong
friends; the Talmudist Strashun acknowledged his indebtedness to
him, and Rabbi Abele of Vilna {212} remarked jestingly that the
only fault to be found with the Te’udah was that its author
was not the Gaon Elijah. He enjoyed prominence in Government
circles, and Prince Wittgenstein was passionately fond of his
company. Above all he endeared himself to the Maskilim. To him they
looked as to their teacher and guide; him they consulted in every
emergency. Lebensohn and Gottlober, Mandelstamm and Gordon, equally
sought his criticism and advice. For all he had words of comfort
and encouragement. The younger Maskilim he warned not to waste
their time in idle versification, not to become intoxicated with
their little learning; and the older ones he implored to respect
the sentiments of their conservative coreligionists. “Take it not
amiss,” he would say to the latter, “that the great bulk of our
people hearken not as yet to our new teachings. All beginnings are
difficult. The drop cannot become a deluge instantaneously.
Persevere in your laudable ambition, publish your good and readable
books, and the result, though slow, is sure.”

Thus lived and labored the first of the Maskilim, an idealist
from beginning to end. Persecution did not embitter, nor poverty
depress him. And when he passed away quietly (February 12, 1860) in
the {213} obscure little town in which he had been
born, and which has become famous through him, it was felt that
Russia had had her Mendelssohn, too. Strange to say, he little
suspected the tremendous influence he exerted upon the Haskalah
movement, but was quite sanguine of the success of his fight for
“truth and justice among the nations.” His work he modestly summed
up in the epitaph which was inscribed on his tombstone at his
request:

Contemporaneous with Isaac Bär Levinsohn, and hardly less
distinguished and influential, was Mordecai Aaron Günzburg
(ReMAG, Salanti, Kovno, December 3, 1795—Vilna, November 5,
1846). His family had been prominent in many walks of life since
the fourteenth century, and, whether in the land of the Saxons or
of the Slavs, represented the cream of the Jewries in which they
lived. His father was a Maskil of great repute, who had written
several treatises, in Hebrew, on {214} algebra, geometry, optics,
and kindred subjects. He sought to supplement his son Mordecai
Aaron’s heder education with a knowledge of secular sciences. But
at that time and in that place not many were the books, outside the
Talmud, accessible to a lad eager for learning, the only ones
available being such as the Josippon, Zemah David,
and Sheërit Yisraël on Jewish History, the
Sefer ha-Berit, and a Hebrew translation of Mendelssohn’s
Phaedon on general philosophy. But the precocious and
clear-minded youth did not need much to stimulate his love for
history and his inclination to philosophy, and his intellectual
development continued in spite of the untoward circumstances in
which he happened to be placed.

Though he was “given” in marriage at a very early age, the
proverbial “millstone” weighed but lightly upon the neck of young
Günzburg. He never discontinued the habit of secluding himself
in his study for hours, sometimes for days, at a time, and there
writing down his thoughts in painstaking penmanship. These
productions, with all their crudity, promised, according to a keen
critic, the flowers which would one day “ripen into delicious
fruit, not only pleasant to the sight but also delicious to the
taste.” In fact, even his religious views {215} underwent
but slight modification in later and maturer years. Ceremonial
laws, or minhagim, were to him a social compact among the members
of a sect. He who transgresses them is, eo ipso, excluded
from the sect, as he who disregards the social code, though not
immoral, is ostracized from society. This led him to the logical
conclusion that every Jew must comply with the customs of his
people, though his opinion as to their moral value may differ from
that of the rest. He believed in freedom of thought, but would not
concede freedom of action or even of expression, and would say with
Bolingbroke, “Freedom belongs to a man as a rational creature, he
lies under the restraint as a member of society.”

At these conclusions, Günzburg arrived only after a long,
severe, though silent, struggle in the seclusion of his closet. His
active mind would not at first surrender unconditionally to the
coercion of custom. But his conception of ceremonialism served him
in good stead on many an occasion in his eventful life. Being an
expedient to preserve harmony, it may and must vary with change of
conditions. Accordingly, Günzburg always accommodated himself
to his environment. In Vilna he subscribed to the regulations of
the Shulhan ‘Aruk, {216} in Mitau he quickly and completely
became Germanized. Such adaptability rendered him conspicuous
wherever he went, and as early as 1829 his name was included among
the learned of Livonia, Esthland, and Courland in the Biographical
Dictionary then published by Recke and Napyersky.

His claim to fame, however, consists in the influence he exerted
upon Russian Jews. Like Levinsohn, he was a constructive force. In
his younger days, he had inveighed against the benighted rabbis and
the antiquated garb, but moderation came with discretion. He would
not sweep away by force the accumulation of hundreds of years.
Judaism needed reforms of some sort, but these could not be brought
about by the Russo-German-doctor-rabbis, men who could rede the
seven riddles of the world, but whose knowledge of their own people
and its spiritual treasures was close to the zero point. “For a
rabbi,” writes he, “Torah must be the integer, science the cipher.
Had Aristotle embraced Judaism, notwithstanding his unparalleled
erudition, he would still remain a sage, never become a rabbi.” But
he was as little satisfied with the exclusively Talmudistic rabbis.
“O ye modern rabbis,” he calls out in one of his essays, in which
he stigmatizes Lilienthal’s plans as the “gourd of Jonah,”
{217} “you who stand in the place of seer and
prophet of yore, is it not your duty to rise above the people, to
intervene between them and the Government? And how can you expect
to accomplish it, if the language and regulations of our country
are entirely unknown to you?”

The impress Günzburg left upon Hebrew literature is of
special importance. Until his time, despite the examples set by
Satanov and Levin, Hebrew was stamped with the hallmark of
medievalism. Like the Spanish entertainment in Dryden’s Mock
Astrologer, at which everything at the table tasted of nothing
but red pepper, so the literature of that day was dominated by the
style and spirit of the Talmud and saturated with its subtleties.
Astronomy, philosophy, mathematics, and poetry swarmed with puns,
alliterations, pedantic allusions; they were overladen with
irrelevant notes and interwoven with quaint and strained
interpretations. Günzburg was the first, with the exception of
Erter perhaps, to try to remedy the evil. “Every writer,” he
maintained, “should guard himself against the fastidiousness or
stiffness which results from pedantry, and take great pains not
only with the content of his thoughts, but with the language in
which these thoughts are couched.” Simplicity, perspicuity,
{218} and conciseness, these he taught by
precept and example, and though he was accused of “Germanizing” the
Hebrew language, he persisted in his labor until he attained the
foremost rank among the neo-Hebraic litterateurs.

In Günzburg we find the artistic temperament developed to a
degree rare among Hebraists of even more recent years. He wrote
only in moments of inspiration. At times he passed weeks and months
without penning a line, but when once aroused he wrote unceasingly
until he finished what he had begun. He was careful in the choice
of his words, careful in the choice of his books, and would
recommend nothing but the best. “I may not have genius enough,” he
would say, “to distinguish between better and best, but I do not
lack common sense, to differentiate tares from weeds.” Above all,
he possessed a sense of honor, the greatest stimulus, as he
maintained, to noble endeavors. “For as marriage is necessary to
perpetuate the race, and food to sustain the individual, so is
honor to the existence of the superior man.”

Of the fifty years of his active life more than one-half was
spent in literary labor. His books obtained a wide circulation,
and, though they were rather expensive, became rare soon after
their publication. {219} Yet, strange to say, this eminent
Hebraist seldom, if ever, lauds the beauties of the “daughter of
Eber” (Hebrew) like his fellow-Maskilim since the days of the
Meassefim, nor does he even think it incumbent on a Jew to be
conversant with it.

Three periods have passed over me—he writes to a
friend—since I dedicated myself to Hebrew. As a youth I loved
it as a Jewish lad loves his betrothed, not because he is enamored
of her charms, but because his parents have chosen her for him; as
I grew older, I continued to love it as a Jewish man loves his
wife, not because of real affection, but because she is the only
one he knows; now that I am old, I still love her, as an elderly
Jew loves his helpmate: he is aware that she lacks many of the
accomplishments of which more educated women can boast, but, for
all that, remembering her faithfulness in the past, he loves her
also in the present, and loves her till he dies.

Günzburg was different from most of his contemporaries in
another respect. He was a voluminous writer, but only a few of his
books and essays bear on what we now call Jewish science. Zunz,
Geiger, and Jost, seeing that Judaism was gradually losing its hold
upon their Jewish countrymen, resorted to exploring and narrating,
in German, the wonderful story of their race, in the hope of
renewing its ebbing strength. Levinsohn, living amid a different
environment, deemed it best to convince {220} his
fellow-Jews that secular knowledge was necessary, and religion
sanctioned their pursuit thereof. Günzburg, the man of
letters, determined to teach through the vehicle of Hebrew the true
and the beautiful wherever he found it. He felt called upon to
reveal to his brethren the grandeur of the world beyond the dingy
ghetto, to tell them the stories not contained in the Midrash,
Josippon, or the biographies of rabbis and zaddikim. He
translated Campe’s Discovery of the New World, compiled a
history of ancient civilization, and narrated the epochal event of
the nineteenth century, the conflict between Russia and France. He
taught his fellow-Jews to think correctly and logically, to clothe
their thoughts in beautiful expressions, and revealed his innermost
being to them in his autobiography, Abi’ezer. As a writer he
appears neither erudite nor profound. We cannot apply to his works
what we may safely say of Elijah Vilna’s and Levinsohn’s, that
“there is solid metal enough in them to fit out whole circulating
libraries, were it beaten into the usual filigree.” But he was
elegant, cultured, intelligent, honorable; one who joined a feeling
heart to a love for art; a Moses who struck from the rock of the
Hebrew tongue {221} refreshing streams for those thirsting
for knowledge; a most amiable personality, and an altogether
unusual character during the century-long struggle between light
and darkness in the Jewry of Russia.

(Notes, pp. 318-322.)

CHAPTER V

RUSSIFICATION, REFORMATION, AND ASSIMILATION

1856-1881

The year 1856 will always be remembered as the annus
mirabilis in the history of Russia. It marked at once the
cessation of the Crimean war and the accession of the most liberal
and benevolent monarch Russia ever had. On January 16, the heir
apparent signified his consent to accept Austrian intervention,
which resulted in the Treaty of Paris (March 30), granting the
Powers involved “peace with honor”; and in August, in the Cathedral
of the Assumption at Moscow, amidst unprecedented rejoicing, the
czarevich placed the imperial crown upon his head. From that time
reform followed reform. The condition of the soldiers, who had
virtually been slaves under Nicholas I, was greatly improved, and a
proclamation was issued for the emancipation of the peasants,
slaves not for a limited time only, but for life and from
generation {223} to generation. It cost the United States
five years of fratricidal agony, a billion of dollars, and about
half a million of lives, to liberate five or six millions of
negroes; Russia, in one memorable day (February 19, 1861),
liberated nearly twenty-two millions of muzhiks (peasants), and
gave them full freedom, by a mere stroke of the pen of the “tsar
osvobodityel,” the Liberator Czar, Alexander II (1856-1881).

Other innovations, of less magnitude but nevertheless of
far-reaching importance, were introduced later. Capital punishment,
which still disgraces human justice in more enlightened states, was
unconditionally abolished; the number of offences amenable to
corporal punishment was gradually reduced, until, on April 29,
1863, all the horrors of the gauntlet, the spur, the lash, the cat,
and the brand, were consigned to eternal oblivion. The barbarous
system of the judiciary was replaced by one that could render
justice “speedy, righteous, merciful, and equitable.” Railway
communication, postal and telegraph service, police protection, the
improvement of the existing universities, the opening of many new
primary schools, and the introduction of compulsory school
attendance, told speedily on the intellectual development of the
people. In {224} the words of Shumakr, Russia experienced
“a complete inward revival.” Old customs seemed to disappear, all
things were become new. New life, new hope, new aspirations
throbbed in the hearts of the subjects of the gigantic empire, and
better times were knocking at their doors. Joli tout le monde,
le diable est mort!

This era of great reforms and the resuscitation of all that is
good and noble in the Slavonic soul brought about also a moral
regeneration. The colossus who, according to Turgenief, preferred
to sleep an endless sleep, with a jug of vodka in his clutched
fingers, proved that he, too, was human, with a feeling, human
heart beating in his bosom. With the restoration of peace and the
abolition of serfhood, there began a removal of prejudice even
against Jews. Hitherto the foremost litterateurs in Russia,
imitating the writers of other lands, had painted the Jew as a
monstrosity. Pushkin’s prisoner, Gogol’s traitor, Lermontoff’s spy,
and Turgenief’s Zhid (Jew) were caricatures and libels, equal in
acrimony, and not inferior in art, to Shakespeare’s Shylock and
Dickens’s Fagin. But now the best and ablest men of letters signed
a protest against such unjust and impossible characters.

Two thousand years of cruel suffering and affliction—said
the historian and humanitarian Professor Granovsky, of the
University of Moscow—have at last erased the bloody boundary
line separating the Jews from humanity. The honor of this
reconciliation, which is becoming firmer from day to day, belongs
to our age. The civic status of the Jews is now established in most
European countries, and even in the places that are still backward
their condition is improved, if not by law, then by
enlightenment.

And law and enlightenment radiated their sunshine also upon the
Jews of rejuvenated Russia. The Cantonist system was abolished for
good; the high schools and universities were opened to Jews without
discrimination; and the Governments lying outside the Pale were
made accessible to Jewish scholars, professional men,
manufacturers, wholesale merchants, and skilled laborers (March 16,
1859; November 27, 1861).¹
Through the efforts of Wolf Kaplan, one of Günzburg’s noted
pupils, the persecution of Jews by Germans in Riga was stopped, and
the eminent publicist Katkoff undertook to defend them in the
newspaper Russkiya Vyedomosti. Nazimov, the Governor-General of
Vilna, Mukhlinsky, who inspected the Jewish schools in western
Russia, Artzimovich, of southern Russia, and many other prominent
personages arose as champions of the Jews.²

The physician and pedagogue Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogov
(1810-1881), the superintendent of the Odessa and Kiev school
districts, is especially deserving of honorable mention in the
history of Haskalah. Of all the Russians of the period who gloried
in their liberal convictions, he was the most liberal. In him the
last vestige of prejudice and race distinction disappeared, and he
conscientiously devoted himself to the study, not only of the
present, but also of the past of the Jews, to be in a better
position to lend them his assistance. To the Jews he appealed to
unite and spread enlightenment among the masses by peaceful means.
To the Gentiles, again, he did not hesitate to point out the good
qualities of the Jews, and in an article on the Odessa Talmud Torah
he held up the institution as a model for the public elementary
schools. He admired especially the enthusiasm with which Jewish
youths devoted themselves to the acquisition of knowledge. “Where
are religion, morality, enlightenment, and the modern spirit,”
asked he, “when these Jews, who, with courage and self-sacrifice,
engage in the struggle against prejudices centuries old, meet no
one here to sympathize with them and extend a helping hand to
them?” His liberality carried him so far that he established a fund
for the support {227} of indigent Jewish students at the
University of Kiev, and he advocated strenuously the award of
prizes and scholarships to deserving Jewish students. Such as he
were rare in any land, but nowhere so rare as in Russia.³

Pirogov took the initiative in reorganizing the Jewish schools.
It required little observation to understand that they had proved a
failure. Instead of attracting the Jewish masses to secular
education, they only repelled them. The remedy was not far to seek.
“The abolition of these schools” said Count Kotzebu, “would drive
the Jews back to their fanaticism and isolation. It is necessary to
make the Jews useful citizens, and I see no other means of
achieving this than by their education.” Pirogov’s first move was
to order that Jewish instead of Christian principals be put at
their head, and he set an example by appointing Rosenzweig to that
office. The curriculum was changed, making the lower schools
correspond with our grammar schools, and adapting their studies to
the needs of those who must discontinue schooling at a
comparatively early age. The higher schools were arranged so as to
prepare the pupils for the gymnasium. The salaries of the teachers
were raised, and books and {228} necessaries were provided for pupils
too poor to afford them.

The Government’s attention having been directed by General
Zelenoy to the Jewish agricultural colonies in southern Russia,
Marcus Gurovich was appointed to work out a plan to provide them
with graded schools. He proposed that secular and sacred subjects
alike be taught by Jewish teachers, and these were to be cautioned
to be careful not to offend the religious sensibilities of the
parents. The plan appealed to the colonists, and they looked
forward anxiously to its fulfilment. Having waited in vain till
1868, they offered to defray the expenses of the schools involved,
if the Government would advance the money at the first.
Accordingly, ten schools for boys and two for girls were opened in
that year.

Such disinterested efforts on their behalf would have evoked the
gratitude of Jews at any time and in every country, how much more
in Russia, and following close upon the darkest period in their
history! The struggle for liberty all over Europe in 1848—the
spring of nations—had confirmed Nicholas in his policy of
exclusion. The last five years of his reign had surpassed the
preceding in cruelty and tyranny. The “Don Quixote of Politics,”
{229} finding that his attempts to quarantine
Russia against European influences had proved futile, that the
nationalities constituting the empire remained as distinct as ever,
and the desired homogeneity was still far from becoming a reality,
finally had lost patience and had determined to execute his
conversionist policy at all hazards. He had increased the
conscription duties, already unbearable (January 8, 1852; August
16, 1852), restricted the study of Hebrew and Hebrew subjects still
further in the Government schools, and, as if to embitter the lives
of the Jew by all means available, insisted on the use of the
Mitnaggedic ritual even in communities exclusively or largely
Hasidic.⁴ Even the blood accusation had been
revived, and the statements in the pamphlet entitled Information
about the Killing of Christians by Jews for the Purpose of
Obtaining Their Blood, which Skripitzyn, “the manager of Jewish
affairs in Russia,” published in 1844, found many believers in
Government circles, and caused the Saratoff affair which, though
suppressed, ruined numerous Jewish families, and made the breach
between Jew and Gentile wider than ever.⁵

Now all this was changed. Christians championed the cause of
Jews. The Government, too, appeared to be sincerely anxious for the
welfare of {230} its Jewish subjects. It not only
promised, but frequently also performed. The Jews were allowed to
follow their religious predilections unhindered. The schools were
reorganized with rabbinical graduates as their teachers and
principals. The Rabbinical Assembly, which, though established by
Nicholas (May 26, 1848), had rarely been called together, was
summoned to St. Petersburg, and there spent six months in 1857 and
five in 1861 in deliberating on means of improving the intellectual
and material standing of the Jews. The “learned Jew” (uchony
Yevrey) Moses Berlin was invited to become an adviser in the
Department of Public Worship (1856), to be consulted concerning the
Jewish religion whenever occasion required. Permission was granted
to publish Jewish periodicals in Russian, Polish, Hebrew, and
Yiddish (1860), and on April 26, 1862, the restriction was removed
that limited Jewish publishing houses and printing-presses to Vilna
and Zhitomir. The Russia Montefiore saw on his visit in 1872, how
different from the Russia he had left in 1846!

These auspicious signs renewed the hope of the Maskilim and
intensified their zeal. They were convinced of the noble intentions
of the Liberator Czar; they were confident that the emperor who
{231} emancipated the muzhiks, and expunged
many a kromye Yevreyev (“except the Jews”) which his father
was wont to add to the few privileges he granted his Christian
subjects, would ultimately remove the civil disabilities of the
Jews altogether. In a very popular song, written by Eliakum Zunser
(Vilna, 1836-New York, 1913), then a rising and beloved Badhan
(bard) writing in Yiddish and Hebrew, Alexander II was likened to
an angel of God who finds the flower of Judah soiled by dirt and
trampled in the dust. He rescues it, and revives it with living
water, and plants it in his garden, where it flourishes once
more.⁶ The poets hailed him as the savior
and redeemer of Israel. All that the Jews needed was to make
themselves deserving of his kindness, and worthy of the citizenship
they saw in store for them. In Russian, in Hebrew, and in Yiddish,
in prose and in poetry, the one theme uppermost in the mind of all
was enlightenment, or rather Russification. From all quarters the
reveille was sounded. Abraham Bär Gottlober (1811-1899)
exclaimed:

More impressively still Judah Löb Gordon (1831-1892)
called:

And in Yiddish, too, an anonymous poet echoed the strain:

Rapid growth is sometimes the cause of disease, and sudden
changes the cause of disappointment. This was true of the swift
progress of Haskalah during the reign of Alexander II. To
comprehend fully the tragedies that took place frequently at that
time, the disillusionments that embittered the lives of many of the
Maskilim, the breaking up of homes and bruising of hearts, one
should read Youthful Sins (Plattot Neurim, 1876) by
Moses Löb Lilienblum. The author lays bare a heart ulcerated
and mangled by an obsolete education, a meaningless existence, and
a forlorn hope. The hero of this little work, masterly less by
reason of its artistic {233} finish than the earnestness that
pervades it from beginning to end, is “one of the slain of the
Babylonian Talmud, whose spiritual life is artificially maintained
by a literature itself dead.” His diary and letters grant a glimpse
into his innermost being; his childhood wasted in a methodless
acquisition of futile learning; his boyhood blighted by a union
with a wife chosen for him by his parents; his manhood mortified by
the realization that in a world thrilling with life and activity he
led the existence of an Egyptian mummy. Impatient to save the few
years allotted to him on earth, and undeterred by the entreaties
and the threats of his wife, he leaves for Odessa, the Mecca of the
Maskilim, and begins to prepare himself for admission into the
gymnasium. “While there is a drop of blood in my veins,” he writes
to his forsaken wife, “I shall try to finish my course of studies.
Though the physicians declare that consumption and death must be
the inevitable consequence of such application, I will not desist.
I will rather die like a man than live like a dog.” And on and on
he plods over his Latin, his French, his history, geography, and
grammar. Two more years and the university will be opened to him,
and he will read law, and defend the honor of his {234} people.
But in the midst of his ceaseless toil the spectre of his simple
wife and his former innocent life appears before him and “will not
down.” Is Haskalah worth the sacrifices he and his like are daily
bringing on its altar? Is not the materialism of the emancipated
Maskilim often greater than the medievalism of the fanatical
Hasidim? In his native town, gloomy as it was, there was at least
the glow of sincerity. Haskalah had to be snatched by stealth, but
it was sweeter because thus snatched. In Odessa, where the fruit of
the tree of knowledge could be obtained for the asking, it turned
into the apples of Sodom. The “lishmah” ideal, the love of culture
for its own sake, yielded to the greed which changes everything
into a commodity to profit by. Yet, since life demands it, what a
pity that his early training had incapacitated him from following
the beaten path! He concludes his self-indictment thus, “I have
taken an inventory of the business of my life, and I am
heartbroken, because I find that in striking the balance there
remains on the credit side only a cipher!”

But the tide of Haskalah was not to be stemmed. The “blessed
heritage of noble passion,” the burning desire for enlightenment
and improvement asserted itself at all hazards. The note of despair
{235} was lost in the call for action. Odessa
continued to be in the forefront. There technical institutes for
boys and girls were established in addition to the previously
existing public schools. A society by the name of Trud (Labor) was
organized (October 11, 1864), for the purpose of teaching useful
trades. Its school has ever since been the crown of the
institutions of the sort. It was provided with the most modern
improvements, a workshop for mechanics and an iron foundry, and it
offered a post-graduate course. A similar trade school (remeslenoye
uchilishche) had been in existence since May 1, 1862, in Zhitomir,
where, besides geometry, mechanics, chemistry, physics, etc.,
instruction was given in carpentry, turning, tin, copper, and
blacksmith work.⁹
Through the efforts of Rabbi Solomon Zalkind Minor a Sabbath School
and a Night School for artisans were opened in Minsk (1861), and a
reference and circulating library for the general public (1863),
and similar educational institutions were soon called into
existence in many other cities.

Those were the days of organizing and consolidating among Jews
and Gentiles alike. At the time when Abraham Lincoln was
proclaiming his famous “United we stand, divided we fall,” Julius
Slovacki {236} in Poland pleaded the cause of the
peasantry of his country, and the Alliance Israélite
Universelle issued a call to the entire house of Israel “to defend
the honor of the Jewish name wherever it is attacked; to encourage,
by all means at our disposal, the pursuit of useful handicrafts; to
combat, where necessary, the ignorance and vice engendered by
oppression; to work, by the power of persuasion and by all the
moral influences at our command, for the emancipation of our
brethren who still suffer under the burden of exceptional
legislation; to hasten and solidify complete enfranchisement by the
intellectual and moral regeneration of our brethren.” A powerful
movement for the upliftment of the masses was also taking hold of
the educated classes among the Russians. Professor Kostomarov
started a systematic campaign for the education of the common
people. A species of philanthropic intoxication seized upon the
more enlightened Russian youth. A society of Narodniki, or Common
People, so-called, was organized. Young men and women renounced
high rank, and students came out of their seclusion and joined the
people, dressed in their garb, spoke their dialect, led their life,
and, having won their confidence, gradually opened their minds to
value the {237} blessings of education, and their hearts
to desire them. These examples from within and without resulted in
a similar attempt among the Russian Jews. An organization was
perfected (December, 1863) which exercised a great civilizing
influence for almost half a century, the Society for the Promotion
of Haskalah among the Jews of Russia.

To the credit of the Jewish financiers be it said that they were
always the banner bearers of enlightenment. It had been so with
German Aufklärung, when Ben-David, Itzig, Friedländer,
and Jacobson, laid the corner-stone of the intellectual rebirth of
their people. It was more especially so in Russia during the
“sixties.” Odessa was the most enlightened, because it was the
wealthiest, of Jewish communities, as the benumbing poverty of the
Pale was largely to blame for the unfriendly attitude towards
whatever did not bear the stamp of Jewishness on its surface. The
Society for the Promotion of Haskalah, too, owes its existence to
some of the most prominent Russo-Jewish merchants. Its original
officers were Joseph Yosel Günzburg, President; his son Horace
Günzburg, First Vice-president; Rabbi A. Neuman, Second
Vice-president; the Brodskys, and, the most active of them all, its
Secretary, Leon Rosenthal (1817-1887). Busy {238} as he was
with his financial affairs, Rosenthal devoted considerable time to
the propagation of enlightenment among his coreligionists. Many a
youthful Maskil was indebted to him for material as well as moral
support, and it was due to him that Osip Rabinovich finally
succeeded in publishing the Razsvyet (Dawn, 1860), the first
journal in Russian devoted to Jewish interests.

The Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment was not unlike
the Alliance Israélite Universelle, only on a smaller scale.
Its object was “to spread the knowledge of the Russian language
among the Jews, to publish and assist others in publishing, in
Russian as well as in Hebrew, useful works and journals, to aid in
carrying out the purposes of the Society, and, further, to assist
the young in devoting themselves to the pursuit of science and
knowledge.” For several years, owing to the indifference of the
public, it had a hard struggle to live up to its ideal. But
continuously, if slowly, it gained in membership, so that in 1884
it had an affiliation of 545. During the first twenty years of its
existence its income amounted to 338,685 rubles, its expenditures
to 309,998 rubles. In 1880 it endowed an agricultural college for
Jewish boys. When, in the same year, medical schools for women were
opened, {239} and Jewish girls in large numbers took
up the study of medicine, the Society set aside the sum of 18,900
rubles for the support of the needy among them. Many a young man
was aided in the pursuit of his chosen career by the Society. It
directed its activities principally to the younger generation, yet
it did not neglect the older. With its assistance Sabbath Schools
and Evening Schools were opened in Berdichev, Zhitomir, Poltava,
and other cities; libraries were founded; interesting Hebrew books
on scientific subjects were published. Thus it had a two-fold
object: in those who were drifting away it aimed to reawaken
knowledge or love of Judaism by translating some of the most
important Jewish books into Russian (the Haggadah, in 1871, the
prayer book, Pentateuch, and Psalms, in 1872) as well as text-books
and catechisms; and it popularized science among those who would
not or could not read on such topics in Russian or other living
tongues. In both directions it was a power for good among the Jews
of Russia.¹⁰

These united efforts of the Government, the Maskilim, and the
Jewish financiers produced an effect the like of which had perhaps
been witnessed only during the Hellenistic craze, in the period of
the second commonwealth of Judea. Russian Jewry {240} began to
“progress” as never before. In almost all the large cities,
particularly in Odessa, St. Petersburg, and Moscow, the Jews were
fast becoming Russified. Heretofore cooped up, choking each other
in the Pale as in a Black Hole, they were now wild with an
excessive desire for Russification. What Maimon said of a few,
could now be applied to hundreds and thousands, they were “like
starving persons suddenly treated to a delicious meal.” They
flocked to the institutions of learning in numbers far exceeding
their due proportion. They were among the reporters, contributors,
and editorial writers of some of the most influential Russian
journals. They entered the professions, and distinguished
themselves in art.¹¹

The ambition of the wealthy was no longer to have a son-in-law
who was well-versed in the Torah, but a graduate from a university,
the possessor of a diploma, the wearer of a uniform. The bahur lost
his lustre in the presence of the “gymnasiast.” This ambition
pervaded more or less all classes of Russo-Jewish society. A decade
or two before, especially in the “forties,” orthodoxy had been as
uncompromising as it was unenlightened. “To carry a handkerchief on
the Sabbath,” as Zunser says, “to read a pamphlet of the ‘new
Haskalah,’ {241} or commit some other transgression of
the sort, was sufficient to stamp one an apikoros (heretic).”¹² Reb Israel Salanter, when he
learned that his son had gone to Berlin to study medicine, removed
his shoes, and sat down on the ground to observe shivah (seven days
of mourning). When Mattes der Sheinker (saloon-keeper) discovered
that his boy Motke (later famous as Mark Antokolsky) had been
playing truant from the heder, and had hidden himself in the garret
to carve figures, he beat him unmercifully, because he had broken
the second commandment. This was greatly altered in the latter part
of the “seventies.” Jacob Prelooker has a different story to
tell.

A remarkable change—he says¹³—had taken place in the
minds of my parents since I had overcome all difficulties and
become a student of a royal college. Not only were they reconciled
to me, but they were distinctly proud of me. Old Rabbi Abraham now
delighted in conversation and discussion with his grandson, who
seemed to him almost like an inhabitant of another world, of the
terra incognita of modern knowledge and science. In the town
inhabited chiefly by Jews the very appearance of the rabbi’s
grandson in the uniform of a royal college created an immense
sensation, and I became naturally the hero of the day. The older
generation lamented that now an end would be put to the very
existence of Israel and the sacred synagogue, while the
{242} younger people envied me and were
inspired to follow my example.

Such scenes occurred not only in Pinsk, but, not infrequently,
in other towns of the Pale as well.

The striving for intellectual enlightenment manifested itself in
the refining of religious customs. Though Russian Jewry “has never
experienced any of the ritualistic struggles that Germany has
witnessed,”¹⁴ yet
reform and Haskalah always went hand in hand. The attacks on
tradition by the Maskilim of the “forties” and the early “fifties”
were mild and guarded compared with the assaults by the generation
that followed. With the appearance of the periodicals the combat
was intensified. Ha-Meliz, and, later, Ha-Shahar in Hebrew, and Kol
Mebasser in Yiddish were the organs of those who were dissatisfied
with the old, and sought to introduce the new. It was in the latter
that Dos Polische Yingel (The Polish Boy), by
Linetzky, first appeared, and it proved so popular that the editor
published it in book form long before it was finished in the
periodical. In an article on The Ways of the Talmud, by
Moses Löb Lilienblum, the prevailing Jewish religious
observances were vehemently attacked. This was followed by another
{243} article from the pen of Gordon,
Wisdom for Those Who Wander in Spirit, with suggestions for
adapting religion to the needs of the times, and a still more
powerful one, The Chaotic World, by Smolenskin. The muse
ceased to content herself with “flame-songs that burn their
pathway” to the heart. She preferred to appeal to the head. She no
longer tried

In cutting criticisms and biting satires she exposed
time-honored but time-worn beliefs and practices. Gordon was a
militant reformer in his younger days, and so were Menahem Mendel
Dolitzky and the lesser poets of the period. Needless to say, the
Jewish-Russian press was an enemy of ultra-orthodoxy. Osip
Rabinovich, the leading Russo-Jewish journalist, made his debut
with an article in which he denounced the superstitious customs of
his people in unmeasured terms.¹⁵ The
motto chosen for the Razsvyet (1860) was “Let there be light,” and
the platform it adopted was to elevate the masses by teaching them
to lead the life of all nations, participate in their civilization
and progress, and preserve, {244} increase, and improve the national
heritage of Israel.¹⁶

Yet journalists and poets were outdone by scholars and novelists
in the battle for reform. Lebensohn’s didactic drama Emet
we-Emunah (Truth and Faith, Vilna, 1867, 1870), in which
he attempts to reconcile true religion with the teachings of
science, was mild compared with Dos Polische Yingel or
Shatzkes’ radical interpretations of the stories of the rabbis in
his Ha-Mafteah (The Key, Warsaw, 1866-1869), and both
were surpassed by Raphael Kohn’s clever little work Hut
ha-Meshullash (The Triple Cord, Odessa, 1874), in which
many prohibited things are ingeniously proved permissible according
to the Talmud. But the most outspoken advocate of reform was
Abraham Mapu (1808-1867), author of the first realistic novel, or
novel of any kind, in Hebrew literature, the ‘Ayit Zabua’
(The Painted Vulture). His Rabbi Zadok, the miracle-worker,
who exploits superstition for his own aggrandizement; Rabbi
Gaddiel, the honest but mistaken henchman of Rabbi Zadok; Ga’al,
the parvenu, who seeks to obliterate an unsavory past by fawning
upon both; the Shadkan, or marriage-broker, who pretends to be the
ambassador of Heaven, to unite men and women on earth,—in
{245} these and similar types drawn from life
and depicted vividly, Mapu held up to the execration of the world
the hypocrites who “do the deeds of Zimri and claim the reward of
Phinehas,” whose outward piety is often a cloak for inner impurity,
and whose ceremonialism is their skin-deep religion. These
characters served for many years as weapons in the hands of the
combatants enlisted in the army arrayed for “the struggle between
light and darkness.”

The waves of the Renaissance and the Reformation sweeping over
Russian Jewry reached even the sacred precincts of the synagogues,
the batte midrashim, and the yeshibot. The Tree of Life College in
Volozhin became a foster-home of Haskalah. The rendezvous of the
brightest Russo-Jewish youths, it was the centre in which grew
science and culture, and whence they were disseminated far and wide
over the Pale. Hebrew, German, and Russian were surreptitiously
studied and taught. Buckle and Spencer, Turgenief and Tolstoi were
secretly passed from hand to hand, and read and studied with
avidity. Some students advocated openly the transformation of the
yeshibah into a rabbinical seminary on the order of the Berlin
Hochschule. The new learning found an ardent {246} supporter
in Zebi Hirsh Dainov, “the Slutsker Maggid” (1832-1877), who
preached Russification and Reformation from the pulpits of the
synagogues, and whom the Society for the Promotion of Haskalah
employed as its mouthpiece among the less advanced.¹⁷ In the existing reform
synagogues, in Riga, Odessa, Warsaw, and Vilna, and even in more
conservative communities, sermons began to be preached in Russian.
Solomon Zalkind Minor, who lectured in German, acquired a
reputation as a preacher in Russian since his election to the
rabbinate of Minsk (1860). He was called “the Jellinek of Russia”
by the Maskilim.¹⁸
Aaron Elijah Pumpyansky began to preach in Russian at Ponevezh, in
Kovno (1861). Germanization at last gave way to Russification. Even
in Odessa, where German culture predominated during the reign of
Nicholas I, it was found necessary, for the sake of the younger
generation, to elect, as associate to the German Doctor
Schwabacher, Doctor Solomon Mandelkern to preach in Russian.
Similar changes were made in other communities. In the Polish
provinces the Reformation was making even greater strides. There
the Jews, whether reform, like Doctor Marcus Jastrow, or orthodox
like Rabbi Berish Meisels, identified themselves with the
{247} Poles, and participated in their
cultural and political aspirations, which were frequently
antagonistic to Russification. A society which called itself Poles
of the Mosaic Persuasion was organized in Warsaw, an organ of
extreme liberalism was founded in the weekly Israelita, and, with
the election of Isaac Kramsztyk to the rabbinate, German was
replaced (1852) by the native Polish as the language of the
pulpit.

Some champions of reform did not rest satisfied with mere
innovations and improvements. They went so far as to discard
Judaism altogether and improvise religions of their own. Moses
Rosensohn of Vilna was the first, in his works Advice and
Help (‘Ezrah we-Tushiah, Vilna, 1870) and The Peace
of Brothers (Shelom Ahim, ibid.), to suggest a way to
cosmopolitanism and universalism through Judaism.¹⁹ In 1879, Jacob Gordin founded in
Yelisavetgrad a sort of ethical culture society called Bibleitsy
(also Dukhovnoye Bibleyskoye Bratstvo, Spiritual Bible
Brotherhood), which obtained a considerable following among the
workmen of the section. It advocated the abolition of ritual
observances, even prayer, and the hastening of the era of the
brotherhood of man. It preached, in the words of one of its
leaders, that “our morality {248} is our religion. God, the acme of
highest reason, of surest truth, and of the most sublime justice,
does not demand useless external forms and ceremonies.”²⁰ Following the organization of the
Bibleitsy, and based on almost the same principles, branches of a
Jewish sect, which called itself New Israel (Novy Izrail), were
started almost simultaneously in Odessa and Kishinev. In the former
city, the organization was headed by Jacob Prelooker, in the
latter, by Joseph Rabinowitz. Prelooker, who after graduating from
the seminary at Zhitomir became a school-master at Odessa, sought
to bring about a consolidation between his own people and Russian
Dissenters (Raskolniki: the Molocans, Stundists, and Dukhobortzi).
The theme of his book, New Israel, is a “reformed synagogue,
a mitigation of the cleavage between Jew and Christian, and
recognition of a common brotherhood in religion.” Rabinowitz went
still further, and preached on actual conversion to one of the more
liberal forms of Christianity.²¹

These sects, which sprang up in church and synagogue during the
latter part of the “seventies,” were the outcome of political and
social as well as religious unrest. Alexander II fulfilled the
expectation which the first years of his reign aroused in
{249} Jewish hearts no more than Catherine II
and Alexander I. Those who had hoped for equal rights were doomed
to disappointment. Most of the reforms of the Liberator Czar proved
a failure owing to the antipathy and machinations of his
untrustworthy officials. Russia was split between two diametrically
opposed parties, the extreme radicals and the extreme
reactionaries, waging an internecine war with each other. The
former originated with the young Russians that had served in the
European campaigns during the Napoleonic invasion, and who, in
imitation of the secret organizations which had so greatly
contributed to the liberation of Germany, united to throw off the
yoke of autocracy in Russia. These secret orders, the Southern, the
Northern, the United Slavonian, and the Polish, Alexander I had
endeavored in vain to suppress, and the drastic measures taken by
Nicholas I against the Dekabrists (1825) proved of no avail. Nor
did the reforms of Alexander II help to heal the breach. On the
contrary, seeing that the constitution they expected from the
Liberator Czar was not forthcoming, and the democracy they hoped
for was far from being realized, they became desperate, and
determined to demand their rights by force. The peasants, too,
sobering up from the {250} intoxication, the figurative as well as
the literal, caused by the vodka drunk in honor of their
newly-acquired volyushka (sweet liberty), discovered that the
emancipation ukase of the czar had been craftily intercepted by the
bureaucrats, and their dream of owning the land they had hitherto
cultivated as serfs would never come true. Russia was rife with
discontent, and disaffection assumed a national range. The cry was
raised for a “new freedom.” A certain Anton Petrov impersonated the
czar, and gathered around him ten thousand Russians. Pamphlets
entitled Land and Liberty (Zemlya i Volya) were
spread broadcast among the masses, the mind of the populace was
inflamed, and attempts on the life of the czar ensued.

The extreme reactionaries, consisting mostly of nobles who had
become impoverished by the emancipation of the serfs, grasped the
opportunity to point out to the bewildered czar the evil of his
liberal policy. Slavophilism was rampant. Men like Turgenief,
Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoi, were condemned as “Westernists,” or
German sympathizers, the enemies of Russia. At the recommendation
of Princess Helena Petrovna, the czar engaged as the teacher of his
children a comparatively unknown professor of history,
Pobyedonostsev, who {251} later became the soul of Russian
despotism. This man, meek as a dove and cunning as a serpent,
easily ingratiated himself with the czar, and soon there began “a
war upon ideas, a crusade of ignorance.” “Karakazov’s pistol-shot,”
as Turgenief says, “drove back into the shade the phantom of
liberty, the appearance of which all Russia had hailed with
acclamations. From that moment to the end of his life, the emperor
devoted himself to the undoing of all he had accomplished. If he
could have cancelled with one stroke the glorious ukase that had
proclaimed the emancipation of the serfs, he would have been only
too glad to disgrace himself.”²²

And again, as it had been during the reign of Alexander I after
his acquaintance with Baroness Krüdener, so it was with the
reign of Alexander II after his acquaintance with Pobyedonostsev.
The status of the Jews constituted the first indication of the
ill-boding change. How little the officials had been in sympathy
with the reformatory efforts of their czar, even when the
atmosphere had been filled with peace and good-will to all
including the Jews, is shown by the fact that when, in 1863,
through the efforts of Doctor Schwabacher, the Jewish community of
Odessa applied for a charter {252} to build a Home for Aged
Hebrews, the charter, though granted by the higher authorities, was
withheld for over twenty years! The reaction flaunted its power
once again, and sat enthroned in Tsarskoye Syelo. The few rights
the Jews had enjoyed were rescinded one by one. Not satisfied with
this, the Slavophils tried, under every pretext, to stop the
progress of the Jewish people. Every now and then the Society for
the Promotion of Haskalah would send some of the brighter seminary
students to complete their education in Breslau or Berlin, but at
the command of the Government this was soon discontinued. It was
the intention of the same organization, from its very incipiency,
to have the Bible translated under its auspices into Russian, but
it took ten long years before this praiseworthy undertaking could
be begun, because of the obstacles the Government placed in the way
of its execution. Fortunately, the indomitable courage of the
Maskilim could not be subdued. Young men went, or were sent, to
Germany to prepare themselves for the rabbinate as before; the
Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, too, were translated secretly
by Wohl, Gordon, Steinberg, and Leon Mandelstamm, and published in
Germany, whence they were smuggled into Russia.²³

More direct and equally inexplicable, save on the ground of
animosity to whatever was not Slavonic, was the ukase to close the
Sabbath Schools and the Evening Schools, the only means of
educating the laboring men (1870). In 1871, the first of a series
of massacres (pogromy) took place in the centre of Jewish culture,
Odessa. In 1872, permission was denied to the ladies of that city
to organize a society for the purpose of maintaining trade schools,
to teach poor Jewish girls handicrafts. The two rabbinical
seminaries, of Vilna and Zhitomir, were closed in 1873, and
replaced by institutes for teachers, which were managed in the
spirit that had prevailed under Nicholas I. And in 1878 the absurd
blood accusation, against which four popes, Innocent IV, Paul III,
Gregory X, and Clement XIV, issued their bulls, declaring it a
baseless and wicked superstition, and which not only the Polish
kings Boreslav V, Casimir III, Casimir IV, and Stephen
Bathòry, but also Alexander I (March 18, 1817), branded as a
diabolic invention—that dreadful accusation which even the
commission of Nicholas, despite Durnovo’s efforts, had denounced as
a disgrace and an abomination, was revived by the newspaper
Grazhdanin. The ghost of medievalism began to stalk abroad once
more in {254} erstwhile enlightened Russia and under
the aegis of the Liberator Czar.

As often before in Jewish history, the Jews helped not a little
to aggravate the untoward conditions. At the instigation of a
number of students of the Yeshibah Tree of Life, the doors of that
noble institution were closed (1879), to open again after two years
of untiring efforts on the part of its self-sacrificing dean, the
renowned Naphtali Zebi Judah Berlin. But at the worst this was the
result of mistaken zeal for the cause of Haskalah. What was more
detrimental was the disgrace brought upon the Jewish name by
several converts to Christianity. A certain Jacob Brafmann, having
proved a failure in all he undertook, tried at the last the
business of Christianity, and succeeded therein. He was appointed
professor of Hebrew in the seminary of Minsk, and the Holy Synod
charged him with the duty of devising means to promulgate
Christianity among the Jews. Finding the times auspicious, he
devoted himself to writing libellous articles about his former
coreligionists, and wound up with a Book on the Kahal
(Kniga Kahala, Vilna, 1869), in which he quoted forged
“transactions,” to the effect that Judaism tolerates and even
recommends illegality and immorality {255} among its adherents. In a
conference of Jews and Gentiles convoked by Governor-General
Kaufman (1871), Barit proved the falsity and forgery of Brafmann’s
documents. But, as usual, the defence was forgotten, the charges
remained.²⁴ A
certain Lutostansky poisoned the public mind by caricaturing the
Jews, and aroused an anti-Semitic agitation among his countrymen.
The consequence was that even the liberals began to be suspicious,
and the prospect of better days was blighted by the hatred which
broke out in fiendish fury, in lightnings and thunders which
astounded the world under Alexander III.

It was but natural that the Jews that had become completely
Russified should enlist in the ranks of the extreme liberals. They
found themselves in every way as progressive and patriotic as the
Christian Russians. The language of Russia became their language,
its manners and aspirations their manners and aspirations. They
contributed more than any other nationality to Russifying Odessa,
which, owing to its great foreign population, was known as the
un-Russian city of Russia. Proportionately to their numbers, they
promoted the trade and industry, the science and literature of
their country more than the Russians themselves. Yet {256} the
coveted equality was denied them, and the emancipation granted to
the degraded muzhiks was withheld from them, because of a religion
they hardly professed. They were like Faust when he found himself
tempted but not satisfied by the pleasures of life, when food
hovered before his eager lips while he begged for nourishment in
vain. The liberals, on the other hand, preached and practiced the
doctrine of equal rights to all. Socialism, or nihilism, also
appealed to the Jews from its idealistic side, for never did the
Jews cease to be democrats and dreamers. In the schools and
universities, which they were now permitted to attend, they heard
the new teachings and imbibed the novel ideas.

Those, therefore, who disdained conversion allied themselves
with the secret organizations. “The torrent which had been dammed
up in one channel rushed violently into another.” A Hebrew monthly,
Ha-Emet (Truth, Vienna, 1877), devoted to the cause of communism,
was started by Aaron Liebermann (“Arthur Freeman”), in which, in
the language of the oldest and greatest socialists, the doctrines
of Karl Marx were inculcated among the Hebrew-reading public. The
more completely Russified element took a leading {257} part in
the activities of the Narodnaya Volya (Rights of the People),
propagating socialism among the Russian masses, either by word of
mouth or as editors and coworkers in the “underground”
publications. Not a few went to Berlin, where, though opulent, they
sought employment in factories, the better to disseminate socialism
among the working classes. Others, like Aaronson, Achselrod,
Deutsch, Horowitz, Vilenkin, and Zukerman, fled to Switzerland,
whence, under the assumed names of Marx, Lassalle, Jacoby, etc., or
united in a League for the Emancipation of Labor, they directed the
socialistic movement in Russia.²⁵
Chernichevsky’s What to Do, Gogol’s Dead Souls,
Turgenief’s Virgin Soil and Fathers and Sons, the
doctrines of Pisarev and Bielinsky, and of the other writers who
then had their greatest vogue, were eagerly read and frequently
copied by Jewish young gymnasiasts and passed on to their Christian
schoolmates. The revolutionary spirit seized on men and women
alike. Women left their husbands, girls their devoted parents, and
threw themselves into the swirl of nihilism with a vigor and
self-sacrifice almost incredible. When a squad of police came to
disperse the crowd clamoring for “land and liberty” in front of the
Kazanskaya {258} Church in St. Petersburg, a Jewish
maiden of sixteen, taking the place of the leader, inspired her
comrades with such enthusiasm that the efforts of the police were
ineffectual.²⁶ By
1878, Russia became honeycombed with secret societies. It fell into
spasms of nihilism. One general after another was assassinated.
Attempts were made to wreck the train on which the czar was
travelling (1879) and blow up the palace in which he resided
(1880). Finally, on March 13, 1881, after many hairbreadth escapes,
the carefully laid plans of the revolutionists succeeded, and the
Liberator Czar was no more.

Thus was the deep-rooted yearning for enlightenment finally let
loose, and the gyves of tradition were at last removed. The
Maskilim of the “forties” and “fifties” were antiquated in the
“sixties” and “seventies.” They began to see that the fears of the
orthodox and their denunciations of Haskalah were not altogether
unfounded. A young generation had grown up who had never
experienced the strife and struggles of the fathers, and who lacked
the submissive temper that had characterized their ancestors.
Faster and farther they rushed on their headlong way to
destruction, while the parents sat and wept. When, in 1872, in
Vilna, the police arrested forty Jewish young {259} men
suspected of nihilistic tendencies, Governor-General Patapov
“invited” the representatives of the community to a conference. As
soon as they arrived, Patapov turned on them in this wise, “In
addition to all other good qualities which you Jews possess, about
the only thing you need is to become nihilists, too!” Amazed and
panic-stricken, the trembling Jews denied the allegation and
protested their innocence, to which the Governor-General replied,
“Your children are, at any rate; they have become so through the
bad education you have given them.” “Pardon me, General,” was the
answer of “Yankele Kovner” (Jacob Barit), who was one of the
representatives, “This is not quite right. As long as we
educated our children there were no nihilists among us; but as soon
as you took the education of our children into your hands, behold
the result.” The foundations of religion were undermined. Parental
authority was disregarded. Youths and maidens were lured by the
enchanting voice of the siren of assimilation. The naïve words
which Turgenief put into the mouth of Samuel Abraham, the
Lithuanian Jew, might have been, indeed, were, spoken by many
others in actual life. “Our children,” he complains, “have no
longer our beliefs; they do not say our prayers, nor have they your
{260} beliefs; no more do they say your
prayers; they do not pray at all, and they believe in
nothing.”²⁷ The
struggle between Hasidim and Mitnaggedim ended with the
conversionist policy of Nicholas I, which united them against the
Maskilim. The struggle between these anti-Maskilim and the Maskilim
had ceased in the golden days of Alexander II. But the clouds were
gathering and overspreading the camp of Haskalah. The days in which
the seekers after light united in one common aim were gone.
Russification, assimilation, universalism, and nihilism rent
asunder the ties that held them together. Judah Löb Gordon,
the same poet who, fifteen years before, had rejoiced with
exceeding joy “when Haskalah broke forth like water,” now laments
over the effect thereof in the following strain:

Amidst the disaffection, discord, and dejection that mark the
latter part of the reign of Alexander {261} II, one
Maskil stands out pre-eminently in interest and
importance,—one whom assimilation did not attract nor
reformation mislead, who under all the mighty changes remained
loyal to the ideals ascribed to the Gaon and advocated by
Levinsohn,—Perez ben Mosheh Smolenskin (Mohilev, February 25,
1842-Meran, Austria, February 1, 1885).²⁸

Smolenskin was endowed with the ability and courage that
characterize the born leader. He possessed an iron will and
unflinching determination, before which obstacles had to yield, and
persecution found itself powerless. His talent to grasp and
appreciate the true and the beautiful rendered him the oracle of
the thousands who, to this day, are proud to call themselves his
disciples. To him Haskalah was not merely acquaintance with general
culture, or even its acquisition. It was the realization of one’s
individuality as a Jew and a man. Gordon’s advice, to be a Jew at
home and a man abroad, found little favor in his estimation; for
Haskalah meant the evolution of a Jewish man sui generis. He
equally abhorred the fanaticism of the benighted orthodox and the
Laodicean lukewarmness of the advanced Maskilim. To fight and, if
possible, eradicate both, he undertook the publication of The Dawn
(Ha-Shahar, Vienna, 1869), a magazine {262} in which
he declared “war against the darkness of the Middle Ages and war
against the indifference of to-day!”

Not like the former days are these days, he says in his foreword
to Ha-Shahar. Thirty or twenty years ago we had to fight the enemy
within. Sanctimonious fanatics with their power of darkness sought
to persecute us, lest their folly or knavery be exposed to the
light of day…. Now that they, who hitherto have walked in
darkness, are beginning to discern the error of their ways, lo and
behold, those who have seen the light are closing their eyes
against it…. Therefore let them know beforehand that, as I have
stretched out my hand against those who, under the cloak of
holiness, endeavor to exclude enlightenment from the house of
Jacob, even so will I lift up my hand against the other hypocrites
who, under the pretext of tolerance, strive to alienate the
children of Israel from the heritage of their fathers!

That the salvation of the Jews lies in their distinctiveness,
and that renationalization will prove the only solution of the
Jewish problem, is the central thought of Smolenskin’s journalistic
efforts. Jews are disliked, he maintains, not because of their
religious persuasion, nor for their reputed wealth, but because
they are weak and defenceless. What they need is strength and
courage, but these they will never regain save in a land of their
own. Twelve years before the tornado of persecution {263} broke out
in Russia he had predicted it, and even welcomed it as a means of
arousing the Jews to their duties as a people and their place as a
nation, and that his conclusion was correct, the awakening which
followed proved unmistakably.

For Smolenskin Jews never ceased to be a nation, and to him the
Jew who sought refuge in assimilation was nothing less than a
traitor. He was thus the forerunner of Pinsker, and of Herzl a
decade later. Indeed, in the resurrection of the national hope he
was the first to remove the shroud. According to him, “the eternal
people” have every characteristic that goes to make a nation. Their
common country is still Palestine, loved by them with all the
fervor of patriotism; their common language had never ceased to be
Hebrew; their common religion consists in the basic principles of
Judaism, in which they all agree.

You wish—thus he addresses himself to the
assimilationists—you wish to be like the other people? So do
I. Be, I pray you, be like them. Search and find knowledge, avoid
and forsake superstition, above all be not ashamed of the rock
whence you were hewn. Yes, be like the other peoples, proud of your
literature, jealous of your self-respect, hopeful, even as all
persecuted peoples are hopeful, of the speedy arrival of the day
when we, too, shall reinhabit the land which once was, and still
is, our own.

But as the soil of Palestine, however regarded, is at present
inaccessible to Jews as a national entity, the language once spoken
in Palestine is so much the more to be cherished and cultivated by
the exiled people.

You ask me—he calls out again—what good a dead
language can do us? I will tell you. It confers honor on us, girds
us with strength, unites us into one. All nations seek to
perpetuate their names. All conquered peoples dream of a day when
they will regain their independence…. We have neither monuments
nor a country at present. Only one relic still remains from the
ruins of our ancient glory—the Hebrew language. Those,
therefore, who discard the Hebrew tongue betray the Hebrew nation,
and are traitors both to their race and their religion.

No less trenchant and outspoken was he against the serried array
of self-styled “reformers” of Judaism. He could not forgive the
German rabbis and Russian Maskilim for presuming to “dictate” to
their coreligionists what to select and what to reject in matters
religious. The whole movement he condemned as a mere imitation of
Protestant Christianity. To renovate Judaism! What a stigma on a
religion that had endured through the ages, and is rich in all that
makes for holiness and right living! The old garment needs no new
patches. It still fits and will fit “the eternal people” till time
is no {265} more. Since the reform movement in
Germany went back to the time of Mendelssohn, Smolenskin hurled the
missiles of his criticism against the Berlin sage, forgetting that
for more than half a century his example and encouragement had
served to awaken a love of knowledge in the hearts of his
countrymen. But he saw that in the home of Haskalah, the
Biur, and the Meassefim, apostasy increased, Hebrew was
almost forgotten, and Judaism was declining, and he blamed the
pellucid water at the source of the stream for the muddy pool at
its mouth. Mendelssohn, however, lacked no defenders among his
Russo-Jewish coreligionists, and their sentiments were voiced by
Abraham Bär Gottlober in an opposition periodical, The Light
of Day (Ha-Boker Or, Lublin, 1876). “Why,” exclaimed the editor,
“were it not for him and his reforms … were it not for that grand
and noble personality … neither you nor I should have been what
we are!” It was only the sad sincerity of Smolenskin that mitigated
the errors he had committed in regard to the history of his people
and the theology of its religion.

But the militant editor of Ha-Shahan, who wielded his pen like a
halberd, to deal out blows to those of whose views he disapproved,
became as tender {266} as a father when he set out to write
about the people. His love for the masses whom he knew so well was
almost boundless. Underlying their superstitions, crudities, and
absurdities is the “prophetic consciousness,” of which they have
never been entirely divested. The heder is indeed far from what a
school should be, and the yeshibah is hardly to be tolerated in a
civilized community; yet what spiritual feasts, what noble
endeavors, and what unselfish devotion are witnessed within their
dingy walls! Jewish observances are sometimes cumbersome and
sometimes incompatible with modern life, but what beauty of
holiness, what irresistible influences emanate and radiate from
most of them! Under an uninviting exterior and beneath the
accumulated drift of countless generations he discerned the
precious jewel of self-sacrifice for an ideal. It was this sympathy
and broad-mindedness, expressed in his Ha-Toëh, his
Simhat Hanef, Keburat Hamor, Gemul Yesharim,
and Ha-Yerushah that will ever endear him to the Hebrew
reader.

Such, in brief, was the life of the man who bore the chief part
in framing and moulding the Haskalah of the “eighties,” which was
devoted to the development of Hebrew literature and the
rejuvenation of the Hebrew people. Loving the Hebrew {267} tongue
with a passion surpassing everything else, he censured the German
Jewish savants for writing their learned works in the vernacular,
and was on the alert to discover and bring out new talent and win
over the indifferent and estranged. Dreaming of the redemption of
his people, he paved the way for the Zionistic movement, which
spread with tremendous rapidity after his death. And his sincerity
and ability were repaid in the only coin the poor possess—in
love and admiration. Pilgrimages were made, sometimes on foot, to
behold the editor of Ha-Shahar and the author of
Ha-Toëh. The greatest journalists in St. Petersburg
united in honoring him when he visited the Russian capital in 1881.
And when he was snatched away in the midst of his usefulness, a
victim of unremitting devotion to his people, not only Maskilim,
but Mitnaggedim and Hasidim felt that “a prince and a mighty one
had fallen in Israel!”

(Notes, pp. 322-327.)

CHAPTER VI

THE AWAKENING

1881-1905

The reign of Alexander III, like that of Nicholas I, was devoid
of even that faint glamor of liberalism which, in the days of
Alexander I and Alexander II, had aroused deceptive hopes of better
times. During the thirteen years of Alexander III’s autocracy
(1881-1894) not a ray of light was permitted to penetrate into Holy
Russia. On May 14, 1881, the manifesto prohibiting the slightest
infringement of the absolute power of the czar was promulgated, to
continue unbroken till the Russo-Japanese war.

The liberal current which had carried away his predecessors when
they first mounted the throne was checked, the sluices of
Slavophilism were opened, the history of Russian thinkers became
again, as Herzen said, “a long list of martyrs and a register of
convicts.”

Nicholas Ignatiev, a rabid reactionary, a second Jeffreys,
became chief of the Ministry of the Interior; {269} Katkoff,
a repentant liberal and exile, was appointed the czar’s chief
adviser, the Richelieu behind the throne; and Pobyedonostsev, whom
Turgenief called the “Russian Torquemada,” obtained supremacy over
Melikoff, and was appointed procurator of the Holy Synod. With such
as these at the head of the Russian bureaucracy, there may have
been some foundations for the rumor that an imperial ukase decreed
the pillage and slaughter of the Jews, and the muzhiks, obedient to
the behests of the “little father,” and smarting under the pain of
disappointment, vented their venom on their Jewish compatriots.
Before the new czar had been on his throne three months, Russia was
drenched with Jewish blood. There began saturnalia of rape,
plunder, and murder, the like of which had been witnessed nowhere
in Europe. For half a year the pogroms which began in Yelisavetgrad
(April 27, 28) swept like a tornado over southern Russia, visiting
more than one hundred and sixty communities with fire and sword,
resulting in outrages on women, in the murder of old and young, in
the ruin of millions of dollars of property. The Black Hundreds of
the nineteenth century put to shame the Haidamacks of the
eighteenth and the Cossacks of the seventeenth. In the words of the
Bishop {270} of Canterbury to Sir Moses Montefiore,
it looked “as if the enemy of mankind was let loose to destroy the
souls of so many Christians and the bodies of so many Jewish
people.”

But it would be a vain attempt, and out of keeping with the
object of this work, to describe in detail the “bloody assizes” and
the infernal tragedies that ensued upon the accession of Alexander
III; the moral degeneracy and the economic ruin that spread over
the mighty empire; the shudder that passed over the civilized
world, and was expressed in indignation meetings held everywhere,
especially in Great Britain and in the United States (February,
1882), to protest, “in the name of civilization, against the spirit
of medieval persecution thus revived in Russia.” Suffice it to say
that even when the mob, tired of carnage, ceased its work of
extermination, the bloodthirstiness of those in authority was not
assuaged. Such a policy was inaugurated against the Jews as would,
according to Pobyedonostsev, “force one-third of them to emigrate,
another third to embrace Christianity, and the remainder to die of
starvation.” With this in view, his Majesty the Emperor, “prompted
by a desire to protect the Jews against the Christians,” was
graciously pleased to give his assent to the Resolutions
{271} of the Committee of Ministers, on the
third of May, 1882, i.e. to the notorious “temporary
measures,” or “May laws,” framed by Ignatiev, against the will of
the Council of the Empire.

These “temporary measures” have remained in force to this day.
With them was resuscitated all the inimical legislation of the
past, beginning with the time of Elizabeta Petrovna. What was
favorable was suppressed; the unfavorable was most rigorously
enforced. Jews living outside the Pale were driven back into it on
the slightest pretext and in the most inhuman manner. To increase
the already unendurable congestion, the Pale was made smaller than
before. In accordance with the first clause of the “May laws,” Jews
were expelled from the villages within the Pale itself. In 1888 the
districts of Rostov and Taganrog, which till then had belonged to
the Pale, and had been developed largely through Jewish enterprise,
were torn away and amalgamated with the Don district, in which Jews
were not permitted to reside. This was followed by expulsions from
St. Petersburg (1890), Moscow, (1891), Novgorod, Riga, and Yalta
(1893), and the abrogation of the time-honored privileges of the
Jews of Bokhara (1896). Even those who, as skilled artisans or
discharged {272} soldiers, had been privileged to reside
wherever they chose, were expelled with their wives and the
children born in their adopted city. Their only salvation lay in
conversion. Converts were especially favored, and were offered
liberal inducements. By becoming a convert to the Orthodox Russian
Church, a Jew is immediately freed from all the degrading
restrictions on his freedom of movement and his choice of a
profession. Converts, without distinction of sex, are helped
financially by an immediate payment of sums from thirteen to thirty
rubles, and until recently were granted freedom from taxation for
five years. If a candidate for Greek Christianity is married, his
conversion procures him a divorce, and, unless she likewise is
converted, his wife may not marry again. By conversion, a Jew may
escape the consequence of any misdeed against a fellow-Jew, for, to
quote the Russian code, “in actions concerning Jews who have
embraced Christianity Jews may not be admitted as witnesses, if any
objection is raised against them as such.” The penal code provides
that Jews shall pay twice and treble the amount of the fine to
which non-Jews are liable under similar circumstances. Jews were
excluded from the professions to which they had turned in the
“sixties” and “seventies,” {273} and in which they had been eminently
successful; they were not allowed to hold any civil or municipal
office; they were forbidden even to be nurses in the hospitals or
to give private instruction to children in the homes.

And still persecution did not cease. Not satisfied with starving
the bodies of five millions of Jews, Russian legislators were
determined to crush them intellectually. The Slavophils could not
brook seeing “non-Russians” surpass their own people in the higher
walks of life. The Jews, finally successful in emancipating
themselves from the trammels of rabbinism, had transferred their
extraordinary devotion from the Talmud to secular studies. They
filled the schools and the universities of the empire with zealous
and intelligent pupils, who carried off most of the honors. They
contributed forty-eight pupils to the gymnasia out of every ten
thousand, while the Christians contributed only twenty-two. This
was regarded an unpardonable sin. “These Jews have the audacity to
excel us pure Russians,” Pobyedonostsev is reported to have
exclaimed, and measures were taken to suppress their dangerous
tendency. As early as 1875 a law was passed withholding from Jewish
students the stipends they had hitherto received from a fund set
{274} aside for that purpose. In 1882 the
number of Jewish students in the Military Academy of Medicine was
limited to five per cent, and later it was reduced to zero.
Thereafter one professional school after another adopted a
percentage provision, and some excluded Jews altogether. Finally,
“seeing that many Jewish young men, eager to benefit by a higher
classical, technical, or professional education,” presented
themselves every year for admission to the universities, that they
passed their examination and continued their studies at the various
schools of the empire, the Government deemed it “desirable to put a
stop to a state of affairs which is so unsatisfactory.”
Consequently the ministry limited the attendance of Jews residing
in places within the Pale to ten per cent in all schools and
universities (December 5, 1886; June 26, 1887), in places without
the Pale to five per cent, and in Moscow and St. Petersburg to
three per cent, of the total number of pupils in each school and
university. Of the four hundred young Jews who had successfully
passed their matriculation examination at the beginning of the
scholastic year 1887-1888, and had thus acquired the right of
entering the university, three hundred and twenty-six were refused
admission, and in many schools and {275} universities they were
denied even the small per cent the law permitted.

When, nevertheless, in spite of the many restrictions, the Jew
at last obtained the coveted degree, the Government rendered it
nugatory by depriving him of the right of enjoying the fruit of his
labor and self-sacrifice. He could not practice as an army
physician or jurist, nor obtain a position as an engineer or a
Government or municipal clerk. In the army, he was not allowed to
hold any office, and, though he might be an expert chemist, he
could never fill the post of a dispenser (March 1, 1888). He was
excluded from the schools for the training of officers, and if he
passed the examination on the subjects taught there, his
certificate could not contain the usual statement that there “was
no objection to admitting him to the military schools.”¹

These restrictive measures were not relaxed when Alexander III
was succeeded by his son Nicholas II (1894). If anything, they were
more rigorously executed, and the mob was encouraged to multiply
its outrages upon the defenceless Jews. The closing years of the
nineteenth century wiped out the promises of its opening years.
Blood accusations followed by riots became of frequent occurrence.
Irkutsk (1896), Shpola, and Kiev {276} (1897), Kantakuzov
(Kherson), Vladimir, and Nikolayev (1899) gave the Jews a foretaste
of what they had to expect when the Black Hundreds, encouraged by
the Government and incited by Kruzhevan and Pronin, would be let
loose to enact the scenes that took place in Kishinev and Homel
before the Russo-Japanese war, and in hundreds of towns after it.
The difficulties in the way of securing an education were
increased. Russia did not believe in an “irreducible minimum” where
the rights of her Jews were concerned. Under Nicholas II the number
of Jewish women admitted to medical schools was put at three per
cent of the total number of students; the newly-established School
for Engineers in Moscow was closed to Jewish young men altogether;
and the students of both sexes in the schools were constantly
harassed by the police because of the harsh laws concerning the
rights of residence. Some splendidly equipped institutions of
learning were allowed to remain almost empty rather than admit
Jewish students.²

This was the worst punishment of all, the most relentless
vengeance wreaked on a helpless victim. “Of all the laws which
swept down upon them from St. Petersburg and Moscow,” says
Leroy-Beaulieu with characteristic insight into the soul of
{277} Israel, “those which they [the Jews]
find hardest to bear are the regulations that block their entrance
to the Russian universities.” The bloodless weighed heavier than
the bloody pogroms. Consumed with a desire for education, wealthy
Russian Jews made an attempt to establish higher schools of their
own, without even drawing upon the surplus money of the kosher-meat
fund, which had originally been created for such purposes. Baron de
Hirsch, too, offered two million dollars for the higher and
technical education of the Jews. But every attempt proved
fruitless. Baron de Hirsch’s munificence was flatly refused. In the
school which Mr. Weinstein opened at Vinitza, Podolia, no more than
eight Jews were allowed to attend among eighty Christians, and in
the one at Gorlovka, founded by another Jew (Polyakov), only five
per cent were admitted.³

Writers are wont to speak of this as a reactionary period. The
description applies to the Russians; among the Jews it was a period
of reawakening.⁴ They
were disillusioned. They saw that Russification without
emancipation, as their unsophisticated fathers had told Lilienthal,
meant extermination. The first and worst pogroms were perpetrated
in those places where the Jews were like their Russian {278} neighbors
in every respect, except in the eyes of the law, and with the
approval of some who were devotees of the Narodnaya Volya. The
Jewish consciousness reasserted itself. If Pobyedonostsev
accomplished his fiendish design as regards emigration, more than a
million Jews having left Russia within the last twenty years; if he
has almost succeeded in causing them to die of starvation; yet his
hope of forcing a third of them to conversion was a disappointment
and a delusion. The Jews showed that the traditional description
applied to them, “stiff-necked,” was not undeserved. While the
Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Armenians have undergone conversion
in multitudes, they whose suffering by far exceeded that of any
other “non-Russian” nationality remained, with insignificant
exceptions, loyal to the religion of their fathers.⁵

The Russian Jews—says Zunser—sobered down from the
orgies of assimilation, and its worshippers abandoned their idol.
Those who had almost forgotten that they were of the camp of Israel
began to return to its tents. The Jewish physicians, jurists,
technologists, and the entire so-called Jewish “intelligentia,” who
heretofore had never cared to speak a word of Yiddish to a Jew,
resumed their native tongue; they began to send their children to
the Jewish hadarim, and adopted once more Jewish ways and customs.
Several hundred Jewish university students, proverbially
irreligious, sent to Vilna for tefillin [phylacteries]!

In many cities fasts were observed and prayers for forgiveness
offered, and the prodigal sons of Israel repaired to the synagogue,
participated in the services, and wept with their more steadfast
though equally unfortunate coreligionists. Many converts, too,
began to feel qualms of conscience, and endeavored to make up for
their youthful indiscretions. Some of them fled to places of
safety, and returned to Judaism. The gifted young poet Simon
Yakovlevich Nadsohn died of a broken heart. Sorkin, the classmate
and friend of Levanda, committed suicide, while Levanda, the great
novelist of assimilation, was so affected by the massacres and
their consequences, that he became melancholy, and died in an
asylum for the insane.⁶

If this was the fate of the assimilated and estranged, one may
guess the effect of the reaction on the religious. If the students
of the universities sacrificed their careers, their daily bread,
for the austere satisfaction of discharging their moral obligation
to the best of their knowledge, the students of the Law, always
loyal to the heritage of their people, became more zealous than
ever. Lilienblum who, in 1877, believed that life without a
university education was not worth living, became a repentant
sinner. Russian Jewry seethed with {280} religious enthusiasm. Moses
Isaac Darshan, “the Khelmer Maggid,” preached for six hours at a
time to crowded synagogues. Asher Israelit, less trenchant, but
equally effective, exhorted crowds to repentance. Zebi Hirsh
Masliansky, a finished orator, went from town to town, and aroused
a love for whatever was connected with the history and religion of
the Jewish people. In Kovno those who were preparing themselves for
the rabbinate formed something like a new sect, the Mussarnikes
(Moralists), which practiced asceticism and self-abnegation to an
extraordinary degree.⁷

Those, however, were most affected who had been misled by dreams
of assimilation. They suffered most, for they lost most. Their
hopes were blighted, their hearts broken. The leading-strings
proved to be a halter. They saw they had little to expect at the
hands of those they had believed to have become fully civilized,
and they were embittered toward civilization, which had showed them
flowers, but had given them no fruit. In a work, Sinat ‘Olam
le-‘Am ‘Olam (Eternal Hatred for the Eternal People,
Warsaw, 1882), Nahum Sokolov proved, like Smolenskin before him,
that anti-Semitism was ineradicable, that the fight against the
Jews was a fight to the death, that even emancipation {281} helps
little to remove the animosity innate in one people against
another, and until the “end of days” foretold by the prophets of
yore there will never cease the eternal hatred to the eternal
people. This became the dominant opinion. It dawned upon many that
the only salvation for the Jews lay in becoming a nation once more.
A yearning for a new fatherland and a new country seized young and
old. The times were auspicious. Cosmopolitanism was everywhere
giving place to nationalism. The little Balkan States had broken
the yoke of Ottoman rule, and become self-governing nations since
1878. In Poland, Hungary, and Ireland, home rule was advocated with
fervor that threatened a revolution. Italy and Germany became
united under their own king or emperor. And the Russian Jews, tired
of the constant conflicts with the surrounding peoples, experienced
the desire which had prompted their ancestors to be like all the
other nations.

Sokolov’s sentiments were reinforced in an anonymous pamphlet
written by Doctor Leo Pinsker (1821-1891), one of the foremost
physicians of Odessa. His Auto-Emancipation (Berlin, 1882)
is now recognized as the forerunner of Herzl’s Judenstaat,
which appeared fifteen years later. Pinsker accepts as an axiom
what Sokolov had tried {282} to demonstrate as a proposition.
Jew-hatred, he claims, like Lombroso in his work on anti-Semitism,
is a “platonic hatred,” a hereditary mental disease, which two
thousand years’ duration has so aggravated as to render it
incurable. As the Jewish problem is international, it can be solved
only by nationalism. He admits some of the charges brought against
the Jews by anti-Semites, but Jewish failings result from Christian
intolerance. In a land of their own they will develop into a
Muster-nation, a model people.

The wretches—cries he—they mock the eagle that once
soared sky-high, and saw divinity itself, because he can no longer
fly after his wings are broken! Give us but our independence, allow
us to take care of ourselves, grant us but a little strip of land
like that of the Servians and Rumanians, give us a chance to lead a
national existence, and then prate about our lacking manly virtues.
What we lack is not genius (Genialität) but self-consciousness
(Selbstgefühl) and appreciation of our value as men
(Bewusstsein der Menschenwürde), of which we were deprived by
you!

Of course, it requires many years and a great expenditure of
money to establish a nation on a firm basis. But in Pinsker’s
dictionary the word “impossible” does not exist. “Far, very far,”
says he, “is the haven of rest towards which our souls are turning.
We know not even whether it be East {283} or West. But be the road
never so long, it cannot seem too long to the wanderers of two
thousand years.”

Pinsker’s impassioned appeal made a deep impression. It was
obvious that colonization would be the shortest road to
renationalization. But as to the place in which the colonies should
be established, no agreement could be reached. Pinsker, like Herzl
after him, left the problem unsolved. Some preferred America or
even Spain. In southern Russia a society, ‘Am ‘Olam (The Eternal
Nation), was organized on communistic principles. It sent an
advance guard to the United States, where, as the Sons of the Free,
they established several settlements, the best-known of which was
New Odessa, in Oregon.⁸ The
majority, however, preferred Palestine, the land which, in weal or
woe, in pain or pleasure, remains ever dear to the Jewish heart;
the land to which the ancient exiles by the waters of Babylon had
vowed that sooner than forget her would their right hands forget
their cunning and their tongues cleave to the roofs of their
mouths; the possession whereof had been held out as the most
alluring promise, and to be deprived of which the prophets had
regarded as the severest punishment.

Zionism, even Territorialism, among the Russian Jews is by no
means solely the result of modern anti-Semitism. At the same time
that Mordecai Manuel Noah was planning his Jewish state Ararat in
western New York (1825), Gregori Peretz, who, as a child, had been
converted, with his father, to the dominant religion, and had been
advanced to the rank of an officer in his Majesty’s army, was
dreaming of the renationalization of his alienated brethren. As a
leading figure in the councils of the Dekabrists, he never ceased
his efforts until his comrades accepted the restoration of Israel
to his pristine place among the nations of the earth as part of
their revolutionary programme. But with the suppression of the
Dekabrists by Nicholas I the scheme died “a-borning,” and sank into
oblivion. Later, David Gordon revived the yearnings of Judah Halevi
by his articles in the weekly Ha-Maggid (1863), which he edited in
Lyck, Prussia. Smolenskin’s writings resound with a love for Zion
from the very beginning of his literary career. And a rising young
Hebraist, Eliezer ben Yehudah, while still a student of medicine,
wrote, in 1878, and again in 1880, stirring letters to the editor
of Ha-Shahar, in which he advocated the return to the Holy Land and
the revival of the holy {285} tongue as a conditio sine qua non
for the realization of the Jewish mission. These views, at first
advocated by the Hebrew-writing and Hebrew-reading Maskilim,
gradually filtered into the various strata of Russo-Jewish society,
and when the clouds began to gather fast in Russia’s sky, and the
change in the monarch’s policy augured the approach of evil times,
Zionism rapidly made enthusiastic converts even among the most
Russified of the Jewish youth. On November 6, 1884, for the first
time in history, a Jewish international assembly was held at
Kattowitz, near the Russian frontier, where representatives from
all classes and different countries met and decided to colonize
Palestine with Jewish farmers.

Since then Haskalah in Russia has become nationalistic and
Palestinian. Even those who were at first opposed to it gradually
grew friendly, and finally became “lovers of Zion” (Hobebe Zion).
Among the Russo-Jewish students in Vienna, Smolenskin, the militant
Zionist, organized an academic society, Kadimah, a name which,
meaning Eastward and Forward, contains the philosophy of Zionism in
a nutshell. Seeing that the Alliance Israélite Universelle
encouraged emigration to America, both he and Ben Yehudah published
violent attacks {286} on the French society, and endeavored to
thwart its plans as far as possible.⁹ The
Hebrew weekly Ha-Meliz, published in St. Petersburg, was a staunch
supporter of the movement, and a little later Ha-Zefirah, published
in Warsaw, which was at first indifferent, if not antagonistic,
joined the ranks. In Russian, too, the Razsvyet and especially the
Buduchnost spread Zionism among their readers, while books,
pamphlets, and poems were published in Yiddish for circulation
among the masses. In addition to the Hobebe Zion societies formed
in many cities, secret societies were organized, such as the famous
Bene Mosheh (Sons of Moses), which had for its object the moral and
intellectual improvement of the future citizens of the Jewish
Republic; the Bilu (initials of Bet Ya’akob leku we-nelekah, “O
House of Jacob, come and let us go”), formed by Israel Belkind, who
went to Palestine with his fellow-students of the University of
Kharkov, and founded the colony of Gederah; and the Hillul (Hereb
la-Adonaï u-le-Arzenu, “A sword for God and our land”), the
members of which pledged themselves to remove any obstacle to the
cause of nationalism, even at the cost of their lives. The Bone
Zion (Builders of Zion), a sort of Masonic fraternity, {287} was a
very potent secret society, which undertook to constitute itself a
provisional Jewish Government, and assiduously watched the
Zionistic societies and their leaders in every portion of the
globe.¹⁰

These dreamy youths, however, heartbroken and disgusted with a
civilization which had failed to redeem its promises, proved but
poor material for laying the foundations for a future nation. It
was as with the Darien Company organized by William Paterson when
Scotland was sorely distressed, and the Champ d’Asile, by the
remnant of Napoleon’s grand army—a fine idea, but the men and
the means were wanting to execute it. The colonies in Palestine
fared no better than those in America. They were opposed by the
Government from without and by many of the orthodox Jews from
within. The former, though claiming to be glad to see the Jews
emigrate, though declaring to the Jewish delegation that pleaded
for mercy, Zapadnaya graniza dlya vas otkrita (“the Western
frontier is open to you”), was still, Pharaoh-like, reluctant to
see so many “undesirable citizens” leave, and prohibited the
formation of organizations to accomplish the end. The orthodox were
against the movement on religious grounds, because it was “forcing
the end” of Israel’s trouble before {288} the destined day of God
arrived.¹¹ But with the “nineties” the
movement received a strong impetus. Alexander Zederbaum, the
publisher of Ha-Meliz, succeeded in obtaining a charter (February
9, 1890) for the Association for the Aid of Colonization in
Palestine and Syria. Such eminent rabbis as Mordecai Eliasberg, his
son Jonathan, Samuel Mohilever, N.Z.Y. Berlin, and Mordecai Joffe
espoused the cause, and set the example for their less prominent
colleagues. When the question arose whether Jewish agriculturists
in Palestine are obliged to observe the Biblical injunction not to
till the ground in the seventh year (shemittah), Rabbi Isaac
Elhanan Spector of Kovno, the leading rabbi and Talmudist of his
time, decided, in opposition to the Jerusalem rabbinate, that the
law had ceased to be effective with the destruction of the Temple.
Baron Edmond de Rothschild of Paris also came to the rescue of the
colonists, and, more important still, there began an immigration of
Russo-Jewish farmers into Palestine, of the class, numbering about
ninety-five thousand souls, whom Arnold White described as “an
active, well set-up, sun-burnt, muscular, agricultural people,
marked by all the characteristics of a peasantry of the highest
character.” With them the colonies began to flourish, {289} the debts
were paid off, and a better regime set in. “There was no crime or
drunkenness,” says Bentwich, “in those settlements, and the only
usurer was a Russian peasant, who charged the Jewish borrowers
thirty-six per cent for loans. If ever I saw practical religion
carried into daily life, it was among those brave and sober Hebrew
ploughmen.”¹²

Whatever may be one’s views on Zionism, there can be no doubt
that it has proved a power for good in Russia. It introduced new
ideals and revived old expectations. It has accomplished, in a
measure, the fond hope of the Maskilim and awakened within the
Russian Jew a feeling of self-respect and a “consciousness of human
worth.” Different and contending elements it has coalesced into
one. It has, above all, brought back to the fold the doubting
Thomases and careless Gallios, even the avowed scoffers, among the
Jewish youth, and imbued them with courage and pride,¹³ and given them a new shibboleth,
Meine Kunst der Welt, mein Leben meinem Volke (“My art for
the world, my life for my people”).

“We have seen our youths return to us,” writes Lilienblum,¹⁴ “and our hearts were filled with
joy. In their restoration we found balm for our wounds,
{290} and with rapturous wonderment we asked
‘who has borne us these?'” The poets welcomed them with songs.
Gordon, whose sorrow had silenced his muse, was inspired once more
and called:

Frug sang in Russian:

And Zunser represented Rachel as soliloquizing in Yiddish:

But Zionism is not exclusively either a political or a religious
movement. It is both plus something else; it is eminently
educational. It has produced novelists and poets, whose writings
are full of the virility and beauty of a rejuvenated nation. In
{291} Jaffa it established a high school (Bet
ha-Sefer), it inspired Doctor Chazanowicz to establish a national
library, and ways and means are being considered to establish a
national university in Palestine.

Even among the devotees of the arts it has given rise to a new
romantic school, young painters and sculptors who are depicting
their Judenschmerz.

Their cunning hands—says Mr. Leo Mielziner—have
mastered the technique of their art, be it in Moscow or Munich, or
Berlin, or Paris, but the heart which inspires their brush or
mallet pulsates in Palestine. The wandering Jew in them pauses, not
to portray the impression of the foreign lands and stranger
customs, but to depict his own suffering, his own Heimweh, his own
aspirations.

Struck, Ashkenasi, Maimon, Hirszenberg, Gottlieb, Epstein,
Löbschütz, and Schatz are the leaders of this new
movement. The last-named, together with Ephraim Moses Lilien of
Galicia, perhaps the greatest Jewish illustrator of our time, has
founded a national school, Bezalel, to propagate Jewish art in
Palestine, on the same principles on which the great national art
schools of other countries are based. The language of instruction
is Hebrew.

Meanwhile the Society for the Promotion of Haskalah continued
its work of Russification and {292} general civilization. After
1880 its activity was greatly enhanced, and its members worked with
renewed zeal. It opened elementary schools, and expended large sums
on stipends for students, and the publication of useful and
scholarly books. The branch in Odessa secured two hundred and
thirty-one new members in one year (1900), making the total in that
city alone nine hundred and sixty-eight. It organized a bureau of
information on pedagogic subjects, and through the liberality of
Kalonymos Wissotzky instituted prizes for original works in Hebrew
or Russian. Individual philanthropists did their utmost to
counterbalance the restrictions on education.¹⁵

Trade schools were opened by the Committee for the Promotion of
a Knowledge of Trade and Agriculture among the Jews of Russia, in
Minsk, Vilna, and Vitebsk, besides fifteen manual training schools
for boys and twenty for girls, in which the indigent pupils are
provided with food, clothes, and books. In 1900 thirteen new
schools were opened in Kherson and Yekaterinoslav, to supply the
educational demand of the thirty-eight colonies existing in those
Governments. In the vicinity of Minsk a Junior Republic was
organized, and in many cities art and choral societies were
formed.¹⁶

The desire for self-help and the tendency towards organization,
to which Zionism gave an impetus, was rapidly reflected in every
sphere of Russo-Jewish activity. In a series of works and articles,
Jacob Wolf Mendlin, who studied under Lassalle, pointed out the
importance of the co-operative system. Accordingly, a union was
organized by the Jewish salesmen in Warsaw. In 1897 a conference of
Jewish workingmen was held in that city and Der allgemeine
jüdische Arbeiterbund in Littauen, Polen, und Russland
(Federation of Jewish Labor Unions in Lithuania, Poland, and
Russia) was perfected. It published three papers as its organs, Die
Arbeiterstimme, Der jüdischer Arbeiter, and, in Switzerland,
Letzte Nachrichten. Soon workmen’s associations and artisans’ clubs
appeared wherever there was a sufficient number of Jewish tailors,
hatters, bookbinders, etc., for the purpose of increasing and
improving the value of their production, and to do away with
middlemen and money-lenders. They organized a tailors’, dyers’, and
shoemakers’ union in Kharkov, and a carpenters’ union in Minsk, for
mutual support in the struggle for existence, and for the
construction of sanitary workingmen’s houses. The cultural desire
of the handicraftsmen, constituting twelve per {294} cent of
the Russo-Jewish population and occasionally fifty-two per cent
(Odessa), seventy-three per cent (Kovno), and even ninety per cent
(Byelostok), is phenomenal. Their object is not only physical
improvement. Their highest aim is that their members be enabled, by
means of efficient night schools and private instruction, to
acquire elementary and higher education; in the words of the
constitution of the carpenters’ union of Minsk, “to protect their
material interests, raise their moral and intellectual status, and
foster efforts of self-help.”¹⁷

The Hebrew teachers, a class which, though more respected,
underwent as hard a struggle as the workingmen, banded themselves
together in 1899 in the Society for Aiding Hebrew Teachers of the
Province of Vilna. Their president was Michael Wolper, the
inspector of the Hebrew Institute and successor to Wohl as censor
of Hebrew publications. Similar attempts were made in Bessarabia.
Rabbi Shachor, chairman of the Hebrew Teachers’ Association of
Yekaterinoslav, was instrumental in opening a normal school
conducted on Chautauqua principles, and so advanced the cause of
education considerably.¹⁸

With the establishment of the rabbinical seminaries and the
ukase (May 3, 1855) that only such may officiate as rabbis as have
completed a prescribed course of study, Russian Jewry was placed in
a sore predicament. It was a very difficult task to find men who
united secular knowledge with that thorough mastery of Talmudic
literature which the Jews of Russia exact from their rabbis. Every
community was compelled to appoint two rabbis: an orthodox rabbi
(dukhovny rabbin) and a “crown,” or Government, rabbi (kazyony
rabbin). The people recognized only the authority of the former,
the Government that of the latter. The consequence was that a man
with a mere high-school education would apply for, and would often
receive, the position of crown-rabbi. His duties consisted in
merely keeping a register of marriages, births, and deaths,
administering the oath, and the like. The many lawyers and
physicians who were debarred from practicing their professions
sought to become candidates for the rabbinate. To avoid the
unpleasant results which followed, Rabbi Chernovich of Odessa and
Rabbi I.J. Reines of Lyda established seminaries in Odessa and
Lyda, to take the place and to continue the teaching of the Vilna
and the Volozhin yeshibot, which had been closed, {296} and to
furnish proper rabbis for the various congregations.¹⁹

The century-long struggle for enlightenment had a telling
effect. What the early Maskilim had only dreamed of finally came to
be. The metamorphosis was so great and so general as to be hardly
credible. It was shown by Mr. Landman, in a paper read before the
Russo-Jewish Historical Society of Odessa, that while among the
Gentiles of that city the reading public constituted seven per cent
of the population, among Jews it was no less than thirty-three per
cent, and twenty-five per cent of all readers were Jewish
women.²⁰ By 1905 there were two Yiddish
and three Hebrew dailies, besides several weekly, monthly, and
quarterly periodicals and annuals in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian,
notwithstanding the fact that a numerous class depended on the
general Russian literary output for their mental pabulum.

As the number of those who read Hebrew was still considerable,
Abraham Löb Shalkovich (Ben Avigdor) began, with the
assistance of a number of Maskilim, the publication of “penny
literature” (Sifre Agorah, Warsaw, 1893). Shortly afterwards the
Ahiasaf Society and, a little later, the Tushiyah Society were
founded. The object was {297} to edit and publish “good and useful
books in the Hebrew language for the spread of knowledge and the
teaching of morality and culture among the Hebrew youth, also
scientific books in all departments of learning.” Both these
associations have done admirable work. They have published many
good text-books for teaching Hebrew and Jewish history, an
illustrated periodical for children, Olam Katan (The Little World),
and numerous works of interest to the adult. Among their
publications were, besides the original writings of Peretz, Taviov,
Frischman, Berdichevsky, Chernikhovsky, and others, also
translations from Bogrov, Byron, Frug, Hugo, Nordau, Shakespeare,
Spencer, Zangwill, Zola, critical biographies of Aristotle,
Copernicus, George Eliot, Heine, Lassalle, Nietzsche, Rousseau, and
a great many equally famous men of letters, which followed each
other in promiscuous but uninterrupted succession, all handsomely
printed and prettily bound, and sold at a moderate price.

One evil, however, remained, in the face of which both the
Maskilim and the financiers found themselves utterly helpless, the
evil of the exclusion of Jews from the universities. They could
found elementary and high schools for the young, night schools and
Sabbath Schools for the adult working-men, {298} but to
establish a university was an absolute impossibility. Jewish youths
were again compelled, as in the days of Tobias Cohn and Solomon
Maimon, to seek in foreign lands the education denied them in their
own. Austria, Switzerland, France, and chiefly Germany, became once
more the Meccas whither Russo-Jewish graduates repaired to finish
their studies, and where they formed a sort of Latin Quarters of
their own, and led almost a communal life. Their numbers in the
German universities grew to such proportions, and their material
condition became so wretched, that a society was organized in
Berlin for the express purpose of helping them. On the other hand,
the authorities protested (1906) against expending the funds
granted each year for German educational institutions on the
education of non-Germans, and the Akademischer Club of Berlin
passed resolutions demanding a regulation against their admission.
In Leipsic alone, of the six hundred and sixty-two foreign students
who attended the university, three hundred and forty, or over
one-half, are Russian Jews (1906). Of the five hundred and
eighty-six students enrolled in the Commercial University, three
hundred and twenty-two are foreigners, among whom Russians
predominate, and of the {299} eight hundred students who attend the
Royal Conservatory of Music, three hundred are foreigners, also
mostly Russians. Russians constitute two hundred and two of the
three hundred and forty-seven pupils in the Dresden Polytechnicum,
and sixty out of one hundred and thirty-seven in the Dresden
Veterinary College, while in the Freiberg School of Mines and in
the Tharand Forestry Academy they are in a majority, though they
pay twice, and in some places three times, the amount of tuition
fee required from the native students. The proportion is still
greater in the Swiss universities of Basle, Berne, Geneva,
Lausanne, and Zurich, where they sometimes constitute three-fourths
of the entire student body in the medical schools (Geneva,
1907).

And as for the progress made by the Russo-Jewish woman, it is
wonderful, indeed. It is hardly a quarter of a century since
attention began to be given to her mental development, and yet she
has seldom lagged behind her sisters in more enlightened lands, and
has lately attained to a proud height. Vilna, with her “many
well-educated wives,” attracted the attention of Montefiore in the
early “forties”; Tarnopol speaks in terms of high praise of the
Jewish women of Odessa in the “sixties”; {300} they
“charm by their culture, by the ease and precision with which they
speak several European languages, by the correctness of their
judgment, and the beauty of their conversation.”²¹ The memoirs of Madame Pauline
Wengeroff throw a sidelight also on the accomplishments of her
sisters in the less enlightened districts of Russian Jewry. But in
the last quarter of the nineteenth and the early part of the
twentieth century, their advance was prodigious.²² When decent Jewish women were
prohibited to reside in St. Petersburg, some of the Jewish female
students, at the risk of their reputation, secured the yellow
ticket of the prostitute rather than sacrifice their education. But
the majority went to other countries. The press has lately been
interested in what these seekers for light in foreign lands have
accomplished, and reported the successes of Fanny Berlin, who
graduated from the University of Berne as doctor of law summa
cum laude, and of Miss Kanyevsky of Zinkoff (Poltava), who was
the first woman to take her degree as engineer at the Ecole des
Pontes et Chaussees, in Paris.

It is a curious fact—remarks a correspondent in the Pall
Mall Gazette—the majority [of lady doctors practicing in
Paris] are Russian Jewesses, just as are the greatest number of
young {301} women medical students. At a rough
calculation there are three hundred ladies pursuing medical studies
at the various schools, and working side by side with the male
students. The reason of the invasion of the Jewess is, of course,
the disabilities that exist in Russia for those of the faith of
Israel … disabilities that are hardly lessened in Germany.
Moreover, there exists only one university in Russia, and that is
in St. Petersburg. Some of the women who graduate in medicine do
extremely well afterwards in practice, and are greatly in vogue in
the highest society in Paris…. The lady doctor who is also a
Russian subject has likewise found a field for her energies in
China, where Russian influence is so dominant at the present
moment.

Another writer, in Harper’s Bazaar, speaking of girl-students in
Paris, has this to say:

The Russian students are an interesting class in Paris. There
are some one hundred and thirty of them in all, nearly all Hebrews,
as the Russian universities admit only about four Jews to every
hundred students. Their monthly allowance from their families is
often no more than twenty dollars, and out of that they must pay
board, room-rent, and all outside expenses. These Russian “new
women” are extraordinary students. Mlle. Lepinska, one of the first
to graduate in medicine, presented a thesis six hundred and sixty
pages long to her astonished professors.

With pitying admiration the world looks on the struggle for
enlightenment of these brave sons and daughters of Judah. Their
trials and tribulations, {302} their heart-burnings and
disappointments, have inspired poets and painters, novelists and
playwrights. From Chamisso’s Abba Glusk Leczeka to
Korolenko’s Skazanye o Florye Rimlyaninye, czars have died
or have been assassinated, statesmen have risen and fallen, but the
Russian Jew, like the heroes of the poem or novel, did not wait to
conquer by submitting. Thanks to his indomitable spirit he has made
unexampled progress. Within the last twenty-five years he has not
only emancipated himself, but he is now the most potent factor in
the struggle for the emancipation of his countrymen. Within these
years he has become the recognized torch-bearer of liberty and
enlightenment in darkest Russia. Uvarov justified his inhuman
treatment of the Jews by the plea that they are “orthodox and
believers in the Talmud.” The latest excuse (1904) of von Plehve
was that “if we admitted Jews to our universities without
restriction, they would surpass our Russian students and dominate
our intellectual life.” But neither the former prevails, nor the
latter, nor their henchmen who fill the columns of the Grazhdanin,
Kievlyanin, Novoye Vremya, and the like. The words and writings of
such noble and world-famous Russians as Popoff, Demidov,
Strogonoff, Bershadsky, Shchedrin, Tolstoi, {303} and the
cream of the Russian “intelligentia,” as well as such foreigners as
Mommsen, Gladstone, Leroy-Beaulieu, and Michael Davitt, will have
their salutary effect. The consciousness of the Russian people will
awaken. The attitude lately manifested both in St. Petersburg and
the provinces against the Kontrabandisti, a libellous play
written by an apostate Jew, Levin, will become more and more
general. Then the heroic effort and the unexampled progress of the
Russian Jews will be more fully appreciated, and a patriotic nation
will gratefully acknowledge its indebtedness to that smallest but
most energetic and self-sacrificing portion of its heterogeneous
population, the Jews, who have done so much, not only for Jewish
Russians, but for Christian Russians as well, to hasten the time
when “many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be
increased.”

(Notes, pp. 327-330.)

NOTES

ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES

AZJ = Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, Leipsic,
1837—
FKI = Fünn, Keneset Yisraël, Warsaw, 1860.
FKN = Fünn, Kiryah Ne’emanah, Vilna, 1860.
FSL = Fünn, Safah le-Ne’emanim, Vilna, 1881.
GMC = Ginzberg and Marek, Yevreyskiya Narodniya Pyesni, St.
Petersburg, 1901.
HUH = Harkavy, Ha-Yehudim u-Sefat ha-Selavim, Vilna, 1867.
JE = Jewish Encyclopedia, 12 vols., New York, 1901-1906.
LBJ = Levinsohn, Bet Yehudah, Warsaw, 1901.
LTI = Levinsohn, Te’udah be-Yisraël, Warsaw, 1901.
WMG = Wengeroff, Memoiren einer Grossrautter, i., Berlin, 1908.

CHAPTER I

THE PRE-HASKALAH PERIOD

?-1648

(pp. 17-52)

Footnote 1:(return)

Mention might, indeed, be made of Dr. Zunz’s pioneer work in his
Aelteste Nachrichten über Juden und jüdische Gelehrte in
Polen, Slavonien, Russland (Gesammelte Schriften, Berlin, 1875,
iii. 82-87), and Firkovich, who, in his Abne Zikkaron (Vilna,
1872), threw much light on the history of the Crimean Jews. The
best contributions to the subject, however, are those of Harkavy,
Russ i Russkiye v Sred. Yevr. Lit. (Voskhod, 1881), and
Malishevsky, Yevreyi v Yuzhnoy Rossii i Kieve, v. x-xii. Vyekakh,
St. Petersburg, 1878.

Footnote 2:(return)

LTI, p. 33, n. 2; LBJ, ii. 94, n. 2.

Footnote 3:(return)

See JE, s.v. Azov, and Kertch. See also Fishberg, The Jews: A
Study of Race and Environment, New York, 1911, pp. 150,
192-194.

Footnote 4:(return)

See Judah Halevi’s Kuzari, Introduction.

Footnote 5:(return)

Minor, Rukovodstvo, Moscow, 1881, iv; Ha-Pardes, St. Petersburg,
1902, p. 155.

Footnote 6:(return)

HUH, pp. 31-32, 69-76.

Footnote 7:(return)

Yevrey Minister, Voskhod, 1885, v. 105 f.

Footnote 8:(return)

JE, i. 112, 119, 223; viii. 652.

Footnote 9:(return)

The synagogue in Brest-Litovsk, which Saul Wahl built in memory
of his wife Deborah, was demolished in 1836. WMG, p. 84.

Footnote 10:(return)

HUH, pp. 77-134.

Footnote 11:(return)

JE, x. 569.

Footnote 12:(return)

The story of Zacharias de Guizolfi deserves to be given at
greater length. He was a prince and ruler of the Taman peninsula
near the Black Sea (1419). After he had been unsuccessful in a war
against the Turks, Czar Ivan III sent him a message sealed with the
gold seal (March 14, 1484) as follows:

“By the grace of God, the great ruler of the Russian land, the
Grand Duke Ivan Vassilyevich, czar of all the Russias, to Skariya
the Hebrew.

“You have written to us through Gabriel Patrov, our guest, that
you desire to come to us. It is our wish that you do so. When you
are with us, we shall give you evidence of our favorable
disposition toward you. Should you wish to serve us, we will confer
honors upon you. But should you not wish to remain with us, and
prefer to return to your country, you shall be free to go.”

For some reason or other, Zacharias never accomplished his
contemplated trip, notwithstanding the many inducements repeatedly
offered by the czar during a period of eighteen years. Perhaps it
was because of the disturbances which rendered transportation
dangerous; possibly because he preferred to serve the khan rather
than the czar, for we find him, in 1500, a resident of Circassia.
See JE, vi. 107-108; vi. 12.

Footnote 13:(return)

E.g. Barakha, the hero (1601), Ilyash Karaimovich, the starosta
(1637), and Motve Borokhovich, the colonel (1647). See JE, ii. 128;
iv. 283; ix. 40.

Footnote 14:(return)

See Czacki, Rosprava o Zhydakh, Vilna, 1807, p. 93; Buchholtz,
Geschichte der Juden in Riga, Riga, 1899, p. 3; Mann, Sheerit
Yisraël, Vilna, 1818, ch. 30; Virga, Shebet Yehudah, Hanover,
1856, pp. 147 f., and Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, ix. 480.

Footnote 15:(return)

The Subbotniki, Dukhobortzi, and the other dissenting, but
non-Jewish, sects are not referred to here, though they may have
received their inspiration from Jews or through Judaism.

Footnote 16:(return)

Voskhod, 1881, i. 73-75; JE, vii. 487-488; ix. 570; Bramson, K
Istorii Pervonachalnaho Obrazovaniya Russkikh Yevreyev, St.
Petersburg, 1896, pp. 4-6.

Footnote 17:(return)

Sternberg, Die Proselyten im xvi. und xvii. Jahrhundert, AZJ,
1863, pp. 67-68 (ibid, in L’univers Israelite, 1863, pp. 272 f.);
Mandelkern, Dibre Yeme Russyah, Warsaw, 1875, pp. 231 f.;
Yevreyskaya Enziklopedya, s.v. Zhidostvuyushchikh; Bedrzhidsky in
Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnaho Prosvyeshchanya, St. Petersburg,
1912, pp. 106-122; Jewish Ledger, Jan., 1902, p. 3; Emden, Megillat
Sefer, ed. Cohan, p. 207, Warsaw, 1896. On Count Pototzki, see Ger
Zedek, in Yevreyskaya Biblyotyeka, St. Petersburg, 1892; Gershuni,
Sketches of Jewish Life and History, New York, 1873, pp. 158-224
(also Introduction), and S.L. Gordon’s ballad in Ha-Shiloah (Ger
Zedek), i. 431. On Pototzki and Zaremba, see Gere Zedek (Anon.),
Johannisberg, 1862. On modern Russian Gerim, see Die Welt, July 5,
1907, pp. 16-17 (Palestine), B’nai B’rith News, May 13, 1913
(United States), and Leroy-Beaulieu, Israel among the Nations,
Engl. transl., New York, 1900, p. 110, n. 1; Yiddishes Tageblatt,
July 16 and 23, 1913, Gerim in Russland, and Vieder vegen Gerim;
JE, i. 336; vii. 369-370, 489.

Footnote 18:(return)

HUH, pp. 3, 21 f.; Minor, op. cit., p. 4; Yevreyskiya Nadpisi,
St. Petersburg, 1884, p. 217; Sefer ha-Yashar, no. 522; Eben
ha-‘Ezer, no. 118. On [Hebrew: Bn’n Hrogi] see Monatsschrift, xxii.
514.

Footnote 19:(return)

Catalogue de Rossi, in. 200; Ha-Maggid, 1860, pp. 299-302; HUH,
pp. 33, 40.

Footnote 20:(return)

Autobiography, p. 39.

Footnote 21:(return)

LBJ, ii. 95, n.; Ha-‘Ibri, New York, viii., no. 33; Lehem
ha-Panim, Hil. Nedarim, no. 228.

Footnote 22:(return)

Nishmat Hayyim, Lemberg, 1858, p. 83a; Azulaï, Shem
ha-Gedolim, s.v. Horowitz; FKN, p. 74, and Ha-Maggid, in. 159. Cf.
Sheerit Yisraël, ch. 32, and Edelman, Gedulat Shaül,
London, 1854. Reifman, in Ha-Maggid, claims that to Luria belongs
the honor of being the first-known Jewish author.

Footnote 23:(return)

See Zikronot, ed. Cohan, pp. 62-66, 90, 313, 336, 380, passim;
Schechter, Studies in Judaism, Philadelphia, 1908, ii. 132.

Footnote 24:(return)

Margoliuth, Hibbure Likkutim, Venice, 1715, Introduction.

Footnote 25:(return)

Horowitz, Frankfurter Rabbinen, Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1883, pp.
30-35; FKN, pp. 73-91; Emden, op. cit, p. 125; and biographies.

Footnote 26:(return)

LTI, ii. 81, n.; Hannover, Yeven Mezulah, Warsaw, 1872, p.
7b.

Footnote 27:(return)

Zunz, Literaturgeschichte, pp. 433-435, 442; Buber, Anshe Shem,
Cracow, 1895, pp. 307-309; Benjacob, Ozar ha-Sefarim, p. 396; JE,
xi. 217; Bikkure ha-‘Ittim, 1830, p. 43. Jacob of Gnesen, I
suspect, must have lived in Russia.