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Unconcerned by the hail of lashes from which he was bleeding, he stopped to pick up his cap so as to avoid going bare-headed, and then resumed his march between the two rows of executioners. The unfortunate brothers were released from their Siberian exile during the reign of Alexander II. Hasidic life exhibited no doubt many examples of lofty idealism and moral purity.
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. 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 new Jewish intelligenzia showed utter indifference to the sentiments of the Jewish masses, and did not hesitate to induce the Government to interfere in the affairs of inner Jewish life. Thus by a regulation issued in 1864 all hasidic books were subjected to a most rigorous censorship, and Jewish printing-presses were placed under a more vigilant supervision than theretofore.
Progressive Jewry was rightly incensed against the obsolete forms of Jewish life which obstructed all healthy development; against the fierce superstition of the hasidic environment, against the charlatanism of degenerating Tzaddikism, against the impenetrable religious fanaticism which was throttling the noblest strivings of the Jewish mind.
His successor Rabbi Mendel Lubavicher proved an energetic organizer of the hasidic masses. He was highly esteemed not only as a learned Talmudist he wrote rabbinical novellae and response and as a preacher of Hasidism, but also as a man of great practical wisdom, whose advice was sought by thousands of people in family matters no less than in communal and commercial affairs.
Sharp and sudden was the transition from rabbinic scholasticism and soporific hasidic mysticism to this new world of ideas, flooded with the light of science, to these new revelations announcing the glad tidings of the freedom of thought, of the demolition of all traditional fetters, of the annihilation of all religious and national barriers, of the brotherhood of all mankind.
His translation of Campe's "Discovery of America" and Politz' Universal History, as well as his own history of the Franco-Russian War of 1812, compiled from various sources, were, as far as Russia is concerned, the first specimens of secular literature in pure Hebrew, which boldly claimed their place side by side with rabbinic and hasidic writings.
The predominant note of contemporary Hebrew literature is the Zionist ideal stripped of its mystical envelopes. It may be asserted that the Messianic hope in this new form is in the act of producing a transformation in Polish Hasidic surroundings, identical with that achieved by humanism in Lithuania.
When, in 1838, the Kahal of Ushitza, in the government of Podolia, was implicated in the murder of an informer, Rabbi Israel of Ruzhin was arrested on the charge of abetting the murder. The hasidic "Tzar" languished in prison for twenty-two months. He was finally set free and placed under police surveillance.
Every Hasid was convinced that reverence was due only to his own "Rebbe," and he brushed aside the claims of the other Tzaddiks. Whenever the adherents of the various Tzaddiks met, they invariably engaged in passionate "party" quarrels, which on occasions, especially after the customary hasidic drinking bouts, ended in physical violence.
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