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In 1870 Alexander II. was on a visit to the Kingdom of Poland, and there beheld the sight of dense masses of Hasidim with their long earlocks and flowing coats. The Tzar, repelled by this spectacle, enjoined upon the Polish governors strictly to enforce in their domains the old Russian law prohibiting the Jewish form of dress.
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?
The other Tendenz-novels of Smolenskin reflect the same double-fronted struggle: against the stagnation of the orthodox, particularly the Hasidim, and against the disloyalty of the "enlightened."
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. Intermarriage, social intercourse of any kind, was prohibited between Hasidim and Mitnaggedim.
Frequently the struggle manifested itself in tragic-comic and even repulsive forms. In some places the police adopted the practice of cutting the peies or shortening the long coats of the Jews by force. The opposition to the authorities was particularly vigorous in the Kingdom of Poland where the rank and file of Hasidim were ready to suffer martyrdom for any Jewish custom, however obsolete.
Many Hasidim lost themselves completely in this idle revelry and neglected their business affairs and their starving families, looking forward in their blind fatalism to the blessings which were to be showered upon them through the intercession of the Tzaddik.
According to the local tradition, the Jewish residents, Hasidim almost to a man, were so profoundly stirred by the imperial ukase that they assembled in the synagogues, fasting and praying, and finally resolved to adopt "energetic" measures.
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!"
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.
They were surrounded by immense throngs of Hasidim, unenlightened, ecstatic, worshipping saints during their lifetime. The most honored among these hasidic dynasties was that of Chernobyl. It was founded in the Ukraina toward the end of the eighteenth century by an itinerant preacher, or Maggid, called Nahum. Mordecai's "Empire" fell asunder after his death.
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