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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.
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.
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.
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.
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 The few rights the Jews had enjoyed were rescinded one by one. 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.
The early Haskalah, the gentle, celestial daughter of dreamers, was a thing of the past. The educated classes, conscious of the support of the authorities and of the public opinion prevailing in the centres of enlightenment, became aggressive, and made a bold attack upon the course and ways of the traditionalists.
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.
Several years later the authors of this circular had reason to share Lilienthal's disillusionment over the "benevolent intentions" of the Government. This, however, was not strong enough to uproot the original sin of the Haskalah: its constant readiness to lean for support upon "enlightened absolutism."
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.
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.
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