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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.
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. 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.
This high regard for antiquity produced a belief in the infallibility of the rabbis on the part of the 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.
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 and too vain of his achievements.
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!"
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.
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.
Repulsed by the Mitnaggedim, he sought help with the Hasidim. He was equally ill- fitted for their life. Their uncouth mystical exaltation, the absurdity of their superstitions, and their hypocrisy drove him to exasperation. He cast himself into the whirl of life, became assistant to a cantor at a synagogue, and then teacher of Hebrew and Talmud.
"Our children," he complains, "have no longer our beliefs; they do not say our prayers, nor have they your beliefs; no more do they say your prayers; they do not pray at all, and they believe in nothing." The struggle between Hasidim and Mitnaggedim ended with the conversionist policy of Nicholas I, which united them against the Maskilim.
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?
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