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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.
The Russian Poles, under the leadership of M. Dmowski, have rallied loyally round the Tsar; and there are many signs that the long-deferred Russo-Polish rapprochement is at length on the point of fulfillment.
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.
In a word, the life of the Russian ghetto, its misery and its passions, the positive and the negative types of that vanishing world, have been set down in the writings of Smolenskin with such power of realism and such profound knowledge of conditions that it is impossible to form a just idea of Russo-Polish Judaism without having read what he has written.
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.
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 colonies was superior to the Grub Street style prevalent in Dr.
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.
His devotion to his wife was not diminished even after he had been compelled to divorce her because of his supposed heretical proclivities. 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.
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. 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.
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 the Kulturkampf of the Russo-Polish and of the German Jews in the eighteenth century.
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