United States or Antigua and Barbuda ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But the latest experiences in their own country put Haskalah in a very different light from that in which they were wont to regard it. Formerly the opposition to it had been limited to the very land that gave it birth.
But he saw that in the home of Haskalah, the Biur, and the Meassefim, apostasy increased, Hebrew was almost forgotten, and Judaism was declining, and he blamed the pellucid water at the source of the stream for the muddy pool at its mouth.
The "Lithuanian Jerusalem" had put aside its sceptre, and it lay down for a long sleep, with dreams of the Haskalah, "twin-sister of faith". As Wilna has since that time witnessed no excesses of fanaticism, so also it has not known an intense life, the acrid opposition between Haskalah and religion. It remained the capital of the moderate, traditional attitude and religious opportunism.
Yet he succeeded in giving a strong impetus to the Haskalah movement, and builded better than he knew. The statement in his address at the dedication of the Riga school, "This hour we may call the hour of the renaissance of the mental education of Israel," which reads like an oratorical platitude, was not entirely visionary. The real history of Haskalah in Russia commences with Lilienthal.
Their strenuous pleadings for equal rights were, indeed, ineffectual, but this did not lessen their admiration for the beauties of civilization, nor blind them to its benefits. The beautiful city of Odessa, on the Black Sea, at that time just out of its infancy and full of the virility and aspiration of youth, was also in the full glare of the German Haskalah movement.
The advocates of Haskalah gradually came to recognize the truth, which Lilienthal admitted afterwards, that for a Russian rabbi a thorough knowledge of the Talmud was absolutely indispensable. But it was with the object of discouraging such knowledge that the seminaries had been suggested by Uvarov, and it was this study that was almost entirely ignored in them.
In his native town, gloomy as it was, there was at least the glow of sincerity. Haskalah had to be snatched by stealth, but it was sweeter because thus snatched. In Odessa, where the fruit of the tree of knowledge could be obtained for the asking, it turned into the apples of Sodom.
Haskalah during his reign was like the Leviathan in the Talmud legend which resembled an island, so that wayfarers approached it to moor under its lee and find shelter in its shade, but as soon as they began to walk and cook on it, it would turn and submerge them in the stormy and bottomless sea.
From which it would appear that though the opposition to Haskalah in Russia was by no means as violent as had been the opposition to enlightenment in France, for instance, or even among the Jews of Germany and Austria, it was a bitter and stubborn conflict between parents and children in the adjustment of old ideals to a new environment.
The cities on the borders of Russia were the first strongholds of Haskalah, and among them, as noted before, few struggled so intensely for their intellectual and civil emancipation as those in the provinces of Courland and Livonia.
Word Of The Day