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Updated: May 28, 2025
It seemed that he was just the man to be the successful executor of the czar's plan. The Maskilim, above all, hailed him as the champion of the cause of Haskalah. He was their Moses or Ezra, the God-sent redeemer of their benighted brethren out of the quagmire of fanaticism. From various cities numerous urgent appeals came to him to hasten the execution of his great plan.
He who was ready to undergo martyrdom for his ideas, this champion of the Haskalah, his heart famishing for knowledge and justice, was not long in discerning, with his penetrating, perspicacious mind, that he had not yet reached the best of modern worlds.
When Mendelssohn emerged from obscurity, and, despite ill-health and ignorance, attained culture and breeding, his associate, who was with him the most important factor in German Haskalah, was the renowned Naphtali, or Hartwig, Wessely, whose grandfather Joseph Reis had been among the fugitives from the Cossack massacres in 1648.
The Hebrew periodicals, and partly also those in Yiddish which addressed themselves to the masses, preached Haskalah in the narrower sense. They advocated the necessity of a Russian elementary education and of secular culture in general; they emphasized the uselessness of the traditional Jewish school training, and exposed superstition and obscurantism.
However, during the period under consideration he moved entirely within the boundaries of the Haskalah, of which he was a most radical exponent. Persecuted for his harmless liberalism by the fanatics of his native town of Vilkomir, Lilienblum began to ponder over the question of Jewish religious reforms.
To the member of the Lovers of the New Haskalah, surreptitiously studying the Bible of the "Dessauer," the Hebrew was rather a translation of, or commentary on, the German, and served him as a bridge to cross over into the otherwise hardly accessible field of German literature.
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?
A similar school was opened in Kishinev by Stern, and in the early "forties" there was hardly a Jewish community of note without one or more of such Jewish public institutions. Several well-to-do Maskilim not only founded but, like Perl, also maintained such schools, and gave instruction in some or all of the subjects taught in them. The "forties" began auspiciously for Haskalah in Russia.
Youths and maidens, anxious for the new Haskalah, are now to be met with everywhere, nor are any ashamed to learn a trade." The schools exerted a salutary influence on the younger generation, and the older people, too, began to view life differently, only that they were still reluctant to discard their old-fashioned garb.
In order to guard against the danger with which the spread of the new sect was fraught, and enlighten at least the more intelligent of the people, the intellectual Jews of Poland took up the work of the Meassefim, and constituted themselves the champions of the Haskalah, the liberal movement. They became thus the lieutenants of the Austrian government.
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