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The "titled" inteligenzia, reared in the Russian schools, who had drifted away from Judaism, was now joined by that other intelligenzia, the product of heder and yeshibah, who had acquired European culture through the medium of neo-Hebraic literature, and was in closer contact with the masses of the Jewish people.
The Russian publications, again, which were intended for the Jewish and the Russian intelligenzia, pursued in the main a political goal, the fight for equal rights and the defence of Judaism against its numerous detractors. In both groups one can discern the gradual ripening of the social Jewish consciousness, the advance from elementary and often naive notions to more complex ideas.
At any rate, the league between the new Jewish intelligenzia and the Government was an undeniable fact. The "Crown rabbis" and school teachers from among the graduates of the rabbinical schools of Vilna and Zhitomir played the rôle of Government agents who were apt to resort to police force in their fight against orthodoxy.
The better elements among the intelligenzia, however, looked with consternation upon this growing indifference to everything Jewish among the college-bred Jewish youth. As a result, a new attempt was made toward the very end of this period to restore the Russian-Jewish press. Petersburg, all endeavoring to gain the hearts of the Russian Jewish intelligenzia.
Rather was it a realistic memory of what such war means that made the new America eager to keep the peace as long as it might. There was observable, it is true, a certain amount of rather silly Pacifist sentiment, especially in those circles which the Russians speak of as "Intelligenzia," and Americans as "high-brow."
In the inner, cultural life of Russian Jewry a radical break took place during this period. True, the change did not affect the rank and file of Russian Jewry, being rather confined to its upper layers, to Jewish "society," or the so-called intelligenzia.
The artists were disturbed by futurism and cubism, although as neither paid they were forced to devote the greater part of their inspiration to the marketable California scenery. But the writers: potential or locally arrived novelists, playwrights, poets, essayists, were the real intelligenzia!
The local intelligenzia, those that assured one another how great were each and all, and whose poems or stories found an occasional hospitality in the eastern magazines, who toiled over "precious" paragraphs of criticism or whose single achievement had been a play for the mid-summer jinks of the Bohemian Club; these and their associates, the artists and sculptors, still held aloof, more and more annoyed that Gora Dwight should have had the bad taste to be discovered by the Philistines, and should be flying across the high heavens in spite of their tabu.
The movement which had been called into life by representatives of the intelligenzia succeeded in winning over several champions of rabbinical orthodoxy, among them Samuel Mohilever, the well known rabbi of Bialystok; their affiliation with the new party was largely instrumental in weakening the opposition of the orthodox masses which were inclined to look upon this political movement as a rival of the traditional Messianic idea of Judaism.
The Council of State agreed with this bureaucratic motivation, and the humiliating clause passed into law. While a large part of the Russian public and of the Russian press had succumbed to the prevailing tendencies under the high pressure of the anti-Semitic atmosphere, the progressive elements of the Russian intelligenzia were gradually aroused to a feeling of protest.
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