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Updated: May 6, 2025
In an article on The Ways of the Talmud, by Moses Löb Lilienblum, the prevailing Jewish religious observances were vehemently attacked. This was followed by another article from the pen of Gordon, Wisdom for Those Who Wander in Spirit, with suggestions for adapting religion to the needs of the times, and a still more powerful one, The Chaotic World, by Smolenskin.
In Odessa Lilienblum joined the ranks of the Russified college youth, and became imbued with the radical ideas of Chernyshevski and Pisaryev, gaining the reputation of a "nihilist." His theory of Jewish reform, superannuated by his new materialistic world view, was thrown aside, and a gaping void opened in the soul of the writer.
Lilienblum who, in 1877, believed that life without a university education was not worth living, became a repentant sinner. Russian Jewry seethed with religious enthusiasm. Moses Isaac Darshan, "the Khelmer Maggid," preached for six hours at a time to crowded synagogues. Asher Israelit, less trenchant, but equally effective, exhorted crowds to repentance.
This pessimistic strain recurs in all the later writings of Gordon. Even after the events of 1882, when revived hatred and persecution had thrown the camp of the emancipators into disorder, and the most ardent of the anti-Rabbinic champions, like Lilienblum and Braudes, had been driven to the point of raising the flag of Zionism, Gordon alone of all was not carried along with the current.
The crisis that occurred in the life of Lilienblum, torn from his ideal speculations in a provincial town, and forced into contact with an actuality that was as far as possible away from solving the problem of harmonizing religion and life, was the typical fate of all the educated Jews of the period.
Later, a novelist of talent, Reuben Asher Braudes, resumed the attempt to harmonize theory and practice, in his great novel, "Religion and Life". The hero, the young Rabbi Samuel, is the picture of Lilienblum. From the point of view of art, it is one of the best novels in Hebrew literature. Had not Lilienblum, too, stopped in the middle of the road?
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