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Updated: May 1, 2025
As an offset against these shadows of the past, Mapu lovingly paints the barely visible shoots of the new life, the Maskil, who strives to reconcile religion and science, the misty figure of the Jewish youth who goes to the Russian school in the hope of serving his people, the profiles of the Russian Jewish intellectuals, and the captains of industry from among the rising Jewish plutocracy.
Long after the pious element in Germany had been aroused to the dangers that lurked in the wake of their "Aufklärung," and had begun to endeavor to check its further progress by excommunication and other methods, the Russian Jews remained "seekers after light." They might have condemned a Maskil, they had not yet condemned Haskalah.
Erter went on with his Rabbinic studies, and married a second time. A lucky chance brought him in contact with a Maskil who led him to the study of Hebrew grammar, and he became a devotee of the Haskalah. Encouraged by Rapoport and Krochmal, with whom he had entered into relations, he published his first satire on Hasidism. It evoked considerable comment.
"For," says he, "the Polish Jews are, indeed, for the most part not enlightened by science; their manners and way of life are still rude, but they are loyal to the religion of their fathers and to the laws of their country." It is because I regard him as the greatest Maskil of his time that I have dwelt on Maimon at such length.
In the last of his great satires, "The Two Joseph-ben-Simons", Gordon gives a sombre and at the same time lofty picture of the manners of the ghetto, an exact description of the wicked, arbitrary domination exercised by the Kahal, and an idealization of the Maskil, powerless to prevail single-handed in the combat with combined reactionary forces.
What Leroy-Beaulieu says of Maimon, "that type of the most cultured Jew to be found before the French Revolution," might more justly be applied to many a less prominent Maskil after him: "Despite his learning and philosophy he sank deeper than the most degraded of his fellow-men, because in repudiating his ancestral faith he had lost the staff which, through all their humiliations, served as a prop even to the most debased of ancient Jews."
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