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Updated: June 7, 2025
"Our children," he complains, "have no longer our beliefs; they do not say our prayers, nor have they your beliefs; no more do they say your prayers; they do not pray at all, and they believe in nothing." The struggle between Hasidim and Mitnaggedim ended with the conversionist policy of Nicholas I, which united them against the Maskilim.
It is questionable whether the work of the Galician Maskilim would not have been doomed to perpetual sterility, with no hope of ever making an impression on the Jewish masses, if an Italian writer had not appeared on the scene, who possessed the Jewish feeling that was lacking in his predecessors.
Till about the "sixties," then, the Russo-Jewish Maskilim were the recipients, and the German Jews were the donors. The German Jews wrote, the Russian Jews read.
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.
The pioneer Maskilim learned to handle it with ease and clearness that would do credit to a modern writer in a much more developed European language.
A profound observer of Jewish conditions in the Pale, he realized that the concrete life of the masses should be portrayed in their living daily speech, in the Yiddish vernacular, which was treated with contempt by nearly all the Maskilim of that period.
Maskilim were employed by the authorities as tax collectors, and these, as is ever the case with rapacious farmers of taxes, besides executing the harsh laws of the tyrant, looked also to their own aggrandizement, and harassed their pious coreligionists in all ways conceivable.
As the history of this period is incomplete without an acquaintance with the lives of some of the Maskilim who sowed the seeds that burst into blossom under the favorable conditions of the "sixties," I shall select, as specimens out of a multitude, the two who, more than any others, furthered the cause of Haskalah, Isaac Bär Levinsohn and Mordecai Aaron Günzburg.
If the first two causes are more or less just, the third displays a ludicrously naive conception of life. Lebensohn was speaking of a famished people, the majority of whom ate meat only once a week, on the Sabbath, and he reproaches them with gastronomic excesses and extravagance in dress. We shall see that his simple outlook was shared by most of the Russian Maskilim.
No less trenchant and outspoken was he against the serried array of self-styled "reformers" of Judaism. He could not forgive the German rabbis and Russian Maskilim for presuming to "dictate" to their coreligionists what to select and what to reject in matters religious. The whole movement he condemned as a mere imitation of Protestant Christianity. To renovate Judaism!
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