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Updated: June 7, 2025
These views, at first advocated by the Hebrew-writing and Hebrew-reading Maskilim, gradually filtered into the various strata of Russo-Jewish society, and when the clouds began to gather fast in Russia's sky, and the change in the monarch's policy augured the approach of evil times, Zionism rapidly made enthusiastic converts even among the most Russified of the Jewish youth.
Impatient to save the few years allotted to him on earth, and undeterred by the entreaties and the threats of his wife, he leaves for Odessa, the Mecca of the Maskilim, and begins to prepare himself for admission into the gymnasium. "While there is a drop of blood in my veins," he writes to his forsaken wife, "I shall try to finish my course of studies.
Petersburg united in honoring him when he visited the Russian capital in 1881. And when he was snatched away in the midst of his usefulness, a victim of unremitting devotion to his people, not only Maskilim, but Mitnaggedim and Hasidim felt that "a prince and a mighty one had fallen in Israel!"
Ha-Shahar soon became the organ of all in the ghetto who thought, felt, and fought, the spokesman of the nationalist Maskilim, setting forth their demands as culture bearers and patriots.
Continuing under the tuition of the curate, he studied French, the language of his preference, then German, and, only in the last instance, Russian. The Russian language was not held in high esteem by the Maskilim of Mapu's day.
The economic changes affecting the bourgeoisie and the influence exercised by the realism and the utilitarian tendencies of the Russian literature of the time had not a little to do with the modified aims cherished in the camp of the Maskilim.
Their number increased when the Hasidic movement threatened to render the knowledge of the Talmud unpopular; and when the Maskilim, too, made them a target for their attacks, there was hardly a town in which such institutions were not to be found. There the cherished hopes of the Gaon were finally realized. Within its walls gathered the elect of the Russo-Jewish youth for almost a century.
The members of this association were to be granted land in the northern or southern provinces of Russia and to enjoy special privileges. The bait proved tempting, and, as a consequence, some prominent Maskilim, too weak to resist the allurements, precipitated themselves into the Greek Catholic fold.
Solomon Zalkind Minor, who lectured in German, acquired a reputation as a preacher in Russian since his election to the rabbinate of Minsk . He was called "the Jellinek of Russia" by the Maskilim. Aaron Elijah Pumpyansky began to preach in Russian at Ponevezh, in Kovno . Germanization at last gave way to Russification.
The literary movement of the first half of the nineteenth century did not succeed in making itself felt among the masses. It failed to call forth a national literature of even a slight degree of originality. The Maskilim of Galicia fell into the same mistake as their predecessors in Germany.
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