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Updated: May 26, 2025
The year 1848 was the first scholastic year in the two enlightenment nurseries, the rabbinical schools of Vilna and Zhitomir. Beginning with that year a number of elementary Crown schools for Jewish children were opened in various cities of the Pale. The cruel persecutions of the outgoing regime affected the development of the schools in a twofold manner.
This did not present him from being a decided opponent of the new enlightenment. In the course of Lilienthal's educational propaganda in 1843, Rabbi Mendel was summoned by the Government to participate in the deliberations of the Rabbinical Committee at St. Petersburg. There he found himself in a tragic situation.
'We are the men who know all about Moses and the traditions of the elders; we judge this new phenomenon not by the question, How does it come to our consciences, and how does it appeal to our hearts? but we judge it by the question, How does it fit our Rabbinical learning and subtle casuistical laws?
"This is some of your cursed Rabbinical laws, it is not Judaism, it is not true Judaism. God never made any such law." "Hush!" said Reb Shemuel sternly. "It is the holy Torah. It is not even the Rabbis, of whom you speak like an Epicurean. It is in Leviticus, chapter 21, verse 7: 'Neither shall they take a woman put away from her husband; for he is holy unto his God.
Hence, the need arises for a savior to mediate between man and God. What a construction is this in which myth, rabbinical theology and pagan dualistic cosmologies are drawn together to furnish the setting for a juridical drama!
Probably he had in his thought the Rabbinical limitations which made it as much duty to 'hate thine enemy' as to 'love thy neighbour. Probably, too, he accepted the national limitations, which refused to see any neighbours outside the Jewish people. 'Neighbourhood, in his judgment, implied 'nearness, and he wished to know how far off the boundaries of the region included in the command lay.
He said, 'Rabbi, we know. There is more than a soupcon of patronage in that. He is giving Jesus Christ a certificate, duly signed and sealed by Rabbinical authority. He evidently thinks that it is no small matter that he and some of his fellows should have been disposed to look with favour upon this new Teacher.
Of the Hebrew, a small portion only could be traced to the Bible; the remainder seemed to be in the Rabbinical dialect. All trick or conspiracy was out of the question. Not only had the young woman ever been a harmless, simple creature; but she was evidently labouring under a nervous fever.
We may receive the Scriptures, and be persuaded of their authenticity, on the faith of ecclesiastical tradition; but it seems to me that we may reject, at the same time, all the artificial theology which has been raised on these Scriptures by doctors of the Church, with as much right as they receive the Old Testament on the authority of Jewish scribes and doctors whilst they reject the oral law and all rabbinical literature.
By the force of enthusiasm for faith, it drew its adherents together into a firmly welded unit in contrast with Rabbinism, which sought the same goal by the aid of the formal law. Scenting danger, the rabbinical hierarchy declared war upon the Kabbala. Emden opposed Eibeschuetz, the Polish Sabbatians and Frankists were fought to the death, the Wilna Gaon organized a campaign against the Chassidim.
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