Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 25, 2025
The new Hebrew periodical ha-Shahar published several of his "contemporary epics" in which he vented his wrath against petrified Rabbinism. He portrays the misery of a Jewish woman who is condemned to enter married life at the bidding of the marriage-broker, without love and without happiness, or he describes the tragedy of another woman whose future is wrecked by a "Dot over the i."
Exhausted by his fruitless struggle, Menashe died, unappreciated and almost unnoticed by his contemporaries. A critical attitude toward the existing order of things could on occasions assert itself in the environment of Rabbinism, where the mind, though forced into the mould of scholasticism, was yet working at high speed.
The early German Maskilim, in trying to escape the Scylla of Rabbinism, fell victims to the Charybdis of Germanism. They possessed originality neither of style nor of sentiment, neither of rhyme nor of reason. Hebrew poetry was an adaptation of current German poetry. The very best the period produced, the Mosaïde of Wessely, was influenced by and largely an imitation of Klopstock and others.
On p. 165 he talks of the "abuse of Rabbinism," in that the Rabbis tacked on new laws to old texts. "Its origin," says George Eliot's pencilled jotting, "was the need for freedom to modify laws" a fine remark.
His thought had marched on: and whereas it had been his complaint to Joseph that Rabbinism laid no stress on immortality, further investigation of the Pentateuch had shown him that Moses himself had taken no account whatsoever of the conception, nor striven to bolster up the morality of to-day by the terrors of a posthumous to-morrow.
Even the orthodox had recourse to this modern expedient of periodicals in their endeavor to put up a defense of Rabbinism. Already tendencies were beginning to crop up radically different from any Judaism had betrayed previously. It also appeared in Vienna.
The Kabbala, with its mist-shrouded symbolism, so grateful to the feelings and the imagination, chimed in better than rationalistic philosophy with the depressed humor under which the greater part of the Jews were then laboring. Another force antagonistic to rationalistic philosophy was the Rabbinism transplanted from France and Germany.
A pitiless combat ensued between the humanists and Rabbinism, and the consequences were fateful for the one party as well as the other. Rabbinism felt that its very essence had been shaken, and that it was destined to disappear, at least in its traditional form.
"The Pale" is a gigantic ghetto where the oldest form of rabbinism prevails to this day. Yet the same fear of the superiority of the Jewish mind haunts the government; it is the alleged reason for practically closing up all the avenues of the higher education for them. Only three per cent of the total number of students are admitted to the universities and to the technical schools.
The Jews, finally successful in emancipating themselves from the trammels of rabbinism, had transferred their extraordinary devotion from the Talmud to secular studies. They filled the schools and the universities of the empire with zealous and intelligent pupils, who carried off most of the honors.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking