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Updated: May 13, 2025
At this point ceases the dominance of the litterateurs of Austrian Poland. The centre of literary activity was thereafter transferred to Russia permanently. Hasidism was about to take complete possession of Galicia, and Hebrew literature, confined to a few small circles, was never again to reach there the heights which it had occupied in the days of Rapoport and Krochmal.
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.
In this fashion Rapoport, who did not hesitate to write on Bible criticism in Hebrew, the first to use the ancient language for the purpose, endeavored to reconcile the reason of a modern mind with the faith and the Messianic hope of an orthodox Rabbi.
Hasidism, triumphant, having conquered the whole of Russian-Poland, threatened to crush all thought and reason at the very time in which the Kulturkampf was battering at the gates of the Polish ghetto. Rapoport, we have seen, contended with Hasidism in a witty pamphlet.
Besides news bearing on politics and literature, and philological essays, and poems more or less bombastic, Ha-Maggid published a number of original articles of great value. Its issues formed the link between the old masters, Rapoport and Luzzatto, and young Russian writers like Gordon and Lilienblum.
These two leaders, Rapoport and Krochmal, stimulated a whole school of writers, whose works established the fortune of the Hebrew language in Galicia. With more or less originality, all departments of literature and science were cultivated. Very soon, however, the times ceased to be propitious to serene thinking and investigation of the past.
He determined to leave Russia for the civilized Occident, the promised land in the dreams of the Russian Maskilim, beautified by the presence of Rapoport and Luzzatto. His first destination was Prague, the residence of Rapoport, then Vienna, and later he pushed his way to Paris and London. Everywhere he studied and made notes.
S.L. Rapoport's paper, 'Independent Jews of Arabia, which will be found at the end of these notes." No such account appeared in the work, but in the Bikkure Haittim for the year 1824, p. 51, there appears an interesting essay in Hebrew on the subject by Rapoport, to which the reader is referred.
The disciple and successor of the German Meassefim, Rapoport inherited from them the conviction which characterized the Jewish Maskil, that science alone and modern civilization can raise the intellectual level and improve the political situation of his co-religionists. All his life he fought for the Haskalah.
All these efforts support Levinsohn's claim to the title of Founder of a modern Jewish Science in Russia, though his scholarly achievements cannot be classed with those of his German and Galician fellow-writers, such as Rapoport, Zunz, Jost and Geiger. Levinsohn stood entirely aloof from the propaganda of bureaucratic enlightenment which was carried on by Lilienthal in the name of Uvarov.
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