These auspicious signs renewed the hope of the Maskilim and intensified their zeal. They were convinced of the noble intentions of the Liberator Czar; they were confident that the emperor who emancipated the muzhiks, and expunged many a kromye Yevreyev ("except the Jews") which his father was wont to add to the few privileges he granted his Christian subjects, would ultimately remove the civil disabilities of the Jews altogether. In a very popular song, written by Eliakum Zunser (Vilna, 1836-New York, 1913), then a rising and beloved Badhan (bard) writing in Yiddish and Hebrew, Alexander II was likened to an angel of God who finds the flower of Judah soiled by dirt and trampled in the dust. He rescues it, and revives it with living water, and plants it in his garden, where it flourishes once more.[6] The poets hailed him as the savior and redeemer of Israel. All that the Jews needed was to make themselves deserving of his kindness, and worthy of the citizenship they saw in store for them. In Russian, in Hebrew, and in Yiddish, in prose and in poetry, the one theme uppermost in the mind of all was enlightenment, or rather Russification. From all quarters the reveille was sounded. Abraham Baer Gottlober (1811-1899) exclaimed:

Awake, Israel, and, Judah, arise! Shake off the dust, open wide thine eyes! Justice sprouteth, righteousness is here, Thy sin is forgot, thou hast naught to fear.[7]

More impressively still Judah Loeb Gordon (1831-1892) called:

Arise, my people, 'tis time for waking! Lo, the night is o'er, the day is breaking! Arise and see where'er thou turn'st thy face, How changed are both our time and place.[8]

And in Yiddish, too, an anonymous poet echoed the strain:

Arise, my people, awake from thy dreaming, In foolishness be not immersed! Clear is the sky, brightly the sun is beaming; The clouds are now utterly dispersed!

Rapid growth is sometimes the cause of disease, and sudden changes the cause of disappointment. This was true of the swift progress of Haskalah during the reign of Alexander II. To comprehend fully the tragedies that took place frequently at that time, the disillusionments that embittered the lives of many of the Maskilim, the breaking up of homes and bruising of hearts, one should read Youthful Sins (Plattot Neurim, 1876) by Moses Loeb Lilienblum. The author lays bare a heart ulcerated and mangled by an obsolete education, a meaningless existence, and a forlorn hope. The hero of this little work, masterly less by reason of its artistic finish than the earnestness that pervades it from beginning to end, is "one of the slain of the Babylonian Talmud, whose spiritual life is artificially maintained by a literature itself dead." His diary and letters grant a glimpse into his innermost being; his childhood wasted in a methodless acquisition of futile learning; his boyhood blighted by a union with a wife chosen for him by his parents; his manhood mortified by the realization that in a world thrilling with life and activity he led the existence of an Egyptian mummy. 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. Though the physicians declare that consumption and death must be the inevitable consequence of such application, I will not desist. I will rather die like a man than live like a dog." And on and on he plods over his Latin, his French, his history, geography, and grammar. Two more years and the university will be opened to him, and he will read law, and defend the honor of his people. But in the midst of his ceaseless toil the spectre of his simple wife and his former innocent life appears before him and "will not down." Is Haskalah worth the sacrifices he and his like are daily bringing on its altar? Is not the materialism of the emancipated Maskilim often greater than the medievalism of the fanatical Hasidim? In his native town, gloomy as it was, there was at least the glow of sincerity. Haskalah had to be snatched by stealth, but it was sweeter because thus snatched. In Odessa, where the fruit of the tree of knowledge could be obtained for the asking, it turned into the apples of Sodom. The "lishmah" ideal, the love of culture for its own sake, yielded to the greed which changes everything into a commodity to profit by. Yet, since life demands it, what a pity that his early training had incapacitated him from following the beaten path! He concludes his self-indictment thus, "I have taken an inventory of the business of my life, and I am heartbroken, because I find that in striking the balance there remains on the credit side only a cipher!"

But the tide of Haskalah was not to be stemmed. The "blessed heritage of noble passion," the burning desire for enlightenment and improvement asserted itself at all hazards. The note of despair was lost in the call for action. Odessa continued to be in the forefront. There technical institutes for boys and girls were established in addition to the previously existing public schools. A society by the name of Trud (Labor) was organized (October 11, 1864), for the purpose of teaching useful trades. Its school has ever since been the crown of the institutions of the sort. It was provided with the most modern improvements, a workshop for mechanics and an iron foundry, and it offered a post-graduate course. A similar trade school (remeslenoye uchilishche) had been in existence since May 1, 1862, in Zhitomir, where, besides geometry, mechanics, chemistry, physics, etc., instruction was given in carpentry, turning, tin, copper, and blacksmith work.[9] Through the efforts of Rabbi Solomon Zalkind Minor a Sabbath School and a Night School for artisans were opened in Minsk (1861), and a reference and circulating library for the general public (1863), and similar educational institutions were soon called into existence in many other cities.

Those were the days of organizing and consolidating among Jews and Gentiles alike. At the time when Abraham Lincoln was proclaiming his famous "United we stand, divided we fall," Julius Slovacki in Poland pleaded the cause of the peasantry of his country, and the Alliance Israelite Universelle issued a call to the entire house of Israel "to defend the honor of the Jewish name wherever it is attacked; to encourage, by all means at our disposal, the pursuit of useful handicrafts; to combat, where necessary, the ignorance and vice engendered by oppression; to work, by the power of persuasion and by all the moral influences at our command, for the emancipation of our brethren who still suffer under the burden of exceptional legislation; to hasten and solidify complete enfranchisement by the intellectual and moral regeneration of our brethren." A powerful movement for the upliftment of the masses was also taking hold of the educated classes among the Russians. Professor Kostomarov started a systematic campaign for the education of the common people. A species of philanthropic intoxication seized upon the more enlightened Russian youth. A society of Narodniki, or Common People, so-called, was organized. Young men and women renounced high rank, and students came out of their seclusion and joined the people, dressed in their garb, spoke their dialect, led their life, and, having won their confidence, gradually opened their minds to value the blessings of education, and their hearts to desire them. These examples from within and without resulted in a similar attempt among the Russian Jews. An organization was perfected (December, 1863) which exercised a great civilizing influence for almost half a century, the Society for the Promotion of Haskalah among the Jews of Russia.

To the credit of the Jewish financiers be it said that they were always the banner bearers of enlightenment. It had been so with German Aufklaerung, when Ben-David, Itzig, Friedlaender, and Jacobson, laid the corner-stone of the intellectual rebirth of their people. It was more especially so in Russia during the "sixties." Odessa was the most enlightened, because it was the wealthiest, of Jewish communities, as the benumbing poverty of the Pale was largely to blame for the unfriendly attitude towards whatever did not bear the stamp of Jewishness on its surface. The Society for the Promotion of Haskalah, too, owes its existence to some of the most prominent Russo-Jewish merchants. Its original officers were Joseph Yosel Guenzburg, President; his son Horace Guenzburg, First Vice-president; Rabbi A. Neuman, Second Vice-president; the Brodskys, and, the most active of them all, its Secretary, Leon Rosenthal (1817-1887). Busy as he was with his financial affairs, Rosenthal devoted considerable time to the propagation of enlightenment among his coreligionists. Many a youthful Maskil was indebted to him for material as well as moral support, and it was due to him that Osip Rabinovich finally succeeded in publishing the Razsvyet (Dawn, 1860), the first journal in Russian devoted to Jewish interests.

The Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment was not unlike the Alliance Israelite Universelle, only on a smaller scale. Its object was "to spread the knowledge of the Russian language among the Jews, to publish and assist others in publishing, in Russian as well as in Hebrew, useful works and journals, to aid in carrying out the purposes of the Society, and, further, to assist the young in devoting themselves to the pursuit of science and knowledge." For several years, owing to the indifference of the public, it had a hard struggle to live up to its ideal. But continuously, if slowly, it gained in membership, so that in 1884 it had an affiliation of 545. During the first twenty years of its existence its income amounted to 338,685 rubles, its expenditures to 309,998 rubles. In 1880 it endowed an agricultural college for Jewish boys. When, in the same year, medical schools for women were opened, and Jewish girls in large numbers took up the study of medicine, the Society set aside the sum of 18,900 rubles for the support of the needy among them. Many a young man was aided in the pursuit of his chosen career by the Society. It directed its activities principally to the younger generation, yet it did not neglect the older. With its assistance Sabbath Schools and Evening Schools were opened in Berdichev, Zhitomir, Poltava, and other cities; libraries were founded; interesting Hebrew books on scientific subjects were published. Thus it had a two-fold object: in those who were drifting away it aimed to reawaken knowledge or love of Judaism by translating some of the most important Jewish books into Russian (the Haggadah, in 1871, the prayer book, Pentateuch, and Psalms, in 1872) as well as text-books and catechisms; and it popularized science among those who would not or could not read on such topics in Russian or other living tongues. In both directions it was a power for good among the Jews of Russia.[10]

These united efforts of the Government, the Maskilim, and the Jewish financiers produced an effect the like of which had perhaps been witnessed only during the Hellenistic craze, in the period of the second commonwealth of Judea. Russian Jewry began to "progress" as never before. In almost all the large cities, particularly in Odessa, St. Petersburg, and Moscow, the Jews were fast becoming Russified. Heretofore cooped up, choking each other in the Pale as in a Black Hole, they were now wild with an excessive desire for Russification. What Maimon said of a few, could now be applied to hundreds and thousands, they were "like starving persons suddenly treated to a delicious meal." They flocked to the institutions of learning in numbers far exceeding their due proportion. They were among the reporters, contributors, and editorial writers of some of the most influential Russian journals. They entered the professions, and distinguished themselves in art.[11]

The ambition of the wealthy was no longer to have a son-in-law who was well-versed in the Torah, but a graduate from a university, the possessor of a diploma, the wearer of a uniform. The bahur lost his lustre in the presence of the "gymnasiast." This ambition pervaded more or less all classes of Russo-Jewish society. A decade or two before, especially in the "forties," orthodoxy had been as uncompromising as it was unenlightened. "To carry a handkerchief on the Sabbath," as Zunser says, "to read a pamphlet of the 'new Haskalah,' or commit some other transgression of the sort, was sufficient to stamp one an apikoros (heretic)."[12] Reb Israel Salanter, when he learned that his son had gone to Berlin to study medicine, removed his shoes, and sat down on the ground to observe shivah (seven days of mourning). When Mattes der Sheinker (saloon-keeper) discovered that his boy Motke (later famous as Mark Antokolsky) had been playing truant from the heder, and had hidden himself in the garret to carve figures, he beat him unmercifully, because he had broken the second commandment. This was greatly altered in the latter part of the "seventies." Jacob Prelooker has a different story to tell.

A remarkable change—he says[13]—had taken place in the minds of my parents since I had overcome all difficulties and become a student of a royal college. Not only were they reconciled to me, but they were distinctly proud of me. Old Rabbi Abraham now delighted in conversation and discussion with his grandson, who seemed to him almost like an inhabitant of another world, of the terra incognita of modern knowledge and science. In the town inhabited chiefly by Jews the very appearance of the rabbi's grandson in the uniform of a royal college created an immense sensation, and I became naturally the hero of the day. The older generation lamented that now an end would be put to the very existence of Israel and the sacred synagogue, while the younger people envied me and were inspired to follow my example.

Such scenes occurred not only in Pinsk, but, not infrequently, in other towns of the Pale as well.

The striving for intellectual enlightenment manifested itself in the refining of religious customs. Though Russian Jewry "has never experienced any of the ritualistic struggles that Germany has witnessed,"[14] yet reform and Haskalah always went hand in hand. The attacks on tradition by the Maskilim of the "forties" and the early "fifties" were mild and guarded compared with the assaults by the generation that followed. With the appearance of the periodicals the combat was intensified. Ha-Meliz, and, later, Ha-Shahar in Hebrew, and Kol Mebasser in Yiddish were the organs of those who were dissatisfied with the old, and sought to introduce the new. It was in the latter that Dos Polische Yingel (The Polish Boy), by Linetzky, first appeared, and it proved so popular that the editor published it in book form long before it was finished in the periodical. In an article on The Ways of the Talmud, by Moses Loeb Lilienblum, the prevailing Jewish religious observances were vehemently attacked. This was followed by another article from the pen of Gordon, Wisdom for Those Who Wander in Spirit, with suggestions for adapting religion to the needs of the times, and a still more powerful one, The Chaotic World, by Smolenskin. The muse ceased to content herself with "flame-songs that burn their pathway" to the heart. She preferred to appeal to the head. She no longer tried

In strains as sweet As angels use ... to whisper peace.

In cutting criticisms and biting satires she exposed time-honored but time-worn beliefs and practices. Gordon was a militant reformer in his younger days, and so were Menahem Mendel Dolitzky and the lesser poets of the period. Needless to say, the Jewish-Russian press was an enemy of ultra-orthodoxy. Osip Rabinovich, the leading Russo-Jewish journalist, made his debut with an article in which he denounced the superstitious customs of his people in unmeasured terms.[15] The motto chosen for the Razsvyet (1860) was "Let there be light," and the platform it adopted was to elevate the masses by teaching them to lead the life of all nations, participate in their civilization and progress, and preserve, increase, and improve the national heritage of Israel.[16]

Yet journalists and poets were outdone by scholars and novelists in the battle for reform. Lebensohn's didactic drama Emet we-Emunah (Truth and Faith, Vilna, 1867, 1870), in which he attempts to reconcile true religion with the teachings of science, was mild compared with Dos Polische Yingel or Shatzkes' radical interpretations of the stories of the rabbis in his Ha-Mafteah (The Key, Warsaw, 1866-1869), and both were surpassed by Raphael Kohn's clever little work Hut ha-Meshullash (The Triple Cord, Odessa, 1874), in which many prohibited things are ingeniously proved permissible according to the Talmud. But the most outspoken advocate of reform was Abraham Mapu (1808-1867), author of the first realistic novel, or novel of any kind, in Hebrew literature, the 'Ayit Zabua' (The Painted Vulture). His Rabbi Zadok, the miracle-worker, who exploits superstition for his own aggrandizement; Rabbi Gaddiel, the honest but mistaken henchman of Rabbi Zadok; Ga'al, the parvenu, who seeks to obliterate an unsavory past by fawning upon both; the Shadkan, or marriage-broker, who pretends to be the ambassador of Heaven, to unite men and women on earth,—in these and similar types drawn from life and depicted vividly, Mapu held up to the execration of the world the hypocrites who "do the deeds of Zimri and claim the reward of Phinehas," whose outward piety is often a cloak for inner impurity, and whose ceremonialism is their skin-deep religion. These characters served for many years as weapons in the hands of the combatants enlisted in the army arrayed for "the struggle between light and darkness."

The waves of the Renaissance and the Reformation sweeping over Russian Jewry reached even the sacred precincts of the synagogues, the batte midrashim, and the yeshibot. The Tree of Life College in Volozhin became a foster-home of Haskalah. The rendezvous of the brightest Russo-Jewish youths, it was the centre in which grew science and culture, and whence they were disseminated far and wide over the Pale. Hebrew, German, and Russian were surreptitiously studied and taught. Buckle and Spencer, Turgenief and Tolstoi were secretly passed from hand to hand, and read and studied with avidity. Some students advocated openly the transformation of the yeshibah into a rabbinical seminary on the order of the Berlin Hochschule. The new learning found an ardent supporter in Zebi Hirsh Dainov, "the Slutsker Maggid" (1832-1877), who preached Russification and Reformation from the pulpits of the synagogues, and whom the Society for the Promotion of Haskalah employed as its mouthpiece among the less advanced.[17] In the existing reform synagogues, in Riga, Odessa, Warsaw, and Vilna, and even in more conservative communities, sermons began to be preached in Russian. Solomon Zalkind Minor, who lectured in German, acquired a reputation as a preacher in Russian since his election to the rabbinate of Minsk (1860). He was called "the Jellinek of Russia" by the Maskilim.[18] Aaron Elijah Pumpyansky began to preach in Russian at Ponevezh, in Kovno (1861). Germanization at last gave way to Russification. Even in Odessa, where German culture predominated during the reign of Nicholas I, it was found necessary, for the sake of the younger generation, to elect, as associate to the German Doctor Schwabacher, Doctor Solomon Mandelkern to preach in Russian. Similar changes were made in other communities. In the Polish provinces the Reformation was making even greater strides. There the Jews, whether reform, like Doctor Marcus Jastrow, or orthodox like Rabbi Berish Meisels, identified themselves with the Poles, and participated in their cultural and political aspirations, which were frequently antagonistic to Russification. A society which called itself Poles of the Mosaic Persuasion was organized in Warsaw, an organ of extreme liberalism was founded in the weekly Israelita, and, with the election of Isaac Kramsztyk to the rabbinate, German was replaced (1852) by the native Polish as the language of the pulpit.

Some champions of reform did not rest satisfied with mere innovations and improvements. They went so far as to discard Judaism altogether and improvise religions of their own. Moses Rosensohn of Vilna was the first, in his works Advice and Help ('Ezrah we-Tushiah, Vilna, 1870) and The Peace of Brothers (Shelom Ahim, ibid.), to suggest a way to cosmopolitanism and universalism through Judaism.[19] In 1879, Jacob Gordin founded in Yelisavetgrad a sort of ethical culture society called Bibleitsy (also Dukhovnoye Bibleyskoye Bratstvo, Spiritual Bible Brotherhood), which obtained a considerable following among the workmen of the section. It advocated the abolition of ritual observances, even prayer, and the hastening of the era of the brotherhood of man. It preached, in the words of one of its leaders, that "our morality is our religion. God, the acme of highest reason, of surest truth, and of the most sublime justice, does not demand useless external forms and ceremonies."[20] Following the organization of the Bibleitsy, and based on almost the same principles, branches of a Jewish sect, which called itself New Israel (Novy Izrail), were started almost simultaneously in Odessa and Kishinev. In the former city, the organization was headed by Jacob Prelooker, in the latter, by Joseph Rabinowitz. Prelooker, who after graduating from the seminary at Zhitomir became a school-master at Odessa, sought to bring about a consolidation between his own people and Russian Dissenters (Raskolniki: the Molocans, Stundists, and Dukhobortzi). The theme of his book, New Israel, is a "reformed synagogue, a mitigation of the cleavage between Jew and Christian, and recognition of a common brotherhood in religion." Rabinowitz went still further, and preached on actual conversion to one of the more liberal forms of Christianity.[21]

These sects, which sprang up in church and synagogue during the latter part of the "seventies," were the outcome of political and social as well as religious unrest. Alexander II fulfilled the expectation which the first years of his reign aroused in Jewish hearts no more than Catherine II and Alexander I. Those who had hoped for equal rights were doomed to disappointment. Most of the reforms of the Liberator Czar proved a failure owing to the antipathy and machinations of his untrustworthy officials. Russia was split between two diametrically opposed parties, the extreme radicals and the extreme reactionaries, waging an internecine war with each other. The former originated with the young Russians that had served in the European campaigns during the Napoleonic invasion, and who, in imitation of the secret organizations which had so greatly contributed to the liberation of Germany, united to throw off the yoke of autocracy in Russia. These secret orders, the Southern, the Northern, the United Slavonian, and the Polish, Alexander I had endeavored in vain to suppress, and the drastic measures taken by Nicholas I against the Dekabrists (1825) proved of no avail. Nor did the reforms of Alexander II help to heal the breach. On the contrary, seeing that the constitution they expected from the Liberator Czar was not forthcoming, and the democracy they hoped for was far from being realized, they became desperate, and determined to demand their rights by force. The peasants, too, sobering up from the intoxication, the figurative as well as the literal, caused by the vodka drunk in honor of their newly-acquired volyushka (sweet liberty), discovered that the emancipation ukase of the czar had been craftily intercepted by the bureaucrats, and their dream of owning the land they had hitherto cultivated as serfs would never come true. Russia was rife with discontent, and disaffection assumed a national range. The cry was raised for a "new freedom." A certain Anton Petrov impersonated the czar, and gathered around him ten thousand Russians. Pamphlets entitled Land and Liberty (Zemlya i Volya) were spread broadcast among the masses, the mind of the populace was inflamed, and attempts on the life of the czar ensued.

The extreme reactionaries, consisting mostly of nobles who had become impoverished by the emancipation of the serfs, grasped the opportunity to point out to the bewildered czar the evil of his liberal policy. Slavophilism was rampant. Men like Turgenief, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoi, were condemned as "Westernists," or German sympathizers, the enemies of Russia. At the recommendation of Princess Helena Petrovna, the czar engaged as the teacher of his children a comparatively unknown professor of history, Pobyedonostsev, who later became the soul of Russian despotism. This man, meek as a dove and cunning as a serpent, easily ingratiated himself with the czar, and soon there began "a war upon ideas, a crusade of ignorance." "Karakazov's pistol-shot," as Turgenief says, "drove back into the shade the phantom of liberty, the appearance of which all Russia had hailed with acclamations. From that moment to the end of his life, the emperor devoted himself to the undoing of all he had accomplished. If he could have cancelled with one stroke the glorious ukase that had proclaimed the emancipation of the serfs, he would have been only too glad to disgrace himself."[22]

And again, as it had been during the reign of Alexander I after his acquaintance with Baroness Kruedener, so it was with the reign of Alexander II after his acquaintance with Pobyedonostsev. The status of the Jews constituted the first indication of the ill-boding change. How little the officials had been in sympathy with the reformatory efforts of their czar, even when the atmosphere had been filled with peace and good-will to all including the Jews, is shown by the fact that when, in 1863, through the efforts of Doctor Schwabacher, the Jewish community of Odessa applied for a charter to build a Home for Aged Hebrews, the charter, though granted by the higher authorities, was withheld for over twenty years! The reaction flaunted its power once again, and sat enthroned in Tsarskoye Syelo. The few rights the Jews had enjoyed were rescinded one by one. Not satisfied with this, the Slavophils tried, under every pretext, to stop the progress of the Jewish people. Every now and then the Society for the Promotion of Haskalah would send some of the brighter seminary students to complete their education in Breslau or Berlin, but at the command of the Government this was soon discontinued. It was the intention of the same organization, from its very incipiency, to have the Bible translated under its auspices into Russian, but it took ten long years before this praiseworthy undertaking could be begun, because of the obstacles the Government placed in the way of its execution. Fortunately, the indomitable courage of the Maskilim could not be subdued. Young men went, or were sent, to Germany to prepare themselves for the rabbinate as before; the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, too, were translated secretly by Wohl, Gordon, Steinberg, and Leon Mandelstamm, and published in Germany, whence they were smuggled into Russia.[23]

More direct and equally inexplicable, save on the ground of animosity to whatever was not Slavonic, was the ukase to close the Sabbath Schools and the Evening Schools, the only means of educating the laboring men (1870). In 1871, the first of a series of massacres (pogromy) took place in the centre of Jewish culture, Odessa. In 1872, permission was denied to the ladies of that city to organize a society for the purpose of maintaining trade schools, to teach poor Jewish girls handicrafts. The two rabbinical seminaries, of Vilna and Zhitomir, were closed in 1873, and replaced by institutes for teachers, which were managed in the spirit that had prevailed under Nicholas I. And in 1878 the absurd blood accusation, against which four popes, Innocent IV, Paul III, Gregory X, and Clement XIV, issued their bulls, declaring it a baseless and wicked superstition, and which not only the Polish kings Boreslav V, Casimir III, Casimir IV, and Stephen Bathory, but also Alexander I (March 18, 1817), branded as a diabolic invention—that dreadful accusation which even the commission of Nicholas, despite Durnovo's efforts, had denounced as a disgrace and an abomination, was revived by the newspaper Grazhdanin. The ghost of medievalism began to stalk abroad once more in erstwhile enlightened Russia and under the aegis of the Liberator Czar.

As often before in Jewish history, the Jews helped not a little to aggravate the untoward conditions. At the instigation of a number of students of the Yeshibah Tree of Life, the doors of that noble institution were closed (1879), to open again after two years of untiring efforts on the part of its self-sacrificing dean, the renowned Naphtali Zebi Judah Berlin. But at the worst this was the result of mistaken zeal for the cause of Haskalah. What was more detrimental was the disgrace brought upon the Jewish name by several converts to Christianity. A certain Jacob Brafmann, having proved a failure in all he undertook, tried at the last the business of Christianity, and succeeded therein. He was appointed professor of Hebrew in the seminary of Minsk, and the Holy Synod charged him with the duty of devising means to promulgate Christianity among the Jews. Finding the times auspicious, he devoted himself to writing libellous articles about his former coreligionists, and wound up with a Book on the Kahal (Kniga Kahala, Vilna, 1869), in which he quoted forged "transactions," to the effect that Judaism tolerates and even recommends illegality and immorality among its adherents. In a conference of Jews and Gentiles convoked by Governor-General Kaufman (1871), Barit proved the falsity and forgery of Brafmann's documents. But, as usual, the defence was forgotten, the charges remained.[24] A certain Lutostansky poisoned the public mind by caricaturing the Jews, and aroused an anti-Semitic agitation among his countrymen. The consequence was that even the liberals began to be suspicious, and the prospect of better days was blighted by the hatred which broke out in fiendish fury, in lightnings and thunders which astounded the world under Alexander III.

It was but natural that the Jews that had become completely Russified should enlist in the ranks of the extreme liberals. They found themselves in every way as progressive and patriotic as the Christian Russians. The language of Russia became their language, its manners and aspirations their manners and aspirations. They contributed more than any other nationality to Russifying Odessa, which, owing to its great foreign population, was known as the un-Russian city of Russia. Proportionately to their numbers, they promoted the trade and industry, the science and literature of their country more than the Russians themselves. Yet the coveted equality was denied them, and the emancipation granted to the degraded muzhiks was withheld from them, because of a religion they hardly professed. They were like Faust when he found himself tempted but not satisfied by the pleasures of life, when food hovered before his eager lips while he begged for nourishment in vain. The liberals, on the other hand, preached and practiced the doctrine of equal rights to all. Socialism, or nihilism, also appealed to the Jews from its idealistic side, for never did the Jews cease to be democrats and dreamers. In the schools and universities, which they were now permitted to attend, they heard the new teachings and imbibed the novel ideas.

Those, therefore, who disdained conversion allied themselves with the secret organizations. "The torrent which had been dammed up in one channel rushed violently into another." A Hebrew monthly, Ha-Emet (Truth, Vienna, 1877), devoted to the cause of communism, was started by Aaron Liebermann ("Arthur Freeman"), in which, in the language of the oldest and greatest socialists, the doctrines of Karl Marx were inculcated among the Hebrew-reading public. The more completely Russified element took a leading part in the activities of the Narodnaya Volya (Rights of the People), propagating socialism among the Russian masses, either by word of mouth or as editors and coworkers in the "underground" publications. Not a few went to Berlin, where, though opulent, they sought employment in factories, the better to disseminate socialism among the working classes. Others, like Aaronson, Achselrod, Deutsch, Horowitz, Vilenkin, and Zukerman, fled to Switzerland, whence, under the assumed names of Marx, Lassalle, Jacoby, etc., or united in a League for the Emancipation of Labor, they directed the socialistic movement in Russia.[25] Chernichevsky's What to Do, Gogol's Dead Souls, Turgenief's Virgin Soil and Fathers and Sons, the doctrines of Pisarev and Bielinsky, and of the other writers who then had their greatest vogue, were eagerly read and frequently copied by Jewish young gymnasiasts and passed on to their Christian schoolmates. The revolutionary spirit seized on men and women alike. Women left their husbands, girls their devoted parents, and threw themselves into the swirl of nihilism with a vigor and self-sacrifice almost incredible. When a squad of police came to disperse the crowd clamoring for "land and liberty" in front of the Kazanskaya Church in St. Petersburg, a Jewish maiden of sixteen, taking the place of the leader, inspired her comrades with such enthusiasm that the efforts of the police were ineffectual.[26] By 1878, Russia became honeycombed with secret societies. It fell into spasms of nihilism. One general after another was assassinated. Attempts were made to wreck the train on which the czar was travelling (1879) and blow up the palace in which he resided (1880). Finally, on March 13, 1881, after many hairbreadth escapes, the carefully laid plans of the revolutionists succeeded, and the Liberator Czar was no more.

Thus was the deep-rooted yearning for enlightenment finally let loose, and the gyves of tradition were at last removed. The Maskilim of the "forties" and "fifties" were antiquated in the "sixties" and "seventies." They began to see that the fears of the orthodox and their denunciations of Haskalah were not altogether unfounded. A young generation had grown up who had never experienced the strife and struggles of the fathers, and who lacked the submissive temper that had characterized their ancestors. Faster and farther they rushed on their headlong way to destruction, while the parents sat and wept. When, in 1872, in Vilna, the police arrested forty Jewish young men suspected of nihilistic tendencies, Governor-General Patapov "invited" the representatives of the community to a conference. As soon as they arrived, Patapov turned on them in this wise, "In addition to all other good qualities which you Jews possess, about the only thing you need is to become nihilists, too!" Amazed and panic-stricken, the trembling Jews denied the allegation and protested their innocence, to which the Governor-General replied, "Your children are, at any rate; they have become so through the bad education you have given them." "Pardon me, General," was the answer of "Yankele Kovner" (Jacob Barit), who was one of the representatives, "This is not quite right. As long as we educated our children there were no nihilists among us; but as soon as you took the education of our children into your hands, behold the result." The foundations of religion were undermined. Parental authority was disregarded. Youths and maidens were lured by the enchanting voice of the siren of assimilation. The naive words which Turgenief put into the mouth of Samuel Abraham, the Lithuanian Jew, might have been, indeed, were, spoken by many others in actual life. "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."[27] The struggle between Hasidim and Mitnaggedim ended with the conversionist policy of Nicholas I, which united them against the Maskilim. The struggle between these anti-Maskilim and the Maskilim had ceased in the golden days of Alexander II. But the clouds were gathering and overspreading the camp of Haskalah. The days in which the seekers after light united in one common aim were gone. Russification, assimilation, universalism, and nihilism rent asunder the ties that held them together. Judah Loeb Gordon, the same poet who, fifteen years before, had rejoiced with exceeding joy "when Haskalah broke forth like water," now laments over the effect thereof in the following strain:

And our children, the coming generation, From childhood, alas, are strangers to our nation— Ah, how my heart for them doth bleed! Farther and faster they are ever drifting, Who knows how far they will be shifting? Maybe till whence they can ne'er recede!

Amidst the disaffection, discord, and dejection that mark the latter part of the reign of Alexander II, one Maskil stands out pre-eminently in interest and importance,—one whom assimilation did not attract nor reformation mislead, who under all the mighty changes remained loyal to the ideals ascribed to the Gaon and advocated by Levinsohn,—Perez ben Mosheh Smolenskin (Mohilev, February 25, 1842-Meran, Austria, February 1, 1885).[28]

Smolenskin was endowed with the ability and courage that characterize the born leader. He possessed an iron will and unflinching determination, before which obstacles had to yield, and persecution found itself powerless. His talent to grasp and appreciate the true and the beautiful rendered him the oracle of the thousands who, to this day, are proud to call themselves his disciples. To him Haskalah was not merely acquaintance with general culture, or even its acquisition. It was the realization of one's individuality as a Jew and a man. Gordon's advice, to be a Jew at home and a man abroad, found little favor in his estimation; for Haskalah meant the evolution of a Jewish man sui generis. He equally abhorred the fanaticism of the benighted orthodox and the Laodicean lukewarmness of the advanced Maskilim. To fight and, if possible, eradicate both, he undertook the publication of The Dawn (Ha-Shahar, Vienna, 1869), a magazine in which he declared "war against the darkness of the Middle Ages and war against the indifference of to-day!"

Not like the former days are these days, he says in his foreword to Ha-Shahar. Thirty or twenty years ago we had to fight the enemy within. Sanctimonious fanatics with their power of darkness sought to persecute us, lest their folly or knavery be exposed to the light of day.... Now that they, who hitherto have walked in darkness, are beginning to discern the error of their ways, lo and behold, those who have seen the light are closing their eyes against it.... Therefore let them know beforehand that, as I have stretched out my hand against those who, under the cloak of holiness, endeavor to exclude enlightenment from the house of Jacob, even so will I lift up my hand against the other hypocrites who, under the pretext of tolerance, strive to alienate the children of Israel from the heritage of their fathers!

That the salvation of the Jews lies in their distinctiveness, and that renationalization will prove the only solution of the Jewish problem, is the central thought of Smolenskin's journalistic efforts. Jews are disliked, he maintains, not because of their religious persuasion, nor for their reputed wealth, but because they are weak and defenceless. What they need is strength and courage, but these they will never regain save in a land of their own. Twelve years before the tornado of persecution broke out in Russia he had predicted it, and even welcomed it as a means of arousing the Jews to their duties as a people and their place as a nation, and that his conclusion was correct, the awakening which followed proved unmistakably.

For Smolenskin Jews never ceased to be a nation, and to him the Jew who sought refuge in assimilation was nothing less than a traitor. He was thus the forerunner of Pinsker, and of Herzl a decade later. Indeed, in the resurrection of the national hope he was the first to remove the shroud. According to him, "the eternal people" have every characteristic that goes to make a nation. Their common country is still Palestine, loved by them with all the fervor of patriotism; their common language had never ceased to be Hebrew; their common religion consists in the basic principles of Judaism, in which they all agree.

You wish—thus he addresses himself to the assimilationists—you wish to be like the other people? So do I. Be, I pray you, be like them. Search and find knowledge, avoid and forsake superstition, above all be not ashamed of the rock whence you were hewn. Yes, be like the other peoples, proud of your literature, jealous of your self-respect, hopeful, even as all persecuted peoples are hopeful, of the speedy arrival of the day when we, too, shall reinhabit the land which once was, and still is, our own.

But as the soil of Palestine, however regarded, is at present inaccessible to Jews as a national entity, the language once spoken in Palestine is so much the more to be cherished and cultivated by the exiled people.

You ask me—he calls out again—what good a dead language can do us? I will tell you. It confers honor on us, girds us with strength, unites us into one. All nations seek to perpetuate their names. All conquered peoples dream of a day when they will regain their independence.... We have neither monuments nor a country at present. Only one relic still remains from the ruins of our ancient glory—the Hebrew language. Those, therefore, who discard the Hebrew tongue betray the Hebrew nation, and are traitors both to their race and their religion.

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! What a stigma on a religion that had endured through the ages, and is rich in all that makes for holiness and right living! The old garment needs no new patches. It still fits and will fit "the eternal people" till time is no more. Since the reform movement in Germany went back to the time of Mendelssohn, Smolenskin hurled the missiles of his criticism against the Berlin sage, forgetting that for more than half a century his example and encouragement had served to awaken a love of knowledge in the hearts of his countrymen. But he saw that in the home of Haskalah, the Biur, and the Meassefim, apostasy increased, Hebrew was almost forgotten, and Judaism was declining, and he blamed the pellucid water at the source of the stream for the muddy pool at its mouth. Mendelssohn, however, lacked no defenders among his Russo-Jewish coreligionists, and their sentiments were voiced by Abraham Baer Gottlober in an opposition periodical, The Light of Day (Ha-Boker Or, Lublin, 1876). "Why," exclaimed the editor, "were it not for him and his reforms ... were it not for that grand and noble personality ... neither you nor I should have been what we are!" It was only the sad sincerity of Smolenskin that mitigated the errors he had committed in regard to the history of his people and the theology of its religion.

But the militant editor of Ha-Shahan, who wielded his pen like a halberd, to deal out blows to those of whose views he disapproved, became as tender as a father when he set out to write about the people. His love for the masses whom he knew so well was almost boundless. Underlying their superstitions, crudities, and absurdities is the "prophetic consciousness," of which they have never been entirely divested. The heder is indeed far from what a school should be, and the yeshibah is hardly to be tolerated in a civilized community; yet what spiritual feasts, what noble endeavors, and what unselfish devotion are witnessed within their dingy walls! Jewish observances are sometimes cumbersome and sometimes incompatible with modern life, but what beauty of holiness, what irresistible influences emanate and radiate from most of them! Under an uninviting exterior and beneath the accumulated drift of countless generations he discerned the precious jewel of self-sacrifice for an ideal. It was this sympathy and broad-mindedness, expressed in his Ha-Toeh, his Simhat Hanef, Keburat Hamor, Gemul Yesharim, and Ha-Yerushah that will ever endear him to the Hebrew reader.

Such, in brief, was the life of the man who bore the chief part in framing and moulding the Haskalah of the "eighties," which was devoted to the development of Hebrew literature and the rejuvenation of the Hebrew people. Loving the Hebrew tongue with a passion surpassing everything else, he censured the German Jewish savants for writing their learned works in the vernacular, and was on the alert to discover and bring out new talent and win over the indifferent and estranged. Dreaming of the redemption of his people, he paved the way for the Zionistic movement, which spread with tremendous rapidity after his death. And his sincerity and ability were repaid in the only coin the poor possess—in love and admiration. Pilgrimages were made, sometimes on foot, to behold the editor of Ha-Shahar and the author of Ha-Toeh. The greatest journalists in St. 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!"

(Notes, pp. 322-327.)



CHAPTER VI

THE AWAKENING

1881-1905

The reign of Alexander III, like that of Nicholas I, was devoid of even that faint glamor of liberalism which, in the days of Alexander I and Alexander II, had aroused deceptive hopes of better times. During the thirteen years of Alexander III's autocracy (1881-1894) not a ray of light was permitted to penetrate into Holy Russia. On May 14, 1881, the manifesto prohibiting the slightest infringement of the absolute power of the czar was promulgated, to continue unbroken till the Russo-Japanese war.

The liberal current which had carried away his predecessors when they first mounted the throne was checked, the sluices of Slavophilism were opened, the history of Russian thinkers became again, as Herzen said, "a long list of martyrs and a register of convicts."

Nicholas Ignatiev, a rabid reactionary, a second Jeffreys, became chief of the Ministry of the Interior; Katkoff, a repentant liberal and exile, was appointed the czar's chief adviser, the Richelieu behind the throne; and Pobyedonostsev, whom Turgenief called the "Russian Torquemada," obtained supremacy over Melikoff, and was appointed procurator of the Holy Synod. With such as these at the head of the Russian bureaucracy, there may have been some foundations for the rumor that an imperial ukase decreed the pillage and slaughter of the Jews, and the muzhiks, obedient to the behests of the "little father," and smarting under the pain of disappointment, vented their venom on their Jewish compatriots. Before the new czar had been on his throne three months, Russia was drenched with Jewish blood. There began saturnalia of rape, plunder, and murder, the like of which had been witnessed nowhere in Europe. For half a year the pogroms which began in Yelisavetgrad (April 27, 28) swept like a tornado over southern Russia, visiting more than one hundred and sixty communities with fire and sword, resulting in outrages on women, in the murder of old and young, in the ruin of millions of dollars of property. The Black Hundreds of the nineteenth century put to shame the Haidamacks of the eighteenth and the Cossacks of the seventeenth. In the words of the Bishop of Canterbury to Sir Moses Montefiore, it looked "as if the enemy of mankind was let loose to destroy the souls of so many Christians and the bodies of so many Jewish people."

But it would be a vain attempt, and out of keeping with the object of this work, to describe in detail the "bloody assizes" and the infernal tragedies that ensued upon the accession of Alexander III; the moral degeneracy and the economic ruin that spread over the mighty empire; the shudder that passed over the civilized world, and was expressed in indignation meetings held everywhere, especially in Great Britain and in the United States (February, 1882), to protest, "in the name of civilization, against the spirit of medieval persecution thus revived in Russia." Suffice it to say that even when the mob, tired of carnage, ceased its work of extermination, the bloodthirstiness of those in authority was not assuaged. Such a policy was inaugurated against the Jews as would, according to Pobyedonostsev, "force one-third of them to emigrate, another third to embrace Christianity, and the remainder to die of starvation." With this in view, his Majesty the Emperor, "prompted by a desire to protect the Jews against the Christians," was graciously pleased to give his assent to the Resolutions of the Committee of Ministers, on the third of May, 1882, i.e. to the notorious "temporary measures," or "May laws," framed by Ignatiev, against the will of the Council of the Empire.

These "temporary measures" have remained in force to this day. With them was resuscitated all the inimical legislation of the past, beginning with the time of Elizabeta Petrovna. What was favorable was suppressed; the unfavorable was most rigorously enforced. Jews living outside the Pale were driven back into it on the slightest pretext and in the most inhuman manner. To increase the already unendurable congestion, the Pale was made smaller than before. In accordance with the first clause of the "May laws," Jews were expelled from the villages within the Pale itself. In 1888 the districts of Rostov and Taganrog, which till then had belonged to the Pale, and had been developed largely through Jewish enterprise, were torn away and amalgamated with the Don district, in which Jews were not permitted to reside. This was followed by expulsions from St. Petersburg (1890), Moscow, (1891), Novgorod, Riga, and Yalta (1893), and the abrogation of the time-honored privileges of the Jews of Bokhara (1896). Even those who, as skilled artisans or discharged soldiers, had been privileged to reside wherever they chose, were expelled with their wives and the children born in their adopted city. Their only salvation lay in conversion. Converts were especially favored, and were offered liberal inducements. By becoming a convert to the Orthodox Russian Church, a Jew is immediately freed from all the degrading restrictions on his freedom of movement and his choice of a profession. Converts, without distinction of sex, are helped financially by an immediate payment of sums from thirteen to thirty rubles, and until recently were granted freedom from taxation for five years. If a candidate for Greek Christianity is married, his conversion procures him a divorce, and, unless she likewise is converted, his wife may not marry again. By conversion, a Jew may escape the consequence of any misdeed against a fellow-Jew, for, to quote the Russian code, "in actions concerning Jews who have embraced Christianity Jews may not be admitted as witnesses, if any objection is raised against them as such." The penal code provides that Jews shall pay twice and treble the amount of the fine to which non-Jews are liable under similar circumstances. Jews were excluded from the professions to which they had turned in the "sixties" and "seventies," and in which they had been eminently successful; they were not allowed to hold any civil or municipal office; they were forbidden even to be nurses in the hospitals or to give private instruction to children in the homes.

And still persecution did not cease. Not satisfied with starving the bodies of five millions of Jews, Russian legislators were determined to crush them intellectually. The Slavophils could not brook seeing "non-Russians" surpass their own people in the higher walks of life. 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. They contributed forty-eight pupils to the gymnasia out of every ten thousand, while the Christians contributed only twenty-two. This was regarded an unpardonable sin. "These Jews have the audacity to excel us pure Russians," Pobyedonostsev is reported to have exclaimed, and measures were taken to suppress their dangerous tendency. As early as 1875 a law was passed withholding from Jewish students the stipends they had hitherto received from a fund set aside for that purpose. In 1882 the number of Jewish students in the Military Academy of Medicine was limited to five per cent, and later it was reduced to zero. Thereafter one professional school after another adopted a percentage provision, and some excluded Jews altogether. Finally, "seeing that many Jewish young men, eager to benefit by a higher classical, technical, or professional education," presented themselves every year for admission to the universities, that they passed their examination and continued their studies at the various schools of the empire, the Government deemed it "desirable to put a stop to a state of affairs which is so unsatisfactory." Consequently the ministry limited the attendance of Jews residing in places within the Pale to ten per cent in all schools and universities (December 5, 1886; June 26, 1887), in places without the Pale to five per cent, and in Moscow and St. Petersburg to three per cent, of the total number of pupils in each school and university. Of the four hundred young Jews who had successfully passed their matriculation examination at the beginning of the scholastic year 1887-1888, and had thus acquired the right of entering the university, three hundred and twenty-six were refused admission, and in many schools and universities they were denied even the small per cent the law permitted.

When, nevertheless, in spite of the many restrictions, the Jew at last obtained the coveted degree, the Government rendered it nugatory by depriving him of the right of enjoying the fruit of his labor and self-sacrifice. He could not practice as an army physician or jurist, nor obtain a position as an engineer or a Government or municipal clerk. In the army, he was not allowed to hold any office, and, though he might be an expert chemist, he could never fill the post of a dispenser (March 1, 1888). He was excluded from the schools for the training of officers, and if he passed the examination on the subjects taught there, his certificate could not contain the usual statement that there "was no objection to admitting him to the military schools."[1]

These restrictive measures were not relaxed when Alexander III was succeeded by his son Nicholas II (1894). If anything, they were more rigorously executed, and the mob was encouraged to multiply its outrages upon the defenceless Jews. The closing years of the nineteenth century wiped out the promises of its opening years. Blood accusations followed by riots became of frequent occurrence. Irkutsk (1896), Shpola, and Kiev (1897), Kantakuzov (Kherson), Vladimir, and Nikolayev (1899) gave the Jews a foretaste of what they had to expect when the Black Hundreds, encouraged by the Government and incited by Kruzhevan and Pronin, would be let loose to enact the scenes that took place in Kishinev and Homel before the Russo-Japanese war, and in hundreds of towns after it. The difficulties in the way of securing an education were increased. Russia did not believe in an "irreducible minimum" where the rights of her Jews were concerned. Under Nicholas II the number of Jewish women admitted to medical schools was put at three per cent of the total number of students; the newly-established School for Engineers in Moscow was closed to Jewish young men altogether; and the students of both sexes in the schools were constantly harassed by the police because of the harsh laws concerning the rights of residence. Some splendidly equipped institutions of learning were allowed to remain almost empty rather than admit Jewish students.[2]

This was the worst punishment of all, the most relentless vengeance wreaked on a helpless victim. "Of all the laws which swept down upon them from St. Petersburg and Moscow," says Leroy-Beaulieu with characteristic insight into the soul of Israel, "those which they [the Jews] find hardest to bear are the regulations that block their entrance to the Russian universities." The bloodless weighed heavier than the bloody pogroms. Consumed with a desire for education, wealthy Russian Jews made an attempt to establish higher schools of their own, without even drawing upon the surplus money of the kosher-meat fund, which had originally been created for such purposes. Baron de Hirsch, too, offered two million dollars for the higher and technical education of the Jews. But every attempt proved fruitless. Baron de Hirsch's munificence was flatly refused. In the school which Mr. Weinstein opened at Vinitza, Podolia, no more than eight Jews were allowed to attend among eighty Christians, and in the one at Gorlovka, founded by another Jew (Polyakov), only five per cent were admitted.[3]

Writers are wont to speak of this as a reactionary period. The description applies to the Russians; among the Jews it was a period of reawakening.[4] They were disillusioned. They saw that Russification without emancipation, as their unsophisticated fathers had told Lilienthal, meant extermination. The first and worst pogroms were perpetrated in those places where the Jews were like their Russian neighbors in every respect, except in the eyes of the law, and with the approval of some who were devotees of the Narodnaya Volya. The Jewish consciousness reasserted itself. If Pobyedonostsev accomplished his fiendish design as regards emigration, more than a million Jews having left Russia within the last twenty years; if he has almost succeeded in causing them to die of starvation; yet his hope of forcing a third of them to conversion was a disappointment and a delusion. The Jews showed that the traditional description applied to them, "stiff-necked," was not undeserved. While the Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Armenians have undergone conversion in multitudes, they whose suffering by far exceeded that of any other "non-Russian" nationality remained, with insignificant exceptions, loyal to the religion of their fathers.[5]

The Russian Jews—says Zunser—sobered down from the orgies of assimilation, and its worshippers abandoned their idol. Those who had almost forgotten that they were of the camp of Israel began to return to its tents. The Jewish physicians, jurists, technologists, and the entire so-called Jewish "intelligentia," who heretofore had never cared to speak a word of Yiddish to a Jew, resumed their native tongue; they began to send their children to the Jewish hadarim, and adopted once more Jewish ways and customs. Several hundred Jewish university students, proverbially irreligious, sent to Vilna for tefillin [phylacteries]!

In many cities fasts were observed and prayers for forgiveness offered, and the prodigal sons of Israel repaired to the synagogue, participated in the services, and wept with their more steadfast though equally unfortunate coreligionists. Many converts, too, began to feel qualms of conscience, and endeavored to make up for their youthful indiscretions. Some of them fled to places of safety, and returned to Judaism. The gifted young poet Simon Yakovlevich Nadsohn died of a broken heart. Sorkin, the classmate and friend of Levanda, committed suicide, while Levanda, the great novelist of assimilation, was so affected by the massacres and their consequences, that he became melancholy, and died in an asylum for the insane.[6]

If this was the fate of the assimilated and estranged, one may guess the effect of the reaction on the religious. If the students of the universities sacrificed their careers, their daily bread, for the austere satisfaction of discharging their moral obligation to the best of their knowledge, the students of the Law, always loyal to the heritage of their people, became more zealous than ever. Lilienblum who, in 1877, believed that life without a university education was not worth living, became a repentant sinner. Russian Jewry seethed with religious enthusiasm. Moses Isaac Darshan, "the Khelmer Maggid," preached for six hours at a time to crowded synagogues. Asher Israelit, less trenchant, but equally effective, exhorted crowds to repentance. Zebi Hirsh Masliansky, a finished orator, went from town to town, and aroused a love for whatever was connected with the history and religion of the Jewish people. In Kovno those who were preparing themselves for the rabbinate formed something like a new sect, the Mussarnikes (Moralists), which practiced asceticism and self-abnegation to an extraordinary degree.[7]



Those, however, were most affected who had been misled by dreams of assimilation. They suffered most, for they lost most. Their hopes were blighted, their hearts broken. The leading-strings proved to be a halter. They saw they had little to expect at the hands of those they had believed to have become fully civilized, and they were embittered toward civilization, which had showed them flowers, but had given them no fruit. In a work, Sinat 'Olam le-'Am 'Olam (Eternal Hatred for the Eternal People, Warsaw, 1882), Nahum Sokolov proved, like Smolenskin before him, that anti-Semitism was ineradicable, that the fight against the Jews was a fight to the death, that even emancipation helps little to remove the animosity innate in one people against another, and until the "end of days" foretold by the prophets of yore there will never cease the eternal hatred to the eternal people. This became the dominant opinion. It dawned upon many that the only salvation for the Jews lay in becoming a nation once more. A yearning for a new fatherland and a new country seized young and old. The times were auspicious. Cosmopolitanism was everywhere giving place to nationalism. The little Balkan States had broken the yoke of Ottoman rule, and become self-governing nations since 1878. In Poland, Hungary, and Ireland, home rule was advocated with fervor that threatened a revolution. Italy and Germany became united under their own king or emperor. And the Russian Jews, tired of the constant conflicts with the surrounding peoples, experienced the desire which had prompted their ancestors to be like all the other nations.

Sokolov's sentiments were reinforced in an anonymous pamphlet written by Doctor Leo Pinsker (1821-1891), one of the foremost physicians of Odessa. His Auto-Emancipation (Berlin, 1882) is now recognized as the forerunner of Herzl's Judenstaat, which appeared fifteen years later. Pinsker accepts as an axiom what Sokolov had tried to demonstrate as a proposition. Jew-hatred, he claims, like Lombroso in his work on anti-Semitism, is a "platonic hatred," a hereditary mental disease, which two thousand years' duration has so aggravated as to render it incurable. As the Jewish problem is international, it can be solved only by nationalism. He admits some of the charges brought against the Jews by anti-Semites, but Jewish failings result from Christian intolerance. In a land of their own they will develop into a Muster-nation, a model people.

The wretches—cries he—they mock the eagle that once soared sky-high, and saw divinity itself, because he can no longer fly after his wings are broken! Give us but our independence, allow us to take care of ourselves, grant us but a little strip of land like that of the Servians and Rumanians, give us a chance to lead a national existence, and then prate about our lacking manly virtues. What we lack is not genius (Genialitaet) but self-consciousness (Selbstgefuehl) and appreciation of our value as men (Bewusstsein der Menschenwuerde), of which we were deprived by you!

Of course, it requires many years and a great expenditure of money to establish a nation on a firm basis. But in Pinsker's dictionary the word "impossible" does not exist. "Far, very far," says he, "is the haven of rest towards which our souls are turning. We know not even whether it be East or West. But be the road never so long, it cannot seem too long to the wanderers of two thousand years."

Pinsker's impassioned appeal made a deep impression. It was obvious that colonization would be the shortest road to renationalization. But as to the place in which the colonies should be established, no agreement could be reached. Pinsker, like Herzl after him, left the problem unsolved. Some preferred America or even Spain. In southern Russia a society, 'Am 'Olam (The Eternal Nation), was organized on communistic principles. It sent an advance guard to the United States, where, as the Sons of the Free, they established several settlements, the best-known of which was New Odessa, in Oregon.[8] The majority, however, preferred Palestine, the land which, in weal or woe, in pain or pleasure, remains ever dear to the Jewish heart; the land to which the ancient exiles by the waters of Babylon had vowed that sooner than forget her would their right hands forget their cunning and their tongues cleave to the roofs of their mouths; the possession whereof had been held out as the most alluring promise, and to be deprived of which the prophets had regarded as the severest punishment.

Zionism, even Territorialism, among the Russian Jews is by no means solely the result of modern anti-Semitism. At the same time that Mordecai Manuel Noah was planning his Jewish state Ararat in western New York (1825), Gregori Peretz, who, as a child, had been converted, with his father, to the dominant religion, and had been advanced to the rank of an officer in his Majesty's army, was dreaming of the renationalization of his alienated brethren. As a leading figure in the councils of the Dekabrists, he never ceased his efforts until his comrades accepted the restoration of Israel to his pristine place among the nations of the earth as part of their revolutionary programme. But with the suppression of the Dekabrists by Nicholas I the scheme died "a-borning," and sank into oblivion. Later, David Gordon revived the yearnings of Judah Halevi by his articles in the weekly Ha-Maggid (1863), which he edited in Lyck, Prussia. Smolenskin's writings resound with a love for Zion from the very beginning of his literary career. And a rising young Hebraist, Eliezer ben Yehudah, while still a student of medicine, wrote, in 1878, and again in 1880, stirring letters to the editor of Ha-Shahar, in which he advocated the return to the Holy Land and the revival of the holy tongue as a conditio sine qua non for the realization of the Jewish mission. 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. On November 6, 1884, for the first time in history, a Jewish international assembly was held at Kattowitz, near the Russian frontier, where representatives from all classes and different countries met and decided to colonize Palestine with Jewish farmers.

Since then Haskalah in Russia has become nationalistic and Palestinian. Even those who were at first opposed to it gradually grew friendly, and finally became "lovers of Zion" (Hobebe Zion). Among the Russo-Jewish students in Vienna, Smolenskin, the militant Zionist, organized an academic society, Kadimah, a name which, meaning Eastward and Forward, contains the philosophy of Zionism in a nutshell. Seeing that the Alliance Israelite Universelle encouraged emigration to America, both he and Ben Yehudah published violent attacks on the French society, and endeavored to thwart its plans as far as possible.[9] The Hebrew weekly Ha-Meliz, published in St. Petersburg, was a staunch supporter of the movement, and a little later Ha-Zefirah, published in Warsaw, which was at first indifferent, if not antagonistic, joined the ranks. In Russian, too, the Razsvyet and especially the Buduchnost spread Zionism among their readers, while books, pamphlets, and poems were published in Yiddish for circulation among the masses. In addition to the Hobebe Zion societies formed in many cities, secret societies were organized, such as the famous Bene Mosheh (Sons of Moses), which had for its object the moral and intellectual improvement of the future citizens of the Jewish Republic; the Bilu (initials of Bet Ya'akob leku we-nelekah, "O House of Jacob, come and let us go"), formed by Israel Belkind, who went to Palestine with his fellow-students of the University of Kharkov, and founded the colony of Gederah; and the Hillul (Hereb la-Adonai u-le-Arzenu, "A sword for God and our land"), the members of which pledged themselves to remove any obstacle to the cause of nationalism, even at the cost of their lives. The Bone Zion (Builders of Zion), a sort of Masonic fraternity, was a very potent secret society, which undertook to constitute itself a provisional Jewish Government, and assiduously watched the Zionistic societies and their leaders in every portion of the globe.[10]

These dreamy youths, however, heartbroken and disgusted with a civilization which had failed to redeem its promises, proved but poor material for laying the foundations for a future nation. It was as with the Darien Company organized by William Paterson when Scotland was sorely distressed, and the Champ d'Asile, by the remnant of Napoleon's grand army—a fine idea, but the men and the means were wanting to execute it. The colonies in Palestine fared no better than those in America. They were opposed by the Government from without and by many of the orthodox Jews from within. The former, though claiming to be glad to see the Jews emigrate, though declaring to the Jewish delegation that pleaded for mercy, Zapadnaya graniza dlya vas otkrita ("the Western frontier is open to you"), was still, Pharaoh-like, reluctant to see so many "undesirable citizens" leave, and prohibited the formation of organizations to accomplish the end. The orthodox were against the movement on religious grounds, because it was "forcing the end" of Israel's trouble before the destined day of God arrived.[11] But with the "nineties" the movement received a strong impetus. Alexander Zederbaum, the publisher of Ha-Meliz, succeeded in obtaining a charter (February 9, 1890) for the Association for the Aid of Colonization in Palestine and Syria. Such eminent rabbis as Mordecai Eliasberg, his son Jonathan, Samuel Mohilever, N.Z.Y. Berlin, and Mordecai Joffe espoused the cause, and set the example for their less prominent colleagues. When the question arose whether Jewish agriculturists in Palestine are obliged to observe the Biblical injunction not to till the ground in the seventh year (shemittah), Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Spector of Kovno, the leading rabbi and Talmudist of his time, decided, in opposition to the Jerusalem rabbinate, that the law had ceased to be effective with the destruction of the Temple. Baron Edmond de Rothschild of Paris also came to the rescue of the colonists, and, more important still, there began an immigration of Russo-Jewish farmers into Palestine, of the class, numbering about ninety-five thousand souls, whom Arnold White described as "an active, well set-up, sun-burnt, muscular, agricultural people, marked by all the characteristics of a peasantry of the highest character." With them the colonies began to flourish, the debts were paid off, and a better regime set in. "There was no crime or drunkenness," says Bentwich, "in those settlements, and the only usurer was a Russian peasant, who charged the Jewish borrowers thirty-six per cent for loans. If ever I saw practical religion carried into daily life, it was among those brave and sober Hebrew ploughmen."[12]

Whatever may be one's views on Zionism, there can be no doubt that it has proved a power for good in Russia. It introduced new ideals and revived old expectations. It has accomplished, in a measure, the fond hope of the Maskilim and awakened within the Russian Jew a feeling of self-respect and a "consciousness of human worth." Different and contending elements it has coalesced into one. It has, above all, brought back to the fold the doubting Thomases and careless Gallios, even the avowed scoffers, among the Jewish youth, and imbued them with courage and pride,[13] and given them a new shibboleth, Meine Kunst der Welt, mein Leben meinem Volke ("My art for the world, my life for my people").

"We have seen our youths return to us," writes Lilienblum,[14] "and our hearts were filled with joy. In their restoration we found balm for our wounds, and with rapturous wonderment we asked 'who has borne us these?'" The poets welcomed them with songs. Gordon, whose sorrow had silenced his muse, was inspired once more and called:

Behold our sons, of whom we despaired, Return to us, the great and the small; God's grace is not ended, our power's unimpaired, Again we shall live, and rise after the fall!

Frug sang in Russian:

My own Nation, Thou art not alone; thy sons behold Coming back in crowds as in days of old!

And Zunser represented Rachel as soliloquizing in Yiddish:

Through the windows what am I seeing, Like turtle-doves hitherward fleeing? Are my Joseph and Benjamin knocking at my door? O Heavens, O mighty wonder! Those are my children yonder! Yes, my dearest and my truest coming home once more!

But Zionism is not exclusively either a political or a religious movement. It is both plus something else; it is eminently educational. It has produced novelists and poets, whose writings are full of the virility and beauty of a rejuvenated nation. In Jaffa it established a high school (Bet ha-Sefer), it inspired Doctor Chazanowicz to establish a national library, and ways and means are being considered to establish a national university in Palestine.

Even among the devotees of the arts it has given rise to a new romantic school, young painters and sculptors who are depicting their Judenschmerz.

Their cunning hands—says Mr. Leo Mielziner—have mastered the technique of their art, be it in Moscow or Munich, or Berlin, or Paris, but the heart which inspires their brush or mallet pulsates in Palestine. The wandering Jew in them pauses, not to portray the impression of the foreign lands and stranger customs, but to depict his own suffering, his own Heimweh, his own aspirations.

Struck, Ashkenasi, Maimon, Hirszenberg, Gottlieb, Epstein, Loebschuetz, and Schatz are the leaders of this new movement. The last-named, together with Ephraim Moses Lilien of Galicia, perhaps the greatest Jewish illustrator of our time, has founded a national school, Bezalel, to propagate Jewish art in Palestine, on the same principles on which the great national art schools of other countries are based. The language of instruction is Hebrew.

Meanwhile the Society for the Promotion of Haskalah continued its work of Russification and general civilization. After 1880 its activity was greatly enhanced, and its members worked with renewed zeal. It opened elementary schools, and expended large sums on stipends for students, and the publication of useful and scholarly books. The branch in Odessa secured two hundred and thirty-one new members in one year (1900), making the total in that city alone nine hundred and sixty-eight. It organized a bureau of information on pedagogic subjects, and through the liberality of Kalonymos Wissotzky instituted prizes for original works in Hebrew or Russian. Individual philanthropists did their utmost to counterbalance the restrictions on education.[15]

Trade schools were opened by the Committee for the Promotion of a Knowledge of Trade and Agriculture among the Jews of Russia, in Minsk, Vilna, and Vitebsk, besides fifteen manual training schools for boys and twenty for girls, in which the indigent pupils are provided with food, clothes, and books. In 1900 thirteen new schools were opened in Kherson and Yekaterinoslav, to supply the educational demand of the thirty-eight colonies existing in those Governments. In the vicinity of Minsk a Junior Republic was organized, and in many cities art and choral societies were formed.[16]

The desire for self-help and the tendency towards organization, to which Zionism gave an impetus, was rapidly reflected in every sphere of Russo-Jewish activity. In a series of works and articles, Jacob Wolf Mendlin, who studied under Lassalle, pointed out the importance of the co-operative system. Accordingly, a union was organized by the Jewish salesmen in Warsaw. In 1897 a conference of Jewish workingmen was held in that city and Der allgemeine juedische Arbeiterbund in Littauen, Polen, und Russland (Federation of Jewish Labor Unions in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia) was perfected. It published three papers as its organs, Die Arbeiterstimme, Der juedischer Arbeiter, and, in Switzerland, Letzte Nachrichten. Soon workmen's associations and artisans' clubs appeared wherever there was a sufficient number of Jewish tailors, hatters, bookbinders, etc., for the purpose of increasing and improving the value of their production, and to do away with middlemen and money-lenders. They organized a tailors', dyers', and shoemakers' union in Kharkov, and a carpenters' union in Minsk, for mutual support in the struggle for existence, and for the construction of sanitary workingmen's houses. The cultural desire of the handicraftsmen, constituting twelve per cent of the Russo-Jewish population and occasionally fifty-two per cent (Odessa), seventy-three per cent (Kovno), and even ninety per cent (Byelostok), is phenomenal. Their object is not only physical improvement. Their highest aim is that their members be enabled, by means of efficient night schools and private instruction, to acquire elementary and higher education; in the words of the constitution of the carpenters' union of Minsk, "to protect their material interests, raise their moral and intellectual status, and foster efforts of self-help."[17]

The Hebrew teachers, a class which, though more respected, underwent as hard a struggle as the workingmen, banded themselves together in 1899 in the Society for Aiding Hebrew Teachers of the Province of Vilna. Their president was Michael Wolper, the inspector of the Hebrew Institute and successor to Wohl as censor of Hebrew publications. Similar attempts were made in Bessarabia. Rabbi Shachor, chairman of the Hebrew Teachers' Association of Yekaterinoslav, was instrumental in opening a normal school conducted on Chautauqua principles, and so advanced the cause of education considerably.[18]

With the establishment of the rabbinical seminaries and the ukase (May 3, 1855) that only such may officiate as rabbis as have completed a prescribed course of study, Russian Jewry was placed in a sore predicament. It was a very difficult task to find men who united secular knowledge with that thorough mastery of Talmudic literature which the Jews of Russia exact from their rabbis. Every community was compelled to appoint two rabbis: an orthodox rabbi (dukhovny rabbin) and a "crown," or Government, rabbi (kazyony rabbin). The people recognized only the authority of the former, the Government that of the latter. The consequence was that a man with a mere high-school education would apply for, and would often receive, the position of crown-rabbi. His duties consisted in merely keeping a register of marriages, births, and deaths, administering the oath, and the like. The many lawyers and physicians who were debarred from practicing their professions sought to become candidates for the rabbinate. To avoid the unpleasant results which followed, Rabbi Chernovich of Odessa and Rabbi I.J. Reines of Lyda established seminaries in Odessa and Lyda, to take the place and to continue the teaching of the Vilna and the Volozhin yeshibot, which had been closed, and to furnish proper rabbis for the various congregations.[19]

The century-long struggle for enlightenment had a telling effect. What the early Maskilim had only dreamed of finally came to be. The metamorphosis was so great and so general as to be hardly credible. It was shown by Mr. Landman, in a paper read before the Russo-Jewish Historical Society of Odessa, that while among the Gentiles of that city the reading public constituted seven per cent of the population, among Jews it was no less than thirty-three per cent, and twenty-five per cent of all readers were Jewish women.[20] By 1905 there were two Yiddish and three Hebrew dailies, besides several weekly, monthly, and quarterly periodicals and annuals in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian, notwithstanding the fact that a numerous class depended on the general Russian literary output for their mental pabulum.

As the number of those who read Hebrew was still considerable, Abraham Loeb Shalkovich (Ben Avigdor) began, with the assistance of a number of Maskilim, the publication of "penny literature" (Sifre Agorah, Warsaw, 1893). Shortly afterwards the Ahiasaf Society and, a little later, the Tushiyah Society were founded. The object was to edit and publish "good and useful books in the Hebrew language for the spread of knowledge and the teaching of morality and culture among the Hebrew youth, also scientific books in all departments of learning." Both these associations have done admirable work. They have published many good text-books for teaching Hebrew and Jewish history, an illustrated periodical for children, Olam Katan (The Little World), and numerous works of interest to the adult. Among their publications were, besides the original writings of Peretz, Taviov, Frischman, Berdichevsky, Chernikhovsky, and others, also translations from Bogrov, Byron, Frug, Hugo, Nordau, Shakespeare, Spencer, Zangwill, Zola, critical biographies of Aristotle, Copernicus, George Eliot, Heine, Lassalle, Nietzsche, Rousseau, and a great many equally famous men of letters, which followed each other in promiscuous but uninterrupted succession, all handsomely printed and prettily bound, and sold at a moderate price.