THE INNER LIFE OF RUSSIAN JEWRY DURING THE PERIOD OF "ENLIGHTENED
ABSOLUTISM"
1. KAHAL AUTONOMY AND CITY GOVERNMENT
The system of state patronage spread its wings also over the
self-government of the Jewish communities. Towards the end of Catherine
II.'s reign the Government clearly betrayed its tendency to curtail the
extensive communal autonomy which the Jews had been guaranteed earlier,
in 1776, when the promise of the Empress, to allow the Jews of annexed
White Russia "to retain their former liberties," was still fresh in the
official mind. But the Russian Government, not in the habit of
tolerating such "licentiousness" among its subjects, looked askance at
the large economic, spiritual, and judicial functions granted to the
Kahals, in addition to their fiscal duties as the collecting agencies of
the state taxes. As a result of this attitude, the ukases of 1786 and
1795 had limited the range of activity of the Kahals to spiritual and
fiscal affairs. The "Jewish Constitution" of 1804 went one step further
by dividing these two functions between the rabbinate and the Kahals,
which had previously formed one whole. The rabbis were given permission
"to look after all the ceremonies of the Jewish faith and decide all
disputes bearing on religion," while the Kahals were ordered "to see to
the regular payment of the state taxes." This was all that was left of
the ancient autonomy of the Jewish communities in Poland, with its vast
network of institutions and central assemblies, or Waads.
It is apparent that in real life the power of the communities was larger
than on paper. The Jews went on submitting most of their cases, even
those involving monetary disputes, to their own rabbinical tribunals.
The prohibition of imposing the herem (excommunication) upon
obstreperous members of the community was occasionally disregarded,
since the "spiritual" tribunals had no other means of coercion at their
disposal. On the other hand, the Government itself, being in need not
only of the fiscal services of the Kahals, but also of a responsible
organization to be consulted upon Jewish matters, could not help
tolerating the extension of Kahal activities far beyond the range of
fiscal interests. When the Government was desirous of ascertaining the
views of the Jewish communities on some of the measures planned by it,
it addressed itself, as was the case in 1802, 1803, and 1807,[255] to
the Kahals, and authorized them to send delegates to St. Petersburg or
the provincial capitals.
This extension of Jewish autonomy was a concession wrested from the
Government by the force of circumstances, by the power of a compact
population living a life of its own and refusing to efface itself to the
point of merging with the surrounding population and fusing all its
public interests with the affairs of the general city administration.
Yet it was just this "municipalization" of the Jewish communities that
the Russian Government had been aiming at for a long time. From the time
of Catherine II. it cherished the thought of "destroying Jewish
separateness," by forcing the Jews into the framework of the Russian
class organization, particularly into the estates of the merchants and
burghers.
When, shortly after 1780, the Jews were accorded the hitherto unheard-of
privilege of participating in the city government with the right of
active and passive suffrage for the magistracies and municipal courts,
the lawgivers of St. Petersburg were confident that Russian Jewry, in a
transport of delight, would throw overboard its old Kahal autonomy, and
eagerly coalesce with the Christian urban estates, to form a common
municipal organization. But neither the Jews nor the Christians
justified these confident expectations. The former, while clinging as
heretofore to their time-honored communal organization, were glad to
participate in the elections to the magistracies, in which up till then
their traditional enemies, the Christian merchants and burghers, had
been the masters, and in which they frankly proposed to protect their
interests, representing as they did a considerable portion of the urban
population.
But here they encountered furious opposition on the part of their
Christian fellow-residents. In the two White Russian Governments of
Vitebsk and Moghilev several Jews had been elected to the magistracies
as aldermen and members of the law courts. But in the majority of cases
the Christians managed to obtain an artificial majority and keep the
Jews out of the municipal administration. Complaints lodged with the
central authorities in St. Petersburg were of no avail, for the Russian,
and even more so the Polish, burghers regarded the bestowal of municipal
rights upon the Jews as a violation of their own chartered privileges.
Yielding to this mood of the Christian population, the administrators of
the southwestern Governments established on their own responsibility a
restrictive percentage for the participation of Jews in the
magistracies, by limiting, even in places with a predominatingly Jewish
population, the number of Jewish members to be elected to the
magistracies to one-third. The representatives of the Jewish majority of
the population in the city administration were thus invariably reduced
to a minority, and were not in a position to protect the interests of
their coreligionists, either in the assessment of the municipal taxes or
in the cases brought before the municipal law courts. Here, too, the
protest addressed to St. Petersburg by a delegate acting on behalf of
the Podolian Jews did not remedy the situation.
In the two Lithuanian Governments which had fallen into the hands of
Russia after the third partition of Poland, in 1795, the Christian
opposition scored even a greater success. For here it became necessary
to suspend altogether the operation of the law granting the Jews
representation in the magistracies. When the Senatorial ukase of 1802,
making the Jews eligible for public office, became known in Vilna, the
local Christian population raised a cry of indignation. The Philistine
arrogance of the old "city fathers," combined with the low motives of
religious and class hatred, manifested itself in a petition addressed in
February, 1803, by the Christian burghers of Vilna to Alexander I.
In this petition the residents of Vilna protest against the violation of
their ancient privilege, in pursuance of which "Jews and members of
other faiths are forbidden to hold office" in Lithuania. The admission
of Jews to the magistracies is a misfortune and a disgrace for the
capital of Lithuania, for
they [the Jews] have not the slightest conception of morality,
while their form of education does not fit them for the calling
of a judge, and altogether this people can only maintain itself
by all kinds of trickery.... The Christians will lose all
interest in accepting public office once the Jews are given the
right to dominate them.
The petitioners point out threateningly that the domination of the Jews,
_i. e._ their participation in the magistracies, though it be limited
to one-third of the number of aldermen, will undermine the people's
confidence in the municipal administration and judiciary. "For the
obedience of the mob will be turned into defamation when the Christian
who enters the sacred place [of justice] beholds a Jew as his superior
and judge, submission to whom is unnatural, by reason of class and
religion."
The Christian population of Kovno resorted, in presenting a similar
petition, to another incontrovertible argument against the admission of
Jews to municipal offices. Referring to the cross with the "sacred
figure" of the crucifixion, which is placed on the court table for the
administration of the oath, the petitioners assert that the Jewish
members of the court "will refuse to look upon it, but, by reason of
their faith, will think disrespectfully of it, so that, instead of
judicial impartiality, there will be mockery of the Christian law." The
Government found these arguments convincing, and in 1805 repealed the
ukase of the Senate concerning the election of Jews to the magistracies
of Lithuania.
In this way the stolid rancor of the "privileged" burghers in some
places handicapped the activity of the Jews in the city administration,
and in others entirely suppressed it. The Jewish communities, backward
though they were, displayed sufficient civic courage to send their
representatives to the camp of the enemy to work in common with him for
the benefit of the whole urban population. But the narrow-minded
burghers, who were thoroughly saturated with medieval prejudices, would
not recognize the Jews as their fellow-townsmen. The Jews had to reckon
with this coarse conservatism of the surrounding population. They were
still able to fall back upon their own communal self-government, and,
had their social energies been directed towards that end, the old Kahal
autonomy, in spite of all Government restrictions, might to a certain
extent have come into its own again. But another factor thwarted this
revival--the deep rift in the Russian Jewish community, which began with
the rise of Hasidism in the second half of the eighteenth century, and
was an accomplished fact at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
2. THE HASIDIC SCHISM AND THE INTERVENTION OF THE GOVERNMENT
The period of Poland's partitions was also a period of divisions within
Polish Jewry. The external division was accompanied by an internal
split; the political partition, by a spiritual schism. The body of
Polish Jewry was divided among Russia, Austria, and Prussia, and its
soul between Rabbinism and Hasidism. There was even a significant
coincidence in dates: the first declaration against Hasidism by the
rabbinate of Vilna, which started the religious schism, was issued in
1772, in the year of the first Polish partition, and the second emphatic
declaration of the same rabbinate, which completed the schism, followed
close upon the third partition of Poland, in 1796.
The interval between these two dates represents one continuous stretch
of Hasidic triumphs. The Russian Southwest, Volhynia, the province of
Kiev, and Podolia, had by the end of the period, been almost completely
conquered by the Hasidim. With the exception of a few cities, they now
formed the predominating element in the communities; their ritual was
adopted in synagogue worship, and their spiritual rulers, the Tzaddiks,
exercised control over the official rabbinate. As far as the Northwest
is concerned, Hasidism had managed during that interval to obtain a
foothold in White Russia, the only Polish province which for over twenty
years had been under Russian dominion, and thus politically severed from
the rest of curtailed Poland. Under the leadership of the Tzaddik Shneor
Zalman of Lozno, a strong Hasidic center had been built up in that part
of the Northwest, but there were yet no compact Hasidic communities in
that region. In the majority of towns the communities were composed of
both elements, Hasidim and their opponents, the Rabbinists, who were
nicknamed _Mithnagdim_ ("Protestants"), the preponderance being now on
this side, now on the other, a state of affairs which gave rise to
endless dissensions in the Kahals and synagogues.
In Lithuania alone, the stronghold of Rabbinism, Hasidism failed to take
root. Here a few small Hasidic groups were ensconced in a number of
cities. They held their services in modest rooms in private residences
(_minyanim_), which they were often forced to hide from the gaze of the
hostile Kahal authorities. In Vilna, the residence of the great zealot
of Rabbinism, Elijah Gaon, the Hasidim constituted an "illegal" secret
organization. Only in the suburb of Pinsk, in Karlin, the Hasidim
succeeded in establishing themselves firmly, and could boast of having
their own synagogues and Tzaddiks.[256] Karlin became the seat of a
Hasidic propaganda extending all over Lithuania, where the Hasidim were
accordingly nicknamed "Karliners."
The second and third partition of Poland, which united Lithuania and
White Russia under the sovereignty of Russia, tended to buoy up the
oppressed Lithuanian Hasidim, who could now join forces against the
common enemy with their brethren all over the northwestern region. The
Hasidic propaganda took on new courage. To enhance the success of their
missionary activity, the Hasidim spread a rumor, that the former
anti-Hasidic thunderer, the veteran Rabbi Elijah Gaon, was sorry for all
the hostile acts he had committed against the sectarians, and that in
consequence the excommunication formerly hurled by him against them was
no longer valid. When this clever ruse became known in Vilna, the
indignant champions of Rabbinism prompted the aged Gaon to publish an
epistle in which he reaffirmed his former attitude towards the
"heretics," and declared that all the herems previously issued against
them remained in force (May, 1796). The epistle was intrusted to two
envoys, who were dispatched from Vilna to a number of cities, for the
purpose of stirring up an anti-Hasidic agitation. When the envoys
arrived in Minsk, and set about executing their instructions, the
Hasidim started a rumor to the effect that the Gaon's signature under
the epistle was not genuine. The Kahal of Minsk sent an inquiry to
Vilna, and in reply received, in September, 1796, a new energetic appeal
of the Gaon addressed to all the gubernatorial Kahals of Lithuania,
White Russia, Volhynia, and Podolia.
Ye mountains of Israel--cried the great zealot--ye spiritual
shepherds, and ye lay leaders of every Government, also ye, the
heads of the Kahals of Moghilev, Polotzk, Zhitomir, Vinnitza,
and Kamenetz-Podolsk, you hold in your hands a hammer wherewith
you may shatter the plotters of evil, the enemies of light, the
foes of the [Jewish] people. Woe unto this generation! They [the
Hasidim] violate the Law, distort our teachings, and set up a
new covenant; they lay snares in the house of the Lord, and give
a perverted exposition of the tenets of our faith. It behooves
us to avenge the Law of the Lord, it behooves us to punish
these madmen before the whole world, for their own improvement.
Let none have pity on them and grant them shelter!... Gird
yourselves with zeal in the name of the Lord!
In calling to arms against the Hasidim in these fulminant terms, the
venerable knight of Rabbinism was moved by the profound conviction that
the "new sect," which by that time numbered its adherents by the
hundreds of thousands, was leading the Jewish religion and nation to
ruin, because it was rending asunder the Jewish camp internally while
the political upheavals were severing it externally. He was moreover
alarmed by the luxuriant growth of the cult of the Tzaddiks, or
miracle-workers, which constituted a menace to the purity of the Jewish
doctrine.
The Gaon's ire was particularly aroused by a work published in the same
year as his epistle (1796), by Rabbi Shneor Zalman, the head of the
White Russian Hasidim. The work was familiarly called _Tanyo_,[257] and
contained a bold exposition of the pantheistic doctrine of Hasidism,
which the champions of the established dogma were prone to regard as
blasphemy and heresy.[258] The Gaon's proclamation hinted at this work,
and its author felt painfully hurt by the attack. Shneor Zalman
responded in a counter-epistle, in which he tried to prove that the
patriarch of Rabbinism had been misinformed about the true essence of
Hasidism, and he invited his opponent to a literary dispute for the
purpose of elucidating the truth and "restoring peace in Israel." But
the Gaon refused to enter into polemics with a "heretic." In the
meantime the Vilna epistle continued to circulate in many communities,
and gave rise to severe conflicts between Mithnagdim and Hasidim, the
former as a rule taking the offensive.
Exasperated to the point of madness by these persecutions, the Hasidic
association of Vilna was stung into perpetrating an act of gross
tactlessness. When, in the fall of 1797, about a year after the
publication of his last circular, the aged Gaon closed his eyes, and the
whole community of Vilna was plunged into mourning, the local Hasidic
society met in a private house and indulged in a gay drinking bout, to
celebrate the deliverance of the sect from its principal enemy. This
ugly demonstration arranged on the day of the funeral raised a storm of
indignation throughout the community. Before leaving the cemetery, the
leaders of the community, standing at the Gaon's grave, pledged
themselves solemnly to wreak vengeance upon the Hasidim. On the
following day the Kahal elders were called to a special meeting, at
which a series of repressive measures against the Hasidim was adopted.
Apart from the measures to be made public, such as a new bull of
excommunication against the sectarians, the meeting passed several
resolutions which were to remain confidential. A special committee of
five Kahal members was appointed, and was vested with large powers, for
the purpose of grappling with the "heresy." Subsequent events proved
that among the contemplated means of warfare was included the plan of
informing against the leaders of the sect to the Russian Government.
It did not take long for the disgraceful scheme to be put into action.
Soon the Prosecutor-General in St. Petersburg, Lopukhin, received a
denunciation directing his attention "to the political misdeeds
perpetrated by the chief of the Karliner [Hasidic] sect, Zalman
Borukhovich [son of Borukh]," and his fellow-workers in Lithuania. Under
the influence of this denunciation, Lopukhin, acting in the name of the
Tzar, ordered the local gubernatorial administration, early in the fall
of 1798, to arrest Zalman, the head of the sect, in the townlet of
Lozno, together with twenty-two of his accomplices who were found in
Lithuania. Zalman was apprehended and dispatched post-haste to St.
Petersburg, accompanied by "a strong convoy"; his incriminated followers
remained under arrest in Vilna.
Zalman was arraigned before the so-called "Secret Expedition," a
department which dealt with crimes of a political nature. A long bill of
indictments was read out to him. He was accused of being the founder of
a harmful religious sect, which had changed the order of divine service
among Jews, of spreading pernicious ideas, and collecting funds for
mysterious purposes in Palestine. The cross-examination clearly implied
the charge of _political_ disloyalty. To all questions laid before him,
the accused gave an elaborate written reply in Hebrew. Zalman's defense,
which was translated from the Hebrew into Russian, produced a favorable
impression in Government circles. Acting upon the report submitted to
him by the Prosecutor-General respecting "all the circumstances revealed
by the investigation," Tzar Paul I. issued an order to liberate Zalman
and the other sectarian chiefs who had been placed under arrest, but to
keep "a strict watch over them as to whether there exists, or is liable
to come into existence, a secret relationship or correspondence between
them and those who entertain perverted notions concerning the
authorities and the form of Government." Towards the end of 1798 Zalman
was allowed to return home, and the other prisoners were likewise set at
liberty.
Now it was the turn of the Hasidim to retaliate on their persecutors. In
view of the fact that the persecutions against them had been instigated
by the Kahal elders of Vilna, who had composed the "Committee of Five,"
the Hasidim made up their mind to depose these elders and put their own
partisans in their places. With the help of bakhshish the Vilna Hasidim
managed to secure the good-will of the gubernatorial administration. In
the beginning of 1799 they lodged a complaint with the local authorities
against the Kahal elders, charging them with having perpetrated all
kinds of abuses, including the embezzlement of public funds. This action
resulted in the removal and imprisonment of several elders. Under
official pressure their places were filled by new elders, who either
were themselves Hasidim or had been recommended by them. The community
of Vilna was rent in twain. One section remained true to the dismissed
elders, the other stood up for the newly-elected. The warring factions
were busy sending complaints and denunciations directed against each
other to the Government in St. Petersburg. The canker of "informing,"
which, perhaps not accidentally, had developed in the first years of
Russian rule in Lithuania, brought to the front one hideous personality,
a rabbi-informer by the name of Avigdor Haïmovich (son of Hayyim), of
Pinsk.
Avigdor, formerly rabbi of Pinsk and the surrounding district, had been
dismissed from office owing to the intrigues of the Hasidic members of
the community, who were his opponents. What Avigdor lamented most was
the loss of revenue. For a long time the dethroned shepherd had been
dragging his flock through the magistracies and law courts. Having
failed in his efforts, he decided to wreak vengeance upon the leader of
the sect responsible for his ruin. In the beginning of 1800 Avigdor
addressed an elaborate petition to Tzar Paul I., in which he described
the Hasidic sect as "a pernicious and dangerous organization," which was
continuing the work of the former Messianic Sabbatians. By a vast array
of distorted quotations from Hasidic literature the informer endeavored
to prove that the teachers of the sect enjoined upon their followers to
fear only God and not men, in other words, to disregard the authorities,
including the Tzar.
The denunciation was allowed to take its course. Early in November of
the same year, the Tzaddik Zalman Borukhovich was rearrested in Lozno
and dispatched to St. Petersburg under the convoy of two Senatorial
couriers. On his arrival in the capital the Tzaddik was incarcerated in
the fortress, and after a cross-examination confronted with his accuser
Avigdor. Zalman again replied in writing to the indictments against him,
which now mounted up to nineteen counts. He repudiated emphatically the
charge of not recognizing the authority of the Government, of
immorality, of collecting money, and arranging meetings for secret
purposes. Towards the end of November Zalman was set at liberty, but was
ordered to remain in St. Petersburg pending the examination of his case
by the Senate, to which it had now been transferred from the Secret
Expedition. While the Senate was preparing to take up the case, the
palace revolution of March, 1801, cut short Paul's reign, and placed
Alexander I. upon the throne. The political wind veered round, and on
March 29, 1801, the new Tzar gave Zalman permission to depart from St.
Petersburg.
Having satisfied itself that the religious schism in Judaism was
perfectly harmless from the political point of view, the Government was
ready to give it its sanction. One of the clauses of the Statute of
1804 permits the sectarians to establish their own synagogues in every
community and to elect their own rabbis, with the sole stipulation that
the Kahal administration in each city shall remain one and the same for
all sections of the community. As a matter of fact, the law merely
recognized what had already become the living practice. The religious
split had long been an accomplished fact, and the internecine strife of
1796-1801 was merely its final act. As for the communal organization of
the Jews, which had already been undermined by the political changes,
the schism proved nothing short of disastrous. The Kahals, weakened by
inner struggles and demoralized by denunciations and bureaucratic
interference, failed to present a united front in the first years of
Alexander's reign, when the Government was carrying out its "plan of
reform," and invited the Kahal leaders to share in its labors. The
communities of the Southwest, which were completely under the ban of
Hasidic mysticism, reacted feebly to the social and economic crisis
facing them. The Jewish delegates who presented their views in reply to
the official inquiries of 1803 and 1807[259] were recruited principally
from the White Russian and Lithuanian Governments, where the political
sense of the Jews had not yet been completely dulled.
3. RABBINISM, HASIDISM, AND ENLIGHTENED "BERLINERDOM"
While in Western Europe the old forms of Jewish life were breaking up,
the cultural development of the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe remained
stationary. The two dominating forces in their spiritual life, Rabbinism
and Hasidism, watched with equal zeal over the maintenance of the old
order of things. The traditional form of education remained unchanged.
The old school, the heder and yeshibah, with its exclusive Talmudic
training, supplied its pupils with a vast amount of mental energy, but
failed to prepare them for practical life, and the girls and women
remained entirely outside the influence of the school. Just as firmly
established was the old-fashioned scheme of family life, with its early
marriages, between the years of thirteen and sixteen, with the prolonged
maintenance of such married children in the paternal home, with its
excessive fertility in the midst of habitual poverty, with its reduction
of physical wants to the point of exhaustion and degeneration. This
patriarchal mass of Jews fought shy of all cultural "novelties," and
deprecated the slightest attempt to extend its mental and social
horizon. Religious culture had not yet had a chance to cross swords with
secular culture. The war between Hasidism and Rabbinism was fought on
purely religious soil. Its sole issue was the _type_ of the believer:
the old discipline with its emphasis upon the scholastic and ceremonial
aspect of Judaism was fighting against the onrush of ecstatic mysticism
and the blind "cult of saints."
It cannot be said that benumbed Rabbinism revived under the effect of
this vehement contest. At the time we are speaking of no distinct traces
of such a revival are to be seen, and all one can discern are the signs
of a purely scholastic renaissance. The method of textual analysis
introduced by Elijah Gaon into Talmudic research, which took the place
of the hair-splitting casuistry formerly in vogue, gained ever wider
currency and an ever firmer foothold in the yeshibahs of Lithuania.
In the new center of Talmudic learning, the yeshibah of the Lithuanian
townlet of Volozhin,[260] established in 1803, this novel method
received particular attention at the hands of its founder, Rabbi Hayyim
Volozhiner, a pupil of the Gaon. The yeshibah of Volozhin raised a whole
generation of scholars and rabbis "in the spirit of the Gaon." In these
circles one could even detect a certain amount of toleration towards the
anathematized "secular sciences," though this toleration was limited to
the realm of mathematics and partly that of natural history. The Gaon,
who had himself engaged in mathematical exercises in his spare moments,
permitted his pupil Borukh Shklover to publish a Hebrew translation of
Euclid's Geometry (1780). Yet the dread of philosophy was as great as
theretofore, and the incompatibility of free research with Judaism was
looked upon as an inviolable dogma. The Jewish mind continued to move
within the narrow range of "the four ells of the Halakha," and was
doomed to sterility. In the course of that whole stormy period,
extending over a quarter of a century, Rabbinism, aside from the Gaon,
had not put forward a single literary figure of any magnitude, not a
single writer of large vision. It seemed as if the spirit of originality
had fled from it.
Greater productivity was to be found among the Hasidim of the period,
although in point of originality it yielded considerably to the
preceding era of the Besht and his first apostles. Alongside of
triumphant practical Tzaddikism, trading in miracles and thriving on the
credulity of the masses, we observe to a certain degree the continued
development of the Hasidic doctrine on the lines laid down by Besht. In
the North a new Hasidic theory was spreading, which strove to adapt the
emotional pietism of Besht to the "intellectualism" of the Lithuanian
schoolmen. The originator of this doctrine, Rabbi Shneor Zalman, the
hero of the religious struggle depicted in the foregoing chapters,
endeavored to rationalize Hasidism, which had manifested a decided
leaning toward the principle _credo quia absurdum sit_. In the hands of
the author of _Tanyo_, the ecstasy of feeling is transformed into
ecstasy of thinking. Occasionally he speaks of the knowledge of God in
terms worthy of a Maimonides. Needless to say, Rabbi Zalman rejects the
Tzaddik cult in the vulgar form of miracle-mongering, which it had
assumed in the South.
In the South--to speak more exactly, in the Ukraina--Hasidism persisted
in the beaten track. Its two pillars, Levi Itzhok (Isaac) of Berdychev
(died 1809) and Nohum (Nahum) of Chernobyl (died 1799), continued to
uphold Besht's traditions. The former, the author of _Kedushath
Levi_[261] (1798), manifests in his work the genuine fervor of Hasidic
faith, without its morbid ecstasy. In his private life this leader of
Volhynian Hasidism was the embodiment of lovingkindness, extending alike
to Jew and non-Jew. Many popular legends tell of his surpassing
affection for the humble and suffering. The Tzaddik Nohum of Chernobyl,
who was an itinerant preacher in the Government of Kiev, laid in his
sermons special emphasis on the element of the Cabala. Towards the end
of his life he was primarily a Tzaddik, of the "practitioner" and
"miracle-worker" type, and founded the "Chernobyl Tzaddik dynasty,"
which is still widely ramified in the Ukraina.
Quite apart from the rest stands the figure of the Podolian Tzaddik and
dreamer Nahman of Bratzlav (1772-1810), a great-grandson of Besht.
Gifted with a profoundly poetical disposition, he spurned the beaten
tracks of the professional "Righteous," and struck out into a path of
his own. The goal he aimed at was the return to the childlike simplicity
of Besht's teachings. In 1798-1799 Nahman made a pilgrimage to
Palestine, just about the time when Bonaparte's army was marching
through the Holy Land, and a gust from tempestuous Europe drifted
through the slumbering East. But the Podolian youth had an ear only for
the whisper from the tombs of the great Cabalist teachers, Rabbi Shimeon
ben Yohai and Ari, and for the discourses of the living Tzaddiks who had
settled in Tiberias. On his return to Europe, Nahman made his home in
Bratzlav, and became the head of a group of Podolian Hasidim. In his
intimate circle he was wont to preach, or rather to muse aloud, on the
reign of the spirit, on the communion of the Tzaddik with his flock in
religious ecstasy. He spoke in epigrams, sometimes clothing his thoughts
in the form of folk-tales. He wrote a number of books,[262] in which he
constantly emphasized the need of blind, unsophisticated faith.
Philosophy he regarded as destructive to the soul; Maimonides and the
rationalists were hateful to him. The unfamiliar Berlin "enlightenment"
filled his heart with mysterious awe. Nahman's life was cut short
prematurely. Surrounded by his admirers, he died of consumption, in
Uman, at the age of thirty-eight. Down to this day his grave serves as a
place of pilgrimage for the "Bratzlav Hasidim."
However, the average Tzaddik of the type which had assumed definite
shape in that period was equally removed from the complexity of Rabbi
Zalman and the simplicity of Rabbi Nahman. On the whole, the Tzaddiks
drifted further and further away from their mission of religious
teachers, and became more and more "practitioners." Surrounded by a host
of enthusiastic worshipers, these "middlemen between God and mankind"
understood the art of turning the blind faith of the masses to good
account. They waxed rich on the gifts and offerings of their admirers,
lived in palaces, much after the manner of the Polish magnates and
Church dignitaries. The "court" of Besht's grandson in Medzhibozh,
Borukh Tulchinski (1780-1810), was marked by particular splendor. Borukh
even had his court-fool, Herschel Ostropoler, the well-known hero of
popular anecdotes.
In the original Polish provinces, afterwards incorporated into the Duchy
of Warsaw, the commanders-in-chief of the Hasidic army were two
Tzaddiks, Rabbi Israel of Kozhenitz and Rabbi Jacob Itzhok (Isaac) of
Lublin. These two pupils of the "apostle" Baer of Mezherich became the
pioneers of Hasidism on the banks of the Vistula towards the end of the
eighteenth century. At the close of their careers--both died in
1815--the banner of Hasidism floated over the whole of Poland.
The breezes of Western culture had hardly a chance to penetrate to this
realm, protected as it was by the double wall of Rabbinism and Hasidism.
And yet here and there one may discern on the surface of social life the
foam of the wave from the far-off West. From Germany the free-minded
"Berliner," the nickname applied to these "new men," was moving towards
the borders of Russia. He arrayed himself in a short German coat, cut
off his earlocks, shaved his beard, neglected the religious observances,
spoke German or "the language of the land," and swore by the name of
Moses Mendelssohn. The culture of which he was the banner-bearer was a
rather shallow enlightenment, which affected exterior and form rather
than mind and heart. It was "Berlinerdom," the harbinger of the more
complicated Haskala of the following period, which was imported into
Warsaw during the decade of Prussian dominion (1796-1806). The contact
between the capitals of Poland and Prussia yielded its fruits. The
Jewish "dandy" of Berlin appeared on the streets of Warsaw, and not
infrequently the long robe of the Polish Hasid made way timidly for the
German coat, the symbol of "enlightenment."
Alongside of this external assimilation, attempts were also made to copy
the literary models of Prussian Jewry. In 1796 a Jewish Mendelssohnian
named Jacques Kalmansohn published a French pamphlet in Warsaw, under
the title _Essai sur l'état actuel des Juifs de Pologne et leur
perfectibilité_, dedicating it to the Prussian Minister Hoym, who had
carried out Jewish reforms in the Polish provinces of Prussia. The
pamphlet contains an account of the status of Polish Jewry of his time
and a plan for its amelioration. The account is rather superficial,
concocted after the approved Western recipe. In the judgment of the
author, the misfortune of the Jews lies in their separation from the
surrounding nations, and their happiness in merging with them. The
scheme of reform proposed by the Jew Kalmansohn differs but slightly
from the Polish projects of Butrymovich and Chatzki. It advocates
equally the weakening of rabbinical and Kahal authority, the
extermination of Hasidism and Tzaddikism, the introduction of German
dress, the shaving of beards, the establishment of German schools, and
in general the cultivation of "civism."
The mould of Berlin fashion was overlaid with a Parisian veneer when
soon afterwards (1807-1812), at the bidding of Napoleon, the Duchy of
Warsaw sprang into being. Now a new note was sounded. A group of
Parisian "dandies" claim equal rights as a compensation for having
changed their dress and their "moral conduct."[263] Even respectable
representatives of the Warsaw Jewish community designate themselves in
their petition to the Senate as "members of the Polish nation of the
Mosaic persuasion," copying the latest Parisian fashion, in vogue at the
time of the Napoleonic Synhedrion.[264] This was the first, though as
yet naïve and unsophisticated, attempt to secure the "transfer" from the
Jewish nation to the Polish, the germ of the future "Poles of the Old
Testament persuasion."
The torch-bearers of Berlin culture from among the followers of David
Friedländer encouraged this frame of mind in every possible manner, and
in their organ[265] constantly appealed in this spirit to their Polish
brethren.
How long will you continue--one of these appeals reads--to speak
a corrupt German dialect [Yiddish] instead of the language of
your country, the Polish? How many misfortunes might have been
averted by your forefathers, had they been able to express
themselves adequately in the Polish tongue before the magnates
and kings! Take a group of a hundred Jews in Germany, and you
will find that either all or most of them can speak to the
magnates and rulers, but in Poland scarcely five or ten out of a
hundred are capable of doing so.
Some stray seeds of Western "enlightenment" were carried as far as the
distant Russian North. During Dyerzhavin's tour of inspection through
White Russia there flitted across his vision the figure of the physician
Frank in Kreslavka, an avowed follower of Mendelssohn, calling for
religious and educational reforms.[266] In St. Petersburg, in the house
of the Maecenas Abraham Peretz, lived his teacher Judah Leib
Nyevakhovich, a native of Podolia. In 1803, the same year in which the
Jewish deputies sojourned in St. Petersburg, Nyevakhovich published a
pamphlet in Russian, under the title, "The Wailing of the Daughter of
Judah," with a dedication to Kochubay, the Minister of the Interior and
Chairman of the "Jewish Committee." The dedication strikes the keynote
of the "Wailing": genuflexion before the greatness of Russia and
mortification at the fate of his coreligionists, who are deprived of
their share in the "blessings" of the country.
"How greatly," exclaims the author, "doth my soul exult over these
matters [the victories and might of the Russian Empire]; how deeply doth
it grieve over my coreligionists, who are removed from the hearts of
their compatriots." And throughout the whole of the pamphlet the
"Daughter of Judah" bewails the fact that neither the eighteenth
century, "the age of humanity, toleration, and meekness," nor "the
smiling spring of the present century, the beginning of which hath been
crowned ... by the accession of Alexander the Merciful, has removed the
deep-seated Jewish hatred in Russia." "Many minds doom the tribe of
Judah to contempt. The name 'Judean' hath become an object of ridicule,
contempt, and scorn for children and the feeble-minded." With particular
reference to Mendelssohn and Lessing the author exclaims: "You search
for the Jew in man. Search for man in the Jew, and you will no doubt
find him."
Nyevakhovich's pamphlet concludes with a grievous moan:
While the hearts of all the European nations have drawn nearer
to one another, the Jewish people still finds itself despised. I
feel the full weight of this torment. I appeal to all who have
sympathy and compassion. Why do you sentence my entire people to
contempt? Thus waileth sadly the daughter of Judah, wiping her
tears, sighing and yet uncomforted.
The author himself, by the way, subsequently managed to obtain comfort.
A few years after the publication of the "Wailing," still finding
himself "removed from the hearts of his compatriots," he discovered the
magic key to these obstreperous hearts. He embraced Christianity, and,
transformed into Lev Alexandrovich Nyevakhovich, began to write
moralizing Russian plays, which pleased the unsophisticated taste of the
Russian public of the day. Nyevakhovich thus carried his "Berlinerdom"
to that dramatic _dénouement_ which was in fashion in Berlin itself,
where an epidemic of baptism was raging. His example was followed by his
patron Abraham Peretz, who had been ruined in the War of 1812 by
military contracts. The descendants of both converts occupied important
posts in the Russian civil service. One of the Peretz family was a
member of the Council of State during the reign of Alexander II.
A faint reflection of the Western literature of enlightenment is visible
during this period on the somber horizon of Russia. Mendel Lewin, of
Satanov[267] (1741-1819), who had been privileged to behold in the flesh
the Father of Enlightenment in Berlin, scattered new seeds in his native
country. He translated into Hebrew the popular manual of medicine by
Tissot, the moral philosophy of Franklin, and the books of travel by
Campe. He also made an attempt to render the Book of Proverbs and
Ecclesiastes into the vernacular Yiddish.
The last undertaking drew upon Lewin the wrath of another "enlightened"
writer, Tobias Feder of Piotrkov and Berdychev (died 1817), who attacked
him savagely for "profaning" Holy Writ by turning it into the "language
of the street." Feder himself published studies in Hebrew grammar and
Biblical exegesis, moralizing treatises, harmless satires, and poetical
odes. These publications cannot be said to mark an epoch in the realm of
literature, but they undoubtedly symbolize a new departure in cultural
life. The secular book, of which the mere appearance was apt to arouse a
murmur of discontent among the alarmed Orthodox, takes its place side by
side with the religious literature of Rabbinism and Hasidism. These
literary attempts were the harbingers of the subsequent secularization
of Hebrew literature.
FOOTNOTES:
[255] See pp. 337, 339, 349.
[256] One of these Tzaddiks, Rabbi Solomon (Shelomo) of Karlin, lost his
life, according to Hasidic tradition, during the riots of the
Russo-Polish confederate troops in the district of Minsk.
[257] [The title of the work is _Likkute Amarim_, "Collected
Discourses." It is called _Tanyo_ from the first word.]
[258] Among the incriminated ideas was that of the presence of the Deity
in all existing things and in all, even sinful, thoughts, and the
concomitant mystical theory of "raising the sparks to the source," _i.
e._ extracting good from evil, righteousness from sinfulness, and pure
passion from impure impulses.
[259] See pp. 339, 349.
[260] [In the Government of Vilna.]
[261] ["The Holiness of Levi."]
[262] _Likkute Maharan_, "Collected Sayings of MaHaRaN" [abbreviation of
_M_orenu _H_a-_R_ab _R_abbi _N_ahman], and others.
[263] [See p. 300.]
[264] See p. 301.
[265] [The Hebrew periodical _Ha-Me´assef_ ("The Collector"), which was
founded in Berlin in 1784, and appeared until 1811.]
[266] See p. 331.
[267] [In Podolia.]