IN LITHUANIA
HUMANISM IN RUSSIA
We are in the Jewish country, perhaps the only Jewish country in the
world. [Footnote: See Slouschz, _Massa' be-Lita_ ("Journey through
Lithuania"), Jerusalem, 1899.]
The last to participate in the intellectual movement of European
Judaism, the Lithuanian Jews start into view, in the second half of the
seventeenth century, as a peculiar social organism, clearly marked as
such from its first appearance. The Rabbis and scholars of Lithuania
acquired fame without a struggle, and its Rabbinical schools quickly
became the busy centres of Talmudic research.
The destinies of the Jewish population of Lithuania, so different in
character from that of Poland proper, were ruled absolutely by the
"Synod of the Four Countries", with Brest, and afterwards Wilna, as
headquarters.
The revolutions and upheavals to which is due the social and religious
decadence of the Polish Jews during the eighteenth century, barely
touched this forsaken corner of the earth. Even the Cossack invasion
dealt leniently with Lithuania, if the city of Wilna is excepted, and
its early annexation by Russia saved the province from the anarchy and
excitement which agitated Poland during its latter days.
Left to their fate, neglected by the authorities, and forming almost the
whole of the urban population, the Jews of Lithuania, in the full glare
of the eighteenth century, were in all essentials an autonomous
community with Jewish national and theocratic features. The Talmud did
service as their civil and religious code. The court of final appeal was
a Rabbinical expert, supported by the central synod and the local
_Kahal_, and exercising absolute authority over the moral and
material interests of those subordinated to his jurisdiction. The study
of the Law was carried to the extreme of devotion. To have an
illiterate, an _'Am ha-Arez_, a "rustic", in one's family, was
considered a pitiable fate.
Lithuania, in fine, was the promised land of Rabbinism, in which
everything favored the development of a national Jewish centre.
The natural poverty of the country, its barren soil, dense forests, and
lack of populous centres of civilization, all tended to keep the Polish
lords aloof. Poland offered them a more inviting sojourn. There was
nothing to hinder the pious scholars who had escaped from religious
persecution in the countries of Europe, especially France and Germany,
from devoting themselves, with all their heart and energy, to the study
of the Talmud and the ceremonials of their religion. No infusion of
aliens disturbed them. The inhospitable skies, the absence of
diversions, little troubled the refugees of the ghetto, for whom the
Book and the dead letter were all-sufficing. They were not affected,
their dignity was hardly wounded, by the haughty and arbitrary treatment
which the nobleman accorded to the Jewish "factor" and steward, and by
the many humiliations which were the price paid in return for the right
to live, for without the protection of the lords they would not have
been able to hold out against the wretched orthodox peasants. In
morality and in race, however, they considered themselves the superior
of the "Poriz", the Polish nobleman, with his extravagance and folly.
In the villages, the Jews had the upper hand, either as the actual
owners of the estates, or as the overseers, and in the rude cities with
their wooden buildings, they constituted the bulk of the merchants, the
middlemen, the artisans, even the workmen. They all led a sordid life.
Mere existence required a bitter struggle. Destitute of all pleasures
save the intimate joys of family life, fostering no ambition except such
as was connected with the study of the Law, disciplined by religious
authority, and chastened by austere and rigid principles of morality,
the Jewish masses had a peculiar stamp impressed upon their character by
their life of subjection and misery. The mind was constantly kept alert
by the dialectics of the Talmud and the ingenious efforts needed to
secure one's daily bread. Even the Messianic dreams, inspired by a
belief in Divine justice and in the moral and religious superiority of
Israel, rather than by a mystic conception of life, gave but a faint
touch of beauty and glamour to an existence so mournful, so abjectly
sad.
Such was, and such in part is still, the manner in which they live--a
sober, energetic, melancholy, and subtle people, the mass of the two
millions of Jews who reside in Lithuania and White Russia, and send
forth, to the great capitals of Europe and to the countries beyond seas,
a stream of industrious immigrants, resourceful intellectually and
morally.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, thanks to the peace with
which Lithuania was blessed after its subjection by Russia, Rabbinical
studies reached their zenith. The high schools, the _Yeshibot_,
became the centres of attraction for the best of the young men. The
number of writers and scholars increased considerably, and the Hebrew
printing presses were kept in full blast. The ideal of every Lithuanian
Jew was, if not to marry his daughter to a scholar, at least to have a
_Bahur_ at his table, a student of the Talmud, a prospective Rabbi.
"The Torah is the best _Sehorah_" ("merchandise"), every Lithuanian
mother croons at the cradle of her child.
In those days a Rabbinic authority arose like unto whom none had been
known among Jews in the later centuries, and his earnest, independent
genius, as well as his moral grandeur, conferred a consecration upon the
peculiar spiritual tendencies prevailing in Lithuanian Judaism, which he
personified at its loftiest. Elijah of Wilna, surnamed "the Gaon", "his
Excellency", succeeded in resisting the assaults of Hasidism, which
threatened to overwhelm, if not the learned among them, certainly the
Lithuanian masses. To parry the dangers of mysticism, which exercised so
powerful an attraction that the dry and subtle casuistry of Rabbinic
learning could not damp its ardor, he broke with scholastic methods, and
took up a comparatively rational interpretation of texts and the laws.
He went to the extreme of asserting the value of profane and practical
knowledge, the pursuit of which could not but bring advantage to the
study of the Law--a position unheard of at his day, and excusable only
in so popular a man as he was. He himself wrote a treatise on
mathematics, and philologic research was a favorite occupation with him.
His pupils followed his example; they translated several scientific
works into Hebrew, and founded schools and centres of puritanism, not
only in Lithuania, but also as far away as Palestine. From this time on
the _Yeshibah_ of Wolosin became the chief seat of traditional
Talmud study and Rabbinic rationalism.
One of the contemporaries of "the Gaon" was the physician Judah Hurwitz,
of Wilna, who opposed Hasidism in his pamphlet _Megillat Sedarim_
("A Book of Essays"), and in his ethical work _Ammude Bet-Yehudah_
("The Pillars of the House of Judah ", Prague, 1793), he pleads the
cause of internationalism and the equality of men and races!
It would be rash to suppose that an echo of the studies of the
Encyclopedists had reached a province double-barred and double-locked by
politics and religion. The European languages were unknown in the
Lithuanian Jewries of the Gaon's day, and his pupils sought their mental
pabulum in the writings of the Jewish scholars of the Middle Ages,
Maimonides, and Albo, and their compeers. The result was an odd,
whimsical science. False, antiquated notions and theories were
introduced through the medium of the Hebrew, and they attained no slight
vogue. At the end of the eighteenth century, a certain Elias, a Rabbi,
also of Wilna, undertook to gather all the facts of science into one
collection. He compiled a curious encyclopedia, the _Sefer ha-
Berit_ ("The Book of the Covenant"). By the side of geographic
details of the most fantastic sort, he set down chemical discoveries and
physical laws in the form of magical formulas. This book, by no means
the only one of its kind, was reprinted many a time, and in our own day
it still affords delight to orthodox readers.
A long time passed before the Russian government took note of the
intellectual condition of its Jewish subjects, who, in turn, asked
nothing better than to be left undisturbed. Nevertheless, the treatment
accorded them by the government was not calculated to inspire them with
great confidence in it. As for a Russification of the Jewish masses,
there could be no question of that, at a time when Russian civilization
and language were themselves in an embryonic state.
It was only when the first Alexander came to the throne that the reforms
planned by the government began to make an impression upon the distant
ghetto. A special commission was instituted for the purpose of studying
the conditions under which the Jews were living, and how to ameliorate
them materially and intellectually. The first close contact between Jews
and Russians took place in the little town of Shklow, inhabited almost
entirely by Jews. It was an important station on the route from the
capital to Western Europe, and the Jews were afforded an opportunity of
entering into relations with men of mark, both Russians and strangers,
who passed through on their way to St. Petersburg. [Footnote: As early
as 1780 a Hebrew ode was published on the occasion of Empress Catherine
II's passing through Shklow. A printing press was set up there about
1777, and it was at Shklow that a litterateur, N. H. Schulmann, made the
first attempt to found a weekly political journal in Hebrew, announcing
it in his edition of the _Zeker Rab_.] A circle of literary men
under the influence of the Meassefim was founded there, and a curious
literary document issued thence testifies to the hopes aroused by the
reform projects planned in the reign of Alexander I for the improvement
of the condition of the Jews. It is a pamphlet bearing the title _Kol
Shaw'at Bat-Yehudah_, or _Sinat ha-Dat_ ("The Loud Voice of the
Daughter of Judah", or "Religious Hatred"), and published, in Shklow in
1803, in Hebrew and Russian. The author, whose name was Löb Nevakhovich,
protests energetically, in behalf of truth and humanity, against the
contemptuous treatment accorded the Jews. [Footnote: Grandfather of the
well-known scholar E. Metchnikoff, of the Pasteur Institute.]
"Ah, ye Christians, men of the newer faith, who vaunt your mercy
and lovingkindness! Exercise your mercy upon us, turn your loving
hearts toward us. Why do you scorn the Jew? If he forsakes his
faith, how doth it profit you? Have you not heard the voice of
Moses Mendelssohn, the celebrated writer of our people, who asked
your co-religionists, 'Of what avail that you should continue to
attach men lacking faith and religion to yourselves'? Can you
not understand that the Jew, too, loves righteousness and justice
like unto yourselves? Why do you constantly scrutinize the
_man_ to find the _Jew_ in him? Seek but the man in the
Jew, and you will surely find him!"
Like so many that have followed, this first appeal awakened no answering
echo in Russian hearts. A century has passed since then, and Russia
still fails to find the man in the unconverted Jew!
The hopes aroused in the Jews of Lithuania by the Napoleonic wars were
disappointed. An iron hand held them down, and they continued to
vegetate miserably in their gloomy, abandoned corner.
* * * * *
The story goes that when Napoleon at the head of the _grande armée_
entered Wilna, the exclamation was forced from him, "Why, this is the
Jerusalem of Lithuania!" Whether the story is true or not, it is a fact
that no other city was more deserving of the epithet. The residence of
the Gaon was a Jewish metropolis as early as the eighteenth century, and
during the whole of the nineteenth century Wilna was the Jewish city
_par excellence_, a distinction to which it was helped by several
facts--by the systematic and intentional elimination of the Polish
element, especially since the insurrection of 1831, by the prohibition
of the Polish language, the closing of the university, and the absence
of a Lithuanian population. The dethroned capital of a people betrayed
by its nobility became, after its abandonment by the native inhabitants,
the centre of a Jewry independent of its surroundings and undisturbed in
its internal development. Without in the least deviating from Rabbinic
traditions, its constitutional platform, Jewish society in Wilna was
gradually penetrated by modern ideas.
The humanism of the German Jews, the Haskalah, met with no effective
resistance in a comparatively enlightened world, prepared for it by the
school of the Gaon. The Rabbinical students themselves were the first
representatives of humanism in Lithuania. They became as ambitious in
cultivating the Hebrew language and studying the secular sciences
presented in it, as in searching out and examining the Talmud. Sprung
from the people, living its life and sharing in its miseries, separated
from Christian society by a barrier of prescriptions that seemed
insuperable to them, the earliest of the Lithuanian litterateurs
vitalized their young love for science and Hebrew letters with the
disinterested devotion that characterizes the idealists of the ghetto in
general.
A literary circle, known as the "Berliners", was formed in Wilna, about
1830. It was the pattern after which a large number were modelled a
little later, all of them pursuing Hebrew literature with zeal and
ardor.
Two writers of worth, both from Wilna, the one a poet, the other a prose
writer, headed the literary procession in Lithuania.
Abraham Bär Lebensohn (Adam ha-Kohen, 1794-1880), surnamed the "father
of poetry", was born at Wilna. He spent a sad childhood. Left motherless
early, he was deprived of the love and the care that are the only
consolations known to a child of the ghetto. At the age of three, he was
sent to the _Heder_, at seven he was a student of the Talmud, then
casuistry occupied his mind, and, finally, the Kabbalah. The last had
but feeble attractions for the future poet. His mental mould was
determined by his thorough study of the Bible and Hebrew grammar, which
was good form in Wilna as early as his day, and the works of Wessely,
for whom he always professed warm admiration, had a decided influence
upon his poetic bias.
In his first attempts at poetry, Lebensohn did not depart greatly from
the achievements of the many Rabbinical students whose favorite pastime
was to discuss the events of the day in Hebrew verse. An elegy to the
memory of a Rabbi, an ode celebrating the equivocal glory of a Polish
nobleman, and similar subjects, were the natural choice of the muse of
the era, and the early flights of our author were not different. There
was nothing in them to betray the future poet of merit. A little later
he took up the study of German, but his knowledge of the language was
never more than superficial. Haunted by the fame of Schiller, he devoted
himself to poetry, and imitated the German poets, or tried to imitate
them, for he never succeeded in grasping the true meaning of German
poetry, nor in understanding erotic literature. To the Rabbinical
student, with his puritanic spirit and austere manners, it was a
collocation of poetic figures of speech and symbolic expressions.
His life differed in no wise from that of the poor Jews of the ghetto.
Given in marriage early by his father, he suddenly found himself deep in
the bitter struggle for existence, before he had known the transport of
living, or youth, or the passions, or love, or the inner doubts and
beliefs that contend with one another in the heart of man. Feeling for
nature, aesthetic delights, were strange provinces to this son of the
ghetto. A conception of art that is destitute of a moral aim would have
passed his understanding and his puritanic horizon. Too much of a free-
thinker to follow the Rabbinical profession, he taught Hebrew to
children--an unremunerative occupation, and little respected in a
society in which the most ignorant are not uninstructed, and in which,
the choice of vocations being restricted, the unsuccessful and the
unskilled naturally drop into teaching. Ten years of it, daily from
eight in the morning until nine at night, undermined his health. He fell
sick, and was compelled to give up his hap-hazard calling, to the great
gain of Hebrew poetry. He went into the brokerage business, and his
small leisure he devoted to his muse. Harassed by petty, sordid cares,
this broker was yet a genuine idealist, though it cannot be maintained
that Lebensohn was of the stuff of which dreamers are made and great
poets. But in his mind, rationalistic and logical to the point of
dryness, there was a secluded recess pervaded with melancholy and real
feeling. The Hebrew language he cherished with ardent and exalted love.
Is it not a beautiful language and admirable? Is it not the last relic
saved from the shipwreck in which all the national possessions of our
people were lost? And is not he, Lebensohn himself, the heir to the
prophets, the poet laureate and high priest to the holy language? With
what pride he unveils the state of his soul to us:
"I am seated at the table of God, and with my hand I guide His
pen; and my hand writes the language holy unto Him, the language
of His Law, the language of His people, Selah! O God, arouse,
awake my spirit, for is it not Thy holy language wherein I sing
unto Thee?" [Footnote: _Shire Sefat Kodesh_, II, i.]
A creature of his surroundings, and a disciple of the Rabbis, as he was,
the dialectics of a logician were in him joined to native simplicity of
spirit, yet he never reached the point of understanding the inner world
of struggles and passions that agitate the individual lives of men. For
a love song or a poem in praise of nature, he thought it necessary only
to copy the German authors and link together a series of pointed verses.
The poem "David and Bath-sheba" is a failure. His descriptions of nature
are dry and artificial. He was never able to account for what was
happening under his eyes and around him. Events produced an effect upon
him out of all proportion to their importance. The military and civic
reforms of Nicholas I, he celebrated in an ode, in which he applied the
enthusiastic praise "Henceforth Israel will see only good!" to
regulations that were wholly prejudicial to Jewish interests. When some
Jewish banker or other was appointed consul-general in the Orient, he
welcomed the occurrence in dithyrambic verses, dedicated to the poor
fellow in the name of the Jews of Lithuania and White Russia. But
whenever the heart of our poet beats in unison with the sentiments of
his Jewish brethren, whenever he surrenders himself to the sadness, the
peculiar melancholy, that pervades Jewish relations, then he attains to
moral heights and lyric vigor unsurpassed. In his three volumes of
poetry, by the side of numerous worthless pieces, we meet many gems of
style and thought. The distressed cry of humanity against the
wretchedness under which it staggers, the sorrowful protest man makes
against the lack of compassion he encounters in his fellow, his
obstinate refusal to understand the implacable cruelty of nature when
she snatches his dearest from him, and his impotence in the presence of
death--these are the subjects that have inspired Lebensohn's best
efforts. He insists constantly, Is not pity the daughter of heaven? Do
we not find her among beasts even, and among reptiles? Man alone is a
stranger to her, and he makes himself the tyrant of his neighbor.
But it is not man alone who refuses to know this daughter of heaven,
Nature denies pity, too, and shows herself relentless:
"O world! House of mourning, valley of weeping! Thy rivers are
tears, and thy soil ashes. Upon thy surface thou bearest men that
mourn, and in thy bowels the corpses of the dead.... From out of
the mountains covered with snow and ice comes forth a chariot
with none to guide. Within sits man and the wife of his bosom,
beautiful as a flower, and at their knees play sweet children.
Alas! a caravan of the dead simulating life! They journey on, and
they go astray, and perish on the icy fields."
Distress round about, and all hopes collapsed, death hovers apart, yet
near, remorseless, threatening, and in the end victorious.
In another poem, entitled "The Weeping Woman", his subject is pity
again. He cries out:
"Thy enemy [cruelty] is stronger than thou. If thou art a burning
fire, she is a current of icy water!... Alas for thee, O pity!
Where is he that will have pity upon thee?"
With a few vigorous strokes, the Hebrew poet describes the nothingness
of man in the face of the vast world. The lot of the Hamlets and of the
Renés is more enviable than that of the "Mourner" of the ghetto. They at
least taste of life before becoming a prey to melancholy and delivering
themselves up to pessimism. They know the charms of living and its
vexations. The disappointed son of the ghetto lays no stress on
gratifications and pleasures. In the name of the supreme moral law he
sets himself up for a pessimistic philosopher.
"Our life is a breath, light as a floating bark. The grave is at
the very threshold of life, it awaits us not far from the womb of
our mother....
"Since the beginnings of the earth, we have been here, and she
changes us like the grass of her soil. She stands firm, unshaken.
We alone are changeable, and help there is none for us, no
refuge, nor may we decline to come hither. Like an angler of
fish, the world brings us up on a hook. Before it has finished
devouring one generation, the next is ready for its fate. One is
swallowed up, the other snatched away. Whence cometh our help?"
To this general destruction, this wildness of the elements, which the
"Mourner" fails to comprehend, permeated as he is with belief in Divine
justice, is superadded the malice of man.
"And thou also, thou becomest a scourge unto thy brother! The
heavenly host is joined by thy fellow-man. From the wrath of man,
O man, thou wilt never escape. His jealousy of thee will last for
aye, until thou art no more!"
And with all this, does life offer aught substantial, aught that is
lasting?
"Where are they, the forgotten generations? Their very name and
memory have disappeared. And in the generation to come, we, too,
shall be forgotten. And who escapes his lot? Not a single one of
us all. None is secure from death. Wealth, wisdom, strength,
beauty, all are nothing, nothing...."
In a burst of revolt, our poet exclaims:
"If I knew that my voice with its reverberations sufficed to
destroy the earth and the fulness thereof, and all the hosts of
heaven, I would cry with a thundering noise: Cease! Myself I
would return to nothing with the rest of mankind. Know not the
living that the grave will swallow them up after a life of
sadness and cruel misery? See they not that the whole of human
life is like the flash that goes before the fatal thunderbolt?"
The same train of thought is not met with again until we come down to
our own time, and Maupassant himself does not present it with greater
vigor in _Sur l'eau_.
And the end of the matter is that "man has nothing but the consciousness
of sorrow; he is naked and starved, feeble and without energy. His soul
desires all that he has not, and so he longs and languishes day and
night."
The uncertainty caused by the certainty of death, the terror inspired by
the fatal end, the aching regrets over the parting with dear ones, these
feelings, which possess even the devoutest Jew, are expressed in one of
Lebensohn's most beautiful poems, "The Death Agony", and in "Knowledge
and Death" the skepticism of the Maskil prevails over the optimism of
the Jew.
Sometimes he permits himself to sing of the misery of his people as
such. In "The Wail of the Daughter of Judah" (_Naäkat Bat-
Yehudah_), it would not be too much to say that there is an echo of
the best of the Psalms. The weakest of his verses are, nevertheless,
those in which he expresses longing for Jerusalem.
A great misfortune befell Lebensohn. The premature death of his son, the
young poet Micah Joseph, the centre of many and legitimate hopes,
extorted cries of distress and despair from him.
"Who, alas! hath driven my bird from my nest? Who is it that hath
banished my lyre from my abode? Who hath shattered my heart, and
brought me lamentation?... Who hath with one blow blasted my
hopes?"
There is enough in his writings to make the fortune of a great poet, in
spite of their ballast of mediocre and tiresome verses, which the reader
should disregard as he goes along. Between him and his contemporary, the
haughty recluse Alfred de Vigny, there is not a little resemblance.
Needless to say that Lebensohn had no acquaintance whatsoever with the
works of the French poet.
Lebensohn's poems, published at Wilna, in 1852, under the title "Poems
in the Holy Language" (_Shire Sefat Kodesh_), were greeted with
enthusiasm. The author was hailed as the "father of poetry". Besides, he
published several works treating of grammar and exegesis.
When the celebrated philanthropist Montefiore went to Russia, in 1848,
to induce the Czar's government to ameliorate the civil condition of the
Jews and grant reforms in the conduct of the schools, Lebensohn ranged
himself publicly on the side of the reformers. According to him, the
degradation of the Jews was due to three main causes:
1. Absence of Haskalah, that is, a rational education, founded upon
instruction in the language of the land, the ordinary branches of
knowledge, and a handicraft.
2. The ignorance of the Rabbis and preachers on all subjects outside of
religion.
3. Indulgence in luxuries, especially of the table and of dress.
If the first two causes are more or less just, the third displays a
ludicrously naïve conception of life. Lebensohn was speaking of a
famished people, the majority of whom ate meat only once a week, on the
Sabbath, and he reproaches them with gastronomic excesses and
extravagance in dress. We shall see that his simple outlook was shared
by most of the Russian Maskilim.
In 1867, at the time when the struggle for the emancipation of the Jews
and internal reforms in general was at its highest point, Lebensohn
published his drama "Truth and Faith" (_Emet we-Emunah_, Wilna),
which he had written all of twenty years earlier. It is a purely
didactic work, blameless of any trace of poetic ardor. It must be
conceded that the style is clear and fluent, and the ethical problem is
stated with precision. But it lacks every attempt at analysis of
character, and is destitute of all psychologic motivation. These being
of the very essence of dramatic composition, his drama reduces itself to
a moral treatise, wearisome at once and worthless. The plan is simple
enough. Sheker (Falsehood) seeks to seduce and win over Hamon (the
Crowd). He offers to give him his daughter Emunah (Faith) in marriage,
but she is wooed by two lovers, Emet (Truth) and Sekel (Reason).
The influence of Moses Hayyim Luzzatto is direct and manifest. Like the
older author, Lebensohn, skeptic though he is, does not go to the length
of casting doubt upon faith. He rises up against falsehood, hypocrisy,
and mock piety, the piety that persecutes others, and steeps its
votaries in ignorance. "Pure reason is not opposed to a pure religion",
was the device adopted by the Wilna school.
Belief in God being set aside as a basic principle, the reason invoked
by the dramatist is positive reason, the reason of science, of justice,
of rational logic. In verbose monologues, he combats the superstitions
and fanaticism of the orthodox. The whole force of the Maskil's hatred
against obscurantism is expressed through the character named Zibeon,
Jewish hypocrite and chief adjutant in the camp of Sheker (Falsehood).
This Jewish Tartufe is very different in his complexity from the
character created by Moliere. Zibeon is a wonderworking Rabbi, a subtle
sophist, a crafty dialectician. The waves of the Talmud, the casuistry
of more than a millennium of scholasticism, have left their traces in
his mind and personality. In his hatred of the adversaries of the
Haskalah, Lebensohn depicts him, besides, as a hypocrite, a lover of the
good things of this world, and given to lewdness, which are not the
usual traits of these Rabbis. The alleged Tartufe of the ghetto cannot
be called a hypocrite. He is a believer, and hence sincere. What leads
him to commit the worst excesses, is his fanaticism, his blind piety.
On the other hand, the dramatist is full of admiration for Sekel
(Reason), Hokmah (Knowledge), Emet (Truth), and even Emunah (Faith).
On the background of the prosiness of this work by Lebensohn, there
stands out one passage of remarkable beauty, the prayer of Sekel
beseeching God to liberate Emet. The triumph of Truth closes the drama.
One characteristic feature should be pointed out: Neither Regesh
(Sentiment), a prominent Jewish quality, nor Taawah (Passion), appears
in this gallery of allegorical characters personifying the moral
attributes. For Lebensohn, as for the whole school of the humanists of
his time, the only thing that mattered was reason, and reason had to be
shown all-sufficing to ensure the triumph of truth.
In its day Lebensohn's drama excited the wrath of the orthodox. A Rabbi
with literary pretensions, Malbim (Meir Lob ben Jehiel Michael),
considered it his duty to intervene, and to the accusations launched by
Lebensohn he replied in another drama, called _Mashal u-Melizah_
("Allegory and Interpretation"), wherein he undertakes the defense of
the orthodox against the charges of ill-disposed Maskilim.
* * * * *
If Abraham Bär Lebensohn is considered the father of poetry, his no less
celebrated contemporary and compatriot, Mordecai Aaron Ginzburg, has an
equally good claim to be called the foremost master of modern Hebrew
prose. Ginzburg is the creator of a realistic Hebrew prose style, though
he was permeated to the end with the style and the spirit of the Bible.
Whenever the Biblical style can render modern thoughts only by torturing
and twisting it, or by resorting to cumbersome circumlocutions, Ginzburg
does not hesitate to levy contributions from Talmudic literature and
even the modern languages. These linguistic additions made by him are
always excellent, and in no way prejudicial to the elegance of Hebrew
style. For it should be reiterated, in season and out of season, that it
is a mistake to believe the neo-Hebrew to be essentially different from
the language of the Bible, analogous to the difference between the
modern and the classic Greek. The modern Hebrew is nothing more than an
adaptation of the ancient Hebrew, conformable to the modern spirit and
new ideas. The extreme innovators, who at best are few in number, cannot
but confirm this statement of the case.
Ginzburg was a fertile writer; he has left us fifteen volumes, and more,
on various subjects. Endowed with good common sense, and equipped with a
more solid modern education than the majority of the writers of the
time, he exercised a very great influence upon his readers and upon the
development of Hebrew literature. His "Abiezer", a sort of
autobiography, very realistic, presents a striking picture of the
defective education and backward ways of the ghetto, which the critic
denounces, with remarkable subtlety, in the name of civilization and
progress. Besides, he published two volumes on the Napoleonic wars; one
volume, under the title _Hamat Damesek_ (1840), on the ritual
murder accusation at Damascus; a history of Russia; a translation of the
Alexandrian Philo's account of his mission to Rome; and a treatise on
style (_Debir_). He was very successful with his works, and all of
them were published during his lifetime, at Wilna, Prague, and Leipsic,
and have been republished since. One of his achievements is that he
helped to create a public of Hebrew readers. It must be admitted that
the great mass of the people were at first somewhat repelled by his
realism and by his terse and accurate way of writing. Their taste was
not sufficiently refined to appreciate these qualities, and their
primitive sensibilities could not derive pleasure from a description of
things as they actually are. This is the difficulty which the second
generation of Lithuanian writers took account of, and overcame, when
they introduced romanticism into Hebrew literature.
Though it was the first, Wilna was not the only centre of Hebrew
literature in Russia. In the south, and quite independent of the Wilna
school, literary circles were formed under the influence of the Galician
writers and workers.
At Odessa, a European window opening on the Empire of the Czar, we see
the first enlightened Jewish community come into existence. The educated
flocked thither from all parts, especially from Galicia. Simhah Pinsker
and B. Stern are the representatives of the Science of Judaism in
Russia, and the contributions of the Karaite Abraham Firkovich in the
same field were most valuable, while Eichenbaum, Gottlober, and others
distinguished themselves as poets and writers.
Isaac Eichenbaum (1796-1861) was a graceful poet. Besides his prose
writings and his remarkable treatise on the game of chess, we have a
collection in verse by him, entitled _Kol Zimrah_ ("The Voice of
Song", Leipsic, 1836). His sweetness and tenderness, his elegant and
clear style, often recall Heine. The following quotation is from his
poem "The Four Seasons".
"Winter has passed, the cold has fled, the ice melts under the
fiery darts of the sun. A stream of melted snow sends its limpid
waters flowing down the declivity of the rock. My beloved alone
is unmoved, and all the fires of my love cannot melt her icy
heart.
"The hills are clothed with festive mirth, the face of the
valleys smiles joyously. The cedar beams, the vine is jubilant,
and the pine tree finds a nest in the recesses of the jagged
mountain. But in me sighs increase, they bring me low--my friend
will not yet hearken unto me.
"All sings that lives in the woodland. The beasts of the earth
rejoice, and in the branches of the trees the winged creatures
warble, each to his mate. My well-beloved alone turns her steps
away from me, and under the shadow of my roof I am left in
solitude.
"The plants spring from the soil, the grass glitters in the
splendor of the sun, and the earth is covered with verdure. Upon
the meadows, the lilies and the roses bloom. Thus my hopes
blossom, too, and I am filled with joyous expectation--my friend
will come back and in her arms enfold me."
The acknowledged master of the humanists in southern Russia was Isaac
Bär Levinsohn, of Kremenetz, in Wolhynia (1788-1860). His proper place
is in a history of the emancipation of the Russian Jews, rather than in
a history of literature. Levinsohn was born in the country of Hasidism.
A happy chance carried him to Brody when he was very young. He attached
himself there to the humanist circle, and made the acquaintance of the
Galician masters. On his return to his own country, he was actuated by
the desire to work for the emancipation and promote the culture of the
Russian Jews.
Like Wessely, Levinsohn remained on strictly orthodox ground in his
writings, and in the name of traditional religion itself he attacks
superstition, and urges the obligatory study of the Hebrew language, the
pursuit of the various branches of knowledge, and the learning of
trades. His profound scholarship, the gentleness and sincerity of his
writings, earned for him the respect of even the most orthodox. His
_Bet-Yehudah_ ("The House of Judah") and _Te'udah be-Yisraël_
("Testimony in Israel") are pleas in favor of modern schooling. In
"Zerubbabel" he treats of questions of Hebrew philology, and with the
help of documents he annihilates the legend of the ritual murder in his
_Efes-Dammim_ ("No Blood!"). _Ahijah ha-Shiloni_ is a defense
of Talmudic Judaism against its Christian detractors. Besides, Levinsohn
wrote a number of other things, epigrams, articles, and essays.
[Footnote: We owe a new edition of all his works to Nathansohn, Warsaw,
1880-1900.]
The contemporaries of Levinsohn exaggerated the importance of the
literary part of his work. Not much of it, outside of his philologic
studies, deserves to be called literary, and even they often fall below
the mark on account of the simplicity of his views, and especially on
account of his prolixity and his awkward diction and style. Also the
direct influence which he has exerted upon Jews is less considerable
than once was thought. Upon Hasidism he made no impression whatsoever.
In Lithuania, to be sure, his works were widely read by the Jews, but in
that home of the Hebrew language the subject-matter and arguments of an
author play but little part in giving vogue to what is written in the
Biblical language.
By his self-abnegation and his wretched fortunes, his isolated life in a
remote town, weak in body yet working for the elevation of his co-
religionists, he won the admiration of his contemporaries without
exception.
The fame of the solitary idealist of Kremenetz spread until it reached
government circles. Levinsohn was the first of the Jewish humanists who
maintained direct relations with the Russian authorities. Czar Nicholas
I gave him a personal audience, and several times sought his advice on
problems connected with the endeavor to ameliorate the social condition
of the Jews. The founding of Jewish elementary schools, the opening of
two Rabbinical seminaries, one at Wilna and one at Zhitomir, the
establishment of numerous agricultural colonies, the improvements
effected in the political condition of the Jews and in the censorship of
Hebrew books--all these progressive measures are in great part, if not
entirely, due to the influence of Levinsohn. And the educated men of his
time paid the tribute of veneration to a compeer who enjoyed the esteem
of the governing classes to so high a degree.
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