REFORMERS AND CONSERVATIVES
THE TWO EXTREMES
Though Gordon was the most distinguished, he was not the only
representative of the anti-Rabbinic school in the neo-Hebrew literature.
The decline of liberalism in official state circles, and the frustration
of every hope of equality, had their effect in reshaping the policy
pursued by educated Jews. Up to this time they had cherished no desire
except for external emancipation and to assimilate with their neighbors
of other faiths. Liberty and justice suddenly removed from their
horizon, they could not but transfer their ambition and their activity
to the inner chambers of Judaism. Other circumstances contributed to the
result. The economic changes affecting the bourgeoisie and the influence
exercised by the realism and the utilitarian tendencies of the Russian
literature of the time had not a little to do with the modified aims
cherished in the camp of the Maskilim. Jews of education living in
Galicia or in the small towns of Russia, who had the best opportunity of
penetrating to the intimate life of the people and knowing its day by
day misery, could and did make clear, how helpless the masses of the
Jews were in the face of the moral and economic ruin that menaced them,
and how serious an obstacle religious restrictions and ignorance placed
in the way of any change in their condition. And therefore they made it
their object to extol practical, thoroughgoing reforms.
In religion, they demanded, with Gordon, the abolition of all
restrictions weighing upon the people, and a radical reform of Jewish
education.
In practical life, they were desirous of turning the attention of their
brethren to the manual trades, to the technical professions, and to
agriculture. Besides, it was their purpose to extend modern primary
instruction and bring it within the reach of considerably larger
circles.
The government viewed these efforts with a favorable eye, and under its
protection the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews in
Russia was formed, with headquarters at St. Petersburg. Thus supported,
the educated could carry on their propaganda in the open, and throw
light into the remotest corners of the country. The Hebrew press, though
still in its infancy, co-operated with them zealously in furthering
their beneficent purposes.
The most determined group of the anti-religious propagandists was at
Brody in Galicia. Thence emanated the influences that operated in
Russia, and thence _He-Haluz_ ("The Pioneer"), founded by Erter and
Schorr in 1853, and published at Lemberg, carried on a brilliant
campaign against religious superstitions, shrinking not even from
attacks upon the Biblical tradition itself. The boldest of the
contributors to _He-Haluz_, not counting its valiant editor, was
Abraham Krochmal, the son of the philosopher. A scholar and subtle
thinker, he introduced Biblical criticism into Hebrew literature. In his
books as well as in his articles in _He-Haluz_ and in _Ha-
Kol_, the latter edited by Rodkinson, he goes so far as to dispute
the Divine character of the Bible, and he demands radical reforms in
Judaism. [Footnote: _Ha-Ketab weha-Miktab_ ("Writing and the
Scriptures"), Lemberg, 1875; _'lyyun Tefillah_ ("Reflections on
Prayer"), Lemberg, 1885, etc.] His writings gave the signal for a
considerable stir and expression of opinion. Even the most moderate
among the orthodox could not remain tranquil in the presence of such
blasphemous views. They put Krochmal outside of the pale of Judaism,
together with all scholars occupied with Bible criticism, among them
Geiger, who had exerted great influence upon the school of reformers
writing in Hebrew.
In Lithuania things did not go so far. The hard conditions of existence
there were not propitious to the rise of a purely scholarly school or to
theoretic discussion. Scientific centres were entirely wanting, and the
censor permitted no trifling with the subject of religion. A new
movement, realistic and utilitarian in the main, began to take shape,
first in the form of a protest against the unsubstantial ideals of the
Hebrew press and Hebrew literature. In 1867, Abraham Kowner, an ardent
controversialist, published his _Heker Dabar_ ("A Word of
Criticism"), and his _Zeror Perahim_ ("A Bouquet of Flowers"), in
which he takes the press and the writers severely to task for indulging
in rhetoric and futile scintillations, instead of occupying themselves
with the real exigencies of life. In the same year, Abraham Jacob
Paperna published his essay in literary criticism, and the young
Smolenskin, in an article appearing at Odessa, attacked Letteris for his
artificial, insincere translation of Goethe's _Faust_ into Hebrew.
On all sides there blew a fresh breath of realism, and the critical
spirit was abroad.
The most characteristic exponent of this reforming movement was Moses
Löb Lilienblum, a native of the Government of Kowno. Endowed with a
temperate, logical mind, untroubled by an excess of sentimentality,
Lilienblum, one of those deliberate, puritanic scholars that constitute
the glory of Lithuanian Talmudism, was at once hero and actor in the
intense drama performed in the Russian ghetto, which he himself
described as the "Jewish tragi-comedy".
He began his literary career with an article entitled _Orhot ha-
Talmud_ ("The Paths of the Talmud"), and published in _Ha-Meliz_
in 1868. Here, as well as in the articles following it, he does not
depart from established tradition. In the very name of the spirit of the
Talmud, he demands religious reforms and the abolition of the
restrictions that make daily life burdensome. These excessive
requirements, he urges, were heaped up by the Rabbis subsequent to the
full development of the Law, and in opposition to its spirit. The young
scholar showed himself to be a zealous admirer of the Talmud, and with
clinching logic he proves that the Rabbis of later times, in asserting
its immutability, had distinctly deviated from the principles of the
Law, the fundamental idea of which was the harmonizing of "Law and
Life". The wrath aroused by such articles can easily be imagined.
Lilienblum was an _Apikoros_, the "heretic" _par excellence_
of the Lithuanian ghetto. The young writer had to undergo a series of
outrageous persecutions and acts of vengeance inflicted by the fanatics,
especially the Hasidim, of his town. He tells the story in detail in his
autobiography, _Hattot Neurim_ ("The Sins of Youth"), published at
Vienna, in 1876, one of the most noteworthy productions of modern Hebrew
literature. With the logical directness of a _Mitnagged_ [1], and
the cruel, sarcastic candor of a wasted existence, Lilienblum probes and
exposes the depths of his tortured conscience, at the same time
following up inexorably the steps which remove the free-thinker from the
faithful believer, without, however, reaching a real or positive result--
in the spirit at once of Rousseau and Voltaire. [Footnote 1: Literally,
"one who is opposed" [to the mystical system of Hasidism]; a
protestant, a Puritan.] As he himself says:
"It is a drama essentially Jewish, because it is a life without
dramatic effect, without extraordinary adventure. It is made up
of torment and suffering, all the more grievous as they are kept
hidden in the recesses of one's heart...."
Better than any one else he knows the cause of these ills. Like Gordon,
he holds that the Book has killed the Man, the dead letter has been
substituted for feeling.
"You ask me, O reader", he says with bitterness, "who I am, and
what my name is?--Well, then, I am a living being, not a Job who
has never existed. Nor am I one of the dead in the valley of
bones brought back to life by the prophet Ezekiel, which is only
a tale that is told. But I am one of the living dead of the
Babylonian Talmud, revived by the new Hebrew literature, itself a
dead literature, powerless to bring the dead to life with its
dew, scarcely able to transport us into a state between life and
death. I am a Talmudist, a believer aforetimes, now become an
unbeliever, no longer clinging to the dreams and the hopes which
my ancestors bequeathed to me. I am a wreck, a miserable wretch,
hopeless unto despair...."
And he narrates the incidents of his childhood, the period of the
_Tohu_, of chaos and confusion, the days of study, misery,
superstition. He recalls the years of adolescence, his premature
marriage, his struggle for a bare existence, his wretched life as a
teacher of the Talmud, panting under the double yoke of a mother-in-law
and a rigid ceremonial. Then comes his introduction to Hebrew
literature. His conscience long refuses assent, but stern logic
triumphs, and the result is that all the ideas that have been his
guiding principles crumble into dust one by one. Negation replaces
faith. The terrible conflict begins with a whole town of formalists, who
declare him outside of the community of Israel,--a pitiless conflict, in
which he is supported half-heartedly by two or three of the strong-
minded. The publication of his first article, on the necessity of
reforms in religion, increases the fury of the people against him, and
his ruin is determined. Had there not been intervention from the
outside, he would have been delivered to the authorities to serve in the
army, or denounced as a dangerous heretic. And yet the so-called heretic
cursed by every mouth had proceeded so short a distance on the path of
heterodoxy that he still entertained scruples about carrying a book from
one house to another on the Sabbath!
This naïve soul, in which all sorts of feelings had long before begun to
stir obscurely, was aroused to full consciousness by the reading of
Mapu's works. Casual acquaintance with an intelligent woman made his
heart vibrate with notes unknown until then. Life in his native town
became intolerable, and he left it for Odessa, the El Dorado of all
ghetto dreamers. Again disillusionment was his lot. He who was ready to
undergo martyrdom for his ideas, this champion of the Haskalah, his
heart famishing for knowledge and justice, was not long in discerning,
with his penetrating, perspicacious mind, that he had not yet reached
the best of modern worlds. With bitterness he notes that the Jews of the
south of Russia, "where the Talmud is cut out of practical life, if they
are more liberal than the others, are yet not exempt from stupid
superstitions." He notes that the Hebrew literature so dear to his heart
is excluded from the circles of the intellectual. He sees that egotistic
materialism has superseded the ideal aspirations of the ghetto. He
discovers that feeling has no place in modern life, and tolerance, the
loudly vaunted, is but a sound. When he ventures to put his complaints
into words, he is treated as a "religious fanatic" by people who have no
interest beyond their own selfish pleasures and the satisfaction of
their material cravings. He is deeply affected by what he observes and
notes. In the presence of the egotistic indifference of the emancipated
Jews, he is shaken in his firmest convictions, and he admits with
anguish that the ideal for which he has fought and sacrificed his life
is but a phantom. Under the stress of such disappointment he writes
these lines:
"In very truth, I tell you, never will the Jewish religion be in
accord with life. It will sink, or, at best, it will remain the
cherished possession of the limited few, as it is now in the
Western countries of Europe.... Practical reality is in
opposition to religion. Now I know that we have no public on our
side; and actual life with its great movements produces its
results without the aid of literature, which even in our people
is an effective influence only with the simple spirits of the
country districts. The desire for life and liberty, the
prevalence of charlatanism on the one side, and on the other the
abandoning of religious studies in favor of secular studies, will
have baleful consequences for the Jewish youth, even in
Lithuania."
This whole period of our author's life is characterized by similar
regrets--he mourns over days spent in barren struggles and over the
follies of youth.
"To-day I finished writing my autobiography, which I call 'The
Sins of Youth'. I have drawn up the balance-sheet of my life of
thirty years and one month, and I am deeply grieved to see that
the sum total is a cipher. How heavily the hand of fortune has
lain upon me! The education I received was the reverse of
everything I had need of later. I was raised with the idea of
becoming a distinguished Rabbinical authority, and here I am a
business man; I was raised in an imaginary world, to be a
faithful observer of the Law, shrinking back from whatever has
the odor of sin, and the very things I was taught crush me to
earth now that the imaginary man has disappeared in me; I was
raised to live in the atmosphere of the dead, and here I am cast
among people who lead a real life, in which I am unable to take
my part; I was raised in a world of dreams and pure theory, and I
find myself now in the midst of the chaos of practical life, to
which I am driven by my needs to apply myself, though my brain
refuses to leave the old ruts and substitute practice for
speculation. I am not even equipped to carry on a discussion with
business men discussing nothing but business. I was raised to be
the father of a family, in the sphere chosen for me by my father
in his wisdom.... How far removed my heart is from all such
things...!
"I weep over my shattered little world which I cannot restore!"
The regrets of Lilienblum over the useless work attempted by Hebrew
literature betray themselves also in his pamphlet in verse, _Kehal
Refaïm_ ("The Assembly of the Dead"). The dead are impersonated by
the Hebrew periodicals and reviews.
Later, a novelist of talent, Reuben Asher Braudes, resumed the attempt
to harmonize theory and practice, in his great novel, "Religion and
Life". The hero, the young Rabbi Samuel, is the picture of Lilienblum.
From the point of view of art, it is one of the best novels in Hebrew
literature. Life in the rural districts, the austere idealism of the
enlightened, the superstitions of the crowd, are depicted with
extraordinary clearness of outline. [Footnote: _Ha-Dat weha-
Hayyim_, Lemberg, 1880. Another long novel by Braudes is called
_Shete ha-Kezawot_ ("The Two Extremes"), published in 1886, wherein
he extols the national revival and religious romanticism.] The novel ran
in _Ha-Boker Or_ (1877-1880), and was never completed--a
counterpart of its hero. Had not Lilienblum, too, stopped in the middle
of the road?
The crisis that occurred in the life of Lilienblum, torn from his ideal
speculations in a provincial town, and forced into contact with an
actuality that was as far as possible away from solving the problem of
harmonizing religion and life, was the typical fate of all the educated
Jews of the period. Lilienblum and his followers gave themselves up to
regrets over the futile work of three generations of humanists, who,
instead of restoring the ghetto to health, had but hastened its utter
ruin. The ideal aspirations of the Maskilim had been succeeded by a
gross utilitarianism without an ideal. What disquieted the soul of the
Maskil in the decade from 1870 to 1880 is expressed in the concluding
words of "The Sins of Youth":
"The young people are to work at nothing and think of nothing but
how to prepare for their own life. All is forbidden, wherefrom
they cannot derive direct profit--they are permitted only the
study of sciences and languages, or apprenticeship to a trade.
"The youth who break away from the laborious study of the Talmud,
throw themselves with avidity into the study of modern
literature. This headlong course has been in vogue with us about
a century. One generation disappears, to make place for the next,
and each generation is pushed forward by a blind force, no one
knows whither...!
"It is high time for us to throw a glance backward--to stop a
moment and ask ourselves: Whither are we hastening, and why do we
hasten?"....
However, the gods did not forsake the ghetto. If Gordon and, with more
emphasis, Lilienblum predicted the ruin of all the dreams of the ghetto,
it was because, having been wrenched from the life of the masses and out
of traditional surroundings, they judged things from a distance, and
permitted themselves to be influenced by appearances. Blinded by their
bias, they saw only two well-defined camps in Judaism--the moderns,
indifferent to all that constitutes Judaism, and the bigots, opposed to
what savors of knowledge, free-thinking, and worldly pleasure. They made
their reckoning without the Jewish people. The humanist propaganda was
not so empty and vain as its later promoters were pleased to consider
it. The conservative romanticism of a Samuel David Luzzatto and the
Zionist sentiments of a Mapu had planted a germinating seed in the heart
of traditional Judaism itself. It is conceded that we cannot resort for
evidence to such old romanticists as Schulman, who in the serenity of
their souls gave little heed to the campaign of the reformers, though it
is nevertheless a fact that they contributed to the diffusion of
humanism and of Hebrew literature by their works, which were well
received in orthodox circles. Our contention is better proved by Rabbis
reputed orthodox, who devoted themselves with enthusiasm to the
cultivation of Hebrew literature. Without renouncing religion, they
found a way of effecting the harmonization of religion and life. In
point of fact, humanism of a conservative stripe reached its zenith at
the precise moment when the realists, deceived by superficial
appearances, were predicting the complete breaking up of traditional
Judaism.
The chief representatives of the reform press were _He-Haluz_,
_Ha-Meliz_, and later on _Ha-Kol_ ("The Voice"), and by their
side the views of the conservatives were defended in _Ha-Maggid_,
_Ha-Habazzelet_ ("The Lily"), published at Jerusalem, and
especially _Ha-Lebanon_, appearing first at Paris and then at
Mayence. In _Ha-Maggid_, beginning with the year 1871, the editor,
David Gordon, supported by the assenting opinion of his readers, carried
on an ardent campaign for the colonization of Palestine as the necessary
forerunner of the political revival of Israel.
A Galician thinker, Fabius Mises, published, in 1869, an article in
_Ha-Meliz_, entitled _Milhemet ha-Dat_ ("The Wars of the
Faith"), in which he wards off the attacks upon the Jewish religion by
the anti-Rabbinical school. He proves it to be a reasonable religion,
and a national religion _par excellence_. In his poems, Mises
assails Geiger for the religious reforms urged by him, and he opposes
also the school of _He-Haluz_ in the name of the national
tradition. Later on Mises published an important history of modern
philosophy in Hebrew.
Michael Pines, a writer in _Ha-Lebanon_, and the opponent of
Lilienblum, was the protagonist of the conservative party in Lithuania.
His chief work, _Yalde Ruhi_ ("The Children of My Spirit"),
appeared in 1872 at Mayence. It may be considered the literary
masterpiece on the conservative side, the counterstroke to Lilienblum's
"Sins of Youth". It is a defense of traditional Judaism, and is instinct
with an intuitive philosophy and with deep faith. Pines makes a closely
reasoned claim for the right of the Jewish religion to exist in its
integrity. Without being a fanatic, he believes, with Samuel David
Luzzatto, that the religion of the Jew on its poetic side is the
peculiar product of the Jewish national genius--that the religion, and
not the artificial legal system engrafted upon it, is the essential part
of Judaism. The ceremonies and the religious practices are necessary for
the purpose of maintaining the harmony of the faith, "as the wick is
necessary for the lamp". This harmony, reacting at once upon feeling and
morality, cannot be undone by the results of science, and therefore the
Jewish religion is eternal in its essence. The religious reforms
introduced by the German Rabbis have but had the effect of drying up the
springs of poetry in the religion, and as for the compromise between
faith and life, extolled and urged by Lilienblum, it is only a futile
phrase. Of what use is it, seeing that the religious feel no need of it,
but on the contrary take delight in the religion as it stands, which
fills the void in their soul?
Pines did not share the pessimistic fears of the realists of his time. A
true conservative, he believed in the national rebirth of the people of
Israel, and, a romantic Jew, he dreamed of the realization of the
humanitarian predictions of the prophets. Judaism to him is the pure
idea of justice, "and every just idea ends by conquering the whole of
humanity".
Extremes meet. There is one point in common between Lilienblum, the last
of the humanists, the disillusioned skeptic, and Pines, the optimist of
the ghetto. Both maintained that the action of the humanists was
inefficacious, and the compromise between religion and life a vain
expedient. Nevertheless, there was no possibility of bringing the two to
stand upon the same platform. While the humanists, in abandoning the
perennial dreams of the people, had separated themselves from its moral
and religious life, and thus cut away the ground from under their own
feet, the romantic conservatives paid no attention to the demands of
modern life, the currents of which had loosed the foundations of the old
world, and were threatening to carry away the last national breastwork.
A synthesis was needed to merge the two currents, the humanist and the
romantic, and lead the languishing Haskalah back to the living sources
of national Judaism. This was the task accomplished by Perez Smolenskin,
the leader of the national progressive movement.
* * * * *