 Section 16 of History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, Volume 2, from the death of Alexander I until the death of Alexander III, 1825 to 1894, by Shimon Dubunov, translated by Israel Fridlander. This Livrivox recording is in the public domain, recording by SS Kim, Manicked Baishio, Portugal. Chapter 20, the Inner Life of Russian Jewry during the reign of Alexander II. Part 1. The Russification of the Jewish Intelligencia. In the Inner Cultural Life of Russian Jewry, a radical break took place during this period. True, the change did not affect the rank and file of Russian Jewry, being rather confined to its upper layers to Jewish society or the so-called intelligentsia. But as far as the letter circles are concerned, the rapidity and intensity of their spiritual transformation may well be compared with the stormy eve of Jewish emancipation in Germany. This wild rush for spiritual regeneration was out of all proportion to the snail-like tartness and peaceful character of civil emancipation in Russia. However, the modern history of Western Europe has shown more than once that such pre-emancipation periods, including those that evidently prove abortive, offer the most favorable conditions for all kinds of mental and cultural revolutions. Liberty as a hope invariably allows this greater enthusiasm for self-regimination than liberty as a fact when the romanticism of the unknown has vanished. Hulled into the abyss of despair by the last events of Nicholas's regime, the Russian Jews suddenly received what may be called an honest of civil emancipation. The Jewish pale knew but vaguely what was taking place in the recesses of St. Petersburg's chancellors during the decades of reforms, but that a striking change in the attitude of government had taken place was seen and felt by all. Freedom had been granted to the victims of the military and physician, the Cantonists. The gates of the Russian interior had been opened to Jews, possessing certain qualifications with regard to property, education, or labor. The educated Jews in particular were smiled upon benevolently from above. They were regarded by the government as a factor of making for assimilation and as a connecting link with the law Jewish classes. The venerable son of Russian liberty, which flooded with its rays the social life of the whole country, just then emerging from serfdom, shown also for the helpless Jewish people and filled their hearts with cheer and hope. The blasts of revelry which had been sounded in the best circles of Russian society by such humanitarians as Pirov and such champions of liberty as Hurtson, Cherenyshevsky, and Dobrolov were carried through the air into the huge Jewish ghetto of Russia. True, the Jewish question received during the decades of reforms, but scanty attention in Russian press, but little that was said about it was permeated by a friendly spirit. The former habit of making sports of the seed was energetically repudiated. This change of attitude may well be illustrated by the following instance. In 1858, the magazine Illustratia, illustration of St. Petersburg published an anti-Semitic article on the seed of the Russian West. The article was answered by two cultured Jews, Chetskin and Horowitz, in the influential periodicals Rusky via Stinik, the Russian Herald, and Atina, Atenem. In reply to this refutation, the Illustratia showered a torrent of views upon the two orders who were contemptuously styled red Chetskin and red Horowitz, and whose pro-Jewish attitude was explained by motives of avarice. The action of the anti-Semitic journal aroused a storm of indignation in the literary circles of both capitals. The conduct of the Illustratia was condemned in a public protest which bore the signature of 140 writers, including some of the most illustrious names in the Russian literary world. The protest declared that in the presence of Horowitz and Chetskin, an insult has been offered to the entire Russian people to all Russian literature, which has no right to let naked slander pass under the disguise of polemics. Though the protesting writers were wholly actuated by the desire to protect the moral purity of Russian literature and did not at all touch upon the Jewish question, the Jewish public workers were nevertheless enchanted by this declaration of literary Russia and were deeply gratified by the implied assumption that the Jews of Russia formed part of the Russian people. Several sympathetic articles in influential periodicals advocating the necessity of Jewish emancipation seemed to complete the happiness of the progressive section of Russian Jewry. Even the slavophile publicist Ivan Aksakov, who subsequently joined the ranks of Jew-baters, recognized at that time in 1862 the need of a certain measure of emancipation for the Jews. The only thing that worried him was the danger that the admission of the Jews to the Russian civil service in all departments might result in filling with Jews the Senate and Council of State, not excluding the possibility of a Jew occupying the post of procreator general of the Holy Synod. Unshakable in his friendship with the Jews was the physician and humanitarian and Peter Wolf, who in his capacity of superintendent of the Odessa School District was largely instrumental in encouraging the Jewish youth in the pursuit of general culture and in creating a Russian Jewish press. The most efficient factor of cultural regeneration was the secular school, both the general Russian and the Jewish Crown School. A flood of young men, ruled by the rose prospects of free human existence in the midst of free Russian people, rushed from the farthest nukes and corners of the pale into the gymnasium and universities whose doors were kept wide open for the Jews. Many children of the ghetto rapidly enlisted under the banner of the Russian youth and became intoxicated with the Rogerian growth of Russian literature, which carried to them the intellectual gifts of the contemporary European writers. The masters of thought in their generation, Trinyshevsky, the ruler of Wolf, Pizariyev, Berkel, Darwin, Spencer, became also the idols of the Jewish youth. The heads, which had but recently been bending over the Talmud folios in the stuffy atmosphere of the headers in Jehovah's were now cramped with the ideas of positivism, evolution and socialism. Sharp and sudden was the transition from rabbinic scholasticism and sufferific ascetic mysticism to this new world of ideas flooded with the light of science, to these new revelations announcing the glad tidings of the freedom of thought, of the demolition of all traditional fetters, of the annihilation of all religious and national barriers, of the brotherhood of all mankind. The Jewish youth began to shatter the old idols, disregarding the outcry of the masses that had bowed down before them. A tragic war ensued between fathers and children. A war of annihilation with the belligerent parties were extreme obscurantism and fanaticism on the one hand and the negation of all historic forms of Judaism, both religious and national on the other. In the middle between these two extremes stood the men of the transitional period, the Odettes of Haskala, those lovers of enlightenment who had in younger years suffered for their convictions at the hands of fanatics and now came forward to make peace between religion and culture. Encouraged by the success of the new ideas, the masculine became more aggressive in their struggle with obscurantism. They ventured to expose the saddics who scattered the seeds of prostitution to ridicule the ignorance and credibility of the masses and occasionally went so far as to complain of the burdensome ceremonial discipline hinting at the needs of moderate religious reforms. Their principal task, however, was the cultivation of the neo-Hebrewic literary style and the rejuvenation of the content of that literature. They were willing to pursue the road of the emancipated Jewry of Western Europe, but only to a certain limit, refusing to cut themselves or drift from the national language or the religious and national ideas. On the other hand, that section of the young generation which had passed through a Russian school refused to recognize any such barriers and rushed with elemental force on the road of self-annihilation. Russification became the war cry of these Jewish circles as it had long been the watchword of the government. The one side was anxious to Russify and the other was equally anxious to be Russified and the natural result was an intent coder between the new Jewish intelligentsia and the government. The idea of Russification was marked by different stages beginning with the harmless acquisition of the Russian language and culminating in a complete identification with Russian culture and Russian national ideas involving the renunciation of the religious and national traditions of Judaism. The advocates of moderate Russification did not foresee that the letter was bound by the force of circumstances to assume a radical form while the champions of extreme Russification saw no harm for Jewry in following the example of complete assimilation set by Western Europe. To the former, all that Russification implied was the removal of the obnoxious exorcisms of Judaism but not the demolition of the national organism itself. Progressive Jewry was rightly incensed against the obsolete forms of Jewish life which obstructed all healthy development, against the fierce superstition of the Hasidic environment, against the shalatanism of degenerating Sadikism, against the impenetrable religious fanaticism which was throttling the noblest strivings of the Jewish mind. But this struggle for freedom of thought should have been fought out within the confines of Judaism by means of a thoroughgoing cultural self-improvement and not on the soil of assimilation nor in alliance with the powers that be which were aiming not at the rejuvenation but at the obliteration of Judaism in accordance with the official program of fusion. At any rate, the league between the new Jewish intelligentsia and the government was an undeniable fate. The crown revise and school teachers from among the graduates of the rabbinical schools of Vilna and Zitomir played the role of government agents who were apt to resort to police force in their fight against orthodoxy. Feeling secure beneath the protecting wings of the Russian authorities, they often went out of their way to hold the susceptibilities of the masses by their ostentious disregard of the Jewish religious ceremonies. When the community refused to appoint rabbis of this class, the latter obtained their post either by direct appointment from the government or by bringing the pressure of the provincial administration to bear upon the elders. Needless to say, the enlightenment propagated by these government underlings did not win the confidence of the orthodox masses who remembered vividly how official enlightenment was disseminated by the government of Nicholas I during the era of juvenile conscription. The new Jewish intelligentsia showed utter indifference to the sentiment of the Jewish masses and did not hesitate to induce the government to interfere in the affairs of the Jewish life. Thus, by a regulation issued in 1864, all Hasidic books were subjected to a most rigorous censorship and Jewish printing places were placed under a more vigilant supervision than there to fall. The Zadiks were barred from visiting their parishes for the purpose of working miracles and collecting tributes, a measure which only served to surround the Hasidic chieftains with the halo of Matodom and resulted in the pilgrimage of vast numbers of Hasidim to the holy places, the capital of the Zadiks. All these only went to intensify the distrust of the masses towards the college bread, officially hallmarked Jewish intellectuals, and to lower their moral prestige to the detriment of the cause of enlightenment of which they professed to be the missionaries. A peculiar variety of assimilationist tendencies sprang upon the upper class of Jews in the Kingdom of Poland, more especially in Warsaw. It was the most repellent variety of assimilation, exhibiting more flunkism than pursuit of culture. The pulse of the mosaic appreciation, as these assimilationists styled themselves, had long been begging for admission into Polish society, though rudely repulsed by it. During the insurrection of 1861 to 1863, when they were graciously received as useful allies, they were indefatigable in parading their Polish patriotism. In the Polish Jewish weekly, Yuzenka, the dawn, the organ of these assimilationists, the tried Western European theory, which looks upon Judaism as a religious sect and not as a national community, was repeated at Nozium. One of the most prominent contributors to that journal, Ludwig Kublovic, the author of monograph on the history of the Jews in Poland, who subsequently made a name for himself as a sociologist, and after his conversion to Christianity, received the professorship at an Austrian university, opened his series of articles on Polish Jewish history with the following observation. The fact that the Jews had the history was their misfortune in Europe, for their history inevitably presupposes an isolated life severed from that of the other nations. It is just this which constitutes the misfortune alluded to. After the insurrection, the colonization of the Jewish population assumed menacing proportions. The upper layer of Polish Jewry consisted exclusively of Poles of the Mosaic Preciation, who rejected all elements of Jewish culture, while the broad masses, following blindly the mandates of their tactics, rejected fanatically even the most indispensable elements of European civilization. Riven between such monstrous extremes, Polish Jewry was unable to attain even to a semblance of normal development. Two, the society for the division of enlightenment. Though intensely engaged in this cultural movement, Russian Jewry did not yet comment sufficient resources for carrying on a well-ordered and well-systematized activity. The only modern Jewish organization of that period was the Society for the Division of Enlightenment amongst the Jews, which had been founded in 1867 by a small courtry of Jewish finances and intellectuals of St. Petersburg. It would seem that the Jewish colony of the Russian metropolis, consisting of big merchants and university graduates who, by virtue of the laws of 1859 and 1861, enjoyed the right of residence outside the pail, did not yet contain a sufficient number of competent public workers. For during the first decade of the society, its executive committee included, apart from its Jewish founders, Byron Ginsberg, Leon Rosenthal, Rabbi Neumann, two apostates, Professor Daniel Chorsen, and the court physician, I. Bertenson. The purpose of the society was explained by one of the founders, Leon Rosenthal, in the following unsophisticated manner. We constantly hear men in high positions, with whom we come in contact, complain about the separatism and fanaticism of the Jews, and about the aloofness from everything Russian, and we have received assurances on all hands that with the removal of these peculiarities, the condition of our brethren in Russia will be improved, and we shall all become full-fledged citizens of this country. Actuated by this motive, we have organized a League of Educated Men for the purpose of eradicating our above-mentioned shortcomings by disseminating among the Jews the knowledge of the Russian language and other useful subjects. What the society evidently aimed at was to place itself at the head of the Russian Jewish intelligentsia, which had undertaken to act as negotiators between the government and the Jews in the course of recification. In reality, the mission of the society was carried out within exceedingly narrow limits. Education for the sake of emancipation became the watchword of the society. It promoted higher education by granting monetary assistance to Jewish students, but it did nothing either for the upbuilding of a normal Jewish school or for the improvement of the headers and Yehoshvas. The dissemination of the knowledge of useful subjects reduced itself to the grant of a few subsides to Jewish writers for translating a few books on history and natural science into Hebrew. Even more circumscribed and utilitarian was the point of view adopted by the Odessa branch of the society. This branch founded in 1867 adopted as its slogan the enlightenment of the Jews through the Russian language and in the Russian spirit. The Russification of the Jews was to be promoted by translating the Bible and the prayer book into the Russian language, which must become the national tongue of the Jews. However, the Hadlam rush for assimilation was soon halted by the sinister spectacle of the Odessa program of 1871. The moving spirits of the local branch could not help to use the language of its president, losing heart and becoming rather doubtful as to whether the goal pursued by them is in reality a good one. Seeing that all the endeavors of our brethren to draw nearer to the Russians are of no avail, so long as the Russian message remain in their present and enlightened condition and have hostile sentiments towards the Jews. The program put a temporary stop to the activity of the Odessa branch. As for the Central Committee in St. Petersburg, its experience was not less disappointing. For despite all the endeavors of the society to adapt itself to the official point of view, it was regarded with suspicion by the powers that be, having been included by the informal Brahman among the constituent organization of the dreadful and mysterious Jewish kaha. The Russian assimilators now branded as separatists found themselves in a tragic conflict. Moreover, the work of the society in promoting general culture among the Jews was gradually losing its raison d'etre since without any efforts on its parts, the Jews began to flock to the gymnasium and universities. The formal practical stimulus to general culture, the acquisition of a diploma for the sake of equal rights was intensified by the promulgation of the military statute of 1874, which conferred a number of privileges in the discharge of military duty on those possessing a higher education. These privileges induced many parents, particularly among the merchant class, which was then drafted into the army for the first time to send their children to the middle and higher educational institutions. As a result, the role of the society in the dissemination of enlightenment reduced itself to a mere dispensation of charity and the great crisis of the 80s found this organization standing irresolute at the crossroads. 3. The Jewish Press In the absence of comprehensive network of social agencies, the driving force in this cultural upheaval came from the periodical Jewish press. The creation of several press organs in Hebrew and Russian in the beginning of the 60s was a sign of the times. Though different in their linguistic medium, the two groups of publications were equally engaged in the task of the regeneration of Judaism, each adapting itself to its particular circle of readers. The Hebrew preodicars, and partly also those in Yiddish, which addressed themselves to the masses, preached Haskala in the narrow sense. They advocated the necessity of Russian elementary education and of secular culture in general. They emphasized the uselessness of the traditional Jewish school training and exposed superstition and obscurantism. The Russian publications, again, which were intended for the Jewish and Russian intelligentsia, pursued in the main political goal the fight for equal rights and the defense of Judaism against its numerous detractors. In both groups, one can discern the gradual ripening of the social Jewish consciousness, the advance from elementary and often naive notions to more complex ideas. The two Hebrew weeklys founded in 1860, Ha Karmel, the Karmel in Vilna, and Ha Melitz, the interpreter in Odessa, the former edited by Fune and the latter by Zedobam, were at first adapted to the mental level of grown-up children, expating upon the benefits of secular education and the favors of the government, consequent upon it. Ha Karmel expired in 1870, while yet in its infancy, though it continued to appear at irregular intervals in the form of booklets dealing with scientific and literary subjects. Ha Melitz was more successful. It soon grew to be a live and courageous organ which held its share of Hasidism and Zadikism, and occasionally even ventured to raise its hand against rabbinical Judaism. The eighties weekly Kohl-Mevazel, which was published during 1862 to 1871 as a supplement to Ha Melitz, and spoke directly to the masses in their own language, attacked the dark sides of the older order of things in publicistic essay and humanistic stories. Another step forward was the publication of the Hebrew monthly Ha Shahr, the Dawn, which was founded by Peret Smolenskin in 1869. This periodical, which appeared in Vienna but was read principally in Russia, pursued a twofold aim to fight against the fanaticism of the benighted masses on the one hand and combat the indifference to Judaism of the intellectuals on the other. Ha Shahr exerted a tremendous influence upon the mental developments of the young generation, which had been trained in the Heads and Yeshvas. Here, they found the response to the those that agitated them. Here, they learned to think logically and critically and to distinguish between the essential elements in Judaism and its mere aggressions. Ha Shahr was the step of life for generations of that period of transition, which stood on the borderline dividing the old Judaism from the new. The various stages in the justification of the Jewish intelligentsia are marked by the changing tendencies of the Jewish periodical press in the Russian language. In point of literary form, it approached the European models more closely than the contemporary Hebrew press. The contributors to the three Russian-Jewish weeklies, all of them, each in Odessa, had the advantage of having before them patterns of Western Europe. Jewish publicists of the type of research and Philipsen served as living examples. They had blazed the way for Jewish journalism and had shown it how to fight for civil emancipation to ward off anti-Semitic attacks and strive at the same time for the advancement of inner Jewish life. However, as soon as the Russian research applied themselves to the task, they met with insurmountable difficulties. When the Asiated, which was edited by Osip Joseph Rabinovitz, attempted to lay bare the inner wounds of Jewish life, it encountered the concerted opposition of all prominent Jews who, of the opinion that an organ employing the language of the country should not, on technical grounds, busy itself with self-levelations but should rather limit itself to the fight for equal rights. The latter function again was hampered by the other side, the Russian censorship. Despite the model tone adopted by the Asiated, in its articles on Jewish emancipation, the Russian censorship found them incompatible with the interests of the state. One circulant set out by the government was even went so far as to prohibit to discuss the question of granting the Jews equal rights with those of the other Russian subjects. On one occasion, the editor of Asiated, in appealing to the authorities of Saint Petersburg against the prohibition of a certain article by the Odessa censor, had to resort to the sham arguments that the incriminated article referred merely to the necessity of granting the Jews equality in the rights of residents but not in other rights. But even this stratagem failed of its object. After a year of bitter struggle against the interference of the censor and against financial difficulties, the number of Russian readers among Jews was still very small at the time. The Asiated passed out of existence. Its successor, Sion, edited by Zolovaichik and Leon Pinsko, who subsequently became the exponent of prehazelian Zionism, attempted a different policy to prove the case of Jews by reigning the anti-Semites and granting the Russian public with the history of Judaism. Sion, too, like its predecessors, had to give up the fight in less than a year. After an interval of seven years, a new attempt was made in the same city. The DN, today, was able to master a larger number of contributors from among the increased ranks of the titled intelligentsia than its predecessors. The new periodical was bolder in unfolding the banner of emancipation, but it also went much further than its predecessors in its championship of justification and assimilation. The motto of the DN was complete fusion of the interests of the Jewish population with those of the other citizens. The editors looked upon the Jewish problem not as national but as a social and economic issue, which, in their opinion, could be solved simply by bestowing upon their section of the Russian people the same rights which were enjoyed by the rest. The Odessa program of 1871 might have taught the writers of the DN to judge more soberly the prospects of a fusion of interests had not made some censorship force this periodical to discontinue its publication after a short time. The next few years were a period of silence in the Russian Jewish press. The rank and file of the Russian Jewish intellectuals who formed the backbone of the reading public of this press became indifferent to it. Living up consensuously to the principle of fusion of interests, they failed to recognize the special interest of their own people whose only duty they thought was to be recified, i.e. obliterated and put out of existence. The better elements among their intelligentsia however looked with consternation upon this growing indifference to everything Jewish among the college-bred Jewish youth. As a result, a new attempt was made toward the very end of this period to restore the Russian Jewish press. Three weeklies, the Rusky-Evry, the Russian Jew, the Raziat, the Dawn, and later on the Force Court, the Sunrise were started in St. Petersburg all endeavoring to gain the hearts of the Russian Jewish intelligentsia. In the midst of this work, they were overwhelmed by the terrific cataclysm of 1881 which decided the further destines of Jewish journalism in Russia. End of section 16. Section 17 of History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume 2. From the death of Alexander I until the death of Alexander III. 1825 to 1894 by Shimon Dubnop translated by Israel Friedlander. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by S.S. Kim, Manik the Bioshoh, Portugal. Chapter 20. The Inner Life of Russian Jewry during the reign of Alexander II. Part 2. 4. The Jews and the Revolutionary Movement. The Russian school and literature pushed the Jewish college youth head over heels into the intellectual current of progressive Russian society. Naturally enough, a portion of the Jewish youth was also drawn into the Revolutionary Movement of the 70s. A movement which, in spite of the theoretical materialism of its adepts, was of one essentially idealistic tendency. In joining the ranks of the revolutionaries, the young Jews were less actuated by resentment against the continued though somewhat mitigated rightlessness of their own people than by discontent with the general political reaction in Russia. That discontent which found expression in the movements of populism of going to the people and similar current then in vogue. Jewish students attending the rabbinical and teacher's institutes of the government were auto-deduct from among former header and Yeshua pupils also began to go to the people, the Russian people to be sure not the Jewish. They carried on a revolutionary propaganda both by direct and indirect means among the Russian peasants and working men known to them only from books. It was taken for granted at the time that the realization of the ideals of Russian democracy would carry with it the solution of Jewish as well as of all other sectional problems of Russian life so that these problems might for the moment be safely set aside. As far as the Jewish youth was concerned, the whole movement was doubly academic for the only points of contact of that youth with younger Russia was not living reality but the book Problems of the Intellect, The Search for New Ways, the attempt to work out a felt unshown. The fundamental article of faith of the Jewish socialists was cosmopolitanism and they failed to discern in Russian populism the underlying elements of Russian national movement. Jewry was not believed to be a nation and as a religious entity it was looked upon as a relic of the past which was doomed to disappearance. One attempt of coupling socialism with Judaism ought not to be passed over in silence. In the beginning of the 70s, there exists in Vilna, a Jewish revolutionary circle made the principally of the pupils of the Rabinikar school and of the teacher's institute of the same city. In 1875, the police tracked the members of the circle, some were arrested, others escaped. One of the refugees, a Lieberman, managed to reach London where he associated with the circle of Lavrov and the editors of the revolutionary journal Beferoid. In the following year, Lieberman founded in London the League of Jewish Socialists with the purpose of carrying on a propaganda among the Jewish masses. It was a small society of students and working men which visit itself with arranging lectures and debates and panning Hebrew appeals on the need of organizing the proletariat. The society was soon dissolved and Lieberman emigrated to Vienna where under the name of Freeman he started in 1877 a socialistic magazine in Hebrew under the name Ha'imet the truth. The first two issues of Ha'imet were admitted into Russia but the third was confiscated by the censor. The magazine had to be discontinued. It yielded its place to a paper called Asifat Hakamim, the assembly of wise men published in Königsberg in 1878 by M. Bincevsky as a supplement to paper Ha'imet the voice which was issued there by Lodkinson. Soon this whole species of socialistic literature was put out of existence. In 1879 Lieberman in Vienna and his comrades in Berlin and Königsberg were arrested and expelled from the borders of Austria and Prussia. They emigrated to England and America and lost touch with Russia. In Russia itself, the Jewish revolutionaries were heart and soul devoted to the cause. The children of the ghetto displayed considerable heroism and self-sacrifice in the revolutionary upheaval of the 70s. Jews figured in all important political trials and public manifestations. They languished in the jails and suffered as exiles in Siberia. But this idealistic fight for general freedom left a Jewish north. The endeavor to free their own nation which lived in greater drolldom than any other. And no one at the time ever dreamt that after all these sacrifices the Jews of Russia would be visited by still greater misfortunes by problems and increased disabilities. 5. The Neo-Hebraic Renaissance With all deflections from the course of normal development such as unavoidable in times of violent mental disturbances, the main line of the whole cultural movement, the resultant of the various forces within it was headed toward the healthy progress of Judaism. The most substantial product of this movement was the Neo-Hebraic literary renaissance which had already appeared in faint outlines on the somber background of external operation and internal obscurantism during the preceding period. The Haskellah, formerly anathematized, was now able to unfold all its creative powers. What in the time of Isaac Bear Levinson had been accomplished stately by a few isolated conspirators of enlightenment in some petty society in Vilna or in some out-of-the-way town like Kamenetz-Podorsky was now done in full light of the day. Instead of a few stray writers, the avengers of the new literature, there now appeared this literature itself, new both in form and content. The restoration of the Hebrew language to its biblical purity and the removal of the linguistic excrescences of the later Lavinic idiom became for some writers an end itself for others a weapon in the fight for the Enlightenment. Melitza, a conventionalized style which moving strictly within the confines of the biblical diction and there was to adapt the form of an ancient language to the contents of a modern life became the fashion of the day. In point of content, rejuvenated Hebrew literature was of necessity elementary. Mental restlessness and naiveness of those were not conducive to the development of the science of Judaism which had attained to such luxurious growth in Germany. The Hebrew writers of Russia during that period had no means of propagating their ideas except through the medium of poetry, fiction or journalism. The result of historic research was squeezed into the mold of a poem or novel where it furnished the material for a press article in which the Jewish past was considered from the point of view of the present. Objective scientific investigation could find no place and the little that was accomplished in that direction did not bear the character of a living account of the past but was rather in the nature of crude archaeological material. At the same time as the crest of the social progress was rising the borderline between poetry and fiction on the one hand and topical journalism on the other was gradually obliterated. The poet or novelist was often turned into a fighter who attacked the old order of things and defended the new one. Even before the first blush of dawn when everyone in Russia was yet groaning under the strokes of an autocratic tyranny which the presentment of its speed and had driven into madness, the beaching strains of the new Hebrew liar resounded through Lithuania. They came from Mika Joseph Levinson, the son of Adam Levinson, author of high-flown Hebrew arts or contemplative Jewish youths suffering from tuberculosis and felt schmerz. He began his poetic career in 1840 by a Hebrew adaptation of the second book of Virgil's Enate but soon turned to Jewish motives. In the musical rhymes of the songs of daughter of Zion, Shirebeth, Zion, Vilna, 1851, the order poured forth the anguish with suffering soul which was torn between faith and science, weighed down by the oppression from without and stirred to its depths by the stretch of his homeless nation. A cruel disease cut short the poet's life in 1852 at the age of 24. A small collection of biblical poems published after his death under the title Kinolevat Zion, the half of the daughter of Zion, exhibited even more brilliantly the wealth of creative energy which was hidden in the soul of this prematurely cut off youth who, on the brink of the grave, sang so touchingly of love, beauty and pure joys of life. The year after the death of our poet in 1853, there appeared in the same chapter of Lithuania the historic novel Ahavat Zion, Love of Zion. His author, Abraham Map of Kovno, 1808 to 1867, was a poor melamed who had by his own endeavors and without the help of a teacher raised himself to the level of a modern Hebrew pedagogue. He lived in two worlds, in the valley of tears such as the ghetto presented during the reign of Nicholas and in the radiant recollections of the far-off biblical past. The inspired dreamer, while strolling on the banks of the Neiman along the hills which skirt the city of Kovno, was picturing to himself the luminous dawn of the Jewish nation. He published these radiant descriptions of ancient Judea in the dismal years of the captured recruits. The youth of the ghetto, who had been pouring over Talmudic folios, fell eagerly upon this little book which breathed the perfumes of Sharon and Kamel. They read it in secret. To read the novel openly was not a safe thing in those days and their hearts expanded with rapture over the enchanting idylls of the time of King Heschia, the portrayal of the tumultuous Jerusalem and peaceful Bethlehem. They sighed over the fate of the lovers Amnon and Tamar and in their flight of imagination were carried far away from painful reality. The name literary construction of the plot was of no consequence to the reader who tasted the novel for the first time in his life. The naivety of the plot was in keeping with the nave artificially reproduced language of the prophet Isaiah and biblical annals which intensified the illusion of the antiquity. Several years after the publication of his love of Zion when social currents had begun to stir Russian Jewelry, Mapp began his five-volume novel of contemporary life under the title Ait Zabua, the Speckled Bird or the Hippocrate 1857-1869. In his naivety fiction, which is curiously out of harmony with the complex plot in sensational French style, the author pictures the life of an obscure Lithuanian townlet, the Kahal bosses who hide their misdeeds beneath the cloak of piety, the fanatical rebels, the tattooed face of the pale of settlement who persecute the champions of enlightenment. As an offset against these shadows of the past, Mapp lovingly paints the barely visible shoots of the new life, the maskill who strives to reconcile religion and science, the misty figure of Jewish youth who goes to the Russian school in the hope of serving his people, the profile of Russian Jewish intellectuals and the captains of industry from among the rising Jewish plutocracy. Toward the end of his life, Mappu returned to his historical novel and in the Transgression of Samaria, Ashmat Shonlon 1865, he attempted through a picture of ancient Hebrew life during the declining years of the northern kingdom. But this novel, appearing as it did at the height of the cultural movement, failed to produce the powerful effect of his Ahabat Zion, although its charming biblical diction enraptured the lovers of Melitza. The noise of the new Jewish life with its constantly growing problems invaded the precincts of literature and even the poets were impaled to take sides in the burning questions of the day. The most important poet of that era, Judah Life Gordon 1830 to 1892, who began by composing biblical epics and moralistic favors, soon entered the field of intellectual poetry and became the champion of enlightenment and the trenchant critic of old-fashioned Jewish life. As far back as 1863, while active as a teacher at the Crown School in Lithuania, he composed his Marseilles of Enlightenment, Hakitsa Amni, Awake My People. In it, he sang of the sun shedding its rays over the land of Eden where the neck of the enslaved was freed from the yoke and where the modern Jew was welcomed with a brotherly embrace. The poet calls upon his people to join the ranks of fellow countrymen, the hosts of cultured Russian citizens who speak the language of the land and offers his Jewish contemporaries the brief formula, be a man on the street and a Jew in the house, i.e. be a Russian in public and a Jew in private life. Gordon himself defined his function in the work of Jewish regeneration to be that of exposing the inner ills of the people of fighting rabbinical orthodoxy and tyranny of ceremonialism. This carping tendency, which implies condemnation of the whole historic structure of Judaism, manifests itself as early as 1868 in its songs of Judah, Shireh Yehuda, in strobes radiant with the beauty of the Hebrew addiction. To live by soulless rites has to though been told, to swim against life and a lifeless letter to keep, to be dead upon earth and in heaven alive, to dream while awake and to speak while asleep. During the 70s, Gordon joined the ranks of the official agents of enlightenment. He removed the two St. Petersburg and became secretary of the society for the diffusion of enlightenment. The new Hebrew periodical Ha-Shahad published several of his contemporary epics in which he vented his wrath against petrified rabbinism. He portrays the misery of a Jewish woman who is condemned to enter married life at the bidding of the marriage broker without love and without happiness, or he describes the tragedy of another woman whose future is wrapped by a dot over the eye. He lashes furiously the Orthodox Spiders, the official leaders of the community, who catch the young pioneers of enlightenment in the meshes of Kahal authority backed by police force. Climbing higher upon the ladder of history, the poet registers his protest against the predominance of the spiritual over the worldly elements in the whole evolution of Judaism. He assails the prophet Jeremiah, who in beleaguered Jerusalem, preaches submission to the Babylonians and strict obedience to the law. The prophet, dressed up in the garb of a contemporary Orthodox rabbi, was to be exhibited as a terrifying incarnation of the soulless formula, law of life. The implication is obvious. The power of Orthodoxy must be broken and Jewish life must be secularized. But while unmasking the old, Gordon could not fail to perceive the soul spots in the new enlightened generation. He saw the flight of the educated youth from the Jewish camp, its ever-growing estrangement from the national tongue in which the poet uttered his songs and the cry of anguish burst from his lips, for whom do I labor? It seemed to him that the rising generation detached from the fountain head of Jewish culture would no more be able to read the songs of Zion and that the poet's rhymes were limited in their appeal to the last handful of worshipers of the Hebrew muse. Who knows but I am the last singer of Zion and you are the last who my songs understand. These lines were penned on the threshold of the new era of the 80s. The exponent of Jewish self-criticism lived to see not only the horrors of the pogroms but also the misty dawn of the national movement and he could comfort himself with the conviction that he was destined to be the singer for more than one generation. The question for whom do I labor was approached and solved in a different way by another writer whose genius expanded with the increasing years of his long life. During the first years of his activity, Shalom Jacob Abromovich, born 1836, tried his strengths in various fields. He wrote Hebrew essays on literary criticism. Mishpat Shalom, 1859, adapted books on natural science written in modern language. Toldotah Teba, Natural History, 1862, composed a social tendency of Roman under the title Fathers and Children. Her abode were Habanim, 1868, but all this left him dissatisfied. Pondering over the question for whom do I labor, he came to the conclusion that his labors belong to the people at large, to the downtrodden messes instead of being limited to the educated classes who understand the national term. A profound observer of Jewish conditions in the pale, he realized that the concrete life of the messes should be portrayed in their living daily speech in the Yiddish vernacular which was treated with contempt by nearly all the masculine of that period. Accordingly, Abromovich began to write in the dialect of the people under the assumed pen name of Mendele Mokhe Shvorem, Mendele the bookseller. Choosing his subject from the life of the lower classes, he portrayed the barriers of Jewish society and their oppressors. Those climb, eventually, a humble man, the life of Jewish beggars and vagrants, fish-cared the grimoire, fish-cared the cripple, and the immense cobweb which had been spun around the destitute messes by the contractors of the meat tax and their accomplices, the alleged benefactors of the community, the taxi, or the Banderstot Baler Toyvos, the meat tax or the gang of town benefactors. His trenchant satire on the tax hit the mark and the author had reason to fear the ire of those who were heard to the quick by his literary chefs. He had to leave the town of Berlitychev in which he resided at the time and removed to Zitomiya. Here, he wrote in 1873 one of his ripest works, The Mare or Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, The Klaghe. In his allegorical narrative, he depicts a homeless man, the personification of the Jewish messes which is pursued by the bosses of the town who do not allow her to graze on the common pasture lands with the town cattle and who set street loafers and dogs at her heels. The society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, the government cannot make up its mind whether the mare should be granted equal rights with the native horses or should be left unprotected and the matter is submitted to a special commission. In the meantime, certain horsemen from among the communal benefactors jump upon the back of the unfortunate mare, beat and torment her well night to death and drive her for their pleasure until she collapses. Leaving the field of polemical allegory, Abramovich published the humorous description of the travels of Benjamin III, Masiot Benjamin Ha-Sherlish, 1878, portraying a Jewish Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, who make an overseas journey to the mystical river Sembation on the way from Berlitychev to Kiev. A subtle observation of existing conditions combined with the profound analysis of the problems of Jewish life, artistic power matched with publicistic skill such as the salient future of the first phase of Abramovich's literary activity. In the following period, beginning with the 80s, his literary creations exhibit greater artistic harmony in their content. As far as the linguistic harvest concerned, they combine the idish vernacular with the Hebrew national tongue, which are employed side by side by our author as the vehicles of his thought and reach at his hand an equally high state of perfection. End of section 17, section 18 of History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, volume 2 from the deaths of Alexander I until the deaths of Alexander III, 1825 to 1894 by Shimon Dubnov, translated by Israel Friedlander. This livrivox recording is in the public domain, recording by SS Kim, Manik Dubaisu, Portugal. Chapter 20, The Inner Life of Russian Jewry during the reign of Alexander II, Part 3. 6. The Harbinger of Jewish Nationalism, Pérez Smolenskin. The artistic portrayal of life was, however, a rare exception in the literature of the Haskellah. Reven by social and cultural strife, the period of enlightenment called rather for theories than for art, and the novelist, no less than the publicist, was called upon to supply the want. This theoretic element was paramount in the novels of Pérez Smolenskin, 1842 to 1885, the editor of the popular Hebrew magazine Ha-Shahar. The pupil of a white Russian Yeshua, he afterwards drifted into frivolous Odessa until later to Vienna, suffering painfully from the shock of the contrast. Personally, he had emerged unscathed from this conflict of ideas, but round about him, he witnessed the dead bodies of enlightenment which are just as numerous as the victims of ignorance. He saw the Jewish youth fling from its people and forgetting its national language. He saw reformed Judaism of Western Europe, which had retained nothing of Jewish culture except the modernized superficialities of synagogue. Repeled by this spectacle, Smolenskin decided from the very beginning to fight on two fronts, against the fanatics of orthodoxy in the name of European progress and against the championship assimilation in the name of national Jewish culture and more particularly of the Hebrew language. You say, Smolenskin exclaims, addressing himself to the assimilators, let us be like the other nations. Well and good, let us indeed be like the other nations, cultured men and women, free from superstition, loyal citizens of the country. But let us also remember, as the other nations do, that we have no right to be ashamed of our origin, that it is our duty to hold dear our national language and our national dignity. In his first great novel, A Rovo on Life's Path, Hatoe Bedrake Ha Haim, 1869 to 1876, Smolenskin carries his hero through all the stages of cultural development, leading from an obscure white Russian hamlet to the centers of European civilization in London and Paris. But at the end of his rovings, the hero ultimately attains a synthesis of Jewish nationalism and European progress and ends by sacrificing his life while defending his brethren during the Odessa program of 1871. The other tendons novels of Smolenskin reflect the same double-fronted struggle against the stagnation of the Orthodox, particularly the Hasidim and against the disloyalty of the Enlightened. Smolenskin's theory of Judaism is formulated in two publicistic works, The Eternal People, Amulam, 1872, and There is a Time to Plant, Elatad, 1875 to 1877. As a counterbalance to the artificial religious reforms of the West, he sets up the far-reaching principle of Jewish evolution over gradual amalgamation of the national and humanitarian elements within Judaism. The messianic dogma, which the Jews of the West had completely abandoned because of its alleged incompatibility with Jewish citizenship in the diaspora, is warmly defended by Smolenskin as one of the symbols of national unity. In the very center of his system stands the Cult of Hebrew as a national language, without which there is no Judaism. In order to more successfully demolish the idea of assimilation, Smolenskin bombards its structure, the theory of enlightenment as formulated by Moses Mendelssohn with his definition of the Jews as a religious community and not as a nation, though in his polemic order he often goes too far and does occasional violence to restrict truth. In both works, one medicine, though in vague outlines only, the theory of a spiritual nation. However, Smolenskin did not succeed in developing and consolidating his theory. The pogroms of 1881 and the beginning of the Jewish Exodus from Russia upset his equilibrium once more. He laid aside the question of the national development of Jewry in the diaspora and became an enthusiastic preacher of the restoration of the Jewish people in Palestine. In the midst of this propaganda, the life of the talented publicist was cut short by premature death. The same conviction was finally reached after a prolonged inner struggle by Moses' life Lillian Bloom, 1843-1910, who might well be called a matter of enlightenment. However, during the period under consideration, he moved entirely within the boundaries of the Haskellah, of which he was the most radical exponent. Persecuted for his harmless liberalism by the fanatics of his native town of Wilkomir, Lillian Bloom began to ponder over the question of Jewish religious reforms. In advocating the reform of Judaism, he was not actuated as were so many in Western Europe by the desire of adapting Judaism to the non-Jewish environment, but rather by the profound and painful conviction that dominant rabbinism in its medieval phase does not represent the true essence of Judaism. Reform of Judaism, as interpreted by Lillian Bloom, does not mean a revolution but an evolution of Judaism, just as the Talmud had was reformed Judaism in accordance with the requirement of its time. So, most Judaism be reformed by us in accordance with the demands of our own times. When the youthful writer embodied these views in a series of articles published in the Haar Melitz under the title of Talmud, the Ways of the Talmud, 1868-1869, his orthodox townsmen were so thoroughly aroused that his furthest day in Wilkomir was not free from danger, and he was compelled to remove to Odessa. Here he published in 1870 his rhymed satire, Kehal Refime, in each the dark shadows of Jewish town, the Kehal elders, the Revice, the Zadiks, and other what is more weirdly about in the gloom of the network world. In Odessa, Lillian Bloom joined the ranks of the Russified College Jews and became imbued with the radical ideas of Cherni Shevsky and Pizarjev, gaining the reputation of a nihilist. His theory of Jewish reform, superannuated by his new materialistic worldview was drawn aside and the gaping void opened in the soul of the writer. This frame of mind is reflected in Lillian Bloom's self-revelation, The Sins of Youth, Hartot Nerium, 1876. This agonizing cry of one of the many victims of the mental cataclysm of the 60s. The book made a tremendous impression for the mental torture depicted in it were typical of the whole age of transition. However, the final note of the confession, the shriek of a wasted soul which having overthrown the old idols has failed to find a new god did not express the general trends of that period which was far from despair. As for our author, his tempestuous soul was soon set at rest. The events which filled the minds of progressive Jewry with agitation, the horrors of the pogroms and the political oppression of the beginning of the 80s brought peace to the aching heart of Lillian Bloom. He found the solution of the Jewish problems in the love of Zion, of which he became the philosophic exponent. At the later stage, he became an ardent champion of political Zionism. 7. Jewish Literature in the Russian Language The left wing of enlightenment was represented during this period by Jewish literature in the Russian language which had several noteworthy exponents. It is interesting to observe that whereas all the prominent writers in Hebrew were children of profoundly nationalistic Lithuania, those that wrote in Russian with the sole exception of Levanda were natives of South Russia, where the two extremes, stagnant Hasidism and radical Russification fought for supremacy. The founder of this branch of Jewish literature was Osip Joseph Ravinovich, 1817-1869, a sudden native of Portava and the resident of Odessa. Alongside of journalistic articles, he wrote protracted novels. His touching pictures of the past, his stories, the penal recruits and the inherited candlestick, 1859-1860, called off before the generation living at the dawn of the new era of reforms, the shadows of the passing night, the tortures of Nicholas's conscription and the degrading forms of Jewish rightlessness. The fight against the rightlessness was the goal of his journalistic activity, which prior to the publication of the Raziat, he had carried on in the columns of the liberal Russian press. The problems of inner Jewish life had brought little attraction for him. Like Rizzo, he looked upon civil emancipation as a penicillor for all Jewish ailments. He was snatched away by death before he could be cured of this illusion. Ravinovich's work was continued by a talented youth, the journalist Ilya Ilyers Oshansky of Ekaterinovich's love, 1846-1875, who was the main contributor to the D.N. of Odessa and to the Jewish guy, Bibliotheca. To fight for Jewish rights, not to offer humble apologies, to demand emancipation, not to beg for it, this attitude lends the charm of its own to Oshansky's writings. His brilliant analysis of Russian legislation concerning the Jews offers a complete anatomy of Jewish disenfranchisement in Russia, beginning with Catherine II and ending with Alexander II. Nevertheless, being a child of his age, he preached his formula. While a passionate Jew at heart, he championed the cause of recification, though not in the extreme form of spiritual self-effacement. The Odessa program of 1871 staggered his impressionable soul. He was tossing about restlessly, seeking an outlet for his resentment, but everywhere he knocked his head against the barriers of censorship and police. Had he been granted longer life, he might, like Smolenskin, have chosen the role of nationalistic progressive synthesis, but the white plague carried him off in his 29th year. The literary work of Lev Levanda, 1835-1888 was of a more complicated character. A graduate of one of the official rabbinical schools, he was first active as teacher in a Jewish crown school in Minsk, and afterwards occupied the post of one running Jew under Muraviov, the governor-general of Vilna. He thus moved in the hotbed of official enlightenment and in the headquarters of the policy of recification as represented by Muraviov, a circumstance which left his impress upon all the products of his pen. In his first novel, The Grocery Store, 1860, of Little Merritt from the artistic point of view, he still appears as the name part of that shallow enlightenment, the champion of which is sufficiently characterized by wearing a European costume, calling himself by a well-sounded German or Russian name. In the novel, on the discussion, the hero goes by the name of Arnold, cultivating friendly relations with the noble-minded Christians and making a love match unassisted by the marriage broker. During this stage of his career, Levanda was convinced that no educated Jew could help being a cosmopolitan. But a little later, his cosmopolitanism displayed distinct propensity toward recification. In his novel, Heart Time, 1871 to 1872, Levanda renounces his former Polish sympathies and through the mouth of his hero, Serin, preaches the gospel of the approaching cultural fusion between the Jews and the Russians, which is to mark a new epoch in the history of the Jewish people. Old-fashioned Jewish life is cleverly ridiculed in the sketches of the past, the eologs of my melanomet, sculophobia, etc., 1870 to 1875. His peace of mind was not even disturbed by the manifestation towards the end of the 60s of the antisemitic reaction in those very official circles in which the learned Jew moved and in which Brahman was looked up to as an authority in matters of pertaining to Judaism. But the catastrophe of 1881 dealt a staggering blow to Levanda's soul and forced him to overthrow his former idol of assimilation. With his mind not yet fully settled on the new theory of nationalism, he joined the Palestine movement toward the end of his life and went down to his grave with a clouded soul. One who stuck fast in his denial of Judaism was Grigory Bogorov, 1825 to 1885. The descendant of a family of rabbis in Portava, he passed from darkness to light by way of the curious educational institution of Nicolaus Brandt, the office of an exiled farmer in which he was employed for a number of years. The enlightened arsenic became conscious of his literary talent late in his life. His protracted memoirs of a Jew, largely made up of autobiographical material, was published in a Russian magazine as late as 1871 to 1873. They contain an agrimonious description of Jewish life in the time of Nicolaus I. No Jewish artist had ever yet dipped his brush in color so small and had displayed so ferocious a hatred as did Bogorov in painting the old Jewish mode of life within the pale, with its poverty and darkness, its hunters and victims, its demoralized color rule of the days of conscription. Bogorov's account of his childhood and youth is not relived by a single cheerful innocence except that of a young Russian girl. The whole patriarchal life of Jewish town led of that period is transformed into a sort of infirmary, teeming with criminals or idiots. To the mind of Bogorov, only two ways promised an escape from this hell, the way of cosmopolitanism and rationalism, opening up into humanity at large, or the way leading into the midst of the Russian nation. Bogorov himself stood irresolute on this fateful borderline. In 1879 he wrote to Levanda that as an emancipated cosmopolitan, he would long ago have crossed over to the opposite shore where other sympathies and ideas smiled upon him, where he not kept within the Jewish fold by four million people innocently suffering from systematic persecutions. Bogorov's hatred of the persecutors of the Jewish people was poured forth in his history novel, a Jewish manuscript, 1876, the plot of which is based on events of the time of communist scheme. But even here, while describing as he himself puts it the history of the struggle between the spider and the fly, he finds in the life of the fly nothing worthy of sympathy except its sufferings. In 1879 Bogorov began a new novel, The Scum of the Age, picturing the life of the modern Jewish youth who were engulfed in the Russian Revolutionary propaganda. But the hand which knew how to portray the horrors of the old conscription was powerless to reproduce except in very crude outlines the world of political passions which was born into the author that the novel remained unfinished. The reaction of the 80s produced no change in Bogorov's attitude. He breathed his last in a distant Russian village and was buried in a Russian cemetery having embraced Christianity shortly before his death as a result of a sad concatenation of family circumstances. Before the young generation which entered upon active life in the 80s laid broken tablets of Russian Jewish literature. New tablets were needed partly to restore the commandment of the preceding period of enlightenment partly to correct its mistakes. End of section 18