In their deep-rooted love for learning, they sometimes ventured even beyond the German boundaries, into countries whose language and customs had little in common with theirs. Padua continued to be the resort of Russo-Polish Jews that it had been before 1648. Moses Hayyim Luzzatto found an ardent admirer and zealous propagandist of his principles in the young medical student Jekuthiel Gordon (ab. 1729), who wrote concerning his master to friends in Vienna and Vilna.[31] Judah Halevi Hurwitz (d. 1797), whose work 'Ammude Bet Yehudah (Amsterdam, 1765) was highly recommended by Mendelssohn and Wessely, was a graduate of the same famous institution. In addition to his medical and philosophic attainments, he wrote a number of poems, and he was among the first to translate fables from German into Hebrew.[32]
The story of Zalkind Hurwitz (1740-1812), "le fameux," as he was called by a French writer, is interesting. Starting, as usual, by going to Berlin, and succeeding, as usual, in gaining the friendship of Mendelssohn, he then visited Nancy, Metz, and Strasburg, and finally settled in Paris. Like Doctor Behr, he had to resort to peddling as a means for a livelihood. The rudiments of French he acquired from any book he chanced to obtain. Nevertheless, he soon became proficient in the language of his adopted country, and wrote his excellent Apologie des juifs, which, crowned by the Academy of Metz and quoted by Mirabeau, was largely instrumental in removing the disabilities of the Jews in France. Clermont-Tonnerre, the advocate of Jewish emancipation, said of him, Le juif polonais seul avait parlé en philosophe. He was suggested as a member of the Sanhedrin convoked by Napoleon in 1807. Though for some reason he never enjoyed the honor of membership in it, he was, nevertheless, the ruling spirit in the august assembly, and later generations have paid him the homage he deserves.[33]
Where Hurwitz failed, another of his countrymen was to succeed. Judah Litvack (1776-1836) removed from Berlin to Amsterdam, became prominent among the Dutch mathematicians, and wrote a Dutch work, Verhandeling over de Profgetallen Gen. ii (Amsterdam, 1817), which appeared in a second edition four years after the first. The author was elected a member of the Mathesis Artium Genetrix Society, and appointed one of the deputation sent to the Sanhedrin (February 12, 1807), before which he delivered a discourse in the German language.
The "distant isles of the sea," the British Islands, Russo-Polish Jews seem to have frequented ever since the Restoration, probably contemporaneously with the settlement of the Spanish Jews. The famous mystic Hayyim Samuel Jacob Falk, one of the many Baal-Shems who flourished in Podolia at the beginning of the eighteenth century, settled in London before 1750, and became the subject of many wonder stories. Sussman Shesnovzi, apparently a countryman of his, describes him, in a letter to Jacob Emden, as "standing alone in his generation by reason of his knowledge of holy mysteries." That this was the opinion of many and prominent personages may be inferred from the fact that among his callers were such distinguished visitors as the Marchese de Crona, Baron de Neuhoff, Prince Czartorisky, and the Duke of Orleans. The confidence of such as these brought Falk a considerable fortune, a large part of which he bequeathed to a charity fund, the interest of which the overseers of the United Synagogue still distribute annually among the poor.[34] Shortly before "Doctor" Falk's death (1782), there settled in London Phinehas Phillips of Krotoschin, the founder of the Phillips family, which has furnished two Lord Mayors to the city of London.
It was not merely because of its business facilities that England appealed to the Slavonic Jews. Baruch Shklover, or Schick (1740-1812), went thither to study medicine, and it was from English literature that he selected the material for his Keneh ha-Middah (Prague, 1784; Shklov, 1793), on trigonometry. It would appear that the first Hebrew book, Toledot Ya'akob, printed for a Jew in England, was, as the name of the author, Eisenstadt, suggests, that of a Slavonic Jew. Although a silversmith by profession, Israel Lyons (d. 1770) was appointed teacher of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge. He acquired repute as a Hebrew scholar, and published, in 1757, the Scholar's Instructor, or Hebrew Grammar (4th ed., 1823), and in 1768 a treatise printed by the Cambridge Press, Observations and Inquiries Relating to Various Parts of Scripture History. In the same chosen field labored Hyman Hurwitz (1770-1844), the friend of Coleridge, who founded the Highgate Academy (1799), and wrote an Introduction to Hebrew Grammar, Vindica Hebraica, and Hebrew Tales, which were translated into various languages. He finally became professor of Hebrew in University College, London.
A younger contemporary of Abrahamson, the Jewish German medallist, was Solomon (Yom Tob) Bennett (1780-1841), the engraver of Polotsk, who spent a number of years at Copenhagen and Berlin in perfecting himself in his art. Among his works is a highly praised bas-relief of Frederick II, which was much admired by the professors of the Academy. An ardent lover of liberty, of which there was little more in Germany at that time than in Russia, he left for England, where he spent the remaining years of his life, in Bristol. Besides being an artist and an engraver he was a profound theologian, anxious to defend the cause of Judaism against enemies within and without. The enemy within he attacked in his cutting criticism of Solomon Cohen's Rudiments of Religion, and the enemy outside, in his other work, The Constancy of Israel (Nezah Yisraël, London, 1809). He also wrote expositions on many important Biblical topics, such as sacrifices (1815) and the Temple (1824). Having pointed out the defects of the Authorized Version (1834), he was ambitious of publishing a complete revised translation of the Bible. Specimens appeared in 1841. Death intervened and frustrated his plans. As Schick was the first Jew to translate from English into Hebrew, so Bennett was the first after Manasseh ben Israel to write in English in behalf of his people.[35]
If the contributions of Slavonic Jews to Latin, German, French, Dutch, and English literature were not less considerable at that time than those of the Jews residing in the countries where these languages were respectively used as media, they excelled them in Hebrew literature. In the renaissance of the holy tongue, they played the most important part from the first. The striving for knowledge, not for the purpose of obtaining a coveted privilege, but for its own sake, became an irresistible passion, and it was accompanied by an unquenchable desire to disseminate knowledge among the masses, to make learning and wisdom common property. The Hebrew language being the best vehicle for the purpose, it was soon impressed into the service of Haskalah. The pioneer Maskilim learned to handle it with ease and clearness that would do credit to a modern writer in a much more developed European language.
From the middle of the fifteenth to the latter part of the eighteenth century, Hebrew literature consisted, if a few scattered books on philosophy, mostly translations from the Arabic, are excepted, mainly of Talmudic disquisitions, written in the rabbinic dialect and in a euphuistic style. Besides the great Maimuni, there were few able or willing to write Hebrew "as she should be spoke." The early German Maskilim, in trying to escape the Scylla of Rabbinism, fell victims to the Charybdis of Germanism. They possessed originality neither of style nor of sentiment, neither of rhyme nor of reason. Hebrew poetry was an adaptation of current German poetry. The very best the period produced, the Mosaïde of Wessely, was influenced by and largely an imitation of Klopstock and others. Like English classic poetry, it is pretty in form but poor in spirit. The element of nationality, or distinctiveness, the life-giving and soul-uplifting element in all poetry, as Delitzsch justly maintains it to be, was lacking in the German Maskilim, anxious for naturalization as they were. It was the Slavonic Maskilim who mastered Hebrew in its purity, as it had not been mastered since the day of Judah Halevi. In those days of transition the diligent student can find, in germ, what was later to develop into the resplendent poetical flowers produced by the Lebensohns, the Gordons, Dolitzky, Schapiro, Mane, and Bialik.
The Slavonic contributors to the Meassef, the first Hebrew literary periodical (1784-1811), were not conspicuous in number, but if quality can compensate for quantity, they made up for it by the value of their articles. Dubno and Maimon enriched the early issues, the one with poetry, the other with philosophy; and when it began to struggle for its existence, and was on the point of giving up the ghost, Shalom Cohen (1772-1845) came to the rescue, and, as editor, prolonged its existence by a few years. Among the best articles in the Meassef are those of Isaac Halevi Satanov (1733-1805). This "conglomeration of contrasts," whom Delitzsch regards as the restorer of Hebrew poetry to its primitive beauty and purity, was the embodiment of the period in which he lived. "He was," we are told, "a thorough master of Jewish traditional lore, and at the same time a most advanced thinker, a profound physicist, and an inspired poet; a master of the old school and at the same time the founder of the new school, the national-classical, of Hebrew poetry." His pure and precise style, his good-natured, Horace-like, delicate, yet unmistakable, humor, he showed in a series of books bearing the name of Asaf, which still must be counted among the gems of Hebrew literature.[36]
Satanov was greatly in favor of expanding the Hebrew language, but the first to borrow expressions from the Talmud literature or coin words of his own was Mendel Levin, also of Satanov, Podolia (1741-1819), the friend of Mendelssohn while in Berlin, the inspirer of Perl and Krochmal while in Brody, the companion of Zeitlin and Schick while in Mohilev. The Meassefim, the name generally applied to all who participated in the publication of the Meassef, were shocked by what they regarded a profanation of the sacred tongue. Their idea was that Hebrew was to be utilized as a means of introducing Western civilization. Afterwards it was to be relegated once more to the holy Ark. To Levin Hebrew had a far higher significance. Not only should Western civilization be introduced into Jewry through its means, but Hebrew itself should be so perfected as to take a place by the side of the more modern and cultivated languages. It should find adequate expressions for the new thoughts and ideas which the new learning would introduce into it directly or indirectly. The medieval translations from the Arabic should be retranslated into the new Hebrew, he held, and he furnished an example by recasting the first part of Maimuni's Moreh Nebukim. His modernized version, lucid and fluent, printed alongside of Ibn Tibbon's, presents a striking contrast to the stiffness and obscurity of the Provençal scholar's. Levin was also the first to write in the Yiddish, or Judeo-German, dialect, for the instruction of the masses, which made him the butt of more than one satire. But what was generally regarded as a degrading task was fraught with the greatest consequences to the Haskalah. To this day Yiddish has continued an important medium for disseminating culture among Russian Jews, both in the Old World and in the New.[37]