1840-1855
The charges brought against the Jews of Russia by henchmen of the czar were grave, indeed, only they did not contain a particle of truth. In Russia itself, not only Jews and non-Russians but even many Christians testified to the innocence of the Jews, and protested against their oppressors. Bibikov, the Governor-General of Podolia and Volhynia; Diakov, the Governor-General of Smolensk; and Surovyetsky, the noted statesman, all write in terms of such praise of their unfortunate countrymen of the Jewish faith that their statements would sound exaggerated, were it not that many other unprejudiced Russians confirm their views.[1] The fact that Nicholas thought the Jews reliable as soldiers speaks against the imputation that they were mercenary and unpatriotic. Neither was the conventional accusation, that they were a people of petty traders, applicable to the Jews in Russia. Laborers of all kinds were very common among them. It was they, in fact, who rendered all manner of service to their Gentile neighbors, from a cobbler's and blacksmith's to producing the most exquisite objets d'art and gold and silver engraving. They were equally well represented among the clerks and bookkeepers, and the bricklayers and stone-cutters. They took up with the most laborious employments, if only they furnished them with an honest even though scanty livelihood.[2]
But most unfounded of all was the allegation that Jews were opposed to education. The Memoirs of Madame Pauline Wengeroff indicate that even among the very strict Jews of her time children were not denied instruction in the German, Polish, and Russian literatures. We have seen how they availed themselves of the permission, granted to them by Alexander I, to attend the schools and universities of the empire. Nor did they fail to open schools of their own. No sooner was the Franco-Russian war over than Joseph Perl of Galicia founded a school in Tarnopol (1813), then under the Russian Government, and two years later he drew upon his own resources to build a school-house large enough to accommodate the great, steadily growing number of students. In 1822 we hear of a school that had been in existence for some time in Uman (the Ukraine). It had been established by Meïr Horn, Moses Landau, and Hirsh Hurwitz, all of whom were indefatigable laborers in the cause of Haskalah in the Ukraine. Perl's school was the pattern and model for a multitude of other schools, among them the one founded by Zittenfeld (1826) in Odessa, in the faculty of which were Simhah Pinsker, Elijah Finkel, the grandson of Elijah Gaon, and Abraham Abele, the eminent Talmudist. In 1836 a girls' department was added to it, and when Lilienthal visited Odessa (ab. 1843) it had an attendance of from four to five hundred pupils of both sexes, the annual expense being twenty-eight thousand rubles. A similar school was opened in Kishinev by Stern, and in the early "forties" there was hardly a Jewish community of note without one or more of such Jewish public institutions. Several well-to-do Maskilim not only founded but, like Perl, also maintained such schools, and gave instruction in some or all of the subjects taught in them.[3]
The "forties" began auspiciously for Haskalah in Russia. On January 15, 1840, the Riga community, amid pomp and rejoicing, opened the first Jewish school affiliated with a university. The teaching staff consisted of three Jews and one Christian, with Doctor Max Lilienthal (1815-1882), the young, highly recommended, and recently chosen local rabbi, as its principal. In the same year, the indefatigable Basilius Stern succeeded in forming a committee, of which Hayyim Efrusi and Moses Lichtenstadt were members, to deliberate on founding rabbinical seminaries in Russia. In 1841, forty-five delegates, representing the six chief committees of the Lovers of Enlightenment, assembled in Vilna, and thence issued an appeal in which they adopted as their platform the elevation of the moral standards of adults by urging them to follow useful trades and discouraging the Jewish proclivity to business as much as possible; a reform of the prevailing system of the education of the young; the combating, if possible the eradication, of Hasidism, the fountainhead, as they thought, of ignorance and superstition; the establishment of rabbinical seminaries, after the model of those in Padua and Amsterdam, to supply congregations with educated rabbis. It was further agreed that a Consistory be created, to supervise Jewish affairs and establish schools and technical institutes wherever necessary. To these main points were added several others of minor importance. The Maskilim of Besascz insisted that steps be taken to stop the prevailing custom of premature marriages. Those of Brest proposed that Government aid be invoked to compel Jews to dress in the German style, to use authorized text-books in the hadarim, and interdict the study of the Talmud except by those preparing themselves for the rabbinate.[4]
Even in Vilna and Minsk, towns which later put themselves on record as opposed to Government schools, the Jews yielded gladly to the innovations of such Maskilim as S. Perl, G. Klaczke, I. Bompi, and the distinguished philanthropist David Luria, who took the initiative in transforming the educational system of these cities. Under the superintendence of Luria, the Minsk Talmud Torah became a model institution; the training conferred there on the poor and orphaned surpassed that given to the children of the rich in their private schools. This aroused jealousy in the parents of the latter, and at their request Luria organized a merchants' school, for the wealthier class. He then established what he called Midrash Ezrahim, or Citizens' Institute, in which he met with such success that he attracted the attention of the authorities, and received a special acknowledgment from the czar.[5]
Russian Jewry was astir with new life. In many places secular education was divorced for the first time from rabbinical speculation. Knowledge became an end in itself, and learning increased greatly. An investigation by Nicholas I convinced all who were interested that though the Talmud remained the chief subject of study, the number of educated Jews was far greater than commonly supposed. The upliftment of the masses was the beau-ideal of every Maskil, and Hebrew and even the much-despised Yiddish were employed to effect it. Ignorance was regarded as the bane of life, and enlightenment as the panacea for all the ills to which their downtrodden brethren were heirs. As their pious coreligionists deemed it the universal duty to be well-versed in the Talmud, so the Maskilim thought it incumbent upon everybody to be highly cultured. No obstacle was great enough to discourage them. They were willing martyrs to the goddess of Wisdom, at whose shrine they worshipped, and whose cult they spread in the most adverse circumstances.
Had the Government not interfered with the efforts of the Maskilim, or had it chosen a commission from among the Russian Jews themselves, among whom, as soon became evident to Nicholas himself, there were more than enough to do justice to an educational inquiry, the Haskalah movement would have continued to spread, notwithstanding the obstacles put in its way. But Nicholas was determined to reduce the number of Jews also by "re-educating" them in accordance with his own ideas. Every attempt made by the Jews to educate themselves was, therefore, checked. Even the noble efforts of Luria were stopped, his schools were closed, and his only rewards were "a gold medal from the czar and a short poem by Gottlober."
In Germany, since the time of Mendelssohn, the study of the Talmud had been on the wane. The great yeshibot formerly existing in Metz, Frankfort, Hamburg, Prague, Fiirth, Halberstadt, etc., disappeared, and the reforms introduced in the synagogue and the numerous converts to Christianity impressed the outside world with the idea that Judaism among German Jews was writhing in the agony of death. If the same disintegrating elements were introduced among the Russian Jews, the Government believed that they would ultimately come over to the Greek Catholic Church of their own accord. Hence it was anxious to learn the secret of this power and beamed graciously on several learned Jews of Germany.
David Friedländer (1750-1834) was then considered the legitimate successor of Mendelssohn, whose friend he had been for more than twenty years. He resembled his master in many respects, though he lacked both his genius and his sympathy. Mendelssohn translated the Pentateuch and the Psalms into German, Friedländer translated the Haftarot (selections from the Prophets) and the prayer book. Mendelssohn encouraged the publication of the Meassef; he did likewise, and contributed several articles to the journal. But, unlike his master, or, as he claimed, like his master in secret, he held exceedingly latitudinarian views on Judaism. In his later years he advocated abolishing the study of Hebrew in the schools and discarding it from the prayer book. He even rejoiced that by attending the services in Protestant churches many Jewish families were becoming acquainted with the religion he himself would have accepted on certain conditions.[6]
It was to Friedländer that Bishop Malchevsky, actuated, as he maintained, by a desire to render the Jews worthy of the enjoyment of civil rights, applied for suggestions, in 1816, when the missionary zeal of Alexander I was first aroused. He responded in a pamphlet, On the Improvement of the Israelites in the Kingdom of Poland,[7] in which he declared that the quickest way of "civilizing" the Jews would be to deprive their rabbis of power and influence, to force them to dress in the German fashion, and use the Polish language, to admit them to the public schools and other educational institutions, and, above all, to abrogate the laws discriminating between them and their Gentile countrymen.