These persecutions, however, did not smother the fire of protest in the breast of the excommunicated rural philosopher. In the last years of his life he published two pamphlets, [1] in which he severely lashed the shortcomings of Jewish life, the early marriages, the one-sided school training, the repugnance to living knowledge and physical labor. However, the champions of orthodoxy took good care to prevent these books from reaching the masses. Exhausted by his fruitless struggle, Menashe died, unappreciated and almost unnoticed by his contemporaries.
[Footnote 1: One of these, entitled Samme de-Hayye ("Elixir of Life"), was written in Yiddish, being designed by the author for the lower classes.]
2. THE STAGNATION OF HASIDISM
A critical attitude toward the existing order of things could on occasions assert itself in the environment of Rabbinism, where the mind, though forced into the mould of scholasticism, was yet working at high speed. But such "heretical" thinking was utterly inconceivable in the dominant circles of Hasidism, where the intellect was rocked to sleep by mystical lullabies and fascinating stories of the miraculous exploits of the Tzsaddiks. The era of political and civil disfranchisement was a time of luxuriant growth for Hasidism, not in its creative, but rather in its stationary, not to say stagnant, phase.
The old struggle between Hasidism and Rabbinism had long been fought out, and the Tzaddiks rested on their laurels as teachers and miracle-workers. The Tzaddik dynasties were now firmly entrenched. In White Russia the sceptre lay in the hands of the Shneorsohn dynasty, the successors of the "Old Rabbi," Shneor Zalman, the progenitor of the Northern Hasidim. [1] The son of the "Old Rabbi," Baer, nicknamed "the Middle Rabbi" (1813-1828), and the latter's son-in-law Mendel Lubavicher [2] (1828-1866) succeeded one another on the hasidic "throne" during this period, with a change in their place of residence. Under Rabbi Zalman the townlets of Lozno and Ladi served as "capitals"; under his successors, they were Ladi and Lubavichi. The three localities are all situated on the border-line of the governments of Vitebsk and Moghilev, in which the Hasidim of the Habad persuasion [3] formed either a majority, as was the case in the former government, or a substantial minority, as was the case in the latter.
[Footnote 1: See Vol. I, p. 372.]
[Footnote 2: From the townlet Lubavichi. See later in the text.]
[Footnote 3: Compare Vol. I, p. 234, n. 2.]
Rabbi Baer, the son and successor of the "Old Rabbi," did not inherit the creative genius of his father. He published many books, made up mostly of his Sabbath discourses, but they lack originality. His method is that of the talmudic pilpul, [1] transplanted upon the soil of Cabala and Hasidism, or it consists in expatiating upon the ideas contained in the Tanyo. [2] The last years of Rabbi Baer were darkened by the White Russian catastrophes, the expulsion from the villages in 1823, and the ominous turn in the ritual murder trial of Velizh. On his death-bed he spoke to those around him about the burning topic of the day, the conscription ukase of 1827.
[Footnote 1: i.e., Dialectics. Comp. Vol. I, p. 122.]