One attempt of coupling socialism with Judaism ought not to be passed over in silence. In the beginning of the seventies there existed in Vilna a Jewish revolutionary circle made up principally of the pupils of the rabbinical school and of the teachers' 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 Vperyod ("Forwards").
In the following year, Lieberman founded in London the "League of Jewish Socialists" for the purpose of carrying on a propaganda among the Jewish masses. It was a small society of students and workingmen which busied itself with arranging lectures and debates, and penning 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-Emet ("The Truth"). The first two issues of ha-Emet 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 Asefat Hakamim ("The Assembly of Wise Men"), published in Koenigsberg in 1878 by M. Winchevski as a supplement to the paper ha-Kol ("The Voice"), which was issued there by Rodkinson. Soon this whole species of socialistic literature was put out of existence. In 1879, Lieberman in Vienna and his comrades in Berlin and Koenigsberg 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 seventies. Jews figured in all important political trials and public manifestations; they languished in the gaols, and suffered as exiles in Siberia. But this idealistic fight for general freedom lacked a Jewish note, the endeavor to free their own nation which lived in greater thraldom than any other. And no one at that time ever dreamt that after all these sacrifices the Jews of Russia would be visited by still greater misfortunes, by pogroms and increased disabilities.
5. THE NEO-HEBRAIC RENAISSANCE
With all deflections from the course of normal development, such as are 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 towards 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 sombre background of external oppression and internal obscurantism during the preceding period. The Haskalah, formerly anathematized, was now able to unfold all its creative powers. What in the time of Isaac Baer Levinsohn had been accomplished stealthily by a few isolated conspirators of enlightenment in some petty society in Vilna or in some out-of-the-way town like Kamenetz-Podolsk was now done in the full light of the day. Instead of a few stray writers, the harbingers 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 rabbinic idiom became for some writers an end in itself, for others a weapon in the fight for enlightenment. Melitzah, a conventionalized style, which, moving strictly within the confines of the biblical diction, endeavored to adapt the form of an ancient language to the content 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 thought were not conducive to the development of that "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 results of historic research were squeezed into the mould of a poem or novel, or 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 border-line 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.
Even before the first blush of dawn, when every one in Russia was yet groaning under the strokes of an autocratic tyranny, which the presentiment of its speedy end had driven into madness, the bewitching strains of the new Hebrew lyre resounded through Lithuania. They came from Micah Joseph Lebensohn, the son of "Adam" Lebensohn, author of high-flown Hebrew odes [1]—a contemplative Jewish youth, suffering from tuberculosis and Weltschmerz. He began his poetic career in 1840 by a Hebrew adaptation of the second book of Virgil's Aeneid [2] but soon turned to Jewish motifs. In the musical rhymes of the "Songs of the Daughter of Zion" (Shire bat Zion, Vilna, 1851), the author poured forth the anguish of his suffering soul, which was torn between faith and science, weighed down by the oppression from without and stirred to its depth by the tragedy of his homeless nation. [3] A cruel disease cut short the poet's life in 1852, at the age of twenty-four. A small collection of lyrical poems, published after his death under the title Kinnor bat Zion ("The Harp 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 the pure joys of life.
[Footnote 1: See above, p. 134 et seq.]
[Footnote 2: It was made from the German translation of Schiller]
[Footnote 3: See the poems "Solomon and Koheleth," "Jael and Sisera," and "Judah ha-Levi.">[