Volume I Part 25 (2/2)

The breezes of Western culture had hardly a chance to penetrate to this realm, protected as it was by the double wall of Rabbinism and Hasidism.

And yet here and there one may discern on the surface of social life the foam of the wave from the far-off West. From Germany the free-minded ”Berliner,” the nickname applied to these ”new men,” was moving towards the borders of Russia. He arrayed himself in a short German coat, cut off his earlocks, shaved his beard, neglected the religious observances, spoke German or ”the language of the land,” and swore by the name of Moses Mendelssohn. The culture of which he was the banner-bearer was a rather shallow enlightenment, which affected exterior and form rather than mind and heart. It was ”Berlinerdom,” the harbinger of the more complicated Haskala of the following period, which was imported into Warsaw during the decade of Prussian dominion (1796-1806). The contact between the capitals of Poland and Prussia yielded its fruits. The Jewish ”dandy” of Berlin appeared on the streets of Warsaw, and not infrequently the long robe of the Polish Hasid made way timidly for the German coat, the symbol of ”enlightenment.”

Alongside of this external a.s.similation, attempts were also made to copy the literary models of Prussian Jewry. In 1796 a Jewish Mendelssohnian named Jacques Kalmansohn published a French pamphlet in Warsaw, under the t.i.tle _Essai sur l'etat actuel des Juifs de Pologne et leur perfectibilite_, dedicating it to the Prussian Minister Hoym, who had carried out Jewish reforms in the Polish provinces of Prussia. The pamphlet contains an account of the status of Polish Jewry of his time and a plan for its amelioration. The account is rather superficial, concocted after the approved Western recipe. In the judgment of the author, the misfortune of the Jews lies in their separation from the surrounding nations, and their happiness in merging with them. The scheme of reform proposed by the Jew Kalmansohn differs but slightly from the Polish projects of Butrymovich and Chatzki. It advocates equally the weakening of rabbinical and Kahal authority, the extermination of Hasidism and Tzaddikism, the introduction of German dress, the shaving of beards, the establishment of German schools, and in general the cultivation of ”civism.”

The mould of Berlin fas.h.i.+on was overlaid with a Parisian veneer when soon afterwards (1807-1812), at the bidding of Napoleon, the Duchy of Warsaw sprang into being. Now a new note was sounded. A group of Parisian ”dandies” claim equal rights as a compensation for having changed their dress and their ”moral conduct.”[263] Even respectable representatives of the Warsaw Jewish community designate themselves in their pet.i.tion to the Senate as ”members of the Polish nation of the Mosaic persuasion,” copying the latest Parisian fas.h.i.+on, in vogue at the time of the Napoleonic Synhedrion.[264] This was the first, though as yet nave and unsophisticated, attempt to secure the ”transfer” from the Jewish nation to the Polish, the germ of the future ”Poles of the Old Testament persuasion.”

The torch-bearers of Berlin culture from among the followers of David Friedlander encouraged this frame of mind in every possible manner, and in their organ[265] constantly appealed in this spirit to their Polish brethren.

How long will you continue--one of these appeals reads--to speak a corrupt German dialect [Yiddish] instead of the language of your country, the Polish? How many misfortunes might have been averted by your forefathers, had they been able to express themselves adequately in the Polish tongue before the magnates and kings! Take a group of a hundred Jews in Germany, and you will find that either all or most of them can speak to the magnates and rulers, but in Poland scarcely five or ten out of a hundred are capable of doing so.

Some stray seeds of Western ”enlightenment” were carried as far as the distant Russian North. During Dyerzhavin's tour of inspection through White Russia there flitted across his vision the figure of the physician Frank in Kreslavka, an avowed follower of Mendelssohn, calling for religious and educational reforms.[266] In St. Petersburg, in the house of the Maecenas Abraham Peretz, lived his teacher Judah Leib Nyevakhovich, a native of Podolia. In 1803, the same year in which the Jewish deputies sojourned in St. Petersburg, Nyevakhovich published a pamphlet in Russian, under the t.i.tle, ”The Wailing of the Daughter of Judah,” with a dedication to Kochubay, the Minister of the Interior and Chairman of the ”Jewish Committee.” The dedication strikes the keynote of the ”Wailing”: genuflexion before the greatness of Russia and mortification at the fate of his coreligionists, who are deprived of their share in the ”blessings” of the country.

”How greatly,” exclaims the author, ”doth my soul exult over these matters [the victories and might of the Russian Empire]; how deeply doth it grieve over my coreligionists, who are removed from the hearts of their compatriots.” And throughout the whole of the pamphlet the ”Daughter of Judah” bewails the fact that neither the eighteenth century, ”the age of humanity, toleration, and meekness,” nor ”the smiling spring of the present century, the beginning of which hath been crowned ... by the accession of Alexander the Merciful, has removed the deep-seated Jewish hatred in Russia.” ”Many minds doom the tribe of Judah to contempt. The name 'Judean' hath become an object of ridicule, contempt, and scorn for children and the feeble-minded.” With particular reference to Mendelssohn and Lessing the author exclaims: ”You search for the Jew in man. Search for man in the Jew, and you will no doubt find him.”

Nyevakhovich's pamphlet concludes with a grievous moan:

While the hearts of all the European nations have drawn nearer to one another, the Jewish people still finds itself despised. I feel the full weight of this torment. I appeal to all who have sympathy and compa.s.sion. Why do you sentence my entire people to contempt? Thus waileth sadly the daughter of Judah, wiping her tears, sighing and yet uncomforted.

The author himself, by the way, subsequently managed to obtain comfort.

A few years after the publication of the ”Wailing,” still finding himself ”removed from the hearts of his compatriots,” he discovered the magic key to these obstreperous hearts. He embraced Christianity, and, transformed into Lev Alexandrovich Nyevakhovich, began to write moralizing Russian plays, which pleased the unsophisticated taste of the Russian public of the day. Nyevakhovich thus carried his ”Berlinerdom”

to that dramatic _denouement_ which was in fas.h.i.+on in Berlin itself, where an epidemic of baptism was raging. His example was followed by his patron Abraham Peretz, who had been ruined in the War of 1812 by military contracts. The descendants of both converts occupied important posts in the Russian civil service. One of the Peretz family was a member of the Council of State during the reign of Alexander II.

A faint reflection of the Western literature of enlightenment is visible during this period on the somber horizon of Russia. Mendel Lewin, of Satanov[267] (1741-1819), who had been privileged to behold in the flesh the Father of Enlightenment in Berlin, scattered new seeds in his native country. He translated into Hebrew the popular manual of medicine by Tissot, the moral philosophy of Franklin, and the books of travel by Campe. He also made an attempt to render the Book of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes into the vernacular Yiddish.

The last undertaking drew upon Lewin the wrath of another ”enlightened”

writer, Tobias Feder of Piotrkov and Berdychev (died 1817), who attacked him savagely for ”profaning” Holy Writ by turning it into the ”language of the street.” Feder himself published studies in Hebrew grammar and Biblical exegesis, moralizing treatises, harmless satires, and poetical odes. These publications cannot be said to mark an epoch in the realm of literature, but they undoubtedly symbolize a new departure in cultural life. The secular book, of which the mere appearance was apt to arouse a murmur of discontent among the alarmed Orthodox, takes its place side by side with the religious literature of Rabbinism and Hasidism. These literary attempts were the harbingers of the subsequent secularization of Hebrew literature.

FOOTNOTES:

[255] See pp. 337, 339, 349.

[256] One of these Tzaddiks, Rabbi Solomon (Shelomo) of Karlin, lost his life, according to Hasidic tradition, during the riots of the Russo-Polish confederate troops in the district of Minsk.

[257] [The t.i.tle of the work is _Likkute Amarim_, ”Collected Discourses.” It is called _Tanyo_ from the first word.]

[258] Among the incriminated ideas was that of the presence of the Deity in all existing things and in all, even sinful, thoughts, and the concomitant mystical theory of ”raising the sparks to the source,” _i.

e._ extracting good from evil, righteousness from sinfulness, and pure pa.s.sion from impure impulses.

[259] See pp. 339, 349.

[260] [In the Government of Vilna.]

[261] [”The Holiness of Levi.”]

[262] _Likkute Maharan_, ”Collected Sayings of MaHaRaN” [abbreviation of _M_orenu _H_a-_R_ab _R_abbi _N_ahman], and others.

[263] [See p. 300.]

[264] See p. 301.

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