History of the Jews in Russia and Poland Volume I Part 25

In calling to arms against the Hasidim in these fulminant terms, the venerable knight of Rabbinism was moved by the profound conviction that the "new sect," which by that time numbered its adherents by the hundreds of thousands, was leading the Jewish religion and nation to ruin, because it was rending asunder the Jewish camp internally while the political upheavals were severing it externally. He was moreover alarmed by the luxuriant growth of the cult of the Tzaddiks, or miracle-workers, which const.i.tuted a menace to the purity of the Jewish doctrine.

The Gaon's ire was particularly aroused by a work published in the same year as his epistle (1796), by Rabbi Shneor Zalman, the head of the White Russian Hasidim. The work was familiarly called _Tanyo_,[257] and contained a bold exposition of the pantheistic doctrine of Hasidism, which the champions of the established dogma were p.r.o.ne to regard as blasphemy and heresy.[258] The Gaon's proclamation hinted at this work, and its author felt painfully hurt by the attack. Shneor Zalman responded in a counter-epistle, in which he tried to prove that the patriarch of Rabbinism had been misinformed about the true essence of Hasidism, and he invited his opponent to a literary dispute for the purpose of elucidating the truth and "restoring peace in Israel." But the Gaon refused to enter into polemics with a "heretic." In the meantime the Vilna epistle continued to circulate in many communities, and gave rise to severe conflicts between Mithnagdim and Hasidim, the former as a rule taking the offensive.

Exasperated to the point of madness by these persecutions, the Hasidic a.s.sociation of Vilna was stung into perpetrating an act of gross tactlessness. When, in the fall of 1797, about a year after the publication of his last circular, the aged Gaon closed his eyes, and the whole community of Vilna was plunged into mourning, the local Hasidic society met in a private house and indulged in a gay drinking bout, to celebrate the deliverance of the sect from its princ.i.p.al enemy. This ugly demonstration arranged on the day of the funeral raised a storm of indignation throughout the community. Before leaving the cemetery, the leaders of the community, standing at the Gaon's grave, pledged themselves solemnly to wreak vengeance upon the Hasidim. On the following day the Kahal elders were called to a special meeting, at which a series of repressive measures against the Hasidim was adopted.

Apart from the measures to be made public, such as a new bull of excommunication against the sectarians, the meeting pa.s.sed several resolutions which were to remain confidential. A special committee of five Kahal members was appointed, and was vested with large powers, for the purpose of grappling with the "heresy." Subsequent events proved that among the contemplated means of warfare was included the plan of informing against the leaders of the sect to the Russian Government.

It did not take long for the disgraceful scheme to be put into action.

Soon the Prosecutor-General in St. Petersburg, Lopukhin, received a denunciation directing his attention "to the political misdeeds perpetrated by the chief of the Karliner [Hasidic] sect, Zalman Borukhovich [son of Borukh]," and his fellow-workers in Lithuania. Under the influence of this denunciation, Lopukhin, acting in the name of the Tzar, ordered the local gubernatorial administration, early in the fall of 1798, to arrest Zalman, the head of the sect, in the townlet of Lozno, together with twenty-two of his accomplices who were found in Lithuania. Zalman was apprehended and dispatched post-haste to St.

Petersburg, accompanied by "a strong convoy"; his incriminated followers remained under arrest in Vilna.

Zalman was arraigned before the so-called "Secret Expedition," a department which dealt with crimes of a political nature. A long bill of indictments was read out to him. He was accused of being the founder of a harmful religious sect, which had changed the order of divine service among Jews, of spreading pernicious ideas, and collecting funds for mysterious purposes in Palestine. The cross-examination clearly implied the charge of _political_ disloyalty. To all questions laid before him, the accused gave an elaborate written reply in Hebrew. Zalman's defense, which was translated from the Hebrew into Russian, produced a favorable impression in Government circles. Acting upon the report submitted to him by the Prosecutor-General respecting "all the circ.u.mstances revealed by the investigation," Tzar Paul I. issued an order to liberate Zalman and the other sectarian chiefs who had been placed under arrest, but to keep "a strict watch over them as to whether there exists, or is liable to come into existence, a secret relationship or correspondence between them and those who entertain perverted notions concerning the authorities and the form of Government." Towards the end of 1798 Zalman was allowed to return home, and the other prisoners were likewise set at liberty.

Now it was the turn of the Hasidim to retaliate on their persecutors. In view of the fact that the persecutions against them had been instigated by the Kahal elders of Vilna, who had composed the "Committee of Five,"

the Hasidim made up their mind to depose these elders and put their own partisans in their places. With the help of bakhshish the Vilna Hasidim managed to secure the good-will of the gubernatorial administration. In the beginning of 1799 they lodged a complaint with the local authorities against the Kahal elders, charging them with having perpetrated all kinds of abuses, including the embezzlement of public funds. This action resulted in the removal and imprisonment of several elders. Under official pressure their places were filled by new elders, who either were themselves Hasidim or had been recommended by them. The community of Vilna was rent in twain. One section remained true to the dismissed elders, the other stood up for the newly-elected. The warring factions were busy sending complaints and denunciations directed against each other to the Government in St. Petersburg. The canker of "informing,"

which, perhaps not accidentally, had developed in the first years of Russian rule in Lithuania, brought to the front one hideous personality, a rabbi-informer by the name of Avigdor Hamovich (son of Hayyim), of Pinsk.

Avigdor, formerly rabbi of Pinsk and the surrounding district, had been dismissed from office owing to the intrigues of the Hasidic members of the community, who were his opponents. What Avigdor lamented most was the loss of revenue. For a long time the dethroned shepherd had been dragging his flock through the magistracies and law courts. Having failed in his efforts, he decided to wreak vengeance upon the leader of the sect responsible for his ruin. In the beginning of 1800 Avigdor addressed an elaborate pet.i.tion to Tzar Paul I., in which he described the Hasidic sect as "a pernicious and dangerous organization," which was continuing the work of the former Messianic Sabbatians. By a vast array of distorted quotations from Hasidic literature the informer endeavored to prove that the teachers of the sect enjoined upon their followers to fear only G.o.d and not men, in other words, to disregard the authorities, including the Tzar.

The denunciation was allowed to take its course. Early in November of the same year, the Tzaddik Zalman Borukhovich was rearrested in Lozno and dispatched to St. Petersburg under the convoy of two Senatorial couriers. On his arrival in the capital the Tzaddik was incarcerated in the fortress, and after a cross-examination confronted with his accuser Avigdor. Zalman again replied in writing to the indictments against him, which now mounted up to nineteen counts. He repudiated emphatically the charge of not recognizing the authority of the Government, of immorality, of collecting money, and arranging meetings for secret purposes. Towards the end of November Zalman was set at liberty, but was ordered to remain in St. Petersburg pending the examination of his case by the Senate, to which it had now been transferred from the Secret Expedition. While the Senate was preparing to take up the case, the palace revolution of March, 1801, cut short Paul's reign, and placed Alexander I. upon the throne. The political wind veered round, and on March 29, 1801, the new Tzar gave Zalman permission to depart from St.

Petersburg.

Having satisfied itself that the religious schism in Judaism was perfectly harmless from the political point of view, the Government was ready to give it its sanction. One of the clauses of the Statute of 1804 permits the sectarians to establish their own synagogues in every community and to elect their own rabbis, with the sole stipulation that the Kahal administration in each city shall remain one and the same for all sections of the community. As a matter of fact, the law merely recognized what had already become the living practice. The religious split had long been an accomplished fact, and the internecine strife of 1796-1801 was merely its final act. As for the communal organization of the Jews, which had already been undermined by the political changes, the schism proved nothing short of disastrous. The Kahals, weakened by inner struggles and demoralized by denunciations and bureaucratic interference, failed to present a united front in the first years of Alexander's reign, when the Government was carrying out its "plan of reform," and invited the Kahal leaders to share in its labors. The communities of the Southwest, which were completely under the ban of Hasidic mysticism, reacted feebly to the social and economic crisis facing them. The Jewish delegates who presented their views in reply to the official inquiries of 1803 and 1807[259] were recruited princ.i.p.ally from the White Russian and Lithuanian Governments, where the political sense of the Jews had not yet been completely dulled.

3. RABBINISM, HASIDISM, AND ENLIGHTENED "BERLINERDOM"

While in Western Europe the old forms of Jewish life were breaking up, the cultural development of the Jewish ma.s.ses of Eastern Europe remained stationary. The two dominating forces in their spiritual life, Rabbinism and Hasidism, watched with equal zeal over the maintenance of the old order of things. The traditional form of education remained unchanged.

The old school, the heder and yeshibah, with its exclusive Talmudic training, supplied its pupils with a vast amount of mental energy, but failed to prepare them for practical life, and the girls and women remained entirely outside the influence of the school. Just as firmly established was the old-fashioned scheme of family life, with its early marriages, between the years of thirteen and sixteen, with the prolonged maintenance of such married children in the paternal home, with its excessive fertility in the midst of habitual poverty, with its reduction of physical wants to the point of exhaustion and degeneration. This patriarchal ma.s.s of Jews fought shy of all cultural "novelties," and deprecated the slightest attempt to extend its mental and social horizon. Religious culture had not yet had a chance to cross swords with secular culture. The war between Hasidism and Rabbinism was fought on purely religious soil. Its sole issue was the _type_ of the believer: the old discipline with its emphasis upon the scholastic and ceremonial aspect of Judaism was fighting against the onrush of ecstatic mysticism and the blind "cult of saints."

It cannot be said that benumbed Rabbinism revived under the effect of this vehement contest. At the time we are speaking of no distinct traces of such a revival are to be seen, and all one can discern are the signs of a purely scholastic renaissance. The method of textual a.n.a.lysis introduced by Elijah Gaon into Talmudic research, which took the place of the hair-splitting casuistry formerly in vogue, gained ever wider currency and an ever firmer foothold in the yeshibahs of Lithuania.

In the new center of Talmudic learning, the yeshibah of the Lithuanian townlet of Volozhin,[260] established in 1803, this novel method received particular attention at the hands of its founder, Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner, a pupil of the Gaon. The yeshibah of Volozhin raised a whole generation of scholars and rabbis "in the spirit of the Gaon." In these circles one could even detect a certain amount of toleration towards the anathematized "secular sciences," though this toleration was limited to the realm of mathematics and partly that of natural history. The Gaon, who had himself engaged in mathematical exercises in his spare moments, permitted his pupil Borukh Shklover to publish a Hebrew translation of Euclid's Geometry (1780). Yet the dread of philosophy was as great as theretofore, and the incompatibility of free research with Judaism was looked upon as an inviolable dogma. The Jewish mind continued to move within the narrow range of "the four ells of the Halakha," and was doomed to sterility. In the course of that whole stormy period, extending over a quarter of a century, Rabbinism, aside from the Gaon, had not put forward a single literary figure of any magnitude, not a single writer of large vision. It seemed as if the spirit of originality had fled from it.

Greater productivity was to be found among the Hasidim of the period, although in point of originality it yielded considerably to the preceding era of the Besht and his first apostles. Alongside of triumphant practical Tzaddikism, trading in miracles and thriving on the credulity of the ma.s.ses, we observe to a certain degree the continued development of the Hasidic doctrine on the lines laid down by Besht. In the North a new Hasidic theory was spreading, which strove to adapt the emotional pietism of Besht to the "intellectualism" of the Lithuanian schoolmen. The originator of this doctrine, Rabbi Shneor Zalman, the hero of the religious struggle depicted in the foregoing chapters, endeavored to rationalize Hasidism, which had manifested a decided leaning toward the principle _credo quia absurdum sit_. In the hands of the author of _Tanyo_, the ecstasy of feeling is transformed into ecstasy of thinking. Occasionally he speaks of the knowledge of G.o.d in terms worthy of a Maimonides. Needless to say, Rabbi Zalman rejects the Tzaddik cult in the vulgar form of miracle-mongering, which it had a.s.sumed in the South.

In the South--to speak more exactly, in the Ukraina--Hasidism persisted in the beaten track. Its two pillars, Levi Itzhok (Isaac) of Berdychev (died 1809) and Nohum (Nahum) of Chern.o.byl (died 1799), continued to uphold Besht's traditions. The former, the author of _Kedushath Levi_[261] (1798), manifests in his work the genuine fervor of Hasidic faith, without its morbid ecstasy. In his private life this leader of Volhynian Hasidism was the embodiment of lovingkindness, extending alike to Jew and non-Jew. Many popular legends tell of his surpa.s.sing affection for the humble and suffering. The Tzaddik Nohum of Chern.o.byl, who was an itinerant preacher in the Government of Kiev, laid in his sermons special emphasis on the element of the Cabala. Towards the end of his life he was primarily a Tzaddik, of the "pract.i.tioner" and "miracle-worker" type, and founded the "Chern.o.byl Tzaddik dynasty,"

which is still widely ramified in the Ukraina.

Quite apart from the rest stands the figure of the Podolian Tzaddik and dreamer Nahman of Bratzlav (1772-1810), a great-grandson of Besht.

Gifted with a profoundly poetical disposition, he spurned the beaten tracks of the professional "Righteous," and struck out into a path of his own. The goal he aimed at was the return to the childlike simplicity of Besht's teachings. In 1798-1799 Nahman made a pilgrimage to Palestine, just about the time when Bonaparte's army was marching through the Holy Land, and a gust from tempestuous Europe drifted through the slumbering East. But the Podolian youth had an ear only for the whisper from the tombs of the great Cabalist teachers, Rabbi Shimeon ben Yohai and Ari, and for the discourses of the living Tzaddiks who had settled in Tiberias. On his return to Europe, Nahman made his home in Bratzlav, and became the head of a group of Podolian Hasidim. In his intimate circle he was wont to preach, or rather to muse aloud, on the reign of the spirit, on the communion of the Tzaddik with his flock in religious ecstasy. He spoke in epigrams, sometimes clothing his thoughts in the form of folk-tales. He wrote a number of books,[262] in which he constantly emphasized the need of blind, unsophisticated faith.

Philosophy he regarded as destructive to the soul; Maimonides and the rationalists were hateful to him. The unfamiliar Berlin "enlightenment"

filled his heart with mysterious awe. Nahman's life was cut short prematurely. Surrounded by his admirers, he died of consumption, in Uman, at the age of thirty-eight. Down to this day his grave serves as a place of pilgrimage for the "Bratzlav Hasidim."

However, the average Tzaddik of the type which had a.s.sumed definite shape in that period was equally removed from the complexity of Rabbi Zalman and the simplicity of Rabbi Nahman. On the whole, the Tzaddiks drifted further and further away from their mission of religious teachers, and became more and more "pract.i.tioners." Surrounded by a host of enthusiastic worshipers, these "middlemen between G.o.d and mankind"

understood the art of turning the blind faith of the ma.s.ses to good account. They waxed rich on the gifts and offerings of their admirers, lived in palaces, much after the manner of the Polish magnates and Church dignitaries. The "court" of Besht's grandson in Medzhibozh, Borukh Tulchinski (1780-1810), was marked by particular splendor. Borukh even had his court-fool, Herschel Ostropoler, the well-known hero of popular anecdotes.

In the original Polish provinces, afterwards incorporated into the Duchy of Warsaw, the commanders-in-chief of the Hasidic army were two Tzaddiks, Rabbi Israel of Kozhenitz and Rabbi Jacob Itzhok (Isaac) of Lublin. These two pupils of the "apostle" Baer of Mezherich became the pioneers of Hasidism on the banks of the Vistula towards the end of the eighteenth century. At the close of their careers--both died in 1815--the banner of Hasidism floated over the whole of Poland.

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 fashion 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 fashion, 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 fashion 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.