Note (return) — Chapter II

Such was the man who led the crusade against the converts to Hasidism. But even he could not stem the current. In their despair, the Lithuanian Jews turned to their coreligionists in Germany, and implored their assistance in eradicating, or at least suppressing, the threatened invasion. The great learning and literary ability of the "divine philosopher, Rabbi Moses ben Menahem" (Mendelssohn, 1729-1786), were appealed to for help. Not a stone was left unturned to crush the new sect (kat), so called. Volumes of the Toledot Ya'akob Yosef, in which Rabbi Jacob Joseph of Polonnoy set forth the principles of the Besht, were burnt in the market-place in Vilna. Intermarriage, social intercourse of any kind, was prohibited between Hasidim and Mitnaggedim. In Vilna, Grodno, Brest, Slutsk, Minsk, Pinsk, etc., the ban was hurled against the dissenters by the most prominent rabbis. Israel was divided into two hostile camps.20 But soon everything was changed. Hasidim and Mitnaggedim discovered that while they were fighting each other, a common enemy was undermining the ground on which they stood. The Haskalah was steadily drawing recruits from both, and it threatened ultimately to become more dangerous to both than they were to each other.