Note (return) — Chapter III

But the latest experiences in their own country put Haskalah in a very different light from that in which they were wont to regard it. Formerly the opposition to it had been limited to the very land that gave it birth. Because of their determination to study, Solomon Maimon was denied admission to Berlin, Manasseh of Ilye was stopped in Königsberg, and Abba Glusk Leczeka, better known as "the Glusker Maggid," the subject of a poem by Chamisso, was persecuted everywhere. It was Rabbi Levin, of Berlin, who prohibited the publication of Wessely's works, and insisted that the author be expelled from the city.33 It was Rabbi Ezekiel Landau of Prague who, though approving of Wessely's Yen Lebanon, opposed the translation of the Pentateuch by Mendelssohn, while Rabbi Horowitz of Hamburg denounced it in unmeasured terms, admonishing his hearers to shun the work as unclean, and approving the action of those persons who had publicly burnt it in Vilna (1782). Moses Sofer of Pressburg adopted as his motto, "Touch not the works of the Dessauer" (Mendelssohn),34 and seldom allowed an opportunity to pass without denouncing the Maskilim of his country. Now the clarion note of anti-Haskalah, sounded by these luminaries in Israel, found an echo among the Jews in Russia. They had discovered, to their great sorrow, that like Elisha ben Abuya, the apostate in the Talmud, "those who once entered the paradise [of enlightenment] returned no more." The very name of the seat of Haskalah was an abomination to the pious. To be called "Berlinchick" or "Deitschel" was tantamount to being called infidel and epicurean, anarchist and outlaw. The old instinct of self-preservation, which turned Jews from lambs into lions, holding their ground to the last, asserted itself again. As the Talmudic rabbis excluded certain books from the Canon, as the study of even the Jewish philosophers was later proscribed by certain French rabbis, so the Russian rabbis laid the ban upon whatever savored of German "Aufklärerei."