Note (return) — Chapter IV

The "forties" began auspiciously for Haskalah in Russia. On January 15, 1840, the Riga community, amid pomp and rejoicing, opened the first Jewish school affiliated with a university. The teaching staff consisted of three Jews and one Christian, with Doctor Max Lilienthal (1815-1882), the young, highly recommended, and recently chosen local rabbi, as its principal. In the same year, the indefatigable Basilius Stern succeeded in forming a committee, of which Hayyim Efrusi and Moses Lichtenstadt were members, to deliberate on founding rabbinical seminaries in Russia. In 1841, forty-five delegates, representing the six chief committees of the Lovers of Enlightenment, assembled in Vilna, and thence issued an appeal in which they adopted as their platform the elevation of the moral standards of adults by urging them to follow useful trades and discouraging the Jewish proclivity to business as much as possible; a reform of the prevailing system of the education of the young; the combating, if possible the eradication, of Hasidism, the fountainhead, as they thought, of ignorance and superstition; the establishment of rabbinical seminaries, after the model of those in Padua and Amsterdam, to supply congregations with educated rabbis. It was further agreed that a Consistory be created, to supervise Jewish affairs and establish schools and technical institutes wherever necessary. To these main points were added several others of minor importance. The Maskilim of Besascz insisted that steps be taken to stop the prevailing custom of premature marriages. Those of Brest proposed that Government aid be invoked to compel Jews to dress in the German style, to use authorized text-books in the hadarim, and interdict the study of the Talmud except by those preparing themselves for the rabbinate.4