Note (return) — Chapter V

Thus was the deep-rooted yearning for enlightenment finally let loose, and the gyves of tradition were at last removed. The Maskilim of the "forties" and "fifties" were antiquated in the "sixties" and "seventies." They began to see that the fears of the orthodox and their denunciations of Haskalah were not altogether unfounded. A young generation had grown up who had never experienced the strife and struggles of the fathers, and who lacked the submissive temper that had characterized their ancestors. Faster and farther they rushed on their headlong way to destruction, while the parents sat and wept. When, in 1872, in Vilna, the police arrested forty Jewish young men suspected of nihilistic tendencies, Governor-General Patapov "invited" the representatives of the community to a conference. As soon as they arrived, Patapov turned on them in this wise, "In addition to all other good qualities which you Jews possess, about the only thing you need is to become nihilists, too!" Amazed and panic-stricken, the trembling Jews denied the allegation and protested their innocence, to which the Governor-General replied, "Your children are, at any rate; they have become so through the bad education you have given them." "Pardon me, General," was the answer of "Yankele Kovner" (Jacob Barit), who was one of the representatives, "This is not quite right. As long as we educated our children there were no nihilists among us; but as soon as you took the education of our children into your hands, behold the result." The foundations of religion were undermined. Parental authority was disregarded. Youths and maidens were lured by the enchanting voice of the siren of assimilation. The naïve words which Turgenief put into the mouth of Samuel Abraham, the Lithuanian Jew, might have been, indeed, were, spoken by many others in actual life. "Our children," he complains, "have no longer our beliefs; they do not say our prayers, nor have they your beliefs; no more do they say your prayers; they do not pray at all, and they believe in nothing."27 The struggle between Hasidim and Mitnaggedim ended with the conversionist policy of Nicholas I, which united them against the Maskilim. The struggle between these anti-Maskilim and the Maskilim had ceased in the golden days of Alexander II. But the clouds were gathering and overspreading the camp of Haskalah. The days in which the seekers after light united in one common aim were gone. Russification, assimilation, universalism, and nihilism rent asunder the ties that held them together. Judah Löb Gordon, the same poet who, fifteen years before, had rejoiced with exceeding joy "when Haskalah broke forth like water," now laments over the effect thereof in the following strain: