History of the Jews in Russia and Poland (Vol. 1-3). Dubnow Simon
supreme in the North, and finally declared a war of extermination against its rival.
During the period under discussion, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, the leader of the Lithuanian rabbis was Elijah of Vilna (1720–1797), who received the ancient, high-sounding title of Gaon.204 He was the incarnation of that power of intellect which was the product of subtle Talmudic reasoning. Early in his childhood Elijah displayed phenomenal ability. At the age of six he managed to read the Talmudic text without the aid of a teacher. At the age of ten he participated in difficult Talmudic discussions, amazing old rabbis by his erudition. His mind rapidly absorbed everything that came within its range. Elijah was familiar with the Cabala, and incidentally picked up enough of mathematics, astronomy, and physics, to be able to follow certain discussions in the Talmud. He lived in Vilna as a recluse, leading the life of an ascete and burying himself entirely in his books. He took little nourishment, slept two hours a day, rarely conversed about secular affairs, his contact with the outside world being practically limited to the Talmudic lectures which he delivered before his pupils.
Elijah avoided the method of pilpul, which was meant to exercise the mind by inventing artificial contradictions in the Talmudic text and subsequently removing them. Knowing by heart almost the entire Talmudic and rabbinic literature, he had no difficulty in solving the most complicated questions of Jewish law, and, guided by subtle critical observations, occasionally allowed himself to emend the text of the Talmud. Elijah Gaon wrote commentaries and all sorts of "annotations" to Biblical, Talmudic, and Cabalistic books, but his style was, as a rule, careless, consisting of hints, references, and abbreviations, intelligible only to the learned reader. In his spare moments he occasionally wrote about Hebrew grammar and mathematical sciences. Rabbinical learning was his native element, embodying for him the whole meaning of religion. In questions of religious ceremonialism he was a rigorist, adding here and there new restrictions to the multifarious injunctions of the Shulhan Arukh. He was the idol of all the learned rabbis of Lithuania and other countries, but the masses understood him as little as he understood them. A spiritual aristocrat, he was bound to condemn severely the "plebeian" doctrine of Hasidism. The latter offended in him equally the learned Talmudist, the rigorous ascete, and the strict guardian of ceremonial Judaism, of which certain minutiae had been modified by the Hasidim after their own fashion.
As far back as 1772, when the first Hasidic societies were secretly organized in Lithuania, and several of their leaders were discovered in Vilna, the rabbinical Kahal court of that city pronounced, with the permission of Elijah Gaon, the herem against the sectarians. From Vilna circulars were sent out to the rabbis of other communities, calling upon them to wage war against the "godless sect." In many towns of Lithuania the Hasidim became the object of persecution. The rabbis of Galicia, having been forewarned from Vilna, followed suit, and at a meeting held in Brody, during the local fair, issued a most rigorous herem against every Jew following the Hasidic liturgy, dressing in white on Saturdays and holidays,205 and in general participating in the conventicles of the Hasidim.
We have already had occasion206 to refer to the work of the Hasidic apostle Jacob Joseph Cohen (Toldoth Ya`kob Yoseph), which for the first time reproduced the sayings of Besht, and, by way of comment, indulged in attacks upon the scholastic "pseudo-wisdom" of the rabbis. Cohen's work, which appeared in 1780, once more stirred the rabbinical world. From Vilna the signal was given for a new campaign against the Hasidim. The rabbis of Lithuania, assembling in 1781 at the fair of Zelva, in the Government of Grodno, issued appeals to all Jewish communities, demanding the severest possible penalties for "the dishonorable followers of Besht, the destroyer of Israel." All orthodox Jews were called upon to ostracize the Hasidim socially, to regard them as infidels, to shun all contact and avoid intermarriage with them, and to refrain from burying their dead. The opponents of the Hasidim called themselves Mithnagdim, "Protestants," and persecuted them everywhere as dangerous schismatics.
The formation of important Hasidic societies in White Russia, under the leadership of Zalman Shneorsohn, increased the agitation of the Mithnagdim. At the rabbinical conferences held in Moghilev and Shklov severe measures were adopted against the Hasidim, and their leader was proclaimed a heretic. In vain did Zalman defend himself, and, in his epistles to the rabbis, demonstrate his Orthodoxy. In vain did he travel to Vilna to obtain a personal interview with Elijah Gaon and remove the stain of heresy from himself and his followers. The stern Gaon refused even to see the exponent of heterodoxy. At the very end of the eighteenth century the strife of parties in Russian Jewry became more and more accentuated, and finally led, as we shall see later,207 to the interference of the Russian Government.
While warring with one another, Rabbinism and Hasidism found a point of contact in their common hatred of the new Enlightenment, which proceeded from the Mendelssohn circle in Berlin. If Rabbinism opposed secular knowledge actively, looking upon it as a competitor who contested its own spiritual monopoly, Hasidism opposed it passively, with its whole being, prompted by an irresistible leaning towards mental drowsiness and "pious fraud." Hasidism and its inseparable companion Tzaddikism, the products of a mystical outlook on life, were powerless against cold logical reasoning. It stands to reason that the Tzaddiks were even more hostile towards secular learning than the rabbis. True, Rabbinism had immersed the Jewish mind in the stagnant waters of scholasticism, but Hasidism, in its further development, endeavored altogether to lull rational thinking to sleep, and to cultivate, to an excessive degree, the religious imagination at its expense. The new cultural movement which had arisen among the Jews of Germany had no chance of penetrating into this dark realm, which was guarded on the one hand by scholasticism and on the other by mysticism. The few isolated individuals in Polish Jewry who manifested a leaning towards secular culture were forced to go abroad, primarily to Berlin.
One of these rare fugitives from the realm of darkness was Solomon Maimon (1754–1800). He was born the son of a village arendar in Lithuania, near Nesvizh, in the Government of Minsk, where he received a Talmudic education, and where, having scarcely reached the age of twelve, he was married off by his old-fashioned parents. However, unlike thousands of other Jewish lads, he managed to escape spiritual death in the mire of everyday life. Endowed with a searching mind, Solomon Maimon was driven constantly onward in his mental development. From the Talmud he passed to the Cabala, in which at one time he was completely absorbed. From the Cabala he made a sudden leap to the religious philosophy of Maimonides and other medieval Jewish rationalists. His youthful intellect was eager for new impressions, and these his immediate surroundings failed to give him. In 1777 Maimon left home and family, and went to Germany to acquire secular culture. He found himself first in Königsberg, and then proceeded to Berlin, Posen, Hamburg, and Breslau, enduring all kinds of suffering, and tasting to the full the bitterness of a wanderer's life in a strange land. In Berlin he came in contact with Mendelssohn and his circle, rapidly acquired a knowledge of German literature and science, and made a deep study of philosophy, particularly of the system of Kant.
The sudden transition from rabbinic scholasticism to the "Critical Philosophy" of Germany, and from the primitive existence of a Lithuanian Jew to the free life of an educated European, destroyed Maimon's mental equilibrium. He fell a prey to skepticism and unbelief, denying the foundations of all religion and morality, and led a disorderly life, which made his best friends turn from him. In his philosophic criticism, Maimon went much further than Kant. In 1790 he published in German "A Tentative Investigation of Transcendental Philosophy," and this book was followed by a number of writings dealing with metaphysics and logic. Kant, on reading his first book, made the remark: "No one among my opponents has grasped the essence of my system as profoundly as Maimon, nor are there altogether many men endowed with so refined and penetrating a mind in questions so abstract and complex." In 1792 Solomon Maimon published his "Autobiography" (Lebensgeschichte), a remarkable book, in which he vividly describes the conditions of life and the ideas prevalent among Polish Lithuanian Jews as well as his own sad Odyssey. The Autobiography made a profound impression upon educated Christians, among others on Goethe and Schiller. The last years of his life Maimon spent in Silesia, on the estate of