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Page 42
But more efficacious than all other agencies was Mendelssohn's German
translation of the Bible, and the _Biur_ commentary published therewith.
Renaissance and Reformation, those mighty, revolutionary forces, have
entered every country by side-doors, so to say. The Jewish Pale was no
exception to the rule. What Wycliffe's translation did for England, and
Luther's for Germany, Mendelssohn's did for Russian Jewry. Like the
Septuagint, it marked a new epoch in the history of Jewish advancement.
It is said that Mendelssohn's aim was chiefly to show the grandeur of
the Hebrew poetry found in the Bible, but by the irony of fate his
translation displayed to the Russian Jew the beauty and elegance of the
German language. To the member of the Lovers of the New Haskalah,
surreptitiously studying the Bible of the "Dessauer," the Hebrew was
rather a translation of, or commentary on, the German, and served him as
a bridge to cross over into the otherwise hardly accessible field of
German literature.
The cities on the borders of Russia were the first strongholds of
Haskalah, and among them, as noted before, few struggled so intensely
for their intellectual and civil emancipation as those in the provinces
of Courland and Livonia. Though their lot was not better than that of
their coreligionists, yet, having formerly belonged to Germany, and
being surrounded by a people whose culture was superior to that of the
rest of Russia, they were the first to adopt western customs, and were
surpassed only by the Jews in Germany in their desire for reform. Their
strenuous pleadings for equal rights were, indeed, ineffectual, but this
did not lessen their admiration for the beauties of civilization, nor
blind them to its benefits. "Long ago," remarks Lilienthal, "before the
peculiar Jewish dress was prohibited, a great many could be seen here
[in Courland] dressed after the German fashion, speaking pure German,
and having their whole household arranged after the German custom. The
works of Mendelssohn were not _trefah pasul_ [unclean and unfit], the
children visited the public schools, the academies, and the
universities."[27]
The beautiful city of Odessa, on the Black Sea, at that time just out of
its infancy and full of the virility and aspiration of youth, was also
in the full glare of the German Haskalah movement. With its wide and
straight streets, its public and private parks, and its magnificent
structures, it presents even to-day a marked contrast to other Russian
cities, and the Russians, not without pride, speak of it as "our little
Paris." In the upbuilding of this southern metropolis Jews played an
exceedingly important part. For, as regards the promotion of trade and
commerce, Russia had outgrown the narrow policy of Elizabeta Petrovna,
and did not begrudge her Jews the privilege of taking the lead. The
"enemies of Christ" were permitted, even invited, to accomplish their
"mission" also in Odessa, and thither they accordingly came, not only
from Volhynia, Podolia, and Lithuania, but also from Germany, Austria,
and especially Galicia. Erter, Letteris, Krochmal, Perl, Rapoport,
Eichenbaum, Pinsker, and Werbel became better known in Russia than in
their own land. As the Russo-Polish Jews had carried their Talmudic
learning back to the countries whence they originally received it, so
the Galician Jews, mostly hailing from the city of Brody, where Israel
Zamoscz, Mendel Levin, Joseph Hakohen, and others had implanted the
germs of Haskalah, now reimported it into Russia. The Jews of Odessa
were, therefore, more cultured than other Russian Jews, not excepting
those of Riga. Prosperous in business, they lavished money on their
schools, and their educational system surpassed all others in the
empire. In 1826 they had the best public school for boys, in 1835 a
similar one for girls, and in 1852 there existed fifty-nine public
schools, eleven boarding schools, and four day schools. The children
attended the Richelieu Lyceum and the "gymnasia" in larger proportion
than children of other denominations, and they were among the first, not
only in Russia, but in the whole Diaspora, to establish a
"choir-synagogue" (1840). "In most of the families," says Lilienthal,
"can be found a degree of refinement which may easily bear comparison
with the best French salon." Even Nicholas I found words of praise for
the Odessa Jews. "Yes," said he, "in Odessa I have also seen Jews, but
they were men"; while the zaddik "Rabbi Yisrolze" declared that he saw
"the flames of Gehennah round Odessa."[28]
Warsaw, too, was a beneficiary of Germany, having been occupied by the
Prussians before it fell to the lot of the Russians. It was there that
practically the first Jewish weekly journals were published in Yiddish
and Polish, Der Beobachter an der Weichsel, and Dostrzegacz Nadvisyansky
(1823). There was opened the first so-called rabbinical seminary, with
Anton Eisenbaum as principal, and Cylkov, Buchner, and Kramsztyk as
teachers. The public schools were largely attended, owing to the efforts
of Mattathias Rosen, and a year after a reformed synagogue had been
organized in Odessa another was founded in Warsaw, where sermons were
preached in German by Abraham Me�r Goldschmidt.
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