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.