The leaders [rabbis and elders] consume the offerings of the people, and drink wine for the fines imposed by them. Being in full control of the taxes, they assess and excommunicate [their opponents]; they remunerate themselves for their public activity by every means at their disposal, both openly and in secret. They make no step without accepting bribes, while the destitute carry the burden.... The learned cater to the rich, and, as for the rabbis, they have only contempt for one another. The students of the Talmud despise those engaged in mysticism and Cabala, while the common people accept the testimony of both, and conclude that all scholars are a disgrace to their calling.... The rich value the favor of the Polish pans above the good opinion of the best and noblest among the Jews. The rich Jew does not appreciate the honor shown to him by a scholar, but boasts of having been allowed to enter the mansion of a Polish noble and view his treasures. The rabbi complains in particular that the well-to-do classes are obsessed by a love of show; that the women wear strings of pearls around their necks, and array themselves in many-colored fabrics. The education of the young generation in the heders and yeshibahs sank to ever lower depths. Instruction in the elements of secular culture was entirely out of the question. The Jewish school bore a purely rabbinical character. True, Talmudic scholasticism succeeded in sharpening the intellect, but, failing to supply concrete information, it often confused the mind. Hasidism had wrested a huge piece of territory from the dominion of Rabbinism, but, as far as education was concerned, it was powerless to create anything new. The religious and national sentiments of Polish Jewry had undergone a profound transformation at the hands of Hasidism, but the transformation lured the Jews backward, far into the thickets of mystical contemplation and blind faith, both subversive of rational thinking and of any attempt at social reform. In the last two decades of the eighteenth century, when the banner of militant enlightenment was floating over German Jewry, a bitter warfare between the Hasidim and Mithnagdim was raging all along the line in Poland and Lithuania, with the result that the consciousness of the political crisis through which Polish Jewry was then passing was dimmed, and the appeal from the West calling to enlightenment and progress was silenced. The specter of German rationalism, which flitted across the horizon of Polish Jewry, produced horror and consternation in both camps. To be a "Berliner" was synonymous with being an apostate. A Solomon Maimon was forced to flee to Germany in order to gain access to the world of new ideas, which were taboo in Poland. 2. THE PERIOD OF THE QUADRENNIAL DIET (1788-1791)