While in Western Europe the old forms of Jewish life were breaking up, the cultural development of the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe remained stationary. The two dominating forces in their spiritual life, Rabbinism and Hasidism, watched with equal zeal over the maintenance of the old order of things. The traditional form of education remained unchanged. The old school, the heder and yeshibah, with its exclusive Talmudic training, supplied its pupils with a vast amount of mental energy, but failed to prepare them for practical life, and the girls and women remained entirely outside the influence of the school. Just as firmly established was the old-fashioned scheme of family life, with its early marriages, between the years of thirteen and sixteen, with the prolonged maintenance of such married children in the paternal home, with its excessive fertility in the midst of habitual poverty, with its reduction of physical wants to the point of exhaustion and degeneration. This patriarchal mass of Jews fought shy of all cultural "novelties," and deprecated the slightest attempt to extend its mental and social horizon. Religious culture had not yet had a chance to cross swords with secular culture. The war between Hasidism and Rabbinism was fought on purely religious soil. Its sole issue was the _type_ of the believer: the old discipline with its emphasis upon the scholastic and ceremonial aspect of Judaism was fighting against the onrush of ecstatic mysticism and the blind "cult of saints." It cannot be said that benumbed Rabbinism revived under the effect of this vehement contest. At the time we are speaking of no distinct traces of such a revival are to be seen, and all one can discern are the signs of a purely scholastic renaissance. The method of textual analysis introduced by Elijah Gaon into Talmudic research, which took the place of the hair-splitting casuistry formerly in vogue, gained ever wider currency and an ever firmer foothold in the yeshibahs of Lithuania.