The Haskalah Movement in RussiaRaisin, Jacob S. (Jacob Salmon)
Religion
The Haskalah Movement in Russia
Raisin, Jacob S. (Jacob Salmon)
Haskalah -- Soviet Union; Jews -- Soviet Union
[Footnote 2: In the diary of a Polish squire we find the following item:
"Jan. 5. As the lessee Herszka had not yet paid me the rental of 91
gulden, I went to his house to get my debt. According to the contract, I
can arrest him and his wife for as long as I wish, until he settles the
bill, and so I ordered him locked up in the pig-sty and left his wife
and his sons in the inn. The youngest son, however, I took with me to
the palace to be instructed in the rudiments of our religion. The boy is
unusually bright and shall be baptized. I already wrote to our priest
concerning it, and he promised to come to prepare him. Leisza at first
stubbornly refused to make the sign of the cross and repeat our prayers,
but Strelicki administered a sound whipping, and to-day he even ate ham.
Our venerable priest Bonapari ... is inventing all manner of means to
break his stiff-neckedness." Meassef, St. Petersburg, 1902, pp.
192-193.]
[Footnote 3: See Wolkonsky, Pictures of Russian History and Literature,
Boston, 1897, p. 136.]
[Footnote 4: Orshansky, in Yevreyskaya Biblyotyeka, ii. 207.]
[Footnote 5: Meassef, St. Petersburg, 1902, p. 195; Beck and Brann,
Yevreyskaya Istoriya, p. 326; JE, iv. 155; xi. 113.]
[Footnote 6: Meassef, p. 200. On Russia at the time of Peter the Great,
see Macaulay, History of England, ch. xxiii., where he describes the
"savage ignorance and the squalid poverty of the barbarous country." In
that country "there was neither literature nor science, neither school
nor college. It was not till more than a hundred years after the
invention of printing that a single printing-press had been introduced
into the Russian empire, and that printing-press speedily perished in a
fire, which was supposed to have been kindled by priests." When Pyoter
Vyeliki (Peter the Great), while in London, saw the archiepiscopal
library, he declared that "he had never imagined that there were so many
printed volumes in the world." See also Carlyle, History of Frederick
the Great, iv. 7.]
[Footnote 7: FKN, pp. 126-132; Voskhod, 1893; on the Hasidim and
Mitnaggedim see below.]
[Footnote 8: Ma'aseh Tobiah, p. 18; Meassef, pp. 206-209; Geiger (Melo
Hofnayim, Berlin, 1840, pp. 1-29) published Delmedigo's corroboration of
this statement.]
[Footnote 9: Rapoport, Etan ha-'Ezrahi, Ostrog, 1776, Introduction.]
[Footnote 10: Cf. Zederbaum, Keter Kehunnah, pp. 72-74, 84, 121, etc.,
and Ha-Shiloah, xxi. 165; Schechter, Studies in Judaism, i.,
Philadelphia, 1896, i. 17 f., and Greenstone, The Messiah Idea in Jewish
History, pp. 237 f. According to some, Judah he-Hasid and his followers
went to Palestine in the expectation, not of the Messiah, but of
Shabbatai Zebi, who was believed to have been in hiding for forty years,
in imitation of the retirement of Moses in Midian for a similar period
of years. "The ruins of Rabbi Judah he-Hasid's synagogue" and Yeshibah
in Jerusalem still keep the memory of the event fresh in the minds of
Palestinian Jews.]
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