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
The story of Maimon, as I have said, is the story of many of the
peripatetic apostles of Haskalah, and his experience was more or less
also theirs. Issachar Falkensohn Behr (or Baer Falkensohn, 1746-1796?),
without funds, friends, or rudimentary knowledge of the subjects
necessary for admission into a public school, left his native city of
Zamosez with the determination to enter the university of "Little
Berlin," as Koenigsberg was called. Too poor to carry out his plan, he
tramped to Berlin. Through the influence of his relatives and
countrymen, Israel Moses Halevi and Daniel Jaffe, he was introduced to
Mendelssohn, and was enabled to devote himself systematically to the
study of German, the alphabet of which he had learned from Wolff's
treatise on mathematics, and to French, Latin, physics, philosophy, and
medicine. In a very short time he mastered them all, especially German.
His _Gedichte eines polnischen Juden_ (Mitau and Leipsic, 1772) caused
no little stir among the poets. Lessing and Goethe, close observers of
symptoms of enlightenment among the Jews, expressed themselves
differently as to the real merit of the collection; but both concurred
with Boie, who, writing to Knebel, the friend of Goethe, remarked
concerning them, "You are right; the Jewish nation promises much after
it is once awakened."[29]
For one reason or another we find that some Slavonic Jewish youths
preferred other places to Berlin for the pursuit of their studies. Such
were Benjamin Wolf Guenzberg and Jacob Liboschuets. The former was
probably the only Jew at the Goettingen University. It was from there
that he inquired of Jacob Emden "whether it was permissible to dissect
on the Sabbath," and his thesis for the doctor's degree was _De medica
ex Talmudicis illustrata_ (Goettingen, 1743).[30] Liboschuets studied at
the University of Halle. After graduation, finding that as a Jew he
could not settle in St. Petersburg, he established himself in Vilna,
where he became celebrated as a diplomat, philanthropist, and, more
especially, expert physician. When Professor Frank was asked who would
take care of the public health in his absence, he is reported to have
said, _Deus et Judaeus_, "God and the Jew" [Liboschuets]!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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