The author of a recent work on the history of culture among the Galician Jews[44] has pointed out how at the end of the last century the Mendelssohnian Reform, and with it worldly education, took its course through Austria into Galicia, to appear half a century later in Russia. This quicker awakening in the South was not due to geographical position alone, but in a higher degree to political and social causes as well. The language of enlightenment was at first naturally enough a modernized form of the Hebrew, for the literary German was not easily accessible to the Jews of Galicia in the period immediately following the division of Poland. Besides, although books had been printed in Judeo-German for the use of women and 'less knowing' men, the people with higher culture, to whom alone the Mendelssohnian Reform could appeal, looked with disdain on the profane dialect of daily intercourse. When, however, the time had come to carry the new instruction to the masses, the latter had become sufficiently familiar with the German language to be able to dispense with the intermediary native Jargon.[45] Consequently little opportunity was offered here for the development of a dialect literature. While the Jews of the newly acquired provinces were becoming more and more identified with their coreligionists of German Austria, their Russian and Polish brethren in the Russian Empire were by force of circumstances departing gradually from all but the religious union with them, and were drifting into entirely new channels. Previous to the reign of Nicholas I., their civil disabilities barred them from a closer contact in language and feeling with their Gentile fellow-citizens, while their distance from Germany excluded all intellectual relations with that country. The masses were too downtrodden and ignorant to develop out of themselves any other forms of literature than the one of ethical instruction and stories current in the previous century. In the meanwhile the Haskala, as the German school was called, had found its way into Russia through Galicia, and such men as J. B. Levinsohn, A. B. Gottlober, M. Gordon, Dr. S. Ettinger, had become its warmest advocates. They threw themselves with all the ardor of their natures upon the new doctrine, and tried to correct the neglected education of their childhood by a thorough study of German culture. It was but natural for them to pass by the opportunities offered in their country's language and to seek enlightenment abroad: the Jews were a foreign nation at home, without privileges or duties, except those of paying taxes, while from Germany, their former abiding-place, there shone forth the promise of a salvation from obscurantism and spiritual death. Henceforth the word 'German' became in Russia the synonym of 'civilized,' and a 'German' was tantamount to 'reformed' and 'apostate' with the masses, for to them culture could appear only as the opposite of their narrow Ghetto lives and gross superstition.