their parishes for the purpose of “working miracles” and “collecting tribute,” a measure which only served to surround the hasidic chieftains with a halo of martyrdom and resulted in the pilgrimage of vast numbers of Hasidim to the “holy places,” the “capitals” of the Tzaddiks.  All this only went to intensify the distrust of the masses toward the college-bred, officially hall-marked Jewish intellectuals and to lower their moral prestige, to the detriment of the cause of enlightenment of which they professed to be the missionaries.

A peculiar variety of assimilationist tendencies sprang up among the upper class of Jews in the Kingdom of Poland, more especially in Warsaw.  It was a most repellent variety of assimilation, exhibiting more flunkeyism than pursuit of culture.  The “Poles of the Mosaic Persuasion,” as these assimilationists styled themselves, had long been begging for admission into Polish society, though rudely repulsed by it.  During the insurrection of 1861-1863, when they were graciously received as useful allies, they were indefatigable in parading their Polish patriotism.  In the Polish Jewish weekly, Jutrzenka, [1] “The Dawn,” the organ of these assimilationists, the trite West-European theory, which looks upon Judaism as a religious sect and not as a national community, was repeated ad nauseam.  One of the most prominent contributors to that journal, Ludwig Gumplovich, the author of a monograph on the history of the Jews in Poland, who subsequently made a name for himself as a sociologist, and, after his conversion to Christianity, received a professorship at an Austrian university, opened his series of articles on Polish-Jewish history with the following observation:  “The fact that the Jews had a history was their misfortune in Europe....  For their history inevitably presupposes an isolated life severed from that of the other nations.  It is just this which constitutes the misfortune alluded to.”

[Footnote 1:  Pronounce Yutzhenka.]

After the insurrection, the Polonization of the Jewish population assumed menacing proportions.  The upper layer of Polish Jewry consisted exclusively of “Poles of the Mosaic Persuasion” who rejected all elements of Jewish culture, while the broad masses, following blindly the mandates of their Tzaddiks, rejected fanatically even the most indispensable elements of European civilization.  Riven between such monstrous extremes, Polish Jewry was unable to attain even to a semblance of normal development.

2.  THE SOCIETY FOR THE DIFFUSION OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Though intensely engaged in this cultural movement, Russian Jewry did not yet command sufficient resources for carrying on a well-ordered and well-systematized activity.  The only modern Jewish organization of that period was the “Society for the Diffusion of Enlightenment amongst the Jews,” which had been founded in 1867 by a small coterie of Jewish financiers and intellectuals of St. Petersburg.