Jewish youth fleeing from its people and forgetting its national language.  He saw Reform Judaism of Western Europe which had retained nothing of Jewish culture except the modernized superficialities of the synagogue.  Repelled by this spectacle, Smolenskin decided from the very beginning to fight on two fronts:  against the fanatics of orthodoxy in the name of European progress, and against the champions of assimilation in the name of national Jewish culture, and more particularly of the Hebrew language.  “You say,” Smolenskin exclaims, addressing himself to the assimilators, “let us be like the other nations.  Well and good.  Let us, indeed, be like the other nations:  cultured men and women, free from superstition, loyal citizens of the country.  But let us also remember, as the other nations do, that we have no right to be ashamed of our origin, that it is our duty to hold dear our national language and our national dignity.”

[Footnote 1:  See above, p. 218.]

In his first great novel “A Rover on Life’s Paths” (Ha-to-’eh bedarke ha-hayyim, 1869-1876), Smolenskin carries his hero through all the stages of cultural development, leading from an obscure White Russian hamlet to the centers of European civilization in London and Paris.  But at the end of his “rovings” the hero ultimately attains to a synthesis of Jewish nationalism and European progress, and ends by sacrificing his life while defending his brethren during the Odessa pogrom of 1871.  The other Tendenz-novels of Smolenskin reflect the same double-fronted struggle:  against the stagnation of the orthodox, particularly the Hasidim, and against the disloyalty of the “enlightened.”

Smolenskin’s theory of Judaism is formulated in two publicistic works:  “The Eternal People” (’Am ’olam, [1] 1872) and “There is a Time to Plant” (’Et la-ta’at [2], 1875-1877).  As a counterbalance to the artificial religious reforms of the West, he sets up the far-reaching principle of Jewish evolution, of a gradual amalgamation of the national and humanitarian element within Judaism.  The Messianic dogma, which the Jews of the West had completely abandoned because of its alleged incompatibility with Jewish citizenship in the Diaspora, is warmly defended by Smolenskin as one of the symbols of national unity.  In the very center of his system stands the cult of Hebrew as a national language, “without which there is no Judaism.”  In order the more successfully to demolish the idea of assimilation, Smolenskin bombards its substructure, the theory of enlightenment as formulated by Moses Mendelssohn, with its definition of the Jews as a religious community, and not as a nation, though in his polemical ardor he often goes too far, and does occasional violence to historic truth.

[Footnote 1:  From Isa. 44. 7.]

[Footnote 2:  From Eccles. 3. 2.]