Ten years later, while residing temporarily in Volhynia, the hot-bed of hasidism, Menashe began to print his religio-philosophic treatise Alfe Menassheh ("The Teachings of Manasseh"). [1] But the first proof-sheets sufficed to impress the printer with the “heretical” character of the book, and he threw them together with the whole manuscript into the fire.  The hapless author managed with difficulty to restore the text of his “executed” work, and published it at Vilna in 1822.  Here the rabbinical censorship pounced upon him.  The book had not yet left the press, when the rabbi of Vilna, Saul Katzenellenbogen, learned that in one passage the writer deduced from a verse in Deuteronomy (17.9) the right of the “judges” or spiritual leaders of each generation to modify many religious laws and customs in accordance with the requirements of the time.  The rabbi gave our author fair warning that, unless this heretical argument was withdrawn, he would have the book burned publicly in the synagogue yard.  Menashe was forced to submit, and, contrary to his conviction, weakened his heterodox argument by a number of circumlocutions.

[Footnote 1:  With a clever allusion to the Hebrew text of Deut. 33.17.]

These persecutions, however, did not smother the fire of protest in the breast of the excommunicated rural philosopher.  In the last years of his life he published two pamphlets, [1] in which he severely lashed the shortcomings of Jewish life, the early marriages, the one-sided school training, the repugnance to living knowledge and physical labor.  However, the champions of orthodoxy took good care to prevent these books from reaching the masses.  Exhausted by his fruitless struggle, Menashe died, unappreciated and almost unnoticed by his contemporaries.

[Footnote 1:  One of these, entitled Samme de-Hayye ("Elixir of Life"), was written in Yiddish, being designed by the author for the lower classes.]

2.  THE STAGNATION OF HASIDISM

A critical attitude toward the existing order of things could on occasions assert itself in the environment of Rabbinism, where the mind, though forced into the mould of scholasticism, was yet working at high speed.  But such “heretical” thinking was utterly inconceivable in the dominant circles of Hasidism, where the intellect was rocked to sleep by mystical lullabies and fascinating stories of the miraculous exploits of the Tzsaddiks.  The era of political and civil disfranchisement was a time of luxuriant growth for Hasidism, not in its creative, but rather in its stationary, not to say stagnant, phase.