or unable, to profess the new religion, discarded every vestige of traditional Judaism, and deemed it their duty to set an example of infidelity and sometimes immorality to their less enlightened coreligionists.  What Leroy-Beaulieu says of Maimon, “that type of the most cultured Jew to be found before the French Revolution,” might more justly be applied to many a less prominent Maskil after him:  “Despite his learning and philosophy he sank deeper than the most degraded of his fellow-men, because in repudiating his ancestral faith he had lost the staff which, through all their humiliations, served as a prop even to the most debased of ancient Jews."[31]

Haskalah thus having become synonymous with apostasy or licentiousness, we can easily understand why the unsophisticated among the Russian Jews were so bitterly opposed to it from the time the sad truth dawned upon them, until, under Alexander II, their suspicions were somewhat dissipated.  Previous to the latter part of the reign of Alexander I the “struggle groups” in Russian Jewry were at first Frankists and anti-Frankists, and afterwards Hasidim and Mitnaggedim.  It was a conflict, not between religion and science, but between religion and what was regarded as superstition.  Secular instruction, far from being opposed, was, as we have seen, sought and disseminated.  Long after the pious element in Germany had been aroused to the dangers that lurked in the wake of their “Aufklaerung,” and had begun to endeavor to check its further progress by excommunication and other methods, the Russian Jews remained “seekers after light.”  They might have condemned a Maskil, they had not yet condemned Haskalah.  Mendelssohn’s German translation was welcomed in Russia at its first appearance no less than in Germany, but when some of the children of Rabbi Moses ben Menahem embraced the Christian faith, and their father, as was natural, was suspected of skepticism, the Biur and the Meassefim were pronounced, like libraries by Sir Anthony Absolute, to be “an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge.”  So also with Wessely’s Epistles, which were destroyed in public, together with Polonnoy’s Toledot Ya’akob Yosef.  Haskalah itself was not impugned, and as theretofore translations and original works on science were encouraged, and the wish was entertained that “many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased."[32]

But the latest experiences in their own country put Haskalah in a very different light from that in which they were wont to regard it.  Formerly the opposition to it had been limited to the very land that gave it birth.  Because of their determination to study, Solomon Maimon was denied admission to Berlin, Manasseh of Ilye was stopped in Koenigsberg, and Abba Glusk Leczeka, better known as “the Glusker Maggid,” the subject of a poem by Chamisso, was persecuted everywhere.  It was Rabbi Levin, of Berlin, who prohibited the publication of Wessely’s works, and insisted that the author be expelled from the