and many minor allurements were potent enough to draw even the heretofore callous German Jews out of their isolation, and their Germanization by the middle of the nineteenth century was an established fact.  No wonder, then, that, unlike Russian Jewry, the German Jews experienced an unprecedented revolution; that the difference between the Mendelssohnian generation and the next following was almost as great as that between the modern American Jew and his brother in the Orient.  No wonder, also, that when Haskalah finally took root in Russia, it was purely German for fifty years and more; that Nicholas’s vigorous attempts, instead of making the Slavonic Jews better Russians, merely helped to make those he “re-educated” greater admirers of Germany.  The most puissant autocrat of Russia unwittingly contributed to the downfall of Russian autocracy, and Gregori Peretz, the Dekabrist, son of the financier who became converted under Alexander I, was the first of those who were to endeavor, with book and bomb, to break the backbone of tyranny under Nicholas II.[25]

Till about the “sixties,” then, the Russo-Jewish Maskilim were the recipients, and the German Jews were the donors.  The German Jews wrote, the Russian Jews read.  Germany was to the Jewish world, during the early Haskalah movement, what France, according to Guizot, was to Europe during the Renaissance:  both received an impetus from the outside in the form of raw ideas, and modified them to suit their environment.  Berlin was still, as it had been during the days of Mendelssohn and Wessely, the sanctuary of learning, the citadel of culture.  In the highly cultivated German literature they found treasures of wisdom and science.  The poetical gems of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and Herder captivated their fancy; the philosophy of Kant and Fichte, Schelling and Hegel nourished their intellect.  Kant continued to be the favorite guide of Maimon’s countrymen, and in their love for him they interpreted the initials of his name to mean “For my soul panteth after thee."[26]

But more efficacious than all other agencies was Mendelssohn’s German translation of the Bible, and the Biur commentary published therewith.  Renaissance and Reformation, those mighty, revolutionary forces, have entered every country by side-doors, so to say.  The Jewish Pale was no exception to the rule.  What Wycliffe’s translation did for England, and Luther’s for Germany, Mendelssohn’s did for Russian Jewry.  Like the Septuagint, it marked a new epoch in the history of Jewish advancement.  It is said that Mendelssohn’s aim was chiefly to show the grandeur of the Hebrew poetry found in the Bible, but by the irony of fate his translation displayed to the Russian Jew the beauty and elegance of the German language.  To the member of the Lovers of the New Haskalah, surreptitiously studying the Bible of the “Dessauer,” the Hebrew was rather a translation of, or commentary on, the German, and served him as a bridge to cross over into the otherwise hardly accessible field of German literature.