In some provinces the conflict lasted longer
than in others. To this day not a few Russian Jews would seem to be of
Slavonic rather than Semitic extraction. As late as the sixteenth
century there was still a demand in certain places for a Russian
translation of the Hebrew Book of Common Prayer, and in 1635 Rabbi Meir
Ashkenazi, who came from Frankfort-on-the-Main to study in Lublin, and
was retained as rabbi in Mohilev-on-the-Dnieper, had cause to exclaim,
"Would to God that our coreligionists all spoke the same
language--German."[19] Even Maimon, in the latter half of the eighteenth
century, mentions one, by no means an exception, who did not "understand
the Jewish language, and made use, therefore, of the Russian."[20] But
by the middle of the seventeenth century the amalgamation was almost
complete. It resulted in a product entirely new. As the invasion of
England by the Normans produced the Anglo-Saxon, so the inundation of
Russia by the Germans produced the Slav-Teuton. This is the clue to the
study of the Haskalah, as will appear from what follows.
Russo-Poland gradually became the cynosure of the Talmudic world, the
"Aksanye shel Torah," the asylum of the Law, whence "enlargement and
deliverance" arose for the traditions which the Jews carried with them,
through fire and water, during the dreary centuries of their dispersion.
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