Everywhere
the desire for "liberty, equality, and fraternity" began to manifest
itself. In Courland, the most German of Russian provinces, Georg
Gottfried Mylich, a Lutheran pastor at Nerft, made a touching appeal
(ab. 1787) in German on behalf of the Jews, insisting that the word Jew
"should not be taken to indicate a class of people different from us,
but only a different religious body; and as regards his nationality, it
should not hinder him from obtaining citizen's rights and liberties
equal to those of the people of Sleswick, the Saxons, Danes, Swedes,
Swiss, French, and Italians, who also live among us." In Poland, Tadeusz
Czacki, the historian, wrote his _Discourse on the Jews_ (_Rosprava o
Zhydakh_, Vilna, 1807), in which he deplores that Jews "experienced
indulgence rarely, oppression often, and contempt nearly always" under
the most Christian governments, and suggests a plan for reforming their
condition. But the main appeal for freedom came, as might have been
expected, from the Jews themselves. Contemporaneous with, if not before,
Michel Beer's _Appel a la justice des nations et des rois_, a Lithuanian
Jew, during his imprisonment in Nieszvicz on a false charge, wrote a
work in Polish on the Jewish problem,[2] while in 1803 Loeb, or Leon,
Nebakhovich, an intimate friend of Count Shakovskoy, published _The Cry
of the Daughter of Judah_ (_Fopli Docheri Yudeyskoy_), the first defence
of the Russian Jew in the Russian language.
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