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_.
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