Moses
Sofer of Pressburg adopted as his motto, "Touch not the works of the
Dessauer" (Mendelssohn),[34] and seldom allowed an opportunity to pass
without denouncing the Maskilim of his country. Now the clarion note of
anti-Haskalah, sounded by these luminaries in Israel, found an echo
among the Jews in Russia. They had discovered, to their great sorrow,
that like Elisha ben Abuya, the apostate in the Talmud, "those who once
entered the paradise [of enlightenment] returned no more." The very name
of the seat of Haskalah was an abomination to the pious. To be called
"Berlinchick" or "Deitschel" was tantamount to being called infidel and
epicurean, anarchist and outlaw. The old instinct of self-preservation,
which turned Jews from lambs into lions, holding their ground to the
last, asserted itself again. As the Talmudic rabbis excluded certain
books from the Canon, as the study of even the Jewish philosophers was
later proscribed by certain French rabbis, so the Russian rabbis laid
the ban upon whatever savored of German "Aufklaererei."
Thus began the bitter fight against Haskalah, in which Hasidim and
Mitnaggedim, forgetting their differences, joined hands, and stood
shoulder to shoulder.
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