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.
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