In Kovno those who were preparing themselves for the
rabbinate formed something like a new sect, the Mussarnikes (Moralists),
which practiced asceticism and self-abnegation to an extraordinary
degree.[7]
[Illustration: MOSES LOeB LILIENBLUM, 1843-1910]
Those, however, were most affected who had been misled by dreams of
assimilation. They suffered most, for they lost most. Their hopes were
blighted, their hearts broken. The leading-strings proved to be a
halter. They saw they had little to expect at the hands of those they
had believed to have become fully civilized, and they were embittered
toward civilization, which had showed them flowers, but had given them
no fruit. In a work, _Sinat 'Olam le-'Am 'Olam_ (_Eternal Hatred for the
Eternal People_, Warsaw, 1882), Nahum Sokolov proved, like Smolenskin
before him, that anti-Semitism was ineradicable, that the fight against
the Jews was a fight to the death, that even emancipation helps little
to remove the animosity innate in one people against another, and until
the "end of days" foretold by the prophets of yore there will never
cease the eternal hatred to the eternal people.
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