things, or turn in the direction of living knowledge,
of "extraneous sciences," [3] it was checked by threats of
excommunication and persecution. Many were the victims of this petrified
milieu, whose protests against the old order of things and whose
strivings for a newer life were nipped in the bud.

[Footnote 1: On the _bahur_ or Talmud student see Vol. I, p. 116 et
seq.]

[Footnote 2: On the yeshibah in Volozhin, in the government of Vilna,
see Vol. I, p. 380 et seq. Mir is a townlet in the government of Minsk.]

[Footnote 3: An old Hebrew expression for secular learning.]

Instructive in this respect is the fate of one of the most remarkable
Talmudists of his time, Rabbi Menashe Ilyer. Ilyer spent most of his
life in the townlets of Smorgoni and Ilya (whence his surname), in the
government of Vilna, and died of the cholera, in 1831. While keeping
strictly within the bounds of rabbinical orthodoxy, whose adepts
respected him for his enormous erudition and strict piety, Menashe
assiduously endeavored to widen their range of thought and render them
more amenable to moderate freedom of research and a more sober outlook
on life. But his path was strewn with thorns. When on one occasion he
expounded before his pupils the conclusion, which he had reached after a
profound scientific investigation, that the text of the Mishnah had in
many cases been wrongly interpreted by the Gemara,[1] he was taken to
task by a conference of Lithuanian rabbis and barely escaped
excommunication.

[Footnote 1: The Mishnah is a code of laws edited about 200 C.E. by
Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi. The Gemara consists largely of the comments of the
talmudic authorities, who lived after that date, on the text of this
code.]

Having conceived a liking for mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy,
Menashe decided to go to Berlin to devote himself to these studies, but
on his way to the German capital, while temporarily sojourning in
Koenigsberg, he was halted by his countrymen, who visited Prussia on
business, and was cowed by all kinds of threats into returning home. By
persistent private study, this native of a Russian out-of-the-way
townlet managed to acquire a fair amount of general culture, which, with
all its limitations, yielded a rich literary harvest. In 1807 he made
his _debut_ with the treatise _Pesher Dabar_ ("The Solution of the
Problem"), [1] in which he gave vent to his grief over the fact that the
spiritual leaders of the Jewish people ke