w official enlightenment was disseminated by the
Government of Nicholas I. during the era of juvenile conscription.

The new Jewish _intelligenzia_ showed utter indifference to the
sentiments of the Jewish masses, and did not hesitate to induce the
Government to interfere in the affairs of inner Jewish life. Thus by a
regulation issued in 1864 all hasidic books were subjected to a most
rigorous censorship, and Jewish printing-presses were placed under a
more vigilant supervision than theretofore. The Tzaddiks were barred
from visiting their parishes for the purpose of "working miracles" and
"collecting tribute," a measure which only served to surround the
hasidic chieftains with a halo of martyrdom and resulted in the
pilgrimage of vast numbers of Hasidim to the "holy places," the
"capitals" of the Tzaddiks. All this only went to intensify the distrust
of the masses toward the college-bred, officially hall-marked Jewish
intellectuals and to lower their moral prestige, to the detriment of the
cause of enlightenment of which they professed to be the missionaries.

A peculiar variety of assimilationist tendencies sprang up among the
upper class of Jews in the Kingdom of Poland, more especially in Warsaw.
It was a most repellent variety of assimilation, exhibiting more
flunkeyism than pursuit of culture. The "Poles of the Mosaic
Persuasion," as these assimilationists styled themselves, had long been
begging for admission into Polish society, though rudely repulsed by it.
During the insurrection of 1861-1863, when they were graciously received
as useful allies, they were indefatigable in parading their Polish
patriotism. In the Polish Jewish weekly, _Jutrzenka_, [1] "The Dawn," the
organ of these assimilationists, the trite West-European theory, which
looks upon Judaism as a religious sect and not as a national community,
was repeated _ad nauseam_. One of the most prominent contributors to
that journal, Ludwig Gumplovich, the author of a monograph on the
history of the Jews in Poland, who subsequently made a name for himself
as a sociologist, and, after his conversion to Christianity, received a
professorship at an Austrian university, opened his series of articles
on Polish-Jewish history with the following observation: "The fact that
the Jews had a history was their misfortune in Europe.... For their
history inevitably presupposes an isolated life severed from that of the
other nations. It is just this which constitutes th