the author was censured for being
afraid to come out openly and boldly as a champion of Haskalah.[38] In
spite of obstacles and strictures, the book met with success surpassing
the author's expectations. It found its way not only into Russia,
Poland, and Germany, but even into France, Italy, England, Holland, and
Palestine. An edition of two thousand copies was entirely exhausted,
unusual at a time when books were costly and money was scarce, and
another edition was issued. What Phinehas Elijah (Hurwitz) of Vilna had
sown in tears, he lived to reap in joy.

There was a crying need in Russia for a work of the sort. In Germany the
very Government encouraged organizations and publications aiming at
enlightenment. Accordingly, a Society for the Promotion of the Good and
the Noble was started, and the Meassef was published. In Russo-Poland
not even a Hebrew printing-press was permitted, and certainly no
periodical publications would have been tolerated. Phinehas Elijah,
therefore, grasped the opportunity, and showed himself equal to it. His
aim was, like that of the French encyclopedists, to lead his readers
"through nature to God." He gives an account of the various sciences,
natural and philosophical, as a prolegomenon to the study of theology,
even of the mystic teachings of Vital's _Gates of Holiness_. Withal he
evinces a sound intellect and refined, if rudimentary, taste. He decries
the "ancestor worship" that rendered the Jew of his day a fossil
specimen of an extinct species. The present is superior to the past, "a
dwarf on a giant's shoulder seeth farther than doth the giant himself."
He ridicules the base and degrading habit of dedicating books to
"benefactors, friends, lovers, parents, men, or women." His work was
written for the glory of God, and he dedicates it to eternal,
all-conquering truth.[39]

All these Maskilim, so many hands reaching out into the light, were both
the cause and the consequence of the longing for enlightenment
characteristic at all times of the Slavonic Jew. Graetz and his
followers among the latter-day Maskilim delighted in calling them "they
that walk in darkness." Facts, however, prove that at no time before
Nicholas I was education per se regarded with the least suspicion,
though the Talmud was given the preference. As in the pre-Haskalah
period, the greatest Talmudists deemed it a sacred duty to perfect
themselves in some branch of secular science. When, in 1710, a terrible
plague b