had not yet condemned Haskalah. Mendelssohn's German translation was
welcomed in Russia at its first appearance no less than in Germany, but
when some of the children of Rabbi Moses ben Menahem embraced the
Christian faith, and their father, as was natural, was suspected of
skepticism, the _Biur_ and the Meassefim were pronounced, like libraries
by Sir Anthony Absolute, to be "an evergreen tree of diabolical
knowledge." So also with Wessely's Epistles, which were destroyed in
public, together with Polonnoy's _Toledot Ya'akob Yosef_. Haskalah
itself was not impugned, and as theretofore translations and original
works on science were encouraged, and the wish was entertained that
"many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased."[32]

But the latest experiences in their own country put Haskalah in a very
different light from that in which they were wont to regard it. Formerly
the opposition to it had been limited to the very land that gave it
birth. Because of their determination to study, Solomon Maimon was
denied admission to Berlin, Manasseh of Ilye was stopped in Koenigsberg,
and Abba Glusk Leczeka, better known as "the Glusker Maggid," the
subject of a poem by Chamisso, was persecuted everywhere. It was Rabbi
Levin, of Berlin, who prohibited the publication of Wessely's works, and
insisted that the author be expelled from the city.[33] It was Rabbi
Ezekiel Landau of Prague who, though approving of Wessely's _Yen
Lebanon_, opposed the translation of the Pentateuch by Mendelssohn,
while Rabbi Horowitz of Hamburg denounced it in unmeasured terms,
admonishing his hearers to shun the work as unclean, and approving the
action of those persons who had publicly burnt it in Vilna (1782). Moses
Sofer of Pressburg adopted as his motto, "Touch not the works of the
Dessauer" (Mendelssohn),[34] and seldom allowed an opportunity to pass
without denouncing the Maskilim of his country. Now the clarion note of
anti-Haskalah, sounded by these luminaries in Israel, found an echo
among the Jews in Russia. They had discovered, to their great sorrow,
that like Elisha ben Abuya, the apostate in the Talmud, "those who once
entered the paradise [of enlightenment] returned no more." The very name
of the seat of Haskalah was an abomination to the pious. To be called
"Berlinchick" or "Deitschel" was tantamount to being called infidel and
epicurean, anarchist and outlaw. The old instinct of self-preservation,
which turned Jews from lam