ier and more prosperous lands prominent in every sphere of practical
life, were directed toward the realm of thought, and the merciless
severity with which the Government excluded them from the enjoyment of
things material only increased their ardor for things spiritual and
intellectual.

In its wide sense Haskalah denotes enlightenment. Those who strove to
enlighten their benighted coreligionists or disseminate European culture
among them, were called Maskilim. A careful perusal of this work will
reveal the exact ideals these terms embody. For Haskalah was not only
progressive, it was also aggressive, militant, sometimes destructive.
From the days of Mordecai Guenzburg to the time of Asher Ginzberg (Ahad
Ha-'Am), it changed its tendencies and motives more than once.
Levinsohn, "the father of the Maskilim," was satisfied with removing the
ban from secular learning; Gordon wished to see his brethren "Jews at
home and men abroad"; Smolenskin dreamed of the rehabilitation of Jews
in Palestine; and Ahad Ha-'Am hopes for the spiritual regeneration of
his beloved people. Others advocated the levelling of all distinctions
between Jews and Gentiles, or the upliftment of mankind in general and
Russia in particular. To each of them Haskalah implied different ideals,
and through each it promulgated diverse doctrines. To trace these
varying phases from an indistinct glimmering in the eighteenth century
to the glorious effulgence of the beginning of the twentieth, is the
main object of this book.

In pursuance of my end, I have paid particular attention to the causes
that retarded or accelerated Russo-Jewish cultural advance. As these
causes originate in the social, economic, and political status of the
Russian Jew, I frequently portray political events as well as the state
of knowledge, belief, art, and morals of the periods under
consideration. For this reason also I have marked the boundaries of the
Haskalah epochs in correspondence to the dates of the reigns of the
several czars, though the correspondence is not always exact.

Essays have been published, on some of the topics treated in these
pages, by writers in different languages: in Russian, by Bramson,
Klausner, and Morgulis; in Hebrew, by Izgur, Katz, and Klausner; in
German, by Maimon, Lilienthal, Wengeroff, and Weissberg; in English, by
Lilienthal and Wiener; and in French, by Slouschz. The subject as a
whole, however, has not been treated. Should this work stimulate f