assistance in eradicating, or at least suppressing, the threatened
invasion. The great learning and literary ability of the "divine
philosopher, Rabbi Moses ben Menahem" (Mendelssohn, 1729-1786), were
appealed to for help. Not a stone was left unturned to crush the new
sect (kat), so called. Volumes of the _Toledot Ya'akob Yosef_, in which
Rabbi Jacob Joseph of Polonnoy set forth the principles of the Besht,
were burnt in the market-place in Vilna. Intermarriage, social
intercourse of any kind, was prohibited between Hasidim and Mitnaggedim.
In Vilna, Grodno, Brest, Slutsk, Minsk, Pinsk, etc., the ban was hurled
against the dissenters by the most prominent rabbis. Israel was divided
into two hostile camps.[20] But soon everything was changed. Hasidim and
Mitnaggedim discovered that while they were fighting each other, a
common enemy was undermining the ground on which they stood. The
Haskalah was steadily drawing recruits from both, and it threatened
ultimately to become more dangerous to both than they were to each
other.

From the South had come the impulse of religious revivalism through the
followers of the Besht, and the North was showing signs of awakening
through the reforms of the Gaon. At the same time a ray of enlightenment
from the West pierced through the night. To make the regeneration of
Slavonic Judaism complete, the element of estheticism had to be added to
emotionalism and reason. From the warm South came Besht, from the
studious North Hagra, and Rambman (Mendelssohn) made his appearance from
the enlightened West. The triumvirate was complete.

Not that Mendelssohn ever visited or resided in Russo-Poland. But the
gentle, cultured little savant of Berlin, with whose lips, Carlyle tells
us, Socrates spoke like Socrates in German as in no other modern
language, "for his own character was Socratic," was at no period of his