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 broke out in his native town, Rabbi Jonathan of Risenci (Grodno)
vowed that, "if he were spared, he would disseminate a knowledge of
astronomy among his countrymen." To fulfil the vow he went to Germany
(1725), where, though blind, he devoted himself assiduously first to the
acquisition of astronomy, then to writing on it.[40] Baruch Yavan of
Volhynia, who more than any one exposed the impostures of Jacob Frank,
"spoke and wrote Hebrew, Polish, German, and probably French," and his
accomplishments and address won him the admiration of Count Brühl, the
virtual ruler of Poland, and the favor of the highest officials at St.
Petersburg. His associate in the righteous fight, Bima Speir of Mohilev,
was also possessed of a thorough command of the language of Russia, and