Promoting Christianity among the Jews, made a tour through Europe,
everywhere urging the Gentiles to enfranchise the Jews as an inducement
to them to embrace Christianity, the only means of hastening the advent
of the Apostolic millennium. His _Mémoires sur l'état des israélites_
presented to the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (October 11, 1818) and his
visit to Russia resulted in an imperial ukase (March 25, 1817)
organizing a Committee of Guardians for Israelitish Christians
(Izrailskiye Christyanye). The members of this association were to be
granted land in the northern or southern provinces of Russia and to
enjoy special privileges. The bait proved tempting, and, as a
consequence, some prominent Maskilim, too weak to resist the
allurements, precipitated themselves into the Greek Catholic fold.
Abraham Peretz, financier and champion of Jews' rights, consented to be
converted, as also Löb Nebakhovich, the dramatist, whose plays were
produced in the Imperial theatre of St. Petersburg and performed in the
presence of the emperor.[30] Equally bad, if not worse, for the cause of
Haskalah was the conduct of those who, disdaining, or unable, to profess
the new religion, discarded every vestige of traditional Judaism, and
deemed it their duty to set an example of infidelity and sometimes
immorality to their less enlightened coreligionists. What Leroy-Beaulieu
says of Maimon, "that type of the most cultured Jew to be found before
the French Revolution," might more justly be applied to many a less
prominent Maskil after him: "Despite his learning and philosophy he sank
deeper than the most degraded of his fellow-men, because in repudiating
his ancestral faith he had lost the staff which, through all their
humiliations, served as a prop even to the most debased of ancient
Jews."[31]

Haskalah thus having become synonymous with apostasy or licentiousness,
we can easily understand why the unsophisticated among the Russian Jews