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 lambs into lions, holding their ground to the
last, asserted itself again. As the Talmudic rabbis excluded certain
books from the Canon, as the study of even the Jewish philosophers was
later proscribed by certain French rabbis, so the Russian rabbis laid
the ban upon whatever savored of German "Aufklärerei."

Thus began the bitter fight against Haskalah, in which Hasidim and
Mitnaggedim, forgetting their differences, joined hands, and stood
shoulder to shoulder. For, after all, was not Judaism in both these
phases endangered by the new and aggressive enemy from the West? And did
not the two have enough in common to become one in the hour of great
need? Hasidism, in fact, was Judaism emotionalized, and since, beginning