THE JEWISH COMMUNITY 181Moses Mendelssohn, it sought to modify the exclusively religious content of
Jewish education and to integrate the Jews into the mainstream of European
culture. Its disciples, known as maskilim or 'men of understanding' gained
many adherents in the towns of Silesia, and at the turn of the century in Galicia,
where over one hundred Jewish schools, using German as the language of
instruction, were founded. In 1816, the Rabbi of Lemberg thought fit to place
them under a ban. In the subsequent period, the movement spread into the
Russian Pale, where the first Jewish school of the new type was opened at
Human in 182.2, and to a much smaller degree, into the Congress Kingdom. For
a time it gained the approval of the Tsarist authorities who recognized an
instrument for disrupting the solidarity of the Jewish community and for setting
the Jews on the road to political subservience. In this they were sadly mistaken,
for in the long run the principal achievement of the Haskalab, whilst under-
mining religious Judaism, was to sow the seeds of modern Jewish nationalism.^4
In due course, the maskilim were challenged by reformers who wanted to
extend the ideals of the Haskalab into the political and social spheres. Not con-
tent with limited educational aims, the Assimilationists wanted the Jews to
abandon their exclusive communities and to participate fully in all branches of
public life. Throughout Jewish History, of course, Jews who wished to escape
from the constrictions of the ghetto, had always possessed the option of accept-
ing the dominant religion, language, and culture of the country in which they
lived. In the Polish lands, isolated converts to Christianity had followed this
course for longer than anyone could remember; and the Frankists of the 1760s
had provided an instance where the phenomenon briefly assumed mass propor-
tions. But at that stage, no one had advocated Assimilation as a policy for the
Jewish community as a whole. In the early nineteenth century, however, with
the influx of French Revolutionary ideas, new voices were heard. In 1816, when
the Berlin scholar, D. Friedlander was asked for an opinion, his pamphlet on
The Improvement of the Jews in the Kingdom of Poland' strongly supported the
replacement of the Yiddish language by Polish, as a first step to the closer inte-
gration of the Jews into Polish life. In the 1820s, a group of Warsaw bankers and
intellectuals calling themselves 'The Old Testament Believers' adopted
Friedlander's programme as part of their campaign to abolish the local kabal.
At this juncture, Joachim Lelewel was speaking of Poles and Jews as 'brothers
walking hand in hand' towards a common future. In the November Rising of
1830-1, many Jews gave their lives for the Polish cause.^5 A Jewish Militia was
formed to assist in the defence of Warsaw. In 1848 in Galicia, Rabbi Dov Beer
Meisels (1798—1870) of Cracow openly urged his flock to support Polish politi-
cal demands. In the following decade, this same leader, now Chief Rabbi of
Warsaw, joined prominent members of the assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie, such
as Leopold Kronenburg and Herman Epstein, in a concerted movement to
reconcile Polish and Jewish interests in religious, cultural, and economic mat-
ters, Kronenburg's newspaper, Gazeta Codzienna (Daily Gazette), edited by
the novelist Ignacy Kraszewski, was specifically launched for the purpose of