appearance of Hebrew newspapers such as Ha-Maggid (The Preacher),
Ha-Shachar(The Dawn) and Ha-Melitz (The Intercessor) created fora for the
dissemination of Hebrew poems and short stories to a vast Jewish audience.
Given that they were situated in a sea of Hasidic and Mitnagedic Jews, it
is not surprising that Russian maskilim were severe critics of traditional
Jewish life. The maskilic critique of traditional Jewish life was reflected in
derogatory depictions of the shtetl, the literary sobriquet of a typical small
town, illustrated by the names of the fictional shtetls in maskilic literature:
Tonyadevka-Betalon (Donothingville), Kaptunsk-Kaptsiel (Beggartown),
Glupsk-Kesalon (Stupidville), and Lohayapolie (No Such Place)
Similarly, in a seminal narrative poem called Kozo Shel Yud(Tip of the
[Hebrew letter] Yud), Gordon delivering a scathing critique of traditional
Jewish society while simultaneously advocating for the liberation of Jewish
women from the tyranny of the rabbis. This poem, whose title alludes to
Akiva’s second-century C.E. maxim concerning the limitless possibility of
rabbinic interpretation, tells of the plight of the ‘aguna(literally, anchored
women), the tragic situation of Jewish women who were trapped by a rab-
binic law that allowed only the husband to initiate a divorce.
In this story, the husband of an ‘agunais missing. Thus, she could never
remarry. Fortunately, her husband had had the foresight to add a clause to
the wedding contract stipulating that if he should be missing for a year, his
wife could have a divorce. The adjudicating rabbi, however, notes that the
tip of the letter yud in this last clause is missing – nullifying the missing
husband’s special provision and rendering his wife an ‘aguna. As part of his
critique of traditional Judaism, Gordon called for the elimination of this
and other similarly oppressive laws and customs, and the rigid rabbinic
mentality. Interestingly, recent research in archives of the former Soviet
Union has revealed that what Gordon was demanding in theoretical and
idealistic terms, ‘agunotthemselves were pursuing in actuality by going
over the head of the Jewish tribunals and getting their marriages annulled
by state courts.
No less impressive than the revival of Hebrew was the revival of Yiddish as
a literary language. Previously a street dialect of German that had been
rejected even by other Russian maskilim, Yiddish, too, was transformed into
a modern literary language. Spearheading this effort was Shalom Jacob
Abramowitsch, more commonly known by his pen name and the name of his
most famous literary character Mendele Mokher Seforim (Mendele the
Bookseller). After starting out writing in Hebrew, Abramowitsch switched to
Yiddish and defended Yiddish as the true Jewish language: “Here I am ...
attempting to write for our people in the holy tongue, yet most of them do
not even know this tongue. Their language is Yiddish.”
The simultaneous revival of Hebrew and Yiddish, remarkable in and of
itself, fostered by the end of the 1860s the first stirrings of a Jewish national
The age of enlightenment and emancipation, 1750–1880 177