owing to a sweeping array of reforms that he implemented during the 1860s.
Regarding Jews, he eliminated the cantonist units and relaxed the regula-
tions governing the Pale of Settlement, allowing certain types of Jews to live
outside the Pale: soldiers, first-rank merchants, and university graduates. He
also relaxed censorship, allowing the emergence of a Jewish press.
Most important, perhaps, was his emancipation of the Russian peasantry
in 1861. For the first time, the notion of Jewish emancipation seemed plausi-
ble, at the moment when it seemed that the tsar was transforming Russia into
a European-style country. This attracted a small but growing number of
Russian Jews to the Russian Haskalah.
Like the Berlin Haskalah, the Russian Haskalah called for political eman-
cipation while advocating the transformation of Jewish life to make Jews
more productive and more involved in mainstream society. The Russian
Haskalah echoed Mendelssohn’s notion of a making Judaism private and vol-
untary. As the maskil Judah Lieb Gordon put it, “Be a Jew in your tent and a
man in the street.” This allowed the Haskalah to embrace the tsarist aim of
Russification. Writing in 1861, Osip Rabinovich called on Russian Jews to
abandon Yiddish, “these old rags, a heritage of the Middle Ages,” concluding
that “our homeland is Russia – just as its air is ours, so its language must
become ours.” Others, such as Judah Lieb Gordon, used the pages of the
nascent Jewish press to urge Jews to embrace the new possibilities dawning in
Russia: “This land of Eden – Russia – now opens its gates to you, her sons call
you brother. How long will you dwell among them as a guest?” Such opti-
mism was epitomized by an obituary for Tsarina Maria Alexandrova, the
deceased wife of Alexander II, that appeared in the Jewish weekly Ha-melizon
June 8, 1880: “Even if we tried, we could not enumerate all the good that the
deceased has done for us from the time she ascended the throne until the time
she met her maker.”
At the same time, there were stark differences between the Russian and
Berlin Haskalah. The adherents of the Russian Haskalah were drawn from a
constituency that differed quantitatively and qualitatively from its central
European counterpart. Russian Jewry numbered in the hundreds of thousands,
German Jewry in the tens of thousands; Russian Jews often lived in small
towns where they were the local majority. Russian Jews tended to be more tra-
ditional, thus the Russian Haskalah had stronger ties to Jewish tradition.
In addition, Russian maskilim were never drawn to Russian culture in the
way maskilim in central Europe were drawn to German or Viennese culture.
Whereas the Berlin Haskalah, after a brief foray into Hebrew, turned largely
to the vernacular as its language of expression, the Russian Haskalah was
multilingual, its adherents producing works in Russian, Hebrew, and
Yiddish. At the heart of the Russian Haskalah, in fact, was a literary renais-
sance of the Hebrew language. Previously a language of prayer and rabbinic
discourse, by the 1860s, Hebrew emerged as a modern literary language. The
176 The age of enlightenment and emancipation, 1750–1880