Chapter 237 - The Maskilim's Defeat in the Campaign.

00:01 We continue the story of the Tzemach Tzedek and his struggle with the maskilim. Someone who helped him greatly was Count Golitsyn, along with his nephew, the younger Golitsyn. Now the elder Count Golitsyn writes a letter to his young nephew. “I remember,” writes the elder count, “the denunciation that the persecutors and enemies of Rabbi Boruchovitch, the grandfather of the present Rabbi Schneersohn, fabricated against him after...” We are speaking about the Alter Rebbe, of course. “They fabricated it after his integrity and uprightness in political matters had already been established. Those opponents succeeded to such an extent that he was summoned to Petersburg a second time and detained by the Secret Council, and it was nearly decided that he would remain a prisoner in Petersburg for life. Only thanks to upright people in government circles, and above all thanks to the uprightness and kind heart of our sovereign, Emperor Alexander, was he granted complete freedom. There is no doubt that the same will now happen to his grandson, Rabbi Schneersohn: his enemies and persecutors among his fellow Jews, who consider themselves scholars, will denounce him and fabricate charges against him. Therefore,” Uncle Golitsyn concludes his letter to his young nephew, “you must know that it is your duty to protect this upright man, who is battling his brethren who deny their own Torah, the Torah of Moshe.” This letter from his uncle made a tremendous impression on the younger Golitsyn. When he learned about the elections to the assembly convened by the Minister of the Interior, and that the Tzemach Tzedek had replied that he could not undertake the burden of being elected to it, the governor-general produced a certificate from Dr. Heibenthal[?] stating that, because of his poor health, Rabbi Schneersohn could not and must not take such a heavy burden upon himself. When Governor-General Golitsyn—apparently the younger Golitsyn—received the Tzemach Tzedek’s written response, which we spoke about yesterday, he knew how strongly the maskilim opposed the Rebbe of Lubavitch. Golitsyn therefore summoned Eliezer Tsipkin, who was proficient in Russian, and instructed him to translate the booklet for him. Tsipkin told Golitsyn that although he understood the booklet well, he could not

02:58 translate it, because he did not have Russian translations of the verses quoted in it. He said that Mr. Pyotr Paskovich of Shklov had a tutor for his son Yaakov, the academic Otto Schulz, who had graduated from an institute of Oriental languages and could certainly prepare an accurate translation. Golitsyn then sent the booklet in Hebrew to the governor in Mogilev, asking him to forward it to Count Paskovich in Shklov, together with a letter to the count and a letter to the scholar Schulz, requesting that he translate the booklet into Russian. Schulz translated it, adding marginal notes from books of scholarship and science relating to the subjects discussed in the booklet, and sent it to the governor in Mogilev to pass on to Golitsyn. Then, one day, Governor-General Golitsyn received the following notice from Count Orlov of the Minister of the Interior’s Third Department. The Third Department had received a copy of a notice sent to the governor-general in Vitebsk and Mogilev concerning a booklet being circulated by the tzaddik Schneersohn of Lubavitch, which allegedly contained a rebellion against the emperor’s views and wishes. The governor-general’s office, it said, was protecting the rebel. The notice was signed by residents of Vitebsk named Shmuel Mirkin, Reuven Wolf Zlotnik, and Moishe Binyamin Briskin. Golitsyn was therefore asked: A. To take the necessary steps to establish whether the notice was true. B. To provide the Third Department with a copy of the booklet. In one of their conversations, the elder Count Golitsyn told Yerachmiel Masiavo[unclear] about the investigation and interrogation of Rabbi Boruchovitch—that is, the Alter Rebbe—in Petersburg in 1801, and also about the rabbis’ assembly in 1843. Masiavo told him about the booklet he had translated into Russian. The elder Count Golitsyn read the translated booklet and praised Yerachmiel and his young scholarly friends for the notes they had added. When he wrote to his nephew, the governor-general in Vitebsk, he sent him a copy of the booklet with a personal letter, as we have already discussed. In the meantime, the governor-general received

06:01 two translations: Professor Schulz’s translation from the governor of Mogilev province, and censor Tugenhold’s translation from the governor-general in Vilna. Governor-General Golitsyn then replied to the Third Department that the booklet mentioned in the notice from Mirkin, Zlotnik, and Briskin was the same booklet he had received directly from the esteemed citizen Rabbi Mendel Schneersohn of Lubavitch, written in Hebrew. He had sent it to the Office of Religious Affairs, where they had surely translated it accurately. Since the governor-general’s office had three different translations of the booklet from three different sources, he was forwarding them to the Third Department, but he could not take responsibility for saying which translation was the most accurate. On the basis of the governor-general’s reply, the Third Department asked the Office of Religious Affairs to send it a translation of the booklet. The office complied and sent the translation prepared by Dr. Mandelstam and his colleagues. The Third Department now had four different translations of the Tzemach Tzedek’s booklet, which greatly astonished Count Orlov. He was interested in the course of the denunciations against Chassidus and the ordeals it had faced in those four periods: first, the denunciation in 5532, that is, 1772—just a moment, 1772—against the Karliners; the denunciation in 5558, that is, 1798, and the Alter Rebbe’s imprisonment; third, the denunciation in 5587, 1827, and the Mitteler Rebbe’s imprisonment; and the denunciations over the ten years from 5598, 1838, to 5608, 1848, along with the Tzemach Tzedek’s repeated detentions in 5603. Orlov then drew up his opinion on the matter as a whole and proposed that the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Education establish a special committee to examine the question of these denunciations: What was their source? Denunciations involving such serious falsifications brought disgrace upon the institutions

09:09 of government that took account of those responsible for the falsifications. At the joint conference, Minister of the Interior Sarganov reproached Minister of Education Uvarov for placing too much faith in the Jewish scholars. For many years he had trusted Dr. Lilienthal, until Lilienthal misappropriated government funds and fled, leaving no trace. Since then, he had managed matters concerning the Jews with his associates Dr. Mandelstam and Dr. Rothenberg, while abandoning the rabbis altogether. Then, on the instructions of the Minister of Education’s office, the Minister of the Interior’s office selected the six members of the current assembly. The Minister of the Interior’s office received a report from the governor of Vitebsk province and reports from the governors of Vilna, Minsk, Vilna, and other provinces, saying that the Jews were alarmed by what was happening at the assembly and were saying that there was an attempt to make them abandon their faith. Uvarov summoned Mandelstam and Rothenberg, together with four assembly members—Worbel, Eichenbaum, Bernstein, and Lifshitz—and poured out his anger on them. He rebuked them in the most disparaging terms and demanded to know how Mandelstam had dared advise him to choose four men who publicly violated Jewish religious law. Even the one rabbi he had chosen was not really a rabbi serving Jews, but a teacher at a house of study in Vilna. He also showed them the falsifications in the Tzemach Tzedek’s booklet and informed them that in a few days the assembly would be closed without adopting any resolutions at all, as though it had never taken place, and that they were to leave the city. The liberal members of the assembly—that is, the maskilim—had prepared a great deal of material, some of it dating back to the days of Catherine II and Paul. They drew up a detailed presentation on banning the import of books of Kabbalah and Chassidus from abroad, replacing the cheder with an organized school, and charging the costs of the schools to the Jews through a special tax on candles for the eve of Shabbos and Yom Tov. The assembly members were confident of success because they were in the majority, and especially because their proposal had been drafted by the renowned educator of that generation, the famous scholar Hertz

11:43 Homberg, who was the general inspector of Jewish schools in the province of Bohemia—apparently the state of Bohemia, which I think is Germany or something. The Maskilim wanted the government’s approval of their proposal to be kept secret so they would not encounter opposition. As they discussed among themselves, the right time to put their plan into action would be before the assembly closed, when he, Berur, and his deputies Stotsky and Korpov, their allies, would be favorably disposed toward them. They were worried about only one thing: the participation of the two members, Goldberg and Bashkovitz, who would certainly oppose their proposal. But after Bashkovitz and Goldberg submitted their resignations, the meetings were suspended for about three weeks. They later resumed, with two meetings still on the agenda. At the final meeting, they were supposed to read the rabbis’ responses to the five proposals and announce the matter. The second item was a proposal for managing affairs in the future and putting the plans into action—in other words, how to plan things. The third item was the closing of the assembly. The Maskilim were confident that if they presented their proposal and obtained the necessary authorization, their clever scheming would enable them to carry out their designs, as Homberg—an expert in deceit and deception—had proposed and advised. They would do everything in a foreign language, and it would all happen suddenly. Border officials would receive a secret order from the central customs office to send back any shipments of Jewish books arriving from outside the country. They would prepare schools, and when the school term began, the government offices would announce that children and young people must attend the schools instead of cheder. They needed to arrange for one of the city’s residents to lease the candle tax, and at the right moment the municipal police office would announce that the candle concession belonged to a particular shop, whose owner was the sole leaseholder, and that all candles held by anyone else would be confiscated. This way they would succeed, because by the time their opponents were alerted and submitted complaints, the deed would already be done, and negotiations would drag on until they managed to obtain

14:06 some minor concession. But Hakadosh Boruch Hu, Who sits in heaven, would laugh and mock them. The uproar over the forged copy of the Tzemach Tzedek’s pamphlet brought a terrible crisis upon the Maskilim. Their hopes were dashed, and their evil scheme was never carried out. Some time later, through the devoted work of the Committee of Communal Activists, all the details of these events became public. As a result, the government canceled the assembly, made no decisions, and published none of the proceedings or discussions of that assembly. The trickery of Mandelstam and his associates at the assembly, and their conduct in disgracing themselves by eating non-kosher food and desecrating Shabbos, brought disaster upon the Maskilim of Russia and Poland. Were it not for the help of Maskilim abroad and large sums of money, the two institutions of apostasy—the rabbinical seminaries in Vilna and Zhitomir—would have collapsed. The Maskilim were driven away from every community, with people calling after them, “Forgerers! Unfit!” Despite Mandelstam’s position as a learned Jew in the offices of the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Education, he lost favor with both ministers, and the name and memory of that Mandelstam became notorious among all the Jews of Russia.