THE FINAL DECADES of the nineteenth century found Jews in Russia, Poland, and Lithuania coming to grips with a number of new movements and philosophies. What in the previous century had been a cohesive society had, in a hundred years, been fragmented, and abandonment of religious tradition was widespread. Although the apostles of Jewish enlightenment (Haskalah), through their propagation of new ideals, had some influence in bringing about this modernization and acculturation, there were other important factors which were independent of Haskalah, although often indirectly nourished by it. Foremost among them was the need for economic improvement, which was pursued by most without any concern for, or knowledge of, the Haskalah vision. It was these economic concerns which led many young people, including women, to study at gymnasiums and universities, an extremely rare phenomenon in previous generations when those men who engaged in intellectual pursuits concentrated on rabbinic literature.

By the last two decades of the nineteenth century, although most east European Jews were still traditional, the guardians of tradition were confronted with an entirely new challenge, and never before had it been so difficult to retain the allegiance of the young. Even in the smaller towns, where adherence to tradition was always stronger than in the cities, there were signs of change, and important elements of traditional society such as arranged marriages and an education system centred on the Talmud began to be questioned.

For many of the young intellectuals, who would formerly have been expected to enter the rabbinate, the Haskalah literature, in particular Hebrew belles-lettres, became the alternative to rabbinic literature. We know that even in the great yeshiva of Volozhin there were times when this literature was popular, much to the displeasure of the yeshiva administration. It is true that even in earlier generations yeshivot were known to be centres of the Enlightenment. This phenomenon was no doubt related to the fact that many students attending the yeshivot were not dedicated to their studies but had other motives in mind, for example, finding a good wife or escaping from home. However, there is no doubt that by the last decades of the nineteenth century student interest in Haskalah literature, at the expense of talmudic studies, was much more widespread than before.