THE CHANNELS OF DISTRIBUTION

A NEW LIFE’, wrote Shalom Abramowitz, better known by his pen-name MendeleMokher Seforim (1835-1917), as he looked back nostalgically at the past, ‘was in store for the Jews, beginning with the sixties of this century, a life marked by an uplifted, light-hearted spirit, full of hopes for the future.’ Although the hopes that the maskilim pinned on the reign of the Russian tsar Alexander II (1855-81) were not always realized, and while maskilic faith in Russia's ‘benevolent government’ gradually crumbled from 1870s onwards, changes did actually take place. The Jewish population increased (from 2,350,000 in 1850 to 3,980,000 in 1880); gradually, on a selective basis, more Jews were allowed to reside outside the Jewish Pale of Settlement; some of Nicholas I's edicts were abolished, chief among them the cruel conscription of Jewish boys and young men to the army; economic patterns fluctuated, with poverty and distress increasing, on one hand, and a small class of wealthy entrepreneurs developing, on the other; and processes of acculturation were intensified, particularly in the large cities that were the destinations of internal immigration.

Changes also took place within maskilic circles. Young maskilim were exposed to Russian culture, a new generation of maskilim was affected by the prevailing spirit of modernity, and secondary streams were formed in the Haskalah movement. The numbers of maskilim grew, there was a substantial increase in works of Hebrew literature, the Jewish press offered vastly greater opportunities for publication and communication between maskilim, and the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia, founded in 1863, provided financial support for initiatives to bring the Jews closer to Russian culture.

While my reconstruction of the maskilic sense of the past in the first half of the nineteenth century was based on a handful of prominent writings, some of which were never completed, in the second half of the century the maskilim produced a large number of historical works of different types. In this chapter I will attempt to find some order in these writings, and to classify them according to their aims and the particular audiences to which they were addressed.