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Beit Yehudah ("House of Judah"), was published after considerable argument with the printers who refused to print it because of rabbinical opposition. The book purports to be a reply to 35 questions asked by "the great Christian nobleman Emanuel Lipen" (the name is a scramble of the Hebrew letters Peloni Almoni "So-and-So"). The questions deal with the nature of the Commandments, the Talmud, the Karaites, the Pharisees, the Zohar, Shabbateanism, Hasidism, and poses the question: "Is there still hope to reform the House of Israel and how?" In his basic assumptions Levinsohn follows Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem. Judaism is a law; it should not be limited to "divine law," rather it should include "civic law," involving the practices of society and the sciences required for its maintenance and development. "Civic law" may be reformed and altered, with the consent of the people, in accordance with the spirit of the times and national needs. "The Jew is free to accept the legends of the Talmud or to reject them." Modern Christians should not be regarded as idolaters because they obey the seven Noachide commandments and worship God. They are equal to Jews in respect to all the precepts involving the relations between men. The second half of the book is devoted to a historical survey of the teachings of the Jewish sages in all periods, including R. Elijah of Vilna and Moses Mendelssohn. His historical survey follows traditional lines and contains numerous errors, demonstrating the backward state of Jewish knowledge at the time. Toward the end of the book, Levinsohn presents a five-point program for the reform of Jewish life in Russia:
(a) The establishment of elementary schools for boys and girls of the lower classes. At the same time, boys and girls should learn a trade or a craft. For gifted pupils only, central colleges should be established in Warsaw, Vilna, Odessa, and Berdichev to teach Talmud and Codes, as well as "science, and various languages."
(b) The appointment of a rav kelali ("chief rabbi"), assisted by a supreme religious court, who would appoint rabbis and preachers in all the towns of Russia, under his supervision. A committee of parnasim kolelim ("communal leaders") should also be appointed mainly to defend the poor and the ordinary people "against their leaders and the rich men who suck their marrow and drink their blood."
(c) Preachers and orators should be appointed to arouse the people to good behavior, encourage them to take up trades and handicrafts, and explain to them their duties "to the Lord, to themselves, to their fellows, to the State, and to every man."
(d) Representations should be made to the government to transfer one-third of the Jews of Russia to agriculture.
(e) Luxuries should be forbidden, especially expensive feminine jewelry. These reforms should be carried out without asking for the people's consent.
Isaac Baer Levinsohn is one of the founders of the Haskalah in Russia. A child prodigy, he began heder at the age of three and composed a Kabalistic work at the age of nine. At ten, Levinsohn was versed in Talmudic lore, and knew the Hebrew Bible by heart. He mastered the Russian language, an unusual achievement for a Russian Jew of that time. From 1813 to 1820 Levinsohn lived in Eastern Galicia, where he was befriended by such leaders of the Haskalah as Nahman Krochmal, Isaac Erter, Joseph Perl, and S. J. Rapoport. From 1820–23 he spread the ideas of the Haskalah as a private tutor in wealthy homes in Berdichev and other towns. He attempted to persuade the Russian authorities to mitigate the persecution of the Jews and to introduce reforms in the spirit of the Haskalah, including a plan for agricultural settlement of Jews. It was on his advice that the Russian authorities limited the number of Hebrew printing presses to three: Warsaw and Vilna in 1836, and Zhitomir in 1846 and imposed censorship on imported Hebrew books. In 1856, the Russian government decided to support him by buying 2,000 copies of his book Beit Yehudah and distributing them to synagogues and Jewish schools.
Levinsohn’s literary work was mainly polemical and propagandistic. He published a the first Hebrew grammar for Russians in 1817. Levinsohn wrote satires against Hasidim and their zaddikim. His most influential work is Te’udah be-Yisrael, which is severely critical of traditional Hadarim which he calls “Hadrei mavet” (rooms of death) and opposes their talmudic-centered curriculum, as well as the use of Yiddish, favoring instead its replacement by “pure” German or Russian. In his second major work, Beit Yehudah (Vilna, 1838) Levinsohn, who follows Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, purports to reply to 35 questions asked by “the great Christian nobleman Emanuel Lipen” (the name is a scramble of the Hebrew letters Peloni Almoni, concerning the nature of the Commandments, the Talmud, the Karaites, the Pharisees, the Zohar, Shabbateanism, Hasidism, and poses the question: “Is there still hope to reform the House of Israel and how?” His contemporaries called him the Russian Mendelssohn.
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