The book appeared anonymously.  This, the author assures us, was due not to humbleness of spirit, but to a vow.  His diligence and constant application had greatly impaired his eyes.  He vowed that if God restored his sight, and enabled him to finish his task, he would publish the book without disclosing his authorship.  God hearkened unto his prayers, and the work was soon completed.  But an unforeseen trouble arose.  His book was ascribed “by some to the sage of Berlin, by others to the Gaon of Vilna, and by many to the united efforts of a coterie of scholars, for it could not be believed that so many and diverse sciences could be mastered by one person.”  Moreover, the author was censured for being afraid to come out openly and boldly as a champion of Haskalah.[38] In spite of obstacles and strictures, the book met with success surpassing the author’s expectations.  It found its way not only into Russia, Poland, and Germany, but even into France, Italy, England, Holland, and Palestine.  An edition of two thousand copies was entirely exhausted, unusual at a time when books were costly and money was scarce, and another edition was issued.  What Phinehas Elijah (Hurwitz) of Vilna had sown in tears, he lived to reap in joy.

There was a crying need in Russia for a work of the sort.  In Germany the very Government encouraged organizations and publications aiming at enlightenment.  Accordingly, a Society for the Promotion of the Good and the Noble was started, and the Meassef was published.  In Russo-Poland not even a Hebrew printing-press was permitted, and certainly no periodical publications would have been tolerated.  Phinehas Elijah, therefore, grasped the opportunity, and showed himself equal to it.  His aim was, like that of the French encyclopedists, to lead his readers “through nature to God.”  He gives an account of the various sciences, natural and philosophical, as a prolegomenon to the study of theology, even of the mystic teachings of Vital’s Gates of Holiness.  Withal he evinces a sound intellect and refined, if rudimentary, taste.  He decries the “ancestor worship” that rendered the Jew of his day a fossil specimen of an extinct species.  The present is superior to the past, “a dwarf on a giant’s shoulder seeth farther than doth the giant himself.”  He ridicules the base and degrading habit of dedicating books to “benefactors, friends, lovers, parents, men, or women.”  His work was written for the glory of God, and he dedicates it to eternal, all-conquering truth.[39]

All these Maskilim, so many hands reaching out into the light, were both the cause and the consequence of the longing for enlightenment characteristic at all times of the Slavonic Jew.  Graetz and his followers among the latter-day Maskilim delighted in calling them “they that walk in darkness.”  Facts, however, prove that at no time before Nicholas I was education per se regarded with the least suspicion, though the Talmud was given the preference.  As