the _Yeshibah_ of Wolosin became the chief seat of traditional
Talmud study and Rabbinic rationalism.

One of the contemporaries of "the Gaon" was the physician Judah Hurwitz,
of Wilna, who opposed Hasidism in his pamphlet _Megillat Sedarim_
("A Book of Essays"), and in his ethical work _Ammude Bet-Yehudah_
("The Pillars of the House of Judah ", Prague, 1793), he pleads the
cause of internationalism and the equality of men and races!

It would be rash to suppose that an echo of the studies of the
Encyclopedists had reached a province double-barred and double-locked by
politics and religion. The European languages were unknown in the
Lithuanian Jewries of the Gaon's day, and his pupils sought their mental
pabulum in the writings of the Jewish scholars of the Middle Ages,
Maimonides, and Albo, and their compeers. The result was an odd,
whimsical science. False, antiquated notions and theories were
introduced through the medium of the Hebrew, and they attained no slight
vogue. At the end of the eighteenth century, a certain Elias, a Rabbi,
also of Wilna, undertook to gather all the facts of science into one
collection. He compiled a curious encyclopedia, the _Sefer ha-
Berit_ ("The Book of the Covenant"). By the side of geographic
details of the most fantastic sort, he set down chemical discoveries and
physical laws in the form of magical formulas. This book, by no means
the only one of its kind, was reprinted many a time, and in our own day
it still affords delight to orthodox readers.

A long time passed before the Russian government took note of the
intellectual condition of its Jewish subjects, who, in turn, asked
nothing better than to be left undisturbed. Nevertheless, the treatment
accorded them by the government was not calculated to inspire them with