element, especially since the insurrection of 1831, by the prohibition
of the Polish language, the closing of the university, and the absence
of a Lithuanian population. The dethroned capital of a people betrayed
by its nobility became, after its abandonment by the native inhabitants,
the centre of a Jewry independent of its surroundings and undisturbed in
its internal development. Without in the least deviating from Rabbinic
traditions, its constitutional platform, Jewish society in Wilna was
gradually penetrated by modern ideas.

The humanism of the German Jews, the Haskalah, met with no effective
resistance in a comparatively enlightened world, prepared for it by the
school of the Gaon. The Rabbinical students themselves were the first
representatives of humanism in Lithuania. They became as ambitious in
cultivating the Hebrew language and studying the secular sciences
presented in it, as in searching out and examining the Talmud. Sprung
from the people, living its life and sharing in its miseries, separated
from Christian society by a barrier of prescriptions that seemed
insuperable to them, the earliest of the Lithuanian litterateurs
vitalized their young love for science and Hebrew letters with the
disinterested devotion that characterizes the idealists of the ghetto in
general.

A literary circle, known as the "Berliners", was formed in Wilna, about
1830. It was the pattern after which a large number were modelled a
little later, all of them pursuing Hebrew literature with zeal and
ardor.

Two writers of worth, both from Wilna, the one a poet, the other a prose
writer, headed the literary procession in Lithuania.