Peretz Smolenskin (1842-1885) was born in Monstriczena, Belarus, to a poor family. He was orphaned by his father and also experienced the kidnapping of his older brother by the army of Tsar Nicholas I, events that marked his childhood. At the age of 14, he entered the Shklov Yeshivah, where he stayed for four years and later spent a few months at the court of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Shneerson, in the village of Lubavitch. Disillusioned with both life in the yeshivah and the Hasidic court, he spent the following years traveling around the Jewish community, settling first in Odessa and finally in Vienna.

In 1868, he founded the Hebrew newspaper «Ha Shachar» and turned his home into a meeting place for young writers. Thanks to his work as editor of Ha Shachar, he was chosen to lead the Alliance Israelite Universelle delegation to Romania. The delegation’s purpose was to investigate the plight of the local Jewish community, who suffered from antisemitism and pogroms, and to help them establish Jewish schools.

In his novels, Smolenskin criticized the social reality of his homeland and proposed progressive changes. His characters included wealthy philanthropists, beggars, rabbis, sages, Hasidim, young people seeking their future, assimilated Jews, traditional Jews, and modern women. Smolenskin was a maskil, a follower of the Haskala, the movement that sought to preserve Jews as a unique and separate community, but within a framework of moral and cultural renewal, where Hebrew would be revived as a secular language through modern journalism and new literature. The Haskala sought the integration of the Jewish group into the surrounding societies by speaking the local language and adopting its values, culture, and appearance.

He was critical of the Hasidim and religious Jews in general, but also of the new generation who sought to shed their Jewish identity and culture. He fought against the «guardians of tradition» who opposed modernization, but also sought to stop Jews who advocated assimilation and who, he believed, posed a danger to the unity of the Jewish people and its culture. Seeing the deterioration of Jewish identity in communities across Western and Central Europe, a result of religious reform, social and economic emancipation, the abandonment of Hebrew, and integration into the country’s culture, Smolenskin concluded that the maskilim had to change their priorities.

The anti-Jewish riots in Odessa in 1871 convinced him that the Haskala, the Enlightenment, had failed in its attempt to introduce humanistic values ​​into modern society and that, for the Jewish people, the only path was cultural nationalism, based on modern Hebrew, the spiritual rather than ritualistic qualities of the Torah, and the hope of achieving national redemption in a secular rather than religious territory. Smolenskin joined the nationalist movement Hovevei Zion and in his articles continued to attack both assimilationist and religious currents, while advocating for immigration to the Land of Israel. Smolenskin was able to summarize his Judaism in one phrase: he was an enlightened Zionist.

By Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography: Articles by Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Encyclopedia, and other sources.