Shklov שקלוב
The rich trading town of the Gaon's circle: from here came the first ban on the Chasidim — and from here too the first Haskalah in the Pale.
After the partition of Poland in 1772, Shklov became the richest Jewish trading town in the new Russian lands: two fairs a year, merchants from Central Asia, Moscow and Central Europe, army contractors and court Jews such as Joshua Zeitlin and Nota Notkin. Their money kept scholarship going. Much was printed here: some two hundred Hebrew books in half a century.
Shklov stands at two beginnings. The first ban on the Chasidim, in 1772, was proclaimed **here**, before Vilna. And here too the Haskalah in the Pale began: Baruch Schick, Notkin, Zeitlin.
That juxtaposition is what makes the town interesting: the enlightenment grew not against the Gaon's circle but inside it. Baruch Schick published an abridged Hebrew Euclid at The Hague in 1780 and in the preface reported the Gaon's words: to the extent a man is deficient in secular knowledge he will be a hundredfold deficient in Torah. The testimony is authentic — printed in the Gaon's lifetime and never repudiated. But it is a single, interested report of a private conversation; nothing of the kind stands in the Gaon's own writings, and scholarship reads his interest in the sciences as auxiliary: astronomy, geometry, grammar for the sake of Torah, while philosophy he called accursed.
From here too came the leaders of the Perushim aliyah — Menachem Mendel of Shklov and Israel of Shklov.
On the timeline
Sources
Documents of the period
- Baruch Schick, Sefer Uklidos, The Hague 1780 — the Gaon's words on the sciences — a single testimony
Scholarship
- D. Fishman, Russia's First Modern Jews: The Jews of Shklov — the Haskalah grew inside the Gaon's circle rather than against it
Basis: documents and evidence.