33.17.] These persecutions, however, did not smother the fire of protest in the breast of the excommunicated rural philosopher.

In the last years of his life he published two pamphlets, [1] in which he severely lashed the shortcomings of Jewish life, the early marriages, the one-sided school training, the repugnance to living knowledge and physical labor.
However, the champions of orthodoxy took good care to prevent these books from reaching the masses.

Exhausted by his fruitless struggle, Menashe died, unappreciated and almost unnoticed by his contemporaries.
[Footnote 1: One of these, entitled _Samme de-Hayye_ ("Elixir of Life"), was written in Yiddish, being designed by the author for the lower classes.] 2.

THE STAGNATION OF HASIDISM A critical attitude toward the existing order of things could on occasions assert itself in the environment of Rabbinism, where the mind, though forced into the mould of scholasticism, was yet working at high speed.

But such "heretical" thinking was utterly inconceivable in the dominant circles of Hasidism, where the intellect was rocked to sleep by mystical lullabies and fascinating stories of the miraculous exploits of the Tzsaddiks.