A survey of the changing attitude of modernized Jews to Hasidism might begin with Solomon Maimon, that 18th-century Kantian, who in his youth had personal contact with the Hasidic movement at a time when it was beginning its spectacular growth in the southern districts of Poland and the Ukraine. Maimon provides information of great historical value about Hasidism and offers some acute speculations concerning its appeal. But there is no gainsaying his disdain for a pietism so contrary to the canons of reason, as reason was understood by the 18th-century Enlightenment. In the chapter of his autobiography dealing with the attractiveness of the movement and its leadership, Maimon writes:

It is an overstatement to say that the Haskalah attitude to Hasidism was totally vitriolic, as I shall show later, but denunciation of the Hasidim as superstitious obscurantists and of the rebbes as charlatans and scoundrels was certainly the norm in maskilic circles. Another example of a critic of the Hasidic movement, who knew something of it at first hand, was the well-known Galician maskil Joseph Perl, whose in-laws were Hasidim.

Around 1816 Perl took up the cudgels of the Kulturkampf, of the sons of light versus the sons of darkness, by writing an influential anti-Hasidic work, Über das Wesen der Sekte Chassidim. In 1819 Perl wrote his wellknown satire, Megalleh Temirin (The Revealer of Secrets), one of the most delightful and cruel works of Haskalah literature. In Megalleh Temirin, Israel Zinberg notes, the Hasidim of Volhynia and Galicia and their rabbis are portrayed in only one colour - ‘pitch black'.