 Section 1 of History of Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume 2. From the death of Alexander I until the death of Alexander III. 1825 to 1894. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by SS Kim. Seoul, South Korea. History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume 2. Chapter 13. The military despotism of Nicholas I. Part 1. Military service as a means of de-Jewization. The era of Nicholas I was typically integrated by the bloody suppression of the Decemberists and their constitutional demands, proving as it subsequently did one continuous triumph of military despotism over the liberal movements of the age. As for the emancipation of the Jews, it was entirely unthinkable in an empire which had become Europe's bulwark against the inroads of revolutionary or even moderately liberal tendencies. The new despotic regime, overflowing with aggressive energy, was bound to create after its likeness a novel method of dealing with the Jewish problem. Such a method was contrived by the iron wheel of the Russian autocrat. Nicholas I, who was originally intended for a military career, was placed under Russian throne by a whim of fate. Prior to his accession, Nicholas had shown no interest in the Jewish problem. The Jewish masses had flitted across his vision but once, in 1816, when still a young man, he traveled through Russia for his education. The impression produced upon him by these strange people is recorded by the then Grand Duke in his diary in a manner fully consistent with the official views of the government. The ruin of the peasants of these provinces are the Z's. As property holders, they are here second in importance to the landed nobility. By their commercial pursuits, they drain the strength of the helpless white Russian people. They are everything here, merchants, contractors, salon keepers, mill owners, ferry holders, artisans. They are regular leeches and so these unfortunate governments to the point of exhaustion. It is a matter of surprise that in 1812 they displayed exemplary loyalty to us and assisted us wherever they could at the risk of their lives. The characterization of merchants, artisans, mill owners and ferry holders as leeches could only spring from a conception which looked upon the Jews as transient foreigners who, by pursuing any line of endeavor, could only do so at the expense of the natives and thus abused the hospitality offered to them. No wonder then that the future Tsar was puzzled by the display of patriotic sentiments on the part of the Jewish population at the fatal juncture in the history of Russia. This immunical view of the Jewish people was retained by Nicholas when he became the master of Russian Jewish destinies. He regarded the Jews as an injurious element which had no place in a Slavonic Greek Orthodox monarchy and which therefore ought to be combated. The Jews must be rendered innocuous, must be corrected and carved by such energetic military method as in keeping with the form of government based on the principles of stone tutelage and discipline. As a result of these considerations, a singular scheme was gradually maturing in the minds of the Tsar to detach the Jews from Judaism by impressing them into a military service of a wholly exceptional character. The plan of introducing personal military service instead of the Hido-2 customary exemption tax had engaged the attention of the Russian government towards the end of Alexander I's reign and had caused a great deal of alarm among the Jewish communities. Nicholas I was now resolved to carry this plan into effect. Not satisfied with imposing a civil obligation upon a people deprived of civil rights, the Tsar desired to use the Russian military service or service marked by most extraordinary features as an educational and disciplinary agency for its Jewish subjects. The barrack was to serve as a school or rather as a factory for producing a new generation of de-Jewdized Jews who were completely crucified and if possible, Christianized. The extension of the term of military service marked by the ferocious discipline of that age to a period of 25 years. The enrollment of immature lads or practically boys there prolonged separation from a Jewish environment and finally the employment of such methods as were likely to produce an immediate effect upon the recruits in the desired direction. All this was deemed an infallible means of dissolving Russian Jewry within the dominant nation there within the dominant church. It was a direct and simplified scheme which seemed to lead in a straight line to the goal. But had the ruling spheres of Saint Petersburg known the history of the Jewish people, they might have realized that the annihilation of Judaism had in past ages been attempted more than once by other known as forcible means and that the attempt had always proved a failure. In the very first year of the new reign, the plan of transforming the Jews by military methods was formally settled in the emperor's mind. In 1826, Nicholas instructed his ministers to draft a special statute of military service for the Jews departing in some respects from the general law. In view of the fact that the new military reform was intended to include the western region, which was under the military command of the jazz brother Grand Duke Konstantin, the draft was sent to him in Warsaw for further suggestions and approval and was in turn transmitted by the Grand Duke to Senator Nicholas Novoselcev, his co-regent for investigation and report. As an experienced statesman who had familiarized himself during his administrative activity with the Jewish conditions obtaining in the western region, Novoselcev realized the grave risks involved in the imperial scheme. In a memorandum submitted by him to the Grand Duke, he argued convincingly that the sudden imposition of military service upon the Jews was bound to cause an undesirable agitation among them and that they should, on the contrary, be slowly prepared for such a radical transformation. Novoselcev was evidently well informed about the state of mind of Jewish masses. Novoselcev had the rumor of the proposed U.K.s, which is the pale of settlement, then the Jews were sieged by a tremendous excitement. It must be borne in mind that the Jewish population of western Russia had but recently been incorporated into the Russian Empire. Clean with patriarchal devotion to their religion is changed from the Russian people and kept, moreover, in a state of civil rightlessness. The Jews of that region could not be reasonably expected to gloat over the prospect of military service of 25 years duration, which was bound to alienate their sons from their ancestral faith, detach them from their native tongue, their habits and customs of life, and throw them into a strange and often hostile environment. The ultimate aim of the project, which embedded in the mind of its originators, seemed safely hidden from the eye of publicity and was quickly sensed by the delicate national instinct and the soul of the people was stirred to its depths. Public minded Jews strained every nerve to avoid the calamity. Jewish representatives journeyed to St. Petersburg and Warsaw to plead the cause of their brethren. Negotiations were entered into with dignitaries of high rank and with men of influence in the world of officialdom. Rumor had it that immense bribes had been offered to Novosiltsev and several high officials in St. Petersburg for the purpose of receiving their cooperation. But even the intercession of leading dignitaries was powerless to change the will of the tsar. It shaped under the red-taped formalities which obstructed the realization of his favorite scheme. Without waiting for the transmission of Novosiltsev's memorandum, the tsar directed the minister of the interior and the chief of the general staff to submit to him for signature on new case imposing military service upon the Jews. The fatal enactment was signed on August 26, 1827. 2. The recruiting U.K.s of 1827 and juvenile conscription. The U.K.s announces the desire of the government to equalize military duty for all estates without being noted equalize them in their rights. It further expresses the conviction that the training and accomplishments acquired by the Jews during their military service will on their return home after the completion of the number of years fixed by law. Fully a quarter of a century be communicated to their families and make for greater usefulness and higher efficiency in their economic life and in the management of their affairs. However, the statute of conscription and military service subjoined to the U.K.s was a lurid illustration of a tendency utterly at variance with the desire to equalize military duty. Had the Russian government been genuinely desirous of rendering military duty uniform for all estates, there would have been no need of issuing separately for the Jews a huge enactment of 95 clauses with supplementary instructions consisting of 62 clauses for the guidance of the civil and military authorities. All that was necessary was to declare that the general military statute applied also to the Jews. Instead, the reverse stipulation is made. The general laws and institutions are not valid in the case of the Jews when at variance with the special statute. Close 3. The discriminating character of Jewish conscription looms particularly large in the central portion of the statutes. Jewish families were stricken with terror on reading the 8th clause of the statute prescribing that the Jewish conscripts presented by the Jewish communes shall be between the ages of 12 and 25. This provision was supplemented by clause 74. Jewish minors, i.e., below the age of 18, shall be placed in preparatory establishment for military training. True, the institution of minor recruits, called Cantonist, existed also for Christians. But in their case, it was confined to the children of soldiers in active service by virtue of the principle laid down by the Arab chief that children born of soldiers were property of the military department. Whereas the conscription of Jewish minors was to be absolute and to apply to all Jewish families without discrimination. To make things worse, the law demanded that the years of preparatory training should not be included in the term of active service, the letter to start only with the age of 18, close 90. In other words, the Jewish Cantonists were compelled to serve an additional term of six years over and above the obligatory 25 years. Moreover, at the examination of Jewish conscripts, all that was demanded for their enlistment was that they be free from any disease or defect incompatible with military service. But the other qualifications required by the general rules shall be left out of consideration. The duty of enlisting the recruits was imposed upon the Jewish communes or Kahals, which were to elect for that purpose between three and six executive officers or trustees in every city. The community as such was held responsible for the supply of a given number of recruits from its own midst. It was authorized to draft into military service any Jew guilty of irregularity in the payment of taxes, of vagrancy, and other misdemeanors. In case the required number of recruits was not forthcoming within a given term, the authorities were empowered to obtain them from the derelict community by way of execution. Any irregularity on the path of the recruiting trustees was to be punished by the imposition of fines or even by sending them into the army. The following categories of Jews were exempted from military duty. Merchants holding membership in guilds, artisans affiliated with trade unions, mechanics in factories, agricultural colonists, rabbis and the Jews, few and far between at that time who had graduated from a Russian educational institution. Those exempted from military service in kind were required to pay recruiting money one thousand rubles for each recruit. The general law providing that a regular recruit could offer as his substitute or volunteer was extended to the Jews with the proviso that volunteer must also be a Jew. The instructions to the civil authorities appended to the statute specified the formalities to be followed both at the recruiting stations and in administering the oath of allegiance to the conscripts in the synagogues. The letter ceremony was to be marked by gloomy solemnity. The recruits was to be arrayed in his prayer shawl, talit and shroud kitel. With his philacteries wound around his arm, he should be placed before the ark and amidst burning candles and to the accompaniment of shofar blasts made to recite a lengthy awe-inspiring oath. The instructions to the military authorities accompanying the statute prescribed that every batch of Jewish conscripts shall be entrusted to a special officer to be watched over prior to their departure for their places of destination and shall be kept apart from the other recruits. Both in the places of conscription and on the journey, the Jewish recruits were to be quartered exclusively in the homes of Christian residents. The promulgated military constitution surpassed the very worst apprehension of the Jews. All were staggered by this sudden blow which descended crushingly upon the mode of life, the time-honored tradition and the religious ideas of Jewish people. The Jewish family-nests became a stir, trembling for their fledglings. Barely a month after the publication of the military statute, the central government in St. Petersburg was startled by the report that the Volinian town of old Konstantin had been the scene of mutiny and disorder among the Jews on the occasion of the promulgation of the UK's. Benkendorf, the chief of the gendarmerie, conveyed this information to the Tsar, who thereupon gave orders that in all similar cases, the culprits be court-measured. Evidently, the St. Petersburg authorities apprehended a whole series of Jewish mutinists as a result of the dreadful UK's and they were ready with extraordinary measures for the emergency. However, their apprehensions were unfounded. Apart from the incident referred to, there was no case of open rebellion against the authorities. As a matter of fact, even in old Konstantin, the mutiny was of a nature little calculated to be dealt with by a court-measure. According to the local tradition, the Jewish residents, Hasidim almost a man, were so profoundly stirred by the imperial UK's that they assembled in the synagogue, fasting and praying, and finally resolved to adopt energetic measures. A petition reciting the grievances against the Tsar was framed in due form and placed in the hands of a member of the community who had just died with the request that the deceased be presented to the Almighty, the God of Israel. This childlike appeal to the heavenly king from the action of an earthly sovereign and the emotional scenes accompanying it were interpreted by the Russian authorities as mutiny. Under the patriarchal conditions of Jewish life prevailing at the time, a political protest was a matter of impossibility. The only medium through which the Jews could give vent to their burning national sorrow was religious demonstration within the walls of the synagogue. End of Section 1. Section 2 of History of Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume 2. From the Death of Alexander I until the Death of Alexander III, 1825-1894 by Shimon Dubnov. Translated by Israel Friedlander. This livre-voix recording is in the public domain. Recording by SS Kim, Seoul, South Korea. Chapter 13. The military despotism of Nicholas I. Part 2. 3. Military martyrdom. The ways and means by which the provisions of the military statute were carried into effect during the reign of Nicholas I. We do not learn from official documents which seem to have drawn avail over this small strip of the past. Our information is derived from sources far more communicative and nearer to truth, the traditions current among the people. Owing to the fact that every Jewish community at the mutual responsibility of all its members was compelled by law to supply a definite number of recruits and that no one was willing to become a soldier of his own volition. The Kahal administration and the recruiting trustees who had to answer to the authorities for any shortage in recruits were practically forced to become a sort of police agent whose function it was to capture the necessary quota of recruits. Prior to every military conscription, the victims marked for prey, the young men and boys of the burger class, very generally took to flight, hiding in distant cities outside the zone of their cars or in forests and ravines. A popular song in Yiddish refers to these conditions in the following words. When the UK came down about Jewish soldiers, we all dispersed over the lonesome forest. Over the lonesome forest did we disperse. In lonesome pits did we hide ourselves. The recruiting agents hired by the Kahal or its trustees who received the nickname hunters or captors hunted down the fugitives, trailing them everywhere and capturing them for the purpose of making up the shortage. In default of a sufficient number of adults, little children who were easier catch were seized, often enough in violation of the provision of law. Even boys under the required age of 12, sometimes no more than 8 years old were caught and offered as conscripts at the recruiting stations their age being mistated. The agent perpetrated incredible cruelties. Houses were raided during the night and children were torn from the arms of their mothers or leered away and kidnapped. After being captured, the Jewish conscripts were sent into the recruiting jail where they were kept in confinement until their examination at the recruiting station. The enlisted minors were turned over to a special officer to be dispatched to their places of destination, mostly in the eastern provinces including Siberia. For it must be noted that Cantonese were stationed almost to men in the outlying Russian governments where they could be brought up at a safe distance from all Jewish influences. The unfortunate victims who were drafted into the army and deported to these far-off regions were mourned by their relatives as dead. During the autumnal season when the recruits were drafted and deported, the streets of the Jewish towns resounded with mourns. The juvenile Cantonese were packed into wagons like so many ships and carried off in batches under a military convoy. When they took the leave of their dear ones, it was for a quarter of a century. In the case of children, it was for a longer term. Too often it was goodbye for life. How these unfortunate youngsters were driven to their places of destination, we learn from the description of Alexander Herzen, who chanced to meet the batch of Jewish cancelists on his involuntary journey through Vyatka in 1835. At one of the poststations in some godforsaken village of the Vyatka government, he met the escorting officer. The following dialogue ensued between the two. Whom do you carry and to what place? Well, sir, you see, they got together a bunch of these accursed Jewish youngsters between the age of eight and nine. I suppose they are meant for the fleet, but how should I know? At first, the command was to drive them to Perum. Now there is a change. We are told to drive them to Kazam. I have had them on my hands for a hundred first or a day about. The officer that turned them over to me told me that they were an awful nuisance. A third of them remained on the road, at least the officer pointed with his finger to the ground. Half of them will not get to their destination, he added. Epidemics, I suppose. I inquired, stirred to the very core. No, not exactly epidemics, but they just fall like flies. Well, you know, these Jewish boys are so funny and delicate. They can't stand mixing dirt for ten hours with dry biscuits to leave on. Again, everywhere, strange folks, no father, no mother, no crass. Well then, you just hear a cough and the youngster is dead. Hello, corporal. Get out the small fry. The little ones were assembled and arrayed in a military line. It was one of the most terrible spectacles I have ever witnessed. Poor, poor children. The boys of twelve or thirteen managed to somehow to stand up, but the little ones of eight and ten. No brush, however black, could convey the terror of this scene on the canvas. Pale, worn out with scared looks. This is the way they stood in their uncomfortable, rough soldier uniforms, with their starched, turned up colors, fixing on inexpressibly helpless and pitiful gains upon the garrisoned soldiers who were handling them rudely. White lips, blue lines under the eyes, be tokened either fever or cold, and these poor children, without care, without crass, exposed to the wind which blows unhindered from the Arctic Ocean, were marching to their deaths. I seized the officer's hand and with the words, take good care of them, threw myself into my carriage. I felt like sobbing and I knew I could not master myself. The great Russian writer saw the Jewish Cantonist on the road, but he knew nothing of what happened to them later on in the recesses of the barracks into which they were driven. This terrible secret was revealed to the world at a later period by the few survivors among these martyred Jewish children. Having arrived at their destination, the juvenile conscripts were put into the Cantonist battalions. The preparation for military service began with the religious re-education at the hands of surgeons and corporals. No means was neglected so long as it paid fair to bring the children to the baptismal font. The authorities refrained from giving formal instructions, leaving everything to the zeal of the officers who knew the wishes of their superiors. The children were first sent for spiritual admonition to the local Greek Orthodox priests whose efforts, however, proved fruitless in nearly every case. They were then taken in hand by the surgeons and corporals who adopted military methods of persuasion. These brutal soldiers invented all kinds of tortures. Our favorite procedure was to make the Cantonists get down on their knees in the evening after all had gone to bed and to keep the sleepy children in that position for hours. Those who agreed to be baptized were sent to bed. Those who refused were kept up the whole night till they dropped from exhaustion. The children who continued to hold their own were locked and under the guise of gymnastic exercises subjected to all kinds of tortures. Those that refused to eat pork or the customary cabbage soup prepared with lard were beaten and left to starve. Others were fed unsalted fish and then forbidden to drink until the little ones, tormented by thirst, agreed to embrace Christianity. The majority of these children, unable to endure the tortures inflicted on them, saved themselves by baptism. But many Cantonists, particularly those of a mature age between 15 and 18, bore their martyrdom with heroic patience. Beaten almost into senselessness, their bodies stripped by lashes tormented to the point of exhaustion by hunger, thirst, and sleeplessness, the lets declared again and again that they would not betray the faith of their fathers. Most of these obstinate youth were carried from the barracks into the military hospitals to be released by a kind death. Only a few remained alive. Alongside of this passive heroism, there were cases of demonstrative martyrdom. One such incident has survived in the popular memory. The story goes that during a military parade in the city of Kazan, the battalion chipped through of all the Jewish Cantonists on the banks of the river, where the Greek Orthodox priests were standing in their vestments and all was ready for the baptismal ceremony. At the command to jump into the water, the boys answered in military fashion, I.I. Whereupon they dived under and disappeared. When they were draped out, they were dead. In most cases, however, these little martyrs suffered and died noiselessly in the gloom of the guardhouses, barracks, and military hospitals. They strode with their tiny bodies the lords that led into the outlying legions of the empire and those that managed to get their war fading away slowly in the barracks, which had been turned into inquisitorial dungeons. This martyrdom of children set in a military environment represents a singular phenomenon even in the extensive annals of Jewish meteorology. Such was the lot of the juvenile Cantonists. As for the adults recruits who were drafted into the army at the normal age of conscription, 18-25, their conversion to Christianity was not pursued by the same direct methods, but their faith was not with less tragic from the moments of their capture till the end of their previous 25-year service. Youths who had no knowledge of the Russian language were torn away from the Heather or Yeshiva, often from wife and children. In consequence of the early marriages then involved, most youths at the age of 18 were married. The impending separation for a quarter of a century added to the danger of the soldiers' apostasy or death in far-off regions often disrupted their family ties. Many recruits, before entering upon their military career, gave their wives a divorce so as not to doom them to perpetual widowhood. At the end of 1834, rumors began to spread among the Jewish masses concerning a law which was about to be issued, forbidding all the marriages but exempting from conscription those married prior to the promulgation of the law. A panic ensued. Everywhere feverish haste was displayed in marrying off boys from 10 to 15 years old to girls of an equally tender age. Within a few months, there appeared in every city hundreds and thousands of such couples whose marital relations were often confined to playing with nuts or bones. The misunderstanding which had caused this senseless, matrimonial panic or beholo, as it was afterwards popularly called, was cleared up by the publication on April 13, 1835 of the New Statute on the Jews. To be sure, the new law contained a clause forbidding marriage before the age of 18, but it offered no privileges for those already married so that the only result of the beholo was to increase the number of families rubbed by the conscription of their heads and supporters. The years of military service were spent by the groan of Jewish soldiers amidst extraordinary hardships. They were beaten and ridiculed because of their inability to express themselves in Russian, their refusal to eat trefa and their general lack of adaptation to their strange environment and to the military mode of life. And even when this process of adaptation was finally accomplished, the Jewish soldier was never promoted beyond the position of a non-commissioned on the officer, baptism being the inevitable stepping stone to a higher rank. True, the Statute on military service promised those Jewish soldiers who had completed their term in the army with distinction or the mission to the civil service, but the promise remained on paper so long as the candidates were loyal to Judaism. On the contrary, the Jews who had completed their military service and had in most cases become invalids were not even allowed to spend the rest of their lives in the localities outside the pail, in which they had been stationed as soldiers. Only at the later period, during the reign of Alexander II, was this rights accorded to the Nicholas soldiers and their descendants. The full weight of conscription fell upon the poorest classes of the Jewish population, the so-called burger estate, consisting of petty artisans and those impoverished tradesmen who could not afford to enroll in the mercantile guilds. Those their cases on record were poor Jews backed from door to door to collect a sufficient sum of money for a guild certificate in order to save their children from military service. The more or less well-to-do were exempted from conscription, either by virtue of their mercantile status or because of their connections with the Kahal leaders who had the power of selecting the victims. Four, the policy of expurgence. In all lands of Western Europe, the introduction of personal military service for the Jews was either accompanied or preceded by their emancipation. At all events, it was followed by some mitigation of their disabilities, serving, so to speak, as an honest of the grant of equal rights. Even in clerical Austria, the imposition of military duty upon the Jews was preceded by the tolerance patent. This would be act of emancipation. In Russia, the very reverse took place. The introduction of military conscription of the most aggravating kind and the unspeakable cruelties attending its practical execution were followed. In the case of the Jews, by an unprecedented ecrudence of legislative discrimination and monstrous increase of their disabilities, the Jews were lashed with the double notes of military and civil. In the same ill-fate year which saw the promulgation of the conscription statute, barely three months after it had received the imperial sanction, while the moans of the Jews, fasting and praying to God to deliver them from the calamity, were still echoing in the synagogues. Two new U-cases were issued, both signed on December 2, 1827. They won decreeing the transfer of the Jews from all villages and village ins in the government of Grodno into the towns and townlets, the other ordering the banishment of all Jewish residents from the city of Kiev. The expulsion from the Grodno villages was the continuation of the policy of the rural liquidation of Jewry, inaugurated in 1823 in White Russia. The Grodno province was merely meant to serve as a starting point. Grand Jew Konstantin, who had brought up the question, was ordered at first to carry out the expulsion in the government of Grodno alone, and to postpone for a later occasion the application of the same measure to the other government's entrusted to his command. Simultaneously, considerable foresight was displayed in instructing the Grand Duke to wait with the expulsion of the Jews until the conclusion of the military conscription going on at present. Evidently, there was some fear of disorders and complications. It was thought wiser to siege the children for the army first and then to expel the parents, to get hold of the young birds than to destroy the nest. The expulsion from Kiev was of a different order. It marked the beginning of a new system, the narrowing down of the urban area allotted to the Jews within the pale of settlement. Since 1794, the Jews had been allowed to settle in Kiev freely. They had formed there with official sanction on important community and had vastly developed commerce and industry. Suddenly, however, the government discovered that their presence is detrimental to the industry of this city and to the exchequer in general, and is moreover at variance with the rights and privileges conferred at different periods upon the city of Kiev. The discovery was followed by a grim script from St. Petersburg, forbidding not only the further settlement of Jews in Kiev, but also prescribing that even though settled there long ago should leave the city within one year, those owning a movable property within two years. Henceforward, only the temporary surgeon of Jews for a period of not exceeding six months was to be permitted and to be limited, moreover to merchants of the first two guilds who arrived in connection with contracts and fares were to attend to public bids and deliveries. In 1829, the whip of expulsion cracked over the backs of the Jews, dwelling on the shores of the Baltic and the Black Sea. In Coreland and Livonia, measures were taken looking to the reduction of the number of Jews, which had been considerably swelled by the influx of newcomers of Jews not born in those provinces and therefore having no right to settle there. The Tsar endorsed the proposal of the Jewish Committee to transfer from Coreland all Jews not born there into the cities in which their birth was registered. Those not yet registered in a municipality outside the province were granted a half years' respite for that purpose. If within the prescribed term they failed to attend to their registration, they were to be sent to the army or in case of unfitness for military service deported to Siberia. In the same year, an imperial U.K. declared that the residents of civilian Jews in the cities of Sevastopol and Nikolayev was inconvenient and injurious in view of the military and naval importance of these places and therefore decreed the expression of their Jewish residents, those owning real property within two years, the others within one year. By a new U.K. issued in 1830, the Jews were expelled from the villages and hamlets of the government of Kiev. Those were human beings heard about from village to town, from city to city, from province to province, with no more concern than might be displayed in the transportation of cattle. This process of mobilization had reached its climax when the Polish insurrection of 1830 to 1831 broke out affecting the whole western region. Fearing less the persecuted Jews might be driven into the arms of the Poles, the government decided on a strategic retreat. In February 1831, in consequence of the representations of the local military commander, who urged the government to take into consideration the present political circumstances in each day, the Jews may occasionally prove useful the final explosion of the Jews from Kiev was postponed for three years. At the end of the three years, the governor of Kiev made similar representations to St. Petersburg, emphasizing the desirability of allowing the Jews to remain in the city. Even though it might become necessary to segregate them in a special quarter, this, i.e. their remaining in the city, being found useful also in this respect, that on account of their temperate and simple habits of life, they are in a position to sell their goods considerably cheaper, whereas in the case of the explosion, many articles and manufacturers will rise in price. Nikolas I rejected this plea and only agreed to postpone the explosion until February 1835 for the reason that the new statute concerning the Jews, then in preparation which was to define the general legal status of Russian Jewry, was expected to be ready by that time. Similar short reprieves were granted to the Jews about to be exiled from Nikolaev from the villages of the government of Kiev and from other places. End of Section 2, Section 3 of History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, Volume 2, from the death of Alexander I until the death of Alexander III, 1825 to 1894 by Shimon Dubnov, translated by Israel Friedlander. This Liberty Box recording is in the public domain, recording by SS Kim, Seoul, South Korea. Chapter 13, The Military Despotism of Nikolas I. Part 3, 5, The Codification of Jewish Disabilities. No sooner had the conscription new case been issued, then the bureaucrats of St. Petersburg began to apply themselves in the hidden recesses of their chancelors to a new civil court for the Jews, which was to supersede the antiquated statute of 1804. The work passed through a number of departments. The projected enactment was framed by the Jewish Committee, which had been established in 1823 for the purpose of bringing about a reduction of the number of Jews in the monarchy and consisted of cabinet ministers and the chips of departments. Originally, the department chips had elaborated a draft covering 1230 clauses, a gigantic code of disabilities, evidently founded on the principle that in the case of Jews, everything is forbidden, which is not permitted by special legislation. The dimension of the draft was such that even the government was appalled and decided to turn it over to the ministerial members of the committee. Modified in shape and reduced in size, the code was submitted in 1834 to the Department of Laws, forming part of the Council of State, and after careful discussion by the Department of Laws was brought up at the plenary sessions of the council. The ministerial draft, though smaller in bulk, was marked by such civility that the Department of Laws founded necessary to turn it down. The ministers, with the exception of the Minister of Finance, had proposed to transfer all Jews within a period of three years from the villages to the towns and townlets. The Department of Laws considered this measure too risky, pointing to the white Russian expulsion of 1823, which had failed to produce the expected results, and while it has ruined the Jews, it does not in the least seem to have improved the conditions of the villages. The plenum of the council agreed with the Department of Laws that the proposed expulsion of the Jews from the villages, being extremely difficult of execution and being of problematic benefit, should be eliminated from the statute and should be stopped even there, while it had been decreed but not carried into effect. The report was laid before the Tsar, who attached to it the following resolution. Where this measure of expulsion had been started, it is inconvenient to repeal it, but it shall be postponed for the time being in the governments in which no steps towards it have as yet been made. For a number of years, this resolution hung like the sword of Damocles over the heads of the rural jury. Less yielding was the Tsar's attitude on the question of the partial enlargement of the paleopsettlement. The Department of Laws had suggested to grant the merchants of the First Guild the right of residence in the Russian interior in the interest of the exchequer and big business. At the general meeting of the council of state, only a minority, 13, voted for the proposer. The majority, 22, argued that they had no right to violate the time under the tradition dating from the time of Peter the Great, which bars the Jews from the Russian interior. That, to automate them would produce a very unpleasant impression upon our people, which, on account of its religious notions and its general estimate of the moral peculiarities of the Jews, has become accustomed to keep aloof from them and to despise them. That the countries of Western Europe, which had accorded full citizenship to the Jews, cannot serve as an example for Russia, partly because of the incomparably larger number of Jews living here, partly because our government and people with all their well-known tolerance are yet far from that indifference with which certain other nations look upon religious matters. After marking his approval of the last wars by the marginal exclamation, thank God, the Tsar disposed of the whole matter in the following brief resolution. This question has been determined by Peter the Great. I dare not change it. I completely share the opinion of the 22 members. While on this occasion, the Tsar endorsed the opinion of the council as represented by its majority, in case in which it proved favorable to the Jews, he did not hesitate to set it aside. Thus, the Department of Laws as part of the Council of State and following in its wake, the council itself had timidly suggested to Nicholas to comply in part with the plea of the Jews for mitigation of the rigors of conscription, but the imperial verdict read to be left as here to fall. Nicholas remained equally firm on the question of the expulsion from Kiev. The Department of Laws, guided by the previously mentioned representation of the local governor, favoured the postponement of the expulsion and 14 members of the Plenary Council agreed with the suggestion of the department and resolved to recommend it to the benevolent consideration of His Majesty. In other words, to request the Tsar to revoke the painful new case. But 15 members rejected all such propositions on the ground that, as far as that question was concerned, the imperial will was unmistakable, the Tsar having decided the matter in a sense unfavorable to the Jews. In a similar manner, numerous other decisions of the Council of State were dictated not so much by inner conviction as by fear of the clearly manifest imperial will, which no one dared to cross. Under these circumstances, the entire draft of the statute passed through the Council of State. In its session of March 28, 1835, the Council voted to submit it to the Emperor for his signature. On this occasion, a solitary and belated voice was raised in defense of the Jews without evoking an echo. A member of the Council, Admiral Greg, who was brave enough to swim against the current, submitted a special opinion on the proposed statute in which he advocated a number of elevations in the intolerable legal status of the Jews. Greg put the whole issue in a nutshell. Are the Jews to be suffered in the country or not? If they are, then we must abandon the system of hampering them in their actions and in their religious customs and grant them at least equal liberty of commerce with others. For, in this case, we may anticipate more good from their gratitude than from their hatred. Should, however, the conclusion be reached that the Jews ought not to be tolerated in Russia, then the only thing to be done is to banish them all without exception from the country into foreign lands. This might be more useful than to allow this estate to remain in the country and to keep it in a position which is bound to arouse in them continual dissatisfaction and resentment. It need scarcely be added that the voice of the queer Admiral found no hearing. Nor did the Jewish people manage to get the hearing. Stunned by the uninterrupted succession of blows and moved by the spirit of martyrdom, Russian Jewry kept its peace during those dismal years. Yet, when the news of an impending general regulation of the Jewish legal status began to leak out, a section of Russian Jewry became a stir. For, to anticipate a blow is more excruciating than to receive one. And it was quite natural that an attempt should be made to stay in the hands which was lifted to strike. Towards the end of 1833, the Council of State received, as part of the material bearing on the Jewish question, two memoranda. One from the Car of Vilna, signed by six elders and another from little man Fagin of Chernigov, well known in administrative circle as merchant and public contractor. The Car of Vilna declared that the repressive policy pursued during the last few years by the Jewish committee had drawn a large part of Jewish people into utmost disorder and had made the Jews shiver and shudder at the thought that a general Jewish statute had been drafted by the same committee and had now been submitted to the Council of State for revision. The petitioners go on to say that weighed down by a succession of cruel discriminations affecting not only their rights but also their mode of discharging military service, the Jews would succumb to utter despair. Did they not repose their hopes in the benevolence of the Tsar, who on his recent trip through the western provinces had expressed it to the deputies of the Jewish communes, his imperial satisfaction with the royalty to the throne, displayed by the Jews during the Polish insurrection of 1831. The Car of Vilna therefore implored the Council of State to turn its attention to this unfortunate and maligned people and to stop all further persecutions. A more emphatic note of protest is sounded in the Memorandum of Wagon. By a string of references to the latest government measures, he demonstrates the fact that the Jewish people is hunted down not because of its moral qualities but because of its faith. The Jews, faced by the new statute, had lost all hope for a better law in as much as the government has embarked upon this measure without having solicited the explanations or justifications of these people, whereas according to the common legal procedure, even an individual may not be condemned without having been called upon to justify himself. The review had no effect. The government preferred to render its verdict in absentia without listening to Council for the defense and without any safeguards of fair play. In line with this attitude, it also denied the petition of the Vilna cahire to be allowed to send at least four deputies to the capital as spokesmen of the entire Jewish people for the purpose of submitting to the government their explanations and propositions concerning the reorganization of the Jews after having been presented with the draft of the statute. The final verdict was pronounced in the spring of 1835 and in April, the new statute concerning the Jews received the signature of the Tsar. This chart of disabilities, which was destined to operate for many decades, represents a combination of the Russian ground laws concerning the Jews and the restrictive bylaws issued after 1804. The pale of settlement was now accurately defined. It consisted of Lithuania and the southwestern provinces without any territorial restrictions. White Russia minus the villages, Little Russia minus the crown hamlets, New Russia minus Nikolayev and Sebastopol, the government of Kiev minus the city of Kiev, the Baltic provinces for the old settlers only, while the rural settlements on the entire 50th verse zone along the western frontier were to be closed to new comers. As for the interior provinces, all the temporary fallows, limited to six weeks and to be certified by governatorial passports, were to be granted for the execution of judicial and commercial affairs with the proviso that the travelers should wear Russian instead of Jewish dress. The merchants affiliated with the 1st and 2nd guilds were allowed in addition to visit the two capitals, the seaports as well as the fairs of Nizhny Novgorod, Harkov and other big fairs for wholesale buying or selling. The Jews were forbidden to employ Christian domestics for permanent employment. They could hire Christians for occasional services only, unconditioned that the latter live in separate quarters. Merges at an earlier age than 18 for the bridegroom and 16 for the bride were forbidden under the pain of imprisonment. A prohibition which the defective legislation of birth and marriages then invoked made it easy to evade. The language to be employed by the Jews in their public documents was to be Russian or any other local dialect, but under no circumstances the Hebrew language. The function of the Ka'al according to the statute is to see to it that the instructions of the authorities carried out precisely and that the state taxes and communal assessments are correctly limited. The Ka'al elders are to be elected by the community every two years from among persons who can read and write Russian subject to their being ratified by the Gobernatorial Administration. At the same time, the Jews are entitled to participation in the municipal elections. Those who can read and write Russian are eligible as members of the town councils and magistracies. The supplementary law of 1836 fixed the rate at one third, accepting the city of Villa where the Jews were entirely excluded from municipal self-government. Synagogues may not be built in the vicinity of churches. The Russian schools of all grades are to be opened to Jewish children who are not compelled to change their religion. Close 106 or welcome provision in view of the compulsory methods which had then become habitual. The coercive baptism of Jewish children was provided for in a separate enactment, the statute on conscription, which is declared to remain in force. In this way, the statute of 1835 reduces itself to a codification of the whole mess of the preceding anti-Jewish legislation. Its only positive feature was that it put a stop to the explosion from the villages which had ruined the Jewish population during the years 1804 to 1836. The Russian censorship and conversionist endeavors. With all its discriminations the promulgation of this general statute was far from checking the feverish activity of the government. With indefatigable zeal, its hands went on turning the legislative heel and squeezing ever tighter the already unbearable vice of Jewish life. The slightest attempt to escape from its pressure was punished ruthlessly. In 1838, the police of St. Petersburg discovered a group of Jews in the capital with expired passports. These Jews, having extended their stay there, a little beyond the term fixed for Jewish travelers, and the tsar cutely decreed to be sent to serve in the panel companies of Kronstadt. In 1840, heavy fines were imposed upon the landed proprietors in the great Russian governments for keeping all of the Jews under estates. Considerable attention was bestowed by the government on placing the spiritual life of the Jews on the police supervision. In 1836, a censorship campaign was launched against Hebrew literature. Hebrew books, which were then almost exclusively of religious nature, such as prayer books, Bible and Talmud editions, rabbinic, Kabbalistic and Hasidic writings were then issuing from the printing presses of Vilna, Slavta and other places, and were subject to a rigorous censorship exercised by Christians or by Jewish converts. Practically, every Jewish home library consisted of religious works of this type. The suspicion of the government was aroused by certain Jewish converts who had insinuated that the foreign editions of these works and those that had appeared in Russia itself prior to the establishment of a censorship were of an injurious character. As a result, all Jewish home libraries were subject to a search. Orders were given to deliver into the hands of the local police in the course of that year, all foreign Hebrew prints as well as the uncensored editions published at any previous time in Russia and to entrust their revision to dependable rabbis. These rabbis were instructed to put their stamp on the books approved by them and returned the books not approved by them to the police for transmission to the Ministry of the Interior. The regulation involved the entire ancient Hebrew literature printed during the 16th, 17th and 18th century prior to the establishment of the Russian censorship. In order to facilitate the supervision of the new publications or reprints from older editions, all Jewish printing presses which existed at the time in various cities and towns were ordered closed and only those of Vilna and Kiev to which special censors were attached were allowed to remain. As the Hebrew orders of antiquity or the Middle Ages did not fully anticipate the requirements of the Russian censors, many classic works were found to contain passages which were thought to be at variance with imperial enactments. By the UK's of 1836, all books of this kind circulating in tens of thousands of copies had to be transported to St. Petersburg under a police escort to await their final verdict. The procedure however proved too cumbersome and in 1837 the emperor, complying with the petitions of the governors, was graciously pleased to comment that all these books be delivered to the flames on the spot. This out-of-the-fair was to be witnessed by a member of the government or administration and the special dependable official dispatched by the governor for the sole purpose of making a report to the central government on every literary conflagration of this kind and forwarding to the ministry of the interior, one copy of each unallied book. But even this was not enough to satisfy the lust of the Russian censorship. It was now suspected that even the dependable rebels might pass many a book as harmless, though its contents were subversive of the public will. As a result, a new UK's was issued in 1841, placing the rabbinical censors themselves under government control. All uncensored books, including those already passed as harmless, were ordered to be taken away from the private libraries and forwarded to the censorship committees in Vilna and Kiev. The letter was instructed to attach their seals to the approved books and deliver to the flames the books condemned by them. Endless wagonload of these confiscated books could be seen moving toward Vilna and Kiev. And for many years afterwards, the literature of the people of the book covering a period of three millenniums was still languishing in the jail of censorship, waiting to be saved from what to be sentenced to a fiery death by a Russian official. It is almost unnecessary to add that the primitive method of solving the Jewish problem by means of conversion was still the guiding principle of the government. The Russian legislation of that period teams with regulations concerning apostasy. The surrender of the synagogue to the church seemed merely a question of time. In reality, however, the government itself believed but half-heartedly in the sincerity of the converted Jews. In 1827, the Tsar put down in his own handwriting the following resolution. It is to be strictly observed that the baptismal ceremony shall take place unconditionally on a Sunday and with all possible publicity so as to remove all suspicion of a pretended adoption of Christianity. Subsequently, this watchfulness had to be lexed in the case of those who avoid publicity in adopting Christianity, more especially in the case of the Cantonists who have declared their willingness to embrace the Orthodox faith under the effect we may add of the tortures in the barracks. Sincerity under these circumstances was out of the question and in 1831 the battalion chaplains were authorized to baptize these helpless creatures even without applying for permission to the ecclesiastic authorities. The barrack missionaries were frequently successful among these unfortunate military prisoners. In the imperial scripts of that period, the characteristic expression, privates from among the Jews remaining in the above faith, figures as a standing designation for that group of refractory and incorrigible soldiers who disturbed the officially pre-established harmony of epidemic conversion by remaining loyal to Judaism. But among the civilian Jews who had not been detached from their Jewish environment, apostasy was extraordinarily rare and law after law was promulgated in vain, offering privileges to converts or leniency to criminals who are ready to embrace the Orthodox creed. End of section 3 Section 4 of History of the Jews in Russia in Poland Volume 2 From the death of Alexander I until the death of Alexander III 1825 to 1894 by Szymon Dubnop Translated by Israel Friedländer This LibriVox recording is in the public domain Recording by SS Kim, Seoul, South Korea Chapter 14 Compulsory enlightenment and increased oppression Part 1 1 Enlightenment as a means of assimilation There was a brief moment of respite when, in the phrase of the Russian poet, the fighter's hand was tired of killing. The Russian government suddenly felt the need of passing over from the medieval forms of patronage to a more enlightened and perfected method. Among the leading statesmen of Russia were men, such as the Minister of Public Instruction, Sergius Ubarov, who were well acquainted with Western European ways and fully aware of the fact that the reactionary governments of Austria and Prussia had invented several contrivances for handling the Jewish problem, which might be usedfully applied in their own country. Though anxious to avoid all contact with the Latin West and being in constant fear of European political movements, the Russian government was nevertheless ready to siege upon the relics of enlightened absolutism, which was still stalking about, particularly in Austria in the early decades of the 19th century. As far as Prussia was concerned, the abundance of assimilated and converted Jews in that country and their attempts at religious reform, which, to a missionary's imagination, were identical with the change of front in favor of Christianity, had a fascination of its own for the Russian dignitaries. No wonder then that the government yielded to the temptation to use some of the contrivances of Western European reaction while holding in reserve the Polish note of genuine Russian manufacture. In 1840, the Council of State was again busy discussing the Jewish question, this time from a theoretic point of view. The reports of the provincial administrator, in particular dead of Bivikov, Governor-General of Kiev, dwelled under fact that even the Statute of 1835 had not succeeded in correcting the Jews. The root of the evil lay rather in their religious fanaticism and separatism, which could only be removed by changing their inner life. The ministers of public instruction and of the interior, Ubarov and Stroganov took occasion to expound the principles of their new system of correction before the Council of State. The discussions culminated in a remarkable memorandum submitted by the Council to Nicholas I. In this document, the government confesses its importance in grappling with the defects of the Jewish masses, such as the absence of useful labor, their harmful pursuit of petty trading, vagrancy and obstinate aloofness from general civic life. Its failure, the government ascribes to the fact that the evil of Jewish exclusiveness has either to not been attacked at its root, the latter being embedded in the religious and communal organization of the Jews. The fountain head of all misfortunes is the Talmud, which fosters in the Jews utmost contempt toward the nations of other faiths, and implants in them the desire to rule over the rest of the world. As a result of the obnoxious teachings of the Talmud, the Jews cannot but regard their presence in any other land except Palestine as a sojourn in captivity, and they are held to obey their own authorities rather than a strange government. This explains the omnipotence of the Kahals, which, contrary to the law of the state, employ secret means to uphold their autonomous authority both in communal and judicial matters, using for this purpose the uncontrolled sums of the special Jewish revenue, the meat tax. The education of the Jewish youth is entrusted to Melamed, a class of domestic teachers immersed in profoundest ignorance and superstition, and under the influence of these fanatics, the children imbibe punishment notions of intolerance towards other nations. Finally, the special dress worn by the Jews helps to keep them apart from the surrounding Christian population. The Russian government had adopted a series of protective measures against the Jews without producing any marked effect. Even the conscription statute had succeeded to a limited extent only in alerting the habits of the Jews. Mere promotion of agriculture and of Russian schooling had been found inadequate. The expulsions from the villages had proved equally fruitless. The Jews, to be sure, have been ruined, but the conditions of the rustics has shown no improvements. It is evident, therefore, the council declares that restrictions which go only halfway or are externally imposed by the police are not sufficient to direct this huge mess of people towards useful occupations. With the patience of matters, the Jews of Western Europe had endured the most uterocious persecutions and had yet succeeded in keeping their national type intact until the government took the trouble to inquire more deeply into the causes separating the Jews from general civic life so as to be able to attack the causes themselves. After blurting out the truth that the government's ultimate aim was the obliteration of the Jewish individuality and modestly yielding the palm in inflicting the most uterocious persecutions upon the Jews to Western Europe, where, after all, they were receding into the past while in Russia, they were still the order of the day. The Council of State proceeds to consider the example set by foreign countries and lingers with particular affection over the Prussian regulation of 1797 issued by the country for its recently occupied Polish provinces, the Prussian Emancipation Edict of 1812. The memorandum very shortly passes over in silence and on the system of compulsory schooling adopted by Austria. Taking its clue from the West, the Council delineates three ways of bringing about radical transformation of these people. One, cultural reforms, such as the establishment of special secular schools for Jewish youth, the fight against the old-fashioned headers and melamets, the transformation of the rabbinates, and the prohibition of Jewish dress. Two, abolition of Jewish autonomy, consisting in the dissolution of the chaos and the modification of the system of special Jewish taxation. Three, increase of Jewish disabilities by segregating from their midst all those who have no established domicile and are without definite financial status, with the view of subjecting them to disciplinary correction through explosions, legal restrictions, intensified conscription, and similar police measures. In this manner, the memorandum concludes, it may be hoped that by coordinating all the particulars of this proposition with the fundamental idea of reforming the Jewish people and by taking compulsory measures to aid, the goal of the government will be attained. As a result of this expose of the Council of State, an imperial rescript was issued on December 27, 1840, calling for the establishment of a committee for defining measures looking to the radical transformation of the Jews of Russia. Count Kizilev, Minister of the Crown Domains, was appointed chairman. The other members included the ministers of public instructions and the interior, the assistant minister of finance, the director of the second section of the Imperial Chancellery, and the chief of the political police, were the dreaded third section. The letter was entrusted with special tasks to keep a watchful eye on the intrigues and actions which may be resulted to by the Jews during the execution of this matter. Moreover, the exposure of the Council of State, which was to serve as the program of the new committee, was sent out to the governor's general of the western region, confidentially for personal information and consideration. The reformatory campaign against the Jews was thus started without any formal declaration of war under the guise of secrecy and surrounded by police precautions. The procedure to be followed by the committee was to consider the project in the order indicated in the memorandum. First, enlightenment, then abolition of autonomy, and finally, disabilities. Two, Ubarov and Lelyentr. An elaborate exposure on the question of enlightenment was composed and laid before the committee by the minister of public instruction, Sergei Ubarov. Having acquired the bone tone of Western Europe, Ubarov prefaces his statement by the remark that the European governments have abandoned the method of persecution and conversion in solving the Jewish question, and that this period has also arrived for us. Nations of service Ubarov are not exterminated, least of all the nations which stood at the foot of Calvary. From what follows, it seems evident that the minister is still in hopes that the gentle measures of enlightenment may attract the Jews towards the religion which derives its origin from Calvary. The best among the Jews, he states, are conscious of the fact that one of the principal causes of their humiliation lies in the provocative interpretation of their religious tradition that the Talmud demoralized and continues to demoralize their co-religionists. But nowhere is the influence of the Talmud so potent among us in Russia and in the Kingdom of Poland. This influence can be counteracted only by enlightenment and the government can do no better than to act in the spirit that animates the handful of the best among them. The re-education of the learned section among the Jews involves at the same time the purification of their religious conceptions. What purification the author of the memorandum has in mind may be gathered from his casual remark that the Jews who maintain their separatism are rightly afraid of reforms, for is it not the religion of the cross, the purest symbol of universal citizenship? This, however, uvara cautiously adds, should not be made public for it would have no other effect except that of arousing from the very beginning the opposition of the majority of the Jews against the projected schools. Officially, the reform must confine itself to the opening in all the cities of the Jewish pale of elementary and secondary schools in which Jewish children should be taught the Russian language, secular sciences, Hebrew, and religion according to the Holy Writ. The instruction should be given in Russian, though all into the shortage in teachers familiar with this language, the use of German is to be admitted temporarily. The teachers in the lower grade schools shall provisionally be recruited from among members who can be depended upon. Those in the higher grade schools shall be chosen from among the modernized Jews of Russia and Germany. The committee endorsed uvara's scheme in its principal features and urgently recommended that in order to prepare the Jewish message for the impending reform, a special propagandist be sent into the pale of settlement for the purpose of acquainting this obstreperous nation with the benevolent intentions of the government. Such a propagandist was soon found in the person of young German Jew, Dr. Max Lillienter, resident of Riga. Lillienter, who was a native of Bavaria, he was born in Munich in 1815 and the German university graduate was a typical representative of the German Jewish intellectual of that period, a champion of assimilation and of moderate religious reform. Lillienter had scarcely completed his university course when he was offered by a group of educated Jews in Riga, the post of preacher and director of the new local Jewish school, one of the three modern Jewish schools then in existence in Russia. In a short time, Lillienter managed to raise the instruction in secular and Jewish subjects to such a high standard of modernity that he elicited a glowing tribute from uvara. The minister was struck by the idea that the Riga school might serve as a model for the net of schools with which he was about to cover the whole pale of settlement and Lillienter seemed the logical man for carrying out the planned reforms. In February 1841, Lillienter was summoned to St. Petersburg where he had prolonged conversation with uvara. According to the testimony of the official Russian sources, he tried to appreciate the minister to abolish all private schools, the headers and to forbid all private teachers, the melamets to teach even temporarily in the projected new schools and to import instead the whole teaching staff from Germany. Lillienter himself tells us in his memoir that he made bold to remind the minister that all obstacles in the path of the desired reeducation of the Russian Jews would disappear were the Tsar to grant them complete emancipation. To this, the minister retorted that the initiative must come from the Jews themselves who first must try to deserve the favor of the sovereign. At any rate, Lillienter accepted the proper task. He was commissioned to tour the pale of settlement to organize there the few isolated progressive Jews, the lovers of enlightenment or masculine as they styled themselves and to propagate the idea of school reform among the Orthodox Jewish masses. While setting out his journey, Lillienter himself did not fully realize the difficulties of the task he had undertaken. He was to instill confidence in the benevolent intentions of the government into the heart of the people which by an uninterrupted series of persecutions and cruel restrictions had been reduced to the level of barriers. He was to make them believe that the government was well-visual of Jewish children. Those same children who at that very time were hunted like wild beasts by the captors in the streets of the pale, who were turned by the thousands into soldiers, deported into outlying provinces and belabored in such a manner that scarcely half of them remained alive and barely a tenth remained within the Jewish fold. Guided by an infallible instinct, the plain Jewish people formulated their own simplified theory to account for the step taken by the government. Up to the present, their children had been baptized through the barracks. In the future, they would be baptized through the additional medium of the school. Lillienter arrived in Vilna in the beginning of 1842 and calling a meeting of the Jewish community, explained the plan conceived by the government and by Uvarov, the friend of the Jews. He was listened to with unveiled distrust. The elders, Lillienter tells us in his memoirs, said they are absorbed in deep contemplation. Some of them, leaning on their silver-adorned steps or smoothing their long beards, seemed as if agitated by honest thoughts and justifiable suspicions. Others were engaging in a lively but quiet discussions on the principles involved. Such put me the ominous question. Doctor, are you fully acquainted with the leading principles of our government? You are a stranger. Do you know what you are undertaking? The cause pursued against all denomination, but the Greek proves clearly that the government intends to have but one church in the whole empire. That it has in view only its own future strengths and greatness and not our own future prosperity. We are sorry to state that we put no confidence in the new measures proposed by the Ministerial Council and that we look with gloomy foreboding into the future. In his reply, Lillienter advanced an impressive array of arguments. What will you gain by your resistance to the new measures? It will only irritate the government and will determine to pursue its system of repression while at present, you are offered an opportunity to prove that the Jews are not enemies of culture and deserve a better lot. When questioned as to whether the Jewish community had any guarantee that the government plan was not a failed attempt to undermine the Jewish religion, Lillienter, by way of reply, solemnly pledged himself to draw off his mission the moment he would find that the government associated with it secret intentions against Judaism. The circle of enlightened Jews in Vilnapp pledged his support to Lillienter and he left full of faith in the success of his enterprise. A cruel disappointment awaited him in Minsk. Here, the arguments which the opponent advanced in a passionate debate at the public meeting were over utilitarian rather than over an idealistic nature. So long as the government does not accord equal rights to the Jews, general culture will only be his misfortune. The plan uneducated Jew does not balk at the low occupation of Vector or Paddler. For drawing comfort and joy from his religion, he is reconciled to his miserable lot. But the Jew who is educated and enlightened and yet has no means of occupying an honorable position in the country will be moved by a feeling of discontent to renounce his religion. And no honest father will think of giving an education to his children which may lead to such an ish. The opponents of official enlightenment in Minsk were not content with advancing arguments that appealed to reason. Both at the meetings and in the street, Lillienter was the target of inserting remarks from the crowd. On his return to St. Petersburg, Lillienter presented Ubalov with a report which convinced the minister that the execution of the school reform was a difficult but not a hopeless task. On June 22, 1842, an imperial rescript was issued placing all Jewish schools including the headers and yeshbaz under the supervision of the Ministry of Public Instruction. Simultaneously, it was announced that the government had summoned a commission of four revised to meet in St. Petersburg for the purpose of supporting the efforts of the government in the realization of the school reform. This committee was to serve Russian Jewry as a security that the school reforms would not be directed against the Jewish religion. At the same time, Lillienter was ordered to proceed again to the pale of settlement. He was directed to a principally through the southwestern and new Russian governments and exert his influence upon the Jewish masses in accordance with the instructions received from the ministry. Before setting out on his journey, Lillienter published a Hebrew pamphlet under the title Magid Yeshua, herald of salvation, which called upon the Jewish communities to comply readily with the wishes of the government. In his private letters addressed to prominent Jews, Lillienter expressed the assurance that the school U.K. was merely the forerunner of a series of measures for the betterment of the civic status of the Jews. This time, Lillienter met with a greater measure of success than on his first journey. In several large centers, such as Belichap, Odessa, Kishnev, he was accorded a friendly welcome and assured of the cooperation of the communities in making the new school system a success. Filled with fresh hopes, Lillienter returned in 1843 to St. Petersburg to participate in the work of the rabbinical commission, which had been convoked by the government and was now holding its sessions in the capital from May till August. The makeup of the rabbinical commission did not fully justify its appellation. Only two ecclesiastics were on it, the president of the Talmudic Academy of Volodzin, Rabbi Itzhak Isaac Itzaki, and the leader of the white Russian Hasidim, Rabbi Mendel Schnirzon, while the southwestern region and New Russia had sent two laymen. The banker Helperin of Belichap and the director of the Jewish school in Odessa, Bezalrelstern. The two representatives of the clergy put up a warm defense for the traditional Jewish school, the Heather, endeavoring to save it from the ministerial supervision, which aimed at its annihilation. Finally, a compromise was effected. The traditional Heather was to be left intact for the timing, but the proposed crown school was to be given full scope in competing with it. The commission even went so far as to work out a program of Jewish studies for the new type of school. The labels of the rabbinical commission were submitted to the Jewish committee under the chairmanship of Kizlev and discussed by it in connection with the general plan of Russian school reform. It was necessary to find resultant between two opposing forces, between the desire of the government to substitute the Russian crown school for the old fashioned Jewish school and the determination of Russian Jewry to preserve its own school as a bulwark against the official institutions foist upon it. The government was bent on carrying out its policy and found itself compelled to resort to diplomatic contrivances. On November 13, 1844, Nikolaus signed two enactments, the one of public U.K.s relating to the education of the Jewish youth, the other a confidential rescript addressed to the minister of public instruction. The public enactment called for the establishment of Jewish schools of two grades corresponding to the courses of instruction in the parochial and county schools and ordered the opening of two rabbinical institutes for the training of rabbis and teachers. The teaching staff in the Jewish crown schools was to consist both of Jews and Christians. The graduates of these schools were granted a reduction in the term of military service. The execution of the school reforms in the respective localities was placed in the hands of school boards composed of Jews and Christians which were to be appointed provisionally for that purpose. In the secret rescript, the tone was altogether different. There it was stated that the aim pursued in the training of the Jews is that of bringing them nearer to the Christian population and eradicating the prejudices fostered in them by the study of the Talmud. That with the opening of the new schools, the old ones what we gradually closed were reorganized. And that as soon as the crown schools have been established in sufficient numbers, attendance at them would become obligatory. That the superintendents of the new schools should only be chosen from among Christians. That every possible efforts should be made to put obstacles in the way of granting teaching licenses to the relevance who left a secular education. That after the lapse of 20 years, no one should hold the position of teacher or rabbi without having obtained his degree from one of the official rabbinical schools. It was not long however before the sacred came out. The Russian Jews were terror-stricken at the thought of being robbed of their ancient school autonomy and decided to adopt the well-tried tactics of passive resistance to all government measures. The school reform was making slow progress. The opening of the elementary schools and of the two rabbinical institutes in Vilna and Zittomir did not begin until 1847, and for the first few years they dragged on a miserable existence. Lilientar himself disappeared from the scene without waiting for the confirmation of the reform plan. In 1845, he suddenly abandoned his post at the Ministry of Public Instruction and left Russia forever. A more intimate acquaintance with the intentions of the leading government circles had made Lilientar realize that the apprehensions voiced in his presence by the old men of the Vilna community were well founded and he thought it his duty to fulfill the pledge given by him publicly. From the land of Selfdom, where to use Lilientar's own world, the only way for the Jew to make peace with the government was by bowing down before the Greek cross, he went to the land of freedom, the United States of America. There he occupied important pulpits in New York and Cincinnati, where he died in 1882.