I'd study the Scriptures head by head.
Woes have come and sought me,
Alas, had I bethought me.
Yet this was not all. Knowing that it is easier to convert the children than their elders, the Government of Nicholas I, out-Heroding Herod, inaugurated a system so cruel as to fill with terror and pity the heart of the most ferocious barbarian. Infants were torn from their mothers, boys of the age of twelve, sometimes of ten and eight, were herded like cattle, sent to distant parts of Russia, and there distributed as chattels among the officers of the army. Many of these Cantonists, as they were called, either died on the way, or were killed off when they resisted conversion. Those who survived sometimes returned to Judaism, and formed the nucleus of Jewish settlements in the interior of Russia. These "soldiers of Nicholas" (Nikolayevskiye soldati), with their uncouth demeanor and devoted, though ignorant, adherence to the faith of their fathers, furnished much material for the folk-songs of the time and the novelists of the somewhat happier reigns of Nicholas's successors.[36]
One of these Cantonists, the first to give a description of the life of his fellow-sufferers, was Wolf Nachlass, or Alexander Alekseyev. For many years he remained faithful to the religion of his forefathers, though he had been pressed into the service at the age of ten. About 1845 he changed his views, became an ardent Greek Catholic, and converted five hundred Cantonists, to the great delight of Nicholas I, who thanked him in person for his zeal. He lost his leg, and during the long illness that followed Nachlass settled in Novgorod, and wrote several works on Jewish customs and on missionary topics.
Less horrifying, but equally aiming at disintegration, was Nicholas's scheme of colonization. What better means was there for "diminishing the number of Jews" than to scatter them over the wilderness of Russia and leave them to shift for themselves? This, of course, was necessarily a slow process and one involving some expense, but it was fraught with great importance not only for the Russian Church, but for Russian trade and agriculture as well.
"Back to the soil!" Was not this the cry of the romantic Maskilim in Germany, in Galicia, and particularly in Russia? And have not country life and field labor been depicted by them in the most glowing colors? Here was an opportunity to save the honor of the Jewish name and also ameliorate the material condition of the Russian Jews. The permission given to them by Alexander I to establish themselves as farmers in the frigid yet free Siberian steppes was greeted with enthusiasm by all. Nicholas's ukase was hailed with joy. Elias Mitauer and Meyer Mendelssohn, at the head of seventy families from Courland, were the first to migrate to the new region (1836), and they were followed by hundreds more. Indeed, the exodus assumed such proportions that the Christians in the parts of the country abandoned by the colonists complained of the decline in business and the depreciation of property. The movement was heartily approved by the rabbis; the populace, its imagination stimulated, began to dream dreams and see visions of brighter days, and all gave vent to their hopefulness in songs of gladness and gratitude, in strains like these:[37]
Who lives so free
As the farmer on his land?