For Lilienthal's disillusionment came apace, and he finally recognized the error of his ways. In his book, My Travels in Russia, published both in English and in German, he admits that the opponents of the schools he advocated were after all in the right. Education without emancipation was indeed the straightest road to conversion. Witness the thirty thousand Jewish apostates in St. Petersburg and Moscow alone, most of whom hailed from the Baltic provinces, where the Jews were more cultured, but not less oppressed, than their brethren.
Those men—says he—who have acquired from study an idea of the rights of man, and that the Jew ought to enjoy the same privileges as every other citizen; those men who tried, by the knowledge they had obtained, to open for themselves better prospects in life, and now saw every hope frustrated by laws inimical to them only as Jews, ran, from mere despair, into the bosom of the Greek Church. The harassing care for a living, the terrible difficulties in surmounting them forced them, in an hour of distress, to deny their faith. I always compared them with the Anusim [forced converts] of Spain. Among them there is no religious indifference, as is the case in Western Europe and Germany; and I have met with many converted Jews there, who, with tears in their eyes, complained of heart-burnings and pangs of conscience; and they look upon themselves as eternally lost. Those tears will show a heavy balance against Czar Nicholas, when, bereft of his earthly power, he stands before the eternal tribunal.
The other charge—he says again after refuting several accusations of the kind stated above—the other charge, that the Jews are averse to secular studies, rests upon an equally erroneous foundation. For even in Germany Jewish parents have at length found out that it is absolute folly to let their sons devote themselves to the study of science, since they never can hope for obtaining the least office; and since many a one, after the best years of his youth are passed, tired of waiting, and fearful of not having in his old age any means of support, finds in the baptismal font the last anchor of his shattered hopes. How much more must this consideration have weight in Russia? Nicholas, instead of encouraging the Jews to study, ordered, on the contrary, that all such of them as held offices and insignia of distinction under Alexander should either resign or become apostates. I know myself several collegiate councillors and men attached to the court, who went to the synagogue on the Day of Atonement with the insignia of the order of St. Anna around their neck, and prayed there with devotion and fervor, who still were forced into apostasy. Such instances are not calculated to encourage Jewish parents to let their children study; and it is but too true that many whose inclination led them to study were carried thereby into the bosom of the Christian Church.[12]
After almost half a decade of indefatigable labor, Lilienthal finally came to understand the Russian State policy, "to assign a plausible reason for every act done by the Government, in order to stand justified in the estimation of Europe, whilst they, by throwing dust in the eyes of the public, conceal their true purpose." The laws which seemed favorable to the Jews, and apparently aimed at promoting culture among them, went hand in hand with laws of the most rigorous character. It is true that the Jews were not the only unfortunates whom the fanatic autocrat wished to Russify, that is, compel to see the pure light of Greek Orthodoxy. But they, of course, suffered the most. The slightest laws were enforced by the chinovniks (officials) with the knout and the leaden lash. When the Judeo-Polish gaberdine, the long side-curls (peot), and the wig or turban (knup) fell into disfavor with the Government, the miserable offender caught by an officer seldom saved himself with the mere sacrifice of knup, coat, peot, and beard. And when the time arrived for the execution of the more important laws, such as the Exportation Act of April 20, 1843, no fiendish ingenuity could surpass the cruelty of the Cossacks. This ukase more than any other, it is claimed, embittered Lilienthal against Russia, and caused him to flee to where he could say as one awakening from a nightmare: "The horrible hatred against the Jews in Russia is nothing more to me than a hazy remembrance. My soul is no longer oppressed by frightful pictures of tyranny and persecution."[13] He was in the land of the free!
The Lilienthal tragedy thus came to a premature close. The hero disappeared at the beginning of the play. He had the potency, but he lacked the conditions, for producing great results. His German birth and training, the very qualities which recommended him to the Government, operated against him when he came to deal with Russian Jews. Yet he succeeded in giving a strong impetus to the Haskalah movement, and builded better than he knew. The statement in his address at the dedication of the Riga school,[14] "This hour we may call the hour of the renaissance of the mental education of Israel," which reads like an oratorical platitude, was not entirely visionary. The real history of Haskalah in Russia commences with Lilienthal.
Time helped greatly to restore, even to deepen, the affection of the Maskilim for Lilienthal. A modern critic speaking of "life and literature" in Hebrew, pictures him in glowing colors, and finishes his description thus:
I have presented to you, reader, a man of deep culture, known and respected in the highest circles, and yet inseparably connected with his race and religion, and ready to offer his life for their welfare; a man who worked with might and main for others at the sacrifice of his own comfort and advancement; an orator whose exalted phrases shattered the pillars and foundations of ignorance and superstition; a hero who in time of peril was proof against the arrows and missiles of the enemy, and who did not relax his hand from the flag. But what was the fruit he reaped? Mostly ingratitude and persecution, a heart lacerated with despair, a soul writhing under the pangs of frustrated hopes. Such a personality with its fine shades, and with the poetry of the artist superimposed, would afford splendid material for the hero of a novel—a hero to captivate the eye and heart of the reader by his nobility and grandeur.[15]
For a long time Russian officialdom discussed the question, whether the establishment of exclusively Jewish schools would prove beneficial, but nobody doubted the efficacy of rabbinical seminaries. Yet it was these latter institutions that evoked the strongest protests from the Jews. The advocates of Haskalah gradually came to recognize the truth, which Lilienthal admitted afterwards, that for a Russian rabbi a thorough knowledge of the Talmud was absolutely indispensable. But it was with the object of discouraging such knowledge that the seminaries had been suggested by Uvarov, and it was this study that was almost entirely ignored in them. What congregation, many of whose members were profound Talmudists, would accept a rabbi to whom unvocalized Hebrew was a snare and a stumbling-block? Moreover, the whole atmosphere of the seminaries was Christian, nay, military. Not a few members of their faculties or boards of governors were discharged police officers or superannuated soldiers, and at the head of the seminary in Vilna, the metropolis of Russian Jewry, stood an apostate Jew! They became, as it were, infirmaries of the bureaucracy, where, at the expense of the Jews, it could stow away anyone who had proved a failure or was no longer useful. The Government also undertook to provide the graduates with positions, patronage which rendered the students insolently independent of their coreligionists, and encouraged some of them to indulge in a modus vivendi distasteful to their future flocks. The graduates, therefore, proved failures as rabbis, and the Government was forced to provide for them by appointing them as teachers.[16]
If this was the case with the rabbinical seminaries, we can easily imagine the state of the subordinate schools. The Christian principals were coarse and uneducated as a rule, and did their best to prejudice the children against their religion. Scattered all over the Pale were to be found Jews competent to fill positions not only as teachers in inferior grades but as professors in the universities. Yet Lilienthal was advised (1841) to advertise for three hundred teachers in Germany. Finally the Government decided to employ Jews as teachers of Hebrew only, the least important subject in the curriculum; for instruction in the secular branches none but Christians were eligible. No Jews were allowed to become rectors in their own schools, and their salaries were so small that they could not support themselves without teaching an additional class, which was prohibited. A Jew might, indeed, become an "honorable overseer" (pochotny blyustityel), to mediate between pupils and parents, but the title was the only pay attached to the office. Respectable parents, therefore, kept their children at home, or rather in the heder, and many a child's name was on the roll of attendance who was not even aware of the existence of the school. "Every year in the autumn," relates a writer a quarter of a century later, "there was a kind of compulsory recruiting of Jewish children for the Government school, accompanied sometimes by struggles between the victims and their enemies,—scenes without a parallel, in some respects, in the civilized world. I remember how poor mothers and sisters wept with despair when some boy of the family was carried off or enlisted by the officers to be a pupil of a Government school." Like the poimaniki, the poor and the orphaned were compelled, or induced, to fill the class-rooms shunned by the rich and respectable, and though the Government not only condemned the ancient Hebrew institutions, but declared the twenty thousand teachers who imparted instruction in them to be outlaws and criminals, the melammedim pursued their vocation as ever, and the hadarim, Talmud Torahs, yeshibot, and batte midrashim swarmed with students of the prohibited learning.[17]
Nicholas was paid measure for measure, and the cunning of his ministers was made of no avail by the shrewdness of his Jewish subjects. The report of the Minister of Education, at the end of 1845, shows incredible progress. It states that since the ukase of November 13, 1844, i.e. in the course of a single year, more than two thousand schools of different grades were established in various cities of the Pale, with more than one hundred and eighty thousand pupils, not including the technical schools in Odessa, Riga, Kishinev, Vilna, and Uman, with their hundreds of students! The truth was that, instead of the reported Russification, there had set in a vigorous reaction, which rendered the position more critical. Both sides had become desperate.[18] Some Maskilim, emboldened by the interest the Government evinced in their efforts, had resorted to all manner of means to accomplish their object, and frequently allied themselves with the oppressors. The Slavuta publishing house, it is claimed, was closed, and the Schapiras met with their tragic end, because "as printers they scrupulously abstained from publishing Haskalah literature." Maskilim were employed by the authorities as tax collectors, and these, as is ever the case with rapacious farmers of taxes, besides executing the harsh laws of the tyrant, looked also to their own aggrandizement, and harassed their pious coreligionists in all ways conceivable. Many of them even hindered the colonization movement, because, if allowed to mature, it would deprive them of their income.[19] In addition to this, the Jews were now burdened, through the instrumentality of the Maskilim, with a tax on the candles lighted on Sabbath eve, yielding annually over one million rubles, the greater part of which went into the coffers of greedy officials. Another tax, also for the maintenance of the newly-organized Government schools, was levied—one kopeck and a half per page!—on text-books, whether imported from abroad or published in Vilna or Zhitomir, and the text-books were published with unnecessarily large type and wide margins to increase the number of pages. The abridgment and translation of Maimuni's Mishneh Torah (St. Petersburg, 1851), superintended by Leon Mandelstamm, cost the Russian Jews tens of thousands of rubles, notwithstanding the expenditure of two or three millions on their own educational institutions, and at a time when every kopeck was needed for the support of the host of victims of fire, famine, and cholera, which ravaged many a city. Hence the reaction became more and more formidable. The cry grew louder and louder, Znaty nye znayem, shkolles nye zhelayem! ("We want no schools!"). The opposition, which began in the latter years of Alexander I, reached its culmination in the last decade of the reign of Nicholas I. "Israel," laments Mandelstamm, "seems to be even worse than formerly; he is like a sick person who has convalesced only to relapse, and the physicians are beginning to despair." It was a struggle not unlike that all over Europe at the beginning of the Renaissance, a struggle between liberty and authority, between this world and other-worldliness, between the spirit of the nineteenth century and that of the millenniums which preceded it.