And again, as it had been during the reign of Alexander I after his acquaintance with Baroness Krüdener, so it was with the reign of Alexander II after his acquaintance with Pobyedonostsev. The status of the Jews constituted the first indication of the ill-boding change. How little the officials had been in sympathy with the reformatory efforts of their czar, even when the atmosphere had been filled with peace and good-will to all including the Jews, is shown by the fact that when, in 1863, through the efforts of Doctor Schwabacher, the Jewish community of Odessa applied for a charter to build a Home for Aged Hebrews, the charter, though granted by the higher authorities, was withheld for over twenty years! The reaction flaunted its power once again, and sat enthroned in Tsarskoye Syelo. The few rights the Jews had enjoyed were rescinded one by one. Not satisfied with this, the Slavophils tried, under every pretext, to stop the progress of the Jewish people. Every now and then the Society for the Promotion of Haskalah would send some of the brighter seminary students to complete their education in Breslau or Berlin, but at the command of the Government this was soon discontinued. It was the intention of the same organization, from its very incipiency, to have the Bible translated under its auspices into Russian, but it took ten long years before this praiseworthy undertaking could be begun, because of the obstacles the Government placed in the way of its execution. Fortunately, the indomitable courage of the Maskilim could not be subdued. Young men went, or were sent, to Germany to prepare themselves for the rabbinate as before; the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, too, were translated secretly by Wohl, Gordon, Steinberg, and Leon Mandelstamm, and published in Germany, whence they were smuggled into Russia.[23]
More direct and equally inexplicable, save on the ground of animosity to whatever was not Slavonic, was the ukase to close the Sabbath Schools and the Evening Schools, the only means of educating the laboring men (1870). In 1871, the first of a series of massacres (pogromy) took place in the centre of Jewish culture, Odessa. In 1872, permission was denied to the ladies of that city to organize a society for the purpose of maintaining trade schools, to teach poor Jewish girls handicrafts. The two rabbinical seminaries, of Vilna and Zhitomir, were closed in 1873, and replaced by institutes for teachers, which were managed in the spirit that had prevailed under Nicholas I. And in 1878 the absurd blood accusation, against which four popes, Innocent IV, Paul III, Gregory X, and Clement XIV, issued their bulls, declaring it a baseless and wicked superstition, and which not only the Polish kings Boreslav V, Casimir III, Casimir IV, and Stephen Bathòry, but also Alexander I (March 18, 1817), branded as a diabolic invention—that dreadful accusation which even the commission of Nicholas, despite Durnovo's efforts, had denounced as a disgrace and an abomination, was revived by the newspaper Grazhdanin. The ghost of medievalism began to stalk abroad once more in erstwhile enlightened Russia and under the aegis of the Liberator Czar.
As often before in Jewish history, the Jews helped not a little to aggravate the untoward conditions. At the instigation of a number of students of the Yeshibah Tree of Life, the doors of that noble institution were closed (1879), to open again after two years of untiring efforts on the part of its self-sacrificing dean, the renowned Naphtali Zebi Judah Berlin. But at the worst this was the result of mistaken zeal for the cause of Haskalah. What was more detrimental was the disgrace brought upon the Jewish name by several converts to Christianity. A certain Jacob Brafmann, having proved a failure in all he undertook, tried at the last the business of Christianity, and succeeded therein. He was appointed professor of Hebrew in the seminary of Minsk, and the Holy Synod charged him with the duty of devising means to promulgate Christianity among the Jews. Finding the times auspicious, he devoted himself to writing libellous articles about his former coreligionists, and wound up with a Book on the Kahal (Kniga Kahala, Vilna, 1869), in which he quoted forged "transactions," to the effect that Judaism tolerates and even recommends illegality and immorality among its adherents. In a conference of Jews and Gentiles convoked by Governor-General Kaufman (1871), Barit proved the falsity and forgery of Brafmann's documents. But, as usual, the defence was forgotten, the charges remained.[24] A certain Lutostansky poisoned the public mind by caricaturing the Jews, and aroused an anti-Semitic agitation among his countrymen. The consequence was that even the liberals began to be suspicious, and the prospect of better days was blighted by the hatred which broke out in fiendish fury, in lightnings and thunders which astounded the world under Alexander III.
It was but natural that the Jews that had become completely Russified should enlist in the ranks of the extreme liberals. They found themselves in every way as progressive and patriotic as the Christian Russians. The language of Russia became their language, its manners and aspirations their manners and aspirations. They contributed more than any other nationality to Russifying Odessa, which, owing to its great foreign population, was known as the un-Russian city of Russia. Proportionately to their numbers, they promoted the trade and industry, the science and literature of their country more than the Russians themselves. Yet the coveted equality was denied them, and the emancipation granted to the degraded muzhiks was withheld from them, because of a religion they hardly professed. They were like Faust when he found himself tempted but not satisfied by the pleasures of life, when food hovered before his eager lips while he begged for nourishment in vain. The liberals, on the other hand, preached and practiced the doctrine of equal rights to all. Socialism, or nihilism, also appealed to the Jews from its idealistic side, for never did the Jews cease to be democrats and dreamers. In the schools and universities, which they were now permitted to attend, they heard the new teachings and imbibed the novel ideas.
Those, therefore, who disdained conversion allied themselves with the secret organizations. "The torrent which had been dammed up in one channel rushed violently into another." A Hebrew monthly, Ha-Emet (Truth, Vienna, 1877), devoted to the cause of communism, was started by Aaron Liebermann ("Arthur Freeman"), in which, in the language of the oldest and greatest socialists, the doctrines of Karl Marx were inculcated among the Hebrew-reading public. The more completely Russified element took a leading part in the activities of the Narodnaya Volya (Rights of the People), propagating socialism among the Russian masses, either by word of mouth or as editors and coworkers in the "underground" publications. Not a few went to Berlin, where, though opulent, they sought employment in factories, the better to disseminate socialism among the working classes. Others, like Aaronson, Achselrod, Deutsch, Horowitz, Vilenkin, and Zukerman, fled to Switzerland, whence, under the assumed names of Marx, Lassalle, Jacoby, etc., or united in a League for the Emancipation of Labor, they directed the socialistic movement in Russia.[25] Chernichevsky's What to Do, Gogol's Dead Souls, Turgenief's Virgin Soil and Fathers and Sons, the doctrines of Pisarev and Bielinsky, and of the other writers who then had their greatest vogue, were eagerly read and frequently copied by Jewish young gymnasiasts and passed on to their Christian schoolmates. The revolutionary spirit seized on men and women alike. Women left their husbands, girls their devoted parents, and threw themselves into the swirl of nihilism with a vigor and self-sacrifice almost incredible. When a squad of police came to disperse the crowd clamoring for "land and liberty" in front of the Kazanskaya Church in St. Petersburg, a Jewish maiden of sixteen, taking the place of the leader, inspired her comrades with such enthusiasm that the efforts of the police were ineffectual.[26] By 1878, Russia became honeycombed with secret societies. It fell into spasms of nihilism. One general after another was assassinated. Attempts were made to wreck the train on which the czar was travelling (1879) and blow up the palace in which he resided (1880). Finally, on March 13, 1881, after many hairbreadth escapes, the carefully laid plans of the revolutionists succeeded, and the Liberator Czar was no more.
Thus was the deep-rooted yearning for enlightenment finally let loose, and the gyves of tradition were at last removed. The Maskilim of the "forties" and "fifties" were antiquated in the "sixties" and "seventies." They began to see that the fears of the orthodox and their denunciations of Haskalah were not altogether unfounded. A young generation had grown up who had never experienced the strife and struggles of the fathers, and who lacked the submissive temper that had characterized their ancestors. Faster and farther they rushed on their headlong way to destruction, while the parents sat and wept. When, in 1872, in Vilna, the police arrested forty Jewish young men suspected of nihilistic tendencies, Governor-General Patapov "invited" the representatives of the community to a conference. As soon as they arrived, Patapov turned on them in this wise, "In addition to all other good qualities which you Jews possess, about the only thing you need is to become nihilists, too!" Amazed and panic-stricken, the trembling Jews denied the allegation and protested their innocence, to which the Governor-General replied, "Your children are, at any rate; they have become so through the bad education you have given them." "Pardon me, General," was the answer of "Yankele Kovner" (Jacob Barit), who was one of the representatives, "This is not quite right. As long as we educated our children there were no nihilists among us; but as soon as you took the education of our children into your hands, behold the result." The foundations of religion were undermined. Parental authority was disregarded. Youths and maidens were lured by the enchanting voice of the siren of assimilation. The naïve words which Turgenief put into the mouth of Samuel Abraham, the Lithuanian Jew, might have been, indeed, were, spoken by many others in actual life. "Our children," he complains, "have no longer our beliefs; they do not say our prayers, nor have they your beliefs; no more do they say your prayers; they do not pray at all, and they believe in nothing."[27] The struggle between Hasidim and Mitnaggedim ended with the conversionist policy of Nicholas I, which united them against the Maskilim. The struggle between these anti-Maskilim and the Maskilim had ceased in the golden days of Alexander II. But the clouds were gathering and overspreading the camp of Haskalah. The days in which the seekers after light united in one common aim were gone. Russification, assimilation, universalism, and nihilism rent asunder the ties that held them together. Judah Löb Gordon, the same poet who, fifteen years before, had rejoiced with exceeding joy "when Haskalah broke forth like water," now laments over the effect thereof in the following strain:
And our children, the coming generation,
From childhood, alas, are strangers to our nation—
Ah, how my heart for them doth bleed!