[265] [The Hebrew periodical Ha-Me´assef ("The Collector"), which was founded in Berlin in 1784, and appeared until 1811.]
[267] [In Podolia.]
CHAPTER XII
THE LAST YEARS OF ALEXANDER I.
1. "The Deputation of the Jewish People"
The great reaction of 1815-1848, which kept the whole of Europe in its throes, assumed peculiar forms in Russia. Tzar Alexander I., one of the triumvirs of the Holy Alliance, which had given birth to this reaction, was eager to atone for the liberal "sins" of his youth, and was cultivating in Russia the principles of "paternal administration" and "Christian government." The last decade of his reign paved the way for the iron-handed absolutism of Nicholas I., which fettered the political and social life of Russia for thirty years, and stood like an ominous specter of medievalism before the eyes of Western Europe.
The destinies of the great monarchy of the East determined those of the greatest Jewish center of the Diaspora. The Vienna Congress of 1815 enlarged the borders of European Russia by including in it almost the entire territory of the former Duchy of Warsaw, which was renamed "Kingdom of Poland."[268] About two million Jews were huddled together on the western strip of the Russian monarchy during the period of 1815-1848,[269] and this immense, sharply marked population served as the subject of all possible experiments, which assumed the coloring of the general Russian politics of the time. The last years of Alexander I. inaugurate the period of patronage and oppression, which reached its culmination in the following reign.