[Footnote 1: See on the meaning of the latter term Vol. I, p. 390, n. 1.]

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 not the religion of the Cross the purest symbol of universal citizenship?" This, however, Uvarov 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, owing to the shortage in teachers familiar with this language, the use of German is to be admitted temporarily. The teachers in the low-grade schools shall provisionally be recruited from among melammeds 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 Uvarov's scheme in its principal features, and urgently recommended that, in order to prepare the Jewish masses 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 a young German Jew, Dr. Max Lilienthal, a resident of Riga.

Lilienthal; who was a native of Bavaria (he was born in Munich in 1815) and a German university graduate, was a typical representative of the German Jewish intellectuals of that period, a champion of assimilation and of moderate religious reform. Lilienthal 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.[1] In a short time Lilienthal managed to raise the instruction in secular and Jewish subjects to such a high standard of modernity that he elicited a glowing tribute from Uvarov. 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 Lilienthal seemed the logical man for carrying out the planned reforms.

[Footnote 1: The other two schools were located in Odessa and in
Kishinev.]

In February, 1841, Lilienthal was summoned to St. Petersburg, where he had a prolonged conversation with Uvarov. According to the testimony of the official Russian sources, he tried to persuade the Minister to abolish all "private schools," the heders, and to forbid all private teachers, the melammeds, to teach even temporarily in the projected new schools, and to import, instead, the whole teaching staff from Germany. Lilienthal himself tells us in his Memoirs that he made bold to remind the Minister that all obstacles in the path of the desired re-education of the Russian Jews would disappear, were the Tzar 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, Lilienthal accepted the proffered task. He was commissioned to tour the Pale of Settlement, to organize there the few isolated progressive Jews, "the lovers of enlightenment," or Maskilim, as they styled themselves, and to propagate the idea of a school-reform among the orthodox Jewish masses.

While setting out on his journey, Lilienthal 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 hearts of a people which by an uninterrupted series of persecutions and cruel restrictions had been reduced to the level of pariahs. He was to make them believe that the Government was a well-wisher 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.

Lilienthal 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—Lilienthal tells us in his Memoirs [1]—sat there absorbed in deep contemplation. Some of them, leaning on their silver-adorned staffs or smoothing their long beards, seemed as if agitated by earnest thoughts and justifiable suspicions; others were engaging in a lively but quiet discussion on the principles involved; such put to 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 course pursued against all denominations 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 strength 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."