ng them from without. Life
was dominated by rigidly conservative principles. The old scheme of
family life, with all its patriarchal survivals, remained in force. In
spite of the law, embodied in the Statute of 1835, which fixed the
minimum age of the bridegroom at eighteen (and that of the bride at
sixteen), the practice of early marriages continued as theretofore.
Parents arranged marriages between children of thirteen and fifteen.
Boys of school age often became husbands and fathers, and continued to
attend heder or yeshibah after their marriage, weighed down by the
triple tutelage of father, father-in-law, and teacher. The growing
generation knew not the sweetness of being young. Their youth withered
under the weight of family chains, the pressure of want or material
dependence. The spirit of protest, the striving for rejuvenation, which
asserted itself in some youthful souls, was crushed in the vise of a
time-honored discipline, the product of long ages. The slightest
deviation from a custom, a rite, or old habits of thought met with
severe punishment. A short jacket or a trimmed beard was looked upon as
a token of dangerous free-thinking. The reading of books written in
foreign languages, or even written in Hebrew, when treating of secular
subjects, brought upon the culprit untold hardships. The scholastic
education resulted in producing men entirely unfit for the battle of
life, so that in many families energetic women took charge of the
business and became the wage earners, [2] while their husbands were
losing themselves in the mazes of speculation, somewhere in the recesses
of the rabbinic _Betha-Midrash_ or the hasidic _Klaus_.

[Footnote 1: See on the latter term, Vol. I, p. 227.]

[Footnote 2: This type of Jewish woman, current in Russia until recent
times, was called _Eshet Hayil_, "a woman of valour," with allusion to
Prov. 31.10.]

In Lithuania the whole mental energy of the Jewish youth was absorbed by
Talmudism. The synagogue served as a "house of study" outside the hours
fixed for prayers. There the local rabbi or a private scholar gave
lectures on the Talmud which were listened to by hosts of _yeshibah
bahurs_. [1] The great yeshibahs of Volozhin, Mir, [2] and other towns
sent forth thousands of rabbis and Talmudists. Mentality, erudition,
dialectic subtlety were valued here above all else. Yet, as soon as the
mind, whetted by talmudic dialectics, would point its edge against the
existing order of