on, the Jewish problem, too, was in line of being placed
in the forefront of these reforms. For, after having done away with the
institution of serfdom, the State was consistently bound to liberate its
three million of Jewish serfs who had been ruthlessly oppressed and
persecuted during the old regime.

Unfortunately the Jewish question, which was nothing more nor less than
the question of equal citizenship for the Jews, was not placed in the
line of the great reforms, but was pushed to the rear and solved
fragmentarily--on the instalment plan, as it were--and within narrowly
circumscribed limits. Like all the other officially inspired reforms of
that period, which proceeded up to a certain point and halted before the
prohibited zone of constitutional and political liberties, so, too, the
solution of the Jewish problem was not allowed to pass beyond the
border-line. For the crossing of that line would have rendered the whole
question null and void by the simple recognition of the equality of all
citizens. The regenerated Russia of Alexander II., stubborn in its
refusal of political freedom and civil equality, could only choose the
path of half-measures. Nevertheless, the transition from the
pre-reformatory order of things to the new state of affairs signified a
radical departure both in the life of Russia in general and in Jewish
life in particular. It did so not because the new conditions were
perfect, but because the old ones were so inexpressibly ugly and
unbearable, and the mere loosening of the chains of servitude was hailed
as a pledge of complete liberation.

Far more intense than in the political life of Russia was the crisis in
its social life. While a chilling wind was still blowing from the wintry
heights of Russian officialdom, while a grim censorship was still
holding down the flight of the printed word, the released social energy
was whirling and swirling in all classes of Russian society, sometimes
breaking the fetters of police restraint. The outbursts of young Russia
ran far ahead of the slow progress of the reforms inspired from above.
It blazed the path for political freedom which the West of Europe had
long traversed, and which was to prove in Russia tortuous and thorny.

The phase of Jewish life which claimed the first thought of Alexander
II.'s Government was the military conscription. Prior to the conclusion
of the Crimean War, the Committee on Jewish Affairs [1] called the
Tzar's attention to t