mehow to give the slip to
"Russian learning"--were it not for the fact that under the influence of
the inner cultural transformation of Russian Jewry the general Russian
school became during that period more and more popular among the
advanced classes of the Jewish population, and gymnazium and university
took their place alongside of heder and yeshibah. Yet the hundreds of
pupils in the new schools faded into insignificance when compared with
the hundreds of thousands who were educated exclusively in the old
schools. The fatal year 1875, the last of the twenty years of respite
granted to the melammeds for their self-annihilation, arrived. But the
huge melammed army was not willing to pass out of Jewish life, in which
they exercised a definite function, with no substitute to take its
place. The Government was forced to yield. After several brief
postponements the melammeds were left in peace, and by an ukase issued
in 1879 the idea of abolishing the heders was dropped.

Towards the end of this period the Government abandoned altogether its
attempts to reform the Jewish schools, and decided to liquidate its
former activity in this direction. By an ukase issued in 1873 the two
rabbinical schools and all Jewish Crown schools were closed. On the
ruins of the vast educational network, originally projected for the
transformation of Judaism, only about a hundred "elementary schools" and
two modest "Teachers Institutes," [1] which were to supply teachers for
these schools, were established by the Government. The authorities were
now inclined to look upon the general Russian schools as the most
effective agencies of "fusion," and put their greatest trust in the
elemental process of Russification which had begun to sweep over the
upper layers of Jewry.

[Footnote 1: In Vilna and Zhitomir. The latter was closed in 1885. The
former is still in existence.]

5. THE JEWS AND THE POLISH INSURRECTION OF 1863

While the official world of St. Petersburg was obsessed with the idea of
the Russification of Jewry, in Warsaw the tendency of Polonization, as
applied to the Jews of the Western region, cropped up in the wake of the
revolutionary Polish movement in the beginning of the sixties. At the
inception of Alexander's reign the Russian Government set out to
equalize the legal status of the Jews in the Kingdom of Poland with that
of the Empire, and to abolish the surviving special restrictions, such
as the prohibition of residing in c