tz and Chatzkin
an insult has been offered to the entire (Russian) people, to all
Russian literature," which has no right to let "naked slander" pass
under the disguise of polemics.

Though the protesting writers were wholly actuated by the
desire to protect the moral purity of Russian literature and
did not at all touch upon the Jewish question, the Jewish
public workers were nevertheless enchanted by this declaration
of literary Russia, and were deeply gratified by the implied
assumption that the Jews of Russia formed part of the Russian people.

Several sympathetic articles in influential periodicals, advocating the
necessity of Jewish emancipation, seemed to complete the happiness of
the progressive section of Russian Jewry. Even the Slavophile publicist
Ivan Aksakov, who subsequently joined the ranks of Jew-baiters,
recognized at that time, in 1862, the need of a certain measure of
emancipation for the Jews. The only thing that worried him was the
danger that the admission of the Jews to the Russian civil service "in
all departments," might result "in filling with Jews" the Senate and
Council of State, not excluding the possibility of a Jew occupying the
post of Procurator-General of the Holy Synod. Unshakable in his
friendship for the Jews was the physician and humanitarian N.
Pirogov, [1] who, in his capacity of superintendent of the Odessa School
District, was largely instrumental in encouraging the Jewish youth in
their pursuit of general culture and in creating a Russian Jewish press.

[Footnote 1: See above, p. 207, n. 1.]

The most efficient factor of cultural regeneration was the secular
school, both the general Russian and the Jewish Crown school. A flood of
young men, lured by the rosy prospects of a free human existence in the
midst of a free Russian people, rushed from the farthermost nooks and
corners of the Pale into the _gymnazia_ and universities whose doors
were kept wide open for the Jews. Many children of the ghetto rapidly
enlisted under the banner of the Russian youth, and became intoxicated
with the luxuriant growth of Russian literature which carried to them
the intellectual gifts of the contemporary European writers. The masters
of thought in that generation, Chernyshevski, Dobrolubov, Pisaryev,
Buckle, Darwin, Spencer, became also the idols of the Jewish youth. The
heads which had but recently been bending over the Talmud folios in the
stuffy atmosphere of the heders and yeshibahs were