fear that
undesirable debates might arise in that august body concerning the
expediency of putting an embargo on education. On December 5, 1886, the
Tzar, acting on the suggestion of the Committee of Ministers, directed
the Minister of Public Instruction, Dyelanov, to adopt measures for the
limitation of the admission of Jews to the secondary and higher
educational establishments.

For six long months the Minister, whose official duty was the promotion
of education, was wavering between a number of schemes designed to
restrict education among the Jews. Suggestions for such restrictions
came from officials of the ministry and from superintendents of school
districts. Some proposed to close the schools only to the children of
the lower classes among the Jews; in which "the unsympathetic traits of
the Jewish character" were particularly conspicuous. Others recommended
a restrictive percentage for Jews in general, without any class
discrimination. Still others pleaded for moderation lest excessive
restriction in admission to Russian universities should force the Jewish
youth to go to foreign universities and make them even "more dangerous,"
since they were bound to return to Russia with liberal notions
concerning the political form of government.

At last, in July, 1887, the Minister of Public Instruction, acting on
the above-mentioned imperial "resolution," published his two famous
circulars limiting the admission of Jews to the universities and to
secondary schools. The following norm was established: in the Pale of
Settlement the Jews were to be admitted to the schools to the extent of
ten per cent of the Christian school population; outside the Pale the
norm was fixed at five per cent, and in the two capitals, St. Petersburg
and Moscow, at three per cent. Although decreed before the very
beginning of the new scholastic year, the percentage norm was
nevertheless immediately applied in the case of the _gymnazia,_ the
"Real schools," [1] and the universities. In the higher professional
institutions, such as the technological, veterinarian, and agronomical
schools, the restrictions had been, practised even before the
promulgation of the circular, or were introduced immediately after it.

[Footnote 1: Or _Real Gymnazia_, see above, p. 163, n, 1.]

This was the genesis of the educational "percentage norm," the source of
sorrow and tears for two generation of Russian Jews--both fathers and
sons now having run the gauntlet.