considerable money,
caused a rumor to spread that the worthy messenger had gone no further
than the village of Navrack, where he himself prepared the parchment and
then returned with the wonderful story of his trip through the air and
with his fortune augmented to the extent of Bensef's present to the
Rabbi. Envious people were not wanting who gave ear to this unkind rumor
and even helped to spread it. But the fact that Mendel had been snatched
from the jaws of death was sufficient vindication for Itzig, who for a
long time enjoyed great honors at Kief.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: Wallace, p. 77.]

CHAPTER X.

MENDEL THINKS FOR HIMSELF.

Mendel's fondness for study determined his future career. Nowhere were
there such opportunities for learning the Talmud as in Kief. Its
numerous synagogues, its eminent rabbis, its large Hebrew population,
made it the centre of Judaism in Southern Russia. In its schools some of
the most learned rabbis of the Empire had studied.

Throughout the whole of Russia there were, at the time of which we
speak, but few universities, and these scarcely deserved to rank above
second-rate colleges. Education was within the reach of very few. At the
present day, "the merchants do not even possess the rudiments of an
education. Many of them can neither read nor write and are forced to
keep their accounts in their memory, or by means of ingenious
hieroglyphics, intelligible only to their inventors. Others can decipher
the calendar and the lives of the saints, and can sign their name with
tolerable facility. They can make the simpler arithmetical calculations
with the help of a little calculating machine, called _stchety_."[6]

In the days of Nicholas it was infinitely worse. Learning of any kind
was considered detrimental to the State; schools were practically
unknown. "The most stringent regulations were made concerning tutors and
governesses. It was forbidden to send young men to study in western
colleges and every obstacle was thrown in the way of foreign travel and
residence. Philosophy could not be taught in the universities."[7]

Contrast with this enforced lethargy the intellectual activity that we
meet with everywhere in Jewish quarters. No settlement in which we find
a _minyan_ (ten men necessary for divine worship), but there we will
also find a _cheder_, a school in which the Bible and the Talmud are
taught. Indeed, study is the first duty of the Jew; it is the
quintessence