I, to attend the schools and universities of the empire. Nor
did they fail to open schools of their own. No sooner was the
Franco-Russian war over than Joseph Perl of Galicia founded a school in
Tarnopol (1813), then under the Russian Government, and two years later
he drew upon his own resources to build a school-house large enough to
accommodate the great, steadily growing number of students. In 1822 we
hear of a school that had been in existence for some time in Uman (the
Ukraine). It had been established by Meir Horn, Moses Landau, and Hirsh
Hurwitz, all of whom were indefatigable laborers in the cause of
Haskalah in the Ukraine. Perl's school was the pattern and model for a
multitude of other schools, among them the one founded by Zittenfeld
(1826) in Odessa, in the faculty of which were Simhah Pinsker, Elijah
Finkel, the grandson of Elijah Gaon, and Abraham Abele, the eminent
Talmudist. In 1836 a girls' department was added to it, and when
Lilienthal visited Odessa (ab. 1843) it had an attendance of from four
to five hundred pupils of both sexes, the annual expense being
twenty-eight thousand rubles. A similar school was opened in Kishinev by
Stern, and in the early "forties" there was hardly a Jewish community of
note without one or more of such Jewish public institutions. Several
well-to-do Maskilim not only founded but, like Perl, also maintained
such schools, and gave instruction in some or all of the subjects taught
in them.[3]

The "forties" began auspiciously for Haskalah in Russia. On January 15,
1840, the Riga community, amid pomp and rejoicing, opened the first
Jewish school affiliated with a university. The teaching staff consisted
of three Jews and one Christian, with Doctor Max Lilienthal (1815-1882),
the young, highly recommended, and recently chosen local rabbi, as its
principal. In the same year, the indefatigable Basilius Stern succeeded
in forming a committee, of which Hayyim Efrusi and Moses Lichtenstadt
were members, to deliberate on founding rabbinical seminaries in Russia.
In 1841, forty-five delegates, representing the six chief committees of
the Lovers of Enlightenment, assembled in Vilna, and thence issued an
appeal in which they adopted as their platform the elevation of the
moral standards of adults by urging them to follow useful trades and
discouraging the Jewish proclivity to business as much as possible; a
reform of the prevailing system of the education of the young; the
combating,