etersburg and Moscow alone,
most of whom hailed from the Baltic provinces, where the Jews were more
cultured, but not less oppressed, than their brethren.

Those men--says he--who have acquired from study an idea of the
rights of man, and that the Jew ought to enjoy the same
privileges as every other citizen; those men who tried, by the
knowledge they had obtained, to open for themselves better
prospects in life, and now saw every hope frustrated by laws
inimical to them only as Jews, ran, from mere despair, into the
bosom of the Greek Church. The harassing care for a living, the
terrible difficulties in surmounting them forced them, in an
hour of distress, to deny their faith. I always compared them
with the Anusim [forced converts] of Spain. Among them there is
no religious indifference, as is the case in Western Europe and
Germany; and I have met with many converted Jews there, who,
with tears in their eyes, complained of heart-burnings and pangs
of conscience; and they look upon themselves as eternally lost.
Those tears will show a heavy balance against Czar Nicholas,
when, bereft of his earthly power, he stands before the eternal
tribunal.

The other charge--he says again after refuting several
accusations of the kind stated above--the other charge, that the
Jews are averse to secular studies, rests upon an equally
erroneous foundation. For even in Germany Jewish parents have at
length found out that it is absolute folly to let their sons
devote themselves to the study of science, since they never can
hope for obtaining the least office; and since many a one, after
the best years of his youth are passed, tired of waiting, and
fearful of not having in his old age any means of support, finds
in the baptismal font the last anchor of his shattered hopes.
How much more must this consideration have weight in Russia?
Nicholas, instead of encouraging the Jews to study, ordered, on
the contrary, that all such of them as held offices and insignia
of distinction under Alexander should either resign or become
apostates. I know myself several collegiate councillors and men
attached to the court, who went to the synagogue on the Day of
Atonement with the insignia of the order of St. Anna around
their neck, and prayed there with devotion and fervor, who still
were forced into apostasy.