toms seemed to disappear, all things were become new. New life,
new hope, new aspirations throbbed in the hearts of the subjects of the
gigantic empire, and better times were knocking at their doors. _Joli
tout le monde, le diable est mort!_

This era of great reforms and the resuscitation of all that is good and
noble in the Slavonic soul brought about also a moral regeneration. The
colossus who, according to Turgenief, preferred to sleep an endless
sleep, with a jug of vodka in his clutched fingers, proved that he, too,
was human, with a feeling, human heart beating in his bosom. With the
restoration of peace and the abolition of serfhood, there began a
removal of prejudice even against Jews. Hitherto the foremost
litterateurs in Russia, imitating the writers of other lands, had
painted the Jew as a monstrosity. Pushkin's prisoner, Gogol's traitor,
Lermontoff's spy, and Turgenief's Zhid (Jew) were caricatures and
libels, equal in acrimony, and not inferior in art, to Shakespeare's
Shylock and Dickens's Fagin. But now the best and ablest men of letters
signed a protest against such unjust and impossible characters.

Two thousand years of cruel suffering and affliction--said the
historian and humanitarian Professor Granovsky, of the
University of Moscow--have at last erased the bloody boundary
line separating the Jews from humanity. The honor of this
reconciliation, which is becoming firmer from day to day,
belongs to our age. The civic status of the Jews is now
established in most European countries, and even in the places
that are still backward their condition is improved, if not by
law, then by enlightenment.

And law and enlightenment radiated their sunshine also upon the Jews of
rejuvenated Russia. The Cantonist system was abolished for good; the
high schools and universities were opened to Jews without
discrimination; and the Governments lying outside the Pale were made
accessible to Jewish scholars, professional men, manufacturers,
wholesale merchants, and skilled laborers (March 16, 1859; November 27,
1861).[1] Through the efforts of Wolf Kaplan, one of Guenzburg's noted
pupils, the persecution of Jews by Germans in Riga was stopped, and the
eminent publicist Katkoff undertook to defend them in the newspaper
Russkiya Vyedomosti. Nazimov, the Governor-General of Vilna, Mukhlinsky,
who inspected the Jewish schools in western Russia, Artzimovich, of
southern Russia, and many