on such
topics in Russian or other living tongues. In both directions it was a
power for good among the Jews of Russia.[10]

These united efforts of the Government, the Maskilim, and the Jewish
financiers produced an effect the like of which had perhaps been
witnessed only during the Hellenistic craze, in the period of the second
commonwealth of Judea. Russian Jewry began to "progress" as never
before. In almost all the large cities, particularly in Odessa, St.
Petersburg, and Moscow, the Jews were fast becoming Russified.
Heretofore cooped up, choking each other in the Pale as in a Black Hole,
they were now wild with an excessive desire for Russification. What
Maimon said of a few, could now be applied to hundreds and thousands,
they were "like starving persons suddenly treated to a delicious meal."
They flocked to the institutions of learning in numbers far exceeding
their due proportion. They were among the reporters, contributors, and
editorial writers of some of the most influential Russian journals. They
entered the professions, and distinguished themselves in art.[11]

The ambition of the wealthy was no longer to have a son-in-law who was
well-versed in the Torah, but a graduate from a university, the
possessor of a diploma, the wearer of a uniform. The bahur lost his
lustre in the presence of the "gymnasiast." This ambition pervaded more
or less all classes of Russo-Jewish society. A decade or two before,
especially in the "forties," orthodoxy had been as uncompromising as it
was unenlightened. "To carry a handkerchief on the Sabbath," as Zunser
says, "to read a pamphlet of the 'new Haskalah,' or commit some other
transgression of the sort, was sufficient to stamp one an apikoros
(heretic)."[12] Reb Israel Salanter, when he learned that his son had
gone to Berlin to study medicine, removed his shoes, and sat down on the
ground to observe shivah (seven days of mourning). When Mattes der
Sheinker (saloon-keeper) discovered that his boy Motke (later famous as
Mark Antokolsky) had been playing truant from the heder, and had hidden
himself in the garret to carve figures, he beat him unmercifully,
because he had broken the second commandment. This was greatly altered
in the latter part of the "seventies." Jacob Prelooker has a different
story to tell.

A remarkable change--he says[13]--had taken place in the minds
of my parents since I had overcome all difficulties and become a
student of a royal colleg