o disgrace himself."[22]

And again, as it had been during the reign of Alexander I after his
acquaintance with Baroness Kruedener, so it was with the reign of
Alexander II after his acquaintance with Pobyedonostsev. The status of
the Jews constituted the first indication of the ill-boding change. How
little the officials had been in sympathy with the reformatory efforts
of their czar, even when the atmosphere had been filled with peace and
good-will to all including the Jews, is shown by the fact that when, in
1863, through the efforts of Doctor Schwabacher, the Jewish community of
Odessa applied for a charter to build a Home for Aged Hebrews, the
charter, though granted by the higher authorities, was withheld for over
twenty years! The reaction flaunted its power once again, and sat
enthroned in Tsarskoye Syelo. The few rights the Jews had enjoyed were
rescinded one by one. Not satisfied with this, the Slavophils tried,
under every pretext, to stop the progress of the Jewish people. Every
now and then the Society for the Promotion of Haskalah would send some
of the brighter seminary students to complete their education in Breslau
or Berlin, but at the command of the Government this was soon
discontinued. It was the intention of the same organization, from its
very incipiency, to have the Bible translated under its auspices into
Russian, but it took ten long years before this praiseworthy undertaking
could be begun, because of the obstacles the Government placed in the
way of its execution. Fortunately, the indomitable courage of the
Maskilim could not be subdued. Young men went, or were sent, to Germany
to prepare themselves for the rabbinate as before; the Bible and the
Book of Common Prayer, too, were translated secretly by Wohl, Gordon,
Steinberg, and Leon Mandelstamm, and published in Germany, whence they
were smuggled into Russia.[23]

More direct and equally inexplicable, save on the ground of animosity to
whatever was not Slavonic, was the ukase to close the Sabbath Schools
and the Evening Schools, the only means of educating the laboring men
(1870). In 1871, the first of a series of massacres (pogromy) took place
in the centre of Jewish culture, Odessa. In 1872, permission was denied
to the ladies of that city to organize a society for the purpose of
maintaining trade schools, to teach poor Jewish girls handicrafts. The
two rabbinical seminaries, of Vilna and Zhitomir, were closed in 1873,
and replaced by ins