f the man who bore the chief part in
framing and moulding the Haskalah of the "eighties," which was devoted
to the development of Hebrew literature and the rejuvenation of the
Hebrew people. Loving the Hebrew tongue with a passion surpassing
everything else, he censured the German Jewish savants for writing their
learned works in the vernacular, and was on the alert to discover and
bring out new talent and win over the indifferent and estranged.
Dreaming of the redemption of his people, he paved the way for the
Zionistic movement, which spread with tremendous rapidity after his
death. And his sincerity and ability were repaid in the only coin the
poor possess--in love and admiration. Pilgrimages were made, sometimes
on foot, to behold the editor of Ha-Shahar and the author of _Ha-Toeh_.
The greatest journalists in St. Petersburg united in honoring him when
he visited the Russian capital in 1881. And when he was snatched away in
the midst of his usefulness, a victim of unremitting devotion to his
people, not only Maskilim, but Mitnaggedim and Hasidim felt that "a
prince and a mighty one had fallen in Israel!"

(Notes, pp. 322-327.)

CHAPTER VI

THE AWAKENING

1881-1905

The reign of Alexander III, like that of Nicholas I, was devoid of even
that faint glamor of liberalism which, in the days of Alexander I and
Alexander II, had aroused deceptive hopes of better times. During the
thirteen years of Alexander III's autocracy (1881-1894) not a ray of
light was permitted to penetrate into Holy Russia. On May 14, 1881, the
manifesto prohibiting the slightest infringement of the absolute power
of the czar was promulgated, to continue unbroken till the
Russo-Japanese war.

The liberal current which had carried away his predecessors when they
first mounted the throne was checked, the sluices of Slavophilism were
opened, the history of Russian thinkers became again, as Herzen said, "a
long list of martyrs and a register of convicts."

Nicholas Ignatiev, a rabid reactionary, a second Jeffreys, became chief
of the Ministry of the Interior; Katkoff, a repentant liberal and exile,
was appointed the czar's chief adviser, the Richelieu behind the throne;
and Pobyedonostsev, whom Turgenief called the "Russian Torquemada,"
obtained supremacy over Melikoff, and was appointed procurator of the
Holy Synod. With such as these at the head of the Russian bureaucracy,
there may have been some foundations for the rumor that an imp