sian universities." The bloodless weighed heavier than the
bloody pogroms. Consumed with a desire for education, wealthy Russian
Jews made an attempt to establish higher schools of their own, without
even drawing upon the surplus money of the kosher-meat fund, which had
originally been created for such purposes. Baron de Hirsch, too, offered
two million dollars for the higher and technical education of the Jews.
But every attempt proved fruitless. Baron de Hirsch's munificence was
flatly refused. In the school which Mr. Weinstein opened at Vinitza,
Podolia, no more than eight Jews were allowed to attend among eighty
Christians, and in the one at Gorlovka, founded by another Jew
(Polyakov), only five per cent were admitted.[3]

Writers are wont to speak of this as a reactionary period. The
description applies to the Russians; among the Jews it was a period of
reawakening.[4] They were disillusioned. They saw that Russification
without emancipation, as their unsophisticated fathers had told
Lilienthal, meant extermination. The first and worst pogroms were
perpetrated in those places where the Jews were like their Russian
neighbors in every respect, except in the eyes of the law, and with the
approval of some who were devotees of the Narodnaya Volya. The Jewish
consciousness reasserted itself. If Pobyedonostsev accomplished his
fiendish design as regards emigration, more than a million Jews having
left Russia within the last twenty years; if he has almost succeeded in
causing them to die of starvation; yet his hope of forcing a third of
them to conversion was a disappointment and a delusion. The Jews showed
that the traditional description applied to them, "stiff-necked," was
not undeserved. While the Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Armenians have
undergone conversion in multitudes, they whose suffering by far exceeded
that of any other "non-Russian" nationality remained, with insignificant
exceptions, loyal to the religion of their fathers.[5]

The Russian Jews--says Zunser--sobered down from the orgies of
assimilation, and its worshippers abandoned their idol. Those
who had almost forgotten that they were of the camp of Israel
began to return to its tents. The Jewish physicians, jurists,
technologists, and the entire so-called Jewish "intelligentia,"
who heretofore had never cared to speak a word of Yiddish to a
Jew, resumed their native tongue; they began to send their
children to the Je