e the restrictions on education.[15]

Trade schools were opened by the Committee for the Promotion of a
Knowledge of Trade and Agriculture among the Jews of Russia, in Minsk,
Vilna, and Vitebsk, besides fifteen manual training schools for boys and
twenty for girls, in which the indigent pupils are provided with food,
clothes, and books. In 1900 thirteen new schools were opened in Kherson
and Yekaterinoslav, to supply the educational demand of the thirty-eight
colonies existing in those Governments. In the vicinity of Minsk a
Junior Republic was organized, and in many cities art and choral
societies were formed.[16]

The desire for self-help and the tendency towards organization, to which
Zionism gave an impetus, was rapidly reflected in every sphere of
Russo-Jewish activity. In a series of works and articles, Jacob Wolf
Mendlin, who studied under Lassalle, pointed out the importance of the
co-operative system. Accordingly, a union was organized by the Jewish
salesmen in Warsaw. In 1897 a conference of Jewish workingmen was held
in that city and Der allgemeine juedische Arbeiterbund in Littauen,
Polen, und Russland (Federation of Jewish Labor Unions in Lithuania,
Poland, and Russia) was perfected. It published three papers as its
organs, Die Arbeiterstimme, Der juedischer Arbeiter, and, in Switzerland,
Letzte Nachrichten. Soon workmen's associations and artisans' clubs
appeared wherever there was a sufficient number of Jewish tailors,
hatters, bookbinders, etc., for the purpose of increasing and improving
the value of their production, and to do away with middlemen and
money-lenders. They organized a tailors', dyers', and shoemakers' union
in Kharkov, and a carpenters' union in Minsk, for mutual support in the
struggle for existence, and for the construction of sanitary
workingmen's houses. The cultural desire of the handicraftsmen,
constituting twelve per cent of the Russo-Jewish population and
occasionally fifty-two per cent (Odessa), seventy-three per cent
(Kovno), and even ninety per cent (Byelostok), is phenomenal. Their
object is not only physical improvement. Their highest aim is that their
members be enabled, by means of efficient night schools and private
instruction, to acquire elementary and higher education; in the words of
the constitution of the carpenters' union of Minsk, "to protect their
material interests, raise their moral and intellectual status, and
foster efforts of self-help."[17]

The Hebrew te