achers, a class which, though more respected, underwent as
hard a struggle as the workingmen, banded themselves together in 1899 in
the Society for Aiding Hebrew Teachers of the Province of Vilna. Their
president was Michael Wolper, the inspector of the Hebrew Institute and
successor to Wohl as censor of Hebrew publications. Similar attempts
were made in Bessarabia. Rabbi Shachor, chairman of the Hebrew Teachers'
Association of Yekaterinoslav, was instrumental in opening a normal
school conducted on Chautauqua principles, and so advanced the cause of
education considerably.[18]

With the establishment of the rabbinical seminaries and the ukase (May
3, 1855) that only such may officiate as rabbis as have completed a
prescribed course of study, Russian Jewry was placed in a sore
predicament. It was a very difficult task to find men who united secular
knowledge with that thorough mastery of Talmudic literature which the
Jews of Russia exact from their rabbis. Every community was compelled to
appoint two rabbis: an orthodox rabbi (dukhovny rabbin) and a "crown,"
or Government, rabbi (kazyony rabbin). The people recognized only the
authority of the former, the Government that of the latter. The
consequence was that a man with a mere high-school education would apply
for, and would often receive, the position of crown-rabbi. His duties
consisted in merely keeping a register of marriages, births, and deaths,
administering the oath, and the like. The many lawyers and physicians
who were debarred from practicing their professions sought to become
candidates for the rabbinate. To avoid the unpleasant results which
followed, Rabbi Chernovich of Odessa and Rabbi I.J. Reines of Lyda
established seminaries in Odessa and Lyda, to take the place and to
continue the teaching of the Vilna and the Volozhin yeshibot, which had
been closed, and to furnish proper rabbis for the various
congregations.[19]

The century-long struggle for enlightenment had a telling effect. What
the early Maskilim had only dreamed of finally came to be. The
metamorphosis was so great and so general as to be hardly credible. It
was shown by Mr. Landman, in a paper read before the Russo-Jewish
Historical Society of Odessa, that while among the Gentiles of that city
the reading public constituted seven per cent of the population, among
Jews it was no less than thirty-three per cent, and twenty-five per cent
of all readers were Jewish women.[20] By 1905 there were