The enforcement of school attendance would scarcely have produced the desired effect—­the orthodox managed somehow to give the slip to “Russian learning”—­were it not for the fact that under the influence of the inner cultural transformation of Russian Jewry the general Russian school became during that period more and more popular among the advanced classes of the Jewish population, and gymnazium and university took their place alongside of heder and yeshibah.  Yet the hundreds of pupils in the new schools faded into insignificance when compared with the hundreds of thousands who were educated exclusively in the old schools.  The fatal year 1875, the last of the twenty years of respite granted to the melammeds for their self-annihilation, arrived.  But the huge melammed army was not willing to pass out of Jewish life, in which they exercised a definite function, with no substitute to take its place.  The Government was forced to yield.  After several brief postponements the melammeds were left in peace, and by an ukase issued in 1879 the idea of abolishing the heders was dropped.

Towards the end of this period the Government abandoned altogether its attempts to reform the Jewish schools, and decided to liquidate its former activity in this direction.  By an ukase issued in 1873 the two rabbinical schools and all Jewish Crown schools were closed.  On the ruins of the vast educational network, originally projected for the transformation of Judaism, only about a hundred “elementary schools” and two modest “Teachers Institutes,” [1] which were to supply teachers for these schools, were established by the Government.  The authorities were now inclined to look upon the general Russian schools as the most effective agencies of “fusion,” and put their greatest trust in the elemental process of Russification which had begun to sweep over the upper layers of Jewry.

[Footnote 1:  In Vilna and Zhitomir.  The latter was closed in 1885.  The former is still in existence.]

5.  THE JEWS AND THE POLISH INSURRECTION OF 1863

While the official world of St. Petersburg was obsessed with the idea of the Russification of Jewry, in Warsaw the tendency of Polonization, as applied to the Jews of the Western region, cropped up in the wake of the revolutionary Polish movement in the beginning of the sixties.  At the inception of Alexander’s reign the Russian Government set out to equalize the legal status of the Jews in the Kingdom of Poland with that of the Empire, and to abolish the surviving special restrictions, such as the prohibition of residing in certain towns, or in certain parts of towns, disabilities in acquiring property, and others.  But the highest Polish administration in Warsaw was obstructing in every possible way the liberal attempts of the Russian Government.  Prior to the insurrection of 1863, the attitude of Polish society towards the Jews was one of habitual animosity, and this notwithstanding the fact that by that time Warsaw harbored already