This change of attitude may well be illustrated by the following incident.  In 1858 the magazine Illustratzia ("Illustration”) of St. Petersburg published an anti-Semitic article on “the Zhyds of the Russian West.”  The article was answered by two cultured Jews, Chatzkin and Horvitz, in the influential periodicals Russki Vyestnik ("The Russian Herald”) and Atyeney ("Athenaeum").  In reply to this refutation, the Illustratzia showered a torrent of abuse upon the two authors who were contemptuously styled “Reb Chatzkin” and “Reb Horvitz,” and whose pro-Jewish attitude was explained by motives of avarice.  The action of the anti-Semitic journal aroused a storm of indignation in the literary circles of both capitals.  The conduct of the Illustratzia was condemned in a public protest which bore the signatures of 140 writers, including some of the most illustrious names in the Russian literary world.  The protest declared that “in the persons of Horvitz and Chatzkin an insult has been offered to the entire (Russian) people, to all Russian literature,” which has no right to let “naked slander” pass under the disguise of polemics.

Though the protesting writers were wholly actuated by the desire to protect the moral purity of Russian literature and did not at all touch upon the Jewish question, the Jewish public workers were nevertheless enchanted by this declaration of literary Russia, and were deeply gratified by the implied assumption that the Jews of Russia formed part of the Russian people.

Several sympathetic articles in influential periodicals, advocating the necessity of Jewish emancipation, seemed to complete the happiness of the progressive section of Russian Jewry.  Even the Slavophile publicist Ivan Aksakov, who subsequently joined the ranks of Jew-baiters, recognized at that time, in 1862, the need of a certain measure of emancipation for the Jews.  The only thing that worried him was the danger that the admission of the Jews to the Russian civil service “in all departments,” might result “in filling with Jews” the Senate and Council of State, not excluding the possibility of a Jew occupying the post of Procurator-General of the Holy Synod.  Unshakable in his friendship for the Jews was the physician and humanitarian N. Pirogov, [1] who, in his capacity of superintendent of the Odessa School District, was largely instrumental in encouraging the Jewish youth in their pursuit of general culture and in creating a Russian Jewish press.

[Footnote 1:  See above, p. 207, n. 1.]

The most efficient factor of cultural regeneration was the secular school, both the general Russian and the Jewish Crown school.  A flood of young men, lured by the rosy prospects of a free human existence in the midst of a free Russian people, rushed from the farthermost nooks and corners of the Pale into the gymnazia and universities whose doors were kept wide open for the Jews.  Many children of