For six long months the Minister, whose official duty was the promotion of education, was wavering between a number of schemes designed to restrict education among the Jews.  Suggestions for such restrictions came from officials of the ministry and from superintendents of school districts.  Some proposed to close the schools only to the children of the lower classes among the Jews; in which “the unsympathetic traits of the Jewish character” were particularly conspicuous.  Others recommended a restrictive percentage for Jews in general, without any class discrimination.  Still others pleaded for moderation lest excessive restriction in admission to Russian universities should force the Jewish youth to go to foreign universities and make them even “more dangerous,” since they were bound to return to Russia with liberal notions concerning the political form of government.

At last, in July, 1887, the Minister of Public Instruction, acting on the above-mentioned imperial “resolution,” published his two famous circulars limiting the admission of Jews to the universities and to secondary schools.  The following norm was established:  in the Pale of Settlement the Jews were to be admitted to the schools to the extent of ten per cent of the Christian school population; outside the Pale the norm was fixed at five per cent, and in the two capitals, St. Petersburg and Moscow, at three per cent.  Although decreed before the very beginning of the new scholastic year, the percentage norm was nevertheless immediately applied in the case of the gymnazia, the “Real schools,” [1] and the universities.  In the higher professional institutions, such as the technological, veterinarian, and agronomical schools, the restrictions had been, practised even before the promulgation of the circular, or were introduced immediately after it.

[Footnote 1:  Or Real Gymnazia, see above, p. 163, n, 1.]

This was the genesis of the educational “percentage norm,” the source of sorrow and tears for two generation of Russian Jews—­both fathers and sons now having run the gauntlet.  In the months of July and August of every year, thousands of Jewish children were knocking at the doors of the gymnazia and universities, but only tens and hundreds obtained admission.  In the towns of the Pale where the Jews form from thirty to eighty per cent of the total population, the admission, of Jewish pupils to the gymnazia and “Real schools” was limited to ten per cent, so that the majority of Jewish children were deprived of a secondary education.

The position of the gymnazium and “Real school” graduates who were unable to continue their studies in the institutions of higher learning was particularly tragic.  Many of these unfortunates addressed personal appeals to the Minister of Public Instruction, Dyelanov, who, being good-natured, would, despite his reactionary proclivities, frequently sanction the admission of the petitioners over and above the school norm.  But the majority of the young men, barred from the colleges, found themselves compelled to go abroad in search of education, and, being generally without means, suffered untold hardships.