What “purification” the author of the memorandum has in mind may be gathered from his casual remark that the Jews, who maintain their separatism, are rightly afraid of reforms:  “for is not the religion of the Cross the purest symbol of universal citizenship?” This, however, Uvarov cautiously adds, should not be made public, for “it would have no other effect except that of arousing from the very beginning the opposition of the majority of the Jews against the (projected) schools.”

Officially the reform must confine itself to the opening in all the cities of the Jewish Pale of elementary and secondary schools in which Jewish children should be taught the Russian language, secular sciences, Hebrew, and “religion, according to the Holy Writ.”  The instruction should be given in Russian, though, owing to the shortage in teachers familiar with this language, the use of German is to be admitted temporarily.  The teachers in the low-grade schools shall provisionally be recruited from among melammeds who “can be depended upon”; those in the higher-grade schools shall be chosen from among the modernized Jews of Russia and Germany.

The Committee endorsed Uvarov’s scheme in its principal features, and urgently recommended that, in order to prepare the Jewish masses for the impending reform, a special propagandist be sent into the Pale of Settlement for the purpose of acquainting this obstreperous nation with “the benevolent intentions of the Government.”  Such a propagandist was soon found in the person of a young German Jew, Dr. Max Lilienthal, a resident of Riga.

Lilienthal; who was a native of Bavaria (he was born in Munich in 1815) and a German university graduate, was a typical representative of the German Jewish intellectuals of that period, a champion of assimilation and of moderate religious reform.  Lilienthal had scarcely completed his university course, when he was offered by a group of educated Jews in Riga the post of preacher and director of the new local Jewish school, one of the three modern Jewish schools then in existence in Russia.[1] In a short time Lilienthal managed to raise the instruction in secular and Jewish subjects to such a high standard of modernity that he elicited a glowing tribute from Uvarov.  The Minister was struck by the idea that the Riga school might serve as a model for the net of schools with which he was about to cover the whole Pale of Settlement, and Lilienthal seemed the logical man for carrying out the planned reforms.

[Footnote 1:  The other two schools were located in Odessa and in Kishinev.]

In February, 1841, Lilienthal was summoned to St. Petersburg, where he had a prolonged conversation with Uvarov.  According to the testimony of the official Russian sources, he tried to persuade the Minister to abolish all “private schools,” the heders, and to forbid all private teachers, the melammeds, to teach even temporarily in the projected new schools, and to import, instead, the whole teaching