staff from Germany.  Lilienthal himself tells us in his Memoirs that he made bold to remind the Minister that all obstacles in the path of the desired re-education of the Russian Jews would disappear, were the Tzar to grant them complete emancipation.  To this the Minister retorted that the initiative must come from the Jews themselves who first must try to “deserve the favor of the Sovereign.”  At any rate, Lilienthal accepted the proffered task.  He was commissioned to tour the Pale of Settlement, to organize there the few isolated progressive Jews, “the lovers of enlightenment,” or Maskilim, as they styled themselves, and to propagate the idea of a school-reform among the orthodox Jewish masses.

While setting out on his journey, Lilienthal himself did not fully realize the difficulties of the task he had undertaken.  He was to instill confidence in the “benevolent intentions of the Government” into the hearts of a people which by an uninterrupted series of persecutions and cruel restrictions had been reduced to the level of pariahs.  He was to make them believe that the Government was a well-wisher of Jewish children, those same children, who at that very time were hunted like wild beasts by the “captors” in the streets of the Pale, who were turned by the thousands into soldiers, deported into outlying provinces, and belabored in such a manner that scarcely half of them remained alive and barely a tenth remained within the Jewish fold.  Guided by an infallible instinct, the plain Jewish people formulated their own simplified theory to account for the step taken by the Government:  up to the present their children had been baptized through the barracks, in the future they would be baptized through the additional medium of the school.

Lilienthal arrived in Vilna in the beginning of 1842, and, calling a meeting of the Jewish Community, explained the plan conceived by the Government and by Uvarov, “the friend of the Jews.”  He was listened to with unveiled distrust.

The elders—­Lilienthal tells us in his Memoirs [1]—­sat there absorbed in deep contemplation.  Some of them, leaning on their silver-adorned staffs or smoothing their long beards, seemed as if agitated by earnest thoughts and justifiable suspicions; others were engaging in a lively but quiet discussion on the principles involved; such put to me the ominous question:  “Doctor, are you fully acquainted with the leading principles of our government?  You are a stranger; do you know what you are undertaking?  The course pursued against all denominations but the Greek proves clearly that the Government intends to have but one Church in the whole Empire; that it has in view only its own future strength and greatness and not our own future prosperity.  We are sorry to state that we put no confidence in the new measures proposed by the ministerial council, and that we look with gloomy foreboding into the future.”

[Footnote 1:  I quote from Max Lilienthal, American Rabbi, Life and Writings, by David Philipson, New York, 1915, p, 264.]