[Footnote 1:  Andreas Tovyanski (In Polish Towianski, 1799-1878), a Christian mystic, founded in Paris a separate community which fostered the belief in the restoration of the Polish and the Jewish people.  The community counted among its members several Jews.  The famous Polish poet Adam Mitzkevich (in Polish Mickiewicz, 1798-1855) joined Tovyanski in his endeavors, and on one occasion even appeared in a Paris synagogue on the Ninth of Ab to make an appeal to the Jews.]

[Footnote 2:  See above, p. 105.]

[Footnote 3:  Lubliner published Des Juifs en Pologne, Brussels, 1839; Hollaenderski wrote Les Israelites en Pologne, Paris, 1846.]

In pacified Poland, which, deprived of her former autonomous constitution, was now ruled by the iron hand of the Russian viceroy, Paskevich, the Jews at first experienced no palpable changes.  Their civil status was regulated, as heretofore, by the former Polish legislation, not by that of the Empire.  It was only in 1843 that the Polish Jews were in one respect equalized with their Russian brethren.  Instead of the old recruiting tax, they were now forced to discharge military service in person.  However, the imperial ukase extending the operation of the Conscription Statute of 1827 to the Jews of the Kingdom contained several alleviations.  Above all, its most cruel provision, the conscription of juveniles or cantonists, was set aside.  The age of conscription was fixed at twenty to twenty-five, while boys between the age of twelve and eighteen were to be drafted only when the parents themselves wished to offer them as substitutes for their elder sons who were of military age.  Nevertheless, to the Polish Jews, who had never known of conscription, military service lasting a quarter of a century, to be discharged in a strange Russian environment, seemed a terrible sacrifice.  The “Congregational Board” of Warsaw, having learned of the ukase, sent a deputation to St. Petersburg with a petition to grant the Jews of the Kingdom equal rights with the Christians, referring to the law of 1817 which distinctly stated that the Jews were to be released from personal military service so long as they were denied equal civil rights.  The petition of course proved of no avail; the very term “equal rights” was still missing in the Russian vocabulary.

Only in point of disabilities were the Jews of Poland gradually placed on an equal footing with their Russian brethren.  In 1845 the Russian law imposing a tax on the traditional Jewish attire [1] was extended in its operation to the Polish Jews, descending with the force of a real calamity upon the hasidic masses of Poland.  Fortunately for the Jews of Poland, the other experiments, in which St. Petersburg was revelling during that period, left them unscathed.  The crises connected with the problems of Jewish autonomy and the Jewish school, which threatened to disrupt Russian Jewry in the forties, had been passed by the