The Government had managed to disrupt the Jewish communal organization and rob the Kahal of all its authority by degrading it to a kind of posse for the capture of recruits and extortion of taxes.  But while the Jewish masses hated the Kahal elders, they retained their faith in their spiritual leaders, the rabbis and Tzaddiks. [1] Heeding the command of these leaders, they closed their ranks, and offered stubborn resistance to the dangerous cultural influences threatening them from without.  Life was dominated by rigidly conservative principles.  The old scheme of family life, with all its patriarchal survivals, remained in force.  In spite of the law, embodied in the Statute of 1835, which fixed the minimum age of the bridegroom at eighteen (and that of the bride at sixteen), the practice of early marriages continued as theretofore.  Parents arranged marriages between children of thirteen and fifteen.  Boys of school age often became husbands and fathers, and continued to attend heder or yeshibah after their marriage, weighed down by the triple tutelage of father, father-in-law, and teacher.  The growing generation knew not the sweetness of being young.  Their youth withered under the weight of family chains, the pressure of want or material dependence.  The spirit of protest, the striving for rejuvenation, which asserted itself in some youthful souls, was crushed in the vise of a time-honored discipline, the product of long ages.  The slightest deviation from a custom, a rite, or old habits of thought met with severe punishment.  A short jacket or a trimmed beard was looked upon as a token of dangerous free-thinking.  The reading of books written in foreign languages, or even written in Hebrew, when treating of secular subjects, brought upon the culprit untold hardships.  The scholastic education resulted in producing men entirely unfit for the battle of life, so that in many families energetic women took charge of the business and became the wage earners, [2] while their husbands were losing themselves in the mazes of speculation, somewhere in the recesses of the rabbinic Betha-Midrash or the hasidic Klaus.

[Footnote 1:  See on the latter term, Vol.  I, p. 227.]

[Footnote 2:  This type of Jewish woman, current in Russia until recent times, was called Eshet Hayil, “a woman of valour,” with allusion to Prov. 31.10.]

In Lithuania the whole mental energy of the Jewish youth was absorbed by Talmudism.  The synagogue served as a “house of study” outside the hours fixed for prayers.  There the local rabbi or a private scholar gave lectures on the Talmud which were listened to by hosts of yeshibah bahurs. [1] The great yeshibahs of Volozhin, Mir, [2] and other towns sent forth thousands of rabbis and Talmudists.  Mentality, erudition, dialectic subtlety were valued here above all else.  Yet, as soon as the mind, whetted by talmudic dialectics, would point its edge against the existing order of things, or turn in the direction of living knowledge, of “extraneous sciences,” [3] it was checked by threats of excommunication and persecution.  Many were the victims of this petrified milieu, whose protests against the old order of things and whose strivings for a newer life were nipped in the bud.