When after the Crimean War, which had exposed the rottenness of the old order of things, a fresh current of air swept through the atmosphere of Russia, and the liberation of the peasantry and other great reforms were coming to fruition, the Jewish problem, too, was in line of being placed in the forefront of these reforms.  For, after having done away with the institution of serfdom, the State was consistently bound to liberate its three million of Jewish serfs who had been ruthlessly oppressed and persecuted during the old regime.

Unfortunately the Jewish question, which was nothing more nor less than the question of equal citizenship for the Jews, was not placed in the line of the great reforms, but was pushed to the rear and solved fragmentarily—­on the instalment plan, as it were—­and within narrowly circumscribed limits.  Like all the other officially inspired reforms of that period, which proceeded up to a certain point and halted before the prohibited zone of constitutional and political liberties, so, too, the solution of the Jewish problem was not allowed to pass beyond the border-line.  For the crossing of that line would have rendered the whole question null and void by the simple recognition of the equality of all citizens.  The regenerated Russia of Alexander II., stubborn in its refusal of political freedom and civil equality, could only choose the path of half-measures.  Nevertheless, the transition from the pre-reformatory order of things to the new state of affairs signified a radical departure both in the life of Russia in general and in Jewish life in particular.  It did so not because the new conditions were perfect, but because the old ones were so inexpressibly ugly and unbearable, and the mere loosening of the chains of servitude was hailed as a pledge of complete liberation.

Far more intense than in the political life of Russia was the crisis in its social life.  While a chilling wind was still blowing from the wintry heights of Russian officialdom, while a grim censorship was still holding down the flight of the printed word, the released social energy was whirling and swirling in all classes of Russian society, sometimes breaking the fetters of police restraint.  The outbursts of young Russia ran far ahead of the slow progress of the reforms inspired from above.  It blazed the path for political freedom which the West of Europe had long traversed, and which was to prove in Russia tortuous and thorny.

The phase of Jewish life which claimed the first thought of Alexander II.’s Government was the military conscription.  Prior to the conclusion of the Crimean War, the Committee on Jewish Affairs [1] called the Tzar’s attention to the necessity of modifying the method of Jewish conscription, with its fiendish contrivances of seizing juvenile cantonists and enlisting “penal” and “captive” recruits.  Nevertheless the removal of this crying evil was postponed for a year, until the promulgation of the Coronation Manifesto [2] of August 26, 1856, when it was granted as an act of grace.