was withheld for over twenty years!  The reaction flaunted its power once again, and sat enthroned in Tsarskoye Syelo.  The few rights the Jews had enjoyed were rescinded one by one.  Not satisfied with this, the Slavophils tried, under every pretext, to stop the progress of the Jewish people.  Every now and then the Society for the Promotion of Haskalah would send some of the brighter seminary students to complete their education in Breslau or Berlin, but at the command of the Government this was soon discontinued.  It was the intention of the same organization, from its very incipiency, to have the Bible translated under its auspices into Russian, but it took ten long years before this praiseworthy undertaking could be begun, because of the obstacles the Government placed in the way of its execution.  Fortunately, the indomitable courage of the Maskilim could not be subdued.  Young men went, or were sent, to Germany to prepare themselves for the rabbinate as before; the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, too, were translated secretly by Wohl, Gordon, Steinberg, and Leon Mandelstamm, and published in Germany, whence they were smuggled into Russia.[23]

More direct and equally inexplicable, save on the ground of animosity to whatever was not Slavonic, was the ukase to close the Sabbath Schools and the Evening Schools, the only means of educating the laboring men (1870).  In 1871, the first of a series of massacres (pogromy) took place in the centre of Jewish culture, Odessa.  In 1872, permission was denied to the ladies of that city to organize a society for the purpose of maintaining trade schools, to teach poor Jewish girls handicrafts.  The two rabbinical seminaries, of Vilna and Zhitomir, were closed in 1873, and replaced by institutes for teachers, which were managed in the spirit that had prevailed under Nicholas I. And in 1878 the absurd blood accusation, against which four popes, Innocent IV, Paul III, Gregory X, and Clement XIV, issued their bulls, declaring it a baseless and wicked superstition, and which not only the Polish kings Boreslav V, Casimir III, Casimir IV, and Stephen Bathory, but also Alexander I (March 18, 1817), branded as a diabolic invention—­that dreadful accusation which even the commission of Nicholas, despite Durnovo’s efforts, had denounced as a disgrace and an abomination, was revived by the newspaper Grazhdanin.  The ghost of medievalism began to stalk abroad once more in erstwhile enlightened Russia and under the aegis of the Liberator Czar.

As often before in Jewish history, the Jews helped not a little to aggravate the untoward conditions.  At the instigation of a number of students of the Yeshibah Tree of Life, the doors of that noble institution were closed (1879), to open again after two years of untiring efforts on the part of its self-sacrificing dean, the renowned Naphtali Zebi Judah Berlin.  But at the worst this was the result of mistaken zeal for the cause of Haskalah.  What was more detrimental