These restrictive measures were not relaxed when Alexander III was succeeded by his son Nicholas II (1894).  If anything, they were more rigorously executed, and the mob was encouraged to multiply its outrages upon the defenceless Jews.  The closing years of the nineteenth century wiped out the promises of its opening years.  Blood accusations followed by riots became of frequent occurrence.  Irkutsk (1896), Shpola, and Kiev (1897), Kantakuzov (Kherson), Vladimir, and Nikolayev (1899) gave the Jews a foretaste of what they had to expect when the Black Hundreds, encouraged by the Government and incited by Kruzhevan and Pronin, would be let loose to enact the scenes that took place in Kishinev and Homel before the Russo-Japanese war, and in hundreds of towns after it.  The difficulties in the way of securing an education were increased.  Russia did not believe in an “irreducible minimum” where the rights of her Jews were concerned.  Under Nicholas II the number of Jewish women admitted to medical schools was put at three per cent of the total number of students; the newly-established School for Engineers in Moscow was closed to Jewish young men altogether; and the students of both sexes in the schools were constantly harassed by the police because of the harsh laws concerning the rights of residence.  Some splendidly equipped institutions of learning were allowed to remain almost empty rather than admit Jewish students.[2]

This was the worst punishment of all, the most relentless vengeance wreaked on a helpless victim.  “Of all the laws which swept down upon them from St. Petersburg and Moscow,” says Leroy-Beaulieu with characteristic insight into the soul of Israel, “those which they [the Jews] find hardest to bear are the regulations that block their entrance to the Russian universities.”  The bloodless weighed heavier than the bloody pogroms.  Consumed with a desire for education, wealthy Russian Jews made an attempt to establish higher schools of their own, without even drawing upon the surplus money of the kosher-meat fund, which had originally been created for such purposes.  Baron de Hirsch, too, offered two million dollars for the higher and technical education of the Jews.  But every attempt proved fruitless.  Baron de Hirsch’s munificence was flatly refused.  In the school which Mr. Weinstein opened at Vinitza, Podolia, no more than eight Jews were allowed to attend among eighty Christians, and in the one at Gorlovka, founded by another Jew (Polyakov), only five per cent were admitted.[3]

Writers are wont to speak of this as a reactionary period.  The description applies to the Russians; among the Jews it was a period of reawakening.[4] They were disillusioned.  They saw that Russification without emancipation, as their unsophisticated fathers had told Lilienthal, meant extermination.  The first and worst pogroms were perpetrated in those places where the Jews were like their Russian neighbors in every respect, except in the eyes of the law, and