The delegates met, deliberated, and disbanded, but the tidings announced in Lilienthal’s epistle did not prove to be good.  In one of the fables of Kryloff, the Russian AEsop, we are told that once a swan, a pike, and a crab, decided to make a trip together.  No sooner had they started than, in accordance with their nature, the swan began to fly, the pike to shuffle along, the crab to crawl backward.  It was so with the delegation of 1843.  Rabbi Isaac, the rabid Mitnagged, could find but little to admire in the proposals of Rabbi Menahem Mendel, the ardent Hasid, and both were bitterly opposed to the view preached by Doctor Lilienthal, that the salvation of the Jews and Judaism would be brought about by a system of education adopted in accordance with an ukase by Nicholas.  Stern, too, had little use for Lilienthal, whom he declared to be ignorant of the condition of Russian Jews and incapable of working in their behalf.  From such discord nothing good could come.  The fact is, that the few resolutions mentioned had been drawn up beforehand by the Government officials, and the time and trouble and expense which the council involved were, a la Russe, for appearance sake.  Finding his efforts an utter failure, Lilienthal went to Odessa with letters of recommendation from Uvarov to Vorontzov, the patron of Stern, and was elected rabbi of that enlightened and wealthy community.  But, for some inexplicable reason, he suddenly left the city on the plea of visiting friends in Germany, and went to the United States, where he remained to the end of his life, and became one of the leading rabbis and communal workers among his coreligionists whose lines had fallen in pleasanter places than the fortunes of those he had left behind in Russia.[11]

For Lilienthal’s disillusionment came apace, and he finally recognized the error of his ways.  In his book, My Travels in Russia, published both in English and in German, he admits that the opponents of the schools he advocated were after all in the right.  Education without emancipation was indeed the straightest road to conversion.  Witness the thirty thousand Jewish apostates in St. Petersburg and Moscow alone, most of whom hailed from the Baltic provinces, where the Jews were more cultured, but not less oppressed, than their brethren.

Those men—­says he—­who have acquired from study an idea of the rights of man, and that the Jew ought to enjoy the same privileges as every other citizen; those men who tried, by the knowledge they had obtained, to open for themselves better prospects in life, and now saw every hope frustrated by laws inimical to them only as Jews, ran, from mere despair, into the bosom of the Greek Church.  The harassing care for a living, the terrible difficulties in surmounting them forced them, in an hour of distress, to deny their faith.  I always compared them with the Anusim [forced converts] of Spain.  Among them there is no religious indifference, as is the case in Western