The Lilienthal tragedy thus came to a premature close.  The hero disappeared at the beginning of the play.  He had the potency, but he lacked the conditions, for producing great results.  His German birth and training, the very qualities which recommended him to the Government, operated against him when he came to deal with Russian Jews.  Yet he succeeded in giving a strong impetus to the Haskalah movement, and builded better than he knew.  The statement in his address at the dedication of the Riga school,[14] “This hour we may call the hour of the renaissance of the mental education of Israel,” which reads like an oratorical platitude, was not entirely visionary.  The real history of Haskalah in Russia commences with Lilienthal.

Time helped greatly to restore, even to deepen, the affection of the Maskilim for Lilienthal.  A modern critic speaking of “life and literature” in Hebrew, pictures him in glowing colors, and finishes his description thus: 

I have presented to you, reader, a man of deep culture, known and respected in the highest circles, and yet inseparably connected with his race and religion, and ready to offer his life for their welfare; a man who worked with might and main for others at the sacrifice of his own comfort and advancement; an orator whose exalted phrases shattered the pillars and foundations of ignorance and superstition; a hero who in time of peril was proof against the arrows and missiles of the enemy, and who did not relax his hand from the flag.  But what was the fruit he reaped?  Mostly ingratitude and persecution, a heart lacerated with despair, a soul writhing under the pangs of frustrated hopes.  Such a personality with its fine shades, and with the poetry of the artist superimposed, would afford splendid material for the hero of a novel—­a hero to captivate the eye and heart of the reader by his nobility and grandeur.[15]

For a long time Russian officialdom discussed the question, whether the establishment of exclusively Jewish schools would prove beneficial, but nobody doubted the efficacy of rabbinical seminaries.  Yet it was these latter institutions that evoked the strongest protests from the Jews.  The advocates of Haskalah gradually came to recognize the truth, which Lilienthal admitted afterwards, that for a Russian rabbi a thorough knowledge of the Talmud was absolutely indispensable.  But it was with the object of discouraging such knowledge that the seminaries had been suggested by Uvarov, and it was this study that was almost entirely ignored in them.  What congregation, many of whose members were profound Talmudists, would accept a rabbi to whom unvocalized Hebrew was a snare and a stumbling-block?  Moreover, the whole atmosphere of the seminaries was Christian, nay, military.  Not a few members of their faculties or boards of governors were discharged police officers or superannuated soldiers, and at the head of the seminary in Vilna, the metropolis of Russian Jewry, stood an apostate