Jew!  They became, as it were, infirmaries of the bureaucracy, where, at the expense of the Jews, it could stow away anyone who had proved a failure or was no longer useful.  The Government also undertook to provide the graduates with positions, patronage which rendered the students insolently independent of their coreligionists, and encouraged some of them to indulge in a modus vivendi distasteful to their future flocks.  The graduates, therefore, proved failures as rabbis, and the Government was forced to provide for them by appointing them as teachers.[16]

If this was the case with the rabbinical seminaries, we can easily imagine the state of the subordinate schools.  The Christian principals were coarse and uneducated as a rule, and did their best to prejudice the children against their religion.  Scattered all over the Pale were to be found Jews competent to fill positions not only as teachers in inferior grades but as professors in the universities.  Yet Lilienthal was advised (1841) to advertise for three hundred teachers in Germany.  Finally the Government decided to employ Jews as teachers of Hebrew only, the least important subject in the curriculum; for instruction in the secular branches none but Christians were eligible.  No Jews were allowed to become rectors in their own schools, and their salaries were so small that they could not support themselves without teaching an additional class, which was prohibited.  A Jew might, indeed, become an “honorable overseer” (pochotny blyustityel), to mediate between pupils and parents, but the title was the only pay attached to the office.  Respectable parents, therefore, kept their children at home, or rather in the heder, and many a child’s name was on the roll of attendance who was not even aware of the existence of the school.  “Every year in the autumn,” relates a writer a quarter of a century later, “there was a kind of compulsory recruiting of Jewish children for the Government school, accompanied sometimes by struggles between the victims and their enemies,—­scenes without a parallel, in some respects, in the civilized world.  I remember how poor mothers and sisters wept with despair when some boy of the family was carried off or enlisted by the officers to be a pupil of a Government school.”  Like the poimaniki, the poor and the orphaned were compelled, or induced, to fill the class-rooms shunned by the rich and respectable, and though the Government not only condemned the ancient Hebrew institutions, but declared the twenty thousand teachers who imparted instruction in them to be outlaws and criminals, the melammedim pursued their vocation as ever, and the hadarim, Talmud Torahs, yeshibot, and batte midrashim swarmed with students of the prohibited learning.[17]