Two thousand years of cruel suffering and affliction—­said the historian and humanitarian Professor Granovsky, of the University of Moscow—­have at last erased the bloody boundary line separating the Jews from humanity.  The honor of this reconciliation, which is becoming firmer from day to day, belongs to our age.  The civic status of the Jews is now established in most European countries, and even in the places that are still backward their condition is improved, if not by law, then by enlightenment.

And law and enlightenment radiated their sunshine also upon the Jews of rejuvenated Russia.  The Cantonist system was abolished for good; the high schools and universities were opened to Jews without discrimination; and the Governments lying outside the Pale were made accessible to Jewish scholars, professional men, manufacturers, wholesale merchants, and skilled laborers (March 16, 1859; November 27, 1861).[1] Through the efforts of Wolf Kaplan, one of Guenzburg’s noted pupils, the persecution of Jews by Germans in Riga was stopped, and the eminent publicist Katkoff undertook to defend them in the newspaper Russkiya Vyedomosti.  Nazimov, the Governor-General of Vilna, Mukhlinsky, who inspected the Jewish schools in western Russia, Artzimovich, of southern Russia, and many other prominent personages arose as champions of the Jews.[2]

The physician and pedagogue Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogov (1810-1881), the superintendent of the Odessa and Kiev school districts, is especially deserving of honorable mention in the history of Haskalah.  Of all the Russians of the period who gloried in their liberal convictions, he was the most liberal.  In him the last vestige of prejudice and race distinction disappeared, and he conscientiously devoted himself to the study, not only of the present, but also of the past of the Jews, to be in a better position to lend them his assistance.  To the Jews he appealed to unite and spread enlightenment among the masses by peaceful means.  To the Gentiles, again, he did not hesitate to point out the good qualities of the Jews, and in an article on the Odessa Talmud Torah he held up the institution as a model for the public elementary schools.  He admired especially the enthusiasm with which Jewish youths devoted themselves to the acquisition of knowledge.  “Where are religion, morality, enlightenment, and the modern spirit,” asked he, “when these Jews, who, with courage and self-sacrifice, engage in the struggle against prejudices centuries old, meet no one here to sympathize with them and extend a helping hand to them?” His liberality carried him so far that he established a fund for the support of indigent Jewish students at the University of Kiev, and he advocated strenuously the award of prizes and scholarships to deserving Jewish students.  Such as he were rare in any land, but nowhere so rare as in Russia.[3]