Now all this was changed.  Christians championed the cause of Jews.  The Government, too, appeared to be sincerely anxious for the welfare of its Jewish subjects.  It not only promised, but frequently also performed.  The Jews were allowed to follow their religious predilections unhindered.  The schools were reorganized with rabbinical graduates as their teachers and principals.  The Rabbinical Assembly, which, though established by Nicholas (May 26, 1848), had rarely been called together, was summoned to St. Petersburg, and there spent six months in 1857 and five in 1861 in deliberating on means of improving the intellectual and material standing of the Jews.  The “learned Jew” (uchony Yevrey) Moses Berlin was invited to become an adviser in the Department of Public Worship (1856), to be consulted concerning the Jewish religion whenever occasion required.  Permission was granted to publish Jewish periodicals in Russian, Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish (1860), and on April 26, 1862, the restriction was removed that limited Jewish publishing houses and printing-presses to Vilna and Zhitomir.  The Russia Montefiore saw on his visit in 1872, how different from the Russia he had left in 1846!

These auspicious signs renewed the hope of the Maskilim and intensified their zeal.  They were convinced of the noble intentions of the Liberator Czar; they were confident that the emperor who emancipated the muzhiks, and expunged many a kromye Yevreyev ("except the Jews”) which his father was wont to add to the few privileges he granted his Christian subjects, would ultimately remove the civil disabilities of the Jews altogether.  In a very popular song, written by Eliakum Zunser (Vilna, 1836-New York, 1913), then a rising and beloved Badhan (bard) writing in Yiddish and Hebrew, Alexander II was likened to an angel of God who finds the flower of Judah soiled by dirt and trampled in the dust.  He rescues it, and revives it with living water, and plants it in his garden, where it flourishes once more.[6] The poets hailed him as the savior and redeemer of Israel.  All that the Jews needed was to make themselves deserving of his kindness, and worthy of the citizenship they saw in store for them.  In Russian, in Hebrew, and in Yiddish, in prose and in poetry, the one theme uppermost in the mind of all was enlightenment, or rather Russification.  From all quarters the reveille was sounded.  Abraham Baer Gottlober (1811-1899) exclaimed: 

  Awake, Israel, and, Judah, arise! 
  Shake off the dust, open wide thine eyes! 
  Justice sprouteth, righteousness is here,
  Thy sin is forgot, thou hast naught to fear.[7]

More impressively still Judah Loeb Gordon (1831-1892) called: 

  Arise, my people, ’tis time for waking! 
  Lo, the night is o’er, the day is breaking! 
  Arise and see where’er thou turn’st thy face,
  How changed are both our time and place.[8]

And in Yiddish, too, an anonymous poet echoed the strain: