Judaism
To the lover of mankind the history of the Russo-Jewish renaissance is an encouraging and inspiring phenomenon. Seldom has a people made such rapid strides forward as the Russian Jews. From the melancholy regularity that marked their existence a little more than two generation...
To the lover of mankind the history of the Russo-Jewish renaissance is an encouraging and inspiring phenomenon. Seldom has a people made such rapid strides forward as the Russia...
2. Chapter 2"There is but one key to the present," says Max Müller, "and that is the past." To understand fully the growth and historical development of a people's mind, one must be familia...
3. Chapter 3The storm of persecution that had been brewing in the sixteenth century, and which burst in all its fury by the middle of the seventeenth century, was allayed but little by the...
4. Chapter 4A glimmer of light pierced the Russian sky at the accession of Catherine II (1762-1796). This "Semiramis of the North," the admirer of Buffon, Montesquieu, Diderot, and, more es...
5. Chapter 5The charges brought against the Jews of Russia by henchmen of the czar were grave, indeed, only they did not contain a particle of truth. In Russia itself, not only Jews and non...
6. Chapter 6The year 1856 will always be remembered as the _annus mirabilis_ in the history of Russia. It marked at once the cessation of the Crimean war and the accession of the most liber...
7. Chapter 7The reign of Alexander III, like that of Nicholas I, was devoid of even that faint glamor of liberalism which, in the days of Alexander I and Alexander II, had aroused deceptive...
8. Chapter 8[Footnote 1: Mention might, indeed, be made of Dr. Zunz's pioneer work in his Aelteste Nachrichten über Juden und jüdische Gelehrte in Polen, Slavonien, Russland (Gesammelte Sch...
9. Chapter 9[Footnote 2: In the diary of a Polish squire we find the following item: "Jan. 5. As the lessee Herszka had not yet paid me the rental of 91 gulden, I went to his house to get m...
10. Chapter 10[Footnote 36: Mandelkern, Dibre Yeme Russyah, iii. 98; American Israelite, nos. 15, 18, etc. (My Travels in Russia); Gordon, Ha-Azamot ha-Yebashot, Odessa, 1899; AZJ, 1854, p. 2...
11. Chapter 11[Footnote 1: Diakov states that "when the population degenerated in West Russia, business and industry declined, and the number of the rich greatly diminished, while the nobles,...
12. Chapter 1213. Chapter 13[Footnote 11: How happy the Maskilim of that time were to save their fellows from the darkness of ignorance can be seen from the following anecdote told by a Maskil in a retrosp...
14. Chapter 14[Footnote 1: Most of this is based on Persecution of the Jews in Russia, Philadelphia, 1891, pp. 8-18, 22, 35, 51-82, 184-185; Frederick, The New Exodus, London, 1892, pp. 192-2...