al 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 Jew! They became, as it were,
infirmaries of the