e 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]

Nicholas was paid measure for measure, and the cunning of his ministers
was made of no avail by the shrewdness of his Jewish subjects. The
report of the Minister of Education, at the end of 1845, shows
incredible progress. It states that since the ukase of November 13,
1844, i.e. in the course of a single year, more than two thousand
schools of different grades were established in various cities of the
Pale, with more than one hundred and eighty thousand pupils, not
including the technical schools in Odessa, Riga, Kishinev, Vilna, and
Uman, with their hundreds of students! The truth was that, instead of
the reported Russification, there had set in a vigorous reaction, which
rendered the position more critical. Both sides had become
desperate.[18] Some Maskilim, emboldened by the interest the Government
evinced in their efforts, had resorted to all manner of means to
accomplish their object, and frequently allied themselves with the
oppressors. The Slavuta publishing house, it is claimed, was closed, and
the Schapiras met with their tragic end, because "as printers they
scrupulously abstained from publishing Haskalah literature." Maskilim
were employed by the authorities as tax collectors, and these, as is
ever the case with rapacious farmers of taxes, besides executing the
harsh laws of the tyrant, looked also to their own aggrandizement, and
harassed their pious coreligionists in all ways conceivable. Many of
them even hindered the colonization movement, because, if allowed to
mature, it would deprive them of their income.[19] In addition to this,
the Jews were now burdened, through the instrumentality of the Maskilim,
with a tax on the candles lighted on Sabbath eve, yielding annually over
one million rubles, the greater part of which went into the coffers of
greedy officials. Another tax, also for the maintenance of the
newly-organized Government schools, was levied--one kopeck and a half
per page!--on text-books, whether imported from abroad or published in
Vilna or Zhitomir, and the text-books were published with unnecessarily
large type and wide margins to increase the number of pages. The
abridgment and translation of Maimuni's _Mishneh Torah_ (St. Petersburg,
185