r known in Russia than in
their own land. As the Russo-Polish Jews had carried their Talmudic
learning back to the countries whence they originally received it, so
the Galician Jews, mostly hailing from the city of Brody, where Israel
Zamoscz, Mendel Levin, Joseph Hakohen, and others had implanted the
germs of Haskalah, now reimported it into Russia. The Jews of Odessa
were, therefore, more cultured than other Russian Jews, not excepting
those of Riga. Prosperous in business, they lavished money on their
schools, and their educational system surpassed all others in the
empire. In 1826 they had the best public school for boys, in 1835 a
similar one for girls, and in 1852 there existed fifty-nine public
schools, eleven boarding schools, and four day schools. The children
attended the Richelieu Lyceum and the "gymnasia" in larger proportion
than children of other denominations, and they were among the first, not
only in Russia, but in the whole Diaspora, to establish a
"choir-synagogue" (1840). "In most of the families," says Lilienthal,
"can be found a degree of refinement which may easily bear comparison
with the best French salon." Even Nicholas I found words of praise for
the Odessa Jews. "Yes," said he, "in Odessa I have also seen Jews, but
they were men"; while the zaddik "Rabbi Yisrolze" declared that he saw
"the flames of Gehennah round Odessa."[28]

Warsaw, too, was a beneficiary of Germany, having been occupied by the
Prussians before it fell to the lot of the Russians. It was there that
practically the first Jewish weekly journals were published in Yiddish
and Polish, Der Beobachter an der Weichsel, and Dostrzegacz Nadvisyansky
(1823). There was opened the first so-called rabbinical seminary, with
Anton Eisenbaum as principal, and Cylkov, Buchner, and Kramsztyk as
teachers. The public schools were largely attended, owing to the efforts
of Mattathias Rosen, and a year after a reformed synagogue had been
organized in Odessa another was founded in Warsaw, where sermons were
preached in German by Abraham Meir Goldschmidt.

But Riga on the Baltic, Odessa on the Black Sea, and Warsaw on the
Vistula were outdone by some cities in the interior. Haskalah lovers
multiplied rapidly, and were found in the early "forties" in every city
of any size in the Pale. "The further we go from Pinsk to Kletzk and
Nieszvicz," writes a correspondent in the Annalen,[29] "the more we lose
sight of the fanatics, and the greater grows the