Finding his
efforts an utter failure, Lilienthal went to Odessa with letters of
recommendation from Uvarov to Vorontzov, the patron of Stern, and was
elected rabbi of that enlightened and wealthy community. But, for some
inexplicable reason, he suddenly left the city on the plea of visiting
friends in Germany, and went to the United States, where he remained to
the end of his life, and became one of the leading rabbis and communal
workers among his coreligionists whose lines had fallen in pleasanter
places than the fortunes of those he had left behind in Russia.[11]
For Lilienthal's disillusionment came apace, and he finally recognized
the error of his ways. In his book, _My Travels in Russia_, published
both in English and in German, he admits that the opponents of the
schools he advocated were after all in the right. Education without
emancipation was indeed the straightest road to conversion. Witness the
thirty thousand Jewish apostates in St. Petersburg and Moscow alone,
most of whom hailed from the Baltic provinces, where the Jews were more
cultured, but not less oppressed, than their brethren.
Those men--says he--who have acquired from study an idea of the
rights of man, and that the Jew ought to enjoy the same
privileges as every other citizen; those men who tried, by the
knowledge they had obtained, to open for themselves better
prospects in life, and now saw every hope frustrated by laws
inimical to them only as Jews, ran, from mere despair, into the
bosom of the Greek Church.
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