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.
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