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 bureaucracy, where, at the expense of the Jews, it
could stow away anyone who had proved a failure or was no longer useful.
The Government also undertook to provide the graduates with positions,
patronage which rendered the students insolently independent of their
coreligionists, and encouraged some of them to indulge in a _modus
vivendi_ distasteful to their future flocks. The graduates, therefore,
proved failures as rabbis, and the Government was forced to provide for
them by appointing them as teachers.[16]
If this was the case with the rabbinical seminaries, we can easily
imagine the state of the subordinate schools. The Christian principals
were coarse and uneducated as a rule, and did their best to prejudice
the children against their religion. Scattered all over the Pale were to
be found Jews competent to fill positions not only as teachers in
inferior grades but as professors in the universities.
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