Jews
were excluded from the professions to which they had turned in the
"sixties" and "seventies," and in which they had been eminently
successful; they were not allowed to hold any civil or municipal office;
they were forbidden even to be nurses in the hospitals or to give
private instruction to children in the homes.
And still persecution did not cease. Not satisfied with starving the
bodies of five millions of Jews, Russian legislators were determined to
crush them intellectually. The Slavophils could not brook seeing
"non-Russians" surpass their own people in the higher walks of life. The
Jews, finally successful in emancipating themselves from the trammels of
rabbinism, had transferred their extraordinary devotion from the Talmud
to secular studies. They filled the schools and the universities of the
empire with zealous and intelligent pupils, who carried off most of the
honors. They contributed forty-eight pupils to the gymnasia out of every
ten thousand, while the Christians contributed only twenty-two. This was
regarded an unpardonable sin. "These Jews have the audacity to excel us
pure Russians," Pobyedonostsev is reported to have exclaimed, and
measures were taken to suppress their dangerous tendency.
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