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The "titled" inteligenzia, reared in the Russian schools, who had drifted away from Judaism, was now joined by that other intelligenzia, the product of heder and yeshibah, who had acquired European culture through the medium of neo-Hebraic literature, and was in closer contact with the masses of the Jewish people.
Nevertheless the expectation of the Russian Government under Nicholas I. that the new schools would take the place of the time-honored educational Jewish institutions, the heder and yeshibah, remained unfulfilled. Only an insignificant percentage of Jewish children went to the Crown schools, and even these children did so only after having received their training at the heder or yeshibah.
For the aristocracy among the Jews, whose minds had not yet been stimulated by the new ideas, the Yeshibah was the home of all the virtues, the school in which the ideal was pursued, and lofty dreams were dreamed.
But there was nothing to do, and I lay there in discomfort until all the lights were extinguished. A life full of excitement, of which the above is a specimen, was not likely to displease so adventurous a spirit as Joseph's. When all is said, the Yeshibah provided a living for the young people, not overabundant, it is true, but at least they were relieved of material cares.
It is the salvation of the young tramp. He is given food, he sleeps on the school benches, and he is rescued from military service. But soon, having incurred disfavor by his frankness, and especially because he is discovered reading secular books, in which he is initiated by one of his fellow- students, he is obliged to leave the Yeshibah.
Boys of school age often became husbands and fathers, and continued to attend heder or yeshibah after their marriage, weighed down by the triple tutelage of father, father-in-law, and teacher. The growing generation knew not the sweetness of being young. Their youth withered under the weight of family chains, the pressure of want or material dependence.
The enforcement of school attendance would scarcely have produced the desired effect the orthodox managed somehow to give the slip to "Russian learning" were it not for the fact that under the influence of the inner cultural transformation of Russian Jewry the general Russian school became during that period more and more popular among the advanced classes of the Jewish population, and gymnazium and university took their place alongside of heder and yeshibah.
In Lithuania the whole mental energy of the Jewish youth was absorbed by Talmudism. The synagogue served as a "house of study" outside the hours fixed for prayers. There the local rabbi or a private scholar gave lectures on the Talmud which were listened to by hosts of yeshibah bahurs. The great yeshibahs of Volozhin, Mir, and other towns sent forth thousands of rabbis and Talmudists.
Jewish students, attending the rabbinical and teachers' institutes of the Government, or autodidacts from among former heder and yeshibah pupils, also began to "go to the people" the Russian people, to be sure, not the Jewish. They carried on a revolutionary propaganda, both by direct and indirect means, among the Russian peasants and workingmen, known to them only from books.
Some students advocated openly the transformation of the yeshibah into a rabbinical seminary on the order of the Berlin Hochschule. In the existing reform synagogues, in Riga, Odessa, Warsaw, and Vilna, and even in more conservative communities, sermons began to be preached in Russian.
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