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Updated: May 9, 2025
Strong as was the trend towards Russification in the new Jewish intelligenzia of the sixties, the broad masses of Jewry knew nothing of such a tendency. The authorities became suspicious: what if these crafty Hebrews should fool us again and refuse to pay for the donated rights by fusing with the Christians?
It is interesting to observe that, whereas all the prominent writers in Hebrew were children of profoundly nationalistic Lithuania, those that wrote in Russian, with the sole exception of Levanda, were natives of South Russia, where the two extremes, stagnant Hasidism and radical Russification, fought for supremacy. Alongside of journalistic articles he wrote protracted novels.
On the other hand, that section of the young generation which had passed through a Russian school refused to recognize any such barriers, and rushed with elemental force on the road of self-annihilation. Russification became the war cry of these Jewish circles, as it had long been the watchword of the Government.
Petersburg, and Moscow, the Jews were fast becoming Russified. Heretofore cooped up, choking each other in the Pale as in a Black Hole, they were now wild with an excessive desire for Russification. What Maimon said of a few, could now be applied to hundreds and thousands, they were "like starving persons suddenly treated to a delicious meal."
But recent years have revealed a subtle change of attitude. The policy of Russification had not been abandoned; indeed in Finland and the Ukraine it survived in its most odious form. But it was none the less possible to detect a growing note of interrogation even among the bureaucracy, and still more an increasing movement of impatient protest on the part of thinking Russians.
There the Jews, whether reform, like Doctor Marcus Jastrow, or orthodox like Rabbi Berish Meisels, identified themselves with the Poles, and participated in their cultural and political aspirations, which were frequently antagonistic to Russification.
Petersburg was obsessed with the idea of the Russification of Jewry, in Warsaw the tendency of Polonization, as applied to the Jews of the Western region, cropped up in the wake of the revolutionary Polish movement in the beginning of the sixties.
A ukase just issued by the present emperor seriously invades these privileges, and a forcible Russification of Finland threatens to bring a wave of Finnish emigration to America . When the Emperor Alexander returned after the Treaty of Paris he was thirty-four years old. Many of the illusions of his youth had faded. His marriage with Elizabeth of Baden was unhappy.
The men stood round the strong-smelling spirits and salt delicacies, and the discussion of the Russification of Poland between Koznishev, Karenin, and Pestsov died down in anticipation of dinner. Sergey Ivanovitch was unequaled in his skill in winding up the most heated and serious argument by some unexpected pinch of Attic salt that changed the disposition of his opponent. He did this now.
When the officials, in obedience to their ruler's wishes, relaxed the severity which had marked the treatment of the Jews and the non-orthodox Christian sects, the change was soon noted by the victims and once more there was a revival of hope. But the efforts of the Finns to secure a modification of the Russification policy were quite fruitless.
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