Note (return) — Chapter IV

How different was the position of the Jews in other countries, especially in Germany! Culture streamed upon them from all sides. As their numbers were small, and as they lived, in most cases, in the larger cities of the empire, their contact with the Christian world was immediate and continuous. And then the irresistible fascination of German literature, and the easy, almost imperceptible transition from the Judeo-German to the Teutonic-German! All this and many minor allurements were potent enough to draw even the heretofore callous German Jews out of their isolation, and their Germanization by the middle of the nineteenth century was an established fact. No wonder, then, that, unlike Russian Jewry, the German Jews experienced an unprecedented revolution; that the difference between the Mendelssohnian generation and the next following was almost as great as that between the modern American Jew and his brother in the Orient. No wonder, also, that when Haskalah finally took root in Russia, it was purely German for fifty years and more; that Nicholas's vigorous attempts, instead of making the Slavonic Jews better Russians, merely helped to make those he "re-educated" greater admirers of Germany. The most puissant autocrat of Russia unwittingly contributed to the downfall of Russian autocracy, and Gregori Peretz, the Dekabrist, son of the financier who became converted under Alexander I, was the first of those who were to endeavor, with book and bomb, to break the backbone of tyranny under Nicholas II.25