Note (return) — Chapter IV
Reading edition
It was to Friedländer that Bishop Malchevsky, actuated, as he maintained, by a desire to render the Jews worthy of the enjoyment of civil rights, applied for suggestions, in 1816, when the missionary zeal of Alexander I was first aroused. He responded in a pamphlet, On the Improvement of the Israelites in the Kingdom of Poland,7 in which he declared that the quickest way of "civilizing" the Jews would be to deprive their rabbis of power and influence, to force them to dress in the German fashion, and use the Polish language, to admit them to the public schools and other educational institutions, and, above all, to abrogate the laws discriminating between them and their Gentile countrymen.