Note (return) — Chapter IV

In order to regain the confidence of the Russian Jews, Lilienthal obtained a permit from the Minister of Education to call an assembly of prominent Jews at St. Petersburg, to decide for themselves how to better the condition of the existing schools and to consider the practicability of establishing rabbinical seminaries. For he, too, like the Maskilim, considered the rabbis the chief menace to Haskalah. Rabbinical authority was supreme, and if the rabbis could be won over, all would be gained. The bell-wethers once secured, the flocks were sure to follow. It took a long time for Lilienthal, and still longer for the Maskilim, to find out that what they regarded as the cause was in reality the consequence. Eight years later Lilienthal himself admitted the sad truth, that the rabbinical seminaries in Russia could not effect the coveted end. "It must not be lost sight of," says he in his Sketches of Jewish Life in Russia9 "that the Russian Jews live strictly in accordance with our received laws, and they are sufficiently learned in them to know that the many cases of conscience which are of constant occurrence cannot be decided understandingly by any one who has but a superficial knowledge of the Talmud and of the decisions of the later doctors of the Law, but that it requires the study of an entire lifetime to become thoroughly acquainted with those stupendous monuments of learning and deep research in the great concerns of life."