The educational Hamans, however, went a step further, and in March, 1911, secured an ukase of the Tzar extending the percentage norm to the "externs":[58] henceforward Jews were to be admitted to the examination for the "certificate of maturity"[59] or for the completion of a part of the curriculum only in a certain proportion to the number of Christian externs. In point of fact, however, there were no Christian externs, since only the Jews who had failed to find admission to the schools were forced to present themselves for examination as externs. In consequence, the enormous number of Jewish children who had been barred from the schools by the percentage norm were deprived of their right to receive a testimonial from a secondary school. This law was passed during a brief interruption in the sessions of the Duma and was never submitted to it. The deputies of the Opposition brought in an interpellation concerning this action, but the "Black Parliament" laid the matter on the table, and the law which lacked all legal basis went into operation. Swayed more and more by the tendencies of a reactionary Russian nationalism, Stolypin's Government set out to uproot the national-cultural institutions of the "alien" races in Russia. The Poles, the Finns, and other nationalities became the victims of this policy. The lash of oppression was also applied to Jewish cultural life. In 1910, Stolypin issued a circular impressing Russian officialdom with the idea that the cultural and educational societies of the "aliens" contributed towards arousing in them "a narrow national-political self-consciousness" and towards "the strengthening of national separatism," and that for this reason all the societies of the Ukrainians and Jews which were established for the purpose of fostering a separate national culture should be prohibited. 5. THE SPIRITUAL REVIVAL OF RUSSIAN JEWRY This new blow was aimed right at the heart of Judaism. For after the revolution, when the political struggle had subsided, the Jewish _intelligenzia_ directed its entire energy into the channel of national-cultural endeavors. Profiting by the law of 1906, granting the freedom of assemblies and meetings, they founded everywhere cultural, educational, and economic (co-operative and credit) societies. In 1908, the Jewish Literary Society was established in St. Petersburg, which soon counted over a hundred branches in the provinces. The same year saw the formation of the Jewish Historico-Ethnographic Society which began to publish a quarterly review under the name _Yevreyskaya Starina_ ("Jewish Antiquity").[60] The oldest educational organization among the Jews, the Society for the Diffusion of Enlightenment, enlarged its activity and was endeavoring to create a new type of national Jewish school.