In addition, the Jews are confined to the most ignoble occupations. They are excluded from the High Schools and the Universities of the Christians, and are forbidden to keep secular schools of their own. The only teaching accessible to the ordinary Russian Jew is Rabbinical teaching. The centre of this education is the Talmudical School of Walosin, known among the Jews as the “Tree of Life College,” founded in 1803 by a disciple of Elijah Wilna, a famous Hebrew scholar, and maintained by contributions collected from all parts of the Russian “pale.” The institution provides spiritual and bodily food--both very primitive in quality and meagre in quantity--to some four hundred hungry students who spend three-fourths of their time poring over the records of the past, and the other fourth is denouncing a present of which they know nothing. Ignorance fosters fanaticism, and the authority of the Synagogue which, under different circumstances, might have been used as an instrument of conciliation, is turned into a source of bitterness. The seed of discord between Jew and Gentile, sown by oppression, is nursed by the benighted Rabbis, who regard thirst for secular knowledge as more sinful than thirst for alcohol; and the poisonous plant is assisted in its growth by the young Jews who, having contrived to obtain abroad an education denied to them at home, intensify the just animosity of their people against the Christian oppressors. The ill-feeling is invigorated further still by the Jewish recruits who, on the expiration of their term of service, return to their families exasperated by the hardships and the insults which they have experienced in the ranks, for the Hebrew soldier in the Russian army is treated exactly as the Christian recruit is treated in the Turkish Gendarmerie. In both cases, not only is promotion out of the question,[176] but the infidels are the victims of unmeasured invective, malice, and injury at the hands of their colleagues and superiors. They are, as a race, considered unclean and unfriendly. They form a small minority. They are powerless to protect themselves, and the officers will not take them under their protection. The less deserved the insult, the more anxious will the victim be to recover his self-esteem by revenge. Is it, then, to be wondered at that the Russian Jews are distinguished among their fellow-slaves for their eager participation in any insurrectionary movement that offers the faintest hope of relief and revenge? To turn a population which, by instinct and interest alike, is the most conservative and peaceful in the world into a people of anarchists is, indeed, the highest triumph hitherto achieved by Russian statesmanship.