Russian Jewry, the Jewry that had been Polish, and that is counted by the millions, might, if necessary, prove its existence by even more tangible marks than Occidental Jewry. To begin with, the centre of gravity of the Jewish nation lies in Russia, whose Jews not only outnumber those of the rest of Europe, but continue to live in a compact mass. Besides, they have preserved the original Jewish culture and their traditional physiognomy to a higher degree than the Jews of other countries. The development of the Russian Jews took a course very different from that of the Jews of the West. This difference was conditioned by the tremendous contrast between Russian culture and West-European culture, and by the change which the external circumstances of Jews outside of Russia underwent during the modern period. The admission of the Polish provinces into the Russian Empire at the end of the eighteenth century found the numerous Jewish population in an almost medieval condition, the same condition in which the non-Jewish population of Russian Poland was at that time. The Polish regime, as we saw above, had isolated the Jews alike in civil and spiritual relations. The new order did not break down the barriers. The masses of Jews cooped up in the "Pale of Settlement" were strong only by reason of their inner unity, their firmly established patriarchal organization. The bulwark of Rabbinism and the citadel of Chassidism protected them against alien influences. They guarded their isolation jealously. True to the law of inertia, they would not allow the privilege of isolation to be wrested from them. They did not care to step beyond the ramparts. Why, indeed, should the Jews have quitted their fortress, if outside of their walls they could expect nothing but scorn and blows? The unfortunates encaged in the sinister Pale of Settlement could have been lured out of their exclusive position only by complete civil emancipation combined with a higher degree of culture than had been attained by Russian society, an impossible set of circumstances in the first half of the nineteenth century. The legislative measures of the time, in so far as they relate to the Jews, breathe the spirit of police surveillance rather than of enlightenment and humanity. To civilizing and intellectual influences from without the way was equally barred. Yet all this watchfulness was of no avail. Nothing could prevent the liberty principles espoused by the Jews of Western Europe from being smuggled into the Pale, to leaven the sad, serried masses. A sluggish process of fermentation set in, and culminated in the literary activity of Isaac Beer Levinsohn and of the Wilna reformers of the second and fourth decades of the nineteenth century. They were the harbingers of approaching spring.