This was the worst punishment of all, the most relentless vengeance wreaked on a helpless victim. "Of all the laws which swept down upon them from St. Petersburg and Moscow," says Leroy-Beaulieu with characteristic insight into the soul of Israel, "those which they [the Jews] find hardest to bear are the regulations that block their entrance to the Russian universities." The bloodless weighed heavier than the bloody pogroms. Consumed with a desire for education, wealthy Russian Jews made an attempt to establish higher schools of their own, without even drawing upon the surplus money of the kosher-meat fund, which had originally been created for such purposes. Baron de Hirsch, too, offered two million dollars for the higher and technical education of the Jews. But every attempt proved fruitless. Baron de Hirsch's munificence was flatly refused. In the school which Mr. Weinstein opened at Vinitza, Podolia, no more than eight Jews were allowed to attend among eighty Christians, and in the one at Gorlovka, founded by another Jew (Polyakov), only five per cent were admitted.[3] Writers are wont to speak of this as a reactionary period. The description applies to the Russians; among the Jews it was a period of reawakening.[4] They were disillusioned. They saw that Russification without emancipation, as their unsophisticated fathers had told Lilienthal, meant extermination. The first and worst pogroms were perpetrated in those places where the Jews were like their Russian neighbors in every respect, except in the eyes of the law, and with the approval of some who were devotees of the Narodnaya Volya. The Jewish consciousness reasserted itself. If Pobyedonostsev accomplished his fiendish design as regards emigration, more than a million Jews having left Russia within the last twenty years; if he has almost succeeded in causing them to die of starvation; yet his hope of forcing a third of them to conversion was a disappointment and a delusion. The Jews showed that the traditional description applied to them, "stiff-necked," was not undeserved. While the Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Armenians have undergone conversion in multitudes, they whose suffering by far exceeded that of any other "non-Russian" nationality remained, with insignificant exceptions, loyal to the religion of their fathers.[5]