The charges brought against the Jews of Russia by henchmen of the czar were grave, indeed, only they did not contain a particle of truth. In Russia itself, not only Jews and non-Russians but even many Christians testified to the innocence of the Jews, and protested against their oppressors. Bibikov, the Governor-General of Podolia and Volhynia; Diakov, the Governor-General of Smolensk; and Surovyetsky, the noted statesman, all write in terms of such praise of their unfortunate countrymen of the Jewish faith that their statements would sound exaggerated, were it not that many other unprejudiced Russians confirm their views.[1] The fact that Nicholas thought the Jews reliable as soldiers speaks against the imputation that they were mercenary and unpatriotic. Neither was the conventional accusation, that they were a people of petty traders, applicable to the Jews in Russia. Laborers of all kinds were very common among them. It was they, in fact, who rendered all manner of service to their Gentile neighbors, from a cobbler's and blacksmith's to producing the most exquisite _objets d'art_ and gold and silver engraving. They were equally well represented among the clerks and bookkeepers, and the bricklayers and stone-cutters. They took up with the most laborious employments, if only they furnished them with an honest even though scanty livelihood.[2] But most unfounded of all was the allegation that Jews were opposed to education. The _Memoirs_ of Madame Pauline Wengeroff indicate that even among the very strict Jews of her time children were not denied instruction in the German, Polish, and Russian literatures. We have seen how they availed themselves of the permission, granted to them by Alexander I, to attend the schools and universities of the empire. Nor did they fail to open schools of their own. No sooner was the Franco-Russian war over than Joseph Perl of Galicia founded a school in Tarnopol (1813), then under the Russian Government, and two years later he drew upon his own resources to build a school-house large enough to accommodate the great, steadily growing number of students. In 1822 we hear of a school that had been in existence for some time in Uman (the Ukraine). It had been established by Meir Horn, Moses Landau, and Hirsh Hurwitz, all of whom were indefatigable laborers in the cause of Haskalah in the Ukraine. Perl's school was the pattern and model for a multitude of other schools, among them the one founded by Zittenfeld (1826) in Odessa, in the faculty of which were Simhah Pinsker, Elijah Finkel, the grandson of Elijah Gaon, and Abraham Abele, the eminent Talmudist. In 1836 a girls' department was added to it, and when Lilienthal visited Odessa (ab. 1843) it had an attendance of from four to five hundred pupils of both sexes, the annual expense being twenty-eight thousand rubles. A similar school was opened in Kishinev by Stern, and in the early "forties" there was hardly a Jewish community of