impending reform, a special propagandist be sent into the Pale of
Settlement for the purpose of acquainting this obstreperous nation with
"the benevolent intentions of the Government." Such a propagandist was
soon found in the person of a young German Jew, Dr. Max Lilienthal, a
resident of Riga.

Lilienthal; who was a native of Bavaria (he was born in Munich in 1815)
and a German university graduate, was a typical representative of the
German Jewish intellectuals of that period, a champion of assimilation
and of moderate religious reform. Lilienthal had scarcely completed his
university course, when he was offered by a group of educated Jews in
Riga the post of preacher and director of the new local Jewish school,
one of the three modern Jewish schools then in existence in Russia.[1]
In a short time Lilienthal managed to raise the instruction in
secular and Jewish subjects to such a high standard of modernity that he
elicited a glowing tribute from Uvarov. The Minister was struck by the
idea that the Riga school might serve as a model for the net of schools
with which he was about to cover the whole Pale of Settlement, and
Lilienthal seemed the logical man for carrying out the planned reforms.

[Footnote 1: The other two schools were located in Odessa and in
Kishinev.]

In February, 1841, Lilienthal was summoned to St. Petersburg, where he
had a prolonged conversation with Uvarov. According to the testimony of
the official Russian sources, he tried to persuade the Minister to
abolish all "private schools," the heders, and to forbid all private
teachers, the melammeds, to teach even temporarily in the projected new
schools, and to import, instead, the whole teaching staff from Germany.
Lilienthal himself tells us in his Memoirs that he made bold to remind