"Ah, ye Christians, men of the newer faith, who vaunt your mercy
and lovingkindness! Exercise your mercy upon us, turn your loving
hearts toward us. Why do you scorn the Jew? If he forsakes his
faith, how doth it profit you? Have you not heard the voice of
Moses Mendelssohn, the celebrated writer of our people, who asked
your co-religionists, 'Of what avail that you should continue to
attach men lacking faith and religion to yourselves'? Can you
not understand that the Jew, too, loves righteousness and justice
like unto yourselves? Why do you constantly scrutinize the
_man_ to find the _Jew_ in him? Seek but the man in the
Jew, and you will surely find him!"

Like so many that have followed, this first appeal awakened no answering
echo in Russian hearts. A century has passed since then, and Russia
still fails to find the man in the unconverted Jew!

The hopes aroused in the Jews of Lithuania by the Napoleonic wars were
disappointed. An iron hand held them down, and they continued to
vegetate miserably in their gloomy, abandoned corner.

* * * * *

The story goes that when Napoleon at the head of the _grande armee_
entered Wilna, the exclamation was forced from him, "Why, this is the
Jerusalem of Lithuania!" Whether the story is true or not, it is a fact
that no other city was more deserving of the epithet. The residence of
the Gaon was a Jewish metropolis as early as the eighteenth century, and
during the whole of the nineteenth century Wilna was the Jewish city
_par excellence_, a distinction to which it was helped by several
facts--by the systematic and intentional elimination of the Polish