If it be true that, in pursuing its system of tutelage and oppression, the Russian Government was genuinely actuated by the desire to graft the modicum of European culture, to which the Russia of Nicholas I.could lay claim, upon the Jews, it certainly achieved the reverse of what it aimed at.

The hand which dealt out blows could not disseminate enlightenment; the hammer which was lifted to shatter Jewish separatism had only the effect of hardening it.
The persecuted Jews clutched eagerly at their old mode of life, the target of their enemies' attacks; they clung not only to its permanent foundations but also to its obsolete superstructure.

The despotism of extermination from without was counterbalanced by a despotism of conservation from within, by that rigid discipline of conduct to which the masses submitted without a murmur, though its yoke must have weighed heavily upon the few, the stray harbingers of a new order of things.
The Government had managed to disrupt the Jewish communal organization and rob the Kahal of all its authority by degrading it to a kind of posse for the capture of recruits and extortion of taxes.

But while the Jewish masses hated the Kahal elders, they retained their faith in their spiritual leaders, the rabbis and Tzaddiks.

[1] Heeding the command of these leaders, they closed their ranks, and offered stubborn resistance to the dangerous cultural influences threatening them from without.