In reality, the mission of the Society was carried out within exceedingly narrow limits.

"Education for the sake of Emancipation" became the watchword of the Society.

It promoted higher education by granting monetary assistance to Jewish students, but it did nothing either for the upbuilding of a normal Jewish school or for the improvement of the heders and yeshibahs.

The dissemination of the knowledge of "useful subjects" reduced itself to the grant of a few subsidies to Jewish writers for translating a few books on history and natural science into Hebrew.
Even more circumscribed and utilitarian was the point of view adopted by the Odessa branch of the Society.

This branch, founded in 1867, adopted as its slogan "the enlightenment of the Jews through the Russian language and _in the Russian spirit_." The Russification of the Jews was to be promoted by translating the Bible and the prayer-book into the Russian language, "which must become the national tongue of the Jews." However, the headlong rush for assimilation was soon halted by the sinister spectacle of the Odessa pogrom of 1871.