populist (a socialist millenarian by way of Russian nationalism) who believed that “as soon as Jews began to speak Russian, they would, just as we had, become ‘people in general,’ ‘cosmopolites.’ ” Many of them did. 35 Meanwhile, the students at the Vilna and Zhitomir rabbinical seminaries (after 1873, teacher training colleges) were being converted to the religion of the Russian language even as they were being taught to be experts on things Jewish. Joshua Steinberg, the renowned Hebrew scholar who taught at Vilna to a mostly skeptical audience, had learned Russian, according to Hirsz Abramowicz, “from the Synodical translation of the Bible, and throughout his life he used its archaic sentence structure and distinctive biblical expressions when he spoke.” He spoke it with “traces of a Jewish accent,” but he spoke it (and apparently nothing else) with his family and in his classes, where students spent the bulk of their time translating the texts of Isaiah and Jeremiah into Russian and then back into Hebrew. The idea was to teach Hebrew, but the main result was to make Russian available to countless heder-educated youngsters, the majority of whom never enrolled in the seminary (while the majority of those who did never meant to become rabbis). In the words of Abramowicz, “many of these impoverished young autodidacts learned Russian from his Hebrew-Russian and Russian- Hebrew dictionaries and from his grammar of the Hebrew language, written in Russian, of which they often memorized entire pages.” 36 Young Jews were not just learning Russian the same way they were learning Hebrew: they were learning Russian in order to replace Hebrew, as well as Yiddish, for good. Like German, Polish, or Hungarian in other high-culture areas, Russian had become the Hebrew of the secular world. As Abram Mutnikovich, a Bund theorist, put it: “Russia, the wonderful country. . . . Russia, which gave mankind such a poet of genius as Pushkin. The land of Tolstoy. . . .” Jabotinsky did not approve of the confusion of “Russian culture” with “the Russian world” (including its “dreariness and philistinism”), but then Jabotinsky, unlike Mutnikovich, spoke Russian as a native language, and the particular confusion he was proposing (of Jewish biblical culture with the Jewish world) was different from the Russian kind only to the extent that it was not pret-a- porter and went more naturally with Swann’s nose, or the Jewish “hump,” as he called it. It was Abraham Cahan, the future New York journalist, who seemed to speak for most Jewish youngsters in the Pale when he described his most fateful experience growing up in Vilna in the 1870s: “My interest in Hebrew evaporated. My burning ambition became to learn Russian and thus to become an educated person.” At about the same time, in the Białystok Realschule , the future “Dr. Esperanto” was writing a Russian tragedy in five acts. 37