More horribly, under Nicholas I after 1825 the kehillot were charged to conscript twelve-year-old Jewish children for a lifetime of forced service in the Russian Army—six years of brutal “education” followed by twenty-five years in the ranks—a fate that befell between 40,000 and 50,000 Jewish sons before the requirement was relaxed in 1856. The memory of that cruelty would endure: Edward Teller’s grandmother responded to his childhood misbehavior, he reminisced once with a friend, by warning him to be a good boy or the Russians would get him.
