Abstract
“I have the honor to report Your Reverence that on 3 and 9 April [1875], according to your instructions, I was at the home of Stefan Spevak, a converted [Jew] who has fallen away from faith,” wrote Pavel Dzagiler to Father Nikandr Briantsev, the head of the Mariinsko Sergievskii Shelter for baptized Jewish children in St. Petersburg.¹ Dzagiler, who had worked as a Jewish schoolteacher in Minsk, was not simply a convert to Russian Orthodoxy but also a graduate of the St. Petersburg Ecclesiastical Seminary. A self-professed missionary to the Jews, he belonged to a small group of seminary-educated converts