ich hurled its shafts at Hasidism and Tzaddikism, and
occasionally even ventured to raise its hand against rabbinical Judaism.
The Yiddish weekly _Kol Mebasser_, [2] which was published during
1862-1871 as a supplement to _ha-Melitz_ and spoke directly to the
masses in their own language, attacked the dark sides of the old order
of things in publicistic essays and humoristic stories.

[Footnote 1: Before that time, the only weekly in Hebrew was
_ha-Maggid_, "The Herald," a paper of no particular literary
distinction, published since 1856 in the Prussian border-town Lyck,
though addressing itself primarily to the Jews of Russia.]

[Footnote 2: "A voice Announcing Good Tidings."]

Another step forward was the publication of the Hebrew monthly
_ha-Shahar_, "The Dawn," which was founded by Perez Smolenskin in 1869.
This periodical, which appeared in Vienna but was read principally in
Russia, pursued a two-fold aim: to fight against the fanaticism of the
benighted masses, on the one hand, and combat the indifference to
Judaism of the intellectuals, on the other. _Ha-Shahar_ exerted a
tremendous influence upon the mental development of the young generation
which had been trained in the heders and yeshibahs. Here they found a
response to the thoughts that agitated them; here they learned to think
logically and critically and to distinguish between the essential
elements in Judaism and its mere accretions. _Ha-Shahar_ was the staff
of life for the generation of that period of transition, which stood on
the border-line dividing the old Judaism from the new.

The various stages in the Russification of the Jewish _intelligenzia_
are marked by the changing tendencies of the Jewish periodical press in
the Russian language. In point of literary form, it approached the
European models more closely than the contemporary Hebrew press. The
contributors to the three Russian-Jewish weeklies, all of them issued in
Odessa, [1] had the advantage of having before them patterns of Western
Europe. Jewish publicists of the type of Riesser and Philippson [2]
served as living examples. They had blazed the way for Jewish
journalism, and had shown it how to fight for civil emancipation, to
ward off anti-Semitic attacks, and strive at the same time for the
advancement of inner Jewish life.

[Footnote 1: _Razswyet_, "The Dawn," 1860, _Sion_, "Zion," 1861, _Dyen_,
"The Day," 1869-1871.]

[Footnote 2: Gabriel Riesser (died 1863), the famous champio