society. Naturally enough a portion of the Jewish youth was also drawn
into the revolutionary movement of the seventies, a movement which, in
spite of the theoretic "materialism" of its adepts, was of an
essentially idealistic tendency. In joining the ranks of the
revolutionaries, the young Jews were less actuated by resentment against
the continued, though somewhat mitigated, rightlessness of their own
people than by discontent with the general political reaction in Russia,
that discontent which found expression in the movement of "Populism," [1]
of "Going to the People," [2] and similar currents then in vogue. Jewish
students, attending the rabbinical and teachers' institutes of the
Government, or autodidacts from among former heder and yeshibah pupils,
also began to "go to the people"--the Russian people, to be sure, not
the Jewish. They carried on a revolutionary propaganda, both by direct
and indirect means, among the Russian peasants and workingmen, known to
them only from books. It was taken for granted at that time that the
realization of the ideals of Russian democracy would carry with it the
solution of the Jewish as well as of all other sectional problems of
Russian life, so that these problems might for the moment be safely set
aside.

[Footnote 1: In Russian, _narodnichestvo_, from _narod_, "People," a
democratic movement In favor of the down-trodden masses, particularly
the Russian peasantry.]

[Footnote 2: Under the influence of the democratic movement many
Russians of higher birth and culture settled among the peasantry, to
which they dedicated their lives. The name of Leo Tolstoi readily
suggests itself in this connection.]

As far as the Jewish youth was concerned, the whole movement was doubly
academic, for the only points of contact of that youth with younger
Russia was not living reality but the book, problems of the intellect,
the search for new ways, the attempt to work out a _Weltanschauung_. The
fundamental article of faith of the Jewish socialists was
cosmopolitanism, and they failed to discern in Russian "Populism" the
underlying elements of a Russian national movement. Jewry was not
believed to be a nation, and as a religious entity it was looked upon as
a relic of the past, which was doomed to disappearance.

One attempt of coupling socialism with Judaism ought not to be passed
over in silence. In the beginning of the seventies there existed in
Vilna a Jewish revolutionary circle made up