narrow
world in which this unhappy tribe has been languishing so long,
gasping for breath in the suffocating atmosphere of poverty and
contempt. Will this go on for a long time? Will the light of day
break at last?

CHAPTER XXV

INNER UPHEAVALS

1. DISILLUSIONMENT OF THE INTELLIGENZIA AND
THE NATIONAL REVIVAL

The catastrophe at the beginning of the eighties took the Jews of Russia
unawares, and found them unprepared for spiritual self-defence. The
impressions of the recent brief "era of reforms" were still fresh in
their minds. They still remembered the initial steps of Alexander II's
Government in the direction of the complete civil emancipation of
Russian Jewry, the appeals of the intellectual classes of Russia calling
upon the Jews to draw nearer to them, the bright prospects of a
rejuvenated Russia. The niggardly gifts of the Russian Government were
received by Russian Jewry with an outburst of gratitude and devotion
which bordered on flunkeyism. The intellectual young Jews and Jewesses
who had passed through the Russian public schools made frantic
endeavors, not only towards association but also towards complete
cultural amalgamation with the Russian people. Assimilation and
Russification became the watchwords of the day. The literary ideals of
young Russia became the sacred tablets of the Jewish youth.

But suddenly, lo and behold! that same Russian people, in which the
progressive forces of Jewry were ready to merge their identity, appeared
in the shape of a monster, which belched forth hordes upon hordes of
rioters and murderers. The Government had changed front, and adopted a
policy of reaction and fierce Jew-hatred, while the liberal classes of
Russia showed but scant sympathy with the downtrodden and maltreated
nation. The voice of the hostile press, the _Novoye Vremya_, the _Russ_,
and others, resounded through the air with fall vigor, whereas the
liberal press, owing partly--but only partly--to the tightening grip of
the censor, defended the Jews in a perfunctory manner. Even the
publicists of the radical type, who were principally grouped around the
periodical _Otyechestvennyia Zapiski_ ("Records of the Fatherland"),
looked upon the pogroms merely as the brutal manifestation of an
economic struggle, and viewed the whole complicated Jewish problem, with
all its century-long tragic implications, in the light of a subordinate
social-economic question.

The only one whose soul was de