tion of these assimilators, who but yesterday were
the champions of national self-effacement. Life demands
self-determination. To sit between two stools has now become an
impossibility. The logic of events has placed them before the
alternative: either to declare themselves openly as renegades, or to
take their proper share in the sufferings of their people.

Another representative of the Jewish _intelligenzia_ writes in the
following strain to the editor of a Russian-Jewish periodical:

When I remember what has been done to us, how we have been taught to
love Russia and Russian speech, how we have been induced and
compelled to introduce the Russian language and everything Russian,
into our families so that our children know no other language but
Russian, and how we are now repulsed and persecuted, then our hearts
are filled with sickening despair from which there seems to be no
escape. This terrible insult gnaws at my vitals. It may be that I am
mistaken, but I do honestly believe that even if I succeeded in
moving to a happier country where all men are equal, where there are
no pogroms by day and "Jewish commissions" by night, I would yet
remain sick at heart to the very end of my life--to such an extent
do I feel worn out by this accursed year, this universal mental
eclipse which has visited our dear fatherland.

Russian-Jewish literature of that period is full of similar
self-revelations of disillusioned intellectuals. However, this
repentant mood did not always lead to positive results. Some
of these intellectuals, having become part and parcel of Russian
cultural life, were no longer able to find their way back to
Judaism, and they were carried off by the current of assimilation,
culminating in baptism. Others stood at the cross-roads,
wavering between assimilation and Jewish nationalism. Still
others were so stunned by the blow they had received that
they reeled violently backward, and proclaimed as their slogan
the return "home," in the sense of a complete renunciation
of free criticism and of all strivings for inner reforms.

However, in the healthy part of Russian Jewry this change of mind
resulted in turning their ideals definitely in the direction of national
rejuvenation upon modern foundations. The idea of a struggle for
national rejuvenation in Eussia itself had not yet matured. It appeared
as an active force only in the following decade. [1] During the era of
pogr