gained by the change from the illegal persecutions [in the form of pogroms] to the legal persecutions of the third of May?  Maltreated, plundered, reduced to beggary, put to shame, slandered, and dispirited, the Jews have been cast out of the community of human beings.  Their destitution, amounting to beggary, has been firmly established and definitely affixed to them.  Gloomy darkness, without a ray of light, has descended upon that bewitched and 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.