The Russian Jews—says Zunser—sobered down from the orgies of assimilation, and its worshippers abandoned their idol. Those who had almost forgotten that they were of the camp of Israel began to return to its tents. The Jewish physicians, jurists, technologists, and the entire so-called Jewish "intelligentia," who heretofore had never cared to speak a word of Yiddish to a Jew, resumed their native tongue; they began to send their children to the Jewish hadarim, and adopted once more Jewish ways and customs. Several hundred Jewish university students, proverbially irreligious, sent to Vilna for tefillin [phylacteries]!
In many cities fasts were observed and prayers for forgiveness offered, and the prodigal sons of Israel repaired to the synagogue, participated in the services, and wept with their more steadfast though equally unfortunate coreligionists. Many converts, too, began to feel qualms of conscience, and endeavored to make up for their youthful indiscretions. Some of them fled to places of safety, and returned to Judaism. The gifted young poet Simon Yakovlevich Nadsohn died of a broken heart. Sorkin, the classmate and friend of Levanda, committed suicide, while Levanda, the great novelist of assimilation, was so affected by the massacres and their consequences, that he became melancholy, and died in an asylum for the insane.[6]
If this was the fate of the assimilated and estranged, one may guess the effect of the reaction on the religious. If the students of the universities sacrificed their careers, their daily bread, for the austere satisfaction of discharging their moral obligation to the best of their knowledge, the students of the Law, always loyal to the heritage of their people, became more zealous than ever. Lilienblum who, in 1877, believed that life without a university education was not worth living, became a repentant sinner. Russian Jewry seethed with religious enthusiasm. Moses Isaac Darshan, "the Khelmer Maggid," preached for six hours at a time to crowded synagogues. Asher Israelit, less trenchant, but equally effective, exhorted crowds to repentance. Zebi Hirsh Masliansky, a finished orator, went from town to town, and aroused a love for whatever was connected with the history and religion of the Jewish people. In Kovno those who were preparing themselves for the rabbinate formed something like a new sect, the Mussarnikes (Moralists), which practiced asceticism and self-abnegation to an extraordinary degree.[7]
Moses Löb Lilienblum, 1843-1910
Those, however, were most affected who had been misled by dreams of assimilation. They suffered most, for they lost most. Their hopes were blighted, their hearts broken. The leading-strings proved to be a halter. They saw they had little to expect at the hands of those they had believed to have become fully civilized, and they were embittered toward civilization, which had showed them flowers, but had given them no fruit. In a work, Sinat 'Olam le-'Am 'Olam (Eternal Hatred for the Eternal People, Warsaw, 1882), Nahum Sokolov proved, like Smolenskin before him, that anti-Semitism was ineradicable, that the fight against the Jews was a fight to the death, that even emancipation helps little to remove the animosity innate in one people against another, and until the "end of days" foretold by the prophets of yore there will never cease the eternal hatred to the eternal people. This became the dominant opinion. It dawned upon many that the only salvation for the Jews lay in becoming a nation once more. A yearning for a new fatherland and a new country seized young and old. The times were auspicious. Cosmopolitanism was everywhere giving place to nationalism. The little Balkan States had broken the yoke of Ottoman rule, and become self-governing nations since 1878. In Poland, Hungary, and Ireland, home rule was advocated with fervor that threatened a revolution. Italy and Germany became united under their own king or emperor. And the Russian Jews, tired of the constant conflicts with the surrounding peoples, experienced the desire which had prompted their ancestors to be like all the other nations.
Sokolov's sentiments were reinforced in an anonymous pamphlet written by Doctor Leo Pinsker (1821-1891), one of the foremost physicians of Odessa. His Auto-Emancipation (Berlin, 1882) is now recognized as the forerunner of Herzl's Judenstaat, which appeared fifteen years later. Pinsker accepts as an axiom what Sokolov had tried to demonstrate as a proposition. Jew-hatred, he claims, like Lombroso in his work on anti-Semitism, is a "platonic hatred," a hereditary mental disease, which two thousand years' duration has so aggravated as to render it incurable. As the Jewish problem is international, it can be solved only by nationalism. He admits some of the charges brought against the Jews by anti-Semites, but Jewish failings result from Christian intolerance. In a land of their own they will develop into a Muster-nation, a model people.
The wretches—cries he—they mock the eagle that once soared sky-high, and saw divinity itself, because he can no longer fly after his wings are broken! Give us but our independence, allow us to take care of ourselves, grant us but a little strip of land like that of the Servians and Rumanians, give us a chance to lead a national existence, and then prate about our lacking manly virtues. What we lack is not genius (Genialität) but self-consciousness (Selbstgefühl) and appreciation of our value as men (Bewusstsein der Menschenwürde), of which we were deprived by you!