[Footnote 1: See later, p. 330 et seq.]
After an interval of seven years a new attempt was made in the same city. The Dyen ("The Day") [1] was able to muster a larger number of contributors from among the increased ranks of the "titled" intelligenzia than its predecessors. The new periodical was bolder in unfurling the banner of emancipation, but it also went much further than its predecessors in its championship of Russification and assimilation. The motto of the Dyen was "complete fusion of the interests of the Jewish population with those of the other citizens." The editors looked upon the Jewish problem "not as a national but as a social and economic" issue, which in their opinion could be solved simply by bestowing upon this "section of the Russian people" the same rights which were enjoyed by the rest. The Odessa pogrom of 1871 might have taught the writers of the Dyen to judge more soberly the prospects of "a fusion of interests," had not a meddlesome censorship forced this periodical to discontinue its publication after a short time.
[Footnote 1: The name was meant to symbolize the approaching day of freedom. It was a weekly publication.]
The next few years were a period of silence in the Russian-Jewish press. [1] The rank and file of the Russian Jewish intellectuals, who formed the backbone of the reading public of this press, became indifferent to it. Living up conscientiously to the principle of a "fusion of interests," they failed to recognize the special interests of their own people, whose only duty they thought was to be Russified, i.e., obliterated and put out of existence. The better elements among the intelligenzia, however, looked with consternation upon this growing indifference to everything Jewish among the college-bred Jewish youth. As a result, a new attempt was made toward the very end of this period to restore the Russian-Jewish press. Three weeklies, the Russki Yevrey ("The Russian Jew"), the Razswyet ("The Dawn"), and later on the Voskhod ("The Sunrise"), were started in St. Petersburg, all endeavoring to gain the hearts of the Russian Jewish intelligenzia. In the midst of this work they were overwhelmed by the terrific cataclysm of 1881, which decided the further destinies of Jewish journalism in Russia.
[Footnote 1: We disregard the colorless Vyestnik Russkikh "Yevreyev"
("The Herald of Russian Jews"), published by Zederbaum in the beginning
of the seventies in St. Petersburg, and the volumes of the Yevreyskaya
Bibliotyeka ("The Jewish Library"), issued at irregular intervals by
Adolph Landau.]
4. THE JEWS AND THE REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT
The Russian school and literature pushed the Jewish college youth head over heels into the intellectual currents of progressive Russian 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.