the Government consequent upon it. Ha-Karmel expired in 1870, while yet in its infancy, though it continued to appear at irregular intervals in the form of booklets dealing with scientific and literary subjects. Ha-Melitz was more successful.  It soon grew to be a live and courageous organ which hurled its shafts at Hasidism and Tzaddikism, and occasionally even ventured to raise its hand against rabbinical Judaism.  The Yiddish weekly Kol Mebasser, [2] which was published during 1862-1871 as a supplement to ha-Melitz and spoke directly to the masses in their own language, attacked the dark sides of the old order of things in publicistic essays and humoristic stories.

[Footnote 1:  Before that time, the only weekly in Hebrew was ha-Maggid, “The Herald,” a paper of no particular literary distinction, published since 1856 in the Prussian border-town Lyck, though addressing itself primarily to the Jews of Russia.]

[Footnote 2:  “A voice Announcing Good Tidings.”]

Another step forward was the publication of the Hebrew monthly ha-Shahar, “The Dawn,” which was founded by Perez Smolenskin in 1869.  This periodical, which appeared in Vienna but was read principally in Russia, pursued a two-fold aim:  to fight against the fanaticism of the benighted masses, on the one hand, and combat the indifference to Judaism of the intellectuals, on the other. Ha-Shahar exerted a tremendous influence upon the mental development of the young generation which had been trained in the heders and yeshibahs.  Here they found a response to the thoughts that agitated them; here they learned to think logically and critically and to distinguish between the essential elements in Judaism and its mere accretions. Ha-Shahar was the staff of life for the generation of that period of transition, which stood on the border-line dividing the old Judaism from the new.

The various stages in the Russification of the Jewish intelligenzia are marked by the changing tendencies of the Jewish periodical press in the Russian language.  In point of literary form, it approached the European models more closely than the contemporary Hebrew press.  The contributors to the three Russian-Jewish weeklies, all of them issued in Odessa, [1] had the advantage of having before them patterns of Western Europe.  Jewish publicists of the type of Riesser and Philippson [2] served as living examples.  They had blazed the way for Jewish journalism, and had shown it how to fight for civil emancipation, to ward off anti-Semitic attacks, and strive at the same time for the advancement of inner Jewish life.

[Footnote 1:  Razswyet, “The Dawn,” 1860, Sion, “Zion,” 1861, Dyen, “The Day,” 1869-1871.]

[Footnote 2:  Gabriel Riesser (died 1863), the famous champion of Jewish emancipation in Germany, established the periodical Der Jude in 1832.  Ludwig Philippson (died 1889) founded in 1837 Die Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, which still appears in Berlin.]