[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.