[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.

One attempt of coupling socialism with Judaism ought not to be passed over in silence.  In the beginning of the seventies there existed in Vilna a Jewish revolutionary circle made up principally of the pupils of the rabbinical school and of the teachers’ institute of the same city.  In 1875, the police tracked the members of the circle.  Some were arrested, others escaped.  One of the refugees, A. Lieberman, managed to reach London where he associated with the circle of Lavrov and the editors of the revolutionary journal Vperyod ("Forwards").

In the following year, Lieberman founded in London the “League of Jewish Socialists” for the purpose of carrying on a propaganda among the Jewish masses.  It was a small society of students and workingmen which busied itself with arranging lectures and debates, and penning Hebrew appeals on the need of organizing the proletariat.  The society was soon dissolved, and Lieberman emigrated to Vienna, where, under the name of Freeman, he started in 1877 a socialistic magazine in Hebrew under the name ha-Emet ("The Truth").  The first two issues of ha-Emet were admitted into Russia, but the third was confiscated by the censor.  The magazine had to be discontinued.  It yielded its place to a paper called Asefat Hakamim ("The Assembly of Wise Men"), published in Koenigsberg in 1878 by M. Winchevski as a supplement to the paper ha-Kol ("The Voice"), which was issued there by Rodkinson.  Soon this whole species of socialistic literature was put out of existence.  In 1879, Lieberman in Vienna and his comrades in Berlin and Koenigsberg were arrested and expelled from the borders of Austria and Prussia.  They emigrated to England and America, and lost touch with Russia.