In Russia itself the Jewish revolutionaries were heart and soul devoted to the cause.  The children of the ghetto displayed considerable heroism and self-sacrifice in the revolutionary upheaval of the seventies.  Jews figured in all important political trials and public manifestations; they languished in the gaols, and suffered as exiles in Siberia.  But this idealistic fight for general freedom lacked a Jewish note, the endeavor to free their own nation which lived in greater thraldom than any other.  And no one at that time ever dreamt that after all these sacrifices the Jews of Russia would be visited by still greater misfortunes, by pogroms and increased disabilities.

5.  THE NEO-HEBRAIC RENAISSANCE

With all deflections from the course of normal development, such as are unavoidable in times of violent mental disturbances, the main line of the whole cultural movement, the resultant of the various forces within it, was headed towards the healthy progress of Judaism.  The most substantial product of this movement was the Neo-Hebraic literary renaissance which had already appeared in faint outlines on the sombre background of external oppression and internal obscurantism during the preceding period.  The Haskalah, formerly anathematized, was now able to unfold all its creative powers.  What in the time of Isaac Baer Levinsohn had been accomplished stealthily by a few isolated conspirators of enlightenment in some petty society in Vilna or in some out-of-the-way town like Kamenetz-Podolsk was now done in the full light of the day.  Instead of a few stray writers, the harbingers of the new literature, there now appeared this literature itself, new both in form and content.  The restoration of the Hebrew language to its biblical purity and the removal of the linguistic excrescences of the later rabbinic idiom became for some writers an end in itself, for others a weapon in the fight for enlightenment. Melitzah, a conventionalized style, which, moving strictly within the confines of the biblical diction, endeavored to adapt the form of an ancient language to the content of a modern life, became the fashion of the day.

In point of content rejuvenated Hebrew literature was of necessity elementary.  Mental restlessness and naiveness of thought were not conducive to the development of that “science of Judaism” which had attained to such luxurious growth in Germany.  The Hebrew writers of Russia during that period had no means of propagating their ideas, except through the medium of poetry, fiction, or journalism.  The results of historic research were squeezed into the mould of a poem or novel, or it furnished the material for a press article, in which the Jewish past was considered from the point of view of the present.  Objective scientific investigation could find no place, and the little that was accomplished in that direction did not bear the character of a living account of the past, but was rather in the nature of crude archaeological material.  At the same time, as the crest of the social progress was rising, the border-line between poetry and fiction, on the one hand, and topical journalism, on the other, was gradually obliterated.  The poet or novelist was often turned into a fighter, who attacked the old order of things and defended the new.