The series of pogroms perpetrated during the spring and summer of that year had inflicted its sufferings on more than one hundred localities populated by Jews, primarily in the South of Russia.  Yet the misery engendered by the panic, by the horrible apprehension of unbridled violence, was far more extensive, for the entire Jewish population of Russia proved its victim.  Just as in the bygone Middle Ages whenever Jewish suffering had reached a sad climax, so now too the persecuted nation found itself face to face with the problem of emigration.  And as if history had been anxious to link up the end of the nineteenth century with that of the fifteenth, the Jewish afflictions in Russia found an echo in that very country, which in 1492 had herself banished the Jews from her borders:  the Spanish Government announced its readiness to receive and shelter the fugitives from Russia.  Ancient Catholic Spain held forth a welcoming hand to the victims of modern Greek-Orthodox Spain.  However, the Spanish offer was immediately recognized as having but little practical value.  In the forefront of Jewish interest stood the question as to the land toward which the emigration movement should be directed:  toward the United States of America, which held out the prospect of bread and liberty, or toward Palestine, which offered a shelter to the wounded national soul.

While the Jewish writers were busy debating the question, life itself decided the direction of the emigration movement.  Nearly all fugitives from the South of Russia had left for America by way of the Western European centers.  The movement proceeded with elemental force, and entirely unorganized, with the result that in the autumn of that year some ten thousand destitute Jewish wanderers found themselves huddled together at the first halting-place, the city of Brody, which is situated on the Russo-Austrian frontier.  They had been attracted hither by the rumor that the agents of the French Alliance Israelite Universette would supply them with the necessary means for continuing their journey across the Atlantic.  The central committee of the Alliance, caught unprepared for such a huge emigration, was at its wit’s end.  It sent out appeals, warning the Jews against wholesale emigration to America by way of Brody, but it was powerless to stem the tide.  When the representatives of the French Alliance, the well-known Charles Netter and others, arrived in Brody, they beheld a terrible spectacle.  The streets of the city were filled with thousands of Jews and Jewesses, who were exhausted from material want, with hungry children in their arms.  “From early morning until late at night, the French delegates were surrounded by a crowd clamoring for help.  Their way was obstructed by mothers who threw their little ones under their feet, begging to rescue them from starvation.”

The delegates did all they could, but the number of fugitives was constantly swelling, while the process of dispatching them to America went on at a snail’s pace.  The exodus of the Jews from Russia was due not only to the pogroms and the panic resulting from them, but also to the new blows which were falling upon them from all sides, dealt out by the liberal hand of Ignatyev.