The only social factor in Jewish life was the press, particularly the three periodicals published in Russian, the Razsvyet ("the Dawn"), the Russki Yevrey ("the Russian Jew"), and the Voskhod ("the Sunrise"), [1] but even they revealed the lack of a well-defined policy.

[Footnote 1:  See on these papers, p. 219 et seq.]

The political movements in Russian Jewry were yet in an embryonic stage, and their rise and development were reserved for a later period.  True, the Russian-Jewish press applied itself assiduously to the task of defending the rights of the Jews, but its voice remained unheard in those circles of Russia in which the poisonous waters of Judaeophobia gushed forth in a broad current from the columns of the semi-official Novoye Vremya, the pan-Slavic Russ, and many of their anti-Semitic contemporaries.

While the summer pogroms were in full swing, the Novoye Vremya, reflecting the views of the official spheres, seriously formulated the Jewish question in the paraphrase of Hamlet:  “to beat or not to beat.”  Its conclusion was that it was necessary to “beat” the Jews, but, in view of the fact that Russia was a monarchical state with conservative tendencies, this function ought not to be discharged by the people but by the Government, which by its method of legal repression could beat the Jews much more effectively than the crowds on the streets.

The editor of the Moscow newspaper Russ, Ivan Aksakov, [1] attacked the Russian liberal press for expressing its sympathy with the Jewish pogrom victims, contending that the Russian people demolished the Jewish houses under the effect of a “righteous indignation,” though he failed to explain why that indignation also took the form of plundering and stealing Jewish property, or violating Jewish women.  Throwing into one heap the arguments of the medieval Church and those of modern German anti-Semitism, Aksakov maintained that Judaism was opposed to “Christian civilization,” and that the Jewish people were striving for “world domination” which they hoped to attain through their financial power.

[Footnote 1:  Compare above, p. 208.]

The bacillus of German anti-Semitism had penetrated even into the circles of the Russian radical intelligenzia.  Among the “Populists,” [1] who were wont to idealize the Russian peasantry, it became the fashion to look upon the Jew as an economic exploiter, with this distinction, however, that they bracketed him with the host of Russian exploiters from among the bourgeois class.  This resulted in a most unfortunate misunderstanding.  A faction of South Russian revolutionaries from among the party known as “The People’s Freedom” [2] conceived the idea that the same peasants and laborers who had attacked the Jews as the representatives of the non-Russian bourgeoisie might easily be directed against the representatives of the ruling classes in general.  During the