Smolenskin was endowed with the ability and courage that characterize the born leader.  He possessed an iron will and unflinching determination, before which obstacles had to yield, and persecution found itself powerless.  His talent to grasp and appreciate the true and the beautiful rendered him the oracle of the thousands who, to this day, are proud to call themselves his disciples.  To him Haskalah was not merely acquaintance with general culture, or even its acquisition.  It was the realization of one’s individuality as a Jew and a man.  Gordon’s advice, to be a Jew at home and a man abroad, found little favor in his estimation; for Haskalah meant the evolution of a Jewish man sui generis.  He equally abhorred the fanaticism of the benighted orthodox and the Laodicean lukewarmness of the advanced Maskilim.  To fight and, if possible, eradicate both, he undertook the publication of The Dawn (Ha-Shahar, Vienna, 1869), a magazine in which he declared “war against the darkness of the Middle Ages and war against the indifference of to-day!”

Not like the former days are these days, he says in his foreword to Ha-Shahar.  Thirty or twenty years ago we had to fight the enemy within.  Sanctimonious fanatics with their power of darkness sought to persecute us, lest their folly or knavery be exposed to the light of day....  Now that they, who hitherto have walked in darkness, are beginning to discern the error of their ways, lo and behold, those who have seen the light are closing their eyes against it....  Therefore let them know beforehand that, as I have stretched out my hand against those who, under the cloak of holiness, endeavor to exclude enlightenment from the house of Jacob, even so will I lift up my hand against the other hypocrites who, under the pretext of tolerance, strive to alienate the children of Israel from the heritage of their fathers!

That the salvation of the Jews lies in their distinctiveness, and that renationalization will prove the only solution of the Jewish problem, is the central thought of Smolenskin’s journalistic efforts.  Jews are disliked, he maintains, not because of their religious persuasion, nor for their reputed wealth, but because they are weak and defenceless.  What they need is strength and courage, but these they will never regain save in a land of their own.  Twelve years before the tornado of persecution broke out in Russia he had predicted it, and even welcomed it as a means of arousing the Jews to their duties as a people and their place as a nation, and that his conclusion was correct, the awakening which followed proved unmistakably.

For Smolenskin Jews never ceased to be a nation, and to him the Jew who sought refuge in assimilation was nothing less than a traitor.  He was thus the forerunner of Pinsker, and of Herzl a decade later.  Indeed, in the resurrection of the national hope he was the first to remove the shroud.  According to him, “the eternal people” have every characteristic that goes to make a nation.  Their common country is still Palestine, loved by them with all the fervor of patriotism; their common language had never ceased to be Hebrew; their common religion consists in the basic principles of Judaism, in which they all agree.