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Updated: June 5, 2025
But Shchedrin was the only Russian writer of prominence who responded to the Jewish sorrow. Turgenyev and Tolstoi held their peace, whereas the literary celebrities of Western Europe, Victor Hugo, Renau, and many others, came forward with passionate protests. The Russian intelligenzia remained cold in the face of the burning tortures of Jewry.
The new Jewish intelligenzia showed utter indifference to the sentiments of the Jewish masses, and did not hesitate to induce the Government to interfere in the affairs of inner Jewish life. Thus by a regulation issued in 1864 all hasidic books were subjected to a most rigorous censorship, and Jewish printing-presses were placed under a more vigilant supervision than theretofore.
What the Society evidently aimed at was to place itself at the head of the Russian-Jewish intelligenzia, which had undertaken to act as negotiators between the Government and the Jews in the cause of Russification. In reality, the mission of the Society was carried out within exceedingly narrow limits. "Education for the sake of Emancipation" became the watchword of the Society.
The whole INTELLIGENZIA of Russia was filled with the ILLEGAL spirit: revolutionary sentiments penetrated into every home, from mansion to hovel, impregnating the military, the CHINOVNIKS, factory workers, and peasants. The atmosphere pierced the very casemates of the royal palace. New ideas germinated in the youth. The difference of sex was forgotten.
The various stages in the Russification of the Jewish intelligenzia are marked by the changing tendencies of the Jewish periodical press in the Russian language. In point of literary form, it approached the European models more closely than the contemporary Hebrew press.
The one side was anxious to Russify, the other was equally anxious to be Russified, and the natural result was an entente cordiale between the new Jewish intelligenzia and the Government.
Ha-Shahar and ha-Melitx in Hebrew and the Razsvyet in Russian became the literary vehicles of the new movement. In opposition to these tendencies, the Voskhod of St. Petersburg reflected the ideas of the progressive Russian-Jewish intelligenzia, and defended their old position which was that of civil emancipation and inner Jewish reforms.
The bacillus of German anti-Semitism had penetrated even into the circles of the Russian radical intelligenzia. Among the "Populists," 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.
Another representative of the Jewish intelligenzia writes in the following strain to the editor of a Russian-Jewish periodical: When I remember what has been done to us, how we have been taught to love Russia and Russian speech, how we have been induced and compelled to introduce the Russian language and everything Russian, into our families so that our children know no other language but Russian, and how we are now repulsed and persecuted, then our hearts are filled with sickening despair from which there seems to be no escape.
Among the members of these revolutionary societies were also some representatives from among the young Jewish intelligenzia. They were in large part college students, who had been carried away by the ideals of their Russian comrades. But few of them were counted among the active terrorists.
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