[3]
Writers are wont to speak of this as a reactionary period. The
description applies to the Russians; among the Jews it was a period of
reawakening.[4] They were disillusioned. They saw that Russification
without emancipation, as their unsophisticated fathers had told
Lilienthal, meant extermination. The first and worst pogroms were
perpetrated in those places where the Jews were like their Russian
neighbors in every respect, except in the eyes of the law, and with the
approval of some who were devotees of the Narodnaya Volya. The Jewish
consciousness reasserted itself. If Pobyedonostsev accomplished his
fiendish design as regards emigration, more than a million Jews having
left Russia within the last twenty years; if he has almost succeeded in
causing them to die of starvation; yet his hope of forcing a third of
them to conversion was a disappointment and a delusion. The Jews showed
that the traditional description applied to them, "stiff-necked," was
not undeserved. While the Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Armenians have
undergone conversion in multitudes, they whose suffering by far exceeded
that of any other "non-Russian" nationality remained, with insignificant
exceptions, loyal to the religion of their fathers.
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