4. THE JEWS AND THE REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT The Russian school and literature pushed the Jewish college youth head over heels into the intellectual currents of progressive Russian society. Naturally enough a portion of the Jewish youth was also drawn into the revolutionary movement of the seventies, a movement which, in spite of the theoretic "materialism" of its adepts, was of an essentially idealistic tendency. In joining the ranks of the revolutionaries, the young Jews were less actuated by resentment against the continued, though somewhat mitigated, rightlessness of their own people than by discontent with the general political reaction in Russia, that discontent which found expression in the movement of "Populism," [1] of "Going to the People," [2] and similar currents then in vogue. Jewish students, attending the rabbinical and teachers' institutes of the Government, or autodidacts from among former heder and yeshibah pupils, also began to "go to the people"--the Russian people, to be sure, not the Jewish. They carried on a revolutionary propaganda, both by direct and indirect means, among the Russian peasants and workingmen, known to them only from books. It was taken for granted at that time that the realization of the ideals of Russian democracy would carry with it the solution of the Jewish as well as of all other sectional problems of Russian life, so that these problems might for the moment be safely set aside. [Footnote 1: In Russian, _narodnichestvo_, from _narod_, "People," a democratic movement In favor of the down-trodden masses, particularly the Russian peasantry.] [Footnote 2: Under the influence of the democratic movement many Russians of higher birth and culture settled among the peasantry, to which they dedicated their lives. The name of Leo Tolstoi readily suggests itself in this connection.] As far as the Jewish youth was concerned, the whole movement was doubly academic, for the only points of contact of that youth with younger Russia was not living reality but the book, problems of the intellect, the search for new ways, the attempt to work out a _Weltanschauung_. The fundamental article of faith of the Jewish socialists was cosmopolitanism, and they failed to discern in Russian "Populism" the underlying elements of a Russian national movement. Jewry was not believed to be a nation, and as a religious entity it was looked upon as a relic of the past, which was doomed to disappearance.