Russian Tzardom began its consistent role as a persecutor of the Eternal People when it received, by way of bequest, the vast Jewish population of disintegrated Poland. At the end of the eighteenth century, when Western Europe had just begun the emancipation of the Jews, the latter were subjected in the East of Europe to every possible medieval experiment.... The reign of Alexander II., who slightly relieved the civil disfranchisement of the Jews by permitting certain categories among them to live outside the Pale and by a few other measures, forms a brief interlude in the Russian policy of oppression. His tragic death in 1881 marks the beginning of a new terrible reaction which has superimposed the system of wholesale street pogroms upon the policy of disfranchisement, and has again thrown millions of Jews into the dismal abyss of medievalism. Russia created a lurid antithesis to Jewish emancipation at a time when the latter was consummated not only in Western Europe, but also in the semi-civilized Balkan States.... True, the rise of Russian Judaeophobia--the Russian technical term for Jew-hatred--was paralleled by the appearance of German anti-Semitism in which it found a congenial companion. Yet, the anti-Semitism of the West was after all only a weak aftermath of the infantile disease of Europe--the medieval Jew-hatred--whereas culturally retrograde Russia was still suffering from the same infection in its acute, "childish" form. The social and cultural anti-Semitism of the West did not undermine the modern foundations of Jewish civil equality. But Russian Judaeophobia, more governmental than social, being fully in accord with the entire regime of absolutism, produced a system aiming not only at the disfranchisement, but also at the direct physical annihilation of the Jewish people. The policy of the extermination of Judaism was stamped upon the forehead of Russian reaction, receiving various colors at various periods, assuming the hue now of economic, now of national and religious, now of bureaucratic oppression. The year 1881 marks the starting-point of this systematic war against the Jews, which has continued until our own days, and is bound to reach a crisis upon the termination of the great world struggle.