[Footnote 1: The article appeared in the _Otyechestvennyia Zapiski_ in August, 1882. The following sentences in that article are worthy of re-production: "History has never recorded in its pages a question more replete, with sadness, more foreign to the sentiments of humanity, and more filled with tortures than the Jewish question. The history of mankind as a whole is one endless martyrology; yet at the same time it is also a record of endless progress. In the records of martyrology the Hebrew tribe occupies the first place; in the annals of progress it stands aside, as if the luminous perspectives of history could never reach it. There is no more heart-rending tale than the story of this endless torture of man by man." In the same article the Russian satirist draws a clever parallel between the merciless Russian _Kulak_, or "boss," who ruins the peasantry, and the pitiful Jewish "exploiter," the half-starved tradesman, who in turn is exploited by everyone.] This disillusionment found its early expression in the lamentations of repentant assimilators. One of these assimilators, writing in the first months of the pogroms, makes the following confession: The cultured Jewish classes have turned their back upon their history, have forgotten their traditions, and have conceived a contempt for everything which might make them realize that they are the members of the "eternal people." With no definite ideals, dragging their Judaism behind them as a fugitive galley-slave drags his heavy chain, how could these men justify their belonging to the tribe of "Christ-killers" and "exploiters"?... Truly pitiful has become the position of these assimilators, who but yesterday were the champions of national self-effacement. Life demands self-determination. To sit between two stools has now become an impossibility. The logic of events has placed them before the alternative: either to declare themselves openly as renegades, or to take their proper share in the sufferings of their people. Another representative of the Jewish _intelligenzia_ writes in the following strain to the editor of a Russian-Jewish periodical: