A multitude of other cultural societies and circles sprang into life with the sanction of the authorities throughout the length and breadth of the Pale. Everywhere lectures and conferences were held and heated debates were carried on, centering around national-cultural problems. Particularly passionate were the discussions about the position of Hebrew and Yiddish in public life, in school and in literature, leading to the alignment of two parties, the Hebraists and the Yiddishists. The lectures, conferences and debates themselves were generally carried on in one of these languages, mostly in the Yiddish vernacular. In spite of their crudities, these partisan conflicts were a clear indication of the advance of national self-consciousness and of the desire for the upbuilding of a genuine Jewish life upon the concrete foundations of a cultural autonomy. Of course, anti-Semitic Tzardom could not be expected to sympathize with this inner regeneration of Jewry, and, as in the time of Plehve, it directed its blow at the Jewish-national organizations. Here and there the blow was effective. In 1911, the Jewish Literary Society, with its one hundred and twenty branches, which had displayed an energetic activity in the establishment of libraries and the arrangement of public lectures, went out of existence. In general, however, the attacks directed against the Jewish spirit proved much more difficult of realization than the attacks upon Jewish property. The cultural activities continued in their course, defying all external restrictions and persecutions. The literary revival, which had started in the nineties, and was but temporarily interrupted by the stormy events of the revolutionary period, also came into its own again. The rejuvenation of both the national and the popular language, finding its expression in a widely ramified Jewish literature, proceeded along paralleled lines. The periodical press in Hebrew, represented by the two dailies, _ha-Tzefirah_ in Warsaw, and _ha-Zeman_ in Vilna, and the monthly ha-Shiloah in Odessa, found its counterpart in a popular press in Yiddish, reaching hundreds of thousands of readers, such as the dailies _Fraind_ ("The Friend," published since 1903 in St. Petersburg), _Haint_ ("To-day"), _Moment_, and others, in Warsaw. In addition there was the Jewish press in Russian: the weeklies _Voskhod_, _Razsvyet_, _Yevreyski Mir_ in St. Petersburg, and a few other publications.