This same idea lies at the root of Pinsker’s conception. A clear-minded and quiet thinker, he was deeply impressed by the events of 1880‒1881. The grave anxieties through which the Russian Jews passed, and the awakening of anti-Jewish feeling in Western Europe, particularly in Germany, led him to reconsider the conventional Emancipation doctrine, in which he, like all highly educated Russian and Polish Jews, had formerly believed. Being a medical man, he may have seen the tortures of the victims; as an old inhabitant of Odessa, he no doubt remembered the anti-Jewish riots of 1859 and 1871; and now the eighties, with all their horrors, began. He then enunciated “the message of political Zionism.”¹ “Pinsker, like all subsequent political Zionists, arrived at the idea of Zionism not through the problem of Judaism――through the necessity of seeking for a new foundation for our national existence and unity, in place of the old foundation, which is crumbling away――but through the problem of Jewry――through a definite conviction that even emancipation and general progress will not improve the degraded and insecure position of the Jews among the nations, and that anti-Semitism will never cease so long as we have not a national home of our own.” Pinsker discovered that the root causes of “our being hated and despised more than any other human beings ... lie deep in human psychology.”² ¹ Zionist Pamphlets. Second Series ... _Pinsker and Political Zionism_, by Achad Ha’am (Translated by Leon Simon), London, 1916, _p._ 7. ² _Ibid._, _p._ 8.