would have interrupted the flow of the narrative, had to be omitted. But
a few passages from it, written in the characteristic style of Mr.
Dubnow, may find a place here:

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.