In the Polish Jewish weekly, _Jutrzenka_, [1] "The Dawn," the organ of these assimilationists, the trite West-European theory, which looks upon Judaism as a religious sect and not as a national community, was repeated _ad nauseam_.

One of the most prominent contributors to that journal, Ludwig Gumplovich, the author of a monograph on the history of the Jews in Poland, who subsequently made a name for himself as a sociologist, and, after his conversion to Christianity, received a professorship at an Austrian university, opened his series of articles on Polish-Jewish history with the following observation: "The fact that the Jews had a history was their misfortune in Europe....

For their history inevitably presupposes an isolated life severed from that of the other nations.

It is just this which constitutes the misfortune alluded to." [Footnote 1: Pronounce _Yutzhenka_.] After the insurrection, the Polonization of the Jewish population assumed menacing proportions.

The upper layer of Polish Jewry consisted exclusively of "Poles of the Mosaic Persuasion" who rejected all elements of Jewish culture, while the broad masses, following blindly the mandates of their Tzaddiks, rejected fanatically even the most indispensable elements of European civilization.