THE JEWS AND THE REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT The Russian school and literature pushed the Jewish college youth head over heels into the intellectual currents of progressive Russian society.

Naturally enough a portion of the Jewish youth was also drawn into the revolutionary movement of the seventies, a movement which, in spite of the theoretic "materialism" of its adepts, was of an essentially idealistic tendency.

In joining the ranks of the revolutionaries, the young Jews were less actuated by resentment against the continued, though somewhat mitigated, rightlessness of their own people than by discontent with the general political reaction in Russia, that discontent which found expression in the movement of "Populism," [1] of "Going to the People," [2] and similar currents then in vogue.

Jewish students, attending the rabbinical and teachers' institutes of the Government, or autodidacts from among former heder and yeshibah pupils, also began to "go to the people"-- the Russian people, to be sure, not the Jewish.

They carried on a revolutionary propaganda, both by direct and indirect means, among the Russian peasants and workingmen, known to them only from books.