authorities had from the very beginning set their faces firmly against
all organized violence.

The series of pogroms perpetrated during the spring and summer of that
year had inflicted its sufferings on more than one hundred localities
populated by Jews, primarily in the South of Russia. Yet the misery
engendered by the panic, by the horrible apprehension of unbridled
violence, was far more extensive, for the entire Jewish population of
Russia proved its victim. Just as in the bygone Middle Ages whenever
Jewish suffering had reached a sad climax, so now too the persecuted
nation found itself face to face with the problem of emigration. And as
if history had been anxious to link up the end of the nineteenth century
with that of the fifteenth, the Jewish afflictions in Russia found an
echo in that very country, which in 1492 had herself banished the Jews
from her borders: the Spanish Government announced its readiness to
receive and shelter the fugitives from Russia. Ancient Catholic Spain
held forth a welcoming hand to the victims of modern Greek-Orthodox
Spain. However, the Spanish offer was immediately recognized as having
but little practical value. In the forefront of Jewish interest stood
the question as to the land toward which the emigration movement should
be directed: toward the United States of America, which held out the
prospect of bread and liberty, or toward Palestine, which offered a
shelter to the wounded national soul.

While the Jewish writers were busy debating the question, life itself
decided the direction of the emigration movement. Nearly all fugitives
from the South of Russia had left for America by way of the Western
European centers. The movement proceeded with elemental force, and
entirely unorganized, with the result that in the autumn of that year
some ten thousand destitute Jewish wanderers found themselves huddled