This organized campaign of the enemies of Judaism, who were preparing
administrative pogroms as a sequel to the street pogroms, met with no
organized resistance on the part of Russian Jewry. The small conference
of Jewish notables in St. Petersburg, which met in September in secret
session, presented a sorry spectacle. The guests from the provinces, who
had been invited by Baron Günzburg, engaged in discussions about the
problem of emigration, the struggle with the anti-Semitic press, and
similar questions. After being presented to Ignatyev, who assured them
in diplomatic fashion of the "benevolent intentions of the Government,"
they returned to their homes, without having achieved anything.

The only social factor in Jewish life was the press, particularly the
three periodicals published in Russian, the _Razsvyet_ ("the Dawn"), the
_Russki Yevrey_ ("the Russian Jew"), and the _Voskhod_ ("the
Sunrise"), [1] but even they revealed the lack of a well-defined policy.

[Footnote 1: See on these papers, p. 219 et seq.]

The political movements in Russian Jewry were yet in an embryonic stage,
and their rise and development were reserved for a later period. True,
the Russian-Jewish press applied itself assiduously to the task of
defending the rights of the Jews, but its voice remained unheard in
those circles of Russia in which the poisonous waters of Judaeophobia
gushed forth in a broad current from the columns of the semi-official
_Novoye Vremya_, the pan-Slavic _Russ_, and many of their anti-Semitic
contemporaries.

While the summer pogroms were in full swing, the _Novoye Vremya_,
reflecting the views of the official spheres, seriously formulated the
Jewish question in the paraphrase of Hamlet: "to beat or not to beat."