THE YEARS BETWEEN 1881 and 1905 saw a significant deterioration in the situation of the Jews in the tsarist empire, who now constituted by far the largest Jewish community in the world with a population in 1897, when the first modern census was taken, of over 5.2 million out of a total 126 million (see Map 1). During this period the crisis caused by the deteriorating position of Russian Jewry was the motor which drove world Jewry. The crisis was partly the result of the growing disillusionment of the tsarist government with what it saw as the negative consequences of the ‘integrationist’ policies vis-a-vis the Jews which it had pursued, particularly during the reign of Alexander II. Its leading bureaucrats, mainly noble in origin, with aristocratic and rural prejudices against Jews, became increasingly subject to an anti-Jewish psychosis, attributing all the ills of the empire to Jewish machinations. More and more they came to see the Jews, rather than the disruptive effects of industrialization and modernization, as the source of their difficulties. Tsarist policy had always had a dual character: on the one hand, its aim was to ‘civilize’ the Jews and transform them into useful subjects of the tsar; on the other, it sought to minimize their ‘harmful’ effect on the rest of the society. Now most stress was placed on the latter goal.