In his autobiography, the Yiddish poet and song-writer Eliakum Zunser relates the story of the arrest of Arkadii Finkelshtein and members of his Vilna socialist circle in 1872. This being the first organized expression of socialist radicalism among Russian Jews, the Governor-General of Vilna chastised Jewish community leaders: ‘To all the other good qualities which you Jews possess, about the only thing you need is to become Nihilists too!’ Adding insult to injury, the general blamed this state of affairs on the ‘bad education’ they were giving their children. Rejecting this accusation, the spokesman of the Jewish notables replied: ‘Pardon me General, this is not quite right! As long as we educated our children there were no Nihilists among us; but as soon as you took the education of our children into your hands they became so.’

Such a response was fair enough, but what the notables failed to recognize – or were reluctant to admit – was that the arrested Vilna radicals, and those who continued their socialist propaganda later on, were as much a product of internal Jewish circumstances and conflict as they were a phenomenon fostered by external non-Jewish influences and tsarist educational policy. More specifically, the origins of the Finkelstein circle, and of Jewish radicalism in general, were rooted in the volatile social and cultural transformation of the Jewish community under the impact of modernity. The beginnings of this momentous transformation of Jewish life in Russia predated the Finkelshtein circle by almost a century.