In the middle between these two extremes stood the Russian weekly _Russki Yevrey_ ("The Russian Jew"), in St.Petersburg, and the Hebrew weekly _ha-Tzefirah_ ("The Dawn"), in Warsaw, voicing the moderate views of the Haskalah period, with a decided bent towards the nationalistic movement.
[Footnote 1: See p.

221, It appeared simultaneously as a weekly and a monthly.] 3.

MISCARRIED RELIGIOUS REFORMS The storm of pogroms not only broke many young twigs on the tree of "enlightenment," which had attained to full bloom in the preceding period, but it also bent others into monstrous shapes.

This abnormal development is particularly characteristic of the idea of religious reforms in Judaism which sprang to life in the beginning of the eighties.

A fortnight before the pogrom at Yelisavetgrad, which inaugurated another gloomy chapter in the annals of Russian Jewry, the papers reported that a new Jewish sect had appeared in that city under the name of "The Spiritual Biblical Brotherhood." Its members denied all religious dogmas and ceremonies, and acknowledged only the moral doctrines of the Bible; they condemned all mercantile pursuits, and endeavored to live by physical labor, primarily by agriculture.
The founder of this "Brotherhood" was a local teacher and journalist, Jacob Gordin, who stood at that time under the influence of the South-Russian Stundists [1] as well as of the socialistic Russian Populists.