Jews were generally restricted to small towns in the Pale of Settlement, unless they had been discharged from the military, were employed as doctors or dentists, or could prove they were 'cantonists', university graduates or merchants belonging to the 1st guild.

Living in Vilna, Lithuania, during the early months of 1905 Russian Revolution, he became active in organizing a Jewish political response to opportunities arising from the new civil rights which were being promised.

In the same year, he founded the Folkspartei (Jewish People's Party) with Israel Efrojkin, which successfully worked for the election of MPs and municipal councilors in interwar Lithuania and Poland.

He welcomed the first February Revolution of 1917 in Russia, regarding it, according to scholar Robert van Voren, as having "brought the long-anticipated liberation of the Jewish people", although he "felt uneasy about the increasing profile of Lenin".

Yet in early 20th-century Europe, many political currents began to trend against polities that accommodated a multiethnic pluralism, as grim monolithic nationalism or ideology emerged as centralizing principles.

[23]Each provincial council or Waad (Hebrew vaad: committee) eventually joined with others to form a central governing body which began to meet regularly.

"As a rule, the Council assembled in Lublin in early spring, between Purim and Passover, and in Yaroslav (Galicia) at the end of summer, before high holidays.

They dispensed justice to all the Jews of the Polish realm, issued preventive measures and obligatory enactments (takkanoth), and imposed penalties as they saw fit.

It sent its shtadlans to the residential city of Warsaw and other meeting-places of the Polish Diets for the purpose of securing from the king and his dignitaries the ratification of the ancient Jewish privileges.

[32] Following the Congress of Vienna (1815) the Russian Empire uneasily governed most of these Polish and Lithuanian lands, including the large Jewish populations long dwelling there.

[36] Not only were their rights attacked, but several of the Tzars allowed the imperial government to propagate and to instigate a series of murderous pogroms against the Jewish people of the realm.

[37] In the cruel atmosphere of this ongoing political crisis in the region, Simon Dubnow wrote his celebrated histories and played an active rôle in Jewish affairs.

He supported the broad movements for change in the Russian Empire; yet in the main he sought to restore and to continue the Jewish autonomy, described above at its zenith under the old Commonwealth, into the 20th century.

Had Judea battled against the Syrian yoke, sacrificed for a quarter of a century its material goods and the blood of its best sons, only in order to become, after attaining independence, a 'despotism' or warrior state after the fashion of its pagan neighbors?

The "Jewish national idea, which can never become aggressive and warlike" will raise aloft its flag, which symbolizes the joining of the prophetic vision of "truth and justice with the noble dream of the unity of mankind.

"The national development is based upon an all-pervasive religious tradition... embracing a luminous theory of life and an explicit code of morality and social converse."

Their history reveals that the Jewish people "has been called to guide the other nations toward sublime moral and religious principles, and to officiate for them, the laity as it were, in the capacity of priests."

After the close of the Tanakh era in Israel, this first half of their history, the "strength and fertility" of the Jews as a spiritual nation "reached a culminating point".

Already in the Biblical times, their "character had been sufficiently tempered", they had learned how to "bear the bitterest of hardships" and were "equipped with an inexhaustible store of energy", thus they could survive, "live for centuries, yea, for thousands of years" under challenging conditions in ethnic enclaves mostly in Southwest Asia and later throughout Europe, during their post-Biblical "second half".

On the negative, when "the powers of darkness and fanaticism held sway" the Jews were subject to "persecutions, infringement of the liberty of conscience, inquisitions, violence of every sort."

Yet when "enlightenment and humanity" prevailed in the neighborhood, the Jews were to benefit by "the intellectual and cultural stimulus proceeding from the peoples with whom they entered into close relations."

[48] On its side, Jewry made its personality felt among the nations by its independent, intellectual activity, its theory of life, its literature, by the very fact indeed, of its ideal staunchness and tenacity, its peculiar historical physiognomy.

[49]Dubnow states that the Jewish people in the first Biblical half of its history "finally attained to so high a degree of spiritual perfection and fertility that the creation of a new religious theory of life, which eventually gained universal supremacy, neither exhausted its resources nor ended its activity."

In its second "lackland" half the Jews were "a people accepting misery and hardship with stoic calm, combining the characteristics of the thinker with those of the sufferer, and eking out existence under conditions which no other nation has found adequate."

"[50] In a short article, Dubnow presented a memorable portrait of historical depth, and its presence in contemporary life: Every generation in Israel carries within itself the remnants of worlds created and destroyed during the course of the previous history of the Jewish people.

"[53] Pinson writes "Dubnow with his profound historical approach, weaves into his automomist theories all the strands of Jewish past, present and future.

[55] It is an interdisciplinary institute for the research of Jewish lived experience in Central and Eastern Europe from the Early Modern Period to the present day.

In tsarist times, ethnic Poland had been largely spared the violent anti-Semitism that was endemic to the Ukraine, and there had been a certain degree of Polish-Jewish cooperation in the revolutionary struggle against Russian rule.

During the Great Depression decade, perhaps the "majority of Poles [became] convinced that a 'native' middle class could develop only through the displacement of the Jews.Czeslaw Milosz presents a nuanced and personally informed portrait of the Jews of interwar Poland in his Native Realm.

Thus in the Soviet Union "the separate Jewish community, which had withstood the most determined assaults of the Romanovs for a century and a quarter, virtually ceased to exist."