ABSTRACT
The crisis created by acts of Judeophobic, anti-Semitic aggression played a crucial role in the history of the Jewish people during the nineteenth century. Crises such as those of 1881–82 and 1840 indeed cannot be fully understood except in terms of constant interaction among the highly disparate, often hostile, forces at work within, and on the periphery of, the Jewish world. True, in the period from April 1881 until the summer of 1882, the most conspicuous development was the emergence, almost overnight, of a politics radical in thought and action, in content and style, within the Russian-Jewish world. A new phenomenon with the most far-reaching consequences, autoemancipationism, has naturally riveted attention on itself. While the crisis of 1881–82 has been the subject of intense historiographical interest almost throughout the twentieth century, the Damascus case has attracted comparatively little close attention.
