The Jewish people have always faced harsh repression and anti-Semitism dating back thousands of years. This astonishing fact is largely supported by the divine writings of the Torah. Eastern European Jews from the 18th century and into the mid-to-late 20th century did not stray from the clichéd treatment of their Jewish ancestors, and they too faced incomprehensible levels of hatred and ignorance. We know that repression breeds revolutions; This was inevitably the path taken by Eastern European Jews, immensely influenced by the radical political ideologies of that period. The natural attraction of Eastern European Jews to radical political ideologies is the corollary of many unique factors working in a similar and powerful direction. The Haskalah, which translates into English as Enlightenment, was a period when the Maskilim, who were the Jews who followed the Haskalah, questioned their traditional diasporic religion and culture. This radical movement asserted that reason and logic should be more credible than untested faith. The Maskilim trained in the sciences and moved away from the obsolete sacred texts that their ancestors studied. Essentially, what the Haskalah accomplished was that it opened the minds and eyes of Jews and gave them the idea that public assimilation into society was acceptable. Another fact that can be inferred is that the Haskalah also provided the infrastructure for future radical political ideologies to flourish, given this new mentality of questioning and open-mindedness. The main driving force behind radicalism was the pervasive anti-Semitism that was present in Eastern Europe. For example, in Russia, May laws existed. The laws were sanctioned by the Tsar in May 1882. These laws were official anti-Semitic legislation that restricted Jewish settlement and also barred expatriate Jews from certain professions. These laws were a consequence of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. The suspected criminals who assassinated the Tsar were considered members of the People's Will, a revolutionary populist group in Russia. The general consensus within Russian society was that it was a "Jewish plot", as one of the eight arrested members, Hesia Helfand, was Jewish. The aftermath of the Tsar's assassination resulted in some of the most intense and brutal pogroms in Jewish history, occurring in 1881 and 1882. The pogroms that occurred forced Jews to reevaluate their position in view of of slow integration into society and to seek more effective radical solutions to account. for their tribulations.