The Jewish people have always faced harsh repression and anti-Semitism that dates back thousands of years. This astonishing fact is amply corroborated by the divine writings of the Torah. Eastern European Jews from the eighteenth century to the mid-late twentieth century did not deviate from the clichéd treatment meted out to their Jewish ancestors, and they too faced incomprehensible amounts of hatred and ignorance. It is known that repression generates revolutions; inevitably this is the path taken by Eastern European Jews, being immensely influenced by the radical political ideologies of that time period. The natural attraction of Eastern European Jews to radical political ideologies is the corollary of many unique factors pulling in a similarly strong direction. The Haskalah which translates into English as the Enlightenment was a time when the Maskilim, who were the Jews who followed the Haskalah, questioned their traditional diasporic religion and culture. This radical movement argued that reason and logic should have more credibility than unverified faith. The Maskilim educated themselves in the sciences and departed from the obsolete sacred texts studied by their ancestors. Essentially, what the Haskalah achieved was to open the minds and eyes of Jews and give them the idea that public assimilation into society was okay. Another fact that can be deduced is that the Haskalah also provided the infrastructure for the flourishing of future radical political ideologies given this new questioning and open-minded mentality. The main driving force of radicalism was the ubiquitous anti-Semitism present in Eastern Europe. In Russia, for example, there were the May Laws. The laws were passed by the Tsar in May 1882. These laws were official anti-Semitic laws that restricted Jewish settlement and also restricted expatriate Jews from certain professions. These laws were the consequence of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. The alleged criminals who assassinated the Tsar were believed to be members of the People Will's, a revolutionary populist group in Russia. The general consensus in Russian society was that it was a "Jewish plot" because one of the eight arrested members, Hesia Helfand, was Jewish. The aftermath of the Tsar's assassination provides 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 positions on slow integration into society and sought more effective radical solutions to take into account their tribulations.