During the revolutions of 1905–7, those movements that combined revolutionary socialism and Jewish nationalism came into their own. In their many varied and rival forms, they now achieved an unprecedented popularity within the Pale of Settlement. There, they even overshadowed general Zionism, on the one hand, and revolutionary “assimilationism,” on the other. This moment of ascendancy had been long in the making, for the ideological and political tributaries that finally merged into the floodwaters of 1905 had their origins largely in the 1880s and 1890s.

The most important of the “synthetic” movements was, of course, the Bund, but from the time of the Kishinev pogrom in 1903 there were Zionist and territorialist movements that sought this same synthesis. These were the movements that raised such veteran ideologists as Syrkin and Zhitlovsky (who had been advocating socialist nationalism since the 1880s) to leadership positions.

In the years 1905–6, they formed into a number of political parties that, while competing with each other, sought to outflank the Bund and to develop a line that would be more nationalist but also more revolutionary. They, too, committed themselves increasingly to Marxism, to scientific determinism, to the class-war doctrine. Borochov, who had been born in 1880, was representative of this all but irresistible, quasi-religious flow of belief among the youth, while Syrkin and Zhitlovsky with their populist and voluntarist credo, came to be regarded as ideologically anachronistic.