The Jewish people have always been faced with harsh repression and anti-Semitism dating back thousand of years. This astonishing fact is greatly substantiated by divine writings of the Torah. Eastern European Jews from the eighteenth century and up until mid-to-late twentieth century did not deviated from their Jewish ancestor's clichéd treatment, and they too have also faced incomprehensible amounts of hatred and ignorance. It is known that repression breeds revolutions; inevitably this is the path Eastern European Jews took, being immensely influenced by radical political ideologies of that time period.
The Eastern European Jews natural attraction to radical political ideologies is the corollary of many unique factors exerting in one forceful analogous direction. The Haskalah which translates into English as Enlightenment was a time period when the Maskilim, who were the Jews that followed the Haskalah, questioned their traditional diasporic religion and culture. This radical movement advocated that reason and logic should hold more creditability then untested faith. Maskilim educated themselves in the sciences and digressed from the obsolete sacred texts that their ancestors studied. Essentially what the Haskalah accomplished was that it opened the minds and eyes of the Jews and gave them the notion that public assimilation into society was ok. Another fact that can be deduced is that the Haskalah also provided the infrastructure for future radical political ideologies to flourish given this new questioning, open minded mentality.
The major driving force for radicalism was the ubiquitous anti-Semitism that was present in Eastern Europe. For example in Russia the May Laws existed. The Laws were sanctioned by the Czar ...