 The Bundists, on the other hand, proclaimed Yiddish as a national language for Jews and argued for a separate set of Jewish-run schools.Zionism stressed self-respect and self-defense for Jewish communities, and by the 1900s, despite ideological differences, Bundists, Labor Zionists and other Zionists banded together to form self-defense organizations against Russian pogroms.Menahem Mendel Beilis was a Russian Jew accused of ritual murder in Kiev in the Russian Empire in a notorious 1913 trial, known as the "Beilis trial" or "Beilis affair".