Lenin seized hold of the Jewish question, not out of an academic interest, but as a burning political problem in Czarist Russia. He sought to give a political answer to the problem at hand, rather than write the definitive answer to the past, present and future of the Jews. However his treatment did not confine itself to the particularism of the Jewish question as it existed in Eastern Europe. Basing himself upon the world trends of Jewish development and upon the teachings of Marxism on the national question he established a firm theoretical justification for the political solutions he offered to the Jewish proletariat and the Jewish people as a whole. Lenin could not conceive of a problem like the Jewish question unrelated to its specific historical context.