Auto-Emancipation is the title of an 1882 manifesto by the Russian Jewish writer and doctor Leo (Judah Leib) Pinsker (1821–1891). The treatise, written in reaction to the pogroms that had broken out in the Russian Empire in 1881, declares existing concepts of emancipation failed and calls on the Jews to emancipate themselves. Auto-Emancipation was widely discussed in the public sphere of Jewish Eastern Europe, and it marks the beginning of a new era in Jewish politics.