It would seem as if the terrible atrocities at Balta had made the highest Government spheres realize that the previous policy of connivance at the pogroms, which had been practised for a whole year, could not but disgrace Russia in the eyes of the world and undermine public order in Russia itself. As soon as this was realized, the luckless Minister, who had been the pilot of Russian politics throughout that terrible year, was bound to disappear from the scene. On May 30, Count Ignatyev was made to resign, and Count Demetrius Tolstoi was appointed Minister of the Interior.

Tolstoi was a grim reactionary and a champion of autocracy and police power, but he was at the same time an enemy of all manifestations of mob rule which tended to undermine the authority of the State. A few days after his appointment the new Minister issued a circular in which he reiterated the recent declaration of his predecessor concerning the "resolve of the Government to prosecute every kind of violence against the Jews," announcing emphatically that "any manifestation of disorders would unavoidably result in the immediate prosecution of all official persons who are in duty bound to concern themselves with the prevention of disorders."

This energetic pronouncement of the Government had a magic effect. All provincial administrators realized that the central Government of St. Petersburg had ceased to trifle with the promoters of the pogroms, and the pogrom epidemic was at an end. Beginning with June, 1882, the pogroms assumed more and more a sporadic character. Here and there sparks of the old conflagration would flare up again, but only to die out quickly. In the course of the next twenty years, until the Kishinev massacre of 1903, no more than about ten pogroms of any consequence may be enumerated, and these disorders were all isolated movements, with a purely local coloring, and without the earmarks of a common organization or the force of an epidemic, such as characterized the pogrom campaigns of 1881, or those of 1903-1905. This is an additional proof for the contention that systematic pogroms in Russia are impossible as long as the central Government and the local authorities are honestly and firmly set against them.

The stringent measures adopted by Tolstoi were soon reflected in the legal trials arising out of the pogroms. Formerly, the local authorities refrained as a rule from putting the rioters on trial lest their testimony might implicate the local administration, and even when action was finally brought against them, the culprits mostly escaped with slight penalties, such as imprisonment for a few months. But after the declaration of the Government in June the courts adopted a more rigorous attitude towards the rioters. [1] In the summer of 1882, a number of cases arising out of the pogroms at Balta and in other cities were tried in the courts. The penalties imposed by the courts were frequently severe, though fully deserved, such as deportation and confinement at hard labor, drafting into penal military companies, etc. In one case, two soldiers, having been convicted of pillage and murder, were court-martialled and sentenced to death. When the sentence was submitted for ratification to Drenteln, governor-general of Kiev, the rabbi of Balta, acting on behalf of the local Jewish community, betook himself to Kiev to support the culprits in their petition for pardon. It was strange to listen to this appeal for mercy on behalf of criminals guilty of violence and murder, coming from the camp of their victims, from the demolished homes which still resounded with the moans of the wounded and with the weeping over lost lives and dishonored women. One finds it difficult to believe that this appeal for mercy was due entirely to an impulse of forgiveness. Associated with it was probably the apprehension that the death of the murderers would be avenged by their like-minded accomplices who were still at liberty.

[Footnote 1: This, by the way, was not always the case. The court of Chernigov, which was compelled to bring in a verdict of guilty against the perpetrators of the pogrom in the townlet of Karpovitchin the same government, decided to recommend the culprits to the clemency of the superior authorities, in view of the dissatisfaction of the people with the "exploitation" of the Jews. There were many instances of these anti-Jewish political manifestations in the law-courts.]

The Jews of Balta were soon to learn that their humility was ill-requited by the highly-placed promoters of the riots. In the beginning of August, Governor-General Drenteln came to Balta. He was exceedingly irritated, not only on account of the recent circular of Tolstoi which implied a personal threat against him as one who had connived at a number of pogroms within his dominions, but also because of the steps taken by the representatives of the Balta Jewish community at St. Petersburg in the direction of exposing the spiritual fathers of the local riots. Having arrived in the sorely stricken city, the head of the province, who ex officio should have conveyed his expression of sympathy to the sufferers, summoned the rabbi and the leaders of the Jewish community, and, in the presence of his official staff, treated them to a speech full of venomous hatred. He told them that by their actions the Jews had "armed everybody against themselves," that they were universally hated, that "they lived nowhere as happily as in Russia," and that the deputation they had sent to St. Petersburg for the purpose of presenting their complaints and "slandering the city authorities and representatives as if they had incited the tumultuous mob against the Jews" had been of no avail. In conclusion, he branded the petition of the Balta community for a commutation of the death sentence passed upon the rioters as an act of hypocrisy, adding impressively that "these persons have been pardoned irrespective of the requests of the Jews."

The speech of the bureaucratic Jew-baiter, whose proper place was in the dock, side by side with the convicted murderers, produced a terrible panic in the whole region of Kiev. The militant organ of the Jewish press, the Voskhod, properly remarked:

After the speech of General-Adjutant Drenteln, our confidence in the impossibility of a repetition of the pogroms has been decidedly shaken. Of what avail can ministerial circulars be when the highest administrators on the spot paralyze their actions in public by the living word?

The apprehensions voiced by the Jewish organ were fortunately unfounded. True, the Minister Tolstoi was not able to punish the criminal harangue of the savage governor-general who had powerful connections at the Russian court. But the firm resolution of the central Government to hold the heads of the administration to account for their connivance at pogroms had the desired effect. All that the snarling dogs could do was to bark.

3. DISABILITIES AND EMIGRATION

The pogrom machinery was thus stopped by a word of command from St. Petersburg. As a counterbalance, the machinery for the manufacture of Jewish disabilities continued in full operation. The "Temporary Rules" of May third established a system of legal persecutions which were directed against the Jews on the ground of their "economic injuriousness," The fact that the Jewish population was in many regards outside the operation of the general laws of Russia opened up a wide field for the grossest forms of arbitrariness and lawlessness. At one stroke, all the exits from the overcrowded cities into the villages within the Pale of Settlement were tightly closed. All branches of industry connected with Jewish land ownership outside the cities were curtailed and in some places entirely cut off. In many villages the right bestowed on the rural communes of ostracising "vicious members" by a special verdict [1] was used as a weapon to expel those Jews who had long been settled there.

[Footnote 1: The official term applied to the resolutions passed by the village communes. Compare p. 310.]

It will be remembered that Ignatyev had proposed to encourage the peasants officially in the use of this weapon against the Jews, and that the Committee of Ministers had rejected his proposal. There were now administrators who did the same thing unofficially. Prompted by selfish motives, the local Kulaks [1] or "bosses," from among the Russian tradesmen, acting in conjunction with the rural elders, would convene peasant assemblies which were treated to liberal doses of alcohol. The intoxicated, half-illiterate moujiks would sign a "verdict" demanding the expulsion of the Jews from their village; the verdict would be promptly confirmed by the governors and would immediately become law. Such expulsions were particularly frequent in the governments under the jurisdiction of Drenteln, governor-general of Kiev, and no one doubted but that this ferocious Jew-baiter had passed the word to that effect throughout his dominions.

[Footnote 1: Literally "Fists."]

The economic misery within the Pale drove a number of Jews into the Russian interior, but here they were met by the whip of the law, made doubly painful by the scorpions of administrative caprice. Wholesale expulsions of Jews took place in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov, and other forbidden centers. The effect of these expulsions upon the commercial life of the country was so disastrous that the big Russian merchants of Moscow and Kharkov appealed to the Government to relax the restrictions surrounding the visits of Jews to these cities.

The civil authorities were now joined by the military powers in hounding the Jews. There were in the Russian army a large number of Jewish physicians, many of whom had distinguished themselves during the preceding Russo-Turkish war. The reactionary Government at the helm of Russian affairs could not tolerate the sight of a Jewish physician exercising the rights of an army officer which were otherwise utterly utterly unattainable for a Jewish soldier. Accordingly, the Minister of War, Vannovski, issued a rescript dated April 10, 1882, to the following effect:

First, to limit the number of Jewish physicians and feldshers[1] in the Military Department to five per cent of the general number of medical men.

Second, to stop appointing Jews on the medical service in the military districts of Western Russia, and to transfer the surplus over and above five per cent into the Eastern districts.

Third, to appoint Jewish physicians only in those contingents of the army in which the budget calls for at least two physicians, with the proviso that the second physician must be a Christian.

[Footnote 1: See p. 167, n. 2.]

The reason for these provisions was stated in a most offensive form:

It is necessary to stop the constant growth of the number of physicians of the Mosaic persuasion in the Military Department, in view of their deficient conscientiousness in discharging their duties and their unfavorable influence upon the sanitary service in the army.

This revolting affront had the effect that many Jewish physicians handed in their resignations immediately. The resignation of one of these physicians, the well-known novelist Yaroshevski, was couched in such emphatic terms, and parried the moral blow directed at the Jewish professional men with such dignity that the Minister of War deemed it necessary to put the author on trial. Among other things, Yaroshevski wrote:

So long as the aspersions cast upon the Jewish physicians so pitilessly are not removed, every superfluous minute spent by them in serving this Department will merely add to their disgrace. In the name of their human dignity, they have no right to remain there where they are held in abhorrence.

Under these circumstances it seemed quite natural that the tendency toward emigration, which had called forth a number of emigration societies as far back as the beginning of 1882 [1], took an ever stronger hold upon the Jewish population of Russia. The disastrous consequences of the resolution adopted by the conference of notables in St. Petersburg [2] were now manifest. By rejecting the formation of a central agency for regulating the emigration, the conference had abandoned the movement to the blind elemental forces, and a catastrophe was bound to follow. The pogrom at Balta called forth a new outburst of the emigration panic, and in the summer of 1882 some twenty thousand Jewish refugees were again huddled together in the Galician border-town of Brody. They were without means for continuing their journey to America, having come to Brody in the hope of receiving help from the Jewish societies of Western Europe. The relief committees established in the principal cities of Europe were busily engaged in "evacuating" Brody of this destitute mass of fugitives. In the course of the summer and autumn this task was successfully accomplished. A large number of emigrants were dispatched to the United States, and the rest were dispersed over the various centers of Western Europe.

[Footnote 1: See above, p. 297 et seq.]

[Footnote 2: See above, p. 307.]

Aside from the highway of American emigration went, along a tiny parallel path, the Jewish emigration to Palestine. The Palestinian movement which had shortly before come into being [1] attracted many enthusiasts from among the Jewish youth. In the spring of 1882, a society of Jewish young men, consisting mostly of university students, was formed in Kharkov under the name Bilu, from the initial letters of their Hebrew motto, Bet Ya'akob leku we-nelka"O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us go." [2] The aim of the society was to establish a model agricultural settlement in Palestine and to carry on a wide-spread propaganda for the idea of colonizing the ancient homeland of the Jews. As a result of this propaganda, several hundred Jews in various parts of Russia joined the Bilu society. Of these only a few dozen pioneers left for Palestine —between June and July of 1882.

[Footnote 1: See later, p. 268.]

[Footnote 2: From Isa. 2.5.]

At first, the leaders of the organization attempted to enter into negotiations with the Turkish Government, with a view to obtaining from it a large tract of land for colonizing purposes, but the negotiations fell through. The handful of pioneers were obliged to work in the agricultural settlements near Jaffa, in Mikweh Israel, a foundation of the Alliance Israelite in Paris, and in the colony Rishon le-Zion, which had been recently established by private initiative. The youthful idealists had to endure many hardships in an unaccustomed environment and in a branch of endeavor entirely alien to them. A considerable part of the pioneers were soon forced to give up the struggle and make way for the new settlers who were less intelligent perhaps but physically better fitted for their task. The foundations of Palestinian colonization had been laid, though within exceedingly narrow limits, and the very idea of the national restoration of the Jewish people in Palestine was then as it was later a much greater social factor in Jewish life than the practical colonization of a country which could only absorb an insignificant number of laborers. At those moments, when the Russian horrors made life unbearable, the eyes of many sufferers were turned Eastward, towards the tiny strip of land on the shores of the Mediterranean, where the dream of a new life upon the resuscitated ruins of gray antiquity held out the promise of fulfilment.

A contemporary writer, in surveying recent events in the Russian valley of tears, makes the following observations:

Jewish life during the latter part of 1882 has assumed a monotonously gloomy, oppressively dull aspect True, the streets are no longer full of whirling feathers from torn bedding; the window-panes no longer crash through the streets. The thunder and lightning which were recently filling the air and gladdening the hearts of the Greek-Orthodox people are no more. But have the Jews actually gained by the change from the illegal persecutions [in the form of pogroms] to the legal persecutions of the third of May? Maltreated, plundered, reduced to beggary, put to shame, slandered, and dispirited, the Jews have been cast out of the community of human beings. Their destitution, amounting to beggary, has been firmly established and definitely affixed to them. Gloomy darkness, without a ray of light, has descended upon that bewitched and narrow world in which this unhappy tribe has been languishing so long, gasping for breath in the suffocating atmosphere of poverty and contempt. Will this go on for a long time? Will the light of day break at last?



CHAPTER XXV

INNER UPHEAVALS

1. DISILLUSIONMENT OF THE INTELLIGENZIA AND THE NATIONAL REVIVAL

The catastrophe at the beginning of the eighties took the Jews of Russia unawares, and found them unprepared for spiritual self-defence. The impressions of the recent brief "era of reforms" were still fresh in their minds. They still remembered the initial steps of Alexander II's Government in the direction of the complete civil emancipation of Russian Jewry, the appeals of the intellectual classes of Russia calling upon the Jews to draw nearer to them, the bright prospects of a rejuvenated Russia. The niggardly gifts of the Russian Government were received by Russian Jewry with an outburst of gratitude and devotion which bordered on flunkeyism. The intellectual young Jews and Jewesses who had passed through the Russian public schools made frantic endeavors, not only towards association but also towards complete cultural amalgamation with the Russian people. Assimilation and Russification became the watchwords of the day. The literary ideals of young Russia became the sacred tablets of the Jewish youth.

But suddenly, lo and behold! that same Russian people, in which the progressive forces of Jewry were ready to merge their identity, appeared in the shape of a monster, which belched forth hordes upon hordes of rioters and murderers. The Government had changed front, and adopted a policy of reaction and fierce Jew-hatred, while the liberal classes of Russia showed but scant sympathy with the downtrodden and maltreated nation. The voice of the hostile press, the Novoye Vremya, the Russ, and others, resounded through the air with fall vigor, whereas the liberal press, owing partly—but only partly—to the tightening grip of the censor, defended the Jews in a perfunctory manner. Even the publicists of the radical type, who were principally grouped around the periodical Otyechestvennyia Zapiski ("Records of the Fatherland"), looked upon the pogroms merely as the brutal manifestation of an economic struggle, and viewed the whole complicated Jewish problem, with all its century-long tragic implications, in the light of a subordinate social-economic question.

The only one whose soul was deeply stirred by the sight of the new sufferings of an ancient people was the Russian satirist, Shchedrin-Saltykov, and he poured forth his, sentiments in the summer of 1882, after the completion of the first cycle of pogroms, in an article marked by a lyric strain, so different from his usual style. [1] But Shchedrin was the only Russian writer of prominence who responded to the Jewish sorrow. Turgenyev and Tolstoi held their peace, whereas the literary celebrities of Western Europe, Victor Hugo, Renau, and many others, came forward with passionate protests. The Russian intelligenzia remained cold in the face of the burning tortures of Jewry. The educated classes of Russian Jewry were hurt to the quick by this chilly attitude, and their former enthusiasm gave way to disillusionment.

[Footnote 1: The article appeared in the Otyechestvennyia Zapiski in August, 1882. The following sentences in that article are worthy of re-production: "History has never recorded in its pages a question more replete, with sadness, more foreign to the sentiments of humanity, and more filled with tortures than the Jewish question. The history of mankind as a whole is one endless martyrology; yet at the same time it is also a record of endless progress. In the records of martyrology the Hebrew tribe occupies the first place; in the annals of progress it stands aside, as if the luminous perspectives of history could never reach it. There is no more heart-rending tale than the story of this endless torture of man by man."

In the same article the Russian satirist draws a clever parallel between the merciless Russian Kulak, or "boss," who ruins the peasantry, and the pitiful Jewish "exploiter," the half-starved tradesman, who in turn is exploited by everyone.]

This disillusionment found its early expression in the lamentations of repentant assimilators. One of these assimilators, writing in the first months of the pogroms, makes the following confession:

The cultured Jewish classes have turned their back upon their history, have forgotten their traditions, and have conceived a contempt for everything which might make them realize that they are the members of the "eternal people." With no definite ideals, dragging their Judaism behind them as a fugitive galley-slave drags his heavy chain, how could these men justify their belonging to the tribe of "Christ-killers" and "exploiters"?... Truly pitiful has become the position of these assimilators, who but yesterday were the champions of national self-effacement. Life demands self-determination. To sit between two stools has now become an impossibility. The logic of events has placed them before the alternative: either to declare themselves openly as renegades, or to take their proper share in the sufferings of their people.

Another representative of the Jewish intelligenzia writes in the following strain to the editor of a Russian-Jewish periodical:

When I remember what has been done to us, how we have been taught to love Russia and Russian speech, how we have been induced and compelled to introduce the Russian language and everything Russian, into our families so that our children know no other language but Russian, and how we are now repulsed and persecuted, then our hearts are filled with sickening despair from which there seems to be no escape. This terrible insult gnaws at my vitals. It may be that I am mistaken, but I do honestly believe that even if I succeeded in moving to a happier country where all men are equal, where there are no pogroms by day and "Jewish commissions" by night, I would yet remain sick at heart to the very end of my life—to such an extent do I feel worn out by this accursed year, this universal mental eclipse which has visited our dear fatherland.

Russian-Jewish literature of that period is full of similar self-revelations of disillusioned intellectuals. However, this repentant mood did not always lead to positive results. Some of these intellectuals, having become part and parcel of Russian cultural life, were no longer able to find their way back to Judaism, and they were carried off by the current of assimilation, culminating in baptism. Others stood at the cross-roads, wavering between assimilation and Jewish nationalism. Still others were so stunned by the blow they had received that they reeled violently backward, and proclaimed as their slogan the return "home," in the sense of a complete renunciation of free criticism and of all strivings for inner reforms.

However, in the healthy part of Russian Jewry this change of mind resulted in turning their ideals definitely in the direction of national rejuvenation upon modern foundations. The idea of a struggle for national rejuvenation in Eussia itself had not yet matured. It appeared as an active force only in the following decade. [1] During the era of pogroms the salvation of Judaism was primarily associated with the idea of emigration. The champions of American emigration were prone to idealize this movement, which had in reality sprung from practical necessity, and they saw in it, not without justification, the beginning of a new free center of Judaism in the Diaspora. The Hebrew poet Judah Leib Gordon [2] addresses "The Daughter of Jacob [the Jewish people], disgraced by the son of Hamor [the Russian Government]" [3] in the following words:

[Footnote 1: That idea was subsequently championed by the writer of this volume. See more about it in Vol. III.]

[Footnote 2: See p. 228 et seq.]

[Footnote 3: An allusion to Gen. 34, with a play on the words Bem-hamor, "the son of an ass."]

Come, let as go where liberty's light Doth shine upon all with equal might, Where every man, without disgrace, Is free to adhere to his creed and his race, Where thou, too, shalt no longer fear Dishonor from brutes, my sister dear![1]

[Footnote 1: From his Hebrew poem Ahoti Ruhama, "My Beloved Sister."]

The exponents of American emigration were inspired by the prospect of an exodus from the land of slavery into the land of freedom. Many of them looked forward to the establishment of agricultural and farming settlements in that country and to the concentration of large Jewish masses in the thinly populated States of the Union where they hoped the Jews might be granted a considerable amount of self-government.

Side by side with the striving for a transplantation of Jewish centers centers within the Diaspora, another idea, which negatives the Diaspora Diaspora altogether and places in its stead the resuscitation of the Jewish national center in Palestine, struggled to life amidst the birth pangs of the pogroms. The first theoretic exponent of this new movement, called "Love of Zion," [1] was M.L. Lilienblum, who in a former stage of radicalism had preached the need of religious reforms in Judaism. [2] As far back as in the autumn of the first pogrom year Lilienblum published a series of articles in which he interpreted the idea of Palestinian colonization, which had but recently sprung to life, in the light of a common national task for the whole of Jewry. Lilienblum endeavored to show that the root of all the historic misfortunes of the Jewish people lay in the fact that it was in all lands an alien element which refuses to assimilate in its entirety with the dominant nation—with the landlord, as it were. The landlord tolerates his tenant only so long as he finds him convenient; let the tenant make the slightest attempt at competing with the landlord, and he will be promptly evicted. During the Middle Ages the Jews were persecuted in the name of religious fanaticism. Now a beginning has been made to persecute them in the name of national fanaticism, coupled with economic factors, and this "second chapter of our history will no doubt contain many a bloody page."

[Footnote 1: A translation of the Hebrew term Hibbat Zion. In Russian it was generally termed Palestinophilstvo, i.e., "Love of Palestine."]

[Footnote 2: See p. 236 et seq.]

Jewish suffering can only be removed by removing its cause. We must cease to be strangers in every land of the globe, and establish ourselves in a country where we ourselves may be the landlords. Such a country can only be our ancient fatherland, Palestine, which belongs to us by the right of history. "We must undertake the colonization of Palestine on so comprehensive a scale that in the course of one century the Jews may be able to leave inhospitable Europe almost entirely and settle in the land of our forefathers to which we are legally entitled."

These thoughts, expounded with that simplified logic which will strike certain types of mind as incontrovertible, were fully attuned to the sentiments of the Jewish masses which were standing with "girded loins," ready for their exodus from, the new Egypt. The emigration societies formed in the beginning of 1882 counted in their ranks many advocates of Palestinian colonization. Bitter literary feuds were waged between the "Americans" and "Palestinians." A young poet, Simon Frug[1], composed the following enthusiastic exodus march, which he prefaced by the biblical verse "Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward" (Ex. 14.15):

[Footnote 1: He became later a celebrated poet in Russian and Yiddish. He died in 1916.]

Thine eyes are keen, thy feet are strong, thy staff is firm— why then, my nation, Dost thou on the road stop and droop, thy gray head lost in contemplation? Look up and see: in numerous bands Thy sons return from all the lands. Forward then march, through a sea of sorrow, Through a chain of tortures, towards the dawn of the morrow! Forward—to the strains of the song of days gone by! For future ages like thunder to us cry: "Arise, my people, from thy grave, And live once more, a nation free and brave!" And in our ears songs of a new life ring, And hymns of triumph the storms to as sing.

This march voiced the sentiments of those who dreamed of the Promised Land—whether it be on the shores of the Jordan or on the banks of the Mississippi.

2. PINSKER'S "AUTOEMANCIPATION"

The conception of emigration as a means of national rejuvenation, which had sprung to life amidst the "thunder and lightning" of the pogroms, found a thoughtful exponent in the person of Dr. Leon Pinsker, a prominent communal worker in Odessa, who had at one time looked to assimilation as promising a solution of the Jewish problem. In his pamphlet "Autoemancipation" (published in September, 1882), which is marked by profound thinking, Pinsker vividly describes the mental agony experienced by him at the sight of the physical slavery of the Jewry of Russia and the spiritual slavery of the emancipated Jewry of Western Europe. To him the Jewish people in the Diaspora is not a living nation, but rather the ghost of a nation, haunting the globe and scaring all living national organisms. The salvation of Judaism can only be brought about by transforming this ghost into a real being, by re-establishing the Jewish people upon a territory of its own which might be obtained through the common endeavor of Jewry and through international Jewish co-operation in some convenient part of the globe, be it Palestine or America. Such is the way of Jewish autoemancipation, in contradistinction from the civic emancipation, which had been bestowed by the dominant nationalities upon the Jews as an act of grace and which does not safeguard them against anti-Semitism and the humiliating position of second-rate citizens. The Jewish people can be restored, if, instead of many places of refuge scattered all over the globe, it will be concentrated in one politically guaranteed place of refuge. For this purpose a general Jewish congress ought to be called which should be entrusted with the financial and political issues involved in the plan. The present generation must take the first step towards this national restoration; posterity will do the rest.

Pinsker's pamphlet, which was written in German and printed abroad [1] with the intention of appealing to the Jews of Western Europe, failed to produce any effect upon that assimilated section of the Jewish people. In Russia, however, it became the catechism of the "Love of Zion" movement and eventually of Zionism and Territorialism. The theory expounded in Pinsker's pamphlet made a strong appeal to the Russian Jews, not only on account of its close reasoning but also because it gave powerful utterance to that pessimistic frame of mind which seemed to have seized upon them all. Its weakest point lay in the fact that it rested on a wrong historic premise and on a narrow definition of the term "nation" in the sense of a territorial and political organism. Pinaker seems to have overlooked that the Jews of the Diaspora, taken as a whole, have not ceased to form a nation, though of a type of its own, and that in modern political history nations of this "cultural" complexion have appeared on the scene more and more frequently.

[Footnote 1: The first edition appeared in Berlin, in 1882. It bears the sub-title: "An Appeal to his Brethren by a Russian Jew," It was published anonymously.]

Lacking a definite practical foundation, Pinsker's doctrine could not but accomodate itself to the Palestinian colonization movement, although its insignificant dimensions were entirely out of proportion to the far-reaching plans conceived by the author of "Autoemancipation." Lilienblum and Pinsker were joined by the old nationalist Smolenskin and the former assimilator Levanda. Ha-Shahar and ha-Melitx in Hebrew and the Razsvyet in Russian became the literary vehicles of the new movement. In opposition to these tendencies, the Voskhod of St. Petersburg[1] reflected the ideas of the progressive Russian-Jewish intelligenzia, and defended their old position which was that of civil emancipation and inner Jewish reforms. In the middle between these two extremes stood the Russian weekly Russki Yevrey ("The Russian Jew"), in St. Petersburg, and the Hebrew weekly ha-Tzefirah ("The Dawn"), in Warsaw, voicing the moderate views of the Haskalah period, with a decided bent towards the nationalistic movement.

[Footnote 1: See p. 221, It appeared simultaneously as a weekly and a monthly.]

3. MISCARRIED RELIGIOUS REFORMS

The storm of pogroms not only broke many young twigs on the tree of "enlightenment," which had attained to full bloom in the preceding period, but it also bent others into monstrous shapes. This abnormal development is particularly characteristic of the idea of religious reforms in Judaism which sprang to life in the beginning of the eighties. A fortnight before the pogrom at Yelisavetgrad, which inaugurated another gloomy chapter in the annals of Russian Jewry, the papers reported that a new Jewish sect had appeared in that city under the name of "The Spiritual Biblical Brotherhood." Its members denied all religious dogmas and ceremonies, and acknowledged only the moral doctrines of the Bible; they condemned all mercantile pursuits, and endeavored to live by physical labor, primarily by agriculture.

The founder of this "Brotherhood" was a local teacher and journalist, Jacob Gordin, who stood at that time under the influence of the South-Russian Stundists [1] as well as of the socialistic Russian Populists. [2] The "Spiritual Biblical Brotherhood" was made up altogether of a score of people. In a newspaper appeal which appeared shortly after the spring pogroms of 1881 the leader of the sect, hiding his identity under the pen-name of "A Brother-Biblist," called upon the Jews to divest themselves, of those character traits and economic pursuits which excited the hatred of the native population against them: the love of money, the hunt for barter, usury, and petty trading. This appeal, which, sounded in unison with the voice of the Russian Jew-baiters and appeared at a time when the wounds of the pogrom victims were not yet healed, aroused profound indignation among the Jews. Shortly afterwards the "Spiritual Biblical Brotherhood" fell asunder. Some of its members joined a like-minded sect in Odessa which had been founded there in the beginning of 1883 by a teacher, Jacob Priluker, under the name of "New Israel."

[Footnote 1: A Russian sect with rationalistic tendencies which are traceable to Western Protestantism.]

[Footnote 2: See above, p. 222.]

The aim of "New Israel" was to facilitate, by means of radical religious reforms conceived in the spirit of rationalism, the contact between Jews and Christians and thereby pave the way for civil emancipation. The twofold religio-social program of the sect was as follows:

The sect recognizes only the teachings of Moses; it rejects the Talmud, the dietary laws, the rite of circumcision, and the traditional form of worship; the day of rest is transferred from Saturday to Sunday; the Russian language is declared to be the "native" tongue of the Jews and made obligatory in every-day life; usury and similar distasteful pursuits are forbidden.

As a reward for all these virtuous endeavors the sect expected from the Russian Government, which it petitioned to that effect, complete civil equality for its members, permission to intermarry with Christians, and the right to wear a special badge by which they were to be marked off from the "Talmudic Jews." As an expression of gratitude for the anticipated governmental benefits, the members of the sect pledged themselves to give their boys and girls who were to be born during the coming year the names of Alexander or Alexandra, in honor of the Russian Tzar.

The first religious half of the program of "New Israel" might possibly have attracted a few adherents. But the second "business-like" part of it opened the eyes of the public to the true aspirations of these "reformers," who, in their eagerness for civil equality, were ready to barter away religion, conscience, and honor, and who did not balk at betraying such low flunkeyism at a time when the blood of the victims of the Balta pogrom had not yet dried.

Thus it was that the withering influence of reactionary Judaeophobia compromised and crippled the second attempt at inner reforms in Judaism. Both movements soon passed out of existence, and their founders subsequently left Russia. Gordin went to America, and, renouncing his sins of youth, became a popular Yiddish playwright. Priluker settled in England, and entered the employ of the missionaries who were anxious to propagate Christianity among the Jews. A few years later, during 1884 and 1885, "New Israel" cropped up in a new shape, this time in Kishinev, where the puny "Congregation of New Testament Israelites" was founded by I. Rabinovich, having for its aim "the fusion of Judaism with Christianity." In the house of prayer, in which this "Congregation," consisting altogether of ten members, worshipped, sermons were also delivered by a Protestant clergyman.

A few years later this new missionary device was also abandoned. The pestiferous atmosphere which surrounded Russian-Jewish life at that time could do no more than produce these poisonous growths of "religious reform." For the wholesome seeds of such a reform were bound to wither after the collapse of the ideals which had served as a lode star during the period of "enlightenment."



CHAPTER XXVI

INCREASED JEWISH DISABILITIES

1. THE PAHLEN COMMISSION AND NEW SCHEMES OF OPPRESSION

The "Temporary Rules" of May 3, 1882, had been passed, so to speak, as an extraordinary "war measure," outside the usual channel of legislative action. Yet the Russian Government could not but realize that sooner or later it would be bound to adopt the customary legal procedure and place the Jewish question before the highest court of the land, the Council of State. To meet this eventuality, it was necessary to prepare materials of a somewhat better quality than had been manufactured by the "gubernatorial commissions" and the "Central Jewish Committee" which owed their existence to Ignatyev, forming part and parcel of the general anti-Jewish policy of the discharged Minister. Even prior to the promulgation of the "Temporary Rules," the Council of Ministers had called the Tzar's attention to the necessity of appointing a special "High Commission" to deal with the Jewish question and to draft legal measures for submission to the Council of State.

This suggestion was carried out on February 4, 1883, on which day an imperial ukase was issued calling for the formation of a "High Commission for the Revision of the Current Laws concerning the Jews." The chairmanship of the Commission was first entrusted to Makov, a former Minister of the Interior, and after his untimely death, to Count Pahlen, a former Minister of Justice, who guided the work of the Commission during the five years of its existence—hence its popular designation as the "Pahlen Commission," The membership of the Commission was made up of six officials representing the various departments of the Ministry of the Interior, and of one official for each of the Ministries of Finance, Justice, Public Instruction, Crown Domains, and Foreign Affairs, and, lastly, of a few experts who were consulted casually.

The new bureaucratic body received no definite instructions as to the period of time within which it was expected to complete its labors. It was evidently given to understand that the work entrusted to it could well afford to wait. The first session of the High Commission was held fully ten months after its official appointment by the Tzar, and its business proceeded at a snail's pace, surrounded by the mysterious air characteristic of Russian officialdom. For several years the High Commission had to work its way through the sad inheritance of the defunct "gubernatorial commissions," represented by mounds of paper with the most fantastic projects of solving the Jewish question, endeavoring to bring these materials into some kind of system. It also received a number of memoranda on the Jewish question from outsiders, among them from public-minded Jews, who in most cases used Baron Horace Guenzburg as their go-between—memoranda which sought to put the various aspects of the question in their right perspective. After four years spent on the examination of the material, the Commission undertook to formulate its own conclusions, but, for reasons which will become patent later on, these conclusions were never crystallized in the form of legal provisions.

While the High Commission was assiduously engaged in the "revision of the current laws concerning the Jews," in other words, was repeating the Sisyphus task abandoned by scores of similar bureaucratic creations in the past, the Government pursued with unabated vigor its old-time policy of making the life of the Jews unbearable by turning out endless varieties of new legal restrictions. These restrictions were generally passed "outside the law," i.e., without their being previously submitted to the Council of State; they were simply brought up as suggestions before the Council of Ministers, and, after adoption by the latter, received legal sanction through ratification by the Tzar. Without awaiting the results of the revision of Jewish legislation which it had itself undertaken, the Russian Government embarked enthusiastically upon the task of forging new chains for the hapless Jewish race. For a number of years the High Commission was nothing more than a cover to screen these cruel experiments of the powers at the helm of the state. At the very time in which the ministerial officials serving on the High Commission indulged in abstract speculations about the Jewish question and invented various methods for its solution, the Council of Ministers anticipated this solution in the spirit of rabid anti-Semitism, and was quick to give it effect in concrete life.

The wind which was blowing from the heights of Russian bureaucracy was decidedly unfavorable to the Jews. The belated coronation of Alexander III., which took place in May, 1883, and, in accordance with Russian tradition, brought, in the form of an imperial manifesto, [1] various privileges and alleviations for different sections of the Russian population, left the Jews severely alone. The Tzar lent an attentive ear to those zealous governors and governors-general, who in their "most humble reports" propounded the new-fangled theory of the "injuriousness" of the Jews; the marginal remarks frequently attached by him to these reports assumed the force of binding resolutions. [2] In the beginning of 1883, the governor-general of Odessa, Gurko, took occasion in his report to the Tzar to comment on the excessive growth of the number of Jewish pupils in the gymnazia [3] and on their "injurious effect" upon their Christian fellow-pupils. Gurko proposed to fix a limited percentage for the admission of Jews to these schools, and the Tzar made the annotation: "I share this conviction; the matter ought to receive attention."

[Footnote 1: See above, p. 246, n. 1]

[Footnote 2: See on the term "Resolution," Vol. I, p. 253, n. 1.]

[Footnote 3: See above, p. 161, n. 1.]

The matter did of course "receive attention." It was brought up before the Committee of Ministers. But the latter was reluctant to pass upon it at once, and thought it wiser to have it prepared and duly submitted for legislative action at some future time. However, when the governor-general of Odessa and the governor of Kharkov, in their reports for the following year, expatiated again on the necessity of fixing a school norm for the Jews, the Tzar made another annotation, in a more emphatic tone: "It is desirable to decide this question finally." This sufficed to impress the Committee of Ministers with the conviction "that the growing influx of the non-Christian element into the educational establishments exerts, from a moral and religious point of view, a most injurious influence upon the Christian children." The question was submitted for consideration to the High Commission under the chairmanship of Count Pahlen. The Minister of Public Instruction was ordered to frame post-haste an enactment embodying the spirit of the imperial resolution. Soon the new fruit of the Russian bureaucratic genius was ready to be plucked—"the school norm," which was destined to occupy a prominent place in the fabric of Russian-Jewish disabilities.

The center of gravity of the system of oppression lay, as it always did, in the restrictions attaching to the right of domicile and free movement—restrictions which frequently made life for the Jews physically impossible by cutting off their access to the sources of a livelihood. The "Temporary Rules" of the third of May displayed in this domain a dazzling variety of legal tortures such as might have excited the envy of medieval inquisitors. The "May laws" of 1882 barred the Jews from settling outside the cities "anew," i.e. in the future, exempting those who had settled in the rural districts prior to 1882. These old-time Jewish rustics were a thorn in the flesh of the Russian anti-Semites, who hoped for a sudden disappearance of the Jewish population from the Russian country-side. Accordingly, a whole set of administrative measures was put in motion, with a view to making the life of the village Jews unbearable. In another connection [1] we had occasion to point out that the Russian authorities as well as the Christian competitors of the Jews made it their business to expel the latter from the rural localities as "vicious members," by having the peasant assemblies render special "verdicts" against them. This method was now supplemented by new contrivances to dislodge the Jews. A village Jew who happened to absent himself for a few days or weeks to go to town was frequently barred by the police from returning to his home, on the ground that he was "a new settler." There are cases of Jewish families on record which, according to custom, had left the village for the High Holidays to attend services in an adjacent town or townlet, and which, on their return home, met with considerable difficulties; because their return was interpreted by the police as a "new settlement." In the dominions of the anti-Jewish satrap Drenteln the administration construed the "Temporary Rules" to mean that Jews were not allowed to move from one village to another, or even from, one house to another within the precincts of their native village. [2]

[Footnote 1: See p. 318 et seq.]

[Footnote 2: Evidence of this is found in the circular of the governor of Chernigov, issued In 1883.]

Moreover, the police was authorized to expel from the villages all those Jews who did not possess their own houses upon their own land, on the ground that these Jews, in renting new quarters, would have to make a new lease with their owners, and such a lease was forbidden by the May laws. [1] These malicious misinterpretations of the law affected some ten thousand Jews in the villages of Chernigov and Poltava. These Jews lived habitually in rented houses or in houses which were their property but were built upon ground belonging to peasants, and they were consequently liable to expulsion. The cry of these unfortunates, who were threatened with eviction in the dead of the winter, was heard not in near-by Kiev but in far-off St. Petersburg. By a senatorial ukase, published in January, 1884, a check was put on these administrative highway methods. The expulsion was stopped, though a considerable number of Jewish families had in the meantime been evicted and ruined.

[Footnote 1: See p. 312.]

At the same time other restrictions which were in like manner deduced from the "Temporary Rules" were allowed to remain in full force. One of these was the prohibition of removing from one village to another, even though they were contiguous, so that the rural Jews were practically placed in the position of serfs, being affixed to their places of residence. This cruel practice was sanctioned by the law of December 29, 1887. As a contemporary writer puts it, the law implied that when a village in which a Jew lived was burned down, or when a factory in which he worked was closed, he was compelled to remove into one of the towns or townlets, since he was not allowed to search for a shelter and a livelihood in any other rural locality. In accordance with the same law, a Jew had no right to offer shelter to his widowed mother or to his infirm parents who lived in another village. Furthermore, a Jew was barred from taking over a commercial or industrial establishment bequeathed to him by his father, if the latter had lived in another village. He was not even allowed to take charge of a house bequeathed to him by his parents, if they had resided in another village, though situated within the confines of the Pale.

While this network of disabilities was ruining the Jews, it yielded a plentiful harvest for the police, from the highest to the lowest officials. "Graft," the Russian habeas Corpus Act, shielded the persecuted Jew against the caprice and Violence of the authorities in the application of the restrictive laws, and Russian officialdom held on tightly to Jewish rightlessness as their own special benefice. Hatred of the Jews has at all times gone hand in hand with love of Jewish money.

2. JEWISH DISABILITIES OUTSIDE THE PALE

Outside the Pale of Settlement the net of disabilities was stretched out even more widely and was sure to catch the Jew in its meshes. Throughout the length and breadth of the Russian Empire, outside of the fifteen governments of Western Russia and the ten governments of the Kingdom of Poland, there was scattered a handful of "privileged" Jews who were permitted to reside beyond the Pale: men with an academic education, first guild merchants who had for a number of years paid their guild dues within the Pale, and handicraftsmen, so long as they confined themselves to the pursuit of their craft. The influx of "illegal" Jews into this tabooed region was checked by measures of extraordinary severity. The example was set by the Russian capital, "the window towards Europe," which had been broken through by Peter the Great. The city of St. Petersburg, harboring some 20,000 privileged Jews who lived there legally, became the center of attraction for a large number of "illegal" Jews who flocked to the capital with the intention, deemed a criminal offence by the Government, of engaging in some modest business pursuit, without paying the high guild dues, or of devoting themselves to science or literature, without the diploma from a higher educational institution in their pockets. The number of these Jews who obtained their right of residence through a legal fiction, by enrolling themselves as artisans or as employees of the "privileged" Jews, was very considerable, and the police expended a vast amount of energy in waging a fierce struggle against them. The city-governor of St. Petersburg, Gresser, who was notorious for the cruelty of his police regime, made it his specialty to hunt down the Jews. A contemporary writer, in reviewing the events of the year 1883, gives the following description of the exploits of the metropolitan police:

The campaign was started at the very beginning of the year and continued uninterruptedly until the end of it. Early in March the metropolitan police received orders to search most rigorously the Jewish residences and examine the passports. In the police stations special records were instituted for the Jews. St. Petersburg was to be purged of the odious Hebrew tribe. The contrivances employed were no longer novel, and were the same which had been successfully tried in other cities. The Jews were raided in regular fashion. Those that were found with doubtful claims to residence in the capital were, frequently accompanied by their families, immediately dispatched to the proper railroad stations, escorted by policemen.... The time for departure was measured by hours. The term of expulsion was generally limited to twenty-four hours, or forty-eight hours, as if it involved the execution of a court-martial sentence. And yet, the majority of the victims of expulsion were people who had lived in St. Petersburg for many years, and had succeeded in establishing homes and business places, which could not be liquidated within twenty-four hours or thereabout.... The hurried expulsions from the capital resulted in numerous conversions to Christianity.... Amusing stories circulated all over town concerning Jews who had decided to join the Christian Church, and had applied for permission to remain in the capital for one or two weeks—the time required by law for a preliminary training in the truths of the new faith—but whose petition was flatly refused because the police believed that a similar training might also be received within the boundaries of the Pale of Settlement.

As a matter of fact, fictitious conversions of this kind were but seldom resorted to in the fight against governmental violence. As a rule, the evasion of the "law" was effected by less harmful, perhaps, but no less humiliating and even tragic fictions. Many a Jewish newcomer would bring with him on his arrival in St. Petersburg an artisan's certificate and enrol himself as an apprentice of some "full-fledged" Jewish artisan. But woe betide if the police happened to visit the workshop and fail to find the fictitious apprentice at work. He was liable to immediate expulsion, and the owner of the shop was no less exposed to grave risks. Some Jews, in their eagerness to obtain the right of residence, registered as man-servants in the employ of Jewish physicians or lawyers. [1] These would-be servants were frequently summoned to the police stations and cross-examined as to the character of their "service." The answers expected from them were something like: "I clean my master's boots, carry behind him his portfolio to court," etc. Several prominent Jewish writers lived for many years in St. Petersburg on this "flunkeyish" basis—among them the talented young poet Simon Frug, [2] the singer of Jewish sorrow who was fast establishing for himself a reputation both in Jewish and in Russian literature.

[Footnote 1: Under the Russian law [see p. 166] Jews possessing a university diploma of the first degree were entitled to employ two "domestic servants" from among their coreligionists.]

[Footnote 2: See p. 330.]

It can easily be realized how precarious was the position of these men. Any day their passports might be found ornamented by a red police notation ordering their expulsion from the capital within twenty-four hours. All Russia was stirred at that time by the sensational story of a young Jewess, who had come to St. Petersburg or Moscow to enter the college courses for women, and in order to obtain the right of residence found herself compelled to register fictitiously as a prostitute and take out "a yellow ticket." When the police discovered that the young woman was engaged in studying, instead of plying her official "trade," she was banished from the capital. In 1886, England was shocked by the expulsion from Moscow of the well-known English Member of Parliament, the banker Sir Samuel Montagu (later Lord Swaythling). Despite his influential position, Montagu was ordered out of the Russian capital "within twenty-four hours," like an itinerant vagrant.

None of these tragedies, however, was able to produce any effect upon the ringleaders and henchmen of the Russian inquisition. The energy of the authorities spent itself primarily in the fight against the natural, yet, according to the Russian code, "illegal" struggle of the Jews for their existence and against the sacred right of man to move about freely. The merciless Russian law, trampling upon this inviolable right, drove human beings from village to town and from one town to another. In the hotbed of militant Judaeophobia, in Kiev, raids upon "illegal" Jewish residents were the order of the day. During the year 1886 alone more than two thousand Jewish families were evicted from the town. [1] Not satisfied with the expulsion of the Jews from the towns prohibited to them by law, the authorities contrived to swell the number of these towns by adding new localities which were part of the Pale and as such open to the Jews. In 1887, the large South-Russian cities Rostov-on-the Don and Taganrog were transferred from the Pale of Settlement [2] to the tabooed territory of the Don Army. Those Jews who had lived in these cities before the promulgation of the law were allowed to remain, but the new settling of Jews was strictly forbidden.

[Footnote 1: These intensified persecutions were popularly explained as an act of revenge on the part of the highest administration of the region, owing to a quarrel which had taken place between a rich Kiev Jew and a Russian dignitary.]

[Footnote 2: They formed part of the government of Yekaterinoslav.]

Not satisfied with constantly lessening the area in which, without any further restrictions, the Jewish population was gasping for breath, the Government was on the look-out for ways and means to narrow also the sphere of Jewish economic activity. The medieval system of Russian society with its division into estates and guilds became an instrument of Jewish oppression. The authorities openly followed the maxim that the Jew was to be robbed of his profession, to the end that it may be turned over to his Christian rival. Under Alexander II, the Government had endeavored to promote handicrafts among the Jews as a counterbalance against their commercial pursuits, and had therefore conferred upon Jewish artisans the right of residence all over the Empire. The change of policy under Alexander III is well illustrated by the ukase of 1884 closing the Jewish school of handicrafts in Zhitomir which had been in existence for twenty-three years. The reason for the enactment is stated with brazen impudence:

Owing to the fact that the Jews living in the towns and townlets of the south-western region form the majority of handicrafts-men, and thereby hamper the development of handicrafts among the original population of that region, which is exploited by them, the existence of a specific Jewish school of handicrafts seems, in view of the lack of similar schools among the Christians, an additional weapon in the hands of the Jews for the exploitation of the original population of that region.

Here the pursuit of handicrafts is actually stigmatized as a means of "exploitation." The true meaning of that terrible word, an invention of the Russian Government, is thereby put in a glaring light: the Jew is an "exploiter" so long as he follows any pursuit, however honorable and productive, in which a Christian might engage in his stead.

The slightest attempt of the Jew to enlarge his economic activity met with the relentless punishment of the law. The Jewish artisan, though permitted to live outside the Pale, had only the right to sell the products of his own workmanship. When found to sell other merchandise which was not manufactured by him he was liable, under Article 1171 of the Penal Code, not only to be immediately expelled from his place of residence but also to have his goods confiscated. The Christian competitors of the Jews, shoulder to shoulder with the police, kept a careful watch over the Jewish artisans and saw to it that a Jewish tailor should not dare to sell a piece of material, a watchmaker—a new factory-made watch with a chain (being only allowed to repair old watches), a baker—a pound of flour or a cup of coffee. The discovery of such a "crime" was followed immediately by cutting short the career of the poor artisan, in accordance with the provisions of the law.

3. RESTRICTIONS IN EDUCATION AND IN THE LEGAL PROFESSION

A salient feature of that gloomy era of counter-reforms was the endeavor of the Government to dislodge the Jews from the liberal professions, and, as a corollary, to bar them from the secondary and higher schools which were the training ground for these professions. What the Government had in view was to reduce the number of those "privileged" Jews, who, under the law passed in the time of Alexander II., had been rewarded for their completion of a course of studies in an institution of higher learning by the right of unrestricted residence throughout the Empire. The authorities now found it to their purpose to hamper the spread of education among the Jews rather than promote it. The highly-placed obscurantists contended that the Jewish students exerted an injurious influence upon their Christian comrades from the religious and moral point of view, while the political police [1] reported that the Jewish college men "are quick in joining the ranks of the revolutionary workers." The fear of educated Russian subjects who were not of the dominant faith was natural in a country in which Pobyedonostzev, the moving spirit of inner Russian politics, looked upon popular education in general as a destructive force, fraught with danger to throne and altar. There can be but little doubt that the previously-mentioned imperial "resolutions" [2] indicating the necessity of curtailing the number of Jews in the Russian educational establishments were inspired by the "Grand Inquisitor."

[Footnote 1: The secret police charged with tracking the followers of liberal and revolutionary tendencies.]

[Footnote 2: See p. 339et seq.]

Notwithstanding the opposition of the majority of the Pahlen Commission, whose members had not yet entirely discarded the enlightened traditions of the reign of Alexander II., the question was decided in accordance with the wishes of the Tzar. Here, too, as in the case of the "Temporary Rules," the Government was resolved to enact the new disabilities by the sovereign will of the emperor, without submitting them to the highest legislative body of the land, the Council of State, for fear that undesirable debates might arise in that august body concerning the expediency of putting an embargo on education. On December 5, 1886, the Tzar, acting on the suggestion of the Committee of Ministers, directed the Minister of Public Instruction, Dyelanov, to adopt measures for the limitation of the admission of Jews to the secondary and higher educational establishments.

For six long months the Minister, whose official duty was the promotion of education, was wavering between a number of schemes designed to restrict education among the Jews. Suggestions for such restrictions came from officials of the ministry and from superintendents of school districts. Some proposed to close the schools only to the children of the lower classes among the Jews; in which "the unsympathetic traits of the Jewish character" were particularly conspicuous. Others recommended a restrictive percentage for Jews in general, without any class discrimination. Still others pleaded for moderation lest excessive restriction in admission to Russian universities should force the Jewish youth to go to foreign universities and make them even "more dangerous," since they were bound to return to Russia with liberal notions concerning the political form of government.

At last, in July, 1887, the Minister of Public Instruction, acting on the above-mentioned imperial "resolution," published his two famous circulars limiting the admission of Jews to the universities and to secondary schools. The following norm was established: in the Pale of Settlement the Jews were to be admitted to the schools to the extent of ten per cent of the Christian school population; outside the Pale the norm was fixed at five per cent, and in the two capitals, St. Petersburg and Moscow, at three per cent. Although decreed before the very beginning of the new scholastic year, the percentage norm was nevertheless immediately applied in the case of the gymnazia, the "Real schools," [1] and the universities. In the higher professional institutions, such as the technological, veterinarian, and agronomical schools, the restrictions had been, practised even before the promulgation of the circular, or were introduced immediately after it.

[Footnote 1: Or Real Gymnazia, see above, p. 163, n, 1.]

This was the genesis of the educational "percentage norm," the source of sorrow and tears for two generation of Russian Jews—both fathers and sons now having run the gauntlet. In the months of July and August of every year, thousands of Jewish children were knocking at the doors of the gymnazia and universities, but only tens and hundreds obtained admission. In the towns of the Pale where the Jews form from thirty to eighty per cent of the total population, the admission, of Jewish pupils to the gymnazia and "Real schools" was limited to ten per cent, so that the majority of Jewish children were deprived of a secondary education.

The position of the gymnazium and "Real school" graduates who were unable to continue their studies in the institutions of higher learning was particularly tragic. Many of these unfortunates addressed personal appeals to the Minister of Public Instruction, Dyelanov, who, being good-natured, would, despite his reactionary proclivities, frequently sanction the admission of the petitioners over and above the school norm. But the majority of the young men, barred from the colleges, found themselves compelled to go abroad in search of education, and, being generally without means, suffered untold hardships.

Nevertheless, the cruel restrictions could not suppress the need for education in a people with an ancient culture. Those that had failed to gain admission to the gymnazia completed the prescribed course of studies at home, under the guidance of private tutors or by private study, and afterwards presented themselves for examination for the "maturity certificate" [1] as "externs," braving all the difficulties of this thorny path. Having successfully passed their secondary course, they found again their way barred as soon as they wished to enter the universities, and the "martyrs of learning" had no choice left except to take up their pilgrim staff and travel abroad. Year in, year out, two processions of emigrants wended their way from Russia to the West: the one was travelling across the Atlantic, in search of bread and liberty; the other was headed towards Germany, Austria, England, and France, in search of a higher education. The former were driven from their homes by a peculiar interdictio ignis et aquae; the other—by an interdictio scientiae.

[Footnote 1: The name given in Russian (and German) to the diploma of a gymnazium.]

Having closed the avenues of higher education to the bulk of Russian Jewry, the Government now went a step further and contrived to dispossess even those Jews who had already managed to obtain a higher education, in spite of all difficulties. It was not satisfied with barring college-bred Jews from the civil service and an academic career, thus limiting the Jewish physicians and lawyers to private practice; it was anxious to restrict even this narrow field of activity still open to Jews. In view of the fact that the Jewish jurists had no chance to apply their knowledge in the civil service, and were entirely excluded from the bench, they naturally turned to the bar, with the result that they soon occupied a conspicuous place there, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Their success was a source of annoyance to the Russian anti-Semites, both those who hated the Jews on principle and those who did so selfishly, being themselves members of the bar. These enemies of Judaism called the attention of the Government to the large number of Jewish lawyers at the St. Petersburg bar—a circumstance due partly to the natural gravitation towards the administrative and legal center of the country, and partly to the fact that the admission of Jews to the bar met with less obstruction from the judicial authorities in the capital than in the provinces, where professional jealousy frequently stood in the way of the Jews.

The reactionary Minister of Justice, Manassein, managed to convince the Tzar that it was necessary to check the further admission of Jews to the bar. However, from diplomatic considerations, it was thought wiser to carry this restriction into effect not under an anti-Jewish flag, but rather as a general measure directed against all members of "non-Christian persuasions." The restriction was therefore extended to Mohammedans and the handful of privileged Karaites, [1] and the religious intolerance of the new measure was thus thrown into even bolder relief.

[Footnote 1: See on the Karaites, Vol. I, p. 318.]

On November, 1889, an imperial ukase decreed as follows:

That, pending the enactment of a special law dealing with this subject, the admission of public and private attorneys of non-Christian denominations by the competent judicial institutions and bar associations [1] shall not take place, except with the permission of the Minister of Justice, on the recommendation of the presidents of the above-mentioned institutions and associations.

[Footnote 1: "Public (literally, sworn) attorneys" are lawyers of academic standing admitted to the bar by the bar associations. "Private attorneys" are lawyers without educational qualifications who receive permission to practise from the "judicial institutions," i.e., the law courts. They are not members of the bar.]

It goes without saying that the Russian Minister of Justice made ample use of the right conferred upon him of denying admission to Jews as public and private attorneys. While readily sanctioning the admission of Mohammedans and Karaites, the Minister almost invariably refused to confirm the election of young Jewish barristers, however warmly they may have been recommended by the judicial institutions and bar associations. [1] In this way, many a talented Jewish jurist, who might have filled a university chair with distinction or might have attained brilliant success in the legal profession, was forced out of his path and deprived of an opportunity to serve his country by his labors and pursue a career for which he had fitted himself at the university. Instead, these derailed professionals went to swell the hosts of those who had been wronged and disinherited by the injustice of the law.

[Footnote 1: During the following five years, until 1895, not a single Jew received the sanction of the Minister.]

4. DISCRIMINATION IN MILITARY SERVICE

It seemed as if the Government was intent on making a one-sided compact with Russian Jewry: "We shall deprive you of all the elementary rights due to you as men and citizens; we shall rob you of the right of domicile and freedom of movement, and of the chance of making a livelihood; we shall expose you to physical and spiritual starvation, and shall cast you out of the community of citizens—yet you dare not swerve an inch from the path of your civic obligations." A lurid illustration of this unique exchange of services was provided by the manner in which military duty was imposed upon the Jews. Russian legislation had long since contrived to establish revolting restrictions for the Jews also in this domain. Jews with physical defects which rendered Christians unfit for military service, such as a lower stature and narrower chest, were nevertheless taken into the army. In the case of a shortage of recruits among the Jewish population even only sons, the sole wage-earners of their families or of their widowed mothers, were drafted, whereas the same category of conscripts among Christians were unconditionally exempt. [1] Moreover, a Jew serving in the army always remained a private and could never attain to an officer's rank.

[Footnote 1: Compare p. 201.]

As if the Government intended to make sport of the Jewish soldiers, the latter were deprived of their right of residence in the localities outside the Pale where they had been stationed, and as soon as their term of service had expired, were sent back into the territory of the Russian-Jewish ghetto. Thus, even Nicholas I, was out-Nicholased. The discharged Jewish soldiers who had served under the old recruiting law enjoyed, both for themselves and their families, the right of residence throughout the Empire. [1] The new military statute of 1874 [2] withdrew from the retired Jewish soldiers this reward for faithfully performed duty, and in 1885 the Senate sustained the disfranchisement of these Jews who had spent years of their life in the service of their fatherland. A Jew from Berdychev, Vilna, or Odessa, who had served five or six years somewhere in St. Petersburg, Moscow, or Kazan, was forced to leave these tabooed cities and return home on the very day on which he had taken off his soldier's uniform.

[Footnote 1: See above, p. 172.]

[Footnote 2: See p. 199 et seq.]

Yet, despite this curious encouragement of Jewish patriotism, the Government had the audacity to charge the Jews continually with the "evasion of their military duty." That a tendency towards such evasion was in vogue among the Jews admits of no doubt. It would have been contrary to human nature if people who were subject to assaults from above and kicks from below, whose right of residence was limited to one-twentieth of the territory of their fatherland, who were robbed of shelter, air, and bread, and deprived of the hope to place themselves, even by means of military service, on an equal footing with the lowest Russian moujik, should have felt a profound need of sacrificing themselves for their country, and should not have shirked this heaviest of civil obligations to a larger extent than the privileged Russian population, in which cases of evasion were by no means infrequent. In reality, however, the complaints about the shortage of Jewish recruits were vastly exaggerated. Subsequent statistical investigations brought out the fact that, owing to irregular apportionment, the Government demanded annually from the Jews a larger quota of recruits than was justified by their numerical relation to the general population in the Pale of Settlement. On an average, the Jews furnished twelve per cent of the total number of recruits in the Pale, whereas the Jewish population of the Pale formed but eleven per cent of the total population. The Government further refused to consider the fact that, owing to inaccurate registration, the conscription lists often carried the names of persons who had long since died, or who had left the country to emigrate abroad. In fact, the annual emigration of Jews from Russia, the result of uninterrupted persecutions, reduced the number of young men of conscription age. But the Russian authorities were of the opinion that the Jews who remained behind should serve in the Russian army instead of those of their brethren who had become citizens of the free American Republic. The "evasion of military duty" and the annual shortage of a few hundred recruits, as against the many thousands of those enlisted, was charged as a grave crime against that very people towards which the Government on its part failed to fulfil even its most elementary obligations. Reams of paper were covered with all kinds of official devices to "cut short" this evasion of military duty by the Jews. On one beautiful April morning of 1886, the Government came out with the following enactment:

The family of a Jew guilty of evading military service is liable to a fine of three hundred rubles ($150). The collection of the fine shall be decreed by the respective recruiting station and carried out by the police. It shall not be substituted by imprisonment in the case of destitute persons liable to that fine.

In addition, a military reward was promised for the seizure of a Jew who had failed to present himself to the recruiting authorities.

By virtue of this barbarous principle of collective responsibility, new hardships were inflicted upon the Jews of Russia. Since the law provided that the fine for evading military service be imposed upon the family of the culprit, the police interpreted that term "liberally," taking it to include parents, brothers, and near relatives. The following procedure gradually came into vogue. In the autumn of every year, the Russian conscription season, the names of the young Jews who have completed their twenty-first year are called out at the recruiting station from a prepared list. When a Jew whose name has been called has failed to present himself on the same day, the recruiting authorities issue an order on the spot imposing a fine on his family. The police then appear in the house of his parents to collect the sum of three hundred rubles. In default of cash, they attach the property of the paupers and have it subsequently sold at public auction. In the case of those who possess nothing that can be taken from them the police insist on their giving a signed promise not to leave the town. Their passports are taken from them, so that, not being able to absent themselves from town to earn a living, they are frequently left to starve. If the parents are dead or absent, the brothers and sisters of the culprit, and then his grandfathers and grandmothers are held answerable with their property.

Thus, a large number of Jewish families were completely ruined, merely because one of their members had emigrated abroad, or, as was frequently the case, had surrendered his soul to God in his beloved fatherland itself, and the relatives had failed to see to it that the dead soul was stricken from the recruiting lists. Yet, despite all these efforts, there still remained a considerable number of uncollected fines—"arrears," as they were officially termed—to the profound regret of the Russian Jew-baiters, who had to look on while the victims were slipping unpunished from their hands.



CHAPTER XXVII

RUSSIAN REACTION AND JEWISH EMIGRATION

1. AFTERMATH OF THE POGROM POLICY

In this wise, beginning with the May laws of 1882, the Government gradually succeeded in monopolizing all anti-Jewish activities by letting bureaucratic persecutions take the place of street pogroms. However, in 1883 and 1884, the "street" made again occasional attempts to compete with the Government. On May 10, 1883, on the eve of Alexander III.'s coronation, a pogrom took place in the large southern city of Rostov-on-the-Don. About a hundred Jewish residences and business places were demolished and plundered. All portable property of the Jews was looted by the mob, and the rest was destroyed. As was to be expected, "the efforts of the police and troops were unable to stop the disorders," and only after completing their day's work the rioters fled, pursued by lashes and shots from the Cossaks. The Russian censorship strictly barred all references to the pogroms in the newspapers, for fear of spoiling the solemnity of the coronation days. The press was only allowed to hint at "alarming rumors," the effect of which extended even to the stock exchange of Berlin. Not before a year had passed was permission given to make public mention of the Rostov events.

There was reason to fear that the pogrom at Rostov was only a prelude to a new series of riots in the South. But more than two months had passed, and all seemed to be quiet. Suddenly, however, on July 20, on the Greek-Orthodox festival dedicated to the memory of the prophet Elijah, the Russian mob made an attack upon the descendants of the ancient prophet at Yekaterinoslav. The memory of the great biblical Nazirite who abhorred strong drink was appropriately celebrated by his Russian votaries in Yekaterinoslav who filled themselves with an immense quantity of alcohol and became sufficiently intoxicated to embark upon their daring exploits as robbers.

The ringleaders of the pogrom movement were not local residents but itinerant laborers from the Great-Russian governments, who were employed in building a railroad in the neighborhood of the South-Russian city. These laborers, to quote the expression of a contemporary, attended to the "military part of the undertaking," whereas the "civil functions" were discharged by the local Russian inhabitants:

While the laborers and the stronger half of the residents were demolishing the houses and stores and throwing all articles and merchandise upon the street, the women and children grabbed everything that came into their hands and carried them off, by hand or in wagons, to their homes.

The looting and plundering continued on the second day, July 21, until a detachment of soldiers arrived. The mob, intoxicated with their success, attempted to beat off the soldiers, but naturally suffered defeat. The sight of a score of killed and wounded had a sobering effect upon the crowd. The pogrom was stopped, after five hundred Jewish families had been ruined and a Jewish sanctuary had been defiled. In one devastated synagogue the human fiends got hold of eleven Torah scrolls, tearing to pieces some of them and hideously desecrating other copies of the Holy Writ, inscribed with the commandments, "Thou shalt not murder," "Thou shalt not steal," "Thou shalt not commit adultery"—which evidently ran counter to the beliefs of the rioters.

The example set by Yekaterinoslav, the capital of the government of the same name, proved to be contagious, for during August and September pogroms took place in several neighboring towns and townlets. Among these the pogrom at Novo-Moskovsk on September 4 was particularly violent, nearly all Jewish houses in that town having been destroyed by the mob.

The year 1884 was marked by a novel feature in the annals of pogroms: an anti-Jewish riot outside the Pale of Jewish Settlement, in the ancient Russian city of Nizhni-Novgorod, which sheltered a small Jewish colony of some twenty families. While comparatively circumscribed as far as the material loss is concerned, the Nizhni-Novgorod pogrom stands out in ghastly relief by the number of its human victims. A report, based upon official data, which endeavors to tone down the colors, gives the following description of the terrible events:

The "disorders" [a euphemism for excesses accompanied by murder] began on June 7 about nine o'clock in the evening, due to the instigation of several half-drunk laborers who happened to overhear a Christian mother telling her child, who was playing with a Jewish girl, to stop playing with her, as the Jews might slaughter her. The work of destruction began with the Jewish house of prayer which was crowded with worshippers. It was followed by the demolition of five more houses owned by Jews. In these houses the mob destroyed everything that fell into its hands. The doors and windows were broken and everything inside was thrown into the streets. On this occasion six adults and one boy was killed; five Jews were wounded, two of whom died soon afterwards.

The governor of Nizhni-Novgorod reported that the disorders could not possibly have been foreseen. Yet there can be no doubt that the people were to a certain extent prepared for them. The investigations of the police and the judicial inquiry both converged to prove that the Nizhni-Novgorod excesses were prompted primarily, if not exclusively, by the desire for plunder. In all demolished houses not a single article of value that could be removed was destroyed, and not only money but anything at all that was fit for use was looted. That the disorders broke out on the seventh of June was, in the opinion of the governor, entirely accidental, but that they were directed against the Jews was due to the fact that the people had been led to believe that even the the gravest crimes were practically unpunishable, so long as they were were committed against the Jews, and not against other nationalities.

An additional reason for the pogrom was the reputed wealth of a goodly number of the Jewish families of Nizhni-Novgorod. The judicial investigation brought out the fact that before attacking the offices of Daitzelman, a big Moscow merchant, the mob was directed by shouts: "Let us go to Daitzelman; there is a lot to be gotten there." The murder of Daitzelman, who was beloved by his Russian laborers, and that of other Jews, was not prompted by revenge, but by mere purposeless savagery. It is impossible to assume that the mob was moved to action by the rumor which had been spread by the ringleaders of the rioting hordes concerning the kidnapping of a Christian child by the Jews—the more so since at the very beginning of the excesses the police produced the supposedly kidnapped child whole and intact, and showed it to the crowd. The pogrom was due primarily to the savagery of brutal and unenlightened mobs, who found an opportunity to vent their beastly instincts, fortified by the conviction of complete immunity, which is referred to in the report of the governor.

Even the central Government in St. Petersburg was alarmed by the St. Bartholemew night which had been enacted at Nizhni-Novgorod. At the recommendation of Governor Baranov, the murderers were tried by court-martial and suffered heavy punishment. Nevertheless, the same governor thought it his duty to appease the Russian popular conscience by ordering the expulsion of those Jews whom the police had found to live outside the Pale "without a legal basis." In this wise, the Russian administration once more managed to follow up a street pogrom by a legal one, not realizing the fact that the atrocities perpetrated upon the Jews by the mob were merely a crude copy of the atrocities perpetrated upon them by the Government, and that the outlawed condition of the Jews bred the lawlessness and violence of the mob, which was fully aware of the anti-Semitic sentiments of the official world. The bloody saturnalia of Nizhni-Novgorod had, however, the beneficent effect that the Government, fearing the spread of the conflagration outside the Pale and even outside Jewry, took energetic steps to prevent all further excesses. As a matter of fact, the Nizhni-Novgorod pogrom was the last in the annals of the eighties—with the exception of a few unimportant occurrences in various localities. For six years "the land was quiet," and the monopoly of "silent pogroms," in the shape of the systematic denial of Jewish rights, remained firmly in the hands of the Government.

2. THE CONCLUSIONS OF THE PAHLEN COMMISSION

Whilst the Russian bureaucrats who had been ordered by the Tzar to take "active" measures towards solving the Jewish problem abandoned themselves entirely to a policy of repression, those of their fellow-bureaucrats who had been commissioned to consider and judge the same question from a purely theoretic point of view came to the conclusion that the repressive policy pursued by the Government was not only injurious but even dangerous. Contrary to expectations, the "High Commission" under the chairmanship of Count Pahlen, consisting of aged dignitaries and members of various ministries, approached the Jewish question, at least as far as the majority of the Commission was concerned, in a much more serious frame of mind than did the promoters of the "active" anti-Jewish policies, who had no time for contemplation and were driven by the pressure of their reactionary energy to go ahead at all cost. In the course of five years the Pahlen Commission succeeded in investigating the Jewish question in all its aspects. It studied and itself prepared a large mass of historic, juridic, as well as economic and statistical material. It probed the labors of Ignatyev's gubernatorial commissions, quickly ascertaining their biased tendency, and examined the entire history of the preceding legislation concerning the Jews. It finally came to the conclusion that the whole century-long system of restrictive legislation had failed of its purpose, and must give way to a system of emancipatory measures, to be carried out gradually and with extreme caution. The majority of the members of the Commission concurred in this opinion, including Count Pahlen, its chairman. In the following we present a few brief extracts from the conclusions formulated by this conservative and bureaucratic commission in its comprehensive "General Memoir" which was written in the beginning of 1888:

Can the attitude of the State towards a population of five millions, forming one-twentieth of its subjects—though belonging to a race different from that of the majority—whom that State itself had incorporated, together with the territories populated by them, into the Russian body politic, differ from its attitude towards all its other subjects?.... Hence, from the political point of view, the Jew is entitled to equality of citizenship. Without granting him equal rights, we cannot, properly speaking, demand from him equal civic obligations.... Repression and disfranchisement, discrimination and persecution have never yet leaded to improve groups of human beings and make them more devoted to their rulers. It is, therefore, not surprising that the Jews, trained in the spirit of a century-long repressive legislation, have remained in the category of those subjects, who are less accurate in the discharge of their civic duty, who shirk their obligations towards the State, and do not fully join Russian life. No less than six hundred and fifty restrictive laws directed against the Jews may be enumerated in the Russian Code, and the discriminations and disabilities implied in these laws are such that they have naturally resulted in making until now the life of an enormous majority of the Jews in Russia exceedingly onerous....

The prejudice against the Jews is largely nurtured by the dislike which the common people secretly harbor towards them until to-day as non-Christians.... The names "Non-Christian" and "Christ-killer" may often be heard from the lips of the Russian common man as abusive terms directed against the Jew. The attitude of our Church and of the law of the State towards the Jewish religion is different. For, while they designate the Jewish religion as a "pseudo-doctrine," they nevertheless sanction religious toleration on as large a scale as possible [?!], and refrain from carrying on a compulsory and official missionary propaganda.

In the course of the last twenty-five years a new accusation has been brought forward against the Jews in Russia and those outside of Russia. The Jews have been found to form a considerable percentage among the champions of anarchistic and revolutionary doctrines, consisting mostly of half-educated youngsters who have drifted away from one shore and have not succeeded in reaching the other. This extremely deplorable fact is used as evidence for the purpose of showing that Judaism itself contains within it a destructive force, and is, therefore, doubly dangerous to State and society. The Jewish progressives and socialists are wont to speak of their mission to reconstruct the world and of their innate love of mankind.... These statements need hardly be taken seriously, for present-day Jewry, by the very essence of its nature, professes strictly conservative principles, which to a large extent are egotistic and have for their aim the practical welfare of its adherents. The interpretation of the spirit of Judaism in a directly opposite sense is but an unsuccessful attempt on the part of Jewish anarchists who wish to proclaim themselves as the apostles of a new national mission invented by them. The fact of their forming a large percentage in the camp of those opposed to the Russian civic order may be explained by the artificial manner in which vast numbers of pupils from among the lowest classes of the Jewish population are attracted into the secondary and elementary educational establishments. These pupils are without means of a livelihood, and they lack, moreover, all religious beliefs; they are embittered not only by their personal unfortunate position but also by the pressure of the restrictive laws which weigh heavily upon their fellow-Jews in Russia.