The defects which should be truly combated by Government and society are: a) Jewish exclusiveness and separatism; b) the endeavor of the Jews to bring the economic forces of the population, in the midst of which they live, under their influence (i.e., exploitation)....

Having established the true dimensions and characteristics of the "Jewish evil," we are naturally expected to answer a question of an opposite nature: are the Jews to any extent useful to State and society? This question, though very frequently heard, is not quite intelligible, for every subject, who fulfils his obligations, is useful to State and society. It would be strange to put a similar question concerning other nationalities of Eastern origin in Russia, such as the Greeks, Armenians, and Tartars. And yet this question is raised with great frequency in the case of the Jews, for the purpose of proving the need of repressive measures and framing a stronger indictment against the Jewish population. There is no doubt that in certain lines of endeavor the Jews are extremely useful. This was already realized by Catherine, who admitted them to the South-Russian coast in order to introduce commercial activities and bring life into the country,.... The peculiar nature of their commerce and credit is useful to the State, because they connect the remotest regions by commercial ties and are satisfied with considerably smaller profits than are the Christian merchants....

We must not, first of all, engage in too comprehensive plans of reform and imagine that the Jewish question can be considered in all its aspects and solved at one stroke.... Gradation and cautiousness must above all become the guiding principles of the future activity of the legislator.

The repressive policy, taken by itself, has been and will always be the first and main source of the clannishness of the Jews and their aloofness from Russian life.... The prohibitive laws have not improved the Jews. On the contrary, they have developed in them the spirit of opposition, and have prompted them to devise all the time most dexterous means of evading the law, thereby corrupting the lower executives of the State power. These laws affect the daily doings of every member of the Jewish population, and they extend to such spheres of life and activity in which State control is almost impossible. They touch the domain of private contract law (the prohibition of land leases), the domain of physical liberty and the need of human locomotion (the prohibition to transgress the Pale of Settlement, or to live in villages within fifty versts of the border), the domain of daily pursuits and earnings (the prohibition of several professions), and many others.

No law will ever be able to check effectively the legal violations in these hourly acts and common relations of life. It is impossible to attach a policeman or a public prosecutor or a justice of the peace to every Jew. And yet it is perfectly natural that, being restricted in the most elementary rights of a subject—to take as one instance only the right of free movement—every Jew should daily attempt to violate and evade such burdensome regulations. This is perfectly natural and intelligible....

About ninety per cent of the whole Jewish population form a mass of people that are entirely unprovided for, and come near being a proletariat—a mass that lives from hand to mouth, amidst poverty, and most oppressive sanitary and general conditions. This very proletariat is occasionally the target of tumultuous popular uprisings. The Jewish mass lives in fear of pogroms and in fear of violence. It looks with envy upon the Jews of the adjacent governments of the Kingdom of Poland, who are almost entirely emancipated, though living under the jurisdiction of the same State. [1] The law itself places the Jews in the category of "alien races," on the same level with the Samoyeds and pagans. [2] In a word the abnormal condition of the present position of the Jews in Russia is evidenced by the instability and vagueness of their juridic rights.

[Footnote 1: The law of 1862 conferred upon the Jews of "the Kingdom of Poland," i.e., of Russian Poland, the right of unrestricted residence throughout the Kingdom, including the villages (see p. 181). This privilege was practically annulled by the enactment of June 11, 1891, which severely restricts the property rights of the Polish Jews.]

[Footnote 2: The Russian Code of Laws classifies the Jews as follows (Volume IX., Laws of Social Orders, Article 762): "Among the Aliens inhabiting the Russian Empire are the following: 1) The Siberian Aliens; 2) The Samoyeds of the Government of Archangel; 3) The nomadic Aliens of the Government of Stavropol; 4) The Kalmycks leading a nomadic life in the Governments of Astrakhan and Stavropol; 5) The Kirgiz of the Inner Ord; 6) The Aliens of the Territories of Akmolinsk, Semipalatinsk, Semiryechensk, Ural, and Turgay; 7) the alien populations of the Trans-Caspian Territory; 8) The Jews."]

Looking at the problem, not at all as Jewish apologetes or sympathizers, but purely from the point of view of civic righteousness and the highest principles of impartiality and justice, we cannot but admit that the Jews have a right to complain about their situation.... However unpleasant it might sound to the enemies of Judaism, it is nevertheless an axiom which no one can deny that the whole five million Jewish population of Russia, unattractive though it may appear to certain groups and individuals, is yet an integral part of Russia and that the questions affecting this population are at the same time purely Russian questions. We are not dealing with foreigners, whose admission to Russian citizenship might be conditioned by their usefulness or uselessness to Russia. The Jews of Russia are not foreigners. For more than one hundred years they have formed a part of that same Russian Empire, which has incorporated scores of other tribes many of which count by the millions....

The very history of Russian legislation, notwithstanding the fact that this legislation has developed largely under the influence of a most severe outlook on Judaism, teaches us that there is only one way and one solution—to emancipate and unite the Jews with the rest of the population under the protection of the same laws. All this is attested not by theories and doctrines but by the living experience of centuries.... Hence the final goal of any legislation concerning the Jews can be no other than its abrogation, a course demanded equally by the needs of the times, the cause of enlightenment, and the progress of the popular masses.

The fitness of the Jews for full civil equality, to be attained by degrees and in the course of many long years, will be the final goal of the reforms, and will lead at last to the disentangling of that age-long knot. In saying this, we do not mean to imply that by that time the Jews will have cast off or transformed all those obnoxious qualities which are at present responsible for the fight in which all are engaged against them. But, as in the case of Europe, this fight can only be terminated by according them full emancipation and equal citizenship. To place obstacles in the way of this solution would be nothing more than a fruitless attempt to check the course of development of human society and Russian civil life. Unsympathetic as the Jews may be to the Russian masses, it is impossible not to agree with this axiomatic truth.

Turning now to the execution of its task, the High Commission has up to the present been able to carry out but a very small part of the program indicated. It was tied down by that gradation and cautiousness which it considers an indispensable condition for every improvement in the status of the Jews.... The principal task of the legislation, as far as it affects the Jews, must consist in uniting them as closely as possible with the general Christian population. It is not advisable to frame a new legislation in the form of a special "Statute" or "Regulation," since such a course would be fundamentally subversive of the efforts of the Government to remove Jewish exclusiveness. The system of repressive and discriminating measures must give way to a graduated system of emancipatory and equalizing laws. The greatest possible cautiousness and gradation are the principles to be observed in the solution of the Jewish question.

3. THE TRIUMPH OF REACTION

With all their moderate and cautious phraseology, the conclusions of the Pahlen Commission, whose members, as hide-bound conservatives, were forced to reckon with the anti-Semitic trend of the governing circles, implied an annihilating criticism of the repressive policy of that very Government by which the Commission had been appointed. From the loins of Russian officialdom issued the enemy who opposed it in its manner of dealing with the Jewish question.

It must be added, however, that the opinions voiced by the Commission in its memorandum were by no means shared by its entire membership. For while the majority of the Commission were in favor of gradual reforms, the minority advocated the continuation of the old repressive policy. Owing to these internal disagreements, the Commission was slow in submitting its conclusions to the Government. One more attempt was made to procrastinate the matter. At the end of 1888 the Commission invited a group of Jewish "experts," being desirous, as it were, to listen to the last words of the prisoner at the bar. The choice fell upon the same Jewish notables of St. Petersburg, who had displayed so little courage at the Jewish conference of 1882. [1] The cross-examination of these Jewish representatives turned on the question of the internal Jewish organization, the existence of a secret Kahal, the purposes of the "basket tax," [2] and so on. Needless to say the replies were given in an apologetic spirit. The Jewish "experts" renounced the idea of a self-governing communal Jewish organization, and pleaded merely for a limited communal autonomy under the strict supervision of the Government. True, a few of the questions referred besides to the legal position of the Jews, but this was done more as a matter of form. Everybody knew that the opinion of the majority of the Commission, favoring "cautious and gradual" reforms, did not have the same prospects of success as the views of the anti-Semitic minority which advocated the continuance of the old-time repressive policy.

[Footnote 1: See p. 304 et seq. In addition to those mentioned, M. Margolis was invited as an expert.]

[Footnote 2: See above, p. 61, n. 1.]

Soon the worst apprehensions proved to be true. Count Tolstoi, the reactionary Minister of the Interior, blocked the further progress of the plans formulated by the Pahlen Commission which should have been submitted in due course to the Council of State. There were persistent rumors to the effect that Alexander III., being decidedly in favor of continuing the policy of oppression towards the Jews, had "attached himself to the opinion of the minority" of the Pahlen Commission. According to another version, the question was actually brought up before the Council of State, and there, too, the anti-Semites proved to be in the minority, but the Tzar threw the weight of his opinion on their side. The project of the Commission, being out of harmony with the current Government policies, was disposed of at some secret session of leading dignitaries. The labor of five years was buried in the official archives.

As for the Jews themselves, they were at no time deceived about the effects that were likely to attend the work of the High Commission. They clearly understood that, if the Government had been genuinely desirous of "revising" the system of Jewish disabilities, it would have stopped, for a time at least, to manufacture new legislative whips and scorpions. The dark polar night of Russian reaction reigned supreme. There seemed to be no end to these orgies of the Russian night owls, the Pobyedonostzevs and Tolstois, who were anxious to resuscitate the savagery of ancient Muscovy, and who kept the people in the grip of ignorance, drunkenness, and political barbarism. Every one in Russia kept his peace and held his breath. The progressive elements of the Empire were held down tightly by the lid of reaction. The press groaned under the yoke of a ferocious censorship. The mystic doctrine of non-resistance preached by Leo Tolstoi was attuned to the mood prevailing among educated Russians, for, in the words of the Russian poet, "their hearts, subdued by storms, were filled with silence and lassitude."

In Jewish life, too, silence reigned supreme. The sharp pangs of the first pogrom year were now dulled, and only suppressed moans echoed the uninterrupted "silent pogrom" of oppression. These were years of which the Jewish poet, Simon Frug, could sing:

Round about all is silent and cheerless, Like a lonesome and desert-like plain. If but one were courageous and fearless And would cry out aloud in his pain! Neither storm-wind nor starshine by night, And the days neither cloudy nor bright: O my people, how sad is thy state, How gray and how cheerless thy fate!

But in this silence the national idea was slowly maturing and gaining in depth and in strength. The time had not yet arrived for clearly marked tendencies or well-defined systems of thought. But the temper of the intellectual classes of Russian Jewry was a clear indication that they were at the cross-roads. The "titled" inteligenzia, reared in the Russian schools, who had drifted away from Judaism, was now joined by that other intelligenzia, the product of heder and yeshibah, who had acquired European culture through the medium of neo-Hebraic literature, and was in closer contact with the masses of the Jewish people.

True, the Jewish periodical press in the Russian language, which had arisen towards the end of the seventies, had lost in quantity. The Razvyet had ceased to appear in 1883, and the Russki Yevrey in 1884. The only press organ to remain on the battlefield was the militant Voskhod, which was the center for the publicistic, scientific, and poetic endeavors of the advanced intellectuals of that period. But the loss of the Russian branch of Jewish literature was made up by the growth of the Hebrew press. The old Hebrew organs ha-Melitz and ha-Tzefirah took on a new lease of life, and grew from weeklies into dailies. Voluminous annuals with rightful claims to scientific and literary importance, such as the ha-Asif ("The Harvest") and Keneset Israel ("The Community of Israel") in Warsaw, and other similar publications, began to make their appearance in Russia. New literary forces began to rise from the ground, though only to attain their full bloom during the following years. Taken as a whole, the ninth decade of the nineteenth century may well be designated as a period of transition from the older Haskalah movement to the more modern national revival.

4. AMERICAN AND PALESTINIAN EMIGRATION

As for the emigration movement, which had begun during the storm and stress of the first pogrom year, this passive but only effective protest against the new Egyptian oppression proceeded at a slow pace. The Jewish emigration from Russia to the United States served as a barometer of the persecutions endured by the Jews in the land of bondage. During the first three years of the eighties the new movement showed violent fluctuations. In 1881 there were 8193 emigrants; in 1882, 17,497; in 1883, 6907. During the following three years, from 1884 to 1886, the movement remained practically on the same level, counting 15,000 to 17,000 emigrants annually. But in the last three years of that decade, it gained considerably in volume, mounting in 1887 to 28,944, in 1888 to 31,256, and in 1889 to 31,889. The exodus from Russia was undoubtedly stimulated by the law imposing a fine for evading military service and by the introduction of the educational percentage norm—two restrictions which threw into bold relief the disproportionate relation between rights and duties in Russian Jewry. In the Empire of the Tzars the Jews were denied the right of residence and the privilege of a school education, but forced at the same time to serve in the army. In the United States they at once received full civil equality and free schooling without any compulsory military service.

It goes without saying that the emigrants who had no difficulty in obtaining equality of citizenship were nevertheless compelled, during their first years of residence in the New World, to engage in a severe struggle for their material existence. Among the emigrants who came to America in those early years there were many young intellectuals who had given up their liberal careers in the land of bondage and were now dreaming of becoming plain agriculturists in the free republic. They managed to obtain a following among the emigrant masses, and founded, in the face of extraordinary difficulties, and with the help of charitable organizations, a number of colonies and farms in various parts of the United States, in Louisiana, North and South Dakota, New Jersey, and elsewhere. After a few years of vain struggling against material want and lack of adaptation to local conditions, a large number of these colonies were abandoned, and only a few of them have survived until to-day.

In the course of time the idealistic pioneer spirit which had animated the Russian intellectuals gave way to a sober realism which was more in harmony with the conditions of American life. The bulk of the emigrant masses settled in the cities, primarily in New York. They worked in factories or at the trades, the most important of which was the needle trade; they engaged in business, in peddling, and in farming, and, lastly, in the liberal professions. Many an immigrant passed successively through all these economic stages before obtaining a secure economic position.

The result of all these wanderings and vicissitudes was a well-established community in the United States of some 200,000 Jews, who formed the nucleus for the rapidly growing new Jewish center in America. One of the active participants and leaders in this movement, who had in his own life experienced all the hardships connected with it, concludes his account of the emigration to the United States at the end of the eighties with the following words:

No one who has seen the poor, down-trodden, faint-hearted inhabitant of the infamous Pale, with the Damocles sword of brutal mob rule dangling constantly over his head, shaking like an autumn leaf at the sight of an inspector or even a plain policeman; who has seen this little Jew transformed, under the influence of the struggle for existence and an independent life, into a free American Jew who holds his head proudly, whom no one would dare to offend, and who has become a citizen in the full sense of the word—no one who has seen this wonderful transformation can doubt for a moment the enormous significance of the emigration movement for the 200,000 Jews that have found shelter in America.

Idealistic influences rather than realistic factors were at work in the Palestinian colonization movement, which proceeded on a parallel line with the American emigration, as a small stream sometimes accompanies a large river. The ideas preached by the first "Lovers of Zion" were but slowly assuming concrete shape. The pioneer colonists in the ancient fatherland met with enormous obstacles in their path: the opposition of the Turkish Government which hindered in every possible way the purchase of land and acquisition of property; the neglected condition of the soil, the uncivilized state of the neighboring Arabs, the lack of financial means and of agricultural experience. Despite all these drawbacks, the efforts of a few men led to the establishment in the very first year of the movement, in 1882, of the colony Rishon le-Zion, near Jaffa. Subsequently a few more colonies were founded, such as Ekron and Ghederah in Judea, Yesod Hama'alah, Rosh-Pinah, Zikhron Jacob in Galilee—the last two founded by Roumanian Jews. Called into life by enthusiasts with inadequate material resources, these colonies would have scarcely been able to survive, had not their plight aroused the interest of Baron Edmond de Rothschild in Paris. Beginning with 1884, the baron, pursuing purely philanthropic aims, gave his support to the colonies, spending enormous sums on cultivating in them the higher forms of agriculture, particularly wine-growing. Gradually, the baron became the actual owner of a majority of the colonies which were administered by his appointees, and most of the colonists were reduced to the level of laborers or tenants who were entirely in the hands of the baron's administration. This state of affairs was unquestionably humiliating and almost too hard to bear for men who had dreamed of a free life in the Holy Land. Yet there can be no doubt that under the conditions prevailing at the time the continued existence of the colonies was only made possible through the liberal assistance which came from the outside.

The progress of the Palestinian colonization, slow though it was, provided a concrete basis for the doctrines preached by the "Lovers of Zion" in Russia. The propaganda of these Hobebe Zion—the Hebrew equivalent for "Lovers of Zion"—who acknowledged as their leaders the first exponents of the territorial restoration of Jewry, Pinsker and Lilienblum, led to the organization of a number of societies in various cities. Towards the end of 1884 the delegates of these societies met at a conference in the Prussian border-town Kattowitz, such a conference being impossible in Russia, in view of the danger of police interference. On that occasion a fund was established under the name of Mazkeret Moshe, "A Memorial to Moses," in honor of the English philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore, whose hundredth birthday was celebrated in that year. The fund, which formed the main channel for all donations in favor of the Palestinian colonies, was administered by the two Hobebe Zion centers in Odessa and Warsaw. The movement which had been called into life by representatives of the intelligenzia succeeded in winning over several champions of rabbinical orthodoxy, among them Samuel Mohilever, the well known rabbi of Bialystok; their affiliation with the new party was largely instrumental in weakening the opposition of the orthodox masses which were inclined to look upon this political movement as a rival of the traditional Messianic idea of Judaism. The lack of governmental sanction hampered the Hobebe Zion societies in Russia in their activities, and the funds at their disposal were barely sufficient for the upkeep of one or two colonies in Palestine. Realizing this, the conference of the "Lovers of Zion" which met at Druskeniki [1] in 1887 decided to apply to the Russian Government for the legalization of the Hobebe Zion organization, a consummation which was realized a few years later, in 1890.

[Footnote 1: A watering-place in the government of Grodno.]

Thus did, during the first decade of the war waged by the Tzars against their Jewish subjects, the tide of Russian-Jewish emigration slowly roll towards various shores, until a fresh storm in the beginning of the new decade whipped its waves to unprecedented heights. Whereas in the course of the eighties the Russian Government wished to give the impression as if it merely "tolerated" the departure of the Jews from Russia—although in reality it was the ultimate aim of its policies—in the beginning of the nineties it suddenly cast off its mask and gave its public sanction to a Jewish exodus from the Russian Empire. As if to strengthen the effect of this sanction, the Jews were to taste even more fully the whip of persecution and expulsion than they had done during the preceding decade.



CHAPTER XXVIII

JUDAEOPHOBIA TRIUMPHANT

1. INTENSIFIED REACTION

The poisonous Judaeophobia bacilli seemed to thrive more than ever in the highest Government circles of St. Petersburg. However, not only the hatred against the Jews but also the fury of general political reaction became more rabid than ever after the "miraculous escape" of the imperial family in the railroad accident near Borki on October 17, 1888. [1] Amidst the ecclesiastic and mystic haze with which Pobyedonostzev and his associates managed to veil this episode the conviction became deeply ingrained in the mind of the Tzar that it was the finger of God which pointed to him the way in which Russia might be saved from "Western" reforms and brought back into the fold of traditional Russian orthodoxy. This conviction of Alexander III. led to the counter-reforms which marked the concluding years of his reign, having for their purpose the strengthening of the police and Church regime in Russia, such as the curtailment of rural and urban self-government, the increase of the power of the nobility and clergy, the institution of Zemstvo chiefs, [2] and the multiplication of Greek-Orthodox parochial schools at the expense of secular schools. The same influences also stimulated the luxurious growth of Judaeophobia which from now on assumed in the highest Government circles a most malignant character. A manifestation of this frame of mind may be found in the words of the Tzar which he penned on the margin of a report submitted to him in 1890 by a high official, describing the sufferings of the Jews and pleading for the necessity of stopping the policy of oppression: "But we must not forget that it was the Jews who crucified our Lord and spilled his priceless blood." Representatives of the court clergy publicly preached that a Christian ought not to cultivate friendly relations with a Jew, since it was the command of the gospel "to hate the murderers of the Savior." The Ministry of the Interior, under the direction of two fanatic reactionaries, Durnovo and Plehve, [3] set on foot all the inquisitorial contrivances of the Police Department, of which both these officials had formerly been the chiefs.

[Footnote 1: Borki is a village in the government of Kherson. Of the fifteen cars of the imperial train only five remained intact. Fifty-eight persons were injured, twenty-one fatally. The members of the imperial family were saved, although their car had been completely wrecked.

The following quotation from Harold Frederic, The New Exodus, p. 168 et seq., is of interest in this connection: "It was reported about that the Tzar regarded the escape alive of himself and family from the terrible railway accident at Borki as the direct and miraculous intervention of Providence. The facts were that the imperial train was being driven at the rate of ninety versts an hour over a road calculated to withstand at the utmost a speed of thirty-five versts; that the engineer humbly warned the Tzar of the danger, and was gruffly ordered to go still faster if possible, and that the miracle would have been the avoidance of calamity."]

[Footnote 2: On the Zemstvos compare p. 173, n. 1. The reactionary law of June 12, 1890 (see later, p. 358 et seq.) puts in place of the executives formerly elected by the people the "Zemstvo chiefs," officials appointed from among the landed proprietors.]

[Footnote 3: Durnovo became Minister of the Interior in 1889, after the demise of Tolstoi; Plehve was assistant-minister.]

The press was either tamed or used as a tool of the governmental policies. The most widely read press organs of the capital, with the exception of the moderately liberal Novosti ("The News") which managed to survive the shipwreck of the liberal press, became either openly or secretly the official mouthpieces of the Government. The venal Novoye Vremya, which the Russian satirist Shchedrin had branded as "the sewer," embarked, towards the end of the eighties, on the noble enterprise of hunting down the Jews with a zeal which was clear evidence of a higher demand for Judaeophobia in the official world. There was no accusation, however hideous, which Suvorin's paper, steered simultaneously by the Holy Synod and by the Police Department, failed to hurl in the face of the Jews. As an organ generally reflecting the views of the Government, the Novoye Vremya served at that time as a source of political information for all dignitaries and officials. The ministers, governors and the vast army of subordinate officials, who wished to ascertain the political course at a given moment, consulted this "well-informed" daily, which, as far as the Jewish question was concerned, pursued but one aim: to make the life of the Jews in Russia unbearable. Apart from the Novoye Vremya, which was read by the Tzar himself, the work of Jew-baiting was also carried on with considerable zeal by the Russian weekly Grazhdanin ("The Citizen"), whose editor, Count Meshcherski, enjoyed not only the personal favor of Alexander III. but also a substantial Government subsidy. These metropolitan organs of publicity gave the tone to the whole official and semi-official press in the provinces, and the public opinion of Russia was systematically poisoned by the venom of Judaeophobia.

When the Pahlen Commission was discharged, the Tzar having "attached himself to the opinion of the minority," [1] the Government had no difficulty in finding a few kind-hearted officials who were eager to carry the project framed by this reactionary minority into effect. The project itself, which had been elaborated in the Ministry of the Interior under the direction of Plehve, the sinister Chief of Police, was guarded with great secrecy, as if it concerned a plan of military operations against a belligerent Power. But the secret leaked out very soon. The Minister had sent out copies of the project to the governors-general, soliciting their opinions, and ere long copies of the project were circulating in London, Paris, and Vienna. In the spring of 1890, Russia and Western Europe were filled with alarming rumors concerning an enactment of some "forty clauses," which was designed to curtail the commercial activities of the Jews, to increase the rigor of the "Temporary Rules" within the Pale, and restrict the privileges conferred upon several categories of Jews outside of it, to establish medieval Jewish ghettos in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev, and similar measures. The foreign press made a terrible outcry against these contemplated new acts of barbarism.

[Footnote 1: See p. 370.]

The voice of protest was particularly strong in England. The London Times assailed in violent terms the reactionary policies of Russia, and a special organ, called Darkest Russia, was published for this purpose by Russian political refugees in England. The Russian Government denied these rumors through its diplomatic channels, though at the very same time the well-informed Novoye Vremya and Grazhdanin were not barred from printing news items concerning the projected disabilities or from recommending ferocious measures against the Jews for the purpose "of removing them from all branches of labor."

This comedy was well understood abroad. At the end of July and in the beginning of August interpellations were introduced in both Houses of the English Parliament, as to whether Her Majesty's Government found it possible to make diplomatic representations in defence of the persecuted Russian Jews for whom England would have to provide, were they to arrive there in large masses. Premier Salisbury, in the House of Lords, and Fergusson, the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, in the House of Commons, replied that "these proceedings, which, if rightly reported to us, are deeply to be regretted, concern the internal affairs of the Russian Empire, and do not admit of any interference on the part of Her Majesty's Government." [1] When shortly afterwards preparations were set on foot for calling a protest meeting in London, the Russian Government hastened to announce through the British ambassador in St. Petersburg that no new measures against the Jews were in contemplation, and the meeting was called off. Rumor had it that the Lord Mayor of London, Henry Isaacs, who was a Jew, did not approve of this meeting, over which, according to the English custom, he would have to preside. The action of the Lord Mayor may have been "tactful," but is was certainly not free from an admixture of timidity.

[Footnote 1: See The Jewish Chronicle of August 8, 1890, p. 18b.]

2. CONTINUED HARASSING

While anxiously endeavoring to appease public opinion abroad, the Russian Government at home did all it could to keep the Jews in an agitated state of mind. The legal drafts and the circulars which had been sent out secretly by the central Government in St. Petersburg elicited the liveliest sympathy on the part of the provincial administrators. Not satisfied with signifying to the Ministry their approval of the contemplated disabilities, many officials of high rank began to display openly their bitter hatred of the Jews.

At one and the same time, during the months of June, July, and August of 1890, the heads of various local provincial administrations published circulars calling the attention of the police to the "audacious conduct" of the Jews who, on meeting Russian officials, failed to take off their hats by way of greeting. The governor of Moghilev instructed the police of his province to impress the local Jewish population with the necessity of "polite manners," in the sense of a more reverent attitude towards the representatives of Russian authority. In compliance with this order, the district chiefs of police compelled the rabbis to inculcate their flock in the synagogues with reverence for Russian officialdom. In Mstislavl, a town in the government of Moghilev, the president of the nobility [1] assembled the leading members of the Jewish community, and cautioned them that those Jews who would fail to comply with the governor's circular would be subjected to a public whipping by the police. The governor of Odessa, the well-known despot Zelenoy, issued a police ordinance for the purpose of "curbing the impudence displayed by the Jews in places of public gathering and particularly in the suburban trolley cars" where they do not give up their seats and altogether show disrespect towards "persons of advanced age or those wearing a uniform, testifying to their high position." Even more brutal was the conduct of the governor-general of Vilna, Kakhanov, who, despite his high rank, allowed himself, in replying to the speech of welcome of a Jewish deputation, to animadvert not only on Jewish "clannishness" but also on the "licentiousness" of the Jewish population, manifesting itself in congregating on the streets, and similar grave crimes.

[Footnote 1: See above, p. 303.]

The simultaneous occurrence of this sort of official actions in widely separated places point to a common source, probably to some secret instructions from St. Petersburg. It would seem, however, that the provincial henchmen of the central Government had overreached themselves in their eagerness to carry out the behest of "curbing the Jews." The pettiness of their demands, which, moreover, were illegal, such as the order to take off the hats before the officials, or to give up the seats in the trolley cars, merely served to ridicule the representatives of Russian officialdom, giving frequent rise to tragi-comic conflicts in public and to utterances of indignation in the press. The public pronouncements of these genteel chinovniks who were anxious to train the Jewish masses in the fear of Russian bureaucracy and inculcate in them polite manners aroused the attention both of the Russian and the foreign press. It was universally felt that these farcical performances of uncouth administrators were only the manifestations of a bottomless hatred, of a morbid desire to insult and to humble the Jews, and that these administrators were capable at any moment to proceed from moralizing to more tangible forms of ill-treatment. This danger intensified the state of alarm.

While making preparations for storming the citadel of Russian Jewry, the Government took good care to keep it meanwhile in its normal state of siege. The resourcefulness of the administration brought the technique of repression to perfection. The officials were no longer content with inventing cunning devices for expelling old Jewish residents from the villages. [1] They now made endeavors to reduce even the area of the urban Pale in which the Jews were huddled together, panting for breath. In 1890, the provincial authorities, acting evidently on a signal from above, began to change numerous little townlets into villages, which, as rural settlements, would be closed to the Jews. As a result, all the Jews who had settled in these localities after the issuance of the "Temporary Rules" of May 3, 1882, were now expelled, and even the older residents who were exempt from the operation of the May laws shared the same fate unless they were able (which in very many cases they were not) to produce documentary evidence that they had lived there prior to 1882. Simultaneously a new attempt was made to drive the Jews from the forbidden fifty verst zone along the Western border of the Empire, particularly in Bessarabia. These expulsions had the effect of filling the already over-crowded cities of the Pale with many more thousands of ruined people.

[Footnote 1: There are cases on record when Jewish soldiers who returned home after the completion of their term of service were refused admission to their villages, on the ground that they were "new settlers."]

At the same time the life of the outlawed Jews was made unbearable in the cities outside the Pale, particularly in the large centers, such as Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. The governor-general of Kiev prohibited the wives of Jewish artisans who were legally entitled to residence in that city to sell eatables in the market, on the technical ground that under the law artisans could only trade in the articles of their own manufacture, thus robbing the poor Jewish workman of the miserable pittance which his wife was anxious to contribute by her honest labor towards the maintenance of the family.

A great political blow for the Jews was the clause in the new reactionary "Statute Concerning the Zemstvo Organizations" issued on June 12, 1890, [1] under which the Jews, though paying the local taxes, were completely barred from participating in the election of deputies to the organization of local self-government. This clause was inserted in the legal draft by the three shining lights of the political inquisition active at that time, Pobyedonostzev, Durnovo, and Plehve. They justified this restriction on the following grounds: the object of the new law is to transform local self-government into a state administration and to strengthen in the former the influence of the central Government at the expense of the local Government; hence the Jews, "being altogether an element hostile to Government," are not fit to participate in the Zemstvo administration. The Council of State agreed with this bureaucratic motivation, and the humiliating clause passed into law.

[Footnote 1: The new law invalidated to a large extent the liberties granted to the Zemstvos by Alexander II. in 1864 (compare p. 173) by placing them under state control.]

While a large part of the Russian public and of the Russian press had succumbed to the prevailing tendencies under the high pressure of the anti-Semitic atmosphere, the progressive elements of the Russian intelligenzia were gradually aroused to a feeling of protest. Vladimir Solovyov, "the Christian philosopher," a friend of the Jewish people, who had familiarized himself thoroughly with its history and literature, conceived the idea of issuing a public protest against the anti-Semitic movement in the "Russian Press," [1] to be signed by the most prominent Russian writers and other well-known men. During the months of May and June, 1890, he succeeded under great difficulties to collect for his protest sixty-six signatures in Moscow and over fifty signatures in St. Petersburg, including those of Leo Tolstoi, Vladimir Korolenko, and other literary celebrities. Despite its mild tone, the protest which had been framed by Solovyov [2] was barred from publication by the Russian censor. Professor Ilovaiski, of Moscow, a historian of doubtful reputation, but a hide-bound Jew-baiter, had informed the authorities of St. Petersburg of the attempt to collect signatures in Moscow for a "pro-Jewish petition." As a result, all newspapers received orders from the Russian Press Department to refuse their columns to any collective pronouncements touching the Jewish question.

[Footnote 1: The latter expression was a euphemism designating the Russian Government and its reactionary henchmen in the press. The severity of the police made this evasion necessary.]

[Footnote 2: The following extracts from this meek appeal deserve to be quoted: "The movement against the Jews which is propagated by the Russian press represents an unprecedented violation of the most fundamental demands of righteousness and humanity. We consider it our duty to recall these elementary demands to the mind of the Russian public.... In all nationalities there are bad and ill-minded persons but there is not, and cannot be, any bad and ill-minded nationality, for this would abrogate the moral responsibility of the individual.... It is unjust to make the Jews responsible for those phenomena in their lives which are the result of thousands of years of persecution in Europe and of the abnormal conditions in which this people has been placed.... The fact of belonging to a Semitic tribe and professing the Mosaic creed is nothing prejudicial and cannot of itself serve as a basis for an exceptional civil position of the Jews, as compared with the Russian subjects of other nationalities and denominations.... The recognition and application of these simple truths is important and is first of all necessary for ourselves. The increased endeavor to kindle national and religious hatred, which is so contradictory to the spirit of Christianity and suppresses the feelings of justice and humaneness, is bound to demoralize society at its very root and bring about a state of moral anarchy, particularly so in view of the decline of humanitarian ideas and the weakness of the principle of justice already noticeable in our life. For this reason, acting from the mere instinct of national self-preservation, we must emphatically condemn the anti-Semitic movement not only as immoral in itself but also as extremely dangerous for the future of Russia."]

Solovyov addressed an impassioned appeal to Alexander III., but received through one of the Ministers the impressive advice to refrain from raising a cry on behalf of the Jews, under pain of administrative penalties. In these circumstances, the plan of a public protest had to be abandoned. Instead, the following device was resorted to as a makeshift. Solovyov's teacher of Jewish literature, F. Goetz, was publishing an apology of Judaism under the title "A Word from the Prisoner at the Bar." Solovyov wrote a preface to this little volume, and turned over to its author for publication the letters of Tolstoi and Korolenko in the defence of the Jews. No sooner had the book left the press than it was confiscated by the censor, and, in spite of all petitions, the entire edition of this innocent apology was thrown into the flames. In this way the Russian Government succeeded in shutting the mouths of the few defenders of Judaism, while according unrestricted liberty of speech to its ferocious assailants.

3. THE GUILDHALL MEETING IN LONDON

The cry of indignation against Jewish oppression, which had been smothered in Russia, could not be stifled abroad. The Jews of England took the initiative in this matter. On November 5, 1890, the London Times published a letter from N.S. Joseph, honorary secretary to the Russo-Jewish Committee in London, passionately appealing to the public men of England to intercede on behalf of his persecuted coreligionists. The writer of the letter called attention to the fact that, while the Russian Government was officially denying that it was contemplating new restrictions against the Jews, it was at the same time applying the former restrictions on so comprehensive a scale and with such extraordinary cruelty that the Jews in the Pale of Settlement were like a doomed prisoner in a cell with its opposite walls gradually approaching, contracting by slow degrees his breathing space, till they at last immure him in a living tomb.

The writer concludes his appeal in these terms:

It may seem a sorry jest but the Russian law, in very truth, now declares: The Jew may live here only and shall not live there; if he lives here he must remain here; but wherever he lives he shall not live—he shall not have the means of living. This is the operation of the law as it stands, without any new edict. This is the sentence of death that silently, insidiously, and in the veiled language of obscurely worded laws has been pronounced against hundreds of thousands of human beings.... Shall civilized Europe, shall the Christianity of England behold this slow torture and bloodless massacre, and be silent?

The appeal of the Russo-Jewish Committee and the new gloomy tidings from Russia published by the Times decided a number of prominent Englishmen to call the protest meeting which had been postponed half a year previously. Eighty-three foremost representatives of English society addressed a letter to the Lord Mayor of London calling upon him to convene such a meeting. The office of Lord Mayor at that time was occupied by Joseph Savory, a Christian, who did not share the susceptibilities which had troubled his Jewish predecessor. Immediately on assuming office, Savory gave his consent to the holding of the meeting.

On December 10, 1890, the meeting was held in the magnificent Guildhall, belonging to the City of London, and was attended by more than 2000 people. The Lord Mayor who presided over the gathering endeavored in his introductory remarks to soften the bitterness of the protest for the benefit of official Russia.

As I hear—he said—the Emperor of Russia is a good husband and a tender father, and I cannot but think that such a man must necessarily be kindly disposed to all his subjects. On his Majesty the Emperor of Russia the hopes of the Russian Jews are at the present moment fixed. He can by one stroke of his pen annul those laws which now press so grievously upon them and he can thus give a happy life to those Jewish subjects of his who now can hardly be said to live at all.

In conclusion, the Lord Mayor expressed the wish that Alexander III. may become the "emancipator" of the Russian Jews, just as his father Alexander II. had been the emancipator of the Russian serfs.

Cardinal Manning, the warm-hearted champion of Jewish emancipation, who was prevented by illness from being present, sent a long letter which was read to the meeting. The argument against interfering with the inner politics of a foreign country, the cardinal wrote, had found its first expression in Cain's question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" There is a united Jewish race scattered all over the world, and the pain inflicted upon it in Russia is felt by the Jewish race in England. It is wrong to keep silent when we see six million men reduced to the level of criminals, particularly when they belong to a race "with a sacred history of nearly four thousand years."

The speakers who followed the Lord Mayor pictured in vivid colors the political and civil bondage of Russian Jewry.

The first speaker, the Duke of Westminster, after recounting the sufferings of Russian Jewry, moved the adoption of the protest resolution, notwithstanding the fact that the "great protest of 1882" (at the Mansion House meeting)[1] had brought no results. "We read in the history of the Jewish race that 'God hardened the heart of Pharaoh so that he would not let the people of Israel go'; but deliverance came at last by the hand of Moses."

[Footnote 1: See p. 288 et seq.]

After brilliant speeches by the Bishop of Ripon, the Earl of Meath, and others, the following resolution was adopted:

That in the opinion of this meeting the renewed sufferings of the Jews in Russia from the operation of severe and exceptional edicts and disabilities are deeply to be deplored, and that in this last decade of the nineteenth century religious liberty is a principle which should be recognized by every Christian community as among the natural human rights.

At the same time a second resolution was adopted to the following effect:

That a suitable memorial be addressed to his Imperial Majesty the Emperor of all the Russias, respectfully praying his Majesty to repeal all the exceptional and restrictive laws and disabilities which afflict his Jewish subjects; and begging his Majesty to confer upon them equal rights with those enjoyed by the rest of his Majesty's subjects; and that the said memorial be signed by the Right Hon. the Lord Mayor, in the name of the citizens of London, and be transmitted by his Lordship to his Majesty.

A few extracts from the memorandum may be quoted by way of illustrating the character of this remarkable appeal to the Russian emperor:

We, the citizens of London, respectfully approach your Majesty and humbly beg your gracious leave to plead the cause of the afflicted.

Cries of distress have reached us from thousands of suffering Israelites in your vast empire; and we Englishmen, with pity in our souls for all who suffer, turn to your Majesty to implore for them your Sovereign aid and clemency.

Five millions of your Majesty's subjects groan beneath the yoke of exceptional and restrictive laws. Remnants of a race, whence all religion sprung—ours and yours, and every creed on earth that owns one God—men who cling with all devotion to their ancient faith and forms of worship, these Hebrews are in your empire subject to such laws that under them they cannot live and thrive....

Pent up in narrow bounds within your Majesty's wide empire, and even within those bounds forced to reside chiefly in towns that reek and overflow with every form of poverty and wretchedness; forbidden all free movement; hedged in every enterprise by restrictive laws; forbidden tenure of land, or all concern in land, their means of livelihood have become so cramped as to render life for them well-nigh impossible.

Nor are they cramped alone in space and action. The higher education is denied them, except in limits far below the due proportion of their needs and aspirations. They may not freely exercise professions, like other subjects of your Majesty, nor may they gain promotion in the Army, however great their merit and their valour....

Sire! we who have learnt to tolerate all creeds, deeming it a principle of true religion to permit religious liberty, we beseech your Majesty to repeal those laws that afflict these Israelites. Give them the blessing of equality! In every land where Jews have equal rights, the nation prospers. We pray you, then, annul those special laws and disabilities that crush and cow your Hebrew subjects....

Sire! your Royal Sister, our Empress Queen (whom God preserve!) bases her throne upon her people's love, making their happiness her own. So may your Majesty gain from your subjects' love all strength and happiness, making your mighty empire mightier still, rendering your Throne firm and impregnable, reaping new blessings for your House and Home.

The memorial was signed by Savory, who was Lord Mayor at that time, and forwarded by him to St. Petersburg. It was accompanied by a letter, dated December 24, from the Lord Mayor to Lieutenant-General de Richter, aide-de-camp of the Tzar for the reception of petitions, with the request to transmit the document to the emperor.

It is almost unnecessary to add that this touching appeal for justice by the citizens of London failed to receive a direct reply. There were rumors that the London petition threw the Tzar into a fury, and the future court annalist of Russia will probably tell of the scene that took place in the imperial palace when this document was read. An indirect reply came through the cringing official press. The mouthpiece of the Russian Government abroad, the newspaper Le Nord in Brussels, which was especially engaged in the task of whitewashing the black politics of its employers, published an article under the heading "A Last Word concerning Semitism," in which the rancor of the highest Government circles in Russia found undisguised expression:

The Semites—quoth the semi-official organ with an impudent disregard of truth—have never yet had such an easy life in Russia as they have at the present time, and yet they have never complained so bitterly. There is a reason for it. It is a peculiarity of Semitism: a Semite is never satisfied with anything; the more you give him the more he wishes to have.

In the evident desire to fool its readers, Le Nord declared that the protesters at the London meeting might have saved themselves the trouble of demanding "religious liberty" for the Jews—which in the London petition was understood, of course, to imply civil liberty for the professors of Judaism—since nobody in Russia restricted the Jews in their worship. Nor did the civil disabilities weigh heavily upon the Jews. On the contrary, they felt so happy in Russia that even the Jewish emigrants in America dreamt of returning to their homeland.

4. THE PROTEST OF AMERICA

The same attitude of double-dealing was adopted by the smooth-tongued Russian diplomats toward the Government of the United States. Aroused over the inhuman treatment of the Jews in Russia, and alarmed by the effects of a sudden Russian-Jewish immigration to America, which was bound to follow as a result of this treatment, the House of Representatives adopted a resolution on August 20, 1890, requesting the President—

To communicate to the House of Representatives, if not incompatible with the public interests, any information in his possession concerning the enforcement of proscriptive edicts against the Jews in Russia, recently ordered, as reported in the public press; and whether any American citizens have, because of their religion, been ordered to be expelled from Russia, or forbidden the exercise of the ordinary privileges enjoyed by the inhabitants.

In response to this resolution, President Harrison laid before Congress all the correspondence and papers bearing on the Jewish question in Russia. [1]

[Footnote 1: The material was printed as Executive Document No. 470, dated October 1, 1890. It reproduced all the documents originally embodied in Executive Document No. 192 (see above, p. 294, n. 1), in addition to the new material.]

A little later, on December 19 of the same year, the following resolution of protest was introduced in the House of Representatives and referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs:

Resolved, That the members of the House of Representatives of the United States have heard with profound sorrow, and with feelings akin to horror, the reports of the persecution of the Jews in Russia, reflecting the barbarism of past ages, disgracing humanity, and impeding the progress of civilization.

Resolved, That our sorrow is intensified by the fact that such occurrences should happen in a country which has been, and now is, the firm friend of the United States, and in a nation that clothed itself with glory, not long since, by the emancipation of its serfs and by its defense of helpless Christians from the oppression of the Turks.

Resolved, That a copy of this resolution be forwarded to the Secretary of State, with a request that he send it to the American Minister at St. Petersburg, and that said Minister be directed to present the same to his Imperial Majesty Alexander III., Czar of all the Russias. [1]

[Footnote 1:Congressional Record, Vol. 22, p. 705.—The resolution was reported back on February 5, 1891, in the following amended form (loc. cit., p. 2219):

Resolved, That the members of the House of Representatives of the United States have heard with profound sorrow the reports of the sufferings of the Jews in Russia; and this sorrow is intensified by the fact that these occurrences should happen in a country which is, and long has been the friend of the United States, which emancipated millions of its people from serfdom, and which defended helpless Christians in the East from persecution for their religion; and we earnestly hope that the humanity and enlightened spirit then so strikingly shown by His Imperial Majesty will now be manifested in checking and mitigating the severe measures directed against men of the Jewish religion.]

In the meantime the Department of State was flooded with protests against the Russian atrocities.

Almost every day—Secretary of State, James G. Blaine, writes to Charles Emory Smith, United States Minister at St. Petersburg, on February 27, 1891—communications are received on this subject; temperate, and couched in language respectful to the Government of the Czar; but at the same time indicative and strongly expressive of the depth and prevalence of the sentiment of disaprobation and regret. [1]

[Footnote 1: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1891, p. 740.]

The American Minister was therefore instructed to exert his influence with the Russian Government in the direction of mitigating the severity of the anti-Jewish measures. He was to point out to the Russian authorities that the maltreatment of the Jews in Russia was not purely an internal affair of the Russian Government, inasmuch as it affected the interests of the United States. Within ten years 200,000 Russian Jews had come over to America, and continued persecutions in Russia were bound to result in a large and sudden immigration which was not unattended with danger. While the United States did not presume to dictate to Russia, "nevertheless, the mutual duties of nations require that each should use his power with a due regard for the other and for the results which its exercise produces on the rest of the world." [1]

[Footnote 1: Loc. cit., p. 737.]

The remonstrances of the American people which were voiced by their representatives at St. Petersburg were received by the Russian Government in a manner which strikingly illustrates the well-known duplicity of its diplomatic methods. While endeavoring to justify its policy of oppression by all kinds of libellous charges against the Russian Jews, it gave at the same time repeated assurance to the American Minister that no new proscriptive laws were contemplated, and the latter reported accordingly to his Government. [1] On February 10, 1891, the American Minister, writing to Secretary Blaine, gives a detailed account of the conversation he had had with the Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs, de Giers. The latter went out of his way to discuss with him unreservedly the entire Jewish situation in Russia, and, while making all kinds of subtle insinuations against the character of the Russian Jew, he expressed himself in a manner which was calculated to convince the American representative of the conciliatory disposition of the Russian Government. [2] Less than three weeks later followed the cruel expulsion edict against the Jews of Moscow.

[Footnote 1: Compare in particular his dispatch, dated September 25, 1890, published in Executive Document No. 470, p. 141.]

[Footnote 2: Foreign Relations, 1891, p. 734.]

While the Russian Government, abashed by the voices of protest, made an effort to justify itself in the eyes of Europe and America and perverted the truth with its well-known diplomatic skill, the Russkaya Zhizn ("Russian Life"), a St. Petersburg paper, which was far from being pro-Jewish, published a number of heart-rending facts illustrating the trials of the outlawed Jews at Moscow. It told of a young talented Jew who maintained himself and his family by working on a Moscow newspaper and, not having the right of residence in that city, was wont to save himself from the night raids of the police by hiding himself, on a signal of his landlord, in the wardrobe. Many Jews who lived honestly by the sweat of their brow were cruelly expelled by the police when their certificates of residence contained even the slightest technical inaccuracy. By way of illustrating the "religious liberty" of the Jews in the narrower sense of the word, the paper mentioned the fact that after the opening of the new synagogue in Moscow, which accommodated five hundred worshippers, the police ordered the closing of all the other houses of prayer, to the number of twenty, which had been attended by some ten thousand people.

The governor of St. Petersburg, Gresser, made a regular sport of taunting the Jews. One ordinance of his prescribed that the signs on the stores and workshops belonging to Jews should indicate not only the family names of their owners but also their full first names as well as their fathers' names, exactly as they were spelled in their passports, "with the end in view of averting possible misunderstandings." The object of this ordinance was to enable the Christian public to boycott the Jewish stores and, in addition, to poke fun at the names of the owners, which, as a rule, were mutilated in the Russian registers and passports to the point of ridiculousness by semi-illiterate clerks.

Gresser's ordinance was issued on November 17, 1890, a few days before the protest meeting in London. As the Russian Government was at that time assuring Europe that the Jews were particularly happy in Russia, the ordinance was not published in the newspapers but nevertheless applied secretly. The Jewish storekeepers, who realized the malicious intent of the new edict, tried to minimize the damage resulting from it by having their names painted in small letters so as not to catch the eyes of the Russian anti-Semites. Thereupon Gresser directed the police officials (in March 1891) to see to it that the Jewish names on the store signs should be indicated "clearly and in a conspicuous place, in accordance with the prescribed drawings" and "to report immediately" to him any attempt to violate the law. In this manner St. Petersburg reacted upon the cries of indignation which rang at that time through Europe and America.



CHAPTER XXIX

THE EXPULSION FROM MOSCOW

1. PREPARING THE BLOW

The year 1891 had arrived. The air was full of evil forebodings. In the solitude of the Government chancelleries of St. Petersburg the anti-Jewish conspirators were assiduously at work preparing for a new blow to be dealt to the martyred nation. A secret committee attached to the Ministry of the Interior, under the chairmanship of Plehve, was engaged in framing a monstrous enactment of Jewish counter-reforms, which were practically designed to annul the privileges conferred upon certain categories of Jews by Alexander II. The principal object of the proposed enactment was to slam the doors to the Russian interior, which had been slightly opened by the laws of 1859 and 1865, by withdrawing the privilege of residing outside the Pale which these laws had conferred upon Jewish first guild merchants and artisans, subject to a number of onerous conditions.

The first object of the reactionary conspirators was to get rid of those "privileged" Jews who lived in the two Russian capitals. In St. Petersburg this object was to be attained by the edicts of Gresser, referred to previously, which were followed by other similarly harassing regulations. In February, 1891, the governor of St. Petersburg ordered the police "to examine the kind of trade" pursued by the Jewish artisans of St. Petersburg, with the end in view of expelling from the city and confiscating the goods of all those who should be caught with articles not manufactured by themselves [1]. A large number of expulsion followed upon this order. The principal blow, however, was to fall in Moscow.

[Footnote 1: See above, p. 170 et seq., and p. 347 et seq.]

The ancient Muscovite capital was in the throes of great changes. The post of governor-general of Moscow, which had been occupied by Count Dolgoruki, was entrusted in February, 1891, to a brother of the Tzar, Grand Duke Sergius. The grand duke, who enjoyed an unenviable reputation in the gambling circles of both capitals, was not burdened by any consciously formulated political principles. But this deficiency was made up by his steadfast loyalty to the political and religious prejudices of his environment, among which the blind hatred of Judaism occupied a prominent place. The Russian public was inclined to attach extraordinary importance to the appointment of the Tzar's brother. It was generally felt that his selection was designed to serve as a preliminary step to the transfer of the imperial capital from St. Petersburg to Moscow, symbolizing the return "home"—to the old-Muscovite political ideals. It is almost superfluous to add that the contemplated change made it necessary to purge the ancient capital of its Jewish inhabitants.

The Jewish community of Moscow, numbering some thirty thousand souls who lived there legally or semi-legally, had long been a thorn in the flesh of certain influential Russian merchants. The burgomaster of Moscow, Alexeyev, an ignorant merchant, with a very shady reputation, was greatly wrought up over the far-reaching financial influence of a local Jewish capitalist, Lazarus Polakov, the director of a rural bank, with whom he had clashed over some commercial transaction. Alexeyev was only too grateful for an occasion to impress upon the highest Government spheres that it was necessary "to clear Moscow of the Jews," who were crowding the city, owing to the indulgence of Dolgoruki, the former governor-general. The reactionaries of Moscow and St. Petersburg joined hands in the worthy cause of extirpating Judaism, and received the blessing of the head of the Holy Synod, Pobyedonostzev. This inquisitor-in-chief appointed Istomin, a ferocious anti-Semite, who had been his general utility man at the Holy Synod, the bureau-manager of the new governor-general, and thus succeeded in establishing his influence in Moscow through his acting representative who was practically the master of the second capital.

The secret council of Jew-haters decided to accomplish the Jewish evacuation of Moscow prior to the solemn entrance of Grand Duke Sergius into the city, either for the purpose of clearing the way for the new satrap, or in order to avoid the unpleasantness of having his name connected with the first cruel act of expulsion. Pending the arrival of Sergius the administration of Moscow was entrusted to Costanda, the chief of the Moscow Military District, an adroit Greek, who was to begin the military operations against the Jewish population. The first blow was timed to take place on the festival of Israel's liberation from Egyptian bondage, as if the eternal people needed to be reminded of the new bondage and of the new Pharaohs.

2. THE HORRORS OF EXPULSION

It was on March 29, 1891, the first day of the Jewish Passover, when in the synagogues of Moscow which were filled with worshippers an alarming whisper ran from mouth to mouth telling of the publication of an imperial ukase ordering the expulsion of the Jews from the city. Soon afterwards the horror-stricken Jews read in the papers the following imperial order, dated March 28:

Jewish mechanics, distillers, brewers, and, in general, master workmen and artisans shall be forbidden to remove from the Jewish Pale of Settlement as well as to come over from other places of the Empire to the City and Government of Moscow.

This prohibition of settling in Moscow anew was only one half of the edict. The second, more terrible half, was published on the following day:

A recommendation shall be made to the Minister of the Interior, after consultation with the Governor-General of Moscow, to see to it that measures be taken to the effect that the above-mentioned Jews should gradually depart from the City and Government of Moscow into the places established for the permanent residence of the Jews.

At first sight it seemed difficult to realize that this harmless surface of the ukase, with its ambiguous formulation, [1] concealed a cruel decree ordering the uprooting of thousands of human beings. But those who were to execute this written law received definite unwritten instructions which were carried out according to all the rules of the strategic game.

[Footnote 1: The Byzantine perfidy of this formulation lies in the phrase "above-mentioned Jews," which gives the impression of referring to those that had "removed" to Moscow from other parts of the Empire, i.e., settled there anew, whereas the real object of the law was to expel all the Jews of the "above-mentioned" categories of master workmen and artisans, even though they may have lived in the city for many years. This amounted to a repeal, illegally enacted outside the Council of State, of the law of 1865, conferring the right of universal residence upon Jewish artisans. Moreover, the enactment was given retroactive force—a step which even the originators of the "Temporary Rules" of May 3 were not bold enough to make. In distinction from the May Laws, the present decree was not even submitted to the Council of Ministers, where a discussion of it might have been demanded; it was passed as an extraordinary measure, at the suggestion of the Ministry of the Interior represented by Durnovo and Plehve. This is indicated by the heading of the ukase: "The Minister of the Interior has applied most humbly to his Imperial Majesty begging permission to adopt the following measures." This succession of illegalities was to be veiled by the ambiguous formulation of the ukase and the addition of the hackneyed stipulation: "Pending the revision of the enactments concerning the Jews in the ordinary course of legislation."]

The first victims were the Jews who resided in Moscow illegally or semi-legally, the latter living in the suburbs. They were subjected to a sudden nocturnal attack, a "raid," which was directed by the savage Cossack general Yurkovski, the police commissioner-in-chief. During the night following the promulgation of the ukase large detachments of policemen and firemen made their appearance in the section of the city called Zaryadye, where the bulk of the "illegal" Jewish residents were huddled together, more particularly in the immense so-called Glebov Yard, the former ghetto of Moscow. The police invaded the Jewish homes, aroused the scared inhabitants from their beds, and drove the semi-naked men, women, and children to the police stations, where they were kept in filthy cells for a day and sometimes longer. Some of the prisoners were released by the police which first wrested from them a written pledge to leave the city immediately. Others were evicted under a police convoy and sent out of the city like criminals, through the transportation prison. [1] Many families, having been forewarned of the impending raid, decided to spend the night outside their homes to avoid arrest and maltreatment at the hands of the police. They hid themselves in the outlying sections of the city and on the cemeteries; they walked or rode all over the city the whole night. Many an estimable Jew was forced to shelter his wife and children, stiffened from cold, in houses of ill repute which were open all night. But even these fugitives ultimately fell into the hands of the police inquisition.

[Footnote 1: Transportation prisons are prisons in which convicts sentenced to deportation (primarily to Siberia) are kept pending their deportation. Such prisons were to be found in the large Russian centers, among them in Moscow.]

Such were the methods by which Moscow was purged of its rightless Jewish inhabitants a whole month before Grand Duke Sergius made his entrance into the city. The grand duke was followed soon afterwards, in the month of May, by the Tzar himself, who stopped in the second Russian capital on his way to the Crimea. A retired Jewish soldier was courageous enough to address a petition to the Tzar, imploring him in touching terms to allow the former Jewish soldiers to remain in Moscow. The request of the Jewish soldier met with a quick response: he was sent to jail and subsequently evicted.

The establishment of the new regime in Moscow was followed, in accordance with the provisions of the recent ukase, by the "gradual" expulsion of the huge number of master workmen and artisans who had enjoyed for many years the right of residence in that city and were now suddenly deprived of this right by a despotic caprice. The local authorities included among the victims of expulsion even the so-called "circular Jews," i.e., those who had been allowed to remain in Moscow by virtue of the ministerial circular of 1880, granting the right of domicile to the Jews living there before that date. This vast host of honest and hard-working men—artisans, tradesmen, clerks, teachers—were ordered to leave Moscow in three installments: those having lived there for not more than three years and those unmarried or childless were to depart within three to six months; those having lived there for not more than six years and having children or apprentices to the number of four were allowed to postpone their departure for six to nine months; finally the old Jewish settlers, who had big families and employed a large number of workingmen, were given a reprieve from nine to twelve months.

It would almost seem as if the maximum and minimum dates within each term were granted specifically for the purpose of yielding an enormous income to the police, which, for a substantial consideration, could postpone the expulsion of the victims for three months and thereby enable them to wind up their affairs. At the expiration of the final terms the unfortunate Jews were not allowed to remain in the city even for one single day; those that stayed behind were ruthlessly evicted. An eye-witness, in summing up the information at his disposal, the details of which are even more heart-rending than the general facts, gives the following description of the Moscow events:

People who have lived in Moscow for twenty, thirty, or even forty years were forced to sell their property within a short time and leave the city. Those who were too poor to comply with the orders of the police, or who did not succeed in selling their property for a mere song—there were cases of poor people disposing of their whole furniture for one or two rubles—were thrown into jail, or sent to the transportation prison, together with criminals and all kinds of riff-raff that were awaiting their turn to be dispatched under convoy. Men who had all their lives earned their bread by the sweat of their brow found themselves under the thumb of prison inspectors, who placed them at once on an equal footing with criminals sentenced to hard labor. In these surroundings they were sometimes kept for several weeks and then dispatched in batches to their "homes" which many of them never saw again. At the threshold of the prisons the people belonging to the "unprivileged" estates—the artisans were almost without exception members of the "burgher class"—had wooden handcuffs put on them....[1]

It is difficult to state accurately how many people were made to endure these tortures, inflicted on them without the due process of law. Some died in prison, pending their transportation. Those who could manage to scrape together a few pennies left for the Pale of Settlement at their own expense. The sums speedily collected by their coreligionists, though not inconsiderable, could do nothing more than rescue a number of the unfortunates from jail, convoy, and handcuffs. But what can there be done when thousands of human nests, lived in for so many years, are suddenly destroyed, when the catastrophe comes with the force of an avalanche so that even the Jewish heart which is open to sorrow cannot grasp the whole misfortune?....

Despite the winter cold, people hid themselves on cemeteries to avoid jail and transportation. Women were confined in railroad cars. There were many cases of expulsions of sick people who were brought to the railroad station in conveyances and carried into the cars on stretchers.... In those rare instances in which the police physician pronounced the transportation to be dangerous, the authorities insisted on the chronic character of the illness, and the sufferers were brought to the station in writhing pain, as the police could not well be expected to wait until the invalids were cured of their chronic ailments. Eye-witnesses will never forget one bitterly cold night in January, 1892. Crowds of Jews dressed in beggarly fashion, among them women, children, and old men, with remnants of their household belongings lying around them, filled the station of the Brest railroad. Threatened by police convoy and transportation prison and having failed to obtain a reprieve, they had made up their mind to leave, despite a temperature of thirty degrees below zero. Fate, it would seem, wanted to play a practical joke on them. At the representations of the police commissioner-in-chief, the governor-general of Moscow had ordered to stop the expulsions until the great colds had passed, but ... the order was not published until the expulsion had been carried out. In this way some 20,000 Jews who had lived in Moscow fifteen, twenty-five, and even forty years were forcibly removed to the Jewish Pale of Settlement.

[Footnote 1: Under the Russian law (compare Vol. I, p. 308, n. 2) burghers are subject to corporal punishment, whereas the higher estates, among them the merchants, enjoy immunity in this direction.]

3. EFFECT OF PROTESTS

All these horrors, which remind one of the expulsion from Spain in 1492, were passed over in complete silence by the Russian public press. The cringing and reactionary papers would not, and the liberal papers could not, report the exploits of the Russian Government in their war against the Jews. The liberal press was ordered by the Russian censor to refrain altogether from touching on the Jewish question. The only Russian-Jewish press organ which, defying the threats of the censor, had dared to fight against official Russian Judaeophobia, the Voskhod, had been suppressed already in March, before the promulgation of the Moscow expulsion edict, "for the extremely detrimental course pursued by it." A similar fate overtook the Novosti of St. Petersburg which had printed a couple of sympathetic articles on the Jews.

In this way the Government managed to gag the independent press on the eve of its surprise attack upon Moscow Jewry, so that everything could be carried out noiselessly, under the veil of a state secret. Fortunately, the foreign press managed to unveil the mystery. The Government of the United States, faced by a huge immigration tide from Russia, sent in June, 1891, two commissioners, Weber and Kempster, to that country. They visited Moscow at the height of the expulsion fever, and, travelling through the principal centers of the Pale of Settlement, gathered carefully sifted documentary evidence of what was being perpetrated upon the Jews in the Empire of the Tzar.

While decimating the Jews, the Russian Government was at the same time anxious that their cries of distress should not penetrate beyond the Russian border. Just about that time Russia was negotiating a foreign loan, in which the Rothschilds of Paris were expected to take a leading part, and found it rather inconvenient to stand forth in the eyes of Europe as the ghost of medieval Spain. It was this consideration which prompted the softened and ambiguous formulation of the Moscow expulsion decree and made the Government suppress systematically all mention of what happened afterwards.

Notwithstanding these efforts, the cries of distress were soon heard all over Europe. The Russian censorship had no power over the public opinion outside of Russia. The first Moscow refugees, who had reached Berlin, Paris, and London, reported what was going on at Moscow. Already in April, 1891, the European financial press began to comment on the fact that "the Jewish population of Russia is altogether irreplaceable in Russian commercial life, forming a substantial element which contributes to the prosperity of the country," and that, therefore, "the expulsion of the Jews must of necessity greatly alarm the owners of Russian securities who are interested in the economic progress of Russia." Soon afterwards it became known that Alphonse de Rothschild, the head of the great financial firm in Paris, refused to take a hand in floating the Russian loan of half a billion. This first protest of the financial king against the anti-Semitic policy of the Russian Government produced a sensation, and it was intensified by the fact that it was uttered in France at a time when the diplomats of both countries were preparing to celebrate the Franco-Russian alliance which was consummated a few months afterwards.

The expulsion from Moscow found a sympathetic echo on the other side of the Atlantic. President Harrison took occasion, in a message to Congress, to refer to the sufferings of the Jews and to the probable effects of the Russian expulsions upon America:

This Government has found occasion to express in a friendly spirit, but with much earnestness, to the Government of the Czar its serious concern because of the harsh measures now being enforced against the Hebrews in Russia. By the revival of anti-Semitic laws, long in abeyance, great numbers of those unfortunate people have been constrained to abandon their homes and leave the Empire by reason of the impossibility of finding subsistence within the Pale to which it is sought to confine them. The immigration of these people to the United States—many other countries being closed to them—is largely increasing, and is likely to assume proportions which may make it difficult to find homes and employment for them here and to seriously affect the labor market. It is estimated that over 1,000,000 will be forced from Russia within a few years. The Hebrew is never a beggar; he has always kept the law—life by toil—often under severe and oppressive restrictions. It is also true that no race, sect, or class has more fully cared for its own than the Hebrew race. But the sudden transfer of such a multitude under conditions that tend to strip them of their small accumulations and to depress their energies and courage is neither good for them nor for us.

The banishment, whether by direct decree or by not less certain indirect methods, of so large a number of men and women is not a local question. A decree to leave one country is in the nature of things an order to enter another—some other. This consideration, as well as the suggestion of humanity, furnishes ample ground for the remonstrances which we have presented to Russia; while our historic friendship for that Government cannot fail to give assurance that our representations are those of a sincere well-wisher.[1]

[Footnote 1: Third Annual Message to Congress by President Harrison, December 9, 1891, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Vol. IX, p. 188.]

The sentiments of the American people were voiced less guardedly in a resolution which was passed by the House of Representatives on July 21, 1892:

Resolved, That the American people, through their Senators and Representatives in Congress assembled, do hereby express sympathy for the Russian Hebrews in their present condition, and the hope that the Government of Russia, a power with which the United States has always been on terms of amity and good will, will mitigate as far as possible the severity of the laws and decrees issued respecting them, and the President is requested to use his good offices to notify the Government of Russia to mitigate the said laws and decrees. [1]

[Footnote 1: Congressional Record, Vol. 23, p. 6533.]

The highly-placed Jew-baiters of St. Petersburg were filled with rage, The Novoye Vremya emptied its invectives upon the Zhydovski financiers, referring to the refusal of Alphonse de Rothschild to participate in the Russian loan. Nevertheless, the Government found itself compelled to stem the tide of oppression for a short while.

We have already had occasion to point out that the Government had originally planned to reduce the Jewish element also in the city of St. Petersburg, whose head, the brutal Gresser, had manifested his attitude toward the Jews in a series of police circulars. Following upon the first raid of the Moscow police on the Jews, Gresser ordered his gendarmes to search at the St. Petersburg railroad stations for all Jewish fugitives from that city who might have ventured to flee to St. Petersburg, and to deport them immediately. In April there were persistent rumors afloat that the Government had decided to remove by degrees all Jews from St. Petersburg and thus make both Russian capitals judenrein. The financial blow from Paris cooled somewhat the ardor of the Jew-baiters on the shores of the Neva. The wholesale expulsions from St. Petersburg were postponed, and the Russian anti-Semites were forced to satisfy their cannibal appetite with the consumption of Moscow Jewry, whose annihilation was carried out systematically under the cover of bureaucratic secrecy.

4. POGROM INTERLUDES

Under the effect of the officially perpetrated "legal" pogroms little attention was paid to the street pogrom which occurred on September 29, 1891, in the city of Starodub, in the government of Chernigov, recalling the horrors of the eighties. Though caused by economic factors, the pogrom of Starodub assumed a religious coloring. The Russian merchants of that city had long been gnashing their teeth at their Jewish competitors. Led by a Russian fanatic, by the name of Gladkov, they forced a regulation through the local town-council barring all business on Sundays and Christian holidays. The regulation was directed against the Jews who refused to do business on the Sabbath and the Jewish holidays, and who would have been ruined had they also refrained from trading on Sundays and the numerous Greek-Orthodox holidays, thus remaining idle on twice as many days as the Christians. The Jews appealed to the governor of Chernigov to revoke or at least to mitigate the new regulation. The governor's decision fell in favor of the Jews who were allowed to keep their stores open on Christian holidays from noon-time until six o'clock in the evening. The reply of the local Jew-baiters took the form of a pogrom.

On Sunday, the day before Yom Kippur, when the Jews opened their stores for a few hours, a hired crowd of ruffians from among the local street mob fell upon the Jewish stores and began to destroy and loot whatever goods it could lay its hands on. The stores having been rapidly closed, the rioters invaded the residences of the Jews, destroying the property contained there and filling the streets with fragments of broken furniture and leathers from torn bedding. The plunderers were assisted by the peasants who had arrived from the adjacent villages. In the evening, a drunken mob, which had assembled on the market-place, laid fire to a number of Jewish stores and houses, inflicting on their owners a loss of many millions.

All this took place during the holy Yom Kippur eve. The Jews, who did not dare to worship in their synagogues or even to remain in their homes, hid themselves with their wives and children in the garrets and orchards or in the houses of strangers. Many Jews spent the night in a field outside the city, where, shivering from cold, they could watch the glare of the ghastly flames which destroyed all their belongings. The police, small in numbers, proved "powerless" against the huge hordes of plunderers and incendiaries. On the second day, the pogrom was over, the work of destruction having been duly accomplished. The subsequent judicial inquiry brought out the fact clearly that the pogrom had been engineered by Gladkov and his associates, a fact of which the local authorities could not have been ignorant. Gladkov fled from the city but returned subsequently, paying but a slight penalty for his monstrous crime.

It should be added, however, that the Government was greatly displeased with the reappearance of the terrible spectre of 1881, as it only tended to throw into bolder relief the policy of legal pogroms by which Western Europe was alarmed. As a matter of fact, already in October, the semi-official Grazhdanin had occasion to print the following news item:

Yesterday [October 15] the financial market [abroad] was marked by depression; our securities have fallen, owing to new rumors concerning alleged contemplated measures against the Jews.

Commenting upon this, the paper declared that these rumors were entirely unfounded, for the reason that "at the present time all our Government departments are weighed down with problems of first-rate national importance which brook no delay, [1] and they could scarcely find time to busy themselves with such matters as the Jewish question, which requires mature consideration and slow progress in action."

[Footnote 1: The paper had in mind the crop failures of that year and the famine which prevailed in consequence in the larger part of Russia.]

The subdued tone adopted by Count Meshcherski, the court journalist, was only partially in accord with the facts. He was right in stating that the terrible country-wide distress had compelled the deadly enemies of Judaism to pause in the execution of their entire program. But he forgot to add that the one clause of that program, the realization of which had already begun—the expulsion from Moscow—was being carried into effect with merciless cruelty. The huge emigration wave resulting from this expulsion threw upon the shores of Europe and America the victims of persecution who re-echoed the cries of distress from the land of the Tzars.

Soon afterwards a new surprise, without parallel in history, was sprung upon a baffled world: the Russian Government was negotiating with the Jewish philanthropist Baron Hirsch concerning the gradual removal of the three millions of its Jewish subjects from Russia to Argentina.



CHAPTER XXX

BARON HIRSCH'S EMIGRATION SCHEME AND UNRELIEVED SUFFERING

1. NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT

Towards the end of the eighties the plan of promoting Jewish emigration from Russia, which had been abandoned with the retirement of Count Ignatyev, was again looked upon favorably by the leading Government circles. The sentiments of the Tzar were expressed in a marginal note which he attached to the report of the governor of Podolia for the year 1888. The passage of the report in which it was pointed out that "the removal of the Jewish proletariat from the monarchy would be very desirable" was supplemented in the Tzar's handwriting by the words "and even very useful." In reply to the proposal of the governor of Odessa to deprive Jewish emigrants of the right to return to Russia, the Tzar answered with a decided "yes." The official Russian chronicler goes even so far as to confess "that it was part of the plan to stimulate the emigration of the Jews (as well as that of the German colonists) by a more rigorous enforcement of the military duty "—a design which, from the political point of view, may well be pronounced criminal and which was evidently at the bottom of the severe military fines imposed upon the Jews. The same open-hearted chronicler adds:

It may be easily understood how sympathetically the Government received the proposal of the Jewish Colonization Association in London, which had been founded by Baron de Hirsch in 1891, to remove, in the course of twenty-five years, 3,250,000 Jews from Russia. [1]

[Footnote 1: This figure represents the official estimate of the number of Russian Jews. In other words, the Government hoped to get rid of all Jews.]

The name of Maurice de Hirsch was not unknown to the Russian Government. For a few years previously it had had occasion to carry on negotiations with him, with results of which it had scant reason to boast. This great German-Jewish philanthropist, who was resolved to spend hundreds of millions on the economic and agricultural advancement of his co-religionists in Eastern Europe, had donated in 1888 fifty million francs for the purpose of establishing in Russia arts and crafts schools, as well as workshops and agricultural farms for the Jews. It was natural for him to assume that the Russian Government would only be too glad to accept this enormous contribution which was bound to stimulate productive labor in the country and raise the welfare of its destitute masses. But he had forgotten that the benefits expected from the fund would accrue to the Jewish proletariat, which, according to the catechism of Jew-hatred, was to be "removed from the monarchy." The stipulation made by the Russian Government to the representatives of Baron Hirsch was entirely unacceptable: it insisted that the money should not be handed over to Jewish public agencies but to the Russian Government which would expend it as it saw fit. Somebody conceived the shameful idea, which was accepted by the representatives of Baron Hirsch, of propitiating Pobyedonostzev by a gift of a million francs for the needs of his pet institution, the Greek-Orthodox parochial schools. The "gift" was accepted, but Hirsch's proposal was declined. Thus it came about that the Russian Jews were deprived of a network of model schools and educational establishments, while a million of Jewish money went to swell the number of the ecclesiastic Russian schools which imbued the Russian masses with crass ignorance and anti-Semitic prejudices. The Hirsch millions, originally intended for Russia, went partly towards the establishment of Jewish schools in Galicia, a work which met with every possible encouragement from the Austrian Government.

The generous Jewish philanthropist now realized that the assistance he was anxious to render to his Russian coreligionists could not take the form of improving their condition in their own country but rather that of settling them outside of it—by organizing the emigration movement. Hirsch's attention was called to the fact that, beginning with 1889, several groups of Russian Jews had settled in Argentina and, after incredible hardships, had succeeded in establishing there several agricultural colonies. The baron sent an expedition to Argentina, under the direction of Professor Loewenthal, an authority on hygiene, for the purpose of investigating the country and finding out the places fit for colonization. The expedition returned in March, 1891, and Hirsch decided to begin with the purchase of land in Argentina, in accordance with the recommendations of the expedition.

This happened at the very moment when the Moscow catastrophe had broken out, resulting in a panicky flight from "Russia to North and South America, and partly to Palestine. Baron Hirsch decided that it was his first duty to regulate the emigration movement from Russia, and he made another attempt to enter into negotiations with the Russian Government. With this end in view he sent his representative to St. Petersburg, the Englishman Arnold White, a Member of Parliament, belonging to the parliamentary anti-alien group, who was opposed to foreign immigration into England, on the ground of its harmful effect upon the interests of the native workingmen. Simultaneously White was commissioned to travel through the Pale of Settlement and find out whether it would be possible to obtain there an element fit for agricultural colonization in Argentina.

White arrived in St. Petersburg in May and was received by Pobyedonostzev and several Ministers. The martyrdom of the Moscow Jews was then at its height. Shouts of indignation were ringing through the air of Europe and America, protesting against the barbarism of the Russian Government, and the latter was infuriated both by these protests protests and the recent refusal of Rothschild to participate in the Russian loan. The high dignitaries of St. Petersburg who had been disturbed in their work of Jew-baiting by the outcry of the civilized world gave full vent to their hatred in their conversations with Baron Hirsch's deputy. White reported afterwards that the functionaries of St. Petersburg had painted to him the Russian Jew as "a compound of thief and usurer." Pobyedonostzev delivered himself of the following malicious observation: "The Jew is a parasite. Remove him from the living organism in which and and on which he exists and put this parasite on a rock—and he will die." While thus justifying before the distinguished foreigner their system of destroying the five million Jewish "parasites," the Russian Ministers were nevertheless glad to lend a helping hand in removing them from Russia, on condition that in the course of twelve years a large part of the Jews should be transferred from the country—in the confidential talks with White three million emigrants were mentioned as the proposed figure. White was furnished with letters of recommendation from Pobyedonostzev and the Minister of the Interior to the highest officials in the provinces, whither the London delegate betook himself to get acquainted with the living export material. He visited Moscow, Kiev, Berdychev, Odessa, Kherson, and the Jewish agricultural colonies in South Russia.