fanatic of uniformity. Combining in himself the qualities of jurist,
theologian, and scholastic, he is too barren in mental powers to master
the conception of a state which should take into account any diversity
of creed or race. Above all, however, any toleration would undermine the
three pillars upon which alone his conception of the Russian empire can
rest--autocracy, orthodoxy, and Russianism. For the preservation of this
Asiatic, uniform, absolutist régime, or, better, of the omnipotence of
hierarchy, it is above all necessary to keep the people in absolute
subjection. This, again, is possible only when every chance of learning
anything else than their own condition is closed to them. A prisoner who
endangered the spirit of blind obedience by a tendency to dispute orders
could not be tolerated in a prison. As little can the great Russian
prison state endure men who might lead the prisoner to think whether he
must be absolutely a prisoner. Of such thoughts, however, the Jews, who
are subject to special taxation, are suspected above all others. Their
criminality is certainly of the smallest; they are the most punctilious
of tax-payers, and, moreover, the best-conducted citizens in the world.
But they are--Heaven knows why--perhaps because of their
Talmudic-dialectic occupation, perhaps also because as pariahs they have
little cause to be enthusiastic over the ruling order--they are
inexorably subtle critics of all existing things, and so could easily
upset the simple minds of the Russian lower classes. That is the chief
reason why they are surrounded by a cordon of plagues. The paternal
precaution of the Russian government is of course not much wiser than
the conviction so many mothers entertain of the unshaken faith of their
children in the story that the stork brought the baby. Quite without
Jewish criticism the Russian peasant, under the never-resting lash of
hunger, begins to think and to grumble; and although his unruly
sentiments express themselves chiefly in the specifically Russian form
of the organization of religious sects, nevertheless each new sectarian
shows a new desertion from Pobyedonostzev's ideal of a Russian subject.
Upon the organization of sects, however, the Jews have of course no
direct influence whatever.
The third cause of the persecution of the Jews is to be found in the
Satanic brain of Plehve, who wishes to furnish to the humane Czar, and
perhaps still more to the Czaritza, who has western European ways of
thinking, an indication that without the Jews there would be no
opposition whatever in Russia. For this purpose he not only has the Jews
entered more strictly on the police-registers, if they are guilty of any
political offence, such as being present in a forbidden assemblage, but
he also directly provokes them, in order to drive them into the ranks of
the revolutionaries and thereby to compromise the latter. In Hungary and
Bohemia ritual murder cases were incited in order to give the Jews a
lesson to remember, and to make them national--_i. e._, more Magyar or
Czechic--in feeling, since they stubbornly persisted in remaining
German. In Russia, however, they are driven into the camp of the
revolutionaries, in order to extirpate the former and to cast suspicion
upon the latter. Nevertheless, some governors, who in other respects
readily comply with the directions given from above, yet dare to step in
in behalf of the Jews, contrary to the measures appointed by higher
authorities, as for example, Prince Urussoff, governor of Bessarabia,
who is to be thanked that in spite of all the efforts of Krushevan, the
creature of Plehve, no outbreaks of the mob against the Jews took place
in Kishinef recently.
As personal but nevertheless effectual causes of the persecution of the
Jews, the anti-Semitism of the dowager Empress and of the Grand-Duke
Sergius, governor-general of Moscow, must be mentioned. Respectively
brother and wife of Alexander III., they conservatively hold to his
opinions. This unfortunate and narrow-minded man had been persuaded by
conscience-smitten persons that Jewish army-contractors were the cause
of the defeat of the Russians in the Turkish war; and it was as hard to
get an idea out of his head as to get one in. The inclination of the
Grand-Duke Sergius to torture human beings amounts to a disease. He can
satisfy it most easily upon the defenceless Jews.
The final cause of the persecution of the Jews, and one which is
regarded by many people as the weightiest, is the certain income which
legislation against the Jews means for every unscrupulous official.
Most of the laws passed against the Jews are quite impossible of
execution, or are executed only in a very imperfect way, thanks to the
corruptibility of the Russian officials. "Absolutism palliated by
corruption"--this bitter saying fits the case of the Jews best. Yet what
relieves the situation for them in a certain way renders it worse for
them in another. It certainly is a question whether the ransom-money of
one generation will not become the purchase-money of the next. The
Russian bureaucracy will not be willing to renounce its income from
bribes and extortions. Thus it prevents all legislative decrees in favor
of the Jews. These poorly paid, much feared, but still despised
officials are, in the inclined plane of their evil consciences, quite as
much victims of the system as the Jews, but in a different way. We are
all human, whether Christian or Jew, and in the long run, under the
operation of the most depraved of all rules, neither the one nor the
other can keep himself pure. The worst thing that has happened to the
Jews, however, is not, as can well be understood, an occasional "pogrom"
(riot), in which, to the indignation of all civilized mankind,
defenceless people are slain and plundered by command of the
authorities. The worst is the restriction to particular zones and to
particular callings. That is systematic massacre, a deliberate policy of
destruction and extirpation. Even if the misery of the ghetto has,
thanks to the strict abstemiousness of the Jews, failed as yet to kill
them in the way that the peasantry, weakened by alcoholism, are killed
in the famine provinces, nevertheless the moral result is frightful.
Even the iron family morality of the Jews is shaken in the western
governments. A deplorable percentage of prostitutes is made up of
Jewesses. Experience shows that sexual deprivation is the beginning of
every other form of degeneration. Moreover, the matter does not
generally end with the individual who sinks into prostitution. The
ethical ideas of such a morally defective person spread contagion in a
wide circle. Families are broken up, or unchastity makes its way into
them. The whole conception of life becomes different when the chastity
of women becomes an article of trade or an object of ironical
scepticism. Still, in comparison with their environment even these Jews
may be called chaste, for they are merely stained by the barbarism of
the Orient. But it is, nevertheless, monstrous that in a Christian
country the hard-won sexual morality of a part of the population, once
gained, must be endangered only because malevolent politics will have it
so. The moral purity of the Jews and of the Teutonic races has redeemed
the world from the deep depravity of the Roman decadence. Now a
Christian state policy destroys a part of the iron stability of this
moral acquisition of humanity.
It is self-evident that whoever can tries to free himself from the
misery of the ghetto. Even Russian legislation has left some small
gates open, and through these the struggling Jews squeeze themselves
with every exertion of strength and cunning. Then there ensues a battle
between brutality and artfulness--one not lacking in elements of humor.
The authorities, hostile to the Jews, try of course to prevent too many
of them from escaping from the ghetto and from settling in cities which
it is desired to keep as free from Jews as possible. The Jews, however,
try again and again to evade the prohibitions and the illegally
interpreted ordinances and to settle where there is a possibility of a
means of livelihood. Such cities are, for example, St. Petersburg and
Moscow. The martyrdom which Jews and Jewesses undergo in order to gain
the right to stay in these cities borders on the tragic. A non-resident
Jewess is not allowed to study in these places, but may live there as a
prostitute. An innocent young girl wished to have herself registered as
a prostitute, so that she might attend the university, never suspecting
what formalities she would have to undergo in consequence. In course of
the medical examination, however, the circumstances of the case were
immediately discovered, and the young girl was punished for the
attempted deception and sent away.
A well-known Orientalist, a man of seventy years, had business to
execute in Moscow which he did not succeed in finishing before night. No
hotel would have taken him in; and he could not endanger any of his
friends, for if in the frequent nocturnal rangings of the police in
Jewish dwellings a Jewish guest without a passport should be taken, the
host would lose his right of residence. In his difficulty the old man
asked a railroad official how he could pass the icy-cold night. The man
gave him the good advice that he should seek out the only place where a
man is permitted to take a room and spend the night without a
passport--a brothel. Accordingly, this man of seventy, in order not to
freeze, was obliged to pass the night in a room with a drunken
prostitute, and sat until morning in a chair, praying. The man who
related these facts to me was a Russian author widely known and honored.
A Jew who for five years has paid the taxes of the first guild in a
municipality of the pale receives permission to leave the pale and
settle elsewhere. He must, however, gain permission for each member of
his family through the strictest formalities. Woe to him if a child has
been born to him during that time! It cannot qualify, and it may easily
happen that the father must return to the pale. A Jewish merchant of the
first guild in Moscow tried to obtain permission to send such a child to
school. Admission was refused, because he did not possess the necessary
papers. The father appealed to the senate in St. Petersburg, and asked
for provisional permission for attendance of his child at school until
the passing of a judgment in that place. The minister of justice,
Muraviev, however, entered a protest against this. Therefore the father
was obliged either to employ private tutors or to let the child grow up
without instruction.
Whoever works as assistant to a dentist, and has obtained a certificate,
may open an office for himself. The only requirement for this is that it
shall be well fitted up and that nobody shall sleep in it. This
facilitation is granted because of the fact that in Russia there is a
great lack of dentists. Yet a Jewish dentist went to a lawyer and
complained that he had fitted up his office and had handed in to the
police his request for leave to practise. The police waited three
months, then came and explained that, since he had not practised his
profession for three months, he must immediately leave Moscow. He was
obliged to leave his house immediately, and wander about all night,
because he could nowhere find lodging.
Another Jewish dentist, a woman, wished to take her examination. A
certificate was demanded testifying to her political blamelessness. When
she tried to obtain this it was refused her, since she had no right of
residence there, and therefore could not demand a certificate!
The Jews meet these tricks of the authorities with tricks of their own.
They pay for a dentist's certificate, fit up an office, and then go into
trade in bed-feathers or calico. The police official who wishes to prove
whether the dentist's profession is really practised has some ruble
notes slipped into his hand. Very recently the Jews have found a means
to become known as Christians without baptism, which they shun.
Good-natured priests, who receive nothing at all for a baptism but a
large price for a written declaration that X. Y. is an orthodox
Christian, draw up such declarations. The unbaptized Hebrew comes as an
orthodox Christian to Great Russia and carries on business, while the
helpful priest receives a little income from him.
In general, the Jew must be able to pay; in that case life is not hard
for him in Russia, where, as I have said, no anti-Semitic feeling
whatever exists among the people, and the national characteristics of
good-nature, of heartiness, helpfulness, and politeness make life easy
and pleasant. But woe to the poor wretch who cannot pay at every step!
Woe to the struggler who wishes to better his lot! Woe to the lover of
justice who dares to fight for his rights or even for the public
welfare! One of the special laws for the Jews is that any one may
trample him and injure him unpunished. Of all the unfortunate subjects
of the Czar, he is the most unfortunate. His intelligence, his sense of
justice are offences against the sacred order of things, which demands
stupidity and obedience. Thus exists the entirely incomprehensible
condition that a great realm steers towards inevitable economic ruin for
lack of economic intelligence, while it possesses five million born
financiers, who in the lifetime of a man could change Russia into an
economic world-power.
XVII
THE JEWISH QUESTION
A visit to Russia offers opportunity for an extremely interesting study.
One may become acquainted with a rapid succession of towns where the
population is almost entirely Jewish, or half Jewish, or to a large
extent Jewish, and also with others in which residence is practically
prohibited to Jews, which, therefore, to speak in anti-Semitic jargon,
are almost "clean of Jews." In western Europe there is neither the one
nor the other. It would be strange, indeed, if such ethnologically
unique conditions offered to the observant spectator no disclosures
which he seeks elsewhere in vain. In fact, I made in the cities free of
Jews an observation which seems to me well worth imparting. The Jewish
problem is nothing but a problem of relative overpopulation. The Jews
are unendurable only where they are forced to compete with each other.
I made this observation in the following way: The Jewish proletarians of
Poland impressed me as extremely repulsive. Their laziness, their filth,
their craftiness, their perpetual readiness to cheat cannot help but
fill the western European with very painful feelings and unedifying
thoughts, in spite of all the teachings of history and all desire to be
just. The evil wish arises that in some painless way the world might be
rid of these disagreeable objects, or the equally inhuman thought that
it would really be no great pity if this part of the Polish population
did not exist at all. One is ashamed of such thoughts; nevertheless,
that does not rid one's mind of them. Either we must renounce our ideas
of cleanliness and honesty or find a great part of the Eastern Hebrews
altogether unpleasant. Since the former is impossible, the latter will
always be the case. Comparison with the still dirtier, still more
immoral, still more neglected Polish proletariat does not drive away
these thoughts. The Jew has, besides his filth and his craftiness in
business, something else which calls to mind a nobility of civilization,
so that he cannot be confused with any chance "lazzarone" or vagabond.
He is not himself, but the caricature of a man of culture, and as such
he produces an irritating effect.
In the cities free of Jews all this suddenly disappears. The Jews whom
one has opportunity to meet there, well educated merchants of the first
guild, incorporated artisans, and descendants of the Jewish soldiers of
Nicholas I., are of quite another caliber from their Polish brothers.
They are in no way to be distinguished from the Russians. One is
continually prone to take the bearded Russian driver or merchant for a
Jew and the intelligently keen Jew for a European. Then one learns that
these Jewish lawyers, physicians, merchants, and artisans are treated by
the Russians themselves as their equals in every respect; indeed, that
the Jews enjoy a certain priority as being relatively more honest in
their dealings. On the contrary, the Russians, when large numbers of
them follow a single calling, as, say, in the great mercantile houses or
the ranks of trade, show all the qualities which, to our Western minds,
are stamped as specifically Jewish. They are outrageously obtrusive, and
unreliable to the point of open deception. The German Hanse towns
strictly forbade their merchants to give Russian Jews goods on credit,
to lend them money, or to borrow from them, under penalty of immediate
punishment.[1] In making the smallest purchase one finds that there is
no question of a mercantile reality; that there is no fixed price, no
keeping one's word, nothing that to us in the West has long seemed a
matter of course. Just as in the Orient the Spanish Jews seem much more
reliable and sterling than the rascally Greeks and Armenians, the Jews,
when thinly scattered, gain by comparison with the native Russians. Now
the Russian Jew is no Spaniard, with a proud Western past. He is
altogether identical with the Polish Jew. His higher development cannot
be accounted for by any ethnological difference. It is simply that under
quite different economic conditions of existence he has become a quite
different person. Dr. Polyakoff, of Moscow, is, in fact, another man
from, say, his grandfather, Pollak, of Poland.
With these facts we now approach the real problem. The overcrowding of a
calling engenders a competition in squalor among Christians as well as
Jews, Aryans as well as Semites. The Jews, however, live in overcrowded
callings all over the world, obeying historic laws of adaptation even
where other callings, not overcrowded, are not closed to them. Hence we
have the disagreeable phenomenon of the handing over of certain
vocations to the Jews, which means nothing else than the injury of these
callings by the trickery of the competition of squalor. Where no fetters
are placed on the economic life, the healthy organism, in time,
overcomes these local inflammations, as we may designate, by an
expression taken from pathology, the influx of an abnormal number of
cells of a certain sort to a place not intended for them. The crowding
of the callings until self-support is impossible, the sinking of
endurance in the overcrowded vocation, lead to a flowing off of the
superfluous elements, and finally the whole organism has overcome the
crisis of assimilation by forcing each particle where it is economically
most valuable. In Germany the adjustment cannot be far away. The fact
of the unheard-of economic growth during the past fifteen years, and the
unusual increase of prosperity in all branches, show at least that
Germany in its bare fifty years of Jewish emancipation has been in no
way injured economically.
In Russia, also, the most expedient thing would evidently be simply to
declare the removal of all restrictive laws, and to open to the Jews the
interior of the country, as well as all occupations which they might
wish to enter. The blessing to Russia would be immense, for the Jews, as
thinking men and members of a race of ancient civilization, would bring
to the Russian nation just what it lacks, an intelligent middle class
capable of culture. The percentage of Jews would not be at all too high
for Russia to carry without danger to the national character of society.
To about one hundred and thirty million Russians there are about five
million Jews--that is, barely four per cent. The "Jew-free" cities of
Moscow and St. Petersburg show approximately this proportion, without
the Jews being perceptible there. (It must be admitted that one of the
comforts of these cities is that they are not, like Warsaw, for
instance, overwhelmed with greasy, caftaned Jews.) If it could be
brought about, therefore, that the Jews could be scattered throughout
the whole kingdom in the ratio of four per cent., it would be an
incalculable gain for all parties, and mankind would be rid of a problem
which threatens the condition of our ethics and humanity the more the
longer it exists.
Nevertheless, this is not to be thought of as an immediate possibility.
The Russian government is not in the least gifted with magnanimity and
farsighted patience, though the contrary is true of the Russian people,
who are entirely free from anti-Semitic prejudice. For this reason any
enlargement of Jewish rights of residence and vocation is prevented by
the pointing out of the infection which would then threaten all cities
and all lucrative occupations. The Jewish question will long remain
unsolved, for whom could the Russian officials bleed if not the
tormented, worried, defenceless Jews?
FOOTNOTE:
[1] _Book of Documents of Esthonia, Livonia, and Courland_, Reval,
1852-64, Nos. 576-588, and _Documentary Business of the Origin of the
German Hanse_, Hamburg, 1830, ii., No. ix., p. 27; both cited in Lanin
_Russian Characteristics_, German edition, i., 142.
XVIII
PLEHVE
In the winter of 1881 there took place in Cracow one of those great
socialistic trials with which in those days it was hoped in Austria to
smother the socialistic movements which were imported by unscrupulous
agitators. The trial is known in the annals of social-democracy as the
proceedings against Warnynski and his accomplices. Thirty-five men were
indicted, among them twenty Russians from Volhynia, mostly students of
the Polytechnic Institute in St. Petersburg, who had been arrested in
the work of agitation in Galicia. The prisoners noticed during the
proceedings that they were conducted one at a time, under one pretext or
another, out through a special door of the courtroom, and they could
discover no explanation of this queer course of action. Finally, one of
them, in passing through the door, found the reason. It was a double
door provided with a deep niche. In this niche was a Russian functionary
acting as a voluntary menial to the Austrian police, and at the same
time as a spy in the Russian service, who took this opportunity of
taking cognizance of his own people among those who were led by. Of
course the matter was not closed without the gravest insults to those
caught, who could only be protected against further abuse by the court
constabulary. And this police devotee, who showed such zeal in putting
down international revolution, was no one else than the present
all-powerful figure in Russia, his excellency the minister of the
interior, M. von Plehve, at that time states-attorney in Warsaw. With
this bit of sleuthing, which the Poles very well remember to this day,
this fortune-favored statesman made his début in the world outside of
Russia. He has remained true to his character. He is to-day, at the head
of the greatest state in the world, nothing else but the greatest police
spy in the world. His politics are stamped with all the characteristics
of a police origin, police in the Machiavellian sense--_i. e._, crime in
the service of order. In all Russia I spoke to no one who would have
chosen for the description of Plehve's character any other expressions
than those which serve for the delineation of the lowest level of moral
existence. I shall here try to make a sketch of Plehve in accordance
with the statements about him which were made to me with perfectly
astonishing unanimity.