THE PALE OF SETTLEMENT (1804-1882)
Gradually the provinces along the western frontier, stretching south
from Riga to the territories bordering on the Black Sea, became marked
off as a Pale of Settlement. Within these regions all the Jews of the
Empire were to be domiciled; saving merchants, bankers, scientists, and
eminent Hebrews whose wealth or accomplishments would outweigh in the
selfish plans of domestic government the anti-Semitic feeling which
appealed to the despotic expediency of exceptional laws. Inside this
economic Siberia, the poorer Jews would have their chances of employment
greatly diminished, while the struggle for existence must become by
degrees a contest between a growing population and a narrower area of
industrial opportunity.
Unnatural social and economic conditions necessarily engender
correlative abuses and evils. Poverty, illegal pursuits, the smuggling
and sale of liquor, evasion of coercive laws, bribery and corruption,
protested against the causes which begot them, until finally an Imperial
Commission had to be appointed to inquire into and report upon the
measures necessary to remedy this state of things. This Commission
issued its report in 1812. The report is so tersely summarised in Prince
Demidoff’s book, and the matters dealt with are so intimately connected
with the inherited injustices of the Russian Jew, that I cannot forbear
adding the following extract to this brief historic sketch of
anti-Semitic legislation and its results:
“Firstly, the Commission was of opinion that the impossibility of
carrying out the provisions of paragraph 34 of the Law of 1804 ‘did not
arise from the obstinacy of the Jews and remissness of the authorities,
but from the natural and political condition of those provinces to
which residence of the Jews is restricted.’ The report then states that
while the Jews retained their political independence and lived in their
own country, they were an agricultural people. Subsequently, when they
were dispersed over the whole world and everywhere subjected to the
bitterest persecution, unrecognised as regular citizens of the countries
in which they were domiciled, agriculture became to them an inaccessible
pursuit. They were thus necessarily obliged to have recourse to trade as
the sole means of occupation according with their new condition of life.
“In Poland the Jews were so numerous that the pursuit of trade alone was
insufficient for their subsistence. On the one hand, the Polish
landlords, owing to constant wars and internal strife, were not able to
manage their own estates in a proper manner. They were, therefore,
obliged to seek special means for increasing the revenue of their
properties, for instance, by distilling brandy, lease of farms, etc.
The correlation of these two causes led to the utilisation of the Jews
by the landed proprietors in their domestic concerns. The Jews became
indispensable to the landed proprietors, and as they did not possess the
right to acquire land and engage in agriculture, they were obliged,
while residing in villages, to confine themselves to a retail sale of
spirits as a main pursuit.
“When White Russia was annexed to Russia, the Russian Government
recognised all the previously existing rights of the Jews. The ukase of
the Senate of 1786 confirmed their right of residence in provincial
districts, and their faculty of holding estates on lease. The immediate
object of this law was the suppression of drunkenness among the rural
population. The distillation of brandy, however, is a privilege of all
landed proprietors, and forms a necessary adjunct to the process of
agriculture. With the departure [expulsion from villages] of the Jews
the retail sale of spirits would be carried on by tapsters of the
native rural class, so that drunkenness would not diminish, but only a
decrease would take place in the number of agriculturists. A peasant had
previously been in the habit of selling his corn on the spot to a Jew,
but now he was obliged to proceed to the nearest town, at a loss in time
and labour, to sell his produce to a Jew, and the money realised he
would still spend on brandy, bought from the same Jew. The same result
would ensue in the purchase by the peasant of articles required by him,
such as iron, salt, etc.
“The Commission also found it unadvisable to allow the Jews to reside in
villages under the prohibition of their not engaging in the retail sale
of brandy; this opinion being founded on the following consideration:
The Jews who inhabit the villages belong to the poorest class, and if
not allowed to sell spirits they would be deprived of all means of
subsistence. The poverty of the peasantry of White Russia is not caused
by the Jews, and this is proved by the fact that there are also many
Jews in the southwestern provinces, yet the peasantry there are in a
more prosperous condition than those populating White Russia. So long as
the landlords of this latter region continue to adhere to their present
system of working their estates, which encourages drunkenness, the evil
will spread, be the village tapster who he may, either Jew or peasant.
This is confirmed by the example of the provinces of Petersburg,
Livonia, and Esthonia, where there are no Jews and yet drunkenness is
very prevalent.
“Should the Government adopt the proper measures for making the sale of
brandy less lucrative, the Jews would be obliged to turn to other
pursuits, perhaps to those of husbandry, especially if they are accorded
the right of purchasing land. If the Jews be interdicted to sell brandy
such sale would be carried on by the peasants, who, in order to increase
their landlord’s revenue, will be obliged to do the same as the Jews.
It should also be borne in mind that the Jews, with all their aptitude
and experience in matters relating to the sale of spirits, never
enriched themselves by this calling, but only earned enough for their
subsistence. It would also be impossible to convert all Jews into
traders and artisans; firstly, because they would not find sufficient
occupation in the towns and hamlets, where there is no demand for a
great supply of services of this kind; and secondly, because great
injury would be inflicted on those Jews who are unable to find
alternative sources of livelihood. As a matter of fact the retail sale
of spirits in the western provinces is only carried on by those Jews who
are unable to find any other means of existence. The Jews adhere to
their present occupations because, owing to the want of means, the
Government is unable to effect any radical change in their condition.
Lastly, the Commission arrived at the conclusion that it was necessary
to rescind entirely paragraph 34 of the Law of 1804.”
This paragraph of the law thus cited ordered the removal of all Jews
from villages and hamlets into the towns.
The recommendation of the Commission was not acted upon. On the
contrary, the law of 1804 was continued. Though not vigorously enforced
it remained as a potential agency for rendering residence of employment
outside the Pale a source of insecurity to the Jews, and a means by
which police, business rivals, and others could at any time put the
ukase of expulsion in operation against them. Trading communities were
most active in appealing for the application of this law. Petitions
calling for expulsion from cities and towns in which Jews were rival
workers and dealers are constantly recurring features of the tyranny,
official and commercial, to which they were subjected during the next
half-century.
General Levashoff, Governor of Kiev, reporting to the Government in
1833 upon a petition asking for the banishment of all the Jews from that
important city, laid bare the motives and condemned the selfish purpose
of the petitioners, in honestly saying:
“It is desirable on the ground of public utility to allow the Jews to
remain in Kiev, where, by the simplicity and moderation of their mode of
life, they are able to sell commodities at a cheap rate. It may
positively be asserted that their expulsion would not only lead to an
enhancement of prices of many products and articles, but that it will
not be possible to obtain these at all. Under these circumstances the
interests of the mass of the inhabitants must be preferred to the
personal advantages which the Christian trading class would derive by
the ejection of the Jews.”[1]
Opposed in cities and towns in this manner, after being turned out of
country districts in obedience to a similar spirit, the authors of
these coercion laws began to find it a serious administrative problem
what to do with subjects for whose systematic oppression they were alone
responsible. Agricultural colonies were planned in Cherson (Southwestern
Russia) and even in Siberia, to which Jews were induced to go in order
to escape from the intolerable hardships of incessant wrong. Failure
followed these benevolent designs of the Government; not from the
reluctance or incapacity of the migrating Jews to work the land, but
owing to the corruption and incompetence of officials who were charged
with the superintendence of these colonies. Money advanced for the
building of dwellings and purchase of stock was disbursed in the
erection of unsuitable houses, in most unsanitary places, and in other
wasteful and ignorant directions. Great hardships were thus entailed
upon the unfortunate victims of this crass official stupidity; a cruelty
of deliberate neglect adding, in the instances of the migrations to
Siberia, its penalties of suffering and death to the bitter
disappointments and the blasting of hopes caused by the callous
miscarriage of the well-meant enterprise of the Government by its
blundering officials.
One unexpected good result followed both to Russia and to large numbers
of Jews by the failure of these contemplated agricultural settlements in
the Governments of Cherson and Ekaterinoslav; where, at a later time,
similar colonies grew and flourished. Odessa, to-day the richest and
busiest maritime city of the Empire, owes its prosperity and progress
largely to Jewish enterprise. Both the forced and voluntary migration
from the north to the south of the Pale brought this resourceful race
near where they were to find an outlet in a young and rising commercial
centre for qualities essential to its rapid development which Russians
do not themselves possess in any marked degree,--commercial genius. The
city and its varied opportunities attracted both those who succeeded and
those who had obtained no fair chance of thriving as agriculturists,
and to-day over two hundred thousand of the Jewish population of Odessa
embrace the wealthiest and most enterprising bankers, merchants,
brokers, contractors, and business men of the Empire.
From the codification of the ukases and laws relating to Jews in 1835,
down to the Ignatieff or “May Laws” of 1882, the treatment of the Jews,
as regulated by these measures, is consistent with their experience as
already briefly described. In some of these laws, Jews would appear from
the text to be on a footing of theoretic equality with other citizens,
while again special provisions are made to limit the application of
these general rights to residence within the selected sphere of
domicile, and to be further curtailed within this area, in the light and
meaning of the law of 1804. There is a bewildering mass and maze of
contradictory purpose in this code of special laws which no summary can
hope intelligently to disentangle. It is obvious, however, that the
vigour of direct persecution is meant to be modified to the extent of
promoting the utilities of the State by Jewish abilities, while
reserving all the powers necessary to dispense with the objectionable
artisan, trader, or mechanic when his services or example are no longer
needed in hamlet or village. This is one of the most objectionable
features of indefensible laws. It wears a character of state meanness
which can well compare in odious rivalry with the methods and morals of
Jewish usury. The spirit of fair play is totally absent from regulations
which give the state, by virtue of permissive coercion, the benefits of
subjects’ services which are ultimately repaid in penalties and
expulsion.
In 1843 the Pale of Settlement was further contracted by a law
forbidding Jews to reside within a distance of fifty versts (about
thirty-three miles) of the Austrian or German frontiers. The necessity
for this regulation was said to be the smuggling operations of the Jews.
They probably excelled in this as in other illegal practices, to which
they were driven on being denied the chances of living by more reputable
means. The injustice of punishing thousands of families who had resided
in these frontier districts for generations, for the wrongdoing of a few
people, would not be calculated to lessen the feeling of settled
disloyalty which persistent oppression must inevitably create in the
minds of an intellectual race. And, these accumulating measures of an
insensate injustice are now responsible for the existence of four
millions of disaffected subjects adjacent to the frontiers of Russia’s
two most formidable rival powers, Germany and Austro-Hungary. The Pale
of Settlement has thus become, by the _lex talionis_ of a poetic
justice, the most vulnerable part of the Russian Empire. It is not alone
the seed-bed and centre of Socialism, born of persecution, it is a
military weakness well measured and noted in the army bureaus of Berlin
and Vienna.
Under the Emperor Alexander II., the emancipator of the serfs, the Jews
obtained a respite from many of the most oppressive and vexatious of the
penal ukases. Schools hitherto closed to Hebrew children were thrown
open to their admission. Restrictions upon attendance at fairs in the
interior were removed, while in many other respects the original plan
and purpose of the Pale were forgotten, and the dawn of happier days
began to rise above the troubled and darkened horizon of the Russian
Jew. The freedom of the peasants gave rise to the hope that the same
liberal-minded Tsar would break the bonds of his Semitic subjects, when
there fell upon all this promise of brighter times the bolt of Nihilist
vengeance, in the assassination of the best of Russia’s rulers. The
abominable deed, which shocked the world by its terrible character and
results, shattered the hopes of Hebrew emancipation, and led to the
savage onslaught which was made upon the objects of peasant fury in 1881
and 1882, in many parts of the Empire.
Beyond doubt there were some Jews concerned in Nihilist plots. The man
who attempted to kill General Loris Melikoff was of Jewish blood. The
women Lewinsohn and Helfman, who were sent to Siberia for complicity in
murder conspiracies, were Jewesses, while several prominent Nihilists
were believed to be half Hebrew in parentage. But the history of human
oppression always explains, even where it may not justify, deeds of
savage political vengeance. No race can be denied the ordinary
franchises of personal freedom--the right to live secure from the insult
and intrusion of a tyrannical law, and the unfair infliction of
exceptional burdens--without rousing into dangerous activity passions
which appeal to the wild impulse of revenge. The assassination of
Alexander II. had nothing to do with the coercion of the Jews. He was
not their enemy; he was their friend. But the revolutionary spirit
which germinates under despotic rule is generally blind in selecting the
objects of its unreasoning fury; just as many Governments are deaf to
the pleadings of an enlightened justice in the rule of a country until
the shock of some desperate deed compels them to think of that which, if
listened to in time, would protect both subjects and monarchs from the
fear and consequences of criminal acts. If some Jews were guilty
accomplices in the murder of a humane Emperor, so were Russians. And it
would have been no greater wrong to punish guiltless peasants for the
acts of the Nihilists than to wreak vengeance upon equally innocent
Jews.
In Warsaw, Kiev, Rostov, and elsewhere Jews were killed, their houses
wrecked, and their shops looted. Outrages occurred throughout the whole
Pale of Settlement, and thousands of terrified people fled across the
frontiers into Germany, Bohemia, and Roumania. These outbreaks occurred
near the end of 1881 and early in the following year and, like the
recent massacres in Bessarabia, aroused a widespread expression of
sympathy in Europe and America for the hapless objects of Russian
popular fury. Manifestations of international feeling greatly impressed
the Tsar’s Government, and earnest efforts appeared to have been made to
curb the lawless conduct of the mobs. This action, however, instead of
being a promise of better things, turned out to be but a prelude to
sterner measures than ever against the victims of exceptional laws.
On the 3d of May, 1882, General Ignatieff obtained the Emperor’s
sanction and signature to what have since been known as the “May Laws”;
the purpose of these being to add more rigorous provisions, as a
supplement to the law of 1804. This latter law ordered all the Jews of
the Empire to retire within the Pale of Settlement, excepting those who
possessed special permits, passports, or privileges to live outside.
The May Laws ordered Jews living inside the Pale to remove from the
villages into the towns within that area. In a word, General Ignatieff
created a Pale within a Pale, and contracted the territory of life and
livelihood for upwards of four millions of people within the boundaries
of the cities and towns inside the already limited domain of legal
domicile. These measures read as follows:
“The Committee of Ministers, having heard the report of the Minister of
the Interior on the execution of the temporary orders concerning the
Jews, resolved:
“1. As a temporary measure, and until a general revision has been made
in a proper manner of the laws concerning the Jews, to forbid the Jews
henceforth to settle outside the towns and townlets, the only exceptions
admitted being in those Jewish colonies that have existed before and
whose inhabitants are agriculturists.
“2. To suspend temporarily the completion of instruments of purchase of
real property mortgages in the name of Jews; as also the registration
of Jews as lessees of landed estates, situated outside the precincts of
towns and townlets, and the issue of powers of attorney to enable them
to manage and dispose of such property.
“3. To forbid Jews to carry on business on Sundays and on Christian
holidays, and that the same laws in force, about the closing on such
days of places of business belonging to Christians, shall, in the same
way, apply to places of business owned by Jews.
“4. That the measures laid down in paragraphs 1, 2, and 3, apply only to
the Governments within the Pale of Jewish Settlement. His Majesty the
Emperor was graciously pleased to give his assent to the above
resolutions of the Committee of Ministers, on the 3d of May, 1882.”
These Laws did not apply to the Jews of Poland.
These “temporary measures” remain to-day the potential law of Russia
regarding Jews. They were not immediately enforced. Russia is never in
a hurry in matters of this kind. She waits and notes the material
results of such enactments at home, and the moral effects upon opinion
abroad. In the case of the May Laws, there was a universal chorus of
condemnation in Western Europe. It was felt everywhere that any attempt
to put such savage measures into operation must either lead to the
flight of hundreds of thousands of wretched Jews over the borders, or to
their death within the crowded towns of the Pale, from starvation
induced by an overwhelming congestion of labour without means of
employment. The laws were, therefore, left inoperative, but _in
terrorem_; General Ignatieff being conveniently superseded, while a
Commission presided over by Count Pahlen was appointed by the Emperor to
prepare a report upon the whole Jewish question.