HISTORY OF THE JEWS
IN RUSSIA AND POLAND
FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES
UNTIL THE PRESENT DAY
HISTORY OF THE JEWS
IN RUSSIA AND POLAND
FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES
UNTIL THE PRESENT DAY
BY
S. M. DUBNOW
TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN
BY
I. FRIEDLAENDER
VOLUME III
FROM THE ACCESSION OF NICHOLAS II. UNTIL THE PRESENT DAY
WITH BIBLIOGRAPHY AND INDEX
[Illustration]
PHILADELPHIA
THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA
NOTE
The present volume, which concludes Dubnow's "History of the Jews
in Russia-Poland," contains, in addition to the text, an extensive
bibliography and an index to the entire work. In the bibliography an
enormous amount of material has been collected, and it is arranged in
such a way as to enable the reader to ascertain the sources upon which
the author drew. It is thus in the nature of notes, and is therefore
arranged according to the chapters of the book. The index, which has
been prepared with the utmost care by the translator, is really a
synopsis of Jewish history in Russia and Poland, and its usefulness
cannot be over-rated.
Professor Friedlaender, the translator of this work, who left the
United States at the beginning of this year, did not see the proof of
the bibliography and index.
The tragic news has just reached this country that Professor
Friedlaender was murdered under the most revolting circumstances. An
eminent scholar and writer has thus been removed from American Jewry,
and the entire house of Israel together with the Jewish Publication
Society of America, on whose committee Professor Friedlaender served
with conspicuous merit for a number of years, mourns this irreparable
loss.
JULY, 1920.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
XXXI. THE ACCESSION OF NICHOLAS II.
1. Continued Policy of Oppression 7
2. The Martyrdom of the Moscow Community 12
3. Restrictions in the Right of Residence 15
4. The Economic Collapse of Russian Jewry 22
5. Professional and Educational Restrictions 26
6. Anti-Semitic Propaganda and Pogroms 31
XXXII. THE NATIONAL AWAKENING.
1. The Rise of Political Zionism 40
2. Spiritual Zionism, or Ahad-Ha´amism 48
3. Spiritual Nationalism, or National-Cultural Autonomism 51
4. The Jewish Socialistic Movement 55
5. The Revival of Jewish Letters 58
XXXIII. THE KISHINEV MASSACRE.
1. Pogroms as a Counter-Revolutionary Measure 66
2. The Organized Kishinev Butchery 69
3. Echoes of the Kishinev Tragedy 76
4. Doctor Herzl's Visit to Russia 82
XXXIV. CONTINUED POGROMS AND THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR.
1. The Pogrom at Homel and the Jewish Self-Defence 87
2. The Kishinev Massacre at the Bar of Russian Justice 90
3. The Jews in the Russo-Japanese War 94
4. The "Political Spring" 97
5. The Homel Pogrom Before the Russian Courts 101
XXXV. THE REVOLUTION OF 1905 AND THE FIGHT FOR EMANCIPATION.
1. The Jews in the Revolutionary Movement 105
2. The Struggle for Equal Rights 108
3. The "Black Hundred" and the "Patriotic" Pogroms 113
4. The Jewish Franchise 121
XXXVI. THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND THE OCTOBER MASSACRES.
1. The Fiendish Designs of the "Black Hundred" 124
2. The Russian St. Bartholomew Night 127
3. The Undaunted Struggle for Equal Rights 131
4. The Jewish Question Before the First Duma 135
5. The Spread of Anarchy and the Second Duma 139
XXXVII. EXTERNAL OPPRESSION AND INTERNAL CONSOLIDATION.
1. The New Alignments Within Russian Jewry 143
2. The Triumph of the "Black Hundred" 149
3. The Third, or Black, Duma 153
4. New Jewish Disabilities 156
5. The Spiritual Revival of Russian Jewry 160
RUSSIAN JEWRY SINCE 1911 164
BIBLIOGRAPHY 171
INDEX 205
CHAPTER XXXI
THE ACCESSION OF NICHOLAS II.
1. CONTINUED POLICY OF OPPRESSION
In the course of the nineteenth century every change of throne in
Russia was accompanied by a change of policy. Each new reign formed, at
least in its beginning, a contrast to the one which had preceded it.
The reigns of Alexander I. and Alexander II. marked a departure in the
direction of liberalism; those of Nicholas I. and Alexander III. were
a return to the ideas of reaction. In accordance with this historic
schedule, Alexander III. should have been followed by a sovereign of
liberal tendencies. But in this case the optimistic expectations with
which the new ruler was welcomed both by his Russian and his Jewish
subjects were doomed to disappointment. The reign of Nicholas II.
proved the most gloomy and most reactionary of all. A man of limited
intelligence, he attempted to play the rôle of an unlimited autocrat,
fighting in blind rage against the cause of liberty.
This reactionary tendency came to light in the very beginning of the
new reign. During the first few months after the accession of Nicholas
II. to the throne--between November, 1894, and January, 1895--the
liberal Zemstvo assemblies of nine governments,[1] in presenting
addresses of loyalty to the new Tzar, were bold enough to voice the
hope that he would eventually invite the representatives of these
autonomous institutions to participate in the legislative acts of the
Government. This first timid request for constitutional rights met with
a harsh and clumsy rebuff. In his reply to the deputation representing
the nobility, the Zemstvos, and the municipalities, which appeared in
the Winter Palace on January 17, 1895, to convey to him the greetings
of the Russian people, the Tzar made the following pronouncement:
In several Zemstvo assemblies there have been heard lately the
voices of men carried away by preposterous delusions concerning
the participation of the representatives of the Zemstvos in
the affairs of the inner administration. Let everybody know
that I shall guard the principle of autocracy as firmly and
uncompromisingly as it was guarded by my never-to-be-forgotten
deceased parent.
This veiled threat was enough to intimidate the faint-hearted
constitutionalists. It was universally felt that the autocratic régime
was still firmly entrenched and that the old constitution of "enforced
safety"[2]--this charter of privileges bestowed upon the police to the
disadvantage of the people--was still unshaken. The hope of seeing
Russia transformed from a state based upon brute force into a body
politic resting upon law and order was dashed to the ground.
The Jews, too, were quick to realize that the war which had been waged
against them by Alexander III. for fourteen long years was far from
being at an end. True, the addresses of welcome presented in 1895 by
the Jewish communities of Russia to the young Tzar on the occasion of
his marriage elicited an official expression of thanks, which was not
marred by any rebuke for harboring "preposterous delusions." But this
was purely for the reason that these addresses were not tainted by
any allusions to the hopes for emancipation entertained by the Jews.
There was nothing, indeed, which might have warranted such hopes. The
same dignitaries who, under Alexander III., had stood forth as the
champions of savage anti-Semitic policies, remained at the helm of
Russian affairs: Pobyedonostzev, the head of the Holy Synod, Durnovo,
the Minister of the Interior--towards the end of 1895 he made room
for Goremykin, who was not a whit less reactionary--and Witte, the
double-faced Minister of Finance, who was anxious at that time to fall
in line with the reactionary influences then in vogue. The thoughts
which occupied Pobyedonostzev's mind at the beginning of the new reign
may be gauged from the report submitted by him to the Tzar in 1895,
concerning the state of affairs in the Greek-Orthodox Church. The
"Grand Inquisitor" was deeply worried by the alleged fact that the Jews
were exercising a dangerous influence over the religious life of their
Christian domestics:
The minors, after living among Jews for several years, prove
entirely forgetful of the Greek-Orthodox faith. But even the
beliefs of the adults are being undermined. The priests who
listen to the confessions of the domestics employed in Jewish
homes are stricken with horror on learning of the abominable
blasphemies uttered by the Jews against Christianity, the
Savior, and the Holy Virgin, which, through the domestics, are
likely to gain currency among the people.
These charges, which might have been bodily quoted from the
sinister writings of the mediæval guardians of the Church, were
intended as a means of preparing the young sovereign for a proper
understanding of the Jewish problem. They were brought forward by
the procurator-in-chief of the Holy Synod, the same ecclesiastical
functionary who inflicted severe persecutions on the Russian
dissidents and soon afterwards forced the Dukhobortzy, an Evangelistic
sect, to leave their native land and to seek refuge in Canada. Having
failed to realize his great ambition--to clear Russia of its Jewish
population, with the help of Baron Hirsch's millions[3]--Pobyedonostzev
resumed his professional duties, which were those of a procurator[4]
of Jewry on behalf of the Holy Synod, the _sanctum officium_ of the
militant Greek-Orthodox Church.
Not content with brandishing his rusty ecclesiastical sword,
Pobyedonostzev resorted to secular weapons in his fight against the
hated tribe. When, in 1898, the Council of the Jewish Colonization
Association in Paris sent a delegation to St. Petersburg to apply to
the Government for permission to settle Russian Jews as agricultural
farmers in Russia itself, Pobyedonostzev replied: "Nos cadres ne
sont pas prêts pour vous recevoir,"[5] and he went out of his way to
explain to the delegates that the Jews were a very clever people,
intellectually and culturally superior to the Russians, and, therefore,
dangerous to them: "The Jews are displacing us, and this does not suit
us." When questioned as to the future of Russian Jewry under the system
of uninterrupted persecutions, Pobyedonostzev on one occasion made the
following candid statement: "One-third will die out, one-third will
leave the country, and one-third will be completely dissolved in the
surrounding population."
Such being the attitude towards the Jewish problem of the ruling
spheres of Russia, any improvement in the situation of Russian Jewry
was manifestly out of the question. Even where such an improvement
might have been found to tally with the anti-Semitic policies of the
Government, it was ruled out as soon as it bade fair to benefit the
Jews. Thus, when in 1895, the governor of Vilna, in his "most humble
report" to the Tzar, advocated the desirability of abrogating the Pale
of Settlement for the purpose "of weakening the detrimental influence
of Jewry," since the latter constituted a majority of the population in
the cities of the Western region,[6] Nicholas II. penned the following
resolution:[7] "I am far from sharing this view of the governor." The
leaders of Russian Jewry knew full well that the wind which was blowing
from the heights of the Russian throne was unfavorable to them, and
their initial hopefulness gave way speedily to a feeling of depression.
A memorandum drafted at that time by prominent Jews of St. Petersburg,
with the intention of submitting it to one of the highest functionaries
at the Russian court, mirrors this pessimistic frame of mind:
The Russian Jews are deprived of that powerful lever for
intellectual and moral advancement which is designated as the
hope for a better future. They are fully aware of the fact that
the highest authority in the land, influenced by the distorted
information concerning the Jews, which is systematically
presented to it by officials acting from avaricious or other
selfish motives, is exceedingly unfavorable to the Jews. They
must resign themselves to the fact that there is actually
no possibility of directing the attention of the Tzar and
Sovereign to the true state of affairs, and that even those
dignitaries who themselves act justly and tolerantly towards
the Jews are afraid of putting in a good word for them for fear
of being charged with favoritism towards them.
2. THE MARTYRDOM OF THE MOSCOW COMMUNITY
The attitude which officials of high rank were prone to adopt towards
the Jews was luridly illustrated at that time in Moscow. It will be
remembered that the small Jewish colony which had been left in the
second Russian capital after the cruel expulsions of 1891 was barred
from holding religious services in its large synagogue which had
been closed by order of Alexander III.[8] In view of the forthcoming
festivities in honor of the coronation of Nicholas II., which were
to be held in Moscow in the spring of 1896, the representatives of
the Jewish community of the second Russian capital petitioned the
governor-general of Moscow, Grand Duke Sergius Alexandrovitch, to
secure for them the Tzar's permission to have their synagogue open at
least during the coronation days, "as a special act of grace, in order
that the Jews of Moscow may be given a chance to celebrate the joyful
event with due solemnity." But the grand duke, maddened by Jew-hatred,
notified the petitioners through the Chief of Police that their
petition was "an insolent violation of the imperial will" and could not
be considered.
The martyrdom of the Moscow community, the heritage of the past reign,
stood out like a black stain even upon the gloomy background of the new
era. An imperial ukase issued in 1892 had decreed that the structure
of the sealed-up Moscow synagogue should be sold to the highest
bidder unless it was converted into a charitable institution.[9]
The community was naturally anxious to prevent the desecration of
its sanctuary and to preserve the edifice for better days to come.
With this end in view it placed in the synagogue building the trade
school for Jewish children which had been established in memory of
Alexander II. The anti-Semitic authorities of Moscow scented in this
step a wicked design. The governor-general got into communication with
the Ministers of the Interior and of Public Instruction, and, as a
result, on May 27, 1896, the executive board of the Moscow community
received the following order: To stop the admission of pupils to the
trade school and to close the school altogether after the completion
of the prescribed course of studies by the present contingent of
students. Thereupon the Jews of Moscow made another attempt to save
their synagogue by transferring hither their school and asylum for
poor and orphaned children, the so-called Talmud Torah. This attempt,
too, was frustrated by the Muscovite Hamans. On October 28, 1897,
the governor-general announced that, after consultation with the
Minister of the Interior, the decision had been reached to close
the asylum, which sheltered about one hundred poor children, on the
fanciful ground that these children might just as well receive their
instruction in Russian educational establishments. The underlying
motive of the new order was unmistakably revealed in its latter part:
Unless in the course of two months the building of the synagogue will
be reconstructed and so altered as to be fitted for a hospital or a
similar charitable institution, it will be sold at public auction.
Once more the Jewish community endeavored to save its sanctuary, which
its enemies had made up their minds to destroy. The synagogue structure
was rebuilt to meet the purposes of a hospital and a shelter. But the
commission appointed by the governor-general to examine the alterations
found that they were not sufficiently extensive and therefore
suggested that the interior of the synagogue should be entirely
remodelled so as to exclude the possibility of its ever being used for
devotional purposes. The struggle centering around the alterations
dragged on for another eight years--until the revolution of 1905 and
the assassination of the ferocious governor-general. It was then that
the Jews finally succeeded in releasing their sanctuary from the death
sentence which had been passed upon it.
The motive which animated the Muscovite Jew-haters was perfectly
evident: it was their fervent desire to wipe out the last remnants of
the local Jewish community by subjecting the Jews to religious and
administrative persecutions and thereby compelling them to flee from
the center of Greek Orthodoxy. The growth of the Jewish settlement at
Moscow was checked in ruthless fashion. The Jewish artisans had been
expelled as far back as 1891, but the Jewish merchants who purchased
their right of residence in the second Russian capital at the annual
cost of one thousand rubles--the tax levied on first guild members--had
been allowed to remain. Moreover, as the largest industrial center of
Russia, Moscow naturally attracted a goodly number of Jewish merchants
who came there temporarily on business. These "newcomers" were handled
more severely than are alien enemies in war-time. Police detectives
prowled about on the streets and at the railroad stations, seizing
passers-by who happened to exhibit a "Semitic" countenance, and
dragging them to the police stations, "with a view to the examination
of their right of residence in Moscow." The unfortunate Jews, whose
documents did not comply with all the technicalities of the law,
were expelled at once. The _Moscow Police News_ carried a regular
advertisement offering a reward for the capture of "rightless" Jews. In
October, 1897, the Moscow Chief of Police announced a premium of equal
amount for the capture of one Jew or of two burglars.[10]
Finally, the Russian Government took a most effective step towards
preventing the increase of the Jewish population of Moscow. On January
22, 1899, an imperial ukase was issued forthwith prohibiting Jewish
merchants of the first guild from settling in Moscow, unless they shall
have obtained special permission from the Minister of Finance and
from the governor-general of Moscow, it being beforehand agreed that
no such permission should be granted. The same ukase enacted a number
of offensive discriminations against the Jewish merchants already
settled in Moscow by depriving them of their vote in the commercial
associations, and by other similar devices. On a subsequent occasion
the admission was candidly made that all these measures were prompted
by the desire "to rid as far as possible the government of Moscow of
the Jews already settled there on a legal basis."
3. RESTRICTIONS IN THE RIGHT OF RESIDENCE
Whereas the régime of Grand Duke Sergius in Moscow represented an acute
stage of Judæophobia, manifesting itself in cruelties of an exceptional
character, the central Government in St. Petersburg exhibited the
same disease in a more "normal" form. Here, the oppression of the
Jews was pursued systematically and quietly, and was carried on as
one of the most important functions of the public administration.
The sacrosanct institution of the Pale of Settlement and the other
mainstays of political anti-Semitism were zealously guarded by the
faithful watchdogs of Russian reaction--the various Ministers of the
Interior who followed one another between the years 1895 and 1904:
Durnovo (until the autumn of 1895), Goremykin (1896-1899), Sipyaghin
(1899-1902), and Plehve (1902-1904). True, during the régime of the
last two Ministers the anti-Semitic temperature rose above normal, but
it was only due to the fact that the increased revolutionary propaganda
of those days had generally stimulated the powers of reaction to
a greater display of energy. Quite aside from these exceptional
conditions, the rigid consistency in enforcing the restrictive laws was
sufficient to account for many tragedies in the life of the Jews, while
the despotism of the provincial authorities aggravated the situation
still further and turned the tragedies into catastrophes.
As far as the Pale of Settlement is concerned, the Government continued
its old-time policy of cooping up the Jews within the area of the
cities and towns by shielding the villages carefully against the
influx of Jews. Since the promulgation of the "Temporary Rules" in
1882, the authorities of St. Petersburg had been aiming at the gradual
elimination of those rural Jewish "old timers" who had been allowed
under those rules to remain in the villages.[11] They had been looking
forward to the time when the eyes of the Russian moujik would no
more be offended by the sight of a Jew. But this pious wish did not
materialize quickly enough. Several governors put forth the simple
proposition to expel all Jews from the villages, not excluding those
who had been settled there for a long time. This step, however, was
deemed too radical. The Minister of Finance, Witte, wished to solve the
problem in a different way. He sought to persuade the Tzar that the
introduction of the state liquor monopoly would automatically have the
effect of forcing the Jews to leave the country-side, inasmuch as the
liquor traffic formed the principal occupation of the village Jews.
Witte's conjecture was to a certain degree borne out by the facts.
By the end of the nineties the Jewish country population of Russia
had been considerably reduced. Nevertheless there was no relief in
sight. For the lust of the administration had grown in proportion.
The governors and the other gubernatorial authorities resorted to
all kinds of cunning devices to force the Jews out of the villages
or out of the railroad stations which were situated outside the town
limits. The Christian land-owners frequently complained about these
deportations, and petitioned the governors to permit the Jewish grain
merchants, who were engaged in buying and shipping the grain from
the manorial store-houses, to reside at the railroad stations. The
Senate was compelled over and over again to pass upon the appeals
of illegally deported Jews and to enter into an examination of all
kinds of hair-splitting questions involved in the manipulation of
the anti-Jewish laws by the lower courts, whether, for instance, an
old-time Jewish villager who returns to his home after a brief absence
is to be regarded as a new settler who has no right to live in the
country, or whether a Jew who lives on an estate which happens to be
situated in two contiguous villages is allowed to remove from the one
to the other. As a rule the authorities decided these questions against
the Jews, though the most revolting decisions of this kind were later
reversed by the Senate.
In connection with the prohibition of residence outside the cities, a
new problem had arisen in Jewish life--the "summer resort question."
The authorities frequently prohibited Jewish families from spending the
summer in the outskirts of the cities if a particular resort or cottage
was found to be situated outside the city line. Thousands of Jewish
families were thus deprived of an opportunity to rest in God's free
nature during the summer months, and to breathe the fresh air of the
fields and forests, for no other reason than that they were Jews--a new
variety of territorially affixed city serfs.
The law was just as merciless in the case of Jews afflicted with
disease. The watering-places situated outside the towns were barred
to Jewish sufferers who wished to take a cure there. The Crimean
watering-place Yalta, in the neighborhood of the imperial summer
resort Livadia, was the object of particular vigilance, having been
barred to the Jews by order of the dying Alexander III.[12] The Jewish
consumptives who had managed to obtain "illegal" access to this spa
were pitilessly expelled. The following incident, which was reported at
that time in the Russian press, may serve as an illustration of this
ruthless policy:
The wife of a [Jewish] physician had come to Yalta to improve
her shattered health. While she was suffering from severe
bloodspitting, a policeman invaded the bedroom of the sick
woman, insisting on her giving a written pledge to leave the
place within twenty-four hours. The patient was terribly
frightened. On the following day the deportation was stopped,
in consequence of the testimony of her physician that the
slightest motion was fraught with danger to the invalid. But
the fright and uncertainty had intensified the cough; the young
woman became worse, and soon afterwards died.
As it happened, the action of the police was subsequently found to be
entirely unwarranted; for, as the wife of a physician, this victim of
bureaucratic heartlessness was, even according to the letter of the
law, entitled to the right of residence in Yalta.
A similar case was that of a sick Jewish student who had been sent by
his physicians to Yalta to cure his lungs. He was expelled in the dead
of winter and deported under a police convoy, together with a batch of
prisoners, to Sevastopol, notwithstanding the fact that he was in a
feverish condition. The correspondent of a local paper in Sevastopol
reported that "along the entire road from the harbor to the prison,
which was traversed by the batch, passers-by would stop in their walk,
staggered by the extraordinary spectacle." The sufferer appealed to the
Senate, but the latter found that the orders of the police "contained
nothing contrary to the law." The highest tribunal of the empire went
with equanimity on record that a Jewish student was liable to the
penalty of being arrested and marched under a police escort, together
with criminal offenders, for an attempt to heal his lungs in the warm
southern climate.
But no place in the empire could vie as regards hostility to the
Jews with the city of Kiev--this inferno of Russian Israel. Though
surrounded on all sides by a string of towns and townlets with a dense
Jewish population, the southwestern metropolis was guarded by a host
of police watchdogs against the invasion of "aliens." Apart from the
"privileged" Jews who formed part of the permanent population, the
police were forced to admit into the city Jewish visitors who came to
Kiev for a few days to attend to their affairs. Yet, haunted by the
fear lest these visitors might stay there too long, the police arranged
_oblavas_, or raids, to hunt them down like stray dogs. About once a
week, during the night, the police would raid certain hostelries in
which the Jews were wont to stop, put those that were caught under
arrest, and then expel them from the confines of the city. This
additional heavy "night work" called for a larger police staff, and to
meet this increased expenditure, an annual sum of 15,000 rubles was
appropriated--from the proceeds of the Jewish meat tax. This revenue,
collected from the Jews for the purpose of maintaining the charitable
and educational institutions of the Jewish communities, was now used
to pay the police agents to enable them to hunt down these Jews and
expel them in merciless fashion. To put it more plainly, the convict,
after being sentenced to be hanged, was forced to buy the rope. The
methods of the Russian inquisition gradually reached the top notch of
efficiency. Even the "_Kievlanin_" ("The Kievian"), the anti-Semitic
official organ of Kiev, was bound to confess on one occasion that "in
the course of the month of July (of the year 1901) things have taken
place in Kiev which are hardly conceivable."
As far as the general disabilities are concerned, the entire area of
the Russian empire outside the Pale of Settlement, though open to
foreigners of all nationalities, remained hermetically closed to the
Jewish citizens of Russia, and the borders of that prohibited area were
guarded even more rigorously than they had been during the previous
reign. In the consistent enforcement of this principle the Government
did not shrink from the most revolting extremes. A law passed in
1896 interdicted Jewish soldiers from spending outside the Pale of
Settlement even the brief leave of absence which they were granted
during their term of military service. A Jewish soldier serving in a
regiment which was stationed, let us say, in St. Petersburg, Moscow,
or even in far-off Siberia, was forced, under this law, to travel
hundreds and even thousands of miles to the Pale of Settlement to spend
his month of furlough there, being denied the right to remain in the
city in which he was discharging his military duty, and it made no
difference even if the furlough was granted to him for the purpose of
recuperating his health.
In many places of the empire, the whimsicality of the local authorities
in construing the law of residence was of a nature to suggest that
they had no other end in view except that of making sport of the Jews.
The administration of Siberia, for instance, invented the following
regulation: a Jewish merchant or artisan who is registered in one of
the Siberian cities shall have the right only to live in the particular
city of his registration, and in no other. Since very many Jews
resided outside the localities of their accidental registration, a
transmigration of Siberian Jewry was the result. The Jews registered,
_e. g._, in Tomsk, though they might have lived from the day of their
birth in Irkutsk, were deported in batches to Tomsk, meeting on the way
parties of exiled Jews from Tomsk who had the misfortune of having
their names entered upon the records of Irkutsk. Human beings were
shuffled like a pack of cards. This revolting practice of the Siberian
authorities, which had begun at the end of the preceding reign, was
sustained by the Senate in a decision handed down in 1897.
4. THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE OF RUSSIAN JEWRY
The result of all these persecutions was the complete economic
collapse of Russian Jewry. Speaking generally, the economic structure
of the Russian Jews experienced violent upheavals during the first
years of Nicholas II.'s reign. The range of Jewish economic endeavor,
circumscribed though it was, was narrowed more and more. In 1894, the
law placing the liquor trade under Government control was put into
effect by Witte, the Minister of Finance. Catering to the prejudices of
the ruling spheres of Russia, Witte had already endeavored to convince
Alexander III. that the liquor state monopoly would have the effect
of completely undermining "Jewish exploitation," the latter being
primarily bound up with the sale of liquor in the towns and villages.
In view of this, the monopoly was introduced with particular zeal
in the western governments, where a little later, in the course of
1896-1898, during the reign of Nicholas II., all private pot-houses
were replaced by official liquor stores, the so-called "imperial
bar-rooms." In consequence of this reform, tens of thousands of Jewish
families who had derived their livelihood either directly from the
liquor trade, or indirectly from occupations connected with it, such
as the keeping of inns and hostelries, were deprived of their means of
subsistence. It goes without saying that, as far as the moral aspect
of the problem was concerned, the best elements of Russian Jewry
welcomed this reform, which bade fair to wipe out an ugly stain on the
escutcheon of the Jewish people--the liquor traffic bequeathed to the
Jews by ancient Poland. Known as the most sober people on earth, the
Jews had been placed in the tragic position that thousands of them, in
their search for a piece of bread, were forced to serve as a medium for
promoting the pernicious Russian drunkenness. The memory of the days
when the Jewish saloon was the breeding-place of pogroms, in which the
Russian peasants and burghers filled themselves with Jewish alcohol to
fortify themselves in their infamous work of demolishing the homes of
the Jews, was still fresh in their minds. Cheerfully would the Jewish
people have yielded its monopoly of the liquor trade to the Russian
bar-room keepers and to the Russian Government who seemed genuinely
attracted toward it, had it only been allowed to pursue other methods
of earning a livelihood. But in closing the avenue of the liquor
traffic to two hundred thousand Jews, the Government did not even think
of removing the special restrictions which barred their way to other
lines of endeavor. Having been robbed of the scanty livelihood they
derived from their country inns, thousands of rural victims of the
state monopoly flocked into the cities, only to clash with a host of
urban victims of the same reform who had also been deprived of their
means of sustenance. The growth of the proletariat within the Pale
of Settlement, both in business and in the trades, assumed appalling
proportions. The observers of economic life in the Pale, such as the
well-known Russian economist Subbotin and others, called attention to
the frightful increase of pauperism in that region. Between 1894 and
1898 the number of Jewish families in need of assistance increased
twenty-seven per cent. as compared with former years. In 1897, the
number of Jews without definite occupations amounted in certain cities
to fifty per cent. and more. The number of destitute Jews applying
for help before the Passover festival reached unheard of proportions,
amounting in Odessa, Vilna, Minsk, Kovno, and other cities to forty
and even fifty per cent. of the total Jewish population. The crop
failures of 1899 and 1900 in the south of Russia resulted in a terrible
famine among the impecunious Jewish masses. Whereas the peasants who
suffered from the same calamity received financial assistance from the
Government, the Jews had to resort to self-help, to the collection
of funds throughout the empire to which only here and there liberal
Christians added their mites.
Many of these Jewish proletarians were willing to take up agriculture,
but the "Temporary Rules" of 1882 blocked their way to the
country-side, and made it impossible for them to buy or even lease
a piece of land. Prominent Jews of St. Petersburg, such as Baron
Günzburg and others, petitioned the Government to allow the Jews to
purchase small parcels of land for personal use, but, after long
deliberations, their petition was rejected. Thus, at the end of the
nineteenth century, the ruling spheres of the Russian empire proved
more anti-Semitic than at the beginning of the same century, when the
Government of Alexander I. and even that of Nicholas I. had endeavored
to promote agriculture among the Jews and had established the Jewish
agricultural colonies in the south of Russia.[13] The mania of
oppression went so far as to prohibit the Jews from buying or leasing
parcels of land which were part of a city, but happened to be situated
outside the city line. A rich Jew of Minsk, by the name of Pollak,
petitioned, in 1897, the local Town Council to sell him a piece of
suburban property for the establishment of a Jewish agricultural farm,
but his petition was refused. This refusal was thoroughly consistent.
For the fact that the Jews were forbidden to own land made the training
of Jews in the art of agriculture entirely superfluous. It may be added
that this prohibition of land ownership was upheld by the Government
even in the case of the Jewish students who had completed their course
in the school of the Jewish Agricultural Farm near Odessa.
Similar methods were employed to check the development of arts and
crafts, which were widely represented among the Jews, but stood on a
very low technical level. Even the efforts to organize mutual help
among the working classes were blocked by the Government in all kinds
of ways. The well-known Jewish millionaire, Brodski, of Kiev, wishing
to assist the toiling masses without distinction of creed, offered to
open a trade bank in that city and to contribute towards that purpose
the sum of 120,000 rubles. When, in 1895, he submitted the constitution
of the proposed bank to the local authorities for their approval, he
was required to insert a clause to the effect that the directors and
the chairman of the bank council should always be Christians and that
the council itself should not include more than one Jewish member.
To this insolent demand Brodski made the only fitting retort: "Being
myself a Jew, I cannot possibly agree that the constitution of an
establishment which is to be founded with the money contributed by me
and which is to bear my name shall contain restrictions affecting my
coreligionists." He naturally withdrew his offer, and Kiev was deprived
of a trade bank. The fact that the failure of the project also affected
the Christian artisans did not disturb the authorities in the least.
It was enough of a compensation that the Jews were made to suffer not
only materially, but also morally, and the purpose of the highly-placed
Jew-baiters was accomplished.
5. PROFESSIONAL AND EDUCATIONAL RESTRICTIONS
In the domain of those liberal professions to which the Jewish
intellectuals, being barred from entering the civil service, were
particularly attracted, the law went to almost any length in its
endeavor to keep them closed to the Jews. The legal career had been
blocked to them ever since the passage of the law of 1889, which made
the admission of a properly qualified Jew to the bar dependent upon
the granting of a special permission by the Minister of Justice. In
the course of a whole decade, the Minister found it possible to grant
this permission only to one Jew, who, it may be added, had sat on the
bench for twenty-five years--there were two or three such "relics,"
dating back to the liberal era of Alexander II. In consequence of
this provision, the proportion of Jews at the bar, which prior to the
enactment of the restriction had reached from fourteen to twenty-two
per cent, was reduced to nine per cent. In 1897, a committee appointed
by the Government was considering the proposal to place the disability
on the statute books and to establish a ten per cent norm for Jewish
lawyers. The reasons advanced by the committee for the proposed
restriction were of the distinctly mediæval variety:
The conduct of a lawyer is determined by the impulses of his
will, of his conscience,--in other words, that sphere of his
inner life which finds its manifestation in religion. Now the
admission of Jews constitutes a menace, resulting from views
peculiar to the Jewish race, which are contrary to Christian
morality.
Subsequently, the champions of "Christian morality" on the staff of the
Ministry of Justice bethought themselves that it might even be better
and nobler to stop the admission of Jews to the bar altogether, and
the proposal regarding the percentage norm was tabled. Hundreds upon
hundreds of young Jews who had completed their legal education at the
universities, or who had acted as assistants to sworn attorneys, saw
once more their hopes for the legitimate pursuit of their profession
vanish into the air.
Jewish physicians were restricted to private practice and robbed
of their right to occupy a Government or public position. Even the
autonomous Zemstvo institutions adopted more and more the practice
of refusing to appoint Jews, and very frequently the printed
advertisements of the Zemstvos offering medical positions contained the
stipulation _kromye yevreyev_ ("except the Jews").
The scholastic education of the Jewish children was throttled in the
same pitiless manner as theretofore. The disgraceful school norm
which had been introduced in 1887[14] performed with ever-increasing
relentlessness its task of dooming to spiritual death the Jewish youths
who were knocking at the doors of the gymnazia and universities. In
the beginning of 1898, the post of Minister of Public Instruction,
which had been occupied by Dyelanov, was entrusted to Professor
Bogolepov of Moscow. While Dyelanov had been occasionally inclined
to soften the rigor of the school norm--it was commonly rumored that
this good-natured dignitary could not bear to see a woman cry, and the
tearful entreaties of the mothers of the rejected scholars made him
sanction the admission of a certain number of Jewish children over and
above the established percentage norm--his successor Bogolepov, an
academic teacher who had become a gendarme of education, was impervious
to any sentiment of pity. In the course of the three years of his
administration, he not only refused to admit the slightest departure
from the established norm, but attempted to curtail it still further.
Thus, orders were issued to calculate the percentage norm of the Jewish
applicants for admission to the universities not in its relation to the
total number of the annual admissions, but separately for each faculty
(1898-1899). This provision was designed to limit the number of Jewish
students who flocked to the medical and legal faculties, since, in
view of the fact that the Jews were entirely barred from appointments
in the general educational institutions, the other faculties did
not offer them even a sporting chance of earning a livelihood. The
ruthlessness displayed by the Ministry of Public Instruction towards
the Jewish youth was officially justified on the ground that certain
elements among them were affiliated with the revolutionary movement
which, just at that time, had assumed particular intensity in the
Russian student body. This sentiment was openly voiced in a circular
of the Ministry, issued on May 26, 1901, which makes the following
statement: "The disorders which took place at the end of the nineties
in the institutions of higher learning testified to the fact that the
instigators of these disorders were, to a large extent, persons of
non-Russian extraction."
Bogolepov himself, the reactionary Minister of enlightenment, fell
a victim of this agitation among the student body. He died from the
bullet of a Terrorist who happened to be of unadulterated Russian
extraction. His successor, General Vannovski (1901-1902), though
endeavoring to assuage the university disorders by a policy of "kindly
solicitude," maintained the former uncompromising attitude as far as
the Jews were concerned. In view of the fact that, in spite of all
restrictions, the ratio of Jewish students at all universities actually
exceeded the norm prescribed by law, the new Minister decreed that
the percentage of Jewish admissions be temporarily curtailed in the
following proportion: Two per cent for the capitals (instead of the
former three per cent), three per cent for the universities outside of
the Pale of Settlement (instead of five per cent), and seven per cent
for the Pale of Settlement (instead of ten per cent).
Even the restrictions placed upon the admission of the Jews to the
gymnazia were intensified. In 1901, Jewish children who had graduated
from a pro-gymnazium[15] were forbidden to continue their education
in the advanced classes of a gymnazium unless there was a free Jewish
vacancy within the percentage norm--a truly miraculous contingency.
The same policy was extended to the commercial schools established
with funds which were provided by the merchant class and the bulk
of which came from Jews. In the commercial schools maintained by
the commercial associations Jewish children were admitted only in
proportion to the contributions of the Jewish merchants towards the
upkeep of the particular school. In private commercial schools,
however, percentages of all kinds, varying from ten to fifty per cent,
were fixed in the case of Jewish pupils. This provision had the effect
that Jewish parents were vitally interested in securing the entrance
of as many Christian children as possible in order to increase thereby
the number of Jewish vacancies. Occasionally, a Jewish father, in the
hope of creating a vacancy for his son, would induce a Christian to
send his boy to a commercial school--though the latter, as a rule,
offered little attraction for the Christian population--by undertaking
to defray all expenses connected with his education. Yet many Jewish
children, though enduring all these humiliations, found themselves
outside the doors of the intermediate Russian schools.
It is worthy of note that in this attempt at the spiritual
extermination of the Jewish children by barring them from intermediate
educational institutions the Russian law followed strictly the ancient
rule of the Pharaohs: "If it be a son, then ye shall kill him; but if
it be a daughter, then she shall live." The Government schools for
girls were opened to the Jewish population without any restriction, and
the influx of Jewesses to these gymnazia was only checked unofficially
by the anti-Semitic authorities of this or that institution, thereby
turning the tide of applicants in the direction of private girls'
schools. But as far as the higher schools were concerned, Jewish girls
were subjected to the same restrictions as the boys. The Higher Courses
for Women and the Pedagogic Courses in St. Petersburg restricted the
admission of Jewesses to five per cent. The constitution of the Medical
Institute for Women, founded in 1895, provided at first for the entire
exclusion of Jewesses. But in 1897, the doors of this institution were
opened to the hated tribe--just enough to admit them to the extent of
three per cent.
It was scarcely to be expected that the Jewish youths who had been
locked out of the Russian school should entertain particularly friendly
sentiments towards a régime which wasted their lives, humiliated their
dignity, and sullied their souls. The Jewish lad, driven from the
doors of the gymnazia, became an embittered "extern," who was forced
to study at home and from year to year present himself for examination
before the school authorities. An immense host of young men and women
who found their way blocked to the higher educational institutions
in Russia went abroad, flocking to foreign universities and higher
professional schools, where they learned to estimate at its full
value a régime which in their own country denied them the advantages
granted to them outside of it. A large number of these college youths
returned home permeated with revolutionary ideas--living witnesses to
the sagacity of a Government which saw its reason for existence in the
suppression of all revolutionary strivings.
6. ANTI-SEMITIC PROPAGANDA AND POGROMS
The reactionary Russian press, encouraged and stimulated by the
official Jew-baiters, engaged in an increasingly ferocious campaign
against the Jews. The Russian censorship, known all over for its
merciless cruelty, which was throttling the printed word and trembling
at the criminal thought of "inciting hatred toward the Government," yet
granted untrammeled freedom to those who propagated hatred to Judaism,
and thereby committed the equally criminal offence of "inciting one
part of the population against the other." The _Novoye Vremya_, the
most wide-spread semi-official press organ, and its satellites in the
provincial capitals were permitted to do what they pleased. They were
free to slander the Jewish religion, the Jewish people, and the Jewish
communities. When the famous Dreyfus affair had started in France, the
_Novoye Vremya_, the oracle of Russia's ruling spheres, arrayed itself
on the side of the Jew-baiters from among the French general staff, and
launched a savage campaign of slander against the Jews of the entire
globe. Many an article published in the anti-Semitic press was scarcely
distinguishable from the proclamations calling upon the mob to massacre
the Jews.
By far the most effective propaganda on behalf of pogroms was carried
on, sometimes without a conscious realization of the consequences,
by the Government itself: by persisting in its anti-Jewish policy.
Observing this uninterrupted maltreatment of the Jews on the part of
the Russian legislation and administration, which treated the Jews
as if they were criminals, witnessing the expulsions inflicted upon
the "illegally residing" Jews and the raids engineered against them,
watching the constant mockery at the Jewish children who were driven
from the doors of the educational institutions, and seeing the endless
multitude of other humiliating disabilities, the unenlightened Russian
populace necessarily gained the conviction that the extermination of
Jewry was a noble and patriotic duty. Coupled with the usual economic
and national conflicts, this trend of mind could not but lead to acts
of violence.
At the end of the nineties the Russian horizon was darkened again by
the ominous shadow of the beginning of the eighties: pogroms, at first
sporadic and within circumscribed limits, broke out again in various
parts of the Pale. On February 18 and 19, 1897, an anti-Jewish riot
took place in Shpola, a town in the government of Kiev. The following
officially inspired account of the excesses, in which the facts were
undoubtedly toned down, appeared in the _Novoye Vremya_:
At three o'clock in the afternoon an immense crowd of peasants
rushed into our town, and wrecked completely the stores, homes,
and warehouses belonging exclusively to the Jews. A large
number of rich business places and small stores, as well as
hundreds of houses, were demolished by the crowd, which acted,
one might say, with elemental passion, dooming to destruction
everything that fell into its hands. The town of Shpola, which
is celebrated for its flourishing trade and its comparative
prosperity, now presents the picture of a city which has been
ravaged by a hostile army. Lines of old women and children may
be seen moving [into the town] to carry home with them the
property of the "Zhyds." Of essential importance is the fact
that these disorders were undoubtedly prearranged. The local
Jews knew of the impending disaster four days before it took
place; they spoke about it to the local police chief, but the
latter assured them that "nothing is going to happen."
Two months later, on April 16 and 17, the Christian inhabitants of
the town of Kantakuzenka, in the government of Kherson, indulged in a
similar "amusement" at the expense of the Jews. To quote the words of a
semi-official report:
A cruel pogrom has taken place. Almost the entire town has
been destroyed by an infuriated mob. All Jewish stores were
wrecked and the goods found there were thrown about. A part of
the merchandise was looted by the rabble. The synagogue alone
remained unscathed.
Here, too, it was known beforehand that a pogrom was in the course
of preparation. The Jews petitioned the authorities to avert the
catastrophe, but the local police force was found inadequate to cope
with the situation.
In both devastated towns the governors of the respective provinces
eventually appeared on the scene with detachments of troops, but in
the meantime the revolting performances were over. Many rioters were
placed under arrest and put on trial. More than sixty were sentenced
by the courts to a term in prison from eight to fourteen months. One
of the defendants, a Little-Russian peasant, who had been arrested for
having taken part in an anti-Jewish riot, voiced his amazement in these
characteristic words: "They told us we had permission to beat the Jews,
and now it appears that it is all a lie."
A pogrom on a more comprehensive scale, arranged in honor of the
Easter festival, and lasting for three days (April 19-21, 1899), was
allowed to take place in the city of Nicholayev, the South-Russian
port of entry. Bands of rioters, to the number of several thousand,
among them many newly arrived Great-Russian day laborers, and a few
"intellectual" ringleaders, fell upon Jewish stores and residences
and destroyed or looted their contents, complying faithfully with the
established pogrom ritual, while the police and Cossack forces proved
"powerless." On the third day, when the news of the freedom accorded
to the rioters and robbers at Nicholayev reached the villages in the
vicinity, a whole army of peasants, both men and women, numbering
some ten thousand, started towards the city on their wagons, with the
intention of carrying off the property of the Jews--but they were too
late; for in the meantime Cossacks and soldiers had been ordered to
stop the pogroms and disperse the rioters. The peasants were driven off
and had to return to their villages on their empty wagons. Exasperated
by their failure, the peasants vented their fury upon the Jewish
cemetery outside the city, demolishing a large number of tombstones,
and then, scattering all over the district, made an attack upon the
Jewish population in the neighboring settlements and villages. In the
Jewish agricultural colony of Nagartava all farm-houses and stores
were wrecked and looted, and the agricultural implements demolished.
The Russian peasant was unscrupulously ruining and robbing his Jewish
fellow-peasant. In the adjacent colonies, the Jews, being of a robust
physique, were able to put up an effective defence.
The only protest against this new outbreak of barbarism was voiced by
the "Son of the Fatherland" (_Syn Otyechestva_), a liberal Russian
press organ:
When at last--questioned the paper--will that terrible relic of
the gloomy era of the Middle Ages take an end? When will there
be a stop to this breaking of windows, this beating of men and
this wrecking of houses and stores?
This time the orders from St. Petersburg were explicit: the local
authorities were commanded to prevent the further spread of the pogrom
agitation. The reason for this unaccustomed attitude is not difficult
to guess. Two weeks after the Nicholayev atrocities, the first
International Hague Conference opened its sessions (May 6-18), having
been called at the initiative of the Russian emperor to discuss the
question of disarmament, and this Conference must have suggested to the
Tzar the advisability of first disarming the anti-Jewish rioters in
Russia itself. However, he failed to draw the more important conclusion
from the Conference called by him: that it was necessary to stop, or at
least to reduce, the constant arming of his own Government against the
Jews and to discard the mediæval weapons of oppression and persecution
which spelled destruction to an entire nation. This alone is enough
to expose the hollowness of the spectacle at the Hague, which had
been designed by the feeble-minded Nicholas as a sort of diplomatic
entertainment.
That the Russian authorities, when so minded, were fully capable of
grappling with the pogrom agitation was demonstrated by the rapidity
with which, on a later occasion, they suppressed the anti-Jewish
excesses in the Polish city of Chenstokhov (August 19, 1902). In this
hotbed of dismal Polish clericalism, the goal of thousands of Catholic
pilgrims, who arrive there to worship the Holy Virgin on the "Bright
Mountain," a street brawl between a Jewish tradesman and a Polish woman
grew, owing to the instigations of Catholic priests, into a monstrous
assault upon Jewish houses and stores by a crowd of fifteen thousand
Poles. Here, too, the customary shouts were heard: "Beat the Jews!
Nothing will happen to us." But the Chenstokhov rioters made a grievous
error in their calculation. The protection of the Russian authorities
did not extend to the Poles who were not considered politically
"dependable," and were known to be equally hostile to the Zhyds and
the "Moskals."[16] The excesses had started in the morning, and in
the evening they were at an end, a volley from the soldiers having
put the tremendous crowd to flight. When the case came up before the
courts, the public prosecutor pleaded for the severe punishment of the
culprits. The guilty Poles were sentenced to penal servitude and to
terms in prison, and in some cases even damages were awarded to the
Jewish victims--an extraordinarily rare occurrence in legal proceedings
of this kind.
The union of Polish anti-Semitism with Russian Judæophobia brought
again to life the old monstrous accusation against the Jews--the ritual
murder libel. A Polish servant girl in the employ of David Blondes,
a Jewish barber in Vilna, steeped, as she was, in gross superstition
and being a pliant tool in the hands of fanatical priests, ran out
one night (March, 1900) into the street, shouting that her master had
wounded her and had tried to squeeze blood from her for the Matzah. A
crowd of Christians quickly assembled, and seeing the scratches on the
neck and hands of the girl, fell upon Blondes and gave him a severe
beating. The "criminal" was thrown into prison, and the prosecuting
authorities, listening to the "voice of the people," were zealous in
their search for the threads of the crime. The anti-Semitic press
launched a well-planned campaign against the Jews in the hope of
influencing the judicial verdict. The lower court recognized the fact
of the assault, but denied the presence of any murderous intent, and,
leaving aside the possibility of a ritual motive, sentenced Blondes
to imprisonment for four months. The counsel for the defence, the
well-known lawyer Gruzenberg, and others, fearing lest this sentence
might be construed by the enemies of Judaism as a corroboration of the
ritual murder libel, appealed from the verdict of the court, and proved
victorious: a decision handed down by the Senate ordered the case to be
sent back for a second trial to the District Court of Vilna, and the
court of jurymen, after listening to the statements of authoritative
experts and the brilliant speeches of the defence, rendered a verdict
of not guilty (February 1, 1902). The prisoner was set at liberty, and
the nightmare of the "ritual murder Dreyfusiad" was dispelled for the
time being.
Even the Russian stage was made subservient to the purposes of
Jew-baiting. A converted Jew by the name of Efron-Litvin, who had
joined the anti-Semitic business firm of the _Novoye Vremya_, wrote a
libelous play under the title "The Sons of Israel," or "The Smugglers,"
in which Jews and Judaism were made the subject of the most horrible
calumnies. The play was first produced at St. Petersburg, in the
theatre controlled by Suvorin, the publisher of the _Novoye Vremya_,
and in the course of 1901-1902 it made the rounds of the provincial
stage. Everywhere, the Russian Jew-haters welcomed this talentless
production, which pictured the Jews as rogues and criminals, and
represented the Jewish religion and morality as the fountain-head
whence the supposed hatred of the Jews against the Christians derived
its origin. Naturally enough the Jews and the best elements among the
Russian _intelligenzia_ looked upon the mere staging of such a play
as an incitement to pogroms. They appealed repeatedly to the police,
calling upon them to stop the production of a play which was sure to
fan national and religious hatred. The police, however, were not guided
by the wishes of the Jews, but by those of their enemies. As a result,
in a considerable number of cities where the play was presented,
such as Smolensk, Oryol, Kishinev, Tiflis, and others, violent
demonstrations took place in the theatres. The Jewish spectators and a
part of the Russian public, particularly from among the college youth,
hissed and hooted, demanding the removal from the stage of this libel
on a whole people. The anti-Semites, in turn, shouted: "Down with the
Jews!", and started a fight with the demonstrators. The police, of
course, sided with the anti-Semites, attacking the demonstrators and
dragging them to the police stations. This agitation led to a number of
legal proceedings against the Jews who were charged with disturbing the
peace. During the trial of one of these cases (in the city of Oryol),
the counsel for the defence used the following argument:
The play inflames the national passions, and makes the national
traits of a people the object of ridicule and mockery,--of a
people, moreover, which is denied equal rights and has no means
of voicing its protest. The production of such a play should
never have been permitted, the more so as the police were well
acquainted with the agitated state of the public mind.
The argument of the defending attorney was scarcely convincing. For the
article of the Russian law which forbids the "incitement of one part of
the population against the other" loses its validity when the "other
part" means the Jews.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See on the Zemstvos, vol. II, p. 173, n. 1.
[2] See vol. II, p. 246.
[3] See vol. II, p. 421.
[4] The Russian title for a prosecuting attorney.
[5] "Our frame (of society) is not ready to receive you."
[6] See on this term vol. II, p. 16, n. 1.
[7] See on the meaning of this term, vol. I, p. 25, n. 1.
[8] See vol. II, p. 423.
[9] See vol. II, p. 424.
[10] These barbarities were suspended only for a few days during that
year, while the International Congress of Medicine was holding its
sessions in Moscow. The police were ordered to stop these street raids
upon the Jews for fear of compromising Russia in the eyes of Western
Europe, since it was to be expected that the membership of the Congress
would include medical celebrities with "Semitic" features.
[11] The "Temporary Rules" were not given retroactive force, and those
settled in the villages before the promulgation of the law of May 3,
1882, were accordingly permitted to stay there. [See vol. II, p. 311.]
[12] See vol. II, p. 428 _et seq._
[13] According to the statistics of 1898-1901, some 150,000 Jews in
Russia engaged in agrarian pursuits. Of these, 51,539 were occupied
with raising corn in the colonies, 64,563 engaged in special branches
of agrarian economy, 19,930 held land as owners or lessees, and 12,901
were engaged in temporary farm labor.
[14] See vol. II, p. 350.
[15] A pro-gymnazium is made up of the six (originally four) lower
grades of a gymnazium which embraces eight grades.
[16] A contemptuous nickname for Russians customary among the Poles.
CHAPTER XXXII
THE NATIONAL AWAKENING
1. THE RISE OF POLITICAL ZIONISM
For two decades the sledge hammer of Russian reaction had been
descending with crushing force upon the vast community of the six
million Russian Jews. Yet in the end it was found that the heavy
hammer, to use the well-known simile of Pushkin, instead of shattering
the national organism of Jewry, had only helped to steel it and to
harden its indestructible spiritual self. The Jewry of Russia showed to
the world that it was endowed with an iron constitution, and those that
had hoped to crush it by the strokes of their hammer were ultimately
forced to admit that they had produced the opposite result. At first it
seemed as if the effect of these blows would be to turn Jewry into a
shapeless mass. There were moments of despair and complete prostration,
when the approaching darkness threatened to obliterate all paths.
This stage was followed by a period of mental haziness, marked by
dim yearnings for regeneration, which were bound to remain fruitless
because unaccompanied by organizing energy.
This transitional state of affairs lasted throughout the eighties
and during the first half of the nineties. But by and by, out of the
chaos of these nebulous social tendencies, there emerged more and
more clearly the outlines of definite politico-national doctrines and
organizations, and new paths were blazed which, leading in different
directions, converged toward one goal--that of the regeneration of the
Jewish people from within, both in its national and social life.
The turning-point of this process is marked by the year 1897. That
year, in which the first International Zionist Congress held its
sessions, inaugurated not only the political Zionist movement, but also
the development of other currents of Jewish national and political
thought. The entire gamut of public slogans rang through the air, all
bearing testimony to one and the same fact: that the era of national
prostration had come to an end, and that the vague longings for
liberation and regeneration had assumed the character of a conscious
endeavor pursuing a well-defined course. The careful observer could
scarcely fail to perceive that beneath the hammer of history the
formless mass of Jewry was being forged into a well-shaped instrument
of great power. The organization of the Jewish people had made its
beginning.
Among the movements which arose at the end of the nineteenth century
there were some which came to the surface of Jewish life rather
noisily, attracting the attention of the Jewish masses as well as
that of the outside world. Others, however, were imbedded more deeply
in the consciousness of the educated classes and were productive of
a new outlook upon the national Jewish problem. The former were an
answer to the question of the "Jewish misery," of the _Judennot_,
in its practical aspect. The latter offered a solution of the
national-cultural problem of Judaism in its totality. The movements of
the first kind are represented by Political Zionism and Territorialism.
In the second category stand Spiritual Zionism and National-Cultural
Autonomism. On a parallel line with both varieties of the national
movement, and frequently intersecting it, went the Jewish socialistic
movement, tinged to a lesser or larger degree by nationalistic
tendencies.
For fifteen years, the "Lovers of Zion," or the _Hibbat Zion_ movement,
had been pursuing its course in Russia, without showing marked
progress in the direction of that universal Jewish goal which had been
formulated by its champions, Lilienblum and Pinsker.[17] During that
period some fifteen Jewish agricultural colonies had sprung up in
Palestine. The Jewish population of the Holy Land had been increased
by some twenty thousand souls, and an effort had been made to create
a national model school and to revive the ancient Hebrew tongue; but
needless to say all this was far from solving the burning question of
the six million Russian Jews who were clamoring for relief from their
intolerable condition. At the slow rate of progress which had hitherto
characterized the Jewish endeavors in Palestine any attempt to transfer
a considerable portion of the Russian center to the Holy Land was
doomed to failure, particularly in view of the hostility of the Turkish
Government which was anxious to check even this insignificant growth of
Jewish colonization.
At that juncture, the air of Europe resounded with the clarion tones
of Theodor Herzl's appeal to the Jews to establish a "Jewish State."
The appeal came from Western Europe, from the circles in which the
sufferings of their "Eastern brethren" had hitherto been viewed
entirely from the philanthropic point of view. It came from a young
Viennese journalist who had been aroused by the orgy of anti-Semitism
in the capital of Austria (the agitation of Burgomaster Lueger, and
others), and by the exciting anti-Jewish scenes enacted in the capital
of France, where, as a correspondent of the Viennese daily "_Die Neu
Freie Presse_," he followed the Dreyfus affair in its first early
stages. Herzl became suddenly conscious of the acute pain of the Jewish
misery. He saw the anti-Semitism of Western Europe closing ranks with
the Judæophobia of Eastern Europe. He saw the ideal of assimilation
crumbling to pieces, and he made up his mind to hoist the flag of
Jewish nationalism, scarcely aware of the fact that it had already
been hoisted in the East.[18] His pamphlet ("The Jewish State"),
which appeared in the beginning of 1896, was in its fundamental
premises a repetition of the old appeal of Pinsker. The author of the
new publication was convinced, like his predecessor, that the only
relief from the Jewish misery lay in the concentration of the Jewish
people upon a separate territory, without determining the question
whether that territory should be Palestine or Argentina. But, in
contradistinction to Pinsker, Herzl was not satisfied with formulating
the problem theoretically; he offered at the same time a plan of
political and economic organization by means of which the problem was
to be solved: the creation of special representative bodies which were
to enter into negotiations with rulers and Governments concerning the
cession of an appropriate territory to the Jews under an international
protectorate, and were also to obtain huge funds to carry out the
transplantation and resettlement of vast Jewish masses. Representing a
combination of theoretic enthusiasm and practical Utopias, the "Jewish
State" of Herzl revived the nearly smothered political hopes which had
been cherished by the _Hobebe Zion_ circles in Russia. The Russian
Jews, groaning under the yoke of an Egyptian bondage, flocked to the
new Moses who announced the glad tidings of the Exodus, and Herzl,
beholding the ready hosts in the shape of the _Hobebe Zion_ societies,
was quick to adjust his territorialistic scheme to the existing
Palestinian movement.
In this wise, the organization of political Zionism sprang into life,
using as its medium of expression the international party congresses,
most of which convened in Switzerland, in the city of Basle. The first
Basle Congress held in August, 1897, was an impressive demonstration of
the national awakening of the Jewish people. For the first time, the
united representatives of Eastern and Western Jewry proclaimed before
the world that the scattered sections of Jewry looked upon themselves
as one national organism striving for national regeneration. From the
center of Western assimilation, advocating the disappearance of Jewry,
came the war-cry, proclaiming the continued existence of the Jewish
nation, though that existence was conditioned by the establishment
of a separate "publicly and legally assured" territorial center. Of
the four articles of the "Basle program," which were adopted by the
first Congress, three deal with the fundamental task of the party,
the political and financial endeavors looking to the colonization of
large Jewish masses in Palestine, and only one voices the need "of
strengthening the Jewish national feeling and self-respect."
In the further progress of the Zionist organization, these two
principles, the political and the cultural, were constantly struggling
for mastery, the Zionists of the West gravitating toward political
activities and diplomatic negotiations, while the Zionists of the
East laid greater emphasis upon internal cultural work along national
lines, looking upon it as an indispensable prerequisite for national
rebirth. The struggle between these two principles continued at each
succeeding annual Congress (at the second and third held in Basle in
1898 and 1899, at the fourth in London in 1900, and at the fifth in
Basle in 1901). On the one hand, the Zionists were feverishly engaged
in the external organization of the movement: the consolidation of
the Shekel-payer societies, the creation of the Jewish Colonial Trust
and the Jewish National Fund, the conduct of diplomatic negotiations
with the Turkish Government and with the political representatives of
other countries for the purpose of obtaining a guaranteed "charter" for
a wholesale colonization in Palestine. On the other hand, endeavors
were made to nationalize the Jewish intellectual classes, to promote
the Hebrew language, to create a national school, and "to conquer the
communities" for Zionism, that is, to strengthen the influence of the
party in the administration of the Jewish communities. The Convention
of Russian Zionists, held at Minsk in 1902, paid particular attention
to the cultural aspirations of the party, and adopted a resolution
calling for the appointment of two committees, an orthodox and a
progressive, to find ways and means for placing Jewish education on
a national basis. The same Convention demonstrated the growth of the
movement, for, during the first five years of its existence, the
Zionist organization in Russia had succeeded in securing about seventy
thousand Shekel-payers who were organized in approximately five hundred
societies.
Yet the political and financial achievements of Zionism during that
period of bloom--prior to the crisis of 1903--were insignificant.
The diplomatic negotiations of the Zionist leader, Dr. Theodor
Herzl, with the Sultan of Turkey and his Government, as well as with
the German emperor and several other European sovereigns, failed of
their purpose--the obtaining of a Turkish charter for the wholesale
colonization of Palestine. The financial instrument of the party,
the Jewish Colonial Trust, proved as yet too weak to collect the
proposed fund of ten million dollars--a modest sum when compared with
the purpose for which it was destined. The colonization of Palestine
proceeded at a slow pace, and its miniature scale was entirely out of
proportion to the grand plan of establishing a national autonomous
center in Palestine. Withal, Zionism proved during that brief interval
a potent factor in the national awakening of Jewry. The strength of
the movement lay, not in the political aims of the organization, which
were mostly beyond reach, but in the very fact that tens of thousands
of Jews were organized with a national end in view. It lay, moreover,
in the current national-cultural activities, in the _Gegenwartsarbeit_,
which, yielding to necessity, had been raised from a means to an end.
In Western Europe, the principal significance of Zionism lay in its
effect as a counterbalance to assimilation, Herzl having declared
that "Zionism aims at the establishment of a publicly and legally
assured home for those Jews who, in their present places of residence,
are not able, or not willing, to assimilate themselves." In Russia,
however, where Jewish life was dominated by more powerful nationalizing
influences, the chief importance of political Zionism lay in this very
propaganda of a national rebirth in the midst of those whom militant
Judæophobia was endeavoring to reduce by intolerable oppression to
the level of moral degenerates. The apathy and faint-heartedness
which had characterized public Jewish life during the eighties and
the first half of the nineties was followed by a period of noisy
bustle, of organizing activity, and of great animation. The Pale
of Settlement resounded with the din of its hundreds of Zionist
societies, with the speeches of Zionist agitators at public meetings
and in the synagogues, with the intense agitation preceding the
elections for each Zionist congress, with the heated debates about the
program between the political and the cultural Zionists, between the
Mizrahists (the faction of orthodox Zionists) and the Progressives.
The public utterances of the Zionist leaders, Herzl and Nordau, were
the subject of interminable discussion and comment. The Russian Jews
were particularly stirred by the annual Congress addresses of Nordau on
the "General Situation in Jewry," in which the famous writer pictured
with characteristic vividness the tragedy of the _Golus_, the boundless
extent of Jewish misery, having a material aspect in the lands of
oppression and a moral aspect among the emancipated sections of Jewry,
and which culminated in the thought that Jewry could not exist without
Zion.
Nordau's motto, "Jewry will be Zionistic, or it will not be," was
differently interpreted in the different circles of the Russian Jewish
_intelligenzia_. Among the Russian leaders of the party only a minority
(Dr. Mandelstamm of Kiev, and others) were fully in accord with the
extreme political views of the Western leaders. The majority of the
former workers in the ranks of the _Hobebe Zion_ movement (Ussishkin,
Chlenov, and others) sought to harmonize the political functions of
Zionism with its cultural aspirations and combine the diplomatic
negotiations concerning a charter with the upkeep of the existing
colonization work in Palestine, which latter was contemptuously
branded by the hide-bound adherents of political Zionism as
"infiltration." This Babel of opinions within the ranks of the
organization could not fail to weaken its effectiveness as an agency
for the attainment of the ultimate Zionist goal. At the same time, it
brought life and animation into the movement. The crack of the whip of
the Egyptian taskmasters remained unheard amidst the clash of ideas and
the proud slogans of national liberation which resounded throughout the
Jewish Pale.
2. SPIRITUAL ZIONISM, OR AHAD-HA´AMISM
And yet, political Zionism viewed as a theory failed to offer a
satisfactory solution of the great Jewish problem in all its historic
complexity. Born of the reaction against anti-Semitism, and endeavoring
to soothe the pain of the wounded Jewish heart, it was marked by all
the merits and demerits of a theory which was substantially Messianic
in character and was entirely dependent on subjective forces, on faith
and will-power. "If you only will it, then it is no fairy tale"[19]--in
these words the ultimate goal of political Zionism is indicated by
its founder, who firmly believed that an extraordinary exertion of
the national will would transform the fairy tale of a "Jewish state"
into reality. When confronted with the question as to the future of
the Jewish nation in case faith and will-power should prove unable
to grapple with the conditions over which it had no control, and the
"fairy tale" of a united political autonomous center should not be
realized, political Zionism either remained silent or indulged in
a polemical retort which was in flagrant contradiction to Jewish
history: "Without Zion, Judaism is bound to perish." The national
conscience, however, could not be reconciled to such an answer. A more
or less satisfactory solution of the problem of Judaism could not
spring from the external reaction against anti-Semitism, but could
only mature as the fruit of profound contemplation of the course of
development pursued by the Jewish people in the Diaspora; such a
solution could only be found in the endeavor to adapt the new national
movement to this historic course. From this point of view political
Zionism was rectified by "Spiritual Zionism," the teaching of the
publicist and philosopher Ahad Ha'am (U. Ginzberg).
Even before political Zionism, or "Herzlianism," appeared on the scene,
Ahad Ha'am had succeeded in substantially modifying the Palestinian
idea as formulated by Lilienblum and Pinsker. In the program of the
semi-Masonic order _Bne Moshe_ ("Sons of Moses"), established by him in
Odessa,[20] he laid down the fundamental principle that the preparation
of the land for the people must be preceded by the transformation of
the people into a firmly-knit national organization: "We must propagate
the national idea, and convert it into a lofty moral ideal." Having
become associated with the Palestinian colonization in a practical
manner, as a leading member of the Odessa Palestine Society, founded
in 1890,[21] Ahad Ha'am indefatigably preached that the significance
of this microscopic colonization was not to be sought in its economic
results, but in its spiritual and cultural effects, in establishing
upon the historic soil of Judaism a nursing-ground for a pure national
culture which should be free from foreign admixture, and from the
inevitable cultural eclecticism of the Diaspora. After the spectacular
appearance of political Zionism on the Jewish stage this fundamental
idea of "Neo-Palestinianism" was more fully elaborated by Ahad Ha'am,
assuming the shape of a comprehensive doctrine, known as the doctrine
of "Spiritual Zionism." When the first Basle Congress was over, Ahad
Ha'am declared that the "Jewish State," as formulated by Herzl,
was beyond realization, for the reason that, under the prevailing
circumstances, it was entirely impossible to transfer to Palestine
the whole Diaspora, or even a substantial part of it. Consequently,
the Palestinian colonization could not put an end to the material
"Jewish misery," whereas a small Jewish center, gradually rising in
Palestine, might, with the help of a proper organization, solve the
national-spiritual problem of Judaism. The formation of a spiritual
center in the historic homeland of the nation, the creation in that
center of a Jewish national school, the revival of the Hebrew language
as a medium of daily speech, the untrammelled development of a Jewish
culture, without the pressure of a foreign environment--such in short
he held to be the true goal of the Palestine idea. A "publicly and
legally assured home for the Jewish spirit" of this kind would exert
an uninterrupted nationalizing influence upon the Diaspora, serving as
a living center of attraction for a genuine Jewish culture, and acting
like a focus which scatters its rays over a large periphery.
The Zionist doctrine of Ahad Ha'am, as a counterbalance to official
Zionism which was hall-marked by the "Basle Program," led to
interminable discussions among the partisans of the movement. It did
not succeed in creating a separate party or a special public agency
for its realization; yet the elements of that doctrine have mingled
in a larger or lesser degree with the views of the political Zionists
in Russia, and manifested themselves in the protests of the cultural
Zionists against the extreme political advocates of the movement at
the Zionist Congresses. The Zionist Convention at Minsk, referred to
previously, resulted in a partial triumph for the ideas championed by
Ahad Ha'am, who submitted a report on the "Spiritual Regeneration of
Judaism."[22] The Convention adopted a resolution calling for a larger
measure of cultural work in the schedule of the party activities,
but rejected at the same time the proposal of the referee to create
a Jewish world organization for the revival of Jewish culture, on
the ground that such an organization might destroy the political
equilibrium of Zionism.
3. SPIRITUAL NATIONALISM, OR NATIONAL-CULTURAL AUTONOMISM
Both political and spiritual Zionism have their roots in the same
common ground, in "the negation of the _Golus_": in the conviction
that outside of Palestine--in the lands of the Diaspora--the Jewish
people has no possibility of continuing its existence as a normal
national entity. Both political and spiritual Zionists have their
eyes equally fixed upon Zion as the anchor of safety for Judaism,
whether it be in its material or in its spiritual aspect. Neither
doctrine had formulated a clear idea of the future destinies of the
Jewish Diaspora, that is, of the destinies of the entire Jewry of the
world, minus the section settled in Palestine. The political Zionists
evaded the question as to the fate of the Jewish people in case
their aspirations should not materialize, and, faithful to the motto
proclaimed by Nordau, were ready, as it were, to sentence the entire
Diaspora to death, or to a life worse than death, in the eventuality of
the Palestine charter being refused. The cultural Zionists protested
against this hypothetical Zionism, insisting that the Diaspora would
preserve its national vitality by mere contact with a small cultural
center in Palestine. But how the tremendous bulk of the Diaspora
Jewry should be organized for a Jewish life on the spot, how it
should be enabled to liberate itself from the political and cultural
pressure of the environment--that question remained unanswered by both
wings of Zionism. An answer to this question could not be found by
considering merely the last stage of Jewish history, but by viewing the
latter in all its phases, beginning with the ancient Greco-Roman and
Eastern Diaspora. Such an answer, based upon the entire Jewish past,
was attempted by the doctrine of "Spiritual Nationalism," or, more
correctly, "National-Cultural Autonomism." Its fundamental principles
have been formulated by the present writer in his "Letters Concerning
Ancient and Modern Judaism."[23]
The theory of Autonomism takes as its point of departure the historic
fact that at all times, with the exception of a few brief and partial
deflections, the Jewish Diaspora, taken as a whole, represented a
national organism, in which the absence of political or territorial
unity was made up by the stronger cohesion of its spiritual and
cultural ties and the greater intensity of its social and autonomous
life. For many centuries the entire culture of Judaism assumed a
religious coloring and its communal autonomy was centered in the
synagogue--which circumstance gave the modern champions of assimilation
reason for thinking that the Jews were only a religious group scattered
among various nations. It was a fatal error on the part of the Parisian
Synhedrion convoked by Napoleon when, in its declaration of 1807, it
proclaimed that "Jewry to-day does not constitute a nation," an error
which during the nineteenth century became an article of faith with
the Jews of Western Europe. The latest development of the national
movement has shown that Jewry, though scattered among various political
states, is a nation full of vitality, and that the Jewish religion
is only one of its functions. The Jewish national idea, secularized
to a certain degree, is based on the assumption that all sections of
the Jewish people, though divided in their political allegiance, form
one spiritual or historico-cultural nation, which, like all national
minority groups in countries with a mixed population, are in duty bound
to fight in their several lands at one and the same time not only for
their civil equality, but also for their national rights--the autonomy
of the Jewish community, school, and language. What Jewish orthodoxy
has for centuries stood for and still stands for, under the guise of
religious Judaism, progressive Jews should fight for under the banner
of a national Jewish culture. The fate of universal Jewry ought not to
be bound up with one single center. We should take into account the
historic fact of a multiplicity of centers of which those that have
the largest numbers and can boast of the most genuine development of a
national Jewish life are entitled to the hegemony of the Jewish people.
In those lands in which civil emancipation has been achieved the fight
must go on for national emancipation, the recognition of the Jews as
a nation which is entitled to a comprehensive communal and cultural
autonomy. In Russia, the struggle must be carried on simultaneously for
civil as well as national rights. Temporary set-backs in this struggle
for a national existence ought not to discourage a nation which has
endured the most terrible sufferings for centuries and has been able to
preserve its spiritual freedom even in the midst of slavery.
A certain measure of relief from these sufferings might be found in the
old-time remedy of Jewish history, in the emigration from the lands of
bondage to countries enjoying a greater amount of freedom. If in one of
the centers the Jews are subject to prolonged persecution, then their
gradual transplantation, be it partial or complete, to another center
offering more favorable opportunities in the struggle for existence
ought to be attempted. Thus, during the last decades, the partial
exodus of the Jews from Russia has helped to create an important Jewish
center in North America and a smaller, yet spiritually valuable center,
in Palestine. The latter may become a medium for the nationalization
of the entire Diaspora, but only then when the Diaspora itself will
be organized _directly_ upon the foundations of a cultural autonomy.
Zionism, when reduced to its concrete possibilities, can form only one
plank in the universal platform of the Jewish nation. The Palestinian
center may strengthen the national development of the Diaspora, but
it does not constitute a _conditio sine qua non_ for its autonomous
existence.
Similar to Spiritual Zionism which had not succeeded in forming
a special party, and yet acted as a lever in the general Zionist
movement, Autonomism, too, failed to find its embodiment in a party
organization, and yet became an integral part of the politico-national
movements of Russian Jewry at the beginning of the present century.
During the revolutionary struggle in Russia, in 1905 and 1906, the
demand for a national-cultural autonomy was embodied in various degrees
by nearly all Jewish parties and groups in their platforms, aside from,
and in addition to, the demand for civil equality.[24]
4. THE JEWISH SOCIALISTIC MOVEMENT
On a parallel line with the nationalistic ideology, which formed a
counterbalance to the assimilationist theory of Western Europe, the
doctrine of Socialism came gradually to the fore, emphasizing the
principle of the class struggle in a more or less intimate connection
with the national idea. The Jewish labor movement was born at the
end of the eighties in Lithuania--in Vilna, and other cities; its
adherents were recruited from among the Jewish workingmen who were
mainly engaged in handicrafts. In the nineties, the movement spread to
the growing manufacturing centers of Lithuania and Poland--Bialystok,
Smorgon, Warsaw, and Lodz. At first, the labor societies were
established with a purely economic end in view--the organization
of strikes for fewer working hours, increased wages, and the like.
The leaders of these societies who were recruited from among the
young Jewish _intelligenzia_, some of whom had received a university
education abroad, endeavored to model the movement upon the pattern
of the West-European Social-Democracy. The doctrine of Marxian
Socialism was applied, sometimes rather hastily, to the primitive
stage of capitalistic production in the Pale of Settlement where it
was still very difficult to draw a line of demarcation between the
poverty-stricken "petty bourgeoisie," forming the bulk of the Jewish
population, and the labor proletariat.
In the second half of the nineties, the Jewish Socialistic societies
were drawn into the maelstrom of the Russian revolutionary movement.
In 1897, all these societies were consolidated in the "League of the
Jewish Workingmen of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia," known under
its abbreviated name as _Der Bund_ ("The League"). The first secret
convention of the "League" took place in Vilna in the month of
September, just one month after the first Zionist Congress at Basle.
Various party centers were organized in Russia--clandestinely, of
course; the party organ, published in the language of the Jewish
masses, in Yiddish, appeared abroad under the name of _Die Arbeiter
Stimme_. It is worthy of note that the formation of the Jewish "Bund"
gave a year later the stimulus to the organization of the "Russian
Social-Democratic Party," which united the formerly existing Russian
labor societies. The "Bund" now joined the ranks of Russian Social
Democracy as a separate autonomous group, although a number of Jewish
Social Democrats who had adopted the viewpoint of assimilation or
cosmopolitanism occupied a conspicuous place in the leadership of the
Russian party at large.
At subsequent conventions the "Bund" endeavored to formulate its
national program. At first, the tendency prevailed to limit the
national element in the party platform to the use of the popular
Jewish vernacular as a propaganda medium among the masses. At the
third convention of the "Bund," which took place in Kovno in 1899, the
proposal to demand national equality for the Jews was voted down on the
ground that the attention of the workingmen should be concentrated upon
their class interests and ought not to be diverted in the direction
of national aspirations. The fourth convention of the party, held in
1901, similarly declared "that it was premature, under the present
circumstances, to put forward the demand for a national autonomy for
the Jews," although it realized at the same time that "the concept
of nationality is also applicable to the Jewish people." Only after
prolonged debates in the party press, and after a violent struggle with
the centralizing tendencies of the Russian Social-Democratic Party, the
convention of the "Bund," held in 1905, adopted a resolution, demanding
"national-cultural autonomy" in the domain of popular education as well
as public rights for the language spoken by the Jews.
In this wise, the national element gradually permeated even the
doctrine of Socialism which, in its essence, had always been opposed to
it and had placed in its stead the principle of internationalism and
class interests. On the other hand, an attempt was made to inject the
Socialistic element into Zionism. Beginning with 1901, the _Poale-Zion_
("The Zionist Workingmen") began to organize themselves in separate
societies which proclaimed the territorial principle of Zionism as the
only means of solving the Jewish social-economic question, proceeding
from the assumption that in the lands of the Diaspora the Jewish masses
would always be barred from the domain of big industry.
5. THE REVIVAL OF JEWISH LETTERS
This national revival of Russian Jewry found its expression also in
Jewish literature. The periodical press, particularly in the Hebrew
language, exhibited new life and vigor, and in other domains of
literary productivity various big talents made their appearance.
As early as the end of the eighties, the two weekly Hebrew organs,
the _ha-Melitz_ in St. Petersburg, and the _ha-Tzefirah_ in Warsaw,
were transformed into dailies. The Hebrew annuals pursuing purely
literary and scientific aims, such as the _ha-Asif_ ("The Harvest"),
_Keneset Israel_ ("The Community of Israel"), _Pardes_ ("The Garden"),
and others, made way for the more energetic _ha-Shiloah_, a monthly
publication which reacted more rapidly on the questions of the day.[25]
This review, which is the equal of the leading periodicals of Europe,
exercised considerable influence upon the views of the nationalist
Jewish youth during the period of transition from the nineteenth to the
twentieth century.
At one and the same time, considerable headway was made by the
periodical press in the popular vernacular, called Jargon, or Yiddish.
The _Jüdisches Volksblatt_, a weekly publication, appeared in
St. Petersburg from 1881 to 1890. The _Hausfreund_, the _Jüdische
Volksbibliothek_, the _Jüdische Bibliothek_, edited by Spektor, Shalom
Aleichem, and I. L. Perez, respectively, were published in Warsaw and
Kiev between 1888 and 1895. _Der Jud_, a Yiddish weekly, was issued in
Warsaw in 1899-1902.
As for the Jewish press in the Russian language, the former mouthpiece
of the progressive _intelligenzia_, the _Voskhod_, which appeared at
the same time as a weekly and as a monthly publication, leaned more
and more towards the national movement. Another Russian-Jewish weekly,
_Budushchnost_, "The Future," which appeared in St. Petersburg from
1899 to 1903, was Zionistic in tendency.
In the theoretic branch of publicistic literature the dominant figure
during that period was Ahad Ha'am, whose articles endeavored to answer
not only the exciting questions of the day, but also the perpetual
problems of Judaism. His brief semi-philosophic, semi-publicistic
essays, under the general heading _Perurim_ ("Titbits"), served as
a lode star for those who hoped to find the synthesis of "Jew" and
"man" in modern Jewish nationalism. In a series of articles he lashes
"slavery in freedom,"[26] or the assimilation of the emancipated
Jews of Western Europe; he criticizes the theory of "Nationalism
without Zion," and the manifestations of a Jewish Nietzscheanism
with its denial of the Jewish ethical doctrine. Not satisfied with
mere criticism, he formulates in these articles the principles of a
"spiritual revival"[27] in the sense of a nationalization of Jewish
culture. The essays of Ahad Ha'am, which were subsequently collected
under the title _'Al Parashat Derakim_, "At the Parting of the
Ways,"[28] represent a profound and closely reasoned system of thought
which is firmly grounded in historico-philosophical premises.
In the forefront of publicists of a less theoretic turn of mind stood
the talented Nahum Sokolow, the editor of the _ha-Tzefirah_ in Warsaw,
who, after some vacillation, joined the ranks of political Zionism.
In the border-land between journalism and literary criticism the most
conspicuous figures were David Frischman and Micah Joseph Berdychevsky.
The former emphasized in his brilliant literary essays the necessity
of a "Europeanization" of Judaism, while the latter championed the
cause of Nietzcheanism, protesting against the suppression of the "man"
in the "Jew," and against the predominance of the spiritual over the
material in the doctrine of Judaism. Berdychevsky is also the author
of a number of sketches portraying the tragic split in the soul of the
Jewish intellectual and the primitive harmoniousness of the old hasidic
world.
In the realm of Jewish _belles lettres_ S. J. Abramovich, known under
his pen-name _Mendele Mokher Sforim_, the writer of the "Era of
Reforms," remained as theretofore the acknowledged leader. The creative
energy of this author, who mastered with equal skill both the national
and the popular language, attained to even greater heights during the
period of the new Jewish martyrdom. His novel _Wünschfingerl_, "The
Wishing Ring," which was originally written in Yiddish, and, in its
Hebrew version, grew into a large volume, _Be-'Emek ha-Bakha_, "In
the Valley of Tears," (1897-1907), constitutes a great epic depicting
Jewish life during the gloomy reign of Nicholas I. and the "Era of
Enlightenment" under Alexander II. A series of sketches, marked by
inimitable humor, portray the disintegration of the old mode of
life under the influence of the pogroms of 1881 and the subsequent
emigration from Russia (_Bime ha-Ra'ash_, "In Stormy Days," and
others). His autobiographical series (_Bayyamim Hahem_, "In Those
Days") and his incomplete _Shloime Reb Hayyims_ ("Solomon the son of
Hayyim") reveal the power of rare psychological analysis.
Abramovich's literary activity, extending over half a century,[29]
earned for him the title of "Grandfather of Neo-Hebrew Literature"
(_Der Zeide_).[30] He was privileged to witness the brilliant
successes of his "sons and grandsons" who came gradually to the fore,
particularly in Yiddish literature. His younger contemporary, Isaac
Leib Perez, wrote, during the first period of his literary endeavors,
clever stories, portraying the life of the Jewish masses in Poland and
distinguished by a powerful realism, often tinged with satire (his
series _Reisebilder_, "Travel Pictures," and other sketches which
were written mostly during the nineties). Later on, Perez leaned more
and more towards modern literary symbolism, drawing his inspiration
mostly from the mystic legends of the Hasidim (his series _Hasidish_,
which was subsequently expanded into two volumes under the title
_Volkstümliche Geschichten_, "Popular Stories," 1909).[31]
Towards the end of the century, the talent of the great Jewish
humorist Shalom Aleichem (S. Rabinovitz)[32] attained its full bloom.
He was particularly successful in his masterly delineation of the
_Luftmensch_ type of the Pale of Settlement, who is constantly on the
hunt for a piece of bread, who clutches at every possible profession
and subsists on illusions (his sketches _Menahem Mendel_). Using the
popular vernacular with its characteristic idioms and witticisms as
his vehicle of expression, Shalom Aleichem draws the pictures of the
"Little People" of the Russian ghetto (his series _Kleine Menshelekh_),
describes the joys and sorrows of their children (_Maassios far Jüdishe
Kinder_, "Stories for Jewish Children"), and puts into the mouth of
the unsophisticated philosopher of the ghetto, "Tevye (Tobias) the
Dairyman," the soul-stirring epic of the great upheavals in this
secluded little world (the series of sketches under the name _Tevye Der
Milchiger_). To these big stars on the sky of Jewish _belles lettres_
may be added the host of lesser luminaries who write in the rejuvenated
ancient language of the nation or in the vernacular of the masses, the
Yiddish.
The literary revival manifested itself with particular vigor in the
domain of poetry. At the beginning of the nineties, the voice of Judah
Leib Gordon, the poet of the "Era of Reforms"[33] was silenced (he died
in 1892). The singer of the national sorrow, Simon Frug,[34] who was
carried away by the new ideas of Zionism, began to sing his "Zionids"
in the Russian language, writing at the same time for the masses
sonorous poems in Yiddish, though neither of them reveals the poetic
charm of his older national elegies.
New stars now glisten on the horizon. The middle of the nineties
saw the ripening of the mighty talent of Hayyim Nahman Bialik, who
brought the poetical forms of ancient Hebrew speech to unprecedented
perfection. The magnificence of form is matched by the wealth of
content. The greatest creative power of Bialik is displayed in his
treatment of national _motifs_. Himself the product of the rabbinical
Yeshibah and Bet ha-Midrash, he sings of the spiritual beauty hidden
behind these ancient and outwardly unattractive walls, in this
antiquated citadel of the Jewish spirit, where the cult of intellectual
knighthood reigned supreme, where the spiritual shield was forged which
preserved a nation of lambs amidst a horde of wolves (his wonderful
poems _Im Yesh Et Nafsheka la-Da'at_,[35] _ha-Matmid_, "the Diligent
Student," and others). The sufferings and humiliations heaped upon his
people by its enemies bring the poet to the brink of despair, for he
realizes that the old shield has been laid aside, and no new shield has
taken its place. He is filled with indignation at the indifference of
the Jewish masses to the appeal for regeneration sounded by Zionism
(_Aken Hatzir ha-'Am_, "Verily, the People are like Grass," and
others). At a later stage, beginning with the Kishinev pogrom of 1903,
Bialik's lyre becomes more and more pessimistic, adopting the tone of
wrathful rebuke and fiery denunciation.
In contradistinction to this singer of the national soul, another
contemporary poet, Saul Chernikhovsky, sounds the keynote of general
human experience and the joy of living. He demonstratively prostrates
himself before the statue of Apollo (_Lenokah Pesel Apollo_, "Before
the Statue of Apollo"), offering to it the repentant prayer of the Jew
for having denied the ideal of beauty. He raves about "Hellenism,"
the cult of joy and light, repudiating the one-sided spirituality and
rigorism of old Judaism. Erotic _motifs_, descriptions of nature,
ballads, rustic idylls--such are the characteristic features of
Chernokhovsky's poetry which forms, as it were, a general human
_pendant_ to the poetry of Bialik, though yielding to it in the depth
of literary conception. Both Bialik and Chernikhovsky fructified the
field of Jewish poetry, which in the beginning of the twentieth century
found a whole host of more or less talented cultivators, most of them
writing in the ancient national language, though in a rejuvenated form.
Less rapid was the progress of Jewish scholarly endeavors. Yet,
beginning with the eighties, even this domain is marked by an
uninterrupted activity which forms a continuation of the scientific
achievements of the West. The nineties inaugurate systematic efforts
directed toward the elucidation of the history of the Jews in Russia
and Poland. A series of scholarly researches, monographs, and general
accounts of Jewish history, written mostly in Russian, make their
appearance. Particularly noteworthy are the efforts to blaze new paths
of Jewish historiography converging towards the national conception of
Judaism. The Jewish historians of the nineteenth century in Western
Europe, who were swayed by assimilationist ideas, viewed Jewish
history primarily from the theological or spiritualistic point of
view. The scholarly endeavors of Russian Jewry constitute an attempt
to understand the social development of the Diaspora as a peculiar,
internally-autonomous nation which, at all times, has sought to
preserve not only its religious treasures, but also the genuine
complexion of its diversified national life.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] See vol. II, p. 332.
[18] After the publication of his _Judenstaat_, Herzl openly confessed
that at the time of writing he did not know of the existence of
Pinsker's "Autoemancipation."
[19] The motto prefixed to Herzl's Zionistic novel _Altneuland_.
[20] It was founded in 1889 and disbanded in 1897.
[21] [See vol. II, p. 421 _et seq._]
[22] [Ahad Ha'am's report is embodied in the second volume of his
collected essays (Berlin, 1903) under the title _Tehiyyat ha-Ru'ah_,
"The Spiritual Revival." An English version of this article is found
in Leon Simon's translation of Ahad Ha'am's essays (Jewish Publication
Society of America, Philadelphia, 1912), p. 253 _et seq._]
[23] [A number of articles under that title appeared originally in the
Russian-Jewish monthly _Voskhod_. They were subsequently enlarged and
published in book form in 1907. The first two "Letters" were rendered
into German by the translator of this volume and published in 1905 by
the _Jüdischer Verlag_ in Berlin, under the title _Die Grundlagen des
Nationaljudentums_.]
[24] See later, p. 108 _et seq._
[25] The _ha-Shiloah_ was edited from 1896 to 1902 by Ahad Ha'am in
Odessa, though it was published in Berlin. Beginning with 1903, it was
edited by Dr. Joseph Klausner, also in Odessa.
[26] [_'Abdut be-tok Herut_, the title of one of these articles.]
[27] [_Tehiyyat ha-Ru'ah_, the title of another article, based upon his
report at the Zionist Convention at Minsk. See above, p. 51.]
[28] The first three volumes appeared in 1895-1904. [The fourth volume
appeared in 1913. A German rendering of Ahad Ha'am's selected essays by
the translator of the present volume was published in Berlin in 1904;
a second enlarged edition appeared in 1913. An English translation by
Leon Simon was issued by the Jewish Publication Society of America in
1912.]
[29] [He died, after the completion of the present volume by the
author, on December 15, 1917.]
[30] [The Yiddish equivalent for "Grandfather."]
[31] A collection of his sketches, translated into English by Helena
Frank, was issued by the Jewish Publication Society of America in 1906.
[32] Died in New York on May 13, 1916.
[33] See vol II, p. 228 _et seq._
[34] See vol. II, p. 330, n. 1.
[35] "If thou wishe to know the fountain--whence thy martyred brethren
drew their inspiration."
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE KISHINEV MASSACRE
1. POGROMS AS A COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY MEASURE
The frenzy of political reaction, which raged for two decades, was
grist to the mill of the Revolution. Stunned by the blow it had
received at the beginning of the eighties, the Russian revolutionary
movement came back to consciousness at the beginning of the twentieth
century, when the hopes for a change of policy on the part of Nicholas
II. had been completely blasted. The agitation among the students and
the workingmen, the "disorders" at the universities, the strikes at the
factories, the revolutionary propaganda carried on in the underground
press at home and in the public press abroad--all these endeavors
were gradually co-ordinated within the frame of the two revolutionary
organizations, the Social-Democratic and the Social-Revolutionary
parties, both of which assumed definite shape between 1898 and 1900.
The Social-Revolutionary party favored terrorism as a weapon in its
struggle with the Russian Government, which had made use of all the
appliances of police terrorism to suppress the faintest stirring for
liberty. This official terrorism raged with unrestricted violence.
Nocturnal raids, arrests, prisons, and places of deportation or of
penal servitude, filled to overflowing with "political criminals,"
mostly young men and women--such were the agencies by means of which
the Government hoped to stamp out the "revolutionary hydra," even when
manifesting itself in the form of moderate constitutional demands.
The revolutionaries fought terrorism with terrorism, and one of their
victims was the reactionary Minister of the Interior, Sipyaghin, who
was assassinated in April, 1902. The exasperated Tzar retorted by
appointing to the same office von Plehve, one of the most experienced
henchmen of the Russian political inquisition, who had long before, in
his capacity of Chief of the Political Police, brought its mechanism to
the top notch of efficiency.[36] He was destined to play an ill-fated
rôle in the martyrology of Russian Jewry.
It was easily to be foreseen that the Russian revolutionary movement
would make a strong appeal to the Russian Jewish youth. Had any other
cultured nation been tormented and humiliated as cruelly and as
systematically as were the Jews in Russia it would surely have given
birth to an immense host of desperate terrorists. True, the Jews
supplied the revolutionary army with a larger number of fighters than
was warranted by their numerical proportion to the rest of the Russian
population. Yet their number was insignificant when compared with the
atrocities which were constantly perpetrated against them. As a rule,
the Jewish college youth joined the ranks of the Social-Democratic
organization, which disapproved of political assassination. There were
particularly numerous Marxists among the Jewish young men and women
who had been turned away from the Russian institutions of learning
and had gone to Western Europe where they imbibed the doctrines and
methods of German Social Democracy. There were fewer Jews among the
Social Revolutionaries (Gershuni, Gotz, and others), and these, too,
did not as a rule take a direct part in the terroristic plots. As a
matter of fact, the only terrorist act committed by a Jew was that of
the workingman Hirsh Lekkert, in Vilna. Stung by the barbarous conduct
of the governor of Vilna, von Wahl, who had given orders to flog the
Jewish workingmen in public for having arranged a demonstration on
May 1, 1902, Lekkert fired upon that official. The governor escaped
unscathed, and Lekkert paid with his life for the attempt. But on
the whole, the revolutionary activity of the Jews was limited to the
frequent political demonstrations arranged by the "Bund," and to the
organizing endeavors of a certain section of the Jewish intellectuals
who had joined the ranks of both Russian Socialistic parties.
Had the Russian Government been guided by a genuine interest in the
body politic, the spread of the revolutionary movement among the
Jews, which was the child of its own system of oppression, would have
inevitably induced it to mitigate a system which was bound to turn
millions of people into desperadoes. But the Russian Government was,
properly speaking, not a Government. It was a caste of officials who
had degraded the administration of the country to the systematic
endeavor of saving their own personal careers and class interests,
both of which were indissolubly bound up with unlimited autocracy. The
Russian bureaucracy regarded the revolution as a personal threat, as
a menace to its existence, and looked upon the Jewish participants in
the revolution as their own individual enemies whose deeds were to be
avenged upon the whole Jewish people. Thus there ripened in the mind
of Plehve, the head of the bureaucratic inquisition, a truly devilish
plan: to wage war against the Russian revolution by waging war against
the Jews, and to divert the attention of the Russian public, which was
honeycombed with the revolutionary propaganda, in the direction of the
"aliens," thereby stigmatizing the entire emancipatory movement in
Russia as "the work of Jewish hands," as an anti-patriotic cause which
was foreign to the Russian people. It was part of this plan to engineer
somewhere a barbarous anti-Jewish pogrom in order to intimidate the
Jewish revolutionaries and to put it forward as a protest of the
"Russian people" against the "Jewish revolution." "Drown the revolution
in Jewish blood!"--this motto underlay the terrible scheme which,
beginning with 1903, was put into execution by the underlings of
Nicholas II. at the most crucial moments in the Russian revolutionary
movement.
2. THE ORGANIZED KISHINEV BUTCHERY
Needless to say, there was plenty of inflammable material for such
an anti-Jewish conflagration. One of the criminal haunts of these
incendiaries was situated at that time in Kishinev, the capital of
semi-Moldavian Bessarabia. Until the end of the nineteenth century,
the fifty thousand Jews of that city had lived in peace and harmony
with their Christian neighbors who numbered some sixty thousand. At the
beginning of the new century, these friendly relations were severed,
owing to the untrammelled anti-Semitic agitation of a local yellow
journalist, a petty official by the name of Krushevan. This official
had been publishing in Kishinev since 1897 a local sheet under the name
of _Bessarabetz_ ("The Bessarabian"). Having originally embarked upon a
moderately progressive policy, the paper soon sold itself to the local
anti-Semitic reactionaries from among the nobility and bureaucracy,
and was thenceforth subvention-ed by the Government. For a number of
years Krushevan's paper carried on an unbridled agitation against
the Jews. The Jews were accused of every possible crime, of economic
"exploitation," of Socialism, of "hatred towards the Christians," of
ritual murders, and of fathering the "Godless revolution." Favored by
the powers that be, the _Bessarabetz_ could do what it pleased. The
censorship of the paper lay in the hands of the deputy-governor of
Kishinev, Ustrugov, who during his administrative activity had proved
himself a past master in the art of persecuting the Jews and curtailing
the crumbs of rights that were still left to them. Under the auspices
of such a censor, who was in reality a contributor to the paper, the
latter was sure of immunity even when it proceeded to print appeals
calling on the Christian population to make pogroms upon the Jews.
This agitation was particularly dangerous in view of the fact that
the _Bessarabetz_ was the only press organ in the province, the
Government consistently refusing to license the publication of
any other newspaper. As a matter of fact, Krushevan's activity in
Bessarabia was so well thought of by Plehve that in 1902 the mercenary
journalist received considerable sums from a special slush fund for
the publication of a newspaper in St. Petersburg, under the name
_Znamya_ ("The Banner"), with a similarly reactionary anti-Semitic
tendency. However, in the capital, the filthy sheet was unable to find
readers. But as far as the _Bessarabetz_ was concerned, its influence
was clearly felt. Russian public opinion was affected by the poisonous
doses administered to it daily. The sinister instincts of the mob
became inflamed more and more, and there was the foreboding of a storm
in the air.
In the beginning of 1903, Krushevan found an occasion to give a
definite turn to his accustomed pogrom propaganda. In the town of
Dubossary the mutilated body of a Russian peasant boy, Rybalenko,
had been found, who, as was subsequently brought out by the judicial
inquiry, had been slain by his uncle in the hope of appropriating his
portion of a bequest. The _Bessarabetz_ immediately launched a campaign
against the Jews, accusing them of ritual murder. "Death to the Jews!
Let all Zhyds be massacred!"--such appeals were almost daily repeated
in the paper which was read in all the saloons and public-houses of
Bessarabia. The unenlightened Russian mob itched for an occasion to lay
its hands upon the Jews. An attempt at a pogrom was made at Dubossary,
but it was frustrated by the local Jews who were of a sturdy physique.
On the eve of the Easter festival of 1903, mysterious rumors were set
afloat in Kishinev itself telling of the murder of a Christian servant
girl, whose death was ascribed to the Jews. In reality the girl had
taken poison and died, despite the efforts of her Jewish master to
save her life. The goings-on in Kishinev on the eve of that Easter
bore the earmarks of an energetic activity on the part of some secret
organization which was hatching an elaborate fiendish scheme. That
criminal organization was centered in the local Russian club which was
the rallying-point of the officials of the province. Shortly before
the holiday, there suddenly appeared in the city an emissary of the
political police, the gendarmerie officer Levendahl, who had been
despatched from St. Petersburg; after Easter, when the sanguinary crime
had already been committed, the same mysterious envoy vanished just as
suddenly.
The triumvirate Krushevan-Ustrugov-Levendahl was evidently the soul of
the terrible anti-Semitic conspiracy. Printed hand-bills were scattered
about in the city, telling the people that an imperial ukase had been
published, granting permission to inflict a "bloody punishment" upon
the Jews in the course of the three days of the Christian Passover.
The police made no attempt to suppress these circulars, for, as
was subsequently brought out, they were in the conspiracy. Several
police officials even hinted at the impending events in their talks
with Jewish acquaintances. In the saloons and in the tea-houses, the
approaching pogrom was the subject of public discussion. The Jews were
fully aware of the coming storm, though they scarcely realized that it
would take the form not merely of an ordinary pogrom, but of a regular
butchery. On the eve of the festival of Passover, the representatives
of the Jewish community waited upon the governor and the Chief of
Police, praying for protection, and received the cool reply that the
necessary instructions had already been given and that the proper
measures for their safety had been adopted. The local Greek-Orthodox
bishop asked the rabbi, who came to see him on the subject, whether it
was true that there was a Jewish sect which used Christian blood for
ritual purposes.
The conflagration which was openly prepared by the incendiaries broke
out at the moment determined upon. On Sunday, April 6, the first day of
the Christian Passover and the seventh day of the Jewish holiday, the
church bells began to ring at noontime, and a large crowd of Russian
burghers and artisans, acting undoubtedly upon a given signal, scattered
all over the town, and fell upon the Jewish houses and stores. The
bands were preceded by street urchins who were throwing stones at
the windows. The rioters, whose number was swelled by these youthful
"fighters," seeing that the police made no attempt to interfere,
began to break into the houses and stores, and to throw the contents
on the street where everything was destroyed or plundered by the
festive crowd. But even then the police and soldier detachments who
were stationed on the streets remained passive, and made no attempt
to arrest the rioters. This attitude served in the eyes of the mob as
a final proof that the rumors concerning the permission of the Tzar
"to beat the Jews" were correct. An immense riff-raff, in a state of
intoxication, crowded the streets, shouting "Death to the Zhyds! Beat
the Zhyds!"
In the evening looting gave way to killing. The murderers, armed with
clubs and knives, assailed the Jews in the cars, on the streets, and in
the houses, wounding them severely, sometimes even fatally. Even then,
the police and military remained inactive; only when in one place a
group of Jews, armed with sticks, attempted to drive off the murderers,
the police stepped in at once and disarmed the defenders.
At ten o'clock in the evening the looting and killing were suddenly
stopped. Rumor had it that the general staff of the rioters were
holding a meeting concerning the further plan of military operations,
and were making arrangements for a systematic butchery. The "army" soon
received the necessary orders, and in the course of the entire day of
April 7, from daybreak until eight o'clock in the evening, Kishinev
was the scene of bestialities such as find few parallels even in the
history of the most barbarous ages. Finding themselves defenceless and
exposed to the passions of a savage crowd, many Jewish families hid
themselves in their cellars, or in their garrets, and sometimes sought
safety in the houses of their Christian neighbors, but the murderers
succeeded in hunting down their unfortunate victims. The Jews were
slain in most barbarous fashion. Many of them were not killed at once,
but were left writhing in pre-mortal agonies. Some had nails driven
into their heads or had their eyes put out. Little children were thrown
from garrets to the pavement, and their brains dashed out upon the
stones. Women had their stomachs ripped open or their breasts cut off.
Many of them became the victims of rape. One gymnazium pupil who saw
his mother attacked by these fiends threw himself single-handed upon
them, and saved at the cost of his life his mother's honor; he himself
was slain, and his mother's eyes were put out. The drunken hordes broke
into the synagogue, and, getting hold of the Torah scrolls, tore them
to shreds, defiled them, and trampled upon them. In one synagogue, the
old _Shammes_ (beadle), arrayed in his prayer-shawl, and shielding with
his body the Ark containing the sacred scrolls, was savagely murdered
by the desecrators on the threshold of the sanctuary.
Throughout the entire day, wagons were seen moving in the streets,
carrying wounded and slain Jews to the hospitals which had been
converted into field-lazarettes.
But even this sight did not induce the police to step in. The Russian
population, outside of a few isolated cases, made no attempt to
defend the tormented Jews. The so-called "intelligent" public, the
officials with their wives and children, the students, the lawyers,
the physicians, walked leisurely upon the streets and looked on
indifferently, and sometimes even sympathetically, while the terrible
"work" was going on. The governor of Bessarabia, von Raaben, who, on
the morning of the second day of the pogrom, was waited upon by a
Jewish deputation begging for protection, replied that he could do
nothing since he had received no instructions from St. Petersburg.
At last at five o'clock in the afternoon, a telegram was received from
Plehve, and at six o'clock large detachments of troops, fully armed,
appeared on the central streets. No sooner had the crowd noticed that
the soldiers were ready to act than it took to its heels, without a
single shot being fired. Only in the outskirts of the town, which had
not yet been reached by the troops, the plunder and massacre continued
until late in the evening.
It is needless to point out that had this readiness of the police and
military to attend to their duty been displayed in Kishinev at the
inception of the pogrom, not a single Jew would have been murdered nor
a single house destroyed. As it was, the murderers and rioters were
given a free hand for two days, and the result was that forty-five
Jews were slain, eighty-six severely wounded or crippled, five hundred
slightly wounded, apart from cases of rape, the number of which could
not be determined. Fifteen hundred houses and stores were demolished
and looted. The victims were mostly among the lower classes of the
Jewish population, since many well-to-do Jewish families were able,
by bribing the police heavily, to secure the protection of the latter
and to have the rioters turned away from their houses. As against the
enormous number of Jewish victims, there were only two fatalities among
the intoxicated rioters. The Kishinev Jews seemed unable to resist the
murderers and sell their lives dearly.
3. ECHOES OF THE KISHINEV TRAGEDY
A cry of horror rang throughout Russia and the more or less civilized
countries of the world when the news of the Kishinev butchery became
known. The entire liberal Russian press voiced its indignation against
the Kishinev atrocities. The most prominent Russian writers expressed
their sympathy with the victims in letters and telegrams. Leo Tolstoi
voiced his sentiments in a letter which could not be published on
account of the censorship.[37] The humanitarian writer Korolenko
portrayed the horrors of Kishinev in a heart-rending story under the
title "House No. 13," in which, on the basis of personal observation,
he pictured how the Jewish residents of one house were tortured to
death by the rioters. The story was circulated in an illegal edition,
its publication having been strictly forbidden by the censor. But
in Russia itself, the cry was stifled by the heavy hand of Plehve's
censorship, and wherever a fraction of the terrible truth managed to
slip through the barriers of the censor, Plehve sent out warnings
to the papers threatening to discontinue their publication for the
"pursuit of an injurious policy." Such a fate actually overtook the
Russian-Jewish _Voskhod_, in St. Petersburg, the legal journal _Pravo_
("The Law"), and others. The entire Russian press was forced by the
Government to publish the falsified version embodied in its official
reports, in which the organized massacre was toned down to a casual
brawl, and the inactivity of the troops was explained either by the
inadequacy of their numbers--despite the fact that several battalions
were stationed in the city--or by the incapacity of the police, while
the dead and wounded were referred to in a vague manner so as to
suggest that the victims of the "brawl" were to be found on both sides.
But the revelations in the foreign press were of a nature to stagger
all Europe and America. The correspondent of the London _Times_
published the text of a secret letter addressed by Plehve to the
governor of Bessarabia, in which, two weeks before the pogrom, the
latter official was told that, in the case of anti-Jewish "disorders,"
"no recourse shall be taken to armed interference with the urban
population, so as not to arouse hostility to the Government in a
population which has not yet been affected by the revolutionary
propaganda." The authenticity of this letter is not entirely beyond
suspicion. But there can be no doubt that instructions to that effect,
rather by word of mouth than in writing, probably through the secret
agent Levendahl, had been actually transmitted to the authorities in
Kishinev.
From the fact that on the second day of the pogrom the governor was
still waiting for instructions from St. Petersburg permitting him to
discontinue the massacre it is evident that he must have received
previous orders to allow it to proceed up to a certain point. The
horrors of the Armenian massacres in Turkey, against which even Russian
diplomacy had protested more than once, faded into insignificance
before the wholesale butchery at Kishinev. Europe and America were
deeply agitated. The Jews outside of Russia collected large funds for
their unhappy Russian brethren, but their efforts exhausted themselves
in sympathy and philanthropy.
The effect of the catastrophe upon Russian Jewry was more lasting.
A mixed feeling of wrath and shame seized the Jewish public--wrath
against the organizers and abetters of the terrible crime, and shame
for the tortured and degraded brethren who, not having a chance to
save their lives, had failed to save their honor by offering stout
resistance to these beasts in human shape, who were sure of immunity.
The poet Frug poured forth his sentiments in a Yiddish poem, voicing
his sorrow at the physical helplessness of his nation and confining
himself to an appeal to the kind Jewish heart:
Too keen and grievous is our pain, too weak our hand the blow to parry.
Come on, then, tender Jewish heart, and love and comfort to us carry!
Brothers, sisters, pray, have pity; dire and dreadful is our need:
Shrouds we want the dead to bury, and bread that the living we
may feed.[38]
A little later, the young poet Bialik gave powerful utterance to his
feeling of wrath and shame in his "Burden of Nemirov."[39] He makes God
address these words to the martyred nation:
Your dead have died in vain, and neither you nor I
Can say for what they gave their lives, and why....
No tears shall flow for you!--the Lord swears by His Name--
For though the pain be great, great also is the shame,
And which of them the greater, thou, son of man, decide....
In picturing the memorial services held in honor of the Kishinev
victims at the synagogues, he angrily exclaims in the name of God:
Lift thine eyes and look how steeped they are in grief.
You hear them cry and sob and mournful prayers read.
You see them beat their breasts and for forgiveness plead....
What are they praying for?... Tell them to protest!
To shake their fists at Me and justice to demand!
Justice for all they've suffered throughout the generations,
So that My Heaven and Throne shall quake to their foundations!
Neither the pogroms at the beginning of the eighties, nor the Moscow
atrocities at the beginning of the nineties can compare, in their
soul-stirring effect upon Russian Jewry, with the massacre of Kishinev.
It awakened the burning feeling of martyrdom, but with it also the
feeling of heroism. All were seized by one and the same impulse--the
organization of self-defence, as if to say: "Since the Government
fails to defend our life and honor, then we ourselves are bound to
defend it." The pogrom panic which spread over the entire South
following upon the terrible days of April 6-7 led to the organization
of self-defence societies in a number of cities. Plehve knew of these
preparations, and found himself in a difficult position. He realized
that these endeavors might interfere with the engineering of the
pogroms, since the latter would no longer be safe for the murderers
and plunderers, and he was, moreover, full of apprehension that
these self-defence societies might become hotbeds of a revolutionary
propaganda and provide a training ground for political demonstrations.
These apprehensions were voiced in a circular issued at the end of
April, in which the Minister instructed the governors, first, that "no
self-defence societies should be tolerated," and, second, that the
authorities should adopt measures for the "prevention of violence" and
the "suppression of lawlessness." Subsequent events showed that the
latter order was never put into effect. The first instruction, however,
was carried out with relentless cruelty, and, during the following
pogroms, the troops made it their first business to shoot down the
members of the self-defence.
Such being the frame of mind of Russian Jewry, the ukase of May 10,
1903, opening up to the Jews for "free domicile" one hundred and one
localities in various governments of the Pale of Settlement, which had
hitherto been barred to them under the "Temporary Rules" of 1882, was
received with complete indifference. As a matter of fact, many of the
rural settlements, included in that ukase, were in reality towns which
had been converted into "villages," at the instigation of spiteful
officials, for the sole purpose of rendering them inaccessible to the
Jews. The stolen property was now returned with a slight surplus. The
Danaid gift, which seemed to be offered to the Jews as a compensation
for the Kishinev horrors, could not but fill them with disgust.
Parenthetically it may be remarked that the Government itself nullified
the moral effect of its "act of grace" by issuing on the same day a new
repressive law prohibiting the privileged Jews who were entitled to the
right of domicile outside the Pale of Settlement from acquiring real
property in the villages and hamlets. The knot of rightlessness was
loosened by a hair's breadth in one place, and tightened in another.
Grief and shame over "the Kishinev days" armed the hand of Pincus
Dashevski, a high-minded Jewish youth, against the most culpable
instigator of the massacre--Krushevan. Dashevski, the son of a
military surgeon, travelled from Kiev, where he was a student at the
Polytechnicum, to St. Petersburg to inflict punishment on the miserable
hireling of Judæophobia, who had caused the Kishinev conflagration
by his criminal newspaper agitation. On June 4, 1903, he assailed
Krushevan in the heart of the capital, on the so-called Nevski
Prospect, wounding him in the neck with a knife. The wound proved of no
consequence, and the "victim" was able to go home, without accepting
the first aid proffered to him in a Jewish drug store nearby. Dashevski
was arrested and brought to trial. At the preliminary examination he
frankly confessed that he had intended to avenge the Kishinev massacre
by killing Krushevan. Krushevan, now more ferocious than ever, demanded
in his newspaper _Znamya_ that the Jewish avenger be court-martialled
and executed, and his demand was echoed by the entire anti-Semitic
press. The case was tried in a district court behind closed doors, the
Government of Plehve evidently fearing the appearance of the sanguinary
ghost of Kishinev in the court-room.
Krushevan was represented by the anti-Semitic lawyer Shmakov, who
subsequently figured in the Beilis trial. The counsel for Dashevski
(the lawyer Gruzenberg and others) pleaded that his client's act had
been inspired by the intention not to kill, but merely to voice his
protest against the unbridled criminal activity of Krushevan. Dashevski
received the severe sentence of penal military service for five years
(August 26). An appeal was taken to the Senate, but the judgment of
the lower court was sustained. The youth who, in a fit of righteous
indignation, had given vent to the outraged feelings of his martyred
nation, was put in chains and sent into the midst of murderers and
thieves, while the venal instigator, whose hands were stained with the
blood of numerous victims, escaped unscathed, and assisted by public
funds, continued his criminal activity of fanning the hatred of the
populace against the Jews.
4. DOCTOR HERZL'S VISIT TO RUSSIA
The alert bureaucratic mind of Plehve was quick to make its deductions
from the Dashevski case. He realized that the Kishinev massacre
would inflame the national Jewish sentiment and divert the national
or Zionist cause into the channel of the revolutionary movement.
Accordingly, on June 24, 1903, Plehve issued a circular to the
governors, which was marked "strictly confidential," and sent out
through the Police Department, ordering the adoption of energetic
measures against "the propaganda of the ideas of Zionism," which had
departed from its original aim--the transfer of Jews to Palestine--and
"had directed its activity towards strengthening the Jewish national
idea," preaching "the organization of the Jews in secluded societies
in the places of their present domicile." Acting upon these orders,
the police began to persecute the Zionists in a number of cities,
prohibiting the sale of Jewish Colonial Trust shares, collections for
the Jewish National Fund, and meetings and conferences of the Zionist
societies.
Shortly thereafter, on July 25, the leader of the Zionists, Dr.
Herzl, arrived in St. Petersburg to induce the Russian authorities
to discontinue these persecutions. Apart from this immediate object,
Herzl had another more important mission in mind. He hoped to obtain
a promise from the Russian Government to exert a diplomatic pressure
upon Turkey in favor of permitting the settlement of Jews in Palestine
on a large scale. During his four interviews with Plehve, the Zionist
leader succeeded in convincing the minister that "it was in keeping
with the interests of the Russian Government to assist the Zionist
movement." Plehve replied--and subsequently confirmed his reply in
writing--that the Russian Government was willing to help Zionism so
long as its political activity would be directed towards the attainment
of its aims outside of Russia, towards the creation of a Jewish center
in Palestine and the emigration of the Jews from Russia, but that as
soon as the movement would be turned inwards, that is, towards the
propaganda of the Jewish national idea and the organization of Jewry
in Russia itself, it would not be tolerated, being subversive of the
Russian national policies. Herzl assured Plehve that political Zionism
_sans phrase_ had no other aim in view, except the creation of a center
outside of the Diaspora.
Both Plehve and Herzl seemed to be satisfied with the results of their
conversation. Herzl saw also the Minister of Finance, Witte, and the
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lamsdorff, and left St. Petersburg in a
hopeful mood. On his way to St. Petersburg, particularly during his
stay in Vilna, Herzl was the object of stormy ovations by the Zionists.
At the same time, he was severely criticized by the representatives
of other Jewish political groups who thought that he had lowered the
national dignity of the Jewish people by conducting negotiations for
the salvation of Jewry with the man on whose forehead was stamped the
Cain's mark of Kishinev.
It seems that the severe crisis which had set in for political Zionism,
when the hope for obtaining a charter from the Sultan had receded into
a distance, had impelled Herzl to catch at a straw, at negotiations
with the Russian Government. He was evidently of the opinion that the
Russian Pharaohs who had countenanced the methods of reducing the
Jewish population in Russia, such as had been practised at Kishinev,
might be willing to achieve the same object by rendering its diplomatic
assistance to the Zionist plans. A pledge in this direction was
actually given to Herzl. But Herzl overestimated the importance of the
promises made to him by potentates who merely looked upon him as a
noble-minded dreamer.
Two weeks after Herzl's visit to St. Petersburg, the acuteness of the
Zionist crisis manifested itself at the sixth Congress at Basle (August
11-16, 1903). On that occasion Herzl announced his new project, the
colonization of Uganda, in British East Africa, by virtue of a charter
which had been offered to him by the British Government. He pointed
out that this project had a definite aim in view--the amelioration of
the terrible condition of Russian Jewry, for which purpose Zion at
that particular moment was not available. Herzl's pronouncement rent
the Congress in twain: one section seized enthusiastically upon the
Uganda project, which held out the promise of at least a temporary
shelter in Africa, a _Nachtasyl_, for a part of the agonized nation.
The other section protested violently against this attempt to create a
"Zionism without Zion," against the abandonment of Palestine and the
higher aspirations of the movement. After many stormy and soul-stirring
scenes, the majority of the Congress adopted a resolution to send an
expedition to Uganda to investigate the proffered country from the
point of view of its fitness for Jewish colonization. Thereupon, all
the opponents of the Uganda project, the so-called _Neinsager_ (the
"Nay-sayers"), mostly Russian Zionists, left the Congress hall in a
body.
The movement was now rent by a severe conflict, the result of the
struggle between the two principles which had long been intermingled
in the theoretic foundations of Zionism: Palestinianism and
Territorialism. This internal conflict culminated in an open split
between these two principles. Out of the Zionist movement was born
the Territorialist Organization, which proclaimed as its object the
creation of a Jewish autonomous center on any available point of the
globe. For the blood of Kishinev cried out for an exodus from the
new Egypt. The emigration to the United States, where the prisoners
of Tzardom had in the course of twenty years, beginning with 1881,
succeeded in forming a big Jewish center, had passed the million mark,
and was expected to assume larger and larger dimensions. The Jewish
public press insisted on the necessity "of regulating the emigration to
America not only as a social-economic, but also as a national factor."
It was pointed out that a considerable portion of the historic national
center in Russia and Poland was, under the pressure of external events,
in the process of removing to North America, and that practical Jewish
politics had the direct duty of organizing this great rising center of
Jewry.
FOOTNOTES:
[36] See vol. II, p. 381.
[37] The following extract may show that the great writer had a
profound insight into the causes of the Kishinev barbarities:
"My opinion concerning the Kishinev crime is the result also
of my religious convictions. Upon the receipt of the first
news which was published in the papers, not yet knowing all
the appalling details which were communicated subsequently,
I fully realized the horror of what had taken place, and
experienced simultaneously a burning feeling of pity for the
innocent victims of the cruelty of the populace, amazement at
the bestiality of all these so-called Christians, revulsion at
all these so-called cultured people who instigated the mob and
sympathized with its actions. But I felt a particular horror
for the principal culprit, our Government with its clergy
which fosters in the people bestial sentiments and fanaticism,
with its horde of murderous officials. The crime committed at
Kishinev is nothing but a direct consequence of that propaganda
of falsehood and violence which is conducted by the Russian
Government with such energy. The attitude adopted by the
Russian Government in relation to this question may only serve
as a new proof of the class egotism of this Government, which
stops at no cruelty whenever it finds it necessary to check
movements that are deemed dangerous by it. Like the Turkish
Government at the time of the Armenian massacres, it remains
entirely indifferent to the most horrible acts of cruelty, as
long as these acts do not affect its interests."
[38]
_Schlaff is unser Hand zu streiten, stark un schwer is unser Schmerz,
Kum-zhe du mit Treist un Liebe, gutes heisses jüdisch Herz!
Brüder, Schwester, hot rachmones: groiss un schrecklich is di Noit,
Giebt di Toite oif Tachrichim, giebt di Lebedige Broit!_
[39] _Massa Nemirov._ This heading was chosen to appease the censor.
As the name Kishinev could not be mentioned, Nemirov was chosen, being
the name of the town which yielded the largest number of victims during
the Cossack massacres of 1648. [See vol. I, p. 146, _et seq._--In a
later edition the poem was renamed _Be-'Ir ha-Haregah_, "In the city of
Slaughter."]
CHAPTER XXXIV
CONTINUED POGROMS AND THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR
1. THE POGROM AT HOMEL AND THE JEWISH SELF-DEFENCE
No sooner had the Zionist Congress, at which the heated discussions
concerning the salvation of Judaism were intermingled with sobs
bemoaning the martyrs of Kishinev, concluded its sessions than a new
catastrophe broke out in the dominions of the Tzar--the pogrom at
Homel, in the Government of Moghilev. In this lively White-Russian
town, in which the twenty thousand Jews formed fully one-half of the
population, public Jewish life was marked by great vigor. There existed
in the city important societies of Zionists and Socialists. Both of
these parties had organized several self-defence contingents, and it
was to be expected that the disgrace of Kishinev would not be repeated
at Homel, and that, in the case of an attack, the Jews would give a
good account of themselves.
On August 29, 1903, a fight broke out on the market-place between a
crowd of Jews and Christians. The cause of the quarrel was a trivial
incident, one peasant trying to carry off from a Jewish store a barrel
of herrings at a lower price than the one demanded by the storekeeper.
The rowdyish purchaser was pushed out of the store, but the peasants on
the market-place took sides with him, and in the ensuing fight between
them and the Jew, one peasant was accidently killed. The peasants were
scared and took to their heels, while the police began to make arrests
among the Jews. The Jews might have been satisfied with the fact that
their energetic attitude had succeeded in preventing a pogrom, did they
not anticipate the revenge which was sure to be wreaked upon them.
Two days passed in a state of tense agitation. On the third day,
on September 1, a crowd of Russian workingmen, numbering about two
hundred, issued forth from the railroad shops, and began to demolish
Jewish residences and houses of worship. The rioters were joined by a
mob of stone-cutters, day-laborers, and ragamuffins. Here and there
the crowd was incited by a few "intellectuals": a merchant, a student,
and a teacher. On the Konnaya Square, the mob was checked by a large
detachment of the Jewish self-defence, consisting of several hundred
men. The rioters were on the point of giving way before the gallant
attack of the self-defence; but at that moment the troops appeared on
the scene, and fired a volley in the direction of the Jews, resulting
in three killed and several wounded. The assistance rendered by the
troops filled the rioters with fresh courage, and they continued their
work of destruction with renewed vigor. All over the town a chain of
soldiers shielded the attacking hordes against the Jewish self-defence
contingents which tried in vain to break through the chain. The
defenders were driven off with rifle butts and bayonets, while the
rioters were allowed to destroy and murder without let or hindrance.
In the evening, the pogrom was stopped; the results were twelve killed
or dangerously wounded Jews, eight killed or dangerously wounded
Christians, a large number of maltreated and slightly wounded Jews and
over two hundred and fifty devastated Jewish residences and stores.
Among those arrested by the police was a considerably larger number of
self-defending Jews than of attacking Christians.
Two days later, the governor of Moghilev came to Homel, and, having
summoned the Jews to the Town Council, treated them to the following
harangue:
I am sorry for the unhappy victims, but how could such
bitterness have arisen? Religious toleration in Russia is
complete. The causes of the latest events lie deeper. The
Jews have now become the leaders and instigators in all
movements directed against the Government. This entire
"Bund" and the Social-Democrats--they are all Jews. You are
yourselves to blame for all that has happened. You do not
educate your children properly. You have no influence over
them. But at least you can surrender them, pointing them out
to the Government, whereas you conceal them. You propagate
disobedience and opposition to the Government among an
uncivilized population. But the Russian populace does not care
for it and turns against you.
It would seem as if Plehve himself had spoken through the mouth
of the governor. The Russian functionary expressed with naïve and
clumsy frankness the hidden thought of the Chief of the Political
Inquisition--the idea of punishing the fathers for the revolutionary
leanings of their children, who were to be surrendered to the police,
and of discrediting the entire Russian liberty movement as a "Jewish
cause." In a Government communication which appeared after the pogrom
the events at Homel were reported in such a way as to suggest that they
were brought about by an attack of the Jews upon Christian residents
and upon the troops, in consequence of which the latter had been forced
to fire in "self-defence." The final deduction was formulated thus:
"The cause of the disorders lies in the extremely hostile and defiant
attitude of the local Jews toward the Christians." Thus were the actual
facts distorted in an official document, and the tortured were put
forward as the torturers.
The Homel pogrom did not attain to the dimensions of the Kishinev
massacre, nor was it as painful to the moral consciousness of the
Jews. For in Homel the Jews did not allow themselves to be beaten
and slaughtered like sheep, but put up a valiant defence. Had the
troops not turned against the self-defence, the pogrom would not
have taken place, and the cowardly rabble would have taken to flight
before the gallant defenders of their national honor. Already in the
spring, Plehve had foreseen that the Jews would attempt to organize
a self-defence of their own, and he had in his previously mentioned
circular declared in advance that this most fundamental right of
human beings to defend their lives was "inadmissible." Accordingly,
several Jewish heroes paid with their lives for having violated this
ministerial circular. Their death was the foreboding of a new Jewish
martyrdom. All this had the natural effect of enormously intensifying
the revolutionary sentiments of the Jewish youth and of inspiring them
with hatred towards a régime which permitted some of its citizens to
commit murder and prohibited others to defend their lives.
2. THE KISHINEV MASSACRE AT THE BAR OF RUSSIAN JUSTICE
In the fall of 1903 the judicial investigation in connection with the
spring pogrom in Kishinev was nearing its end. The investigation was
conducted with a view to obliterating the traces of the deliberate
organization of the pogrom. The representatives of Government authority
and of the better classes whose complicity in the Kishinev massacre had
been clearly established were carefully eliminated from the trial, and
only the hired assassins and plunderers from among the lower classes,
numbering about four hundred men, were brought to justice. Prompted
by fear lest the terrible truth might leak out in the court, the
Ministry of Justice ordered the case to be tried behind closed doors.
By this act, the blood-stained Russian Government refused in advance to
rehabilitate itself before the civilized world, which looked upon it as
the instigator of the catastrophe.
In the court proceedings, the echo of which penetrated beyond the walls
of the closed court-room, the counsel for the defence from among the
best representatives of the Russian bar (Karabchevski, Sokolov, and
others, who were Christians, and the Jews Gruzenberg, Kalmanovich, and
others) succeeded in proving that the prisoners at the bar were only
blind tools in the commission of the crime, whereas the organizers of
the butchery and the ringleaders of the mob were escaping justice.[40]
They demanded that the case be probed to the bottom. The court refused
their demand, whereupon the lawyers, having stated their reasons,
withdrew from the court-room one after the other.[41] The only
advocates left were the anti-Semite Shmakov and other whole-hearted
defenders of the Kishinev massacre, who regarded the latter as a
manifestation of the honor and conscience of the Russian people. In the
end, the court sentenced a score of murderers and rioters of the first
group to hard labor or penal service, dismissing at the same time the
civil actions for damages presented by the Jews.
Six months later the Kishinev case came up before the Senate, the
Jews appearing as complainants against Governor von Raaben (who had
been dismissed after the pogrom), Deputy-Governor Ustrugov, and the
Kishinev Chief of Police, upon whom they fastened the responsibility.
The bureaucratic defendants cynically declared "that the losses
suffered by the Jews have been covered many times over by contributions
from Russia, Western Europe, and America." All the eloquence of the
well-known lawyer Vinaver and of his associates failed to convince the
judges of the Senate, and the petition for damages was dismissed. The
Government did not wish to create a precedent for compensating pogrom
victims out of public funds, for "this might place the representatives
of the administration in an impossible position," as was stated with
naïve frankness by von Raaben, since it might become necessary to
increase the imperial budget by several million rubles a year.
In the midst of these ghastly proceedings Plehve conceived the plan of
"regulating the legislation concerning the Jews." In August, 1903, he
sent out a circular to the governors, calling upon them, in view of
the extraordinarily complex and tangled condition of the Russian laws
affecting the Jews, to point out ways and means "of bringing these
legal enactments into proper order and into as harmonious a system as
possible." In reply to this circular, the governor of Vilna, Pahlen,
submitted an extensive memorial, in which he pointed out that all the
restrictive laws within the boundaries of the Pale of Settlement ought
to be repealed on account of their pernicious political influence,
since they were driving the Jews into the ranks of the paupers or
revolutionaries. At the same time he suggested to retain the repressive
measures "against the manifestation of the injurious characteristics
of Judaism on the part of certain individuals" and also to exclude the
Jewish youth from the Christian schools and establish for them special
elementary and intermediate schools under the supervision of Christian
teachers. A few other governors, among them the new governor of
Bessarabia, Urussov, also expressed themselves in favor of mitigating
the repressive policy against the Jews.
In January, 1904, a committee of governors and of several high
officials representing the Ministry of the Interior met to consider the
Jewish question. From the very beginning the conferees were given to
understand that in "the highest spheres" every thought of the slightest
mitigation of the condition of Jewry was taboo. The only liberal member
of the committee, Governor Urussov, subsequently stated that after
the Kishinev pogrom and the agitation raised by it "one could feel
quite tangibly the unfriendly attitude of the highest spheres toward
the Jews"--in other words, that the hatred toward the Jews was shared
personally by the Tzar and by his _camarilla_. The committee therefore
applied itself to the task, not of reforming Jewish legislation, but
rather of systematizing the anti-Jewish code of laws. Its labors were
interrupted by the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, on January 27,
1904.
3. THE JEWS IN THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR
On the day following the declaration of war, the organ of Russian
Jewry, the _Voskhod_, wrote as follows:
This is not the time to irritate the old wounds. Let us
endeavor, as far as it is in our power, to forget also the
recent expulsion from Port Arthur,[42] the pogroms of Kishinev
and Homel, and many, many other things.... Let the Jewish
parents not think of the bitter fate of their children who had
been thrown overboard [by being barred from the educational
establishments]. The Jews will go forth into battle as plain
soldiers, without any hope of attaining an officer's rank, or
shoulder-straps, or distinctions--the blood of our sons will
flow as freely as that of the Russians.
The Jews marched to the Far East to assist Russia in making the
province of Manchuria part of Siberia in which they were forbidden
to reside. The number of Jews at the front was disproportionately
large--it amounted to some thirty thousand, owing to the fact that, in
accordance with the usual military regulations, the Jewish recruits
from the Western governments were generally despatched to Siberia,
so that, at the very outset, they were near the theatre of military
operations. Disproportionately large was also the number of Jewish
physicians in the reserves. They were mobilized at once, evidently
for the reason that they lived on their private practice and were not
allowed to occupy any state or public office, whereas the Russian
physicians were not drawn upon to the same extent, so as not to divert
them from their administrative, municipal, or Zemstvo services.[43]
Hundreds of Jewish physicians had to work and to encounter the
murderous fire of the Japanese because of the fact that an unjust law
deprived them of the right of civil service in time of peace.
While scores of thousands of disfranchised Jews were fighting for the
prestige of Russia in the Far East, the whip of rightlessness did
not cease to lash their brethren at home. In a number of places the
authorities began to expel the families of the soldiers and physicians
who had been sent to the war, on the ground that with the departure of
the head of the family the wife and children had forfeited the right
of residence, the latter being conditioned by the profession of the
husband or father. This policy, however, was too monstrous even for
St. Petersburg, and Plehve was soon forced to decree that the families
of the mobilized Jews should be left in their places of residence,
"pending the termination of the war."
Though the Government was compelled to relax for a while its oppression
of the Jews, social Judæophobia, fanned by the chauvinism incident
to war time, broke out with greater violence than ever. Irritated by
the rapid failures of the Russian arms and by the unexpected military
superiority of the Japanese, the reactionary press, headed by the
_Novoye Vremya_, began to circulate preposterous rumors to the effect
that the Jews were secretly helping the Japanese, their "kinsmen
by race," in order to wreak their vengeance upon Russia for having
perpetrated the Kishinev massacres. The story of the Jewish-Japanese
alliance issued from the public press of the capital to make its
rounds through the provinces, and each day gave birth to a rumor
more absurd than the other: the Jews are exporting gold abroad, they
are purchasing horses for Japan, they are collecting money to build
cruisers for the Mikado, they are provoking England and America
against Russia, and similar preposterous stories. It was clear that
these rumors were the work of a gang of unscrupulous agitators _à la_
Krushevan, who were eager to instigate anti-Jewish pogroms on a modern
basis--the accusation of "treachery." This assumption is confirmed by
the additional fact that these incendiary rumors were particularly
circulated in February and March, before the Easter festival, the
old-time pogrom season, just as in the preceding year the ritual murder
libel of Dubossary had been kept afloat during the same months. "The
incendiaries have already set out upon their work"--with these words
the Jewish organ _Voskhod_ warned its readers in its issue of March 11.
A week later, the same paper had occasion to publish accounts of the
panic which had spread among the Jewish population, particularly in
the South. In Kishinev, a second pogrom was feared, calling forth an
intensified emigration to America. In Odessa, the Jews were agitated by
sinister rumors, and began to prepare themselves for self-defence. This
state of alarm was reflected in the foreign press. It was rumored that
the American ambassador at St. Petersburg had received instructions
to make representations to the Russian Government--which rumor was
subsequently officially denied.
Fortunately the Government itself came to the conclusion that the
time of war was not a fit opportunity for arranging pogroms. The
governors received orders to adopt energetic measures for the
prevention of Passover excesses. Governor Urussov of Bessarabia and
the city-governor of Odessa addressed serious warnings to the Russian
population. These steps had the desired effect. As soon as the police
and population realized that the pogroms were not desired from above,
the agitation collapsed; and in April the papers were able to tell
their readers that "Passover has passed quietly everywhere." In his
_Memoirs_ Urussov tells us that, during the restless day preceding
the Easter festival in Kishinev, he had been engaged, together with
the Chief of Police, in working out a plan looking to the maintenance
of public order in the city; during this conference he noticed that
the Chief of Police was rather hesitant and puzzled. This hesitation
continued until the governor received from Plehve a telegram in cipher,
calling upon him to prevent pogroms. No sooner had Urussov shown the
Chief of Police the deciphered telegram than the latter exclaimed:
"Don't trouble yourself--now there will be no disorders in Kishinev."
Such was the spirit in which the provincial administrators had been
trained. Without a special order from St. Petersburg, they did not have
the courage to suppress the pogroms.
4. THE "POLITICAL SPRING"
On the morning of July 15, 1904, the square before the Warsaw depôt in
St. Petersburg presented a terrible sight. Upon the pavement lay the
blood-stained body of Plehve, who had been smitten by the bomb of the
Russian terrorist Sazonov while on his way to Peterhof where he was to
report to the Tzar. This meant that the revolution had again raised its
head. After two years of frenzied police terrorism, and in spite of
all attempts to divert the attention of the public from the necessity
of reforms, first by pogroms and then by the war against Japan--Plehve
had insisted upon the declaration of war, hoping to drown the
"seditious" movement in chauvinism--the revolutionary spectre was once
more haunting the country. The martyrs of the autocratic inquisition
perceived the "finger of God" in the calamities caused by the war and
in the miserable end of Plehve. In February, 1904, the Russian censor
confiscated an issue of the _Voskhod_ in which a young Jewish sibyl,
in a poem entitled "To Haman," referring to the biblical _Mene, Mene,
Tekel u-Farsin_, predicted a shameful death for the new Haman who was
easily identified as the hero of Kishinev. One could feel in the air
the coming of a cleansing tempest. Even the reactionary Government was
taken aback by the approaching storm. It did not dare to answer the
terrorism of the revolution with police terrorism. On the contrary, it
made an attempt to moderate the régime of serfdom.
On August 11, on the occasion of the birth of the heir-apparent Alexis,
an imperial manifesto was issued, granting "favors" and "privileges"
to the population, the most important of which consisted in the
abrogation of corporal punishment for peasants and soldiers. On the
same day, a ukase was promulgated in which the Tzar "thought it _just_
to introduce, pending the general revision of the legislation affecting
the Jews, several amendments in the enactments concerning their rights
of residence at present in force." The amendments were trifling: the
Jews with a higher education were permitted to live in the villages
and acquire real property there, as well as to carry on business
everywhere. Those who had participated in the Japanese war, and had
distinguished themselves or had conducted themselves irreproachably
were to be accorded the right of universal domicile. The wives and
under-aged children of the Jews with a higher education were granted
the right of residence even after the death of their husbands and
fathers. These rights were the only ones which the Government thought
it "just" to confer upon the Jews, who had sent thirty thousand people
into the active army to fight on the fields of Manchuria. The Jewish
public received this niggardly gift with chilly indifference, and
turned its gaze to wider horizons which were then opening up before
Russia. The country was on the eve of a "political spring."
On August 26 the post of Minister of the Interior was entrusted to
Svyatopolk-Mirski, who in his previous capacity of governor-general
of Vilna had displayed comparative administrative leniency. The new
leader of internal Russian politics promised that he would strive for
the restoration of "confidence" between the Government and the people
by adjusting his actions to the demands of "true progress." The Jewish
deputation which waited upon him at Vilna and the representatives of
the foreign press were told that as far as the Jewish question was
concerned, he would be guided by justice and "kindness." Unfortunately,
at the very beginning he showed himself powerless to stem the new tide
of pogroms. At the end of August, the Russian South was the scene of
several "regular" pogroms, beginning with a quarrel in a Jewish store
and ending with the demolition of Jewish stores and houses--as was the
case in the town of Smyela, in the government of Kiev, on August 22, or
in the city of Rovno, in Volhynia, where a similar attempt was made on
the same day. Soon these "regular" riots gave way to a new variety of
pogroms, which were distinguished by a peculiar coloring and might be
termed "mobilization pogroms." The mobilized Russian reserve troops,
wrought up over their impending departure to the fields of death in
Manchuria where the Russian army suffered defeat after defeat, directed
their protest along the line of least resistance--against the Jews.
The soldiers, fortifying themselves with goodly doses of alcohol,
began their "gallant exploits," and, accompanied by the street mobs,
engaged in the task of devastating Jewish homes, maltreating their
inmates, and looting their property. A sanguinary pogrom took place
in Alexandria, in the government of Kherson, on September 6 and 7. On
the sacred day of Yom Kippur a horde of intoxicated assassins invaded
the synagogue which was crowded with worshippers, and butchered there
twenty people in a most barbarous fashion. Among the severely wounded,
who soon afterwards died from the wounds, were several gymnazium and
university students. The police made no attempt to stop the killing and
looting, and only on the second day, when the excesses were renewed,
the Cossacks were summoned from an adjacent town, and succeeded in
restoring order.
A month later, the mobilized Russian reservists began to perpetrate
a series of pogroms in the North, in the region of White Russia. In
the city of Moghilev the lawlessness of the soldiers and the local
hooligans assumed appalling dimensions (October 10). The poorest
quarters of the town suffered most. Among the victims of the riots
were also the families of Jewish reservists who had gone to war.
From the capital of the government the pogrom epidemic spread all
over the region. Everywhere the intoxicated "crusaders," prior to
their departure for Manchuria, engaged in destruction, looting, and
incendiarism. In some places, as was the case in the government of
Vitebsk, the rioters acted with perfect religious toleration, and even
attacked the police, although the center of the "stage" was still
occupied by the Jews.
The Government was manifestly unwilling to adopt energetic measures
against the "defenders of the Fatherland" for fear of irritating them
still further and spoiling the progress of mobilization. It was not
until the end of October that the mobilization pogroms died out.
5. THE HOMEL POGROM BEFORE THE RUSSIAN COURTS
In the same month of October, 1904, the case of the Homel pogrom of the
previous year came up before the Court of Appeals of the Government
of Kiev, which held its sessions at Homel. The department of justice
had taken a whole year to prepare the evidence, prompted by the desire
not so much to investigate the case as to entangle it and present it
in a perverted political interpretation. The investigation which had
started in the lifetime of Plehve and proceeded under the pressure of
the anti-Semitic reactionary, Minister of Justice Muravyov, resulted
in a bill of indictment which was a flagrant example of deliberate
misrepresentation. The whole affair was pictured as an anti-Russian
pogrom which had been perpetrated by the Jews. According to this
version, the Jews of Homel, wishing to avenge the Kishinev massacre,
had taken up arms and attacked the Christian population on August 29,
thereby calling forth a counter-pogrom on the part of the Russian
workingmen on September 1, when again the armed Jewish self-defence
had taken an aggressive attitude and thereby forced the soldiers to
shoot at them. Sixty people were indicted on this charge, among them
thirty-six Jews, representing the part of the population which had been
the victims of the pogrom. The Jews who had dared to defend themselves
stood at the prisoners' bar side by side with their assailants.
Yielding to the pressure of public opinion, the Government decided
to have the Homel case tried in open court, but the president of the
tribunal was instructed to eliminate from the judicial proceedings
all political revelations which might embarrass the Government. The
élite of the legal profession, both among Jews and non-Jews (Vinaver,
Sliosberg, Kalmanovich, Ratner, Sokolov, Kupernik, Zarudny, and
others), assembled at Homel to plead the cause of the indicted Jews and
to defend the action for damages brought by the Jewish pogrom victims.
The trial was drawn out for nearly three months, reducing itself to a
duel between the counsel who endeavored to bring out the facts, and
the bench which was anxious to suppress them. The depositions of the
witnesses and the cross-examinations of the Jewish lawyers succeeded in
demolishing the entire structure of the indictment, but when the case
reached the stage which was bound to lead to the detection of the real
authors of the pogrom and lay bare the conduct of the authorities, the
president stopped the counsel despotically, denying them the floor.
The gross partiality manifested by the president of the court had the
effect that the counsel for the defence lost their patience, and on
December 21, after a violent scene, refused to participate in the trial
and demonstratively left the court-room.
This action aroused public opinion throughout Russia to an
extraordinary degree; it caused a storm of indignation against this
official miscarriage of justice, and the fearless defenders received
innumerable expressions of sympathy. The indicted Jews, too, joined
in the noble demonstration of their lawyers, which was in itself
an eloquent plea for a righteous cause. The trial terminated in
January, 1905, and ended in the acquittal of half of the accused Jews
and Christians and a verdict of guilty against the other half from
among both groups. The guilty were sentenced to comparatively light
penalties--to imprisonment for brief terms--and, in addition, the court
decided to petition the Tzar for a mitigation even of these penalties.
This verdict displayed the Jesuitic character of Russian politics. The
reprobate murderers and plunderers from among the Russian group were
either acquitted altogether, or were sentenced to trifling penalties
and placed on the same level of culpability with the members of the
Jewish self-defence whose only crime was that they had stood up for
their life, honor, and property. The Russian law journal _Pravo_ ("The
Law"), the organ of the progressive Russian _intelligenzia_, published
on this occasion a strong article which concluded with the following
words:
The truth stands out in bold relief even in this verdict, and
it does so against the wish of its authors. If, as is implied
in this verdict, both the Jews and Christians are guilty of
murder, violence, and plunder to a minimum degree only--for
how could otherwise the extraordinary leniency of the verdict
be justified?--then everybody is bound to ask himself the
question: Who then is the real author of all the horrors that
were perpetrated at Homel? Those who have followed the course
of the judicial investigation with some degree of attention
can only have one answer: Besides the Christians and the
Jews, there is still a third culprit, the politically rotten
officialdom. This culprit did not stand at the prisoners' bar,
but the verdict is against him.... The best elements of the
Russian public, and the Jews in particular, have been thirsting
for justice and for the disclosure of the truth, but it was
just that third accomplice who was afraid of justice and has
managed to cover it up by a general amnesty.
Such was the end of the two ill-fated years of Russian-Jewish history
(1903-1904)--years, marked by the internal war against the Jews and
by the external war against Japan, filled with the victories of the
reaction at Kishinev and Homel and the defeats of the Russian arms
at Port Arthur, Liao-Yang, and Mukden. This ghastly interval of
reactionary terrorism, which began to subside only towards the end of
1904, drove from Russia to America more than 125,000 Jewish emigrants
who fled for their very lives from the dominions of the Tzar.
However, at the end of the long nightmare, the political horizon began
to clear up. The tide of the liberty movement surged forward again
and it looked as if the Russian people, and with it tormented Russian
Jewry, would soon behold the new dawn. Yet the six million Jews of
Russia were destined to pass through two more stormy years, standing
between the firing lines of autocratic despotism and the revolutionary
movement, and suffering the excruciating agonies of suspense, while
hovering between degradation and emancipation.
FOOTNOTES:
[40] One of the instigators, Pisarevski, a notary public, had blown out
his brains before the beginning of the trial. Other instigators from
among the Kishinev _intelligenzia_ appeared merely as witnesses.
[41] The speech of Karabchevski justifying his withdrawal was
particularly powerful. He openly declared that the pogrom was only
"the fulfilment of a criminal order given from above." "The whole of
Kishinev," he said, "was converted during the excesses into an immense
circus of antiquity, where, before the eyes of curious spectators from
among the administration and the army, before a festively attired
crowd, a terrible drama was enacted in the depth of the arena. From the
one side defenceless victims were driven upon the arena, and from the
other maddened beasts were set at them, until the signal to stop was
given, and the frightful spectacle was ended at once."
[42] About two months before the war, the Russian viceroy of the Far
East had prohibited the Jews from residing in Port Arthur and upon the
Kuantung Peninsula, whence the Russians were expelled by the Japanese a
year later.
[43] Out of the thirty physicians who were mobilized in Kiev twenty-six
were Jews. In Odessa, the Jews furnished twenty-one physicians out of
thirty.
CHAPTER XXXV
THE REVOLUTION OF 1905 AND THE FIGHT FOR EMANCIPATION
1. THE JEWS IN THE REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT
The "political spring," manifesting itself in the attempt of the
Government, headed by Svyatopolk-Mirski, to establish friendly
relations with the liberal elements of Russia, gave the first
impetus to an open movement for political emancipation. The liberal
"conspirators," who had hitherto been secretly dreaming of a
constitution, gave public utterance to this tabooed aspiration. In
November, 1904, the conference of Zemstvo workers, assembled in
St. Petersburg, adopted a resolution pointing out "the anomaly of
the political order" of Russia which is founded on autocracy and
proclaiming the necessity of associating the representatives of the
people in the work of legislation. About the same time, a large
mass-meeting, which took the form of a public banquet, attended by
lawyers and littérateurs, adopted a similar resolution calling for
"the repeal of all national and denominational restrictions." Taking
advantage of the temporary relaxation of police despotism, the press
spoke up more boldly, while the better elements of the population began
to organize themselves in all kinds of public bodies.
The Government was slow in making concessions, and harshly condemned
the "boisterous assemblages" which called for changes in "the
unshakable foundations of our political order." Nevertheless, an
imperial ukase, published on December 12, 1904, promised a number of
partial reforms--improvement of the legal status of the peasantry,
enlargement of the activities of the Zemstvos, the establishment of
a state insurance for workingmen, relaxation of the severities of
police and censorship, and likewise "a revision of the laws restricting
the rights of aliens," with the retention of those provisions only
"which are called forth by the genuine interests of the state and the
manifest needs of the Russian people." It is almost needless to add
that the latter clause held forth no promises to the Jews. For their
disfranchisement could always be justified by "the genuine interests
of the state"--a state built upon the foundations not of law, but of
police force. The carrying into effect of the promised semi-reforms
was entrusted to a bureaucratic body, the Committee of Ministers. The
services of the popular representatives were repudiated.
The new movement for liberty forced further concessions from Russian
officialdom, but these concessions could only be wrested from it
in small doses and were granted only after a desperate resistance.
The "bloody Sunday" of January 9, 1905, marked the beginning of the
open revolution in which social, economic, and political demands
were interwoven with one another. The demonstration of the striking
workingmen of St. Petersburg, who marched in immense numbers to the
Winter Palace to present a petition to the Tzar for economic and
political reforms, ended in a tragedy. The petitioners who marched
with crosses in their hands, under the leadership of the priest and
demagogue Gapon, were received with a shower of bullets, resulting
in a large number of victims from among the participants in the
demonstration, as well as from among the public. There were also
several Jews among them--a first-aid nurse, a dentist, a pharmacy
student and a journalist. This scandalous conduct of the Tzar, who
replied with bullets to a peaceful appeal for reforms, led to a series
of demonstrations, labor strikes, and terrorist acts in the provinces.
In the Western governments and in the Kingdom of Poland the Jews
played a conspicuous rôle in the revolutionary movement, counting as
they did a large number of organized workingmen. In Odessa, a Jewish
workingman by the name of Stillman fired at the Chief of Police and
wounded him (January 19). In Moghilev, a Jewish youth made a vain
attempt upon the life of the local Chief of Police who was accused
of having instigated the pogrom which had taken place there in the
fall of 1904. These incidents served in the hands of the reactionary
Government--on January 9, Svyatopolk-Mirski had been dismissed for his
excessive leaning toward liberalism--as an excuse for continuing its
oppression of the Jews as the "ringleaders of the revolution." The
president of the Committee of Ministers, Witte, was the only one who
advocated a different point of view. At the meeting of the Committee,
held on February 11, he contended that "the hostile attitude toward the
Government, now noticeable among the Jews, is due to the sad material
conditions in which the bulk of Russian Jewry lives, being weighed down
by the pressure of restrictive laws." Witte prophesied that the police
authorities would be bound "to fight with redoubled zeal against the
anti-governmental activity of the Jews, until the amelioration of the
condition of the aliens, promised in the ukase of December 12, would be
carried into effect."
2. THE STRUGGLE FOR EQUAL RIGHTS
Notwithstanding these pleas, the Government was slow in realizing even
the moderate reforms which had been outlined in the imperial ukase. In
the meantime the representatives of Russian Jewry had decided to place
before it their own more comprehensive demands. In February, 1905,
several mass petitions, demanding equal rights for Jews, were addressed
to Witte. A petition signed by thirty-two Jewish communities--St.
Petersburg, Vilna, Kovno, Homel, Berdychev, and others--began with
these words:
The measures adopted for the last twenty-five years toward
the Russian Jews were designed with the deliberate end in
view to convert them into a mass of beggars, deprived of all
means of sustenance, and of the light of education and human
dignity. Consistency and comprehensiveness marked the system
of oppression and violence which was skilfully planned and
carefully executed.... The entire machinery of the state was
directed to one end--that of making the life of the Jews in
Russia impossible.
The petition repudiates the idea, voiced in the ukase of December
12, 1904, of a gradual amelioration of the position of the Jews,
and of a few "mitigations"; for "the insulted dignity of man cannot
be reconciled to half measures; it demands the complete removal of
rightlessness."
All the Jews of Russia are permeated at the present moment by
one thought: that the cruel system of endless restrictions and
disabilities undermines the very basis of their existence,
that it is impossible to continue such a life.... Worn out by
all they have had to go through, and filled with grave anxiety
about their future destinies, the Jews are waiting at last for
their entire enfranchisement; they are waiting for a radical
repeal of all restrictive laws, so that, enjoying freedom and
equality with all others, they may, shoulder to shoulder with
the other citizens of this great country, work for its welfare
and prosperity.
A memorandum couched in more resolute terms was sent by twenty-six
Jewish communities--Moscow, Odessa, and others--and by the radical
groups of the communities which had signed the first petition.
We declare--the memorandum states--that we look upon the
attempt to satisfy and appease the Jewish population by any
partial measures of improvement as doomed to failure. We
expect equal rights, as human beings in whom the feeling of
human dignity is alive, as conscious citizens in a modern body
politic.
The memorandum of the Vilna community made the following addition to
the last clause: "As a cultured nation, we demand the same rights of
national-cultural self-determination which ought to be granted to all
the nationalities that go to make up the Russian body politic."
Memorials and telegrams, addressed to the president of the Committee
of Ministers, with the demand for equal rights, were also sent by many
individual Jewish communities.
In the meantime, the general revolutionary movement in Russia proceeded
apace. Professional organizations were springing into existence,
such as the leagues of railroad workers, engineers, and lawyers.
Here and there, huge railroad strikes were called. The college youth
were in a state of ferment, and often went on strike. The agitation
was answered by rifle shots and Cossack whips which were used to
disperse the demonstrators. The extreme wing of the Socialist party
resorted to terroristic acts. A tremendous sensation was caused by
the assassination of Grand Duke Sergius, the governor-general of
Moscow (February 4), one of the most detestable members of the house
of Romanov. The grand duke, whose name was bound up with the expulsion
of tens of thousands of Jews from Moscow in 1891 and with the cruel
oppression of the Jewish colony still left there, was the victim of a
bomb thrown by a non-Jew, the Social-Revolutionist Kalayev.
The surging tide of the revolution intimidated Nicholas II., and
wrested from him still another concession. On February 18, 1905,
three enactments were published: an imperial manifesto condemning the
revolutionary "unrest" at a time when "the sanguinary war in the Far
East" was going on, and calling upon all "well-intentioned persons"
to wage war against "the internal sedition." A rescript addressed
to Bulyghin, Minister of the Interior, announced the decision of
the Tzar "to invite the worthiest men, invested with the confidence
of the nation and chosen by the population, to participate in the
consideration of legislative projects"--in other words, a popular
representation with merely consultative rights. Finally, an ukase
addressed to the Senate granted permission to private persons and
institutions to lay before the Government their "views and suggestions
relating to the perfection of the wellbeing of the state."
The progressive elements of Russia were not in a mood to be reconciled
to the duplicity of these enactments in which threats and concessions
followed upon one another, or to the pettiness of the concessions
in themselves. They took, however, full advantage of the permission
to "lay" their views before the Government, and indulged in an
avalanche of resolutions and declarations, demanding the substitution
of a parliamentary system of government for the existing system of
autocracy. The Jewish institutions joined in this general campaign.
The oldest Jewish organization, the "Society for the Diffusion of
Enlightenment Among the Jews," in St. Petersburg, at a meeting, held on
February 27, adopted the following resolution:
The proper organization of Jewish education such as would be
in keeping with the social and cultural peculiarities of the
Jewish people, will only be possible when the Jews will be
placed on a footing of complete equality of rights with the
rest of the Russian population. As a firm guarantee of the
untrammelled cultural development and the complete equality of
all nationalities, it is necessary that the legislative power
and the administrative control of the country shall have the
co-operation of popular representatives, to be elected upon the
basis of the universal, direct, and secret vote of all citizens
of the country, without any distinction of nationality,
denomination or calling.
The need of a non-partisan political organization to direct the
struggle for Jewish emancipation which was to be waged by all classes
of Jewry--outside the small fraction which had already been united in
the labor organization of the "Bund"--was universally felt.
Such an organization was formed at the conference of public-spirited
Jews which took place in Vilna at the end of March, 1905. It assumed
the name of "The League for the Attainment of Equal Rights for the
Jewish People in Russia," and proclaimed as its object "the realization
to their full extent of the _civil, political, and national rights_
of the Jewish people in Russia." The complete civil emancipation of
the Jews, the assurance of their proportionate participation in the
Russian popular representation, "the freedom of national-cultural
self-determination in all its manifestations," in the shape of "a
comprehensive system of communal self-government, the freedom of
language and school education"--such was the threefold program of the
League.
It was the first attempt of a Jewish organization in modern history
to inscribe upon its banner not only the demand for the civil and
political, but also for the national emancipation of the Jewish people,
the first attempt to obtain liberty for Jewry as a nationality, and not
as a mere denominational group, forming part of the dominant nation, as
had been the case in Western Europe during the nineteenth century. The
central bureau of the League was located in St. Petersburg, composed
of twenty-two elective members, half of whom lived in the capital (M.
Vinaver, G. Sliosberg, L. Bramson, and others), and the other half in
the provinces (Dr. Shmaryahu Levin, S. M. Dubnow,[44] M. Ratner, and
others).
The first resolutions adopted by the League were in substance as
follows:
To demand universal suffrage at the elections to the future
parliament, with a guarantee of proper representation for
the national minorities; to influence the Russian public to
the end that the general resolutions demanding equality for
all citizens should contain an explicit reference to the
emancipation of the Jews; to call upon all the Jewish aldermen
in the municipal Dumas to resign their posts, in view of the
fact that under the law of 1892, which had deprived the Jews of
their franchise at the municipal elections,[45] these aldermen
had not been elected by the Jewish population, but had been
appointed by the administration--an act which implied an insult
to the civic and national dignity of the Jewish people.
The last-mentioned clause of this resolution, adopted at the first
conference of the League, proved effective. In the majority of cities,
the Jewish members of the municipal Dumas began to tender their
resignations, by way of protest against the disfranchisement of the
Jews in the municipal self-government. At first, the authorities were
somewhat embarrassed and made an attempt to appoint other Jews in
lieu of those that had resigned, but seeing that the Jewish boycott
continued, they became "reconciled" to the entire absence of Jewish
representatives in municipal self-government. The protest of the
Jewish aldermen was drowned in the general noise of protests and
demonstrations which filled the air during the revolutionary year.
3. THE "BLACK HUNDRED" AND THE "PATRIOTIC" POGROMS
In this wise did the Jewish people, though chafing under thraldom and
well-nigh crushed by it, strive for the light of liberty. But the
forces of reaction were preparing to wreak terrible vengeance upon the
prisoner for his endeavor to throw off his bonds. As the revolutionary
tide, which had engulfed the best elements of the Russian people, was
rolling on, it clashed with the filthy wave of the Black Hundred,
which the underlings of Tzardom had called to the surface from the
lowest depths of the Russian underworld. _Acheronta movebo_[46]--this
threat was now carried out systematically by the Government of Nicholas
II. in its struggle with the emancipatory movement. By letting loose
the Russian "nether-world" against the liberal _intelligentzia_ and
the Zhyds, the reactionaries hoped to achieve three objects at
once: to intimidate the liberals and revolutionaries; to demonstrate
the unwillingness of the "people" to abolish autocracy in favor of
constitutional government, and, finally, to discredit the entire
revolutionary movement as "the work of Jewish hands." The latter
end could, in the opinion of the reactionaries, be obtained best by
convincing the Russian masses that "the enemies of Christ are the
only enemies of the Tzar." An open anti-Jewish agitation was set in
motion. Proclamations of the Black Hundred with the appeals, "Slay the
students and the Zhyds!" "Remember Kishinev and Homel!" were scattered
broadcast. The proclamation of the "Nationalist Society" of Kiev,
Odessa, Kishinev, and other cities contained the following sentences:
The shouts "Down with autocracy!" are the shouts of those
blood-suckers who call themselves Zhyds, Armenians, and
Poles.... Be on your guard against the Zhyds! All the
misfortunes in our lives are due to the Zhyds. Soon, very soon,
the great time will come when there will be no Zhyds in Russia.
Down with the traitors! Down with the constitution!
With the approaching Passover season, pogroms were openly organized.
The papers were flooded with telegrams from many cities stating that
riots were imminent. In some places the governors adopted measures to
check the excesses of the savage crowd, but in many localities the
pogroms were deliberately permitted or even directly engineered by
the police. In the manufacturing city of Bialystok, the center of the
Jewish labor movement, the Cossacks assaulted Jewish passers-by on the
streets, invaded the synagogues and Jewish homes, cruelly maltreating
their inmates and frequently searching them and taking away their
money (April 9-10). During the Passover holidays, peasants made an
attack upon the Jews in the town of Dusyaty, in the government of
Kovno, looting their property and beating those that dared to oppose
them. In the city of Melitopol, in the government of Tavrida, an
intoxicated mob demolished and set fire to Jewish stores, and thereupon
started to attack the houses of Christians, but the self-defence
consisting of Jewish and Christian young men checked the pogrom (April
18-19). In Simferopol, in the same government, the Black Hundred spread
a rumor that a Jewish boy, the son of a pharmacist, had desecrated
a Christian ikon. A pogrom was set in motion which met with the
resistance of the armed Jewish youth and was afterwards checked by the
troops (April 22).
The most terrible outbreak took place in Zhitomir. In this quiet center
of Volhynia the progressive elements of both the Jewish and the Russian
population revelled in the joy of their political honeymoon. As had
been the case in other large cities, here, too, the "bloody Sunday" of
January called forth political strikes on the part of the workingmen,
demonstrations on the part of the college youth, and the circulation
of revolutionary appeals. The fact that the movement was headed by
the Jewish youth was enough to inspire the Black Hundred to embark
upon their criminal task. All kinds of rumors were set afloat, such
as that the Jews had been firing at the Tzar's portrait on the field
behind the city, that they were preparing to slaughter the Christians,
and other absurd stories. At the approach of Passover, the pogrom
organizers summoned to their aid a group of "Katzaps," Great-Russian
laborers, from Moscow. The Jews, anticipating the danger, began to
arm themselves in self-defence, and made their preparations openly. A
clash between the "Black" and the "Red" was inevitable. It came in the
form of a sanguinary battle which was fought on April 23-26, matching
by its cruelty the pogrom at Homel, though exceeding it vastly by its
dimensions.
In the course of three days, the city was in the hands of the black
hordes who plundered, murdered and mutilated the Jews. They were
fortified not only by quantities of alcohol, but also by the conviction
that they were fighting for the Tzar against the "Sicilists,"[47]
who clamored for "freedom" and a "republic." The Jewish self-defence
performed prodigies of valor wherever they were not interfered with
by the police and military, and died gallantly where the authorities
actively assisted the savage work of the infuriated rioters. During
the three pogrom days fifteen Jews were killed and nearly one hundred
wounded, many of them severely. The casualties were mostly among young
workingmen and handicraftsmen. But there were also some students among
the victims, one of them a Christian, named Blinov, who stood up nobly
for the assaulted Jews. The inhuman fiends fell upon Blinov, shouting:
"Though you are a Russian, you are a Sicilist and worse than the
Zhyds, now that you've come to defend them." The young hero was beaten
to death, and the murderers were actively assisted by soldiers and
policemen.
On one of those days, on April 25, a heart-rending tragedy took place
in the town of Troyanov, in the government of Volhynia, not far
from Zhitomir. Having learned of the massacre that was going on in
Zhitomir, fourteen brave Jewish young men from the neighboring town
of Chudnov armed themselves with cheap pistols, and proceeded to bring
aid to their endangered fellow-Jews. On the way, while passing through
Troyanov, they were met by a crowd of peasants and workingmen who had
been aroused by a rumor that Jewish "slaughterers" were marching in
order to exterminate the Russians. The infuriated mob fell upon the
youths, and, in the presence of the local Jews, savagely killed ten of
them, while the others were cruelly beaten. The following account of
this ghastly occurrence was given by one of the survivors:
There were fourteen of us. We were on the way from Chudnov
to Zhitomir. In Troyanov we were surrounded by Katzaps. They
began to search us, taking away everything we had, and then
started to beat us with hatchets and clubs. I saw my comrades
fall down dead one after the other. Before the constabulary
appeared, only four had remained alive, I and three other men.
The constabulary ordered us to be carried to the hospital at
Zhitomir, but on the way we were wrested by the Katzaps from
the rural police and were tortured again.... I was roped and
dragged to the priest. He begged that I should be left alone.
The Katzaps made fun of him, dragged me out again, and started
to beat me. The policemen began to tell them that "they would
answer for me," since the constabulary had ordered them to
get me to Zhitomir. "Well," said the Katzaps, "if that be
the case, we will let him go, but before we do this, that
hound of a Jew must have a look at his fellow-Zhyds." I was
then dragged in an unconscious state to my comrades. I found
myself in a pool of water. I had been drenched so as to make
me regain consciousness. Then I beheld the dead bodies of my
ten comrades.... No matter how long I may live, I shall never
forget that sight.... One of them lay with his head chopped
off; another with a ripped stomach ... cut off hands.... I fell
into a swoon, and found myself here in this bed.
In the cemetery of Troyanov one may still behold the ten graves of the
youthful martyrs who unselfishly went to the rescue of their brethren
against beasts in human form, and were on the way torn to pieces by
these beasts--ten graves which ought to become sacred to the entire
Jewish people.
The Government reacted upon the Zhitomir massacre by an official
communication in which the facts were deliberately garbled in order to
prove that the Jews had called forth the pogrom by their conduct. It
was alleged in this communication that, during their shooting exercises
in the woods, the Jews had discharged their pistols at the portrait of
the Tzar, had hurled insulting remarks at the police escort which was
conveying a band of political prisoners, had issued a proclamation in
the name of "the criminal party of the Social-Revolutionaries" in which
the authorities of Zhitomir were accused of preparing the pogrom, and
similar charges. The concrete object of the official communication is
betrayed in its concluding part in which the governors are enjoined "to
explain to the sober-minded section of the Jewish population that, in
the interest of the safety of the Jewish masses, it is in duty bound
to inspire their coreligionists who have been drawn into the political
struggle with the consciousness of the absolute necessity of refraining
from arousing by their behavior the hatred of the Christian population
against them." Translated into plain terms, the Government order meant:
"If you do not wish to have pogroms and massacres, then keep your hands
off the liberty movement; but if you will persist in playing a part in
it, then the Christian population will make short work of you, dealing
with you as with enemies of the Fatherland."
Caught in the general revolutionary conflagration which flared up
with particular violence in the summer of 1905, after the destruction
of the Russian fleet by the Japanese near Tsushima, the Jews reacted
upon the pogroms by intensifying their revolutionary activity and
swelling the number of self-defence organizations. Russian Jewry
played an active part in the two wings of the emancipation army,
the Constitutional-Democratic as well as the Social-Democratic
party, and was represented even in the extreme wing occupied by the
Social-Revolutionaries. The majority of these Jewish revolutionaries
were actuated by general Russian aspirations, and were often entirely
oblivious of the national interests of Judaism. This, however, did
not prevent the henchmen of the Tzar from visiting the "sin" of the
revolution upon the Jewish masses. A vicious circle was the result of
this policy: As victims of the old despotism, the Jews naturally threw
in their lot with the revolution which promised to do away with it;
thereupon uncivilized Russia vented its fury upon them by instituting
pogroms which, in turn, pushed them more and more into the ranks of the
revolution.
During the summer months of 1905, a new succession of pogroms took
place, this time of the military variety. Wrought up over the defeats
of the Russian army in Manchuria, and roused by the vile proclamations
of the Black Hundred which pictured the Jews as the inner enemy,
soldiers and Cossacks began to wreak their vengeance upon this inner
enemy, assaulting and killing or wounding Jews on the streets of Minsk
(May 26), Brest-Litovsk (May 29-31), Syedletz and Lodz (June 9). In
the first three cities, the soldiers plundered and murdered only the
Jews. In Lodz, they fired at a mixed Polish-Jewish demonstration
of workingmen. A regular butchery was engineered by the soldiery in
Bialystok (June 30). During the entire day, the city resounded with the
rifle shots of maddened soldiers who were firing into peaceful Jewish
crowds. Fifty dead and a still larger number of wounded were the result
of these military exploits.
During the same time a regularly organized pogrom occurred in the
southern outskirts of Russia, in the city of Kerch, in the Crimea.
On July 27, a peaceful political demonstration of the kind then
generally in vogue took place in that city; among the participants
were also the Jewish youth. By way of protest, the city-governor and
gendarmerie chief organized a "patriotic" counter-demonstration,
which was held a few days later, on July 31. Carrying a banner with
the portrait of the Tzar and singing the Russian national hymn, the
"patriotic" hordes, with the notorious local thieves and hooligans as
the predominating element, sacked Jewish houses and stores, and, in
the name of patriotism, looted Jewish property--even the so-called
respectable public participating in the latter act. When the armed
Jewish self-defence began to oppose the rioters, they were scattered by
a volley from the soldiers, ten of them being killed on the spot. The
subsequent inquiry established the fact that the pogrom had been fully
prepared by the police and gendarmerie authorities, which had been in
telegraphic communication in regard to it with the Police Department
in St. Petersburg. It was a rehearsal of the monstrous October pogroms
which were to take place a few months later.
4. THE JEWISH FRANCHISE
In the midst of the noise caused by the revolution on the one hand and
by the pogroms on the other, the question of popular representation,
promised in the ukase of February 18, 1905, was discussed in the
highest Government spheres of Russia. A committee, which met under the
chairmanship of M. Bulyghin, was drafting a scheme of a consultative
popular assembly; as far as the Jews were concerned, it was proposed to
exclude them from the franchise, on the ground that the latter would
not be compatible with their civil disfranchisement. This proposition,
which was in entire accord with the general reactionary trend of
Russian politics, called forth a storm of indignation in all circles
of Russian Jewry. During the month of June protest resolutions against
the contemplated measure were adopted by the Jewish communities of St.
Petersburg, Riga, Kishinev, Bobruisk, Zhitomir, Nicholayev, Minsk,
Vitebsk, Vilna, and other cities. Many resolutions were couched in
violent terms betraying the outraged sentiments of Russian Jewry. As an
illustration, the following extract from the Vilna resolution may be
quoted:
In the proposed scheme of popular representation, we
Jews, a cultured nation of six millions, are placed below
the semi-savage aliens of Eastern Russia. The policy of
pacification applied to other suppressed nationalities has
given way to a policy of terrorization when the Jews are
concerned. The mad system, consisting in the endeavor to
irritate and infuriate the Jews by mediæval persecutions and
thereupon wreak vengeance on them for the manifestation of
that irritation, has now reached its climax.... We appeal to
the Russian people, which is now called upon to renovate the
antiquated political structure of the country.... We are of the
hope that the malign vindictiveness toward the Jews on the
part of the retiring bureaucracy, which is eager to carry over
the ferments of corruption into the healthy atmosphere of the
future popular representation, will not be realized.
Professor Trubetzkoy, who waited upon the Tzar on June 6, at the head
of a combined deputation of Zemstvos and municipalities, pointed out
in his famous speech that no one should be excluded from popular
representation: "It is important that there should not be any
disfranchised and disinherited." The Government was shaken in its
resolution, and the Council of Ministers eliminated from the Bulyghin
project the clause barring the Jews from voting, justifying this step
by the undesirability "to irritate the Jews still further."
The Jewish question was also touched upon in the conferences at
Peterhof, which were held during the month of July under the
chairmanship of the Tzar, to formulate plans for an Imperial Duma.
Naryshkin, a reactionary dignitary, demanded that "the dangerous Jewish
nation" be barred from the Duma. But a number of other dignitaries--the
Minister of Finance, Kokovtzev, the Assistant-Minister of the Interior,
Trepov, and Obolenski and Chikhachev, members of the Council of
State--advocated their admission, and the discussions were terminated
by the brief remark of the Tzar: "The project [with the insertion of
the Council of Ministers in favor of the Jews] shall be left unaltered."
By this action, the Government made itself guilty of a flagrant
inconsistency. It conferred upon the Jews the highest political
privilege--the right of voting for popular representatives--but left
them at the same time in a state of complete civil disfranchisement,
even with regard to such elementary liberties as the right of domicile,
the right of transit, and so on. Only one month previously, on June 8,
the Tzar had approved the "Opinion" of the Committee of Ministers--in
pursuance of the ukase of December 12, 1904, the Committee had
been busy discussing the Jewish problem--to the effect that the
consideration of the question of ameliorating the condition of the
Jews should be deferred until the convocation of the new Parliament.
Evidently, the anti-Jewish conscience of the Tzar made it impossible
for him to grant even the slightest relief to the Jews who from pariahs
had been turned into revolutionaries.
FOOTNOTES:
[44] The author of the present volume, who resided in Vilna at that
time.
[45] See vol. II, p. 246.
[46] "I shall set the nether-world in motion."
[47] A mutilated form of "Socialists" which is in vogue among the
ignorant Russian masses.
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION AND THE OCTOBER MASSACRES
1. THE FIENDISH DESIGNS OF THE "BLACK HUNDRED"
Soon afterwards, on August 6, 1905, the so-called "Bulyghin
Constitution" was made public, providing for a truncated Imperial
Duma with a system of representation based on class qualifications
and limited to advisory functions but without any restrictions as
far as the franchise of the Jews was concerned. "Now," wrote the
_Voskhod_, "the Jew has the right to be a popular representative, but
he has no right to reside in the place in which the Imperial Duma
assembles--in the capital." Russian Jewry, with the exception of its
Left wing, was on the point of starting an election campaign to send
its representatives to this mutilated Duma, in the hope of attaining
through it to a more perfect form of representation, when the stormy
course of events brought to the fore new threatening questions. This
counterfeit of a national parliament failed to satisfy the Russian
democracy, and the struggle with the Government broke out anew with
unprecedented energy. Stormy political meetings were held at the
universities and at the other institutions of higher learning, which,
by an ukase of August 27, had been granted academic self-government.
The autonomous professorial councils began to admit Jewish students
to the schools, without any restrictive percentage, and the wave
of an agitated Jewish youth was drawn into the whirling sea of the
Russian student body. A new succession of strikes followed, arranged
by the students, workingmen and railroad workers. A general Russian
strike was being carefully prepared as a last resort in the struggle
for a democratic constitution. The army of the emancipation movement
was instituting a bloodless revolution, the temporary stoppage of
all railroad movements and of all other activities in the country,
in the hope of forcing Tzardom to an act of self-abnegation and the
proclamation of civil liberties.
The month of September and the beginning of October were spent in
these feverish preparations, but at the same time, the black army
of absolutism was making its own arrangements for a sanguinary
counter-revolution, for regular St. Bartholomew nights, directed
against the participants in the emancipation movement, and particularly
against the Jews. The plans of the emancipation army were universally
known, but the terrible designs of the dark forces of reaction
were effectively concealed. Only when the bloody undertaking was
accomplished, was it possible to uncover the threads of the criminal
pogrom organization, which led from the palaces of the Tzar and the
highest dignitaries of state, by way of the Police Department, to the
slums of murderers and hooligans. In the disclosures made by Lvov,
in November, 1905, in his memorandum to Witte, the president of the
Council of Ministers, the officials in the immediate environment
of Nicholas II. who had organized the October pogroms were pointed
out by name. They were the "patriotic" General Bogdanovich in St.
Petersburg, who acted with the blessing of Archbishop[48] Vladimir
and with the assistance of the Imperial camarilla and of many
governors and governors-general in the provinces. During the month of
September "fighting contingents" of the Black Hundred, whose number,
as Bogdanovich boasted in the highest government spheres, amounted
to one hundred thousand, were organized all over Russia. In every
city the parts to be enacted by the administrators, the police and
the pogrom hirelings from among the local riff-raff were carefully
prepared and assigned. The pogrom proclamations were printed openly;
the "manufacturing" center of this propaganda literature, as was
afterwards disclosed in the Imperial Duma by deputy Urussov (formerly
Assistant-Minister of the Interior), was located in the printing office
of the Police Department. There can be no question that the Tzar was
acquainted, if not with all the details of these preparations, at least
with the general plan of arranging a counter-revolution by means of
carefully engineered massacres of which the Jews were to become the
chief victims. Millions of rubles for the organization of the pogroms
were appropriated from a secret ten-million ruble fund, the disposition
of which lay entirely in the hands of the Tzar.
Such were the conditions which ushered in the month of October,
1905. The first days of the month saw the beginning of the railroad
strike; by the middle of the month it had already seized the entire
country, accompanied in the industrial centers by a general strike
in all lines of productive endeavor. In many cities, collisions
took place between the revolutionaries and the military. At first,
the Government made an attempt to resort to threats, and all over
Russia rang the blood-thirsty cry of the Chief of Police Trepov:
"No cartridges shall be spared!" But at the last moment, autocracy
recoiled before the revolutionary tempest and gave way. On October
17, an imperial manifesto was issued, solemnly promising to bestow
all civil liberties upon the Russian people--inviolability of person,
freedom of conscience, liberty of speech, assemblage and organization,
and a legislative Duma in which the representatives of all classes of
the population were to have a voice. The manifesto made no mention,
however, of the equality of all citizens before the law or of the
bestowal of equal rights on the various nationalities, and even in the
accompanying memorandum of Premier Witte, the author of the enactment
of October 17, the subject was disposed of in a few nebulous phrases.
Nevertheless, even in this hazy form, the manifesto made a tremendous
impression. Everybody believed that autocratic Tzardom had been
vanquished by the army of liberty and that Russia had been finally
converted from a state founded on police force into a body politic
based on law. But, on the day following, all these hopes were cruelly
shattered. On October 18, in hundreds of cities the carefully concealed
army of counter-revolutionaries, evidently obeying a prearranged
signal, crawled out from beneath the ground, to indulge in an orgy of
blood, lasting a full week (October 18-25), which in its horrors finds
no parallel in the entire history of humanity.
2. THE RUSSIAN ST. BARTHOLOMEW NIGHT
The principal victims of this protracted St. Bartholomew night were
the new Huguenots of the emancipation movement--the Jews. They were
to pay the penalty for having assisted in wresting from the despotic
Government the manifesto with its promise of liberties. In the
course of one week, nearly fifty anti-Jewish pogroms, accompanied
by bloodshed, took place in various cities (Odessa, Kiev, Kishinev,
Kalarash, Simferopol, Romny, Kremenchug, Chernigov, Nicholayev,
Yekaterinoslav, Kamenetz-Podolsk, Yelisavetgrad, Orsha, etc.), in
addition to several hundred "bloodless" pogroms, marked in regular
fashion by the destruction of property, plunder, and incendiarism. The
pogroms directed against the Christian participants in the emancipation
movement, such as intellectuals, students, etc., in Tver, Tomsk, and
other interior Russian cities, amounted in all to a score or two.
This disproportion alone shows the direction in which the organized
dark forces were active. The strict uniformity and consistency in the
carrying out of the counter-revolutionary conspiracy was too palpable
to be overlooked.
The customary procedure was as follows: In connection with the
manifesto of October 17, the progressive elements would arrange a
street procession, frequently adorned by the red flags of the left
parties and accompanied by appropriate acclamations and speeches
expressive of the new liberty. Simultaneously, the participants in the
"patriotic demonstration"--consisting mostly of the scum of society,
of detectives and police officials in plain clothes--would emerge
from their nooks and crannies, carrying the portrait of the Tzar
under the shadow of the national flag, singing the national hymn and
shouting, "Hurrah, beat the Zhyds! The Zhyds are eager for liberty.
They go against our Tzar to put a Zhyd in his place." These "patriotic"
demonstrators would be accompanied by police and Cossack patrols (or
soldiers), ostensibly to preserve order, but in reality to enable the
hooligans to attack and maltreat the Jews and prevent the victims from
defending themselves. As soon as the Jews assembled for self-defence,
they would be driven off by the police and troops. Thereupon, the
"patriotic" demonstrators and the accomplices, joining them on the
way, would break up into small bands and disperse all over the city,
invading Jewish houses and stores, ruin, plunder, beat, and sometimes
slaughter entire families.
The most terrible pogrom took place in Odessa. It lasted fully four
days. The rioters were openly assisted by the police and troops, and
were encouraged by the active support of city-governor Neidthart, and
the criminal inactivity of the military governor, Kaulbars. The heroism
displayed by the Jewish self-defence was strong enough to beat off
the hooligans, but it was powerless to defeat the troops and police.
Over three hundred dead, thousands of wounded or crippled Jews, among
them many who lost their minds from the horrors, one hundred and forty
widows, five hundred and ninety-three orphans, and more than forty
thousand Jews materially ruined--such were the results of the battle
which was fought against the Jews of Odessa during October 18-21.
Approximately along the same lines the pogrom campaign was conducted
in scores of other cities, with a few lurid departures from the
customary ritual, as, for instance, in Nyezhin, in the government of
Chernigov, where the Jewish community, headed by the rabbi, was forced
by the rioters, under the pain of death, to pronounce publicly the
oath of allegiance to the Tzar. As a rule the pogroms which occurred
in hundreds of cities, towns, and villages, were limited to the
destruction of property, although even in small localities, such as in
Semyonovka, in the government of Chernigov, the riots were occasionally
accompanied by massacres. It may be added that the outbreaks were not
confined to the Pale of Settlement. In a number of cities outside the
Pale, such as in Saratov, Voronyezh, and other places with a small
Jewish population, the Jewish communities were ruthlessly attacked.
Contemporary history is not yet in a position to depict all the horrors
which were perpetrated upon the Jews in Russia in the latter half of
October, 1905, or to trace with any amount of accuracy their underlying
causes. Let us draw a veil over this bloody spectacle. There will
come a time when the world will shudder on learning the truth about
the bloody happenings and about the real culprits of this prolonged
Bartholomew night at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The sinister counter-revolution which broke out on October 17, the
day on which the manifesto of the Tzar was promulgated, threatened to
drag the revolution into the abyss of anarchy. All were profoundly
aroused by the perfidious Byzantine policy of Nicholas II., who with
one hand waved the peace banner before the progressive section of the
Russian people, and with the other plunged a knife into its heart--a
knife which most of all was to slash Jewry. Not only the parties of
the extreme Left, but even the Constitutionalists who were willing to
accept the promises of the October manifesto, had little faith in their
ultimate realization. A reign of chaos ensued. The parties of the Left
demanded now a democratic, now even a social, republic. The political
and labor strikes, among them those arranged by the Jewish "Bund,"
assumed the character of anarchy. The peasant or agrarian movement
burst forth, accompanied by the burning of manors and estates. Poland
and the Baltic region were in the throes of terrorism. Moscow witnessed
an armed uprising with barricades and with all the paraphernalia of a
popular revolution (December, 1905). The Government quelled the Moscow
rebellion, and resolutely adopted a policy of repression. Arrests,
executions, punitive military expeditions, were the means by which the
program of the Witte-Durnovo Cabinet was to be carried into effect.
The reactionary camarilla around the Tzar operated in full force,
fanning the hatred against the Jews. On December 23, the Tzar received
a deputation of the ringleaders of the Black Hundred, who had organized
themselves in the "League of the Russian People." One of the speeches
appealing to the Tzar to preserve autocracy was devoted to the Jewish
question. The deputation begged the Tzar "not to give equal rights to
the Jews." To this Nicholas replied laconically: "I shall think it
over."
3. THE UNDAUNTED STRUGGLE FOR EQUAL RIGHTS
The terrible October calamities were faced by Russian Jewry in a spirit
of courage and fortitude. It stood alone in its sorrow. The progressive
elements of Russian society which were themselves in the throes of
a great crisis reacted feebly upon the sufferings of the Jewish
people which had become the scape-goat of the counter-revolution. The
indifference of the outside world, however, was counteracted by the
rise of the Jewish national sentiment among the better classes of
Russian Jewry. One month after the pogrom bacchanalia, the "League
for the Attainment of Equal Rights for the Jewish People" held its
second convention in St. Petersburg. The Convention which lasted four
days (November 22-25) gave public utterance to the feeling of profound
national indignation. It voted down the motion to send a deputation
to Count Witte, asking for the immediate grant of equal rights to
the Jews. In the resolution repudiating this step the policy of the
Government was characterized in these words:
The facts have incontrovertibly proved that the recent pogroms,
appalling by their dimensions and by the number of their
victims, have been staged with the open connivance and, in many
cases, with the immediate assistance and sometimes even under
the direction of the police and highest local administration;
that the Government, not at all abashed by the monstrous crimes
of its executive organs, the local representatives of State
authority, has not removed from office a single one of the
suspected functionaries, and has taken no measures to bring
them to justice.
In view of the fact that Count Witte has repeatedly stated that
the Government does not see its way clear to proclaim at the
present moment the emancipation of the Jews, supposedly in the
interest of the Jews themselves, against whom the agitation
of the popular masses might be intensified by such a measure,
whereas, in reality, the pogroms are a result of that very
rightlessness of the Jews which is fully realized by the masses
of the Russian people and by the so-called Black Hundred--the
Convention resolves that the sending of a deputation to
Count Witte and the entering into negotiations with him will
achieve no purpose, and that, instead, all efforts shall be
concentrated upon organizing Russian Jewry in the struggle for
its equality of citizenship by joining the ranks of the general
movement for liberty.
Imbued with the spirit of martyrdom, the Convention remembered the
martyr Dashevski, the avenger of the Kishinev massacre,[49] and
passed a resolution to convey to the youthful sufferer, who was then
languishing in a penal military company, its "enthusiastic greetings."
In an outburst of national enthusiasm the Convention adopted the
following bold resolution:
In the interest of realizing to their full extent the civil,
political, and national rights of the Jewish nationality in
Russia, the Convention resolves as follows:
To proceed without delay to call, on the basis of universal
and equal suffrage, without discrimination of sex, and by a
direct secret vote, an All-Russian Jewish National Assembly in
order to establish, in accordance with the will of the entire
Jewish population, the forms and principles of its national
self-determination as well as the foundations of its internal
organization.
It was the project of a national Synedrion, radically different in its
conception from the Napoleonic Synedrion convened in 1807.
The third convention of the "League of Equal Eights" was held on
February 10-13, 1906, during the election campaign to the first
Imperial Duma. The proposal of the Left wing of the League to boycott
the Duma, on the ground that it "will prove a bulwark of reaction"--a
prediction which was fully justified by events--and to refrain from
taking part in the elections, was voted down. On the contrary, a
resolution was passed, calling upon the Jews to take a most active
part in the elections, to nominate everywhere their own Jewish
candidates, and, wherever this was impossible, to give their votes to
the non-Jewish candidates on condition that they pledge themselves
to support in the Duma the civil, political, and national rights of
the Jewish people. The resolution, moreover, contained this clause:
"To insist that the Jewish question in the Duma shall be settled
unconditionally in connection with the fundamental articles of the
Constitution and with the questions of elementary liberties to be
granted to all citizens."
An election campaign was set in motion and carried on under the
most difficult circumstances. The police authorities took advantage
of the state of war which had been proclaimed in many places to
interfere with a comprehensive pre-election propaganda, and at the
same time the Black Hundred tried to intimidate the Jews by holding
out the menace of pogroms during the approaching Passover season.
In Poland, the anti-Semitic chauvinists threatened the Jews with
all possible reprisals for their "audacious intention" to nominate
their own candidates for the Duma, alongside of the candidates of the
Christian Poles. Simultaneously, the Jewish group of the Left, the
"Bund" and others, followed the policy of boycotting the Duma and
did their best to interfere with the elections. However, all these
apprehensions proved groundless. The Passover and election pogroms did
not take place, and Russian Jewry displayed a vigorous activity in the
elections, with the result that twelve Jewish deputies were sent to
the first Duma. The most active among these deputies were M. Vinaver,
one of the leaders of the general Russian Constitutional-Democratic
party and president of the "League for the Attainment of Equal Rights";
Dr. Shmaryahu Levin, the well-known Zionist; L. Bramson, actively
identified with Jewish educational activities, who was affiliated with
the Russian Democratic group, known as the _Trudoviki_, or "Laborites."
All the Jewish deputies were united on the nationalistic platform
formulated by the "League for the Attainment of Equal Rights." By a
resolution passed at the fourth Convention of the League, held on
May 9-13, 1906, they pledged themselves to co-ordinate their actions
in all questions pertaining to Jewish emancipation and to abide by a
common discipline, without, however, forming a separate parliamentary
fraction.
4. THE JEWISH QUESTION BEFORE THE FIRST DUMA
The first Duma was convened on April 27, 1906, and barely three months
later, on July 8, it was dissolved, or rather dispersed by the Tzar,
for having displayed a spirit of excessive opposition. The prevailing
element in the first Duma was the Constitutional-Democratic majority
to which, by their political sympathies, the bulk of Russian Jewry and
ten of its twelve representatives in the Duma--the other two stood
a little more to the Left--belonged. It was natural for the Jews to
expect that a Parliament of this complexion would have no difficulty
in solving the question of equal rights for the Jews as one of the
most fundamental prerequisites of civil liberty. Unfortunately,
this expectation was not justified. The entire brief session of the
Duma was spent in an uninterrupted struggle of the Opposition with
the unscrupulous Government which was then headed by Goremykin, a
hide-bound reactionary. True, in its reply to the speech from the
throne, the Duma declared that "neither liberty nor order can be firmly
established without the equality of all citizens before the law." But
in the pronouncement of the Government of May 13 no word was said about
this equality of citizenship. The Jewish deputy Vinaver delivered a
powerful speech, in which, among other things, he spoke as follows:
From this platform, from which so much has been said about
political liberties, we Jews, the representatives of one of
the most tortured nationalities in the land, have not uttered
a single word about ourselves, because we did not consider it
seemly to speak here of civil inequality.... Now, however, it
is becoming clear to us that the Government has made up its
mind to continue on the same road on which it has gone until
now, and we are, therefore, bound to declare that, so long as
you will connive at civil slavery, there will be no peace in
the land.
The mistake made by the Jewish deputies consisted just in the fact
that they had not "uttered a single word" about themselves on a former
occasion, in reply to the speech from the Throne which had equally
failed to make the slightest mention of civil equality--practically
affecting only the Jews--and that they did not utter that word with
that feeling of righteous indignation to which the representatives of
"the most tortured nationality" in Russia were morally entitled.
Later on, the debates in the Duma concerning the Jewish question were,
by the force of events, concentrated upon the pogrom policy of the
Government. On May 8 an interpellation was introduced regarding the
complicity of the Imperial Police Department in instigating the pogroms
of 1905. Stolypin, the Minister of the Interior, promised to reply to
the interpellation, which was substantiated by documentary evidence, a
month later. But before that term had elapsed a new sanguinary pogrom
broke out in Bialystok.
In this center of the Jewish revolutionary and labor movement, where,
in 1905, the police and troops had already twice staged a Jewish
massacre, a new conspiracy was being hatched by the police and military
against "the authors of the liberty movement." An accidental act of
terrorism, the assassination of the Chief of Police by an unknown
culprit, gave the police conspirators a proper occasion to execute
their terrible design. On June 1, during a church procession, a pistol
was discharged by an _agent provocateur_ from among the Black Hundred,
and at once a rumor spread like wildfire among the crowd that "the
Jewish anarchists are firing at the Christians." The pogrom flared up
on the spot. In the course of two days the mob was busy demolishing
Jewish houses and stores and attacking the Jews, while at the same time
the police and military were systematically firing at the Jews not
only on the streets but also in the houses, in which the unfortunate
tried to hide. The bestialities of Kishinev were enacted again. Entire
families were slaughtered, human beings were tortured, and hacked
to pieces; limbs were cut off from the body, nails driven into the
heads.... Eighty dead and hundreds of wounded Jews were the result of
this new exploit of the counter-revolutionaries.
On June 2, the Imperial Duma received the heart-rending news of the
Bialystok massacre, and right there, after the passionate speeches
of Dr. Levin, Rodichev, and other deputies, passed a resolution to
bring in an interpellation to be answered by the Government within a
fixed date, and to appoint a parliamentary commission which was to
investigate the events on the spot. Three Duma deputies left at once
for Bialystok, and on their return submitted to the Duma an unvarnished
account which incontrovertibly established the fact that the Bialystok
crime had been carefully prepared as a counter-revolutionary act, and
that the peaceful Jewish population had been pitilessly shot down by
the police and soldiery.
On June 5, three days after the appearance of the bloody spectre of
Bialystok in the Duma hall, a bill dealing with civil equality for
the Jews came up for discussion. The burning problem involving the
disfranchisement of six million human beings was discussed side by
side with the question of a few petty class discriminations and with
the entirely separate question of women's rights. The entire treatment
of the subject by the deputies showed a distinct lack of warm-hearted
sympathy. Only the speech of the Jewish deputy Levin reverberated with
indignation, when he reminded the Russian Assembly that he himself,
being a Jew, would in ordinary times be denied the right of residence
in the capital, and that, as soon as the Duma would be dissolved, he, a
representative of the people and a former legislator, would be evicted
from St. Petersburg by the police. The bill was referred to a committee
to receive its final shape.
After an interval of three days, on June 8, the Duma had again occasion
to discuss the subject of pogroms. Premier Stolypin replied to the
interpellation of May 8 concerning the complicity of the Government
in the pogrom of 1905. His lame attempt to exonerate the authorities
called forth a strong rebuttal from a former member of the Government,
the erstwhile Assistant-Minister of the Interior, Deputy Urussov, who
bravely disclosed the full truth. Fortified by documentary evidence,
he proved the existence of a secret printing-press in the Police
Department which was issuing "patriotic" proclamations calling upon
the populace to exterminate the Jews. He quoted the words of the
gendarmerie officer who was in charge of that particular activity:
"A pogrom may be arranged on whatever scale you please, whether it
be against ten people or against ten thousand," and he concluded his
speech with these words: "The danger will not disappear, so long as
the affairs of the state and the destinies of the land will be subject
to the influence of people who, by their training, are corporals and
policemen, and by their convictions pogrom makers." These words were
accompanied by a storm of applause, and the Government bench was
showered with cries, "Resign, you pogrom fiends!" The Duma finally
adopted a resolution echoing these cries of indignation.
A more passionate tone characterized the discussions of the Duma
during the days of June 23-26, in connection with the report of the
parliamentary commission which had been appointed to investigate the
Bialystok massacre. The Duma was scandalized by the lying official
communication, in which the Jews were put forward as the authors of
the pogrom, and by the shameful military order of the day, in which
the troops of the Bialystok garrison were thanked "for their splendid
services during the time of the pogrom." The speeches delivered by the
Jewish deputies, by Jacobson, who had visited Bialystok as one of the
members of the parliamentary commission, and by Vinaver and Levin, gave
vent to their burning national wrath. The Russian Mirabeau, Rodichev,
pilloried the highly placed instigators of the Bialystok butchery.
On July 7, the Duma concluded the debate by adopting a resolution
denouncing in violent terms the policy of the Government, a policy
of oppression, frightfulness and extermination, which had created "a
situation unprecedented in the history of civilized countries," and
demanding, moreover, the immediate resignation of the reactionary
Ministry.
5. THE SPREAD OF ANARCHY AND THE SECOND DUMA
Two days later, when the deputies appeared before the Duma, they
found the building closed, and on the doors was displayed an imperial
manifesto dissolving the Duma which "has encroached upon a domain
outside its jurisdiction, and has engaged in investigating the acts
of the authorities appointed by us." The sudden dissolution of the
Duma was answered by the "Vyborg Manifesto" which was signed by the
entire parliamentary Opposition, calling upon the people to refuse to
pay taxes to furnish soldiers to a Government which had driven asunder
their representatives. The manifesto was also signed by all the Jewish
deputies who subsequently had to pay for it with imprisonment and the
loss of their electoral rights.
The revolutionary terrorism which had subsided during the sessions
of the Duma broke out with redoubled violence after its dissolution.
Attempts upon the lives of high officials--the most terrible being
the explosion of a bomb in the summer residence of Stolypin,
who had been appointed Prime Minister at the dissolution of the
Duma--"expropriations," _i. e._, the plunder of state funds and private
moneys for revolutionary purposes, anarchistic labor strikes, were
the order of the day. The Government retorted with monstrous measures
of oppression. A political court-martial was instituted which, in the
course of five months (September, 1906-January, 1907) sentenced over
one thousand people to death, among them many who were innocent or
under age. Needless to say, a considerable portion of these victims
were Jews.
Yet as far as the revolutionary attitude of the Jewish population was
concerned, the Government was not satisfied to cope with it by "legal"
executions, and therefore resorted, in addition, to the well-tried
contrivance of wholesale executions, in other words, of pogroms. The
chief of the political police in the city of Syedletz, Tikhanovich,
engineered on August 27-28 a bloody military pogrom in that city,
netting thirty dead and more than one hundred and fifty wounded Jews.
The signal for the pogrom were shots fired at a sentry by an _agent
provocateur_, whereupon the troops started an aimless musketry fire
on the streets and even bombarded Jewish houses with grenades. Many
soldiers, in a state of intoxication, committed incredible barbarities
and looted Jewish property. Notwithstanding the official report of
another agent of the local political police, Captain Pyetukhov, in
which he asserted that the Jews had not given the slightest reason for
the butchery and that the latter had been entirely engineered by the
military and political authorities, the perpetrator of the pogrom,
Tikhanovich, was not only allowed to go unpunished, but received from
the governor-general of Warsaw an expression of thanks for his "energy
and executive skill."
This being the attitude of the ruling spheres of Russia, it was out
of the question to expect any initiative from that quarter in regard
to the solution of the Jewish question. The Government of Stolypin,
in a circular issued on August 24, 1906, had promised "to find out
without delay which restrictions, being a source of irritation and
manifestly obsolete, could be immediately repealed, and which others,
affecting basically the relationship of the Jewish nationality to the
native population, seem to be a matter of popular conscience, and
should therefore be referred to the legislative institutions." The
Council of Ministers laid before the Tzar a draft of moderate reforms
in favor of the Jews, pointing to the necessity of appeasing the Jews
who, as a result of their grievous restrictions, "had been forced to
carry on a desperate struggle against the existing order." But these
representations had no effect. Nicholas II. is reported to have said
on that occasion: "So long as I am Tzar, the Zhyds of Russia shall
not have equal rights." During that time, the power of the so-called
"Second Government," the horrible camarilla around the Tzar, was in the
ascendancy, and their mainstay were the Black Hundred now organized
in the reactionary "League of the Russian People." These reactionary
terrorists knew only of one way to solve the Jewish question--by
exterminating the Jews.
There was only one ray of hope left--the second Duma which was to be
convoked in February, 1907. The election campaign was carried on under
Government pressure and was hampered by the threat of reprisals and
pogroms on the part of the "Black." The elections resulted in a Duma
with an anomalous complexion. The two extreme wings, the Socialists
and Black Hundred, had gained in strength, whereas the Constitutional
Democratic center had been weakened. The Jews had managed to elect only
three deputies, apart from one Jewish Social-Democrat who ran on the
ticket of his party. They were men of little renown, whereas of the
deputies of the first Duma who were prosecuted for signing the Vyborg
Manifesto not one was elected.
The entire energy of the new Parliament spent itself in the struggle
between its left and right wing. The Jewish question was entirely
relegated to the "Committee on the Freedom of Conscience." The
Government had brought in a bill repealing all denominational
restrictions, "except those affecting the Jews," but the Committee
decided to eliminate this discriminating clause and in this manner
carry through the emancipation of the Jews under the guise of the
"Freedom of Conscience."
But this time, too, the hope for Jewish emancipation proved an
illusion. The Duma was soon dissolved, under the pretext that a
revolutionary conspiracy of the Socialistic deputies had been
uncovered. On June 3, 1907, another _coup d'état_ took place. The
former electoral law which made it possible for the Russian democracy
and the oppressed nationalities to send their representatives to
the Duma was arbitrarily changed by the Tzar in order to insure a
conservative pro-Government majority in the Russian parliament. There
followed an era of dismal reaction.
FOOTNOTES:
[48] In Russian, _Mitropolit_, the highest ecclesiastical dignitary
in the Greek-Orthodox Church. There are three Mitropolits in Russia,
residing in Petrograd, Moscow, and Kiev.
[49] See above, p. 81.
CHAPTER XXXVII
EXTERNAL OPPRESSION AND INTERNAL CONSOLIDATION
1. THE NEW ALIGNMENTS WITHIN RUSSIAN JEWRY
The terrible quadrennium of 1903-1906 had an extraordinarily quickening
effect upon the national and political thought of the classes as
well as of the masses of Russian Jewry. The year of Kishinev and
Homel, when the rightless Jews were made defenceless; the year of
the Russo-Japanese War, when these rightless and defenceless pariahs
were called upon to fight for their fatherland against the enemy from
without; the year of the revolution when after the sanguinary struggle
for liberty the Jews received a "constitutional charter wrapped up
in pogroms"; finally, the first year of the Duma when indignant
utterances of the Jewish deputies from the platform of the Duma were
accompanied by the moans of the wounded Jews of Bialystok--these
terrible upheavals might have proved fatal to Russian Israel had it
not, during the preceding period, worked out for itself a definite
_nationalistic_ attitude towards the non-Jewish world. There were
several varieties of this national-political formula. At the one pole
stood Zionism, with its theory of a new "exodus." At the other pole
was the Social-Democratic party with its premise that "the blood of
the Jew must serve as lubricating oil upon the wheels of the Russian
Revolution." But even these two poles came somewhat closer to one
another at the moment of the great national danger, converging, in
spite of all their differences in program and tactics, toward the
central line above which floated the banner proclaiming the fight
for the civil, political, and national rights of the Jewish people.
Disfranchised, battered by pogroms, victimized by tyrannous Tzardom,
the Jews of Russia never thought of degrading themselves to the point
of begging equal rights "in instalments." They demanded their rights in
full, and demanded them not merely as "the Jewish _population_," but as
the Jewish _people_, as an autonomous nation among other nations with a
culture of its own. The doctrine of "National-Cultural Autonomism"[50]
was crystallized in definite slogans. These slogans were proclaimed,
as we have seen, by the "League for the Attainment of Equal Rights for
the Jewish People," which united on its platform all political Jewish
groups, with the exception of the Social-Democratic partisans.
The years of storm and stress also forced Zionism to recede from its
original position of denying the possibility of a national struggle
in the Diaspora. Meeting during the most exciting days of the Russian
Revolution, the Seventh Zionist Congress at Basle, held in July, 1905,
mourned the loss of its prematurely cut-off leader, Theodor Herzl, and
adopted a resolution voicing its strict allegiance to the Palestine
idea and rejecting the temptations of Territorialism. This led to a
formal split within the party, the Territorialists, headed by Zangwill,
seceding and forming an organization of their own.
A year later, in November, 1906, the Russian Zionists met at
Helsingfors, and adopted the platform of a "synthetic Zionism," that
is, a combination of the Palestine idea with the fight for national
and cultural autonomy in the Diaspora. The guiding resolution of the
Zionist Convention was couched in the following terms:
The Zionist organization of Russia sanctions the affiliation
of the Zionists with the movement for liberty among the
territorial nationalities of Russia, and advocates the
necessity of uniting Russian Jewry upon the principles of the
recognition of the Jewish nationality and its self-government
in all the affairs affecting Jewish national life.
This slogan of "national rights" was followed by the Zionists during
the elections to the first Imperial Duma. It was acted upon to a lesser
extent by the two Socialistic factions affiliated with Zionism, the
_Poale Zion_ and the Zionistic Socialists[51]; both groups confined
themselves to the demand of a minimum of cultural autonomy in the
Diaspora, concentrating their entire energy upon emigration, whether it
be into Palestine, as advocated by the _Poale Zion_, or into any other
territory, as preached by the Zionistic Socialists. During 1905-1906,
a new Socialistic party with strong nationalistic leanings came into
existence. In distinction from the other two Socialistic factions, it
demanded a maximum of national autonomy in the Diaspora, including
even a Jewish Diet as the central organ of Jewish self-government.
The members of this party called themselves "Saymists" (from _Saym_,
"Diet"), or went by the name of the "Jewish Socialistic Labor Party."
In the midst of all these partisan platforms stood the "League for the
Attainment of Equal Rights for the Jewish People," disregarding all
party and class affiliations.[52] During the revolutionary period,
this organization endeavored to unite all public-spirited Jews in the
general Russian and national Jewish struggle for liberty, but with the
decline of the revolutionary movement, the centrifugal forces within
the League began to assert themselves. The divergence of views and
tactics among the various groups composing the League proved stronger
than their common interest in the nearest aim, which, with the advent
of the political reaction, had become more remote.
Thus it came about that, at the beginning of 1907, the "League for
the Attainment of Equal Rights" fell asunder into its component
parts. The first to secede from it was the Zionist party, which
preferred to carry on its own _Gegenwartsarbeit_ under a separate
party flag--although, properly considered, a far-reaching activity on
behalf of national-Jewish rejuvenation in the lands of the Diaspora
was scarcely compatible with the fundamental principle of political
Zionism, the "negation of the _Golus_." The Helsingfors program of
"synthetic Zionism," the child of the liberty movement, shrank more and
more, as the hopes for a Jewish emancipation in Russia receded into the
distance.
Out of the "League for Equal Eights" came further the "Jewish People's
Group," a party which opposed the Zionist idea altogether and
repudiated the attempt to find new Jewish centers outside of Russia.
This group, headed by the well-known political leader, M. Vinaver,
placed in the center of its program the fight for civil emancipation,
in close contact with the progressive elements of the Russian people,
whereas in the question of national-Jewish interests it confined itself
to the principle of "self-determination" and to the freedom of Jewish
culture in general outlines, without putting forward concrete demands
of Jewish autonomy. The People's Group counted among its adherents
many representatives of the Jewish _intelligenzia_ who had more or
less discarded the idea of assimilation and had come to recognize the
necessity of a minimum of "Jewish-national rights."
The third group, which also took its rise in the "League for Equal
Eights," and received the name _Volkspartei_, or Jewish National
Party, stood firmly on the platform of national Jewish policies.
The underlying principle of this organization, or, more correctly,
of this far-reaching social current, which has its origin in the
historic development of the Jewish people, was the same principle of
national-cultural autonomism which had long before the revolution
pursued its own line of development parallel to Zionism.[53] The
simultaneous struggle for civil and national rights, the creation of
a full-fledged national community, instead of the _Kultusgemeinde_ of
Western Europe, an autonomous national school, and the rights of both
languages, the Hebrew and the Yiddish--such was, in general outlines,
the program of the _Volkspartei_. At the same time, this party,
taking the historic idea of the transplantation of Jewish centers in
the Diaspora as its point of departure, recognized the emigration to
America and the colonization of Palestine as great national factors
destined to create two new centers of Judaism, one quantitatively
powerful center in North America, and a smaller national center,
but qualitatively, from the point of view of cultural purity, more
valuable, in Palestine.[54]
Finally, the "League for Equal Rights" gave birth to a fourth party,
the Jewish Democratic Group, which is distinguished from the People's
Group by its stronger leaning towards the political parties of the
Left, the Russian radicals and Socialists.
Since the dissolution of the "League," these four groups have, as a
rule, united in various coalitions. They are all represented on the
permanent council at St. Petersburg which, together with the deputies
of the Imperial Duma, discusses Jewish political questions as they
arise from time to time. Thus, there emerged in Jewish public life a
form of representation reflecting the national and political ideas
which had assumed concrete shape during the years of the Russian
revolution and counter-revolution. The only organization standing
outside these federated groups and their common platform of national
Jewish politics is the Jewish Social-Democratic party, known as the
"Bund," which is tied down by its class program and is barred by it
from co-operating with the bourgeoisie, or a non-class organization,
even within the domain of national Jewish interests.
2. THE TRIUMPH OF THE "BLACK HUNDRED"
All these strivings and slogans were severely hit by the _coup d'état_
of June 3, 1907, when a large part of what the revolution had achieved
was rendered null and void. Owing to the amendment of the suffrage law
by this clumsy act of autocratic despotism, the constitution became the
handmaid of Tzardom. The ruling power slipped into the hands of the
Black Hundred, the extreme monarchistic groups, which were organized in
the "League of the Russian People" and openly advocated the restoration
of autocracy. The head of the League, Dubrovin, congratulated the
emperor upon his act of violence of June 3, and was assured in reply
that henceforth the "League of the Russian People" would be the
"trusted bulwark" of the Throne. Nicholas might have said with greater
justification that the Throne was the bulwark of the League of the
Black Hundred, the hirelings of the reaction, who were supplied with
millions of rubles from the imperial counter-revolutionary fund,
the so-called "black money." Street heroes and pogrom perpetrators
became the masters of Russian politics. The sinister forces began the
liquidation of the emancipation movement. Day after day the newspaper
columns were crammed with reports concerning the arrests of politically
"undependable" persons and the executions of revolutionaries. The
gallows and the jails became, as it were, the emblems of governmental
authority. The spectacle of daily executions which continued for two
years (1907-1909) forced from the breast of the grand old man, Leo
Tolstoi, the desperate cry: "I cannot keep silent."
Yet Nicholas II. continued his rôle of hangman. While young men and
women, among them a great number of Jews, met their fate on the
scaffold, the rioters and murderers from among the Black Hundred, who
during the days of October, 1905, alone had ruined hundreds of Jewish
communities, remained unpunished. The majority of them were not even
put on trial, for the local authorities who were charged with that
duty were afraid lest the judicial inquiry might establish their
own complicity in the pogroms. But even those who were prosecuted
and convicted on the charge of murder and plunder were released
from punishment by orders from St. Petersburg. As a rule, the local
branch of the League of the Russian People would appeal to the Tzar
to pardon the participants in the "patriotic demonstrations"--the
official euphemism for anti-Jewish riots--and the invariable response
was an immediate pardon which was ostentatiously published in the
newspapers. The petitions to the Tzar applying for the pardon of
convicted perpetrators of violence went regularly through the Minister
of Justice, the ferocious reactionary and anti-Semite Shcheglovitov.
No one doubted that this amnesty was granted by virtue of an agreement
concluded in 1905 between the Government and the pogrom ringleaders,
guaranteeing immunity to the anti-Jewish rioters.
A different treatment was meted out to the Jewish self-defence
contingents, which had the courage to oppose the murderers. They
were dealt with ruthlessly. In Odessa, a court-martial sentenced six
young Jews, members of a self-defence group which was active during
the October pogroms, to long terms of hard labor, characterizing the
"crime" of these Jews in the following words: "For having participated
in a conspiracy having for its object the overthrow of the existing
order by means of arming the Jewish proletariat for an attack upon
the police and troops." This characterization was not far from the
mark. The men engaged in defending the lives of their brothers and
sisters against the murderous hordes were indeed guilty of a criminal
offence against the "existing order," since the latter sought its
support in these hordes, of whom "the police and troops," as was shown
by the judicial inquiries, had formed a part. The appeal taken from
this judgment to the highest military court was dismissed and the
sentence sustained (August, 1907). The Jews who had done nothing beyond
defending life and property could expect neither pardon nor mitigation.
This lurid contrast between the release of the pogrom perpetrators
and the conviction of the pogrom victims was interpreted as a direct
challenge to the Jewish population on the part of Nicholas II. and his
frenzied accomplices.
The Black Hundred had a right to feel that it was their day. They knew
that the League of the Russian People formed, to use the phrase then
frequently applied to it in the press, a "Second Government," which
wielded greater power than the official quasi-constitutional Government
of Stolypin. The dregs of the Russian populace gave full vent to their
base instincts. In Odessa, hordes of League members made it a regular
practice to assault the Jews upon the streets with rubber sticks,
and, in case of resistance, to fire at them with pistols. Grigoryev,
the city-governor, one of the few honest administrators, who made an
attempt to restrain this black terrorism, was dismissed in August,
1907,[55] with the result that the assaults upon the Jews in the
streets assumed an even more sanguinary character. All complaints of
the Jews were dismissed by the authorities with the remark: "All this
is taking place because the Jews were most prominent in the revolution."
The Government represented by Stolypin, which was anxious to save at
least the appearance of a constitutional régime, was often forced
to give way before the secret Government of the Black League, which
commanded the full sympathy of the Tzar. By orders of the League,
Stolypin decreed that one hundred Jewish students who had passed the
competitive examination at the Kiev Polytechnicum should be excluded
from that institution and that a like number of Russian students
who had failed to pass should be admitted instead. The director and
dean of the institution protested against this clumsy violation of
academic freedom, but their protest was left unheeded, whereupon they
tendered their resignation (September, 1907). Following upon this, the
Ministry of Public Instruction, yielding to the pressure of the "Second
Government," restored the shameful percentage norm, restricting the
admission of Jews to institutions of higher learning, which, during the
preceding years, had been disregarded by the autonomous professorial
councils.
About the same time the Senate handed down a decision declaring the
Zionist organization, which had been active in Russia for many years,
to be illegal, and giving full scope to the police authorities to
proceed with repressive measures against the members of the movement.
3. THE THIRD, OR BLACK, DUMA
Such was the atmosphere which surrounded the elections to the third
Imperial Duma in the fall of 1907. The reactionary electoral law of
June 3 barred from the Russian Parliament the most progressive and
democratic elements of the Empire. Moreover, by splitting the electoral
assemblies into class and national curias, the Government succeeded in
preventing the election of any considerable number of Jewish deputies.
The elections took place under severe pressure from the authorities.
Many "dangerous" nominees of the Left were arbitrarily put under
arrest on framed-up political charges and, pending the conclusion of
the investigation, were temporarily barred from running for office. In
some places, the Black Hundred openly threatened the Jews with pogroms,
if they dared to nominate their own candidates. As a result, only
two Jewish deputies managed to get into the Duma--Friedman from the
government of Kovno, and Nisselovich from Courland.
The third Duma, nicknamed the Black, assembled in November, 1907. It
had an overwhelming majority of reactionaries and anti-Semites. This
majority of the Right was made up of the coalition of the conservative
Center, represented by the "Octobrist" party,[56] with the extreme
Right wing, the Russian "Nationalists," and Black Hundred. Whenever the
Jewish question came up for discussion, the reactionary bloc was always
able to drown the voices of the weak opposition, the "Cadet" party
(Constitutional Democrats), the _Trudoviki_ ("the Labor Party"), and
the handful of Socialists.
The attitude of this reactionary Duma toward the Jewish question
was revealed at its early sessions when the bill concerning the
inviolability of the person was the subject of discussion. The
opposition demanded the establishment of the full freedom of movement
as the most fundamental condition of the inviolability of the person,
but the majority of the Right managed to insert in the bill the
following stipulation: "No one shall be limited in the right of
choosing his place of residence and in moving from place to place,
except in the cases set forth in the law, and excepting the Jews who
arrive in localities situated outside the Pale of Settlement" (1908).
In this wise the Russian legislators cleverly succeeded in harmonizing
the principle of the inviolability of the person with the life-long
imprisonment of millions of people in the huge prison house known as
the Pale of Settlement.
Their solicitude for the maintenance of this vast ghetto was so
intense that the reactionary Government of Stolypin was often the butt
of criticism because it did not always show sufficient regard for
this holy institution. The fact of the matter was that in May, 1907,
Stolypin had issued a circular ordering the governors to stop the
expulsion from the interior governments of those Jews who had settled
there before August, 1906, and possessed "a family and a domestic
establishment" in those provinces, provided they were "harmless
to the public order and do not arouse the dissatisfaction of the
Christian population." As a result of this circular, several hundred,
possibly several thousand, Jewish families were saved from expulsion.
In consequence, the Right brought in an interpellation calling upon
the Government to explain on what ground it had dared to issue this
"charter of privileges" to the Jews. The interpellation, of course,
proved effective, and the Government did its utmost to nullify the
exemptive provisions of the circular. The anti-Semitic Duma betrayed
the same spirit on another occasion by rejecting in the same year
(1908) the bill, introduced by the Opposition, conferring the right
of visiting the health resorts or watering-places upon all sufferers,
without distinction of nationality.
Yet these legal discriminations were not the worst feature of the
third Duma. Even more excruciating was the way in which the Right wing
of the Russian Parliament permitted itself to make sport of Judaism
and things Jewish. It almost seemed as if the devotees of autocracy,
the members of the extreme Right, had come to the Russian Parliament
for the express purpose of showering abuse not only on the Russian
constitution but also on parliamentary government in general. The
hirelings of Nicholas II. danced like a horde of savages over the dead
body of the emancipation movement, singing hymns in praise of slavery
and despotism. Creatures of the street, the reactionary deputies
drenched the tribune of the Imperial Duma with mud and filth, and,
when dealing with the Jews, they resorted to methods similar to those
which were in vogue among their accomplices upon the streets of the
devastated cities. The term _Zhyd_ and the adjective _Zhydovski_,
in addition to other scurrilous epithets, became the most favored
terms of their vocabulary. They inserted formulas and amendments in
various bills submitted to the Duma which were deliberately intended
to insult the Jews. They called upon the Ministry of War to bring in
a bill excluding the Jews from the army, in view of the fact that the
Jewish soldiers had proved an element "which corrupts the army in the
time of peace and is extremely unreliable in the time of war" (1908).
They supported a law barring the Jews from the military Academy of
Medicine, on the ground that the Jewish surgeons had carried on a
revolutionary propaganda in the army during the Russo-Japanese War
(1910). The Octobrists demanded the exclusion of the Jews from the
office of Justice of the Peace, for the reason that their admission was
subversive of the principles of a "Christian State" (1909). The remark
made on that occasion by Karaulov, a deputy of the Opposition, "Where
there is no equality, where there are pariah nationalities, there is
no room for a constitutional order," was met from the benches of the
Right with the retort: "Thank God for it; we don't want it." A similar
cynical outburst of laughter greeted the warning of Rodichev: "Without
the abolition of the Jewish disabilities, there is no access to the
Temple of Freedom."
The two Jewish Duma deputies did their utmost to get a hearing,
but the Black Hundred generally interrupted their speeches by wild
and offensive exclamations. In 1910, the Jewish deputy Nisselovich
succeeded in obtaining the signatures of one hundred and sixty-six
deputies for a legal draft, abrogating the Pale of Settlement. It was
laid before the Duma, but resulted merely in fruitless debates. It was
referred to a committee which quietly strangled the bill.
4. NEW JEWISH DISABILITIES
Spurred on by the reactionary Duma, the Government went to even greater
lengths in its policy of Jewish discrimination. Premier Stolypin, who
was getting constantly nearer to the Right, was entirely oblivious
of the promise, made by him in 1905, to remove immediately all
restrictions which are "the source of irritation and are manifestly
obsolete." On the contrary, the Ministry presided over by him was
systematically engaged in inventing new grievous disabilities. The
Jewish deputy Friedman was fully justified in declaring, in a speech
delivered in February, 1910, that even "during the most terrible time
which the Jews had to live through under Plehve no such cruelties
and barbarities were practised as at the present moment." Wholesale
expulsions of Jews from the cities situated outside the Pale of
Settlement and from the villages within the Pale assumed the character
of an epidemic. In the spring of 1910 the Government decided on
sacrificing to the Moloch of Jew-hatred a whole hecatomb by expelling
twelve hundred Jewish families from Kiev--a measure which aroused a
cry of indignation beyond the confines of Russia. The acts of the
Government were marked by a refinement of cruelty, for even little
children, invalids, and aged people were pitilessly evicted. Particular
enmity was shown in the ejection of Jews who had committed the
"crime" of visiting summer resorts outside the city lines. The Senate
handed down a decision to the effect that the Jewish soldiers who had
participated in the defence of the besieged fortress of Port Arthur
during the Japanese War were not entitled to the right of residence
which had been granted by a former decree[57] to the Jewish soldiers
who had taken part in the war.
The spiritual murder of Jewish school children was the function of the
black Minister of Enlightenment, with the significant name of Schwartz.
The school norm, which, before the revolution, had been applied merely
as a Government order, without legislative sanction, was formulated by
him into a law and ratified by the Tzar in September, 1908. Henceforth,
all institutions of higher learning in the Empire were open to the
Jews only in a proportion not exceeding three per cent. of the total
number of students for the capitals, five per cent. for the educational
establishments outside the Pale, and ten per cent. for the Pale of
Settlement. In view of the fact that during the emancipation movement
the influx of Jews to the higher schools had been very great, so that
their number was now vastly in excess of the established norm, it would
have become necessary for the higher schools to bar completely all new
candidates until the number of Jewish students had been reduced to
the prescribed percentage limits. For a while the Minister recoiled
from taking this cruel step, and permitted for the next few years
the admission of Jewish students within the limits of the percentage
norm, calculating the latter in relation to the number of the _newly
admitted_ Christian students during a given year, without regard to
the Jewish students admitted previously. Subsequently, however, many
educational institutions closed their doors completely to the Jews,
referring, by way of explanation, to the "completion of the norm" by
the former pupils. Once more, bands of the "martyrs of learning" could
be seen wending their ways toward the universities in foreign lands.
A year later, in 1909, the percentage restrictions governing the
secondary schools were also placed on the statute books. The proportion
of Jewish admissions was fixed between five and fifteen per cent.--_i.
e._, slightly in excess of the old norm--and was extended in its
application to private educational institutions with the prerogatives
of government schools. This law spelled ruin to many gymnazia and
schools of commerce which, though directed by Christians, were almost
entirely dependent on Jewish support, eighty per cent. of their school
population consisting of Jews. As for the gymnazia maintained by Jews,
with very few exceptions, they never were able to obtain from the
Ministry the status of government institutions.
The educational Hamans, however, went a step further, and in March,
1911, secured an ukase of the Tzar extending the percentage norm to the
"externs":[58] henceforward Jews were to be admitted to the examination
for the "certificate of maturity"[59] or for the completion of a
part of the curriculum only in a certain proportion to the number of
Christian externs. In point of fact, however, there were no Christian
externs, since only the Jews who had failed to find admission to the
schools were forced to present themselves for examination as externs.
In consequence, the enormous number of Jewish children who had been
barred from the schools by the percentage norm were deprived of their
right to receive a testimonial from a secondary school. This law was
passed during a brief interruption in the sessions of the Duma and was
never submitted to it. The deputies of the Opposition brought in an
interpellation concerning this action, but the "Black Parliament" laid
the matter on the table, and the law which lacked all legal basis went
into operation.
Swayed more and more by the tendencies of a reactionary Russian
nationalism, Stolypin's Government set out to uproot the
national-cultural institutions of the "alien" races in Russia.
The Poles, the Finns, and other nationalities became the victims
of this policy. The lash of oppression was also applied to Jewish
cultural life. In 1910, Stolypin issued a circular impressing Russian
officialdom with the idea that the cultural and educational societies
of the "aliens" contributed towards arousing in them "a narrow
national-political self-consciousness" and towards "the strengthening
of national separatism," and that for this reason all the societies
of the Ukrainians and Jews which were established for the purpose of
fostering a separate national culture should be prohibited.
5. THE SPIRITUAL REVIVAL OF RUSSIAN JEWRY
This new blow was aimed right at the heart of Judaism. For after the
revolution, when the political struggle had subsided, the Jewish
_intelligenzia_ directed its entire energy into the channel of
national-cultural endeavors. Profiting by the law of 1906, granting the
freedom of assemblies and meetings, they founded everywhere cultural,
educational, and economic (co-operative and credit) societies. In
1908, the Jewish Literary Society was established in St. Petersburg,
which soon counted over a hundred branches in the provinces. The same
year saw the formation of the Jewish Historico-Ethnographic Society
which began to publish a quarterly review under the name _Yevreyskaya
Starina_ ("Jewish Antiquity").[60] The oldest educational organization
among the Jews, the Society for the Diffusion of Enlightenment,
enlarged its activity and was endeavoring to create a new type of
national Jewish school.
A multitude of other cultural societies and circles sprang into life
with the sanction of the authorities throughout the length and breadth
of the Pale. Everywhere lectures and conferences were held and heated
debates were carried on, centering around national-cultural problems.
Particularly passionate were the discussions about the position of
Hebrew and Yiddish in public life, in school and in literature, leading
to the alignment of two parties, the Hebraists and the Yiddishists. The
lectures, conferences and debates themselves were generally carried on
in one of these languages, mostly in the Yiddish vernacular.
In spite of their crudities, these partisan conflicts were a clear
indication of the advance of national self-consciousness and of the
desire for the upbuilding of a genuine Jewish life upon the concrete
foundations of a cultural autonomy. Of course, anti-Semitic Tzardom
could not be expected to sympathize with this inner regeneration of
Jewry, and, as in the time of Plehve, it directed its blow at the
Jewish-national organizations. Here and there the blow was effective.
In 1911, the Jewish Literary Society, with its one hundred and
twenty branches, which had displayed an energetic activity in the
establishment of libraries and the arrangement of public lectures, went
out of existence. In general, however, the attacks directed against
the Jewish spirit proved much more difficult of realization than the
attacks upon Jewish property. The cultural activities continued in
their course, defying all external restrictions and persecutions.
The literary revival, which had started in the nineties, and was but
temporarily interrupted by the stormy events of the revolutionary
period, also came into its own again. The rejuvenation of both the
national and the popular language, finding its expression in a widely
ramified Jewish literature, proceeded along paralleled lines.
The periodical press in Hebrew, represented by the two dailies,
_ha-Tzefirah_ in Warsaw, and _ha-Zeman_ in Vilna, and the monthly
ha-Shiloah in Odessa, found its counterpart in a popular press in
Yiddish, reaching hundreds of thousands of readers, such as the dailies
_Fraind_ ("The Friend," published since 1903 in St. Petersburg),
_Haint_ ("To-day"), _Moment_, and others, in Warsaw. In addition there
was the Jewish press in Russian: the weeklies _Voskhod_, _Razsvyet_,
_Yevreyski Mir_ in St. Petersburg, and a few other publications.
In the domain of higher literary productivity, new forces were being
constantly added to the old ones. Besides the great national bard
Bialik there appeared a number of gifted poets: Shneor, the singer of
"storm and stress," of doubts and negations, the romantically inclined
Jacob Kohan, Fichman, Reisin, David Einhorn, and many other youthful,
as yet scarcely unfolded talents. J. L. Perez found a rival in Shalom
Asch, the portrayer of patriarchal Jewish life in the provincial
towns of Poland (_Die Städtel_, "The Provincial Town," 1904), and the
author of charming sketches from Jewish life, as well as a playwright
of note whose productions have met with tumultuous applause both on
the Jewish and the non-Jewish stage (_Moshiah's Zeiten_, "Messianic
Times," _Gott von Nekomo_, "God of Revenge," _Shabbetai Zewi_, _Yihus_,
"Blue Blood"). His numerous co-workers in Yiddish letters have devoted
themselves with youthful enthusiasm to the cultivation of this branch
of Jewish literature.
In Hebrew fiction a number of talented writers and a group of
novelists, who publish their works mostly in the _ha-Shiloah_, came
to the fore. The successor of Ahad Ha'am in the editorship of this
periodical, Dr. Joseph Klausner, occupies a prominent place in Jewish
literature as publicist, critic, and partly as historian. If we add
to these talents the not inconsiderable number of writers who are
domiciled in Galicia, Palestine, Germany, and America, and draw their
inspiration from the vast Russian-Jewish reservoir, the growth of
Jewish literature during the last decade stands forth in bold relief.
This progress of inner Jewish life in Russia is truly remarkable. In
spite of the catastrophes which have descended upon Russian Jewry
during the first decade of the twentieth century, the productivity
of the Jewish national spirit has gone on unchecked, and the
national-Jewish culture has struck out in all directions. The
assimilationist positions, which have been generally abandoned, are
only held by a few loyal devotees of a past age. It is true that
the process of _elemental_ assimilation, which penetrates from the
surrounding atmosphere into Judaism through the medium of language,
school and literature continues to affect Jewish life with the same
force as of old. But there can be no doubt that it is effectively
counterbalanced by the centripetal factor of a national culture
which is becoming more and more powerful. Large as is the number of
religious apostates who have deserted Judaism under the effect of
external pressure, and of moral renegades who have abandoned the
national ethical ideals of Judaism in favor of a new-fangled decadent
æstheticism, it is negligible when compared with the compact mass
of Russian Jewry and with the army of intellectuals whose national
self-consciousness has been deepened by suffering. As in all previous
critical moments in the history of the Jews, the spirit of the nation,
defying its new tormentors, has grown stronger in the worn-out body.
The Hamans of Russia who have attempted to crush the Eternal People
have failed as signally as their predecessors in Persia, Syria and
Byzantium.
FOOTNOTES:
[50] See above, p. 51 _et seq._
[51] Called by their Russian initials S. S.
[52] See above, p. 111 _et seq._
[53] See above, p. 51.
[54] Beginning with the year 1905, the emigration to America once more
assumed enormous proportions. During 1905-1906, the years of revolution
and pogroms, nearly 230,000 Jews left Russia for the United States.
During the following years the figure was somewhat lower, but still
continued on a fairly high level, amounting to 50,000-75,000 annually.
In Palestine, the colonization went apace, and with it the cultural
activities. Several schools, with a purely national program, such as
the gymnazia in Jaffa and Jerusalem, and other institutions, came into
being.
[55] When the same official waited upon the Tzar with his report
concerning the events at Odessa, he was amazed to see the Tzar come
out to him with the badge of the League of the Russian People upon
his chest--the same badge which was worn by the rioters in Odessa.
He was subsequently given to understand that the Tzar had done so
demonstratively to show his solidarity with the hordes of the Black
Hundred.
[56] So called because it based its program on the imperial manifesto
of October 17, 1905. See above, p. 127.
[57] See p. 98 _et seq._
[58] See vol. II, p. 351.
[59] The name given to the graduation certificate of a gymnazium. In
German it is similarly called _Reifezeugnis_.
[60] It was edited by the writer of the present work, S. M. Dubnow.
RUSSIAN JEWRY SINCE 1911
Being loath to cross the threshold of the present, we shall stop at the
year 1911, terminating the first decade of the Thirty Years' War waged
by Russian Tzardom against Jewry since 1881. The more recent phases
of this war are still fresh in our memory. To put the new campaign of
Jew-hatred in its proper light, it will suffice to point out its most
conspicuous landmarks which stand out by their extraordinarily sinister
features. In 1911, the organizations of the Black Hundred, with the
help of their accomplices in the Duma and in the Government circles,
manufactured the monstrous "Beilis case." The murder of a Russian boy
in Kiev, of a family belonging to a band of thieves, and the discovery
of the body in the neighborhood of a brickkiln owned by a Jew provided
the anti-Semites with an opportunity to bring forward the old charge of
ritual murder. In the beginning the Government was somewhat uncertain
as to the attitude it should adopt towards the mysterious Kiev murder.
But a political occurrence which took place at the time put an end to
its vacillation. In September, 1911, Premier Stolypin was assassinated
in a Kiev theatre in the presence of the Tzar and the dignitaries of
State. The assassin, by the name of Bogrov, proved to be the son of a
lawyer who was of Jewish extraction, though he had long before turned
his back upon his people--a semi-anarchist, who at one time had been
active as police agent for some mysterious revolutionary purposes. The
Jewish extraction of the father of the assassin was enough to produce a
paroxysm of fury in the camp of the anti-Semitic reactionaries who had
lost in the person of Stolypin an exalted patron. In Kiev preparations
were openly made for a Jewish massacre, but the Government was afraid
that the proposed wholesale execution of Jews would mar the festive
solemnity of the Tzar's visit to Kiev. The authorities made it known
that the Tzar was not in favor of riots, and a bloody street pogrom was
averted.
In its place, however, a bloodless pogrom, extending over two years,
was arranged in the form of the Beilis case. Minister of Justice
Shcheglovitov, a former Liberal, who had become a fanatical partisan
of the Black Hundred, made up his mind to impart to the trial a
glaring ritual coloring. The original Judicial inquiry having failed
to uncover any traces of Jewish complicity, the Minister of Justice
ordered a new special inquiry and constantly changed the personnel of
the investigating and prosecuting officials, until he finally secured
a bill of indictment in which the whole case was represented as a
ritual crime, committed by the Jew Beilis with the participation of
"undiscovered persons."
For two years, the Beilis case provided the pabulum for a wild
anti-Semitic campaign which was carried on among the so-called better
classes, on the streets, in the press, and in the Imperial Duma. The
court trial which took place in Kiev in October, 1913, was expected
to crown with success the criminal design harbored by the Minister of
Justice and the Black Hundred, but the expectations of the Government
were disappointed. In spite of a carefully selected court personnel,
which consisted of anti-Semitic judges representing the Crown, and
of sworn jurymen, ignorant peasants and burghers who believed in the
ritual murder legend, Beilis was acquitted, and the authorities found
it impossible to fasten the guilt upon the Jews.
Exasperated by the failure, the Government wreaked its vengeance upon
the liberal-minded intellectuals and newspaper men, who, by their
agitation against the hideous libel, had wrested the prey from the
hands of the Black Hundred. Scores of legal actions were instituted
not only against newspaper editors and contributors but also against
the St. Petersburg Bar Association, which had adopted a resolution
protesting against the method pursued by Shcheglovitov in the Beilis
trial. The sensational case against the metropolitan lawyers was tried
in June, 1914, one month before the declaration of the World War, and
terminated in a verdict of guilty for twenty-five lawyers, on the
charge of "having agitated against the Government."
The triennium preceding the World War witnessed the rise of a new
danger for Judaism, this time coming from Poland. The extraordinary
intensity of the national and religious sentiment of the Poles,
accentuated by the political oppression which for more than a hundred
years had been inflicted upon them, particularly by the hands of
Russian despotism, has, during the last decade, been directed against
the Jewish people. The economic progress made by the Jews in the two
industrial centers of Russian Poland, in Warsaw and Lodz, gave rise
to the boycott agitation. Polish anti-Semites proclaimed the slogan
"Do not buy from Jews!", aiming the cry specifically against the
"Litvaks," that is, the hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews who, in
the course of the last few decades, had been chiefly instrumental in
the economic advancement of those two centers. The cloak beneath which
this agitation was carried on was purely that of Polish nationalism:
the Russian Jews were alleged, on the one hand, "to Russify Poland,"
and, accused, on the other hand, of an opposite tendency, of asserting
themselves as the members of a separate Jewish nationality, with a
press and a social organization of their own, which refuses to be
merged in the Polish people.
The anti-Semitic movement in Poland, which began shortly after the
revolution of 1905, assumed extraordinary dimensions in 1910-1911, when
the boycott became a fierce economic pogrom, reaching its culmination
in 1912, during the election campaign to the fourth Imperial Duma. The
Jewish electors of Warsaw formed a majority, and were, therefore, in a
position to send a Jewish deputy to the Duma. Yet out of consideration
for the national susceptibilities of the Poles who insisted on
sending as a representative of the Polish capital one of their "own,"
a Christian, the Jews were willing to accept a Polish candidate,
provided the latter was not an anti-Semite. When, however, the Polish
election committee, disregarding the feelings of the Jews, nominated
the anti-Semitic candidate Kukhazhevski, the Jews gave their votes to
the Polish Socialistic nominee Yaghello, who carried the election.
This attitude of the Jews aroused a storm of indignation among the
higher classes of Polish society. An anti-Jewish campaign, marked by
extraordinary bitterness, was set in motion, and in the press and on
the streets the Jews were nicknamed "Beilises," an echo of the ritual
murder legend which had given rise to such horrors in ancient Catholic
Poland. The economic boycott was carried on with incredible fury, and
in a number of towns and villages the cowardly enemies of the Jews,
being afraid of attacking them openly, set fire to Jewish houses, with
the result that in many cases entire families were consumed in the
flames.
The _furor Polonicus_ assumed more and more dangerous forms, so that
at the beginning of the World War, in 1914, almost the entire Polish
nation, from the "progressive anti-Semites" down to the clericals,
were up in arms against the Jews. From this armed camp came the
defiant war cry: "On the banks of the Vistula there is no room for two
nationalities," thus sentencing to death the two millions of Polish
Jewry who consider themselves a part of the Jewish, and not of the
Polish nation. Out of this soil of national hatred crawled forth the
snake of the terrible "military libel," which during the first year of
the war drenched Polish Jewry in rivers of blood. Over the bleeding
body of the Jewish people Polish and Russian anti-Semitism joined
hands. Horrors upon horrors were perpetrated before which the ancient
annals of Jewish martyrdom fade into insignificance.
* * * * *
Nearly twenty centuries have passed since the ancient Judæo-Hellenic
Diaspora sent forth a handful of men who established a Jewish colony
upon the northern Scythian, now Russian, shores of the Black Sea. More
than a thousand years ago the Jews of Byzantium from one direction, and
those of the Arabian Caliphate from another, went forth to colonize the
land of the Scythians. The Jew stood at the cradle of ancient Kiovian
Russia, which received Christianity from the hands of the Byzantines.
The Jew witnessed the birth of Catholic Poland, and, during the stormy
days of the Crusades, fled from the West of Europe to this haven of
refuge which was not yet entirely in the hands of the Catholic Church.
He has seen Poland in its bloom and decay; he has witnessed the rise
of Muscovite Russia, tying the fate of one-half of his nation to the
new Russian Empire. Here the power that dominates history opened up
before the Jewish people a black abyss of mediævalism in the midst of
the blazing light of modern civilization, and finally threw it into
the flames of the gigantic struggle of nations. What may the World War
be expected to bring to the World-Nation? Full of agitation, the Jew
is looking into the future, and the question of his ancient prophet is
trembling on his lips: "Ah Lord God! wilt Thou make a full end of the
remnant of Israel?"[61].... Let the entire past of the Jewish people
serve as an answer to this question--a people which, in the maelstrom
of human history, has succeeded in conquering the two cosmic forces:
Time and Space.
FOOTNOTES:
[61] Ezekiel XI, 13.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
VOLUME I
[_Yevr. Bibl._ = _Yevreyskaya Bibliotyeka_; _Yevr. St._ = _Yevreyskaya
Starina_.]
CHAPTER I
THE JEWISH DIASPORA IN EASTERN EUROPE
(pp. 13-38)
Latyschew, Inscriptiones antiquae orae Septentrionalis Ponti
Euxini, vols. I-II. St. Petersburg, 1885, 1890 [R].
Reghesty i Nadpisi. Svod materialov dla istoriyi yevreyev
v Rossiyi ("Documents and Inscriptions. Collection of
Materials for the History of the Jews in Russia"). Vol. I,
St. Petersburg, 1899, Nos. 1-218 [R].
Dubnow, "The Historical Mystery of the Crimea," _Yevr. St._,
1914, No. 1.
Harkavy, Skazaniya Musulmanskikh pisatyeley o Slavianakh
i Russkikh ("The Accounts of the Mohammedan Writers
concerning the Slavs and Russians") St. Petersburg, 1870
[R].
----, Mitteilungen über die Chasaren, _Russische Revue_, 1877;
also _Yevr. Bibl._, vols. VII-VIII, St. Petersburg, 1878.
----, Altjüdische Denkmäler aus der Krim, St. Petersburg, 1876.
Firkovich, Abne Zikkaron. Matzebot 'al Kibre Bne Israel
bi-Krim, Vilna, 1872.
Chwolson, Corpus inscriptionum hebraicarum. Grabschriften aus
der Krim, St. Petersburg, 1882.
Petahiah of Ratisbon, Sibbub, edited by Grünhut, Jerusalem,
1904.
Benjamin of Tudela, Sefer ha-Massa'ot, ed. Grünhut, Jerusalem,
1903; ed. Marcus Adler, London.
Hoker, "The Jews in Kaffa under the Genoese Régime (1455),"
_Yevr. St._ 1912, p. 66 _et seq._
Sobranie russkih letopisey ("Collection of Russian Chronicles")
[R].
Solovyov, Historiya Rossiyi ("The History of Russia"). Vol. I,
Moscow, 1863-75 [R]
CHAPTER II
THE JEWISH COLONIES IN POLAND AND LITHUANIA
(pp. 39-65)
Volumina legum. Leges et constitutiones Regni Poloniae, vol. I,
St. Petersburg, 1859 (_sub anno_ 1347, 1420, 1496, 1505).
Bershadski, Russko-yevreyski arkhiv ("Russian-Jewish
Archives"), St. Petersburg, vol. I (1882), Nos. 1-39, and
vol. III (1903), Nos. 1-15.
Bersohn, Dyplomataryusz dotyczacy zydów w dawniej Polsce
("Diplomatic Documents relating to the Jews in Ancient
Poland"), Warsaw, 1910, Nos. 1-4, 386-402 [P].
Hube, Constitutiones synodales provinciae Gnesnensis, St.
Petersburg, 1856, pp. 68-70, 159-161.
Czacki, Rozprawa o Zydach ("An Inquiry concerning the Jews"),
Cracow, 1860 [P].
Gumplowicz, Prawodawstwie Polskie wzgledem zydów ("Polish
Legislation relating to Jews"), Cracow, 1867 [P].
Sternberg, Geschichte der Juden in Polen, Leipzig, 1878.
Bershadski, Litovskiye yevreyi ("The Lithuanian Jews"), St.
Petersburg, 1883 [R].
Schipper, Studya nad stosunkami gospodarczymi zydów w Polsce
podczas zredniowiecza ("A Study of the Economic Relations
of the Jews in Poland during the Middle Ages"), Leinberg,
1911 [P].
CHAPTER III
THE AUTONOMOUS CENTER IN POLAND AT ITS ZENITH
(pp. 66-102)
Volumina legum (1859-1860), vol. I, pp. 309, 375, 506, 524-525,
550; vol. II, pp. 624, 690-692, 725, 1052, 1243; vol. III,
pp. 289, 809-810; vol. IV, pp. 39-40.
Bershadski, Russo-yevreyski arkhiv, vol. I, pp. 62-337; vol. II
(St. Petersburg, 1882); vol. III (1903), pp. 36-260 [R].
Reghesty i Nadpisi, vol. I, pp. 95-871 [R].
Akty Vilenskoy kommissiyi dla razbora drevnikh aktov ("Records
of the Vilna Commission for the Examination of Ancient
Documents"), vol. XXVIII, containing documents relating to
Jews (Vilna, 1901), Nos. 1-278 [R].
Bersohn, Dyplomataryusz, Nos. 5-246, 351-356, 401-552 [P].
Schorr, "The Cracow Collection of the Jewish Statutes and
Charters of the Fifteenth to the Sixteenth Century," _Yevr.
St._, vol. I, pp. 247 _et seq._, vol. II, pp. 76, 223 _et
seq._
Czacki, Rozprawa o Zydach, pp. 44-54 [P].
Kraushar, Historya Zydów w Polsce ("History of the Jews in
Poland"), vol. II, Warsaw, 1866, pp. 144-318 [P].
Gumplowicz, Prawodawstwie Polskie, etc., pp. 36-45, 50-52,
58-76, 103 [P].
Nussbaum, Historya Zydów ("History of the Jews"), vol. V, pp.
108-223 [P].
Bershadski, Litovskiye yevreyi, chapters V-VI [R].
Dubnow, "The Jews and the Reformation in Poland during the
Sixteenth Century," _Voskhod_, 1895. Books V-VIII.
----, "The Victims of Fictitious Accusations during the years
1636-1639," _Voskhod_, 1895. Books I-II.
Perles, Geschichte der Juden in Posen, Breslau, 1865. Comp.
Frankel's _Monatsschrift_, 1864-1865.
Balaban, "The Jewish Physicians in Cracow and Tragedies of the
Ghetto," _Yevr. St._, 1912, p. 38 _et seq._
----, "Episodes from the History of Ritual-Murder Trials,"
_Yevr. St._, 1914, p. 163 _et seq._
----, "The Legal Status of the Jews in Poland during the Middle
Ages and in more Recent Times," _Yevr. St._, 1910-1911.
----, Dzieje Zydów w Krakowie ("History of the Jews in
Cracow"), vol. I, Cracow, 1913 [P].
----, Zydyi lwowscy na przelomie XVI i XVII wieku ("The Jews
of Lemberg on the Border-Line between the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Century"), Lemberg, 1906 [P].
CHAPTER IV
THE INNER LIFE OF POLISH JEWRY AT ITS ZENITH
(pp. 103-138)
Dubnow, "Kahal Constitutions," etc., _Voskhod_, 1894, Books
II-XII.
----, "Documents of the Council of Four Lands," _Yevr. St._,
1912, pp. 70, 178, 453.
----, "The Record Book of the Lithuanian Provincial Assembly,"
_Yevr. St._, 1909-1915.
----, Wa'ad Arba 'Aratzot be-Polen, article in _Sefer ha-Yobel_
le-Rab Nahum Sokolow, Warsaw, 1904.
----, "Council of Four Lands," article in Jewish Encyclopedia,
vol. IV, p. 304 _et seq._
----, "The Inner Life of Polish Jewry during the Sixteenth
Century," _Voskhod_, 1900, Books II and IV.
----, "The Vernacular of the Polish-Lithuanian Jews during the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century," _Yevr. St._, 1909, p. 1
_et seq._
Harkavy, Hadashim gam Yeshanim. Appendix to Rabbinowitz's
Hebrew translation of Grätz's History, vol. VII, Warsaw,
1899.
Schorr, Organizacya Zydow w Polsce ("The Organization of the
Jews in Poland"), Lemberg, 1899.
----, Zydzi w Przemyzlu ("The Jews in Pshemyshl"), 1903.
Perles, Geschichte der Juden in Posen, 1865.
Balaban, Zydzi lwowscy, etc.
----, Dzieye Zydow w Krakowie.
----, "Jacob Pollak, the Father of Polish Rabbinism, and His
Age," _Yevr. St._, 1912, p. 225 _et seq._
----, "Die Krakauer Judengemeinde-Ordnung von 1595," _Jahrbuch
der Jüdisch-Literarischen Gesellschaft_, vol. X,
Frankfurt-on-the-Maine, 1913.
Horodezki, Le-Korot ha-Rabbanut, Warsaw, 1911, containing the
biographies of Moses Isserles, Solomon Luria, Mordecai
Joffe, Meir of Lublin, Samuel Edels, and others.
----, "Rabbi Nathan Shapiro, a Kabbalist of the Seventeenth
Century," _Yevr. St._, 1910, pp. 192 _et seq._
----, "The Age of the Ascetic Kabbalah" (Isaiah Horvitz and his
family), _Yevr. St._, 1913, pp. 145, 367, 455.
Rabbinovich, "Traces of Free-thinking in Polish Rabbinism of
the Sixteenth Century," _Yevr. St._, 1911, p. 1 _et seq._
Warchel, "Polish Jews at the University of Padua," _Kwartalnik
historyi Zydow_ ("Jewish Historical Quarterly"), Warsaw,
1913, No. 3.
Bruckner, "From the History of Polish Dissidents," _Ateneum_,
Warsaw, 1898, No. 2.
Isaac Troki, Hizzuk Emunah, edited with German translation by
D. Deutsch, Breslau, 1873.
CHAPTER V
THE AUTONOMOUS CENTER IN POLAND DURING ITS DECLINE
(pp. 139-187)
Nathan Hannover, Yewen Mezulah, Venice 1653. The other Jewish
chronicles and records will be found in the collection of
I. Gurland, Le-Korot ha-Gezerot `al Israel, Parts I-VI,
Cracow, 1887-1892, and the posthumous edition, Odessa, 1892.
Kostomarov, Bogdan Khmelnitzki, vols. I-III, St. Petersburg,
1884 [R].
Arkhiv Yugo-zapadnoy Rossiyi ("Archives of South-western
Russia"), Part III, volume 3, Kiev 1876, containing the
documents relating to the Haidamacks, with a preface by V.
Antonovich [R].
----, Part V, volume II, Kiev 1890, concerning the censuses of
the Jewish population of the South-western region, taken
during the years 1765-1791 [R].
Volumina Legum, vols. IV-VIII, passim.
Bersohn, Dyplomataryusz, Nos. 247-350, 357-384.
Schorr, "The Cracow Collection, etc.," see bibliography to
Chapter III.
Akty Vilenskoy kommissiyi (see bibliography to Chapter III),
vols. XXVIII-XXIX, containing Jewish records, Vilna,
1901-1902.
Reghesty i Nadpisi, vol. I, Nos. 872:1111; vol. II; vol. III,
Nos. 1850-2224, St. Petersburg, 1913.
Levin, Judenverfolgungen im Schwedisch-polnischen Kriege
1655-1659, Posen, 1901.
Dubnow, "The Ruzhan Martyrs of 1659," _Voskhod_, 1893, Book I.
Balaban, "The Jewish Physicians in Cracow, etc." (concerning
Calahora), _Yevr. St._, 1912, pp. 51-53.
----, Skizzen zur Geschichte der Juden in Polen, Berlin, 1911.
----, "From the Past of a Jewish Street in Lemberg," _Yevr.
St._, 1909, p. 237.
----, "The Ritual Murder Trial in Posen of 1736-1740," _Yevr.
St._, 1913, p. 469 _et seq._
----, "An Episode from the History of the Ritual Murder Trials
and of the anti-Jewish Literature in Poland," _Yevr. St._,
1914, p. 318 _et seq._
Galant, "The Ritual Murder Trial in Dunaigorod of 1748," _Yevr.
St._, 1911, p. 268.
----, "The Victims of the Blood Accusation in Zaslav of 1747,"
_Yevr. St._, 1912, p. 202 _et seq._
G. E., On the trials of Stupnitza and Voyslavitzá, _Yevr.
St._, 1912, p. 26 _et seq._
The Papal Bulls concerning the Blood Accusation, Russian
translation of Stern's book, pp. 29-105, containing
Ganganelli's memorandum and the appended documents, Kiev,
1912.
Hekker, "Anti-Semitism in Poland during the Eighteenth
Century," _Yevr. St._, 1913, p. 439 _et seq._
Concerning the Haidamack uprising and the massacre at Uman, see
Gurland's Le-Korot ha-Gezerot and Reghesty i Nadpisi, _sub
anno_ 1768.
CHAPTER VI
THE INNER LIFE OF POLISH JEWRY DURING THE PERIOD OF DECLINE
(pp. 188-241)
Dubnow, "Records of the Council of Four Lands during
1621-1699," _Yevr. St._, 1912, pp. 178, 453.
----, "The Record Book of the Lithuanian Provincial Assembly
during 1623-1761," _Yevr. St._, 1910-1915.
----, Article on the Provincial Assemblies, _Voskhod_, 1894,
Books IV and XII.
Schipper, Beiträge zur Geschichte der partiellen Judentage in
Polen im XVII-XVIII Jahrhundert bis 1764.
Grätz, Geschichte der Juden, vol. X, Index sub "Polen,"
particularly the chapter on Sabbatai Zevi.
----, Frank und die Frankisten, Breslau, 1868.
Dubnow, "Jacob Frank and his Christianizing Sect," _Voskhod_,
1883, Book I _et seq._
----, "The History of Frankism according to newly discovered
sources," _Voskhod_, 1896, Books III-IV.
Kraushar, Frank i Frankizci ("Frank and the Polish Frankists"),
Cracow, 1895. Two volumes [P].
Balaban, "Notes on the History of the Frankist Sect,"
_He-`Atid_, vol. V, Berlin, 1913.
Horodezki, Mystisch-religiöse Strömungen unter den Juden in
Polen im XVI-XVIII Jahrhundert, Leipzig, 1914.
Dubnow, "The Social and Spiritual Life of the Jews in Poland in
the First Half of the Eighteenth Century," _Voskhod_, 1899,
Books I-II.
----, "Introduction to the History of Hasidism," _He-`Atid_,
vol. III, Berlin, 1911.
----, "The Rise of Hasidism and Tzaddikism. History of the
Hasidic Schism. The Religious Struggle, etc.," _Voskhod_,
1888-1893.
Lewin, "Aliyyot Eliyyahu" (a biography of the Gaon of Vilna),
Vilna, 1875.
Yatzkan, Rabbenu Eliyyahu (another biography), Warsaw, 1900.
Solomon Maimon, Lebensgeschichte, Berlin, 1792.
CHAPTER VII
THE RUSSIAN QUARANTINE AGAINST JEWS
(pp. 242-261)
Reghesty i Nadpisi, vol. I, Nos. 462, 470, 527, 653, 654, 757,
877-878, 897-898.
Levanda, Sbornik zakonov o yevreyakh ot 1649 do 1873
("Compendium of the Laws relating to Jews from 1649 to
1873"), Nos. 1-29.
Solovyov, Historya Rossiyi ("History of Russia"), Book III,
edition 1910, p. 1345.
Dubnow, "Peter the Great and the Jews."
----, Article on the Moghilev massacre of 1655, _Pardes_, vol.
III, Odessa, 1896.
Orshanski, Russkoye zakonodatyelstvo o yevreyakh ("The Russian
Legislation relating to Jews"), St. Petersburg, 1877.
Golitzin, Istoriya russkavo zakonodatyelstva o yevreyakh
("History of the Russian Legislation relating to Jews"),
St. Petersburg, 1886.
Kunin, "The Jews of Moscow in the Seventeenth Century," _Yevr.
St._, 1913, p. 96 _et seq._
S. D., "The Expulsion of the Jews from Little Russia in the
Second Quarter of the Eighteenth Century," _Yevr. St._,
1913, pp. 193, 123 _et seq._
----, "The Census taken of the Jews of Little Russia in 1736,"
_Yevr. St._, 1913, pp. 400, 526.
----, "The Petition of the Nobility and the Elders of Little
Russia for the Restoration of the Ancient Rights of Little
Russia, presented to Catherine II. in 1764," _Kievskaya
Starina_, 1883, Book 6.
CHAPTER VIII
POLISH JEWRY DURING THE PERIOD OF THE PARTITIONS
(pp. 262-305)
Czacki, Rozprawa o Zydach (see bibliography to Chapter II), 9,
pp. 117-134 [P].
Korzon, Wewnetvzne dzieje Polskie za Stanislawa Augusta ("The
Inner History of Poland under Stanislav Augustus"), Cracow,
1882, vol. I, pp. 164-167, 230-232, 240 _et seq._ [P].
Solomon Maimon, Lebensgeschichte.
Okhotski, "Stories from Poland's Past," Russian translation,
St. Petersburg, 1874, vol. I, pp. 54-55.
Volumina Legum (see bibliography to Chapter II), vol. VII, pp.
333, 352; vol. VIII, p. 95.
Nussbaum, Szkice historyczne z zycia zydow w Warszawie
("Historic Sketch from the Life of the Jews in Warsaw"),
Warsaw, 1881, pp. 13-15 [P].
Smolenski, Stan i sprawa zydow polskich w XVIII wieku ("The
Status and the Cause of the Polish Jews in the Eighteenth
Century"), Warsaw, 1876 [P].
Maciejowski, Zydzi w Polsce, na Rusi i Litwie (" The Jews in
Poland, Russia and Lithuania"), Warsaw, 1878 [P].
Bershadski, Litovskiye yevreyi ("The Jews of Lithuania"), St.
Petersburg, 1883, pp. 46-48 [R].
Akty Vilenskoy kommissiyi (see bibliography to Chapter III),
vol. 29, pp. 463-180 [R].
Hekker, "The Jews in the Polish Cities in the Second Half of
the XVIII. Century," _Yevr. St._, 1913.
Dubnow, "History of the Hasidic Schism," _Voskhod_, 1890-1891.
Fünn, Kiryah Neemanah (history of the Vilna community), Vilna,
1860, pp. 27, 130, 273.
Katz, "History of the Haskalah Movement in Russia," _Ha-Zeman_,
1903, vol. I, pp. 97-102.
Kraushar, Frank i Frankizci (see bibliography to Chapter VI),
vol. I, pp. 139-149 [P].
Paperna, article on Hirshovitz's memorandum, _Voskhod_, Book
VI, 1902.
Kraszewski, Polska w czasie trzech rozbiorów ("Poland during
the Time of the Three Partitions"), vol. II, pp. 318-320;
vol. III, pp. 108, 122 [P].
Gumplowicz, Stanislawa Augusta proekt reformy zydowstwa
("Stanislav Augustus' Project of Jewish Reform"), Cracow,
1875 [P].
Deiches, Sprawa zydowska podezas Sejmu Weilkiego ("The Jewish
Cause at the Time of the Great, or Quadrennial Diet"), 1891.
Luninski, Berek Joselwicz, Warsaw, 1909 [P]. Comp. _Yevr. St._,
1909, vol. II, p. 128 _et seq._
Moscicki, "Polish Jewry under the Sceptre of Catherine II,"
_Kwartalnik pozwiacony badaniu przeszlozci zydow w Polsce_
("Quarterly devoted to the Study of the History of Polish
Jewry"), Warsaw, vol. I, 1912. Pages 61-65 describe the
attitude of the Jews in Vilna and Grodno in the Polish
revolution of 1794 [P].
Skarbek, Dzieje ksiestwa Warszawskiego ("History of the Duchy
of Warsaw"). Three volumes, Posen, 1860 [P].
Golitzin, Istoriya russkavo zakonodatyelstva (see bibliography
to Chapter VII), pp. 1001 _et seq._, containing a list of
the laws passed by the Duchy of Warsaw during 1807-1812 [R].
Vishnitzer, "A Plan of Reforming Jewish Life in the Duchy of
Warsaw and in the Kingdom of Poland," _Perezhytoye_, vol.
I, pp. 166-171, St. Petersburg, 1908 [R].
Hessen, "In an Ephemeral Body Politic," _Yevr. St._, 1910, p. 6
_et seq._
Askenazy, "The Era of the Duchy of Warsaw," _Kwartalnik_, etc.,
1912, vol. I [P].
CHAPTER IX
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE RUSSIAN RÉGIME
(pp. 306-334)
Shugurov, "History of the Jews in Russia," _Russki Arkhiv_,
1894, vol. I, pp. 163-167. The petition of the Moscow
merchants is reprinted, _Voskhod_, 1895, Book I, pp. 31-33
of the second division [R].
Orshanski, Russkoye zakonodatyelstvo (see bibliography to
Chapter VII), pp. 183-184.
Golitzin, Istoriya russkavo zakonodatelstva, p. 136 [R].
Levanda, Sbornik, etc. (see bibliography to Chapter VII), Nos.
30-47, 55.
Bershadski, "The Jewish Statute of 1804" (containing the
official correspondence and plans relating to the Jewish
question during 1797-1801), _Voskhod_, 1895, Books I-IV.
Dyerzhavin, Collected Writings, 1878, vol. VI, pp. 113-114,
124, 715; vol. VII ("Opinion concerning the Jews") [R].
Hessen, Yevreyi v Rossiyi ("The Jews in Russia"), St.
Petersburg, 1906 [R].
CHAPTER X
THE "ENLIGHTENED ABSOLUTISM" OF ALEXANDER I.
(pp. 335-365)
Brafman, Kniga Kahala ("The Book of the Kahal"), vol. II, Nos.
335, 339, 340, 352.
Hessen, Yevreyi v Rossiyi, pp. 77-78, 322.
----, "The Deputies of the Jewish People," _Yevr. St._, 1909,
vol. II, pp. 19-20.
Gordon, "Note on the History of the Settlement of the Jews in
St. Petersburg," _Voskhod_, 1881, Book II, pp. 29, 39-40.
Levanda, Sbornik zakonov, Nos. 59 (the Statute of 1804), 64,
69-70.
"The Report of the Jewish Committee in 1812," _Russki Arkhiv_,
1903, Book II, pp. 253-274.
Orshanski, Russkoye zakonodatelstvo, p. 271 _et seq._
Golitzin, Istoriya russkavo zakonodatelstva, pp. 543 _et seq._,
587, 590, 981, 985 [R].
Ginsburg, Otyechestvennaya Voyna 1812 goda i russkiye yevreyi
("The Patriotic War of 1812 and the Russian Jews,") St.
Petersburg, 1912 [R].
Nikitin, Yevreyi-zemledyeltzy ("The Jewish Agriculturists"),
St. Petersburg, 1887 [R].
Helman, Bet Rabbi (a biography of Shneor Zalman and his
children), Berdychev, 1901, fol. 47.
CHAPTER XI
THE INNER LIFE OF RUSSIAN JEWRY DURING THE PERIOD OF "ENLIGHTENED
ABSOLUTISM"
(pp. 366-389)
Bershadski, "The Jewish Statute of 1804," _Voskhod_, 1895. Book
VI, pp. 46-63.
Hessen, Yevreyi v Rossiyi, pp. 220, 237 [R].
Golitzin, Istoriya, pp. 348-355 [R].
Dubnow, "History of the Hasidic Schism." _Voskhod_, 1890, Books
XI-XII; 1891, Book I.
----, "The Religious Struggle," _Voskhod_, 1893, Book I, pp.
37-49.
----, "The Intervention of the Russian Government in the War
against Hasidism," _Yevr. St._, 1910, Books I-II.
Hessen, Yevreyi v Rossiyi, p. 164 _et seq._ [R].
Fünn, Kiryah Neemanah (history of the Vilna community), Vilna,
1860, p. 134 _et seq._
----, Safah le-Neemanim, Vilna, 1881, §§ 91, 94, 98.
Horodezki, "Levi Itzhok of Berdychev," _Yevr. St._, 1909, vol.
I, p. 205 _et seq._
----, "Nahman of Bratzlav." _Ha-Goren_, IV (1903).
Zederbaum, Keter Kehunnah, Odessa, 1866.
Frenk, Yehude Polin bime Napoleon, Warsaw, 1912.
Calmanson, Essai sur l'état actuel des Juifs, Warsaw, 1796;
comp. _Ha-Meassef_, 1809, pp. 286-291.
Nyevakhovich, Vopl dochery yudyeyskoy ("The Moan of the
Daughter of Judah"), St. Petersburg, 1803. Reprinted in the
collective volume published by the Russian-Jewish weekly
_Budushchnost_, St. Petersburg, 1902 [R]. The same in
Hebrew, under the title _Kol shaw'at bat Yehudah_, Shklov,
1804.
Stanislavski, "Mendel Lewin," _Voskhod_, 1881, Book III.
CHAPTER XII
THE LAST YEARS OF ALEXANDER I.
(pp. 390-413)
Levanda, Sbornik zakonov, _sub anno_ 1815-1825.
Pen, "The Deputation of the Jewish People," _Voskhod_, 1905,
Books 1-3.
Hessen, "The Deputies of the Jewish People," _Yevr. St._, 1909,
vol. II.
Way, Lewis, Mémoires sur l'état des Israélites, dediés et
presentés à leurs Majestés imperiales et royales réunies au
Congres d'Aix-la-Chapelle, Paris, 1819.
Lerner, Yevreyi v Novo-rossiyskom kraye ("The Jews in the
New-Russian Region"), Odessa, 1901 [R].
Golitzin, Istoriya, etc., pp. 608, 686 [R].
Kozmin, "Past and Present of the Siberian Subbotniks
(Sabbatharians)," _Yevr. St._, 1913, Book I, p. 3 _et seq._
Dubnow, "Historical Communications," _Voskhod_, 1901, Book IV,
p. 37.
"A Inquiry into the Jewish Question," published by the
Chancellery of the United Societies of the Nobility, St.
Petersburg, 1910, vol. I, pp. 3, 18 [R].
Pestel, Russkaya Pravda ("Russian Truth"), edited by
Shchogolev, St. Petersburg, 1906, pp. 50-52 [R].
Semyovski, Politicheskiya i obshchestvennyia idyeyi
Dyekabristov ("The Political and Social Ideas of the
Decembrists"), St. Petersburg, 1910, pp. 517-523 [R].
VOLUME II
CHAPTER XIII
THE MILITARY DESPOTISM OF NICHOLAS I.
(pp. 13-45)
_Yevr. St._, 1911, p. 589 (Nicholas' Opinions of the Jews).
----, 1909, p. 236 ff., (an account of Tziprinus, a Russian
official, about the introduction of military service).
Levanda, Sbornik zakonov, Nos. 153, 154, 159, etc. (see Index
s. v. "Recruits").
Volhynian Legends, _Yevr. St._, 1911, p. 389.
Ginzburg and Marek, Yevreyskiya Narodniya Pyesni ("Jewish
Folk-Songs"), St. Petersburg, 1901, p. 42 _et seq._ [R].
Recollections of former Cantonists in _Yevr. St._, 1909, vol.
II, pp. 115 _et seq._; 1911, pp. 249 _et seq._; 1912, pp.
54 _et seq._
Hertzen, Byloye i Dumy ("Recollections and Reflections"),
foreign edition, vol. I, 308 [R].
Korobkov, "Jewish Conscription during the Reign of Nicholas
I.," _Yevr. St._, 1913, Books I-II.
Nikitin, Mnogostradalnyie ("The Martyrs"), St. Petersburg, 1871.
----, Reminiscences, _Yevr. Bibl._, St. Petersburg, 1873.
On the _Beholoh_, see Bogrov, Zapiski Yevreya ("Memoirs of
a Jew"), St. Petersburg, 1874, p. 114 [R]; Smolenskin,
Ha-To'eh, vol. II, p. 169; and Kotik, Meine Zichroines ("My
Reminiscences"), Warsaw, 1913, pp. 99 _et seq._
Levanda, Sbornik zakonov, _sub anno_ 1827-1840.
Spravka po yevreyskomu voprosu ("Inquiry into the Jewish
Question"), Part I, pp. 1-43 (containing archival documents
on the work preliminary to the Statute of 1835).
Hessen, "The Memoranda Submitted by the Kahal of Vilna and L.
Feigin." _Yevr. St._, 1911, 96 _et seq._ and 394 _et seq._
_Yevr. St._, 1909, p. 112, and 1911, pp. 417-418.
CHAPTER XIV
COMPULSORY ENLIGHTENMENT AND INCREASED OPPRESSION
(pp. 46-87)
Dubnow, "Historical Communications," _Voskhod_, 1901, Books 4-5
(dealing with the work of the committee of 1840).
Georgievski, Doklad po voprosu ob obrazovaniyi yevreyev
("Report on the Question of Educating the Jews"), St.
Petersburg, 1886. Not published [R].
Morgulis, Voprosy yevreyskoy zhizni ("Problems of Jewish
Life"), St. Petersburg, 1889, pp. 33 _et seq._ [R].
Mandelstamm, Hazon la-Mo'ed ("A Vision for the Appointed
Time"), Vienna, 1877. Part II [H].
_Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums_, 1842-1848, articles
describing Lilienthal's mission.
Scheinhaus, Ein deutscher Pioneer (on Lilienthal's mission),
Berlin, 1911.
Tzinberg, "Levinsohn and his Time," _Yevr. St._, 1910, pp. 520
_et seq._ Comp. _ibid._, 1912, p. 91.
Levanda, Sbornik zakonov, Nos. 462, 475, 509-510, 575.
Die Juden in Russland, Hamburg, 1844.
Lerner, Yevreyi v Novorossiyi ("The Jews in New Russia"),
Odessa, 1901, pp. 46 _et seq._ [R].
Loewe, Diaries of Sir Moses Montefiore, London, 1890. Hebrew
edition, Warsaw, 1899.
Ginzburg, "A Forerunner of Baron Hirsch" (on Altaras),
_Voskhod_, 1897, Book XI.
Leket Amarim ("Collection of Essays"), edited _Ha-Melitz_, St.
Petersburg, 1889, pp. 81 _et seq._
Nikitin, Yevreyi zemledyeltzy ("Jews as Agriculturists"), St.
Petersburg, 1887, pp. 103 _et seq._ [R].
Spravka k dokladu po yevreyskomu voprosu ("Inquiry in
connection with the Report on the Jewish Question"). Part
V: The Ritual Murder Trials, edited by the United Societies
of the Nobility, St. Petersburg, 1912 [R].
A memorandum on the Velizh case by the Senate. Not published.
Hessen, Velizhskaya Drama ("The Drama of Velizh"), St.
Petersburg, 1905 [R].
Ryvkin, "The Velizh Case as reflected in local legends,"
_Perezhytoye_, vol. III, St. Petersburg, 1911 [R].
Dubnow's articles on Velizh, _Luah Ahiasaf_, 1895-1896; on
Novaya Ushitza, _Perezhytoye_, vol. I (1909); on Mstislavl,
_Voskhod_, 1899, Book 9.
Hessen, "The Mstislavl Disturbances," _Perezhytoye_, vol. II.
An-ski, "Some of the Legends Connected with the Mstislavl
Incident," _ibid._
CHAPTER XV
THE JEWS IN THE KINGDOM OF POLAND
(pp. 88-110)
S. Askenazy, "Concerning Jewish Affairs during the Era of
Congresses," _Kwartalnik_, etc., vol. I, No. 3, Warsaw,
1913.
Vishnitzer, "Reform Projects in the Kingdom of Poland,"
_Perezhytoye_, vol. I, St. Petersburg, 1908.
Friedländer, David, Die Verbesserung der Israeliten im
Königreich Polen, Berlin, 1819.
Inquiry into the Jewish Question, etc. (the utterances of
Zaionchek), vol. I, 43.
The Legal Journal of the Kingdom of Poland (during the years
indicated in the text).
Golitzin, Istoria Russkavo zakonodatyelstva o yevreyakh ("The
History of Russian Legislation relating to Jews,") pp.
1001-1005 [R].
Luninski, Berek Joselowicz, Warsaw, 1909.
"The Ritual Murder Trials during the Year 1816," _Yevr. St._,
1912, pp. 144-163.
Nussbaum, Historya Zydow, V, 390-399 [P].
"From the History of the Rabbinical School in Warsaw,"
_Perezhytoye_, vol. I.
Kandel, "The Committee of Old Testament Believers,"
_Kwartalnik_, 1912, No. 12, pp. 85-103.
Jost, 11. II, 302 (on Chiarini).
Mstislavskaya, "The Jews in the Polish Insurrection of 1831,"
_Yevr. St._, 1910.
Myakotin, "The Tovyanski Movement," _Voskhod_, 1888, Books
11-12.
Die Juden in Russland, Hamburg, 1844, pp. 35, 38-40 (on
conscription in the kingdom of Poland).
CHAPTER XVI
THE INNER LIFE OF RUSSIAN JEWRY DURING THE PERIOD OF MILITARY DESPOTISM
(pp. 111-139)
Gottlober, Autobiography, in the Hebrew periodical _Ha-Boker
Or_, 1880-1881.
Ginzburg, M. A., Abi`ezer (autobiography), Vilna, 1883.
Plungian, Ben Porat (biography of Menashe Ilyer), Vilna, 1858.
Hilman, Beth Rabbi (biography of Shneor Zalman and
descendants), Berdychev, 1901.
Horodezki, Rabbi Nahum mi-Chernobyl u-Banaw ("R. Nahum of
Chernobyl and his Descendants"), Berdychev, 1902.
Sternholz, `Alim li-Tetrufah ("Leaves for Healing," letters of
Rabbi Nahman of Bratzlav), Berdychev, 1896.
Nathansohn, Sefer ha-Zikronot ("Book of Recollections," on I.
B. Levinsohn), Warsaw, 1878.
Wengeroff, P., Memoiren einer Grossmutter, Berlin, 1908.
Horodezki, "The Sadagora Dynasty," _Yevr. St._, 1909, vol. II.
Zederbaum, Keter Kehunnah ("The Crown of Priesthood," on the
Tzaddiks of Poland), Odessa, 1866.
Magid, "M. A. Ginzburg," St. Petersburg, 1897 [H].
Fünn, Safah le-Neemanim ("Speech of the Trustworthy"), pp. 149
_et seq._, Vilna, 1881.
Gordon, "A. B. Lebensohn," _Yevr. Bibl._, vol. VIII, St.
Petersburg, 1880.
CHAPTER XVII
THE LAST YEARS OF NICHOLAS I.
(pp. 140-153)
Levanda, Sbornik zakonov (for the years 1848-1854).
Ginzburg, "A forgotten Era," _Voskhod_, 1896, Book 2.
Ginzburg and Marek, Yevreyskiya Narodnya Pyesni ("Jewish
Folk-Songs"), St. Petersburg, 1901, No. 53 [R].
Osip Rabinovich, "The Penal Recruit" and "The Inherited
Candlestick," collected works, vol. I, St. Petersburg, 1880
[R].
Bogrov, "The Captured Recruit," _Yevr. Bibl._, vol. IV, St.
Petersburg, 1874, pp. 2-7, preface.
Friedberg, "The Captured Recruits," _Sefer ha-Shanah_, edited
by Sokolow, vol. III, Warsaw, 1901.
Spiegel, "From the Diary of a Cantonist," _Yevr. St._, 1911,
pp. 249 _et seq._
Itzkovich, "Reminiscences of a Cantonist," _Yevr. St._, 1912,
pp. 54 _et seq._
Korobkov, "Jewish Conscription during the Reign of Nicholas
I.," _Yevr. St._, 1913.
On the Ritual Murder Trial of Saratov, see "Inquiry into the
Jewish Question, etc." Part V, pp. 208-243 [R].
Trivus, "Ritual Murder Trials before the pre-Reformatory
Courts," _Yevr. St._, 1912, pp. 252-262 _et seq._
CHAPTER XVIII
THE ERA OF REFORMS UNDER ALEXANDER II.
(pp. 154-183)
Levanda, Sbornik zakonov (for the years 1855-1865).
"Inquiry into the Jewish Question," etc. Part I, pp. 55-102,
105, 112; Part III, pp. 10-17, 79-92 (discussion of the
projected legal bills in the Council of State, etc.).
K stoletyu komityeta ministrov ("The Centenary of the
Committee of Ministers"), St. Petersburg, 1902 [R]; the
"resolutions" of Alexander II. are recorded in _Voskhod_,
1903, Book III.
"Some Resolutions of Alexander II. on the Jewish Question in
1861," _Yevr. St._, 1912, p. 472.
Hessen, "An Attempt at Jewish Emancipation in Russia,"
_Perezhytoye_, vol. I, p. 153 ff.
Orshanski, Yevreyi v Rossiyi ("The Jews in Russia"), St.
Petersburg, 1877 [R].
----, Russkoye zakonodatyelstvo o yevreyakh ("The Russian
Legislation relating to Jews"), St. Petersburg, 1877, pp.
214, 309-334 [R].
Georgievski, Doklad po voprosu ob obrazovaniyi yevreyev
("Report on the Question of educating the Jews"), St.
Petersburg, 1886, pp. 92, 134 _et seq._ [R].
Marek, Ocherki po istoriyi prosvyeshchenya v Rossiyi ("Sketches
from the History of Enlightenment among the Jews of
Russia"), Moscow, 1909 [R].
Kandel, "The Petition of 1857," _Kwartalnik_, 1913, 147-159.
Sternberg, Geschichte der Juden in Polen, Leipsic, 1878,
Beilage G, pp. 186-191 (the Jewish agitation of 1859 in
Warsaw, and Lelevel's reply).
_Jutrzenka_ ("The Dawn"), Polish-Jewish weekly in Warsaw, for
the years 1861-1863.
Berg, Zapiski o polskikh zagovorakh i powstaniakh ("Memoirs
concerning Polish Conspiracies and Revolutions"), St.
Petersburg, 1873 [R].
"The Experiences of a Jew during the Polish Insurrection of
1863," _Yevr. St._, 1910, pp. 378-390.
Inquiry into the Jewish Question, Part VII, pp. 63, 70, 89, 95.
Spasovski, Zhizn i politika markiza Vyelepolskavo ("Life and
Policies of Marquis Vyelepolski"), St. Petersburg, 1882 [R].
CHAPTER XIX
THE REACTION UNDER ALEXANDER II.
(pp. 184-205)
Spravka po yevreyskomu voprosu ("Inquiry into the Jewish
Question"), Part VII, pp. 63, 70, 89, 95 [R].
Brafman, Kniga Kahala, 3d edition, St. Petersburg, 1888 [R].
"The Jewish Delegation in the Vilna Commission of 1869," _Yevr.
St._, 1912, pp. 187 _et seq._; comp. _Perezhytoye_, II, pp.
306 _et seq._ and III, pp. 385 _et seq._
"The Enactments against the Jewish Dress in 1871," _Yevr. St._,
1912, pp. 334-338; comp. "The Struggle with the Jewish
Dress," _Perezhytoye_, I, 2d Section, pp. 16-18.
Orshanski, "On the Nature of the Odessa Pogrom," in the
collective volume _Yevreyi v Rossiyi_ ("The Jews in
Russia"), 1877, pp. 156 _et seq._ [R].
Margulis, "The Odessa Riots of 1871," in the collective volume
_Yevreyski Mir_ ("The Jewish World"), St. Petersburg, 1910.
Levanda, Sbornik zakonov, for the years 1865-1873.
For the additional laws for 1874-1880 see _Sobranie zakonov_
("Collection of Laws"), edited by the Government Senate.
Comp. _Systyematicheski ukazatyel literatury o yevreyakh_
("A Systematic Index of the Literature dealing with the
Jews"), St. Petersburg, 1892, pp. 59-60.
"Analysis of the Legislation relating to the Jews during the
past Decade," _Yevr. Bibl._, vol. VII, 1879.
The memorandum of Nyekhludov "On the Emancipation of the Jews"
is found in _Spravka po yevreyskomu voprosu_, Part VII,
pp. 103-122; appeared also as a separate publication, St.
Petersburg, 1907.
On the Municipal Statute of 1870 and on the Conscription
Statute of 1874, see _Spravka_, Part II, pp. 127-138,
142-209.
An account of the Congress of Berlin, based on the French text
of the Proceedings, _Spravka_, Part III, pp. 151-154; see
also _Yevr. Bibl._, vol. VI, 1878, p. 145 _et seq._ [R].
On the Jews in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, see Criticus
(pen-name of S. M. Dubnow) in _Voskhod_, 1891, Book I, pp.
32-38.
The full proceedings of the Kutais case are found in a
supplement to _Yevr. Bibl._, vol. VI, pp. 1-188.
Chwolson, Upotreblayut-li yevreyi khristianskuyu krov? ("Do the
Jews use Christian Blood?"), 2d edition, with a reply to
Kostomarov, St. Petersburg, 1879 [R].
Borissov, "Ippolit Lutostanski," Kiev, 1912 [R].
CHAPTER XX
THE INNER LIFE OF RUSSIAN JEWRY DURING THE REIGN OF ALEXANDER II.
(pp. 206-242)
S. Ginzburg, "A forgotten Era," _Voskhod_, 1896, Books III and
V.
Margulis, article on "N. I. Pirogov," in _Voprosy yevreyskoy
zhizni_ ("Questions of Jewish Life"), St. Petersburg, 1889.
Criticus (pen-name of S. M. Dubnow), "I. S. Aksakov and the
Jews," _Voskhod_, 1887, Book II.
Dostoyevski, Yevreyski vopros ("The Jewish Question"), in his
collected writings, edited by Marx, vol. XI, pp. 85-102;
also in his _Dnyevnik pisatyela_ ("The Diary of an Author,"
autobiographical sketches), during 1873-1877, in various
places [R].
Orshanski, Yevreyi v Rossiyi ("The Jews in Russia").
Margulis, Voprosy yevreyskoy zhizni, pp. 149-195, on the Crown
rabbis and teachers of the sixties.
Tarnopol, Opyt osmotrityelnoy reformy v oblasti iudaizma
("Attempt at Cautious Reforms in the Domain of Judaism"),
Odessa, 1868, [R].
Gumplovich's article is found in _Jutzenka_ ("The Dawn"), 1891,
No. 19 [P].
Leon Rosenthal, Toldot Hebrat Marbe Haskalah be-Israel
("History of the Society for the Diffusion of Enlightenment
among the Jews"), two volumes, St. Petersburg, 1885-1890;
comp. Criticus, _Voskhod_, 1891, Books X-XI.
Levanda, "The Establishment of the First Periodical of Russian
Jewry," _Voskhod_, 1881, Book VI.
The letters of Ossip Rabinovich, published in _Yevr. St._,
1911, p. 71 _et seq._
Dubnow, "The Change of Tendencies in Jewish Journalism," in
"Letters on Ancient and Modern Judaism," St. Petersburg,
1907, pp. 205-226 [R].
Frumkin, "From the History of the Revolutionary Movement among
the Jews during the Seventies," _Yevr. St._, 1911, pp. 221
_et seq._, 513 _et seq._
Tzinberg, "The First Socialistic Periodicals in Hebrew
Literature," _Perezhytoye_, I, pp. 233-263.
Sosis, "Social Currents during the Period of Reforms," _Yevr.
St._, 1914.
Mandelkern, "Micah Joseph Lebensohn," _Ha-Asif_, III, 1886.
Brainin, "Micah Joseph Lebensohn," _Voskhod_, 1902, Book III.
----, "Abraham Mapu," Warsaw, 1900 [H].
Cantor, "Gordon and His 25 years of Activity," _Voskhod_, 1881,
Books XI-XII.
S. D. (=S. Dubnow), "The Jewish Nyekrassov" (on J. L. Gordon),
_Voskhod_, 1884, Book VII.
Iggerot Jelag ("Letters of J. L. Gordon"), two volumes, Warsaw,
1894.
Bienstock, "A Festival in Yiddish Literature" (a biography of
Abramovich), _Voskhod_, 1884, Book XII.
Frischmann, "Mendele Mokher Sforim," in Introduction to the
collected Hebrew works of Abramovich, vol. II, Odessa, 1911.
Brainin, "Perez Smolenskin," Warsaw, 1896 [H].
M. Kahan, Me-'Ereb 'ad `Ereb, vol. I, Vilna, 1904, pp.
186-244. The same volume also contains an analysis of
Lilienblum's work and of the literary currents of the
seventies in general.
Gottlieb, "P. M. Smolenskin" ("Gallery of Jewish Worthies"),
Part II, St. Petersburg, 1899 [R].
Lilienblum, Hattot Ne`urim ("Sins of Youth"), Vienna, 1876;
also in his collected works, Cracow, 1910-1912, vol. II.
Klausner, "Moshe Leib Lilienblum" (a biographical analysis,
prefacing the first volume of Lilienblum's collected works).
Hessen, "O. Rabinivich and I. Orshanski" ("Gallery of Jewish
Worthies"), Part I, St. Petersburg, 1898 [R].
"Ilya Grigorievich Orshanski, an Autobiographical Sketch,"
_Yevr. Bibl._, vol. VI, pp. 1-43, St. Petersburg, 1878.
Yampolski, "Recollections of I. G. Orshanski," _Yevr. St._,
1911, p. 55 _et seq._
Volynski, "The Portrayer of Russian Jewry" (on the stories of
Levanda), _Voskhod_, 1888.
"From the Correspondence of L. O. Levanda," _Yevr. Bibl._,
vols. IX-X, St. Petersburg, 1901-1903, containing also some
letters from Bogrov; Comp. _Yevr. St._, 1913, pp. 279-281.
Wengeroff, Memoiren einer Grossmutter, vol. II, Berlin, 1910,
containing valuable material for the understanding of the
transition period of the fifties and sixties.