THE LAST YEARS OF NICHOLAS I.
1. THE "ASSORTMENT" OF THE JEWS
The beginning of the "Second Emancipation" of 1848 in Western Europe
synchronized with the last phase of the era of oppression in Russia.
That phase, representing the concluding seven years of pre-reformatory
Russia, was a dark patch in the life of the country at large, doubly
dark in the life of the Jews. The power of absolutism, banished by the
March revolution from the European West, asserted itself with
intensified fury in the land of the North, which had about that time
earned the unenviable reputation of the "gendarme of Europe." Thrown
back on its last stronghold, absolutism concentrated its energy upon the
suppression of all kinds of revolutionary movements. In default of such
a movement in Russia itself, this energy broke through the frontier line
and found an outlet in the punitive expedition sent to support the
Austrians in the pacification of mutinous Hungary. The triumphant
passwords of political freedom which were given out on the other side of
the Western frontier only intensified the reactionary rage on this side.
Since it was impossible to punish action--for under the vigilant eye of
the terrible "Third Section" [1] revolutionary endeavors were a matter
of impossibility--word and thought were subject to punishment.
Censorship ran riot in the subdued literature of Russia, tearing out by
the roots anything that did not fit into the mould of the bureaucratic
way of thinking. The quiet precincts of the Russian _intelligenzia_,
who, in the retirement of their homes, ventured to dream of a better
political and social order, were invaded by political detectives who
snatched thence numerous victims for the scaffold, the galleys, and
conscription. Such were the contrivances employed during the last years
of pre-reformatory Russia to hold together the old order of things in
the land of officialdom and serfdom, in that Russia which the poet
Khomyakov, though patriot and Slavophile, branded thus:
[Footnote 1: Compare above, p. 21, n. 1.]
Blackened in court with falsehood's blackness,
And stained by the yoke of slavery,
Full of godless flattery, of vicious lying,
And ev'ry possible knavery.
But the full weight of "the yoke of slavery" and "falsehood's
blackness," by which pre-reformatory Russia was marked, fell upon the
shoulders of the most hapless section of Russian subjects, the Jews. The
tragic gloom of the end of Nicholas' reign finds its only parallel in
Jewish annals in the beginning of the same reign. The would-be "reforms"
proposed in the interval, in the beginning of the forties, did not
deceive the popular instinct. The Jews of the Pale saw not only the hand
which was holding forth the charter of enlightenment but also the other
hand which hid a stone in the form of new cruel restrictions. Soon the
Government threw off the mask of enlightenment, and set out to realize
its reserve program, that of "correcting" the Jews by police methods.
It will be remembered that the principal item in this program was "the
assortment of the Jews," i.e., the segregation from among them of all
persons without a certain status as to property or without definite
occupations, for the purpose of proceeding against them as criminal
members of society. As far back as 1846 the Government forewarned the
Jews of the imminent "bloody operation over a whole class," against
which Governor-General Vorontzov had vainly protested. [1] All Jews were
ordered to register at the earliest possible moment among the guilds and
estates assigned to them, "with the understanding that in case this
measure should fail, the Government would of itself carry out the
assortment," to wit: "it will set apart the Jews who are not engaged in
productive labor, and will subject them, as burdensome to society, to
various restrictions." The threat fell flat, for it was rather too much
to expect that fully a half of the Jewish population, doomed by civil
disabilities and general economic conditions to a life of want and
distress, could obtain at a stroke the necessary "property status" or
"definite occupations."
[Footnote 1: See above, p. 64 et seq.]
Accordingly, on November 23, 1851, the Tzar gave his sanction to the
"Temporary Rules Concerning the Assortment of the Jews." All Jews were
divided into five categories: merchants, agriculturists, artisans,
settled burghers, and unsettled burghers. The first three categories
were to be made up of those who were enrolled among the corresponding
guilds and estates. "Settled burghers" were to be those engaged in
"burgher trade" [1] with business licenses, also the clergy and the
learned class. The remaining huge mass of the proletariat was placed in
the category of "unsettled burghers," who were liable to increased
military conscription and to harsher legal restrictions as compared with
the first four tolerated classes of Jews. This hapless proletariat,
either out of work or only occasionally at work, was to bear a double
measure of oppression and persecution, and was to be branded as despised
pariahs.
[Footnote 1: i.e., petty trade, as distinguished from the more
comprehensive business carried on by the merchants who were enrolled in
the mercantile guilds.]
By April 1, 1852, the Jews belonging to the four tolerated categories
were required to produce their certificates of enrolment before the
local authorities. Those who had failed to do so were to be entered in
the fifth category, the criminal class of "unsettled burghers." Within
the brief space allotted to them the Jews found themselves unable to
obtain the necessary documents, and, thanks to the representations of
the governors-general of the Western governments, the term was extended
till the autumn of 1852, but even then the "assortment" had not yet been
accomplished. The Government was fully prepared to launch a series of
Draconian laws against the "parasites," including police inspection and
compulsory labor. But while engaged in these charitable projects, the
law-givers were taken aback by the Crimean War, which, with its
disastrous consequences for Russia, diverted their attention from their
war against the Jews. Yet for a successive number of years the law
concerning the "assortment," or _razryaden_, as it was popularly styled
by the Jews, hung like the sword of Damocles over the heads of hundreds
of thousands of Jews, and the anxiety of the suffering masses was poured
out in sad popular ditties:
_Ach, a tzore, a gzeire mit die razryaden!_ [1]
[Footnote 1: "Alas! What misfortune and persecution there is in the
assortment!"]
2. COMPULSORY ASSIMILATION
As for the measures of compulsory assimilation long ago foreshadowed by
the Government, such as the substitution of the Russian or German style
of dress for the traditional Jewish attire, the long coats of the men,
they were without any effect on Jewish life, and merely resulted in
confusion and consternation. A curt imperial ukase issued on May 1,
1850, prohibited "all over (the Empire) the use of a distinct Jewish
form of dress, beginning with January 1, 1851," though the
governors-general were given the right of permitting aged Jews to wear
out their old garments on the payment of a definite tax. The prohibition
extended to the earlocks, or _peies_, of the men.
A year later, in April, 1851, the Government made a further step in
advance and proceeded to deal with the female attire. "His Imperial
Majesty was graciously pleased to command that Jewish women be forbidden
to shave their heads upon entering into marriage." [1] In October, 1852,
this ukase was supplemented by the regulation that a married Jewess
guilty of shaving her head was liable to a fine of five rubles ($2.50),
and the rabbi abetting the crime was to be prosecuted. Since neither the
Jews nor the Jewesses were willing to submit to imperial orders, the
former from habit, the latter from religious scruples, the provincial
authorities entered upon a regular warfare against these "rebels." Both
the governors-general and the governors subordinate to them displayed
extraordinary enthusiasm in this direction. The officials tracked
with utmost zeal not only the women culprits but also their accomplices
the rabbis who attended the wedding ceremony, even including the barbers
who were called in to shave the heads of the Jewish ladies. Jewish women
were examined at the police stations to find out whether they still wore
their own hair beneath their kerchiefs or wigs. Frequently the struggle
manifested itself in tragic-comic and even repulsive forms. In some
places the police adopted the practice of cutting the _peies_ or
shortening the long coats of the Jews by force.
[Footnote 1: In accordance with orthodox Jewish practice, married women
are not allowed to expose their own hair. Apart from the wearing of a
wig, or _Sheitel_, it was also customary for women to cut or shave their
hair before their wedding and cover their heads with a kerchief.]
The opposition to the authorities was particularly vigorous in the
Kingdom of Poland where the rank and file of Hasidim were ready to
suffer martyrdom for any Jewish custom, however obsolete. The fight was
drawn out for a long time and even reached into the following reign, but
the victory remained with the obstreperous masses. Though at a later
period, as the result of general cultural tendencies, the traditional
Jewish costume made way in certain sections of Jewry for the European
form of dress, it was not in obedience to police measures, but in spite
of them. Compulsory assimilation was as little successful now as had
been compulsory isolation in the Middle Ages. The medieval rulers had
imposed upon the Jews a distinct form of garment and a "yellow badge" to
keep them apart from the Christians. Nicholas I. employed forcible means
to make the Jews by their style of dress appear similar to the
Christians. The violence resorted to in both cases, though different in
form, sprang from the same motive.
3. NEW CONSCRIPTION HORRORS
There was yet one domain in which the squeezing and pressing power of
Tzardom could fully employ its destructive energy. We refer to military
conscription. This genuine creation of the imperial brain became more
and more intolerable, serving in Jewish life as a penal and correctional
agency, with its "capture" of old and young, its inquisitorial régime of
cantonists, its deportation for a quarter of a century and longer into
far-off regions. Even the Russian peasants were stricken with terror at
the thought of Nicholas' conscription, which in the reminiscences of the
portrayers of that period is pictured as life-long deportation, and they
frequently shirked military duty by fleeing from the land-owners and
hiding themselves in the woods. How much more terrible must then
conscription have been for the Jew, whose family was robbed both of a
young father and a tender son. No means was left unused to evade this
atrocious obligation. The reports of the governors refer to the
"immeasurable difficulties in carrying out the conscription among the
Jews."
Apart from innumerable cases of self-mutilation--to quote the words
of one of these reports written in 1850--the disappearance, without
exception, of all able-bodied Jews has become so general that in
some communities, outside of those unfit for military service
because of age or physical defects, not a single person can be found
during conscription who might be drafted into the army. Some flee
abroad, whilst others hide in adjacent governments.
Those in hiding were hunted down like wild beasts. Their life, as a
contemporary witness testifies, was worse than that of galley slaves,
for the slightest indiscretion brought ruin upon them. Many resorted to
self-mutilation to render themselves unfit for military service. They
chopped off their fingers or toes, damaged their eyesight, and
perpetrated every possible form of maiming to evade a military service
which was in effect penal servitude. "The most tender-hearted mother,"
to quote a contemporary, "would place the finger of her beloved son
under the kitchen knife of a home-bred quack surgeon."
This evasion resulted in immense shortages which pressed heavily upon
the Jewish communities, since the latter were held collectively
responsible for supplying the full quota of recruits. The reports about
the unsatisfactory conscription results among the Jews filled the
Government in St. Petersburg with rage. The persistent reluctance of
human beings to be parted almost for life from those near and dear to
them, or to see their little ones carried off to an early grave or to
the baptismal font, was regarded as a manifestation of criminal
self-will. Accordingly, the former measures of "cutting short" and
"curbing" this self-will were improved upon by new ones. In December,
1850, the Tzar gave orders that for every missing Jewish recruit in a
given community three men of the minimum age of twenty from the same
community and one more recruit for every two thousand rubles ($1000) of
tax arrears should be impressed into service. A year later the following
atrocious measures were issued for the purpose "of cutting short the
concealment of Jews from military service": the fugitives were to be
captured, flogged, and drafted into the army over and above the required
quota of recruits. The communities in which they were hidden were to be
fined. The relatives of a recruit who failed to present himself in
proper time were to be taken in his stead, even if these relatives
happened to be heads of families. The official representatives of the
communities were equally liable to being sent into the army if found
convicted of any inaccuracy in carrying out the conscription.
A reign of terror followed in the Jewish communities upon the
promulgation of these laws. The Kahal elders--it will be remembered that
they continued to exist after the abrogation of the Kahals, acting as
the fiscal agents of the Government [1]--now faced a terrible
alternative: to become, in the words of a contemporary, "either
murderers of martyrs," i.e., either to capture and send into the army
any youth or boy, without discrimination, or themselves to don the gray
uniform and be impressed into military services as "penal" recruits. In
consequence, a fiendish hunt after human beings was set afoot in the
Pale of Settlement. Adults were seized and, regardless of their being
the only mainstay of their families, were taken captive, and children of
eight were captured and presented to the recruiting authorities as being
of the obligatory age of twelve. But despite all this hunting, many
communities were not able to furnish their quota of soldiers, and the
number of "penal" recruits from among the Kahal elders was very
considerable.
[Footnote 1: See above, p. 60.]
Weeping and moaning resounded in the neighborhood of the recruiting
stations in the Jewish towns where parents and relatives took leave from
their dear ones who were doomed to a perpetual barrack life. And yet the
fury of the Government was not satisfied. In 1853 new "temporary rules"
were issued, "by way of experiment," whereby not only communities but
also individuals among Jews were granted the right of offering as their
substitutes any fellow-Jew from another city than his own who was caught
without a passport. Any Jew who happened to absent himself from his
place of residence without a passport could be seized and drafted into
service as a substitute for a regular recruit due from the family of the
captor. The "captive," regardless of age, was made a soldier, and the
captor was given a receipt for one recruit.
A new ferocious hunt began. The official "captors" employed by the
Kahals were no longer the only ones to prowl after living prey. The
chase was now taken up by every private individual who wished to find a
substitute for a member of his family, or who simply wanted to turn a
penny by selling his recruiting receipt. Hordes of Jewish bandits sprang
up who infested the roads and the inns, and by trickery or force made
the travellers part with their passports and then dragged them to the
recruiting stations as "captives" to be sent into the army. Never before
had the Jewish masses, yielding to pressure from above, sunk to such
depths of degradation. The Jew became a beast of prey to his fellow-Jew.
Jews were afraid of budging an inch from their native cities. Every
passer-by was suspected of being a captor or a bandit. The recruiting
inquisition of Nicholas inflicted upon the Jews the utmost limit of
martyrdom. It set Jew against Jew, called forth "a war of all against
all," threw the tortured and the torturers into one heap, and sullied
the Jewish soul.
All this took place while the Crimean War was going on. The Russian
army, on the altar of which so many human sacrifices had been offered in
the course of thirty years, marched to save "the honor of Russia," in
truth, to save the old régime. Squadron upon squadron issued from the
inner recesses of Russia, and marched towards the battlefields of the
South, marched to the slaughter, into the mouths of the cannons of the
English and French, who knew how to conquer without penal conscriptions
and without inflicting tortures upon tender-aged cantonists. The
"gendarme of Europe," who, armed to his teeth, had contemptuously
threatened to "finish the enemy with his soldier caps," could not hold
out against the army of the "rotten West." Hundreds of thousands of
Russian soldiers fell beneath the walls of Sevastopol, upon the heights
of Inkerman. Thousands of Jewish soldiers were laid among them in
"brotherly graves." The Jews, enslaved by pre-reformatory Russia, died
for a fatherland which treated them as pariahs, which had bestowed upon
them a monstrous conscription, the unexampled institutions of
cantonists, penal recruits, and "captives." However, it soon became
clear that those who had fallen under the walls of Sevastopol had sealed
by their death not the honor but the dishonor of the old régime of blood
and iron. Beneath the rotting corpse of an obsolete statecraft, built
upon serfdom and maintained by soldiery and police, the germ of a new
and better Russia began to stir.
4. THE RITUAL MURDER TRIAL OF SARATOV
One more detail was lacking to complete the dismal picture and to bring
out the full symmetry between the end of Nicholas' reign and its ominous
beginning: a medieval ritual murder trial after the pattern of the
Velizh case. And a trial of this nature did not fail to come. In
December, 1852, and in January, 1853, two Russian boys from among the
lower classes disappeared in the city of Saratov, in central Russia.
Their bodies were found two or three months later in the Volga, covered
with wounds and bearing the traces of circumcision. The latter
circumstance led the coroners to believe that the crime had been
perpetrated by Jews. Saratov, a city situated outside the Pale of
Settlement, harbored at that time a small Jewish settlement consisting
of some forty soldiers of the local garrison and several civilian Jewish
tradesmen and artisans who lived in the prohibited Volga town by the
grace of the police. There were also a few converts.
The vigilant eyes of the coroners were riveted on this settlement. An
official by the name of Durnovo, who had been dispatched from St.
Petersburg to take charge of the case, began at once to direct the
inquiry into the channel of a ritual murder case. Needless to say there
were soon found material witnesses from among the ignorant or criminal
class who were under the hypnotic influence of the ritual murder myth. A
private, called Bogdanov, who had been convicted of vagrancy, and an
intoxicated gubernatorial official by the name of Krueger testified that
they were present at the time when the Jews squeezed out the blood from
the bodies of the murdered boys. They also mentioned by name the
principal perpetrators of the murder, the "circumcision expert" in the
local Jewish settlement, a soldier called Shlieferman, and a furrier
named Yankel Yushkevicher, a devout Jew. The incriminated Jews were
thrown into prison, but, despite excruciating cross-examinations, they
and the other defendants indignantly denied not only their complicity in
the murder but also the ritual murder accusation as a whole.
The investigation became more and more involved, drawing into its net a
constantly growing number of persons, until in July, 1854, a special
"Judicial Commission" was appointed by order of Nicholas I. for the
purpose of disclosing not only the particular crime committed at Saratov
but also "of investigating the dogmas of the religious fanaticism of the
Jews." The latter task, being of a theoretic nature, was entrusted, in
1855, to a special commission under the auspices of the Ministry of the
Interior. Among the theologians and Hebraists who were members of that
Commission was also the baptized professor Daniel Chwolson who had
scientifically disproved the ritual legend. In 1856, after a protracted
inquiry of two years, the judicial commission, having failed to discover
evidence against the accused, decided to set them at liberty, but "to
leave them under strong suspicion."
In the meantime, Alexander II. had ascended the throne of the Tzars, and
the dawn of Russian renascence began to disperse the nightmares of the
past era. Yet so deeply ingrained were the old prejudices in many
bureaucratic minds that when the conclusion reached by the judicial
commission was submitted to the Senate the votes were divided. The case
was transferred to the Council of State, and there the high dignitaries
managed to effect a compromise between their medieval prejudices and
their involuntary concessions to the spirit of the age. They refused to
enter into a discussion of "the still unsolved question as to the use of
Christian blood by the Jews," but they "unhesitatingly recognized the
existence of the crime itself," which had been perpetrated at
Saratov--this in spite of the fact that the only ground on which the
crime was ascribed to alleged fanatical practices and laid at the door
of the Jews were the traces of circumcision on the dead bodies. Ignoring
this inner contradiction and setting aside the weighty objections of the
liberal Minister of Justice Zamyatin, the Council of State brought in a
verdict of guilty against the impeached Jews, the soldier Shlieferman
and the two Yushkevichers, senior and junior, sentencing them to penal
servitude.
The sentence was confirmed by Alexander II. in May, 1860. The
representatives of the St. Petersburg community, Baron Joseph Günzburg
and others, petitioned the Tzar to postpone the verdict until the
scholarly commission of experts should have rendered its decision with
regard to the compatibility of ritual murder with the teachings of
Judaism. But the president of the Council of State, Count Orlov,
presented the matter to the Tzar in a different light, asserting that
all that the Jews intended by their petition was "to keep off for an
indefinite period the decision on a case in which their coreligionists
are involved." He, therefore, insisted on the immediate execution of the
sentence, and the Tzar yielded.
After eight long years of incarceration, in the course of which two of
the impeached Jews committed suicide, the principal "perpetrators" were
found to be physical wrecks and no longer able to discharge their penal
servitude. The innocent sufferer, old Yushkevicher, languished in prison
for seven more years, and was finally liberated in 1867 by order of
Alexander II., who had been petitioned by Adolph Crémieux, the president
of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, to pardon the unhappy man. In
this way the heritage of the dark past protruded into the increasing
brightness of the new Russia, which in the beginning of the sixties was
passing through the era of "Great Reforms."