INCREASED JEWISH DISABILITIES
1. THE PAHLEN COMMISSION AND NEW SCHEMES OF OPPRESSION
The "Temporary Rules" of May 3, 1882, had been passed, so to speak, as
an extraordinary "war measure," outside the usual channel of legislative
action. Yet the Russian Government could not but realize that sooner or
later it would be bound to adopt the customary legal procedure and place
the Jewish question before the highest court of the land, the Council of
State. To meet this eventuality, it was necessary to prepare materials
of a somewhat better quality than had been manufactured by the
"gubernatorial commissions" and the "Central Jewish Committee" which
owed their existence to Ignatyev, forming part and parcel of the general
anti-Jewish policy of the discharged Minister. Even prior to the
promulgation of the "Temporary Rules," the Council of Ministers had
called the Tzar's attention to the necessity of appointing a special
"High Commission" to deal with the Jewish question and to draft legal
measures for submission to the Council of State.
This suggestion was carried out on February 4, 1883, on which day an
imperial ukase was issued calling for the formation of a "High
Commission for the Revision of the Current Laws concerning the Jews."
The chairmanship of the Commission was first entrusted to Makov, a
former Minister of the Interior, and after his untimely death, to Count
Pahlen, a former Minister of Justice, who guided the work of the
Commission during the five years of its existence--hence its popular
designation as the "Pahlen Commission," The membership of the Commission
was made up of six officials representing the various departments of the
Ministry of the Interior, and of one official for each of the Ministries
of Finance, Justice, Public Instruction, Crown Domains, and Foreign
Affairs, and, lastly, of a few experts who were consulted casually.
The new bureaucratic body received no definite instructions as to the
period of time within which it was expected to complete its labors. It
was evidently given to understand that the work entrusted to it could
well afford to wait. The first session of the High Commission was held
fully ten months after its official appointment by the Tzar, and its
business proceeded at a snail's pace, surrounded by the mysterious air
characteristic of Russian officialdom. For several years the High
Commission had to work its way through the sad inheritance of the
defunct "gubernatorial commissions," represented by mounds of paper with
the most fantastic projects of solving the Jewish question, endeavoring
to bring these materials into some kind of system. It also received a
number of memoranda on the Jewish question from outsiders, among them
from public-minded Jews, who in most cases used Baron Horace Günzburg as
their go-between--memoranda which sought to put the various aspects of
the question in their right perspective. After four years spent on the
examination of the material, the Commission undertook to formulate its
own conclusions, but, for reasons which will become patent later on,
these conclusions were never crystallized in the form of legal
provisions.
While the High Commission was assiduously engaged in the "revision of
the current laws concerning the Jews," in other words, was repeating the
Sisyphus task abandoned by scores of similar bureaucratic creations in
the past, the Government pursued with unabated vigor its old-time policy
of making the life of the Jews unbearable by turning out endless
varieties of new legal restrictions. These restrictions were generally
passed "outside the law," i.e., without their being previously submitted
to the Council of State; they were simply brought up as suggestions
before the Council of Ministers, and, after adoption by the latter,
received legal sanction through ratification by the Tzar. Without
awaiting the results of the revision of Jewish legislation which it had
itself undertaken, the Russian Government embarked enthusiastically upon
the task of forging new chains for the hapless Jewish race. For a number
of years the High Commission was nothing more than a cover to screen
these cruel experiments of the powers at the helm of the state. At the
very time in which the ministerial officials serving on the High
Commission indulged in abstract speculations about the Jewish question
and invented various methods for its solution, the Council of Ministers
anticipated this solution in the spirit of rabid anti-Semitism, and was
quick to give it effect in concrete life.
The wind which was blowing from the heights of Russian bureaucracy was
decidedly unfavorable to the Jews. The belated coronation of Alexander
III., which took place in May, 1883, and, in accordance with Russian
tradition, brought, in the form of an imperial manifesto, [1] various
privileges and alleviations for different sections of the Russian
population, left the Jews severely alone. The Tzar lent an attentive ear
to those zealous governors and governors-general, who in their "most
humble reports" propounded the new-fangled theory of the "injuriousness"
of the Jews; the marginal remarks frequently attached by him to these
reports assumed the force of binding resolutions. [2] In the beginning
of 1883, the governor-general of Odessa, Gurko, took occasion in his
report to the Tzar to comment on the excessive growth of the number of
Jewish pupils in the _gymnazia_ [3] and on their "injurious effect" upon
their Christian fellow-pupils. Gurko proposed to fix a limited
percentage for the admission of Jews to these schools, and the Tzar made
the annotation: "I share this conviction; the matter ought to receive
attention."
[Footnote 1: See above, p. 246, n. 1]
[Footnote 2: See on the term "Resolution," Vol. I, p. 253, n. 1.]
[Footnote 3: See above, p. 161, n. 1.]
The matter did of course "receive attention." It was brought up before
the Committee of Ministers. But the latter was reluctant to pass upon it
at once, and thought it wiser to have it prepared and duly submitted for
legislative action at some future time. However, when the
governor-general of Odessa and the governor of Kharkov, in their reports
for the following year, expatiated again on the necessity of fixing a
school norm for the Jews, the Tzar made another annotation, in a more
emphatic tone: "It is desirable to decide this question finally." This
sufficed to impress the Committee of Ministers with the conviction "that
the growing influx of the non-Christian element into the educational
establishments exerts, from a moral and religious point of view, a most
injurious influence upon the Christian children." The question was
submitted for consideration to the High Commission under the
chairmanship of Count Pahlen. The Minister of Public Instruction was
ordered to frame post-haste an enactment embodying the spirit of the
imperial resolution. Soon the new fruit of the Russian bureaucratic
genius was ready to be plucked--"the school norm," which was destined to
occupy a prominent place in the fabric of Russian-Jewish disabilities.
The center of gravity of the system of oppression lay, as it always did,
in the restrictions attaching to the right of domicile and free
movement--restrictions which frequently made life for the Jews
physically impossible by cutting off their access to the sources of a
livelihood. The "Temporary Rules" of the third of May displayed in this
domain a dazzling variety of legal tortures such as might have excited
the envy of medieval inquisitors. The "May laws" of 1882 barred the Jews
from settling outside the cities "anew," i.e. in the future, exempting
those who had settled in the rural districts prior to 1882. These
old-time Jewish rustics were a thorn in the flesh of the Russian
anti-Semites, who hoped for a sudden disappearance of the Jewish
population from the Russian country-side. Accordingly, a whole set of
administrative measures was put in motion, with a view to making the
life of the village Jews unbearable. In another connection [1] we had
occasion to point out that the Russian authorities as well as the
Christian competitors of the Jews made it their business to expel the
latter from the rural localities as "vicious members," by having the
peasant assemblies render special "verdicts" against them. This method
was now supplemented by new contrivances to dislodge the Jews. A village
Jew who happened to absent himself for a few days or weeks to go to town
was frequently barred by the police from returning to his home, on the
ground that he was "a new settler." There are cases of Jewish families
on record which, according to custom, had left the village for the High
Holidays to attend services in an adjacent town or townlet, and which,
on their return home, met with considerable difficulties; because their
return was interpreted by the police as a "new settlement." In the
dominions of the anti-Jewish satrap Drenteln the administration
construed the "Temporary Rules" to mean that Jews were not allowed to
move from one village to another, or even from, one house to another
within the precincts of their native village. [2]
[Footnote 1: See p. 318 et seq.]
[Footnote 2: Evidence of this is found in the circular of the governor
of Chernigov, issued In 1883.]
Moreover, the police was authorized to expel from the villages all those
Jews who did not possess their own houses upon their own land, on the
ground that these Jews, in renting new quarters, would have to make a
new lease with their owners, and such a lease was forbidden by the May
laws. [1] These malicious misinterpretations of the law affected some ten
thousand Jews in the villages of Chernigov and Poltava. These Jews lived
habitually in rented houses or in houses which were their property but
were built upon ground belonging to peasants, and they were consequently
liable to expulsion. The cry of these unfortunates, who were threatened
with eviction in the dead of the winter, was heard not in near-by Kiev
but in far-off St. Petersburg. By a senatorial ukase, published in
January, 1884, a check was put on these administrative highway methods.
The expulsion was stopped, though a considerable number of Jewish
families had in the meantime been evicted and ruined.
[Footnote 1: See p. 312.]
At the same time other restrictions which were in like manner deduced
from the "Temporary Rules" were allowed to remain in full force. One of
these was the prohibition of removing from one village to another, even
though they were contiguous, so that the rural Jews were practically
placed in the position of serfs, being affixed to their places of
residence. This cruel practice was sanctioned by the law of December 29,
1887. As a contemporary writer puts it, the law implied that when a
village in which a Jew lived was burned down, or when a factory in which
he worked was closed, he was compelled to remove into one of the towns
or townlets, since he was not allowed to search for a shelter and a
livelihood in any other rural locality. In accordance with the same law,
a Jew had no right to offer shelter to his widowed mother or to his
infirm parents who lived in another village. Furthermore, a Jew was
barred from taking over a commercial or industrial establishment
bequeathed to him by his father, if the latter had lived in another
village. He was not even allowed to take charge of a house bequeathed to
him by his parents, if they had resided in another village, though
situated within the confines of the Pale.
While this network of disabilities was ruining the Jews, it yielded a
plentiful harvest for the police, from the highest to the lowest
officials. "Graft," the Russian _habeas Corpus_ Act, shielded the
persecuted Jew against the caprice and Violence of the authorities in
the application of the restrictive laws, and Russian officialdom held on
tightly to Jewish rightlessness as their own special benefice. Hatred of
the Jews has at all times gone hand in hand with love of Jewish money.
2. JEWISH DISABILITIES OUTSIDE THE PALE
Outside the Pale of Settlement the net of disabilities was stretched out
even more widely and was sure to catch the Jew in its meshes. Throughout
the length and breadth of the Russian Empire, outside of the fifteen
governments of Western Russia and the ten governments of the Kingdom of
Poland, there was scattered a handful of "privileged" Jews who were
permitted to reside beyond the Pale: men with an academic education,
first guild merchants who had for a number of years paid their guild
dues within the Pale, and handicraftsmen, so long as they confined
themselves to the pursuit of their craft. The influx of "illegal" Jews
into this tabooed region was checked by measures of extraordinary
severity. The example was set by the Russian capital, "the window
towards Europe," which had been broken through by Peter the Great. The
city of St. Petersburg, harboring some 20,000 privileged Jews who lived
there legally, became the center of attraction for a large number of
"illegal" Jews who flocked to the capital with the intention, deemed a
criminal offence by the Government, of engaging in some modest business
pursuit, without paying the high guild dues, or of devoting themselves
to science or literature, without the diploma from a higher educational
institution in their pockets. The number of these Jews who obtained
their right of residence through a legal fiction, by enrolling
themselves as artisans or as employees of the "privileged" Jews, was
very considerable, and the police expended a vast amount of energy in
waging a fierce struggle against them. The city-governor of St.
Petersburg, Gresser, who was notorious for the cruelty of his police
régime, made it his specialty to hunt down the Jews. A contemporary
writer, in reviewing the events of the year 1883, gives the following
description of the exploits of the metropolitan police:
The campaign was started at the very beginning of the year and
continued uninterruptedly until the end of it. Early in March the
metropolitan police received orders to search most rigorously the
Jewish residences and examine the passports. In the police stations
special records were instituted for the Jews. St. Petersburg was to
be purged of the odious Hebrew tribe. The contrivances employed were
no longer novel, and were the same which had been successfully tried
in other cities. The Jews were raided in regular fashion. Those that
were found with doubtful claims to residence in the capital were,
frequently accompanied by their families, immediately dispatched to
the proper railroad stations, escorted by policemen.... The time for
departure was measured by hours. The term of expulsion was generally
limited to twenty-four hours, or forty-eight hours, as if it
involved the execution of a court-martial sentence. And yet, the
majority of the victims of expulsion were people who had lived in
St. Petersburg for many years, and had succeeded in establishing
homes and business places, which could not be liquidated within
twenty-four hours or thereabout.... The hurried expulsions from the
capital resulted in numerous conversions to Christianity.... Amusing
stories circulated all over town concerning Jews who had decided to
join the Christian Church, and had applied for permission to remain
in the capital for one or two weeks--the time required by law for a
preliminary training in the truths of the new faith--but whose
petition was flatly refused because the police believed that a
similar training might also be received within the boundaries of the
Pale of Settlement.
As a matter of fact, fictitious conversions of this kind were but seldom
resorted to in the fight against governmental violence. As a rule, the
evasion of the "law" was effected by less harmful, perhaps, but no less
humiliating and even tragic fictions. Many a Jewish newcomer would bring
with him on his arrival in St. Petersburg an artisan's certificate and
enrol himself as an apprentice of some "full-fledged" Jewish artisan.
But woe betide if the police happened to visit the workshop and fail to
find the fictitious apprentice at work. He was liable to immediate
expulsion, and the owner of the shop was no less exposed to grave risks.
Some Jews, in their eagerness to obtain the right of residence,
registered as man-servants in the employ of Jewish physicians or
lawyers. [1] These would-be servants were frequently summoned to the
police stations and cross-examined as to the character of their
"service." The answers expected from them were something like: "I clean
my master's boots, carry behind him his portfolio to court," etc.
Several prominent Jewish writers lived for many years in St. Petersburg
on this "flunkeyish" basis--among them the talented young poet Simon
Frug, [2] the singer of Jewish sorrow who was fast establishing for
himself a reputation both in Jewish and in Russian literature.
[Footnote 1: Under the Russian law [see p. 166] Jews possessing a
university diploma of the first degree were entitled to employ two
"domestic servants" from among their coreligionists.]
[Footnote 2: See p. 330.]
It can easily be realized how precarious was the position of these men.
Any day their passports might be found ornamented by a red police
notation ordering their expulsion from the capital within twenty-four
hours. All Russia was stirred at that time by the sensational story of a
young Jewess, who had come to St. Petersburg or Moscow to enter the
college courses for women, and in order to obtain the right of residence
found herself compelled to register fictitiously as a prostitute and
take out "a yellow ticket." When the police discovered that the young
woman was engaged in studying, instead of plying her official "trade,"
she was banished from the capital. In 1886, England was shocked by the
expulsion from Moscow of the well-known English Member of Parliament,
the banker Sir Samuel Montagu (later Lord Swaythling). Despite his
influential position, Montagu was ordered out of the Russian capital
"within twenty-four hours," like an itinerant vagrant.
None of these tragedies, however, was able to produce any effect upon
the ringleaders and henchmen of the Russian inquisition. The energy of
the authorities spent itself primarily in the fight against the natural,
yet, according to the Russian code, "illegal" struggle of the Jews for
their existence and against the sacred right of man to move about
freely. The merciless Russian law, trampling upon this inviolable right,
drove human beings from village to town and from one town to another. In
the hotbed of militant Judaeophobia, in Kiev, raids upon "illegal"
Jewish residents were the order of the day. During the year 1886 alone
more than two thousand Jewish families were evicted from the town. [1]
Not satisfied with the expulsion of the Jews from the towns prohibited
to them by law, the authorities contrived to swell the number of these
towns by adding new localities which were part of the Pale and as such
open to the Jews. In 1887, the large South-Russian cities Rostov-on-the
Don and Taganrog were transferred from the Pale of Settlement [2] to the
tabooed territory of the Don Army. Those Jews who had lived in these
cities before the promulgation of the law were allowed to remain, but
the new settling of Jews was strictly forbidden.
[Footnote 1: These intensified persecutions were popularly explained as
an act of revenge on the part of the highest administration of the
region, owing to a quarrel which had taken place between a rich Kiev Jew
and a Russian dignitary.]
[Footnote 2: They formed part of the government of Yekaterinoslav.]
Not satisfied with constantly lessening the area in which, without any
further restrictions, the Jewish population was gasping for breath, the
Government was on the look-out for ways and means to narrow also the
sphere of Jewish economic activity. The medieval system of Russian
society with its division into estates and guilds became an instrument
of Jewish oppression. The authorities openly followed the maxim that the
Jew was to be robbed of his profession, to the end that it may be turned
over to his Christian rival. Under Alexander II, the Government had
endeavored to promote handicrafts among the Jews as a counterbalance
against their commercial pursuits, and had therefore conferred upon
Jewish artisans the right of residence all over the Empire. The change
of policy under Alexander III is well illustrated by the ukase of 1884
closing the Jewish school of handicrafts in Zhitomir which had been in
existence for twenty-three years. The reason for the enactment is stated
with brazen impudence:
Owing to the fact that the Jews living in the towns and townlets of
the south-western region form the majority of handicrafts-men, and
thereby hamper the development of handicrafts among the original
population of that region, which is exploited by them, the existence
of a specific Jewish school of handicrafts seems, in view of the
lack of similar schools among the Christians, an additional weapon
in the hands of the Jews for the exploitation of the original
population of that region.
Here the pursuit of handicrafts is actually stigmatized as a means of
"exploitation." The true meaning of that terrible word, an invention of
the Russian Government, is thereby put in a glaring light: the Jew is an
"exploiter" so long as he follows any pursuit, however honorable and
productive, in which a Christian might engage in his stead.
The slightest attempt of the Jew to enlarge his economic activity met
with the relentless punishment of the law. The Jewish artisan, though
permitted to live outside the Pale, had only the right to sell the
products of his own workmanship. When found to sell other merchandise
which was not manufactured by him he was liable, under Article 1171 of
the Penal Code, not only to be immediately expelled from his place of
residence but also to have his goods confiscated. The Christian
competitors of the Jews, shoulder to shoulder with the police, kept a
careful watch over the Jewish artisans and saw to it that a Jewish
tailor should not dare to sell a piece of material, a watchmaker--a new
factory-made watch with a chain (being only allowed to repair old
watches), a baker--a pound of flour or a cup of coffee. The discovery of
such a "crime" was followed immediately by cutting short the career of
the poor artisan, in accordance with the provisions of the law.
3. RESTRICTIONS IN EDUCATION AND IN THE LEGAL PROFESSION
A salient feature of that gloomy era of counter-reforms was the endeavor
of the Government to dislodge the Jews from the liberal professions,
and, as a corollary, to bar them from the secondary and higher schools
which were the training ground for these professions. What the
Government had in view was to reduce the number of those "privileged"
Jews, who, under the law passed in the time of Alexander II., had been
rewarded for their completion of a course of studies in an institution
of higher learning by the right of unrestricted residence throughout the
Empire. The authorities now found it to their purpose to hamper the
spread of education among the Jews rather than promote it. The
highly-placed obscurantists contended that the Jewish students exerted
an injurious influence upon their Christian comrades from the religious
and moral point of view, while the political police [1] reported that the
Jewish college men "are quick in joining the ranks of the revolutionary
workers." The fear of educated Russian subjects who were not of the
dominant faith was natural in a country in which Pobyedonostzev, the
moving spirit of inner Russian politics, looked upon popular education
in general as a destructive force, fraught with danger to throne and
altar. There can be but little doubt that the previously-mentioned
imperial "resolutions" [2] indicating the necessity of curtailing the
number of Jews in the Russian educational establishments were inspired
by the "Grand Inquisitor."
[Footnote 1: The secret police charged with tracking the followers of
liberal and revolutionary tendencies.]
[Footnote 2: See p. 339_et seq_.]
Notwithstanding the opposition of the majority of the Pahlen Commission,
whose members had not yet entirely discarded the enlightened traditions
of the reign of Alexander II., the question was decided in accordance
with the wishes of the Tzar. Here, too, as in the case of the "Temporary
Rules," the Government was resolved to enact the new disabilities by the
sovereign will of the emperor, without submitting them to the highest
legislative body of the land, the Council of State, for fear that
undesirable debates might arise in that august body concerning the
expediency of putting an embargo on education. On December 5, 1886, the
Tzar, acting on the suggestion of the Committee of Ministers, directed
the Minister of Public Instruction, Dyelanov, to adopt measures for the
limitation of the admission of Jews to the secondary and higher
educational establishments.
For six long months the Minister, whose official duty was the promotion
of education, was wavering between a number of schemes designed to
restrict education among the Jews. Suggestions for such restrictions
came from officials of the ministry and from superintendents of school
districts. Some proposed to close the schools only to the children of
the lower classes among the Jews; in which "the unsympathetic traits of
the Jewish character" were particularly conspicuous. Others recommended
a restrictive percentage for Jews in general, without any class
discrimination. Still others pleaded for moderation lest excessive
restriction in admission to Russian universities should force the Jewish
youth to go to foreign universities and make them even "more dangerous,"
since they were bound to return to Russia with liberal notions
concerning the political form of government.
At last, in July, 1887, the Minister of Public Instruction, acting on
the above-mentioned imperial "resolution," published his two famous
circulars limiting the admission of Jews to the universities and to
secondary schools. The following norm was established: in the Pale of
Settlement the Jews were to be admitted to the schools to the extent of
ten per cent of the Christian school population; outside the Pale the
norm was fixed at five per cent, and in the two capitals, St. Petersburg
and Moscow, at three per cent. Although decreed before the very
beginning of the new scholastic year, the percentage norm was
nevertheless immediately applied in the case of the _gymnazia,_ the
"Real schools," [1] and the universities. In the higher professional
institutions, such as the technological, veterinarian, and agronomical
schools, the restrictions had been, practised even before the
promulgation of the circular, or were introduced immediately after it.
[Footnote 1: Or _Real Gymnazia_, see above, p. 163, n, 1.]
This was the genesis of the educational "percentage norm," the source of
sorrow and tears for two generation of Russian Jews--both fathers and
sons now having run the gauntlet. In the months of July and August of
every year, thousands of Jewish children were knocking at the doors of
the _gymnazia_ and universities, but only tens and hundreds obtained
admission. In the towns of the Pale where the Jews form from thirty to
eighty per cent of the total population, the admission, of Jewish pupils
to the _gymnazia_ and "Real schools" was limited to ten per cent, so
that the majority of Jewish children were deprived of a secondary
education.
The position of the _gymnazium_ and "Real school" graduates who were
unable to continue their studies in the institutions of higher learning
was particularly tragic. Many of these unfortunates addressed personal
appeals to the Minister of Public Instruction, Dyelanov, who, being
good-natured, would, despite his reactionary proclivities, frequently
sanction the admission of the petitioners over and above the school
norm. But the majority of the young men, barred from the colleges, found
themselves compelled to go abroad in search of education, and, being
generally without means, suffered untold hardships.
Nevertheless, the cruel restrictions could not suppress the need for
education in a people with an ancient culture. Those that had failed to
gain admission to the _gymnazia_ completed the prescribed course of
studies at home, under the guidance of private tutors or by private
study, and afterwards presented themselves for examination for the
"maturity certificate" [1] as "externs," braving all the difficulties of
this thorny path. Having successfully passed their secondary course,
they found again their way barred as soon as they wished to enter the
universities, and the "martyrs of learning" had no choice left except to
take up their pilgrim staff and travel abroad. Year in, year out, two
processions of emigrants wended their way from Russia to the West: the
one was travelling across the Atlantic, in search of bread and liberty;
the other was headed towards Germany, Austria, England, and France, in
search of a higher education. The former were driven from their homes by
a peculiar _interdictio ignis et aquae_; the other--by an _interdictio
scientiae_.
[Footnote 1: The name given in Russian (and German) to the diploma of a
_gymnazium_.]
Having closed the avenues of higher education to the bulk of Russian
Jewry, the Government now went a step further and contrived to
dispossess even those Jews who had already managed to obtain a higher
education, in spite of all difficulties. It was not satisfied with
barring college-bred Jews from the civil service and an academic career,
thus limiting the Jewish physicians and lawyers to private practice; it
was anxious to restrict even this narrow field of activity still open to
Jews. In view of the fact that the Jewish jurists had no chance to apply
their knowledge in the civil service, and were entirely excluded from
the bench, they naturally turned to the bar, with the result that they
soon occupied a conspicuous place there, both quantitatively and
qualitatively. Their success was a source of annoyance to the Russian
anti-Semites, both those who hated the Jews on principle and those who
did so selfishly, being themselves members of the bar. These enemies of
Judaism called the attention of the Government to the large number of
Jewish lawyers at the St. Petersburg bar--a circumstance due partly to
the natural gravitation towards the administrative and legal center of
the country, and partly to the fact that the admission of Jews to the
bar met with less obstruction from the judicial authorities in the
capital than in the provinces, where professional jealousy frequently
stood in the way of the Jews.
The reactionary Minister of Justice, Manasseïn, managed to convince the
Tzar that it was necessary to check the further admission of Jews to the
bar. However, from diplomatic considerations, it was thought wiser to
carry this restriction into effect not under an anti-Jewish flag, but
rather as a general measure directed against all members of
"non-Christian persuasions." The restriction was therefore extended to
Mohammedans and the handful of privileged Karaites, [1] and the religious
intolerance of the new measure was thus thrown into even bolder relief.
[Footnote 1: See on the Karaites, Vol. I, p. 318.]
On November, 1889, an imperial ukase decreed as follows:
That, pending the enactment of a special law dealing with this
subject, the admission of public and private attorneys of
non-Christian denominations by the competent judicial institutions
and bar associations [1] shall not take place, except with the
permission of the Minister of Justice, on the recommendation of the
presidents of the above-mentioned institutions and associations.
[Footnote 1: "Public (literally, sworn) attorneys" are lawyers of academic
standing admitted to the bar by the bar associations. "Private
attorneys" are lawyers without educational qualifications who
receive permission to practise from the "judicial institutions,"
i.e., the law courts. They are not members of the bar.]
It goes without saying that the Russian Minister of Justice made ample
use of the right conferred upon him of denying admission to Jews as
public and private attorneys. While readily sanctioning the admission of
Mohammedans and Karaites, the Minister almost invariably refused to
confirm the election of young Jewish barristers, however warmly they may
have been recommended by the judicial institutions and bar
associations. [1] In this way, many a talented Jewish jurist, who might
have filled a university chair with distinction or might have attained
brilliant success in the legal profession, was forced out of his path
and deprived of an opportunity to serve his country by his labors and
pursue a career for which he had fitted himself at the university.
Instead, these derailed professionals went to swell the hosts of those
who had been wronged and disinherited by the injustice of the law.
[Footnote 1: During the following five years, until 1895, not a single
Jew received the sanction of the Minister.]
4. DISCRIMINATION IN MILITARY SERVICE
It seemed as if the Government was intent on making a one-sided compact
with Russian Jewry: "We shall deprive you of all the elementary rights
due to you as men and citizens; we shall rob you of the right of
domicile and freedom of movement, and of the chance of making a
livelihood; we shall expose you to physical and spiritual starvation,
and shall cast you out of the community of citizens--yet you dare not
swerve an inch from the path of your civic obligations." A lurid
illustration of this unique exchange of services was provided by the
manner in which military duty was imposed upon the Jews. Russian
legislation had long since contrived to establish revolting restrictions
for the Jews also in this domain. Jews with physical defects which
rendered Christians unfit for military service, such as a lower stature
and narrower chest, were nevertheless taken into the army. In the case
of a shortage of recruits among the Jewish population even only sons,
the sole wage-earners of their families or of their widowed mothers,
were drafted, whereas the same category of conscripts among Christians
were unconditionally exempt. [1] Moreover, a Jew serving in the army
always remained a private and could never attain to an officer's rank.
[Footnote 1: Compare p. 201.]
As if the Government intended to make sport of the Jewish soldiers, the
latter were deprived of their right of residence in the localities
outside the Pale where they had been stationed, and as soon as their
term of service had expired, were sent back into the territory of the
Russian-Jewish ghetto. Thus, even Nicholas I, was out-Nicholased. The
discharged Jewish soldiers who had served under the old recruiting law
enjoyed, both for themselves and their families, the right of residence
throughout the Empire. [1] The new military statute of 1874 [2] withdrew
from the retired Jewish soldiers this reward for faithfully performed
duty, and in 1885 the Senate sustained the disfranchisement of these
Jews who had spent years of their life in the service of their
fatherland. A Jew from Berdychev, Vilna, or Odessa, who had served five
or six years somewhere in St. Petersburg, Moscow, or Kazan, was forced
to leave these tabooed cities and return home on the very day on which
he had taken off his soldier's uniform.
[Footnote 1: See above, p. 172.]
[Footnote 2: See p. 199 et seq.]
Yet, despite this curious encouragement of Jewish patriotism, the
Government had the audacity to charge the Jews continually with the
"evasion of their military duty." That a tendency towards such evasion
was in vogue among the Jews admits of no doubt. It would have been
contrary to human nature if people who were subject to assaults from
above and kicks from below, whose right of residence was limited to
one-twentieth of the territory of their fatherland, who were robbed of
shelter, air, and bread, and deprived of the hope to place themselves,
even by means of military service, on an equal footing with the lowest
Russian moujik, should have felt a profound need of sacrificing
themselves for their country, and should not have shirked this heaviest
of civil obligations to a larger extent than the privileged Russian
population, in which cases of evasion were by no means infrequent. In
reality, however, the complaints about the shortage of Jewish recruits
were vastly exaggerated. Subsequent statistical investigations brought
out the fact that, owing to irregular apportionment, the Government
demanded annually from the Jews a larger quota of recruits than was
justified by their numerical relation to the general population in the
Pale of Settlement. On an average, the Jews furnished twelve per cent of
the total number of recruits in the Pale, whereas the Jewish population
of the Pale formed but eleven per cent of the total population. The
Government further refused to consider the fact that, owing to
inaccurate registration, the conscription lists often carried the names
of persons who had long since died, or who had left the country to
emigrate abroad. In fact, the annual emigration of Jews from Russia, the
result of uninterrupted persecutions, reduced the number of young men of
conscription age. But the Russian authorities were of the opinion that
the Jews who remained behind should serve in the Russian army instead of
those of their brethren who had become citizens of the free American
Republic. The "evasion of military duty" and the annual shortage of a
few hundred recruits, as against the many thousands of those enlisted,
was charged as a grave crime against that very people towards which the
Government on its part failed to fulfil even its most elementary
obligations. Reams of paper were covered with all kinds of official
devices to "cut short" this evasion of military duty by the Jews. On one
beautiful April morning of 1886, the Government came out with the
following enactment:
The family of a Jew guilty of evading military service is liable to
a fine of three hundred rubles ($150). The collection of the fine
shall be decreed by the respective recruiting station and carried
out by the police. It shall not be substituted by imprisonment in
the case of destitute persons liable to that fine.
In addition, a military reward was promised for the seizure of a Jew who
had failed to present himself to the recruiting authorities.
By virtue of this barbarous principle of collective responsibility, new
hardships were inflicted upon the Jews of Russia. Since the law provided
that the fine for evading military service be imposed upon the _family_
of the culprit, the police interpreted that term "liberally," taking it
to include parents, brothers, and near relatives. The following
procedure gradually came into vogue. In the autumn of every year, the
Russian conscription season, the names of the young Jews who have
completed their twenty-first year are called out at the recruiting
station from a prepared list. When a Jew whose name has been called has
failed to present himself on the same day, the recruiting authorities
issue an order on the spot imposing a fine on his family. The police
then appear in the house of his parents to collect the sum of three
hundred rubles. In default of cash, they attach the property of the
paupers and have it subsequently sold at public auction. In the case of
those who possess nothing that can be taken from them the police insist
on their giving a signed promise not to leave the town. Their passports
are taken from them, so that, not being able to absent themselves from
town to earn a living, they are frequently left to starve. If the
parents are dead or absent, the brothers and sisters of the culprit, and
then his grandfathers and grandmothers are held answerable with their
property.
Thus, a large number of Jewish families were completely ruined, merely
because one of their members had emigrated abroad, or, as was frequently
the case, had surrendered his soul to God in his beloved fatherland
itself, and the relatives had failed to see to it that the dead soul was
stricken from the recruiting lists. Yet, despite all these efforts,
there still remained a considerable number of uncollected
fines--"arrears," as they were officially termed--to the profound regret
of the Russian Jew-baiters, who had to look on while the victims were
slipping unpunished from their hands.