IN RUSSIA
THE one great power in Europe which has refused to follow the new
spirit is Russia. In the middle of the sixteenth century Czar Ivan IV.,
surnamed the Terrible, voiced the feelings of his nation towards the
Jews in his negotiations with Sigismund Augustus, King of Poland. The
latter monarch had inserted in the treaty of peace a clause providing
that the Jews of Lithuania should be permitted to continue trading
freely with the Russian Empire. Ivan answered: “We do not want these
men who have brought us poison for our bodies and souls; they have
sold deadly herbs among us, and blasphemed our Lord and Saviour.” This
speech affords a melancholy insight into the intellectual condition of
the people over whom Ivan held his terrible sway. Nor can one wonder.
Printing had been popular for upwards of a century in the rest of
Europe before a press found its way into the Muscovite Empire, where
it aroused among the natives no less astonishment and fear than the
first sight of a musket did among the inhabitants of Zululand, and
was promptly consigned to the flames by the priests, as a Satanic
invention. Things did not improve during the succeeding ages. Till
the end of the seventeenth century Russia remained almost as total a
stranger to the development of the Western world and to its nations as
Tibet is at the present day. Venice or Amsterdam loomed immeasurably
larger in contemporary imagination than the vast dominions of the
White Czar. British traders at rare intervals brought from the port
of Archangel, along with their cargoes of furs, strange tales of the
snow-clad plains and sunless forests of those remote regions, and of
their savage inhabitants: of their peculiar customs, their poverty,
squalor, and superstition. And these accounts, corroborated by the
even rarer testimony of diplomatic envoys, who in their books of
travel spoke of princes wallowing in filthy magnificence, of starving
peasants, and of ravening wolves and bears, excited in the Western mind
that kind of wonder, mingled with incredulity, which usually attends
the narratives of travellers in unknown lands.
This home of primordial barbarism was suddenly thrust upon the
attention of the civilised world by the genius of one man. Peter the
Great, a coarse and cruel, but highly gifted barbarian, conceived the
colossal plan of bridging over the gulf that separated his empire
from Western Europe, and of reaching at a single stride the point of
culture towards which others had crept slowly and painfully in the
course of many centuries. It was the conception of a great engineer,
and it required great workmen for its execution. It is, therefore,
no matter for surprise if the work, when the mind and the will of
the original designer were removed, made indifferent progress, if it
remained stationary at times, if it was partially destroyed at others.
It must also be borne in mind that Peter’s dream of a European Russia
was far from being shared by the Russian people. The old Russian party,
which interpreted the feelings of the nation, had no sympathy with the
Emperor’s ambition for a new Russia modelled on a Western pattern. They
wanted to remain Asiatic. And this party found a leader in Peter’s own
son Alexis, who paid for his disloyalty with his life. The idea for
which Alexis and his friends suffered death is still alive. Opposition
to Occidental reform and attachment to Oriental modes of thought and
conduct continue to exercise a powerful influence in Russian politics.
Europe and Asia still fight for supremacy in the heterogeneous mass
which constitutes this hybrid Empire, and there are those who believe
that, although Russia poses as European in manner, in soul she is an
Asiatic power; and that the time will come when the slender ties
which bind her to the West will be snapped by the greater force of her
Eastern affinities. Whether this view is correct or not the future will
show. Our business is with the past.
The history of the Russian Empire from the seventeenth till the
twentieth century is largely a history of individual emperors, and
its spasmodic character of alternate progress and retrogression
is vividly illustrated by the attitude of those emperors towards
their Jewish subjects. Peter the Great welcomed them, his daughter
Elizabeth expelled them, Catherine II. re-admitted them, Alexander I.
favoured them. No democratic visionary was ever animated by a loftier
enthusiasm for the happiness of mankind than this noble autocrat.
By the Ukase of 1804 all Jews engaged in farming, manufactures, and
handicrafts, or those who had been educated in Russian schools, were
relieved from the exceptional laws against their race; while special
privileges were granted to those who could show proficiency in the
Russian, German, or Polish language. Other decrees, issued in 1809,
ensured to the Jews full freedom of trade. These concessions, while
testifying to the Emperor’s tolerant wisdom, show the severity of the
conditions under which the race laboured normally. On the partition
of Poland the Russian Empire had received an enormous addition to
its Jewish population, and the Czars, with few exceptions, continued
towards it the inhuman policy already adopted under Casimir the
Great’s successors. The Jews were pent in ghettos, and every care
was taken to check their growth and to hamper their activity. Among
other forms of oppression, the emperors of Russia initiated towards
their Jewish subjects a system analogous to the one formerly enforced
by the Sultans of Turkey on the Christian _rayahs_: the infamous
system of “child-tribute.” Boys of tender age were torn from their
parents and reared in their master’s faith for the defence of their
master’s dominions. Alexander I. determined to lift this heavy yoke,
and, as has been seen, he took some initial steps towards that end.
But, unfortunately, the closing years of the high-minded idealist’s
life witnessed a return to despotism, and consequently a series of
conspiracies, which in their turn retarded the progress of freedom and
hardened the hearts of its foes.
♦1825♦
Alexander’s stern son, Nicholas I., was a nineteenth century Phalaris.
His reign was inaugurated with an insurrectionary movement, whose
failure accelerated the triumph of the Asiatic ideals in Russian
policy. Nicholas, imbued with a strong antipathy to all that was
Occidental, and convinced that the greatness of Russia abroad depended
on tyranny at home, set himself the task of undoing the little his
predecessors had done in the way of reform. ♦1830 and 1848♦ The Poles
and the Hungarians experienced his relentless severity in a manner
which, while filling Europe with horror, inspired little inclination
for interference. In perfect consonance with the character and the
principles of Nicholas was his treatment of the Jews, who, under him,
lost all the poor privileges conferred upon them by his father, and
were not only condemned again to the old sorrows of servitude, but by a
special ukase, published in the beginning of September, 1828, they were
for the first time subjected to the military conscription.
Under Alexander II., the Czar Liberator, some of those oppressive
measures were mitigated, and permission was granted for three Jews to
settle at each railway station. But the improvement, limited as it was,
did not last long. Like some of his ancestors, Alexander II. vacillated
between the two antagonistic forces which wrestle for mastery in
Russia: the party of progress and freedom and the party of reaction
and despotism. Devoid of initiative and strength of purpose himself,
this amiable ruler was led now to right, now to left. The disasters
of the Crimean War had already shown that absolutism had failed in
the one thing which justified its existence--military efficiency. If
Russia could not achieve foreign supremacy, she ought at least to
secure domestic prosperity. ♦1855♦ The party of progress carried the
day, and the Emperor Nicholas with it, who, however, did not live to
work out his repentance, but left the task to his son. As early as
1856 Alexander II. had a plan of a Constitution drawn up; but the
design was postponed owing to more pressing needs. The years 1861–1864,
however, witnessed the emancipation of the serfs, the abolition of
the terrible corporal punishment by the knout, the institution of
the zemstvos, or provincial assemblies, and other measures of reform
which awakened the hopes and the enthusiasm of the Russian people.
_Svobodnaya Rossia_--Free Russia--was on every man’s lips. A new era
had dawned for the cowering masses of the Empire. ♦1863♦ The Polish
rebellion diverted this enthusiasm from internal reform to the defence
of the Fatherland against its hereditary enemy, who, it was suspected,
was aided by some foreign powers.
Military success abroad presupposes union at home, and union often
means the sacrifice of the individual and his interests and rights.
This common historical phenomenon now received a fresh illustration.
Victory took away all the blessings conferred by defeat. The Poles
were crushed, and with them the budding liberty of the Russians. The
people and the press, in calling for the utter annihilation of the
supposed enemy of their country, were unwittingly advocating their own
doom--in extinguishing Poland, they extinguished the last hope of their
country’s happiness. For the defeat of the Poles decided the struggle
in favour of despotism, all schemes of constitutional reform were
abandoned, and Alexander II.’s reign closed as Alexander I.’s had done:
in a craven recantation of the principles which had distinguished its
beginning. This backsliding created bitter disappointment in the hearts
of all Russian friends of liberty, and drove the more desperate among
them to the declaration of a war which culminated in the unfortunate
monarch’s murder. ♦1881 March 13♦ The crime of the Nihilists, however,
defeated its own object and ruined the cause it was meant to serve.
At the very moment of his death the Czar was actually meditating a
plan for some form of representative government, to begin with the
convocation of an Assembly of Notables. The intention died with him.
Henceforth the relations between the Government and the governed are
more than ever marked by mutual distrust.[154] The assassination of
the humane Emperor, far from weakening, strengthened the hands of
the champions of autocracy and intolerance, and these champions were
reinforced by the advocates of Nationalism or Panslavism--a movement
which, like Nihilism, derives its theories from modern Teutonic
speculation, but applies them after a primitive fashion purely Russian.
Russian national consciousness is a recent growth. It sprang up at the
beginning of the nineteenth century under the stimulus of Napoleon’s
invasion. Hatred of the foreign invader brought patriotism into being,
and the exultation of victory forced it to precocious maturity. The
Polish rebellions of 1830 and 1863 assisted its development, which
was also accelerated by the spread of education and the growth of the
press. The extreme partisans of the Nationalist idea, henceforth the
ruling body in the Empire, were imbued with the conviction that the
preservation of the Russian nation required the forcible assimilation
or, failing that, the utter extermination of all that is not Russian.
Under the fell influence of that conviction a systematic campaign was
entered upon for the Russification of all the alien races which had
been incorporated in the Empire during the preceding century. After
the complete subjugation of the Poles--brought about by Muravieff in
a manner which earned him the title of “Hangman of Warsaw”--came the
turn of the inhabitants of the Baltic provinces, who, partly German by
blood, had long adopted the German tongue, German culture, and German
ideals, and who since their conquest by the Russians, in the eighteenth
century, had furnished the Empire with some of its best statesmen,
warriors, and scientists. The Panslavic zeal for assimilation was
intensified by the fear of German expansion. Prussia by her brilliant
war against Austria in 1866 laid the foundations of that national
edifice which was completed by the war, even more brilliant, against
France in 1870, thus realising the national dream of German unity.
It was feared by the Russians that the absorption of the Germanised
provinces of the Baltic would be the next step of Pan-germanic
ambition. Impelled by those motives, Russia inaugurated the
amalgamation of these regions in 1867. Alexander II., notwithstanding
his personal sympathies and his public assurances to the natives of
the Baltic provinces, was carried away by the Panslavic current, which
gained further strength from the national conflict with Turkey in 1877.
♦1881–1894♦
Under Alexander III. the period of partial reform, thanks to the
industry of MM. Pobiedonostseff, Katkoff, and Count Ignatieff, and the
indecision of their Liberal opponents, gave way to one of reaction
in all directions. In administrative matters Alexander III., despite
the advice of so firm a believer in the divine origin of kingship as
the German Emperor William I., reverted to the methods of his own
grandfather, Nicholas I.: the press censorship was revived, the village
communes were placed under the absolute power of the police, flogging
was restored as an instrument of “educating” the peasants; and the very
mention of the Czar Liberator’s name became a punishable offence. At
the same time the work of Russification proceeded, and side by side
with the policy of racial uniformity was carried on a crusade for
religious conformity. ♦1880–1890♦ Panslavism rooted out the national
institutions and language of the Baltic provinces; Panorthodoxy stamped
out their heretical and schismatic doctrines. The Holy Synod in 1893,
inspired by the Imperial Procurator, M. Pobiedonostseff--who, though
a layman, wielded an absolute control over the Russian Church and
was by his opponents nicknamed “Lay Pope”--demanded the suppression
of Protestants, Roman Catholics, Mohammedans, Buddhists, and other
dissenters throughout the Empire. The thirteen years of Alexander
III.’s reign form one of the gloomiest pages in a history not
remarkable for brightness.
♦1894♦
Comparative tolerance followed upon the Czar’s death, and high hopes
were built on the reputed liberality of his successor, Nicholas II. But
these hopes have never been fulfilled. On the contrary, obscurantism
continued to reign supreme, and of late years the Panslavist and
Panorthodox programme has been vigorously pursued in the Caucasus,
in Poland, and in Finland, as well as among the Buddhists of the
trans-Baikalian district. In all these provinces national institutions
have been attacked with a remorseless fury and a brutal thoroughness
worthy of the Inquisition in its worst days. The Armenian Church was
plundered,[155] and Russian bishops were inflicted upon a population
whose language they did not understand. The Tartars, once loyal and
contented, were roused to appeal to the Sultan of Turkey and the
Western Powers for relief from the tyranny of the Czar. In their
petition these Russian Mohammedans describe how their religious
tribunals have been suppressed, how their children are forced into
Russian schools, how when serving in the army they are made to eat food
condemned by the law of Islam, and how they are compelled to observe
Christian festivals and to abandon their faith.[156] But in no part of
the Empire was more systematically repeated the process which, under
Alexander III., had achieved the Russification of the Baltic provinces
than in Finland. Nothing more inhuman or more insane than Russia’s
treatment of that country has been known in Europe since the revocation
of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV. The constitution of Finland,
which Alexander I. on annexing the country in 1809 had solemnly
pledged himself to respect, was abolished; its press was silenced; its
University degraded; its religion trampled under foot; its best men
were banished; ♦1899–1903♦ and all means were employed in the patriotic
endeavour to grind down this highly cultured, but non-Slavonic and
non-Orthodox, province of the north to the level of the rest of the
Empire; with the result that the most loyal and prosperous section
of the Czar’s subjects has been turned into the most disloyal and
miserable. Thus Germans, Esthonians, Poles, Finns, Circassians,
Georgians, Armenians, Mongols, Tartars--all have experienced the
Russian rage for uniformity national and religious; and so have even
dissenters of Russian blood, like the Old Believers and the Dukhobors,
not to mention the Polish and Lithuanian Uniates, whose churches have
been confiscated and converted to other uses, whose clergy has been
suppressed, and who are forced, under severe penalties, to worship, to
be married and buried, and to have their children christened according
to the rites of the Orthodox Church.[157]
Tyranny is a plant that can only flourish in darkness. The press is,
therefore, gagged, public meetings are severely prohibited, and both
Church and State assiduously discourage the education of the masses.
Elementary schools are insufficient and inefficient, while private
initiative is jealously forbidden to supplement the shortcomings of
public instruction. The Government does not provide for the people,
and will not allow it to provide for itself. The authorities at
Moscow have been known to prohibit even factory owners from keeping
elementary schools for the improvement of their working people. When
such is the state of things in the greatest industrial centre of the
Empire, it is not hard to imagine the conditions which prevail in the
remote country districts with their dull agricultural population.[158]
Hence the necessity for employing foreigners in every department of
commercial and industrial life. The success of the foreigner, however,
arouses the jealousy of the native, and Russian economists are apt
to attribute to the predominance of the former that wretchedness of
the Russian masses, which is mainly due to their defective education.
Under the circumstances, it is not surprising to find that the Jews
suffer as grievously as they did in the Middle Ages. The hostility of
a people still barbarous in all essentials has always succeeded in
defeating the good intentions of the best Czars, and in heightening
the horrors consequent on the despotic temper of the worst. If the
treatment of Israel in various countries may be taken as an index to
their respective progress on the road to civilisation, Russia must
be pronounced as standing at this hour where England stood in the
thirteenth century.
In 1881 a violent outbreak of anti-Jewish feeling, encouraged by the
Nationalist newspapers, on one hand, and by the Nihilists on the other,
led to much bloodshed and to the destruction of Jewish property and
life in the southern and western provinces of Russia, especially in
Russian Poland. Many causes contributed to the explosion. For years
past, indeed since the abolition of serfdom, the peasantry, especially
in South Russia, had been deteriorating both materially and morally.
A contemporary observer thus describes the state of things on the eve
of the event: “The bad harvests in the succession of years immediately
preceding 1881, and the accompanying ravages of a virulent and
widespread cattle plague, have completed the misery which idleness and
improvidence were steadily producing; and the removal of restraint,
the separation of families, and the assemblage of large numbers of the
most ignorant classes amid the strange scenes of town and camp life,
have unsettled their minds and degraded their morals.” After relating
the effect of these conditions on the relations between peasant and
landlord, the writer proceeds to explain some of the causes of the
peasant’s ill-feeling towards the Jew. “Besides the landlord, there is
another class in the south and west by whom the peasant thinks that he
has been defrauded. The Jews, whom Government restrictions prevent from
becoming agriculturists, and who are debarred from accepting employment
in any ordinary industrial establishment, by the fact of their Sabbath
limiting them to four and a half days of labour during the Christian
week, have from necessity turned their attention almost exclusively
to trade. The improvidence of the agriculturist and his want of
capital have rendered the assistance of a money-lender and middleman
an absolute necessity to him, and this requirement has been naturally
supplied by the presence of the Jew, whose sobriety, thrift, energy,
and commercial instincts render him especially fit for the vocation.
The more improvident the peasantry, the greater are the immediate
profits of the Jews, and whilst the former have become steadily
impoverished, many of the latter have acquired comparative wealth.
There is nothing astonishing, therefore, in the ill-feeling which has
arisen towards the Jews, and that ill-feeling has been accompanied
by the persuasion that there must be a special injustice in the
superior material prosperity of a race whom the Government, by penal
legislation, had emphatically marked out as inferior to the Christians.
Religious fanaticism is almost unknown in Russia, and indifferentism
is rather the rule among a peasantry which lives in amity with
Mahommedans, Roman Catholics, and Lutherans alike; but it requires a
strong hand to restrain a semi-civilized and poverty-stricken people
from attacking and plundering their richer and defenceless neighbours.
The Government did not show this strong hand in defence of the Jews,
and political agitators eagerly fanned the flame of animosity against
the alien race, and saw with pleasure the spread of disturbances
which would either lead to a collision between the people and the
authorities, or open the eyes of the masses to the weakness of the
latter, and to their own strength.”[159]
The venerable charge of ritual murder was once more brought against
the Jews, and within a few weeks all the provinces from the Baltic to
the Black Sea were a theatre of arson, rapine, and slaughter, such as
Europe had not witnessed since the tragedy of the Black Death in the
fourteenth century. The civilised world shuddered at the appalling
spectacle; but the local authorities, both civil and military, looked,
for the most part, complacently on. The peasantry, having slaked
their thirst for vengeance, plunder, rape, and gin, by sacking the
Jewish houses, drinking shops, and brothels, proceeded to embody their
grievances against the Jew in the following series of demands:
1. “That Jews, members of town councils and provincial assemblies,
vice-directors of town banks, members of different institutions and
committees, should voluntarily give up their present posts, casting off
the cloak of pride and braggadocio; as persons not possessing civic
honesty, they are unfit to hold such places.
2. “That the Jews should impress on their wives and daughters not to
deck themselves out in silk, velvet, gold, etc., as such attire is
neither in keeping with their education nor the position they hold in
society.
3. “That the Jews should dismiss from their service all Russian
female servants, who, after living in Jewish houses, certainly become
prostitutes, forget their religion, and who are intentionally depraved
by the Jews.
4. “To banish, without delay, all Jews belonging to other places who do
not possess any real property in town.
5. “To close all drinking shops.
6. “To forbid Jews to abuse the Christians, and, in general, to scoff
at them.
7. “To prohibit Jews from buying up in the markets the first
necessaries of life with the intention of selling them to the Russians.
8. “To impress on wholesale dealers in spirits not to mix with vodka
any foreign element which is sometimes injurious to health.
9. “Not to trade on the Sabbath before noon, and at Christmas and
Easter not to trade for three days, and not to work on our holidays.
10. “To prohibit Jews buying wheat for trading purposes within thirty
versts of the town of Pereyaslav, and therefore to remove all existing
grain and flour stores.
11. “To prohibit Jews from buying up uncut wheat; also to lease land
from private individuals.
12. “The Town Council is begged not to let, and the Jews not to hire,
the grounds at fairs and at marketplaces, with the object of farming
them out.”[160]
No better proof of the mediaeval character of the Russian peasant’s
mind could be desired than that furnished by the above document. Even
so hearty an apologist of that peasant as Mr. Goldwin Smith finds
himself compelled to remark that these demands “by their grotesque
mixture of real and fancied grievances, remind us of the demands made
by the ignorant, but suffering, peasants of the Middle Ages.” Their
demand that the Jews should be forced “to cast off the cloak of pride
and braggadocio,” has its exact parallel in the complaints of the
Spanish bigots laid before Don Henry in 1371.[161]
But the feeling which found so terrible an expression was by no
means confined to the lower and illiterate classes of the community.
The crime itself was attributed to the deliberate policy of Count
Ignatieff. A high-bred and accomplished Russian lady, a few months
after the massacres, described the general attitude of her compatriots
towards the Jews in very fluent English, as follows:--“Well, we do
not like the Jews, that is a fact; and the dislike is reciprocal. But
the reason we do not like them is not because of their speculative
monotheism, but because of their practical heathenism. To us they are
what the relics of the Amorites and Canaanites were to the Hebrews in
old times--a debased and demoralized element which is alien to our
national life, and a source of indescribable evils to our people. It
is not to the Jew as a rejecter of Christianity that we object; it is
to the Jew as a bitter enemy of Christian emancipation, the vampire of
our rural communes, the tempter of our youth, and the centre of the
demoralizing, corrupting agencies which impair our civilization.”[162]
The modern Russian lady’s denunciation of the Jew, in tone as well as
in substance, is a significant, though, of course, quite unconscious,
echo of Ivan the Terrible’s cruder statement of more than three
centuries ago.[163] The sole difference consists in form--the religious
objection is minimised and the social emphasised in accordance with
Western modes of expression; but fundamentally the two utterances are
identical.
The Minister of the Interior, in less emotional language, explained
the outbreak as due to causes of a purely economic character. “During
the last twenty years,” he said, “the Jews have not only gradually got
into their hands the trade and industry, but have also acquired by
deed of purchase and leases considerable landed estates, and, owing to
their numbers and solidarity, they have, with few exceptions, directed
all their efforts, not towards increasing the productiveness of the
country, but to the spoliation of the native population, chiefly the
poorer classes, by which means they called forth a protest from the
latter, which unfortunately expressed itself in a violent form.”[164]
Vice-Consul Wagstaff in an official despatch, while giving the Jews
full credit for their remarkable intelligence, thrift, and business
qualities, enumerates the complaints made against them by the
Russians--namely, that “the Jews are the principal keepers of drinking
shops and houses of ill-fame, receivers of stolen goods, illegal
pawnbrokers and usurers. As Government contractors they frequently
collude with unscrupulous officials in defrauding the State to vast
amounts. They use their religion for business purposes, ‘boycott’
outsiders, play into each other’s hands at land sales, and thus despoil
the peasantry. Often the harvest of a peasant who has been entangled
in their toils passes into their grasp, as it stands in the field, on
their own terms. They themselves do not raise agricultural products,
but they reap the benefit of others’ labour, and steadily become rich
while proprietors are gradually getting ruined. In their relation to
Russia they are compared to parasites that have settled on a plant not
vigorous enough to throw them off, and which is being gradually sapped
of its vitality.”[165]
Another witness describes the gradual subjection of the impoverished
peasant to the Jewish money-lender and adds, “The Jews’ two great
factors in dealing with the Russian peasant are _vodka_ (native gin)
and a few roubles at a pinch, and with these powers he enslaves and
uses him for his own ends. Many large properties, belonging to
influential and hereditary Russian noblemen, are rented out to Jews,
because the proprietors find that they pay higher rents than the
Russian tenants.” He concludes, however, with the reflection: “The
real source of the evil lies in the mental and moral condition of the
masses, and it is there the remedy must be applied.”[166]
These are the reasons alleged for the persecution of the Russian Jews.
First as to “productiveness,” the neglect of which is brought forward
as a criminal charge against the Jew. It is an old complaint. The
Andalusian monk of yore inveighed against the Jews of Spain because
“they preferred to gain their livelihood by traffic rather than by
manual labour or mechanical arts.”[167] Modern economic science teaches
us that a country can dispense as little with the distributors as with
the producers of wealth. Productiveness, however, is well known to be
the pet idea of Russian economists. The last two Ministers of Finance
have for close on a quarter of a century been fostering production
with a reckless energy which by many unbiassed students is regarded
as fatal. Everything is done to encourage production and exportation,
with the result that the soil gets exhausted, and the reserves of
corn, on which the Russian farmer once relied in time of famine, have
disappeared from the country.[168] Like all measures carried to excess
and without due regard to local conditions, the fever of productiveness
is not an unmixed blessing, and the neglect of it will not be laid, by
the impartial outsider, as a crime at the door of the Jew, especially
when he remembers that the Jew is not a free agent in the choice of
his profession. For, even if the law permitted and the Jew wished to
devote himself to agriculture, he would be prevented from doing so by
the Russian system of village communes--an intrusion into which on the
part of non-Christians would be resented by none more bitterly than by
the Russian peasant himself. It is thus seen that the Jew could not in
any case become a “producer,” but was irresistibly compelled to turn
to handicrafts, retail commerce and money-lending.
As to Jewish extortion. The manumission of the serfs opened up fields
for money-lending which it would have been impossible to resist the
temptation of exploiting even to capitalists whose opportunities
for investment are less circumscribed than are those of the Russian
Jew. That reform, though undoubtedly beneficial in the long run,
was meanwhile bound to upset the social fabric, especially in
Little Russia, and to produce the evils which generally accompany a
radical change brought about in a country unprepared for it. By the
Ukase of 1864 there was created a state of transition. The old was
pronounced out of date; the new was not yet born. While ruining many
noble landlords, the abolition of serfdom brought into being a vast
proletariat of freedmen poor in manual skill and capital, and poorer
still in resource. Both these classes, bewildered by the unaccustomed
conditions rudely thrust upon them, rushed to the Jew for loans as
naturally as the moth rushes to the candle, and, like the moth, they
suffered in the act. The Jew had no cause to treat either borrower
with lenience; but, as might have been expected, the peasant was by
far the greater sufferer of the two. He was less prepared for the
struggle. For centuries he had lived under a restraint which, while
stunting his manhood, conferred upon him some of the privileges, as
well as more than all the punishments, of childhood. If the leading
strings deprived the peasant of the freedom to act, they also deprived
him of the freedom to ruin himself. These strings were suddenly
removed. The peasant, still an infant in mind, was invested with all
the responsibilities of an adult. The very qualities which had enabled
him to bear his servitude now proved his unfitness for liberty.
His utter lack of initiative, of enterprise, of self-reliance, and
of self-restraint, and his abject submissiveness to the decrees of
fate--all characteristic of the serf--are well summarised in the one
word _nitchevo_, the commonest and most comprehensive expression in the
_mujik’s_ vocabulary. It means “no matter,” and corresponds exactly
to the _malesh_ of the Egyptian fellah--another peasantry sunk in
ignorance and fatalistic resignation, as the results of centuries of
serfdom.
In addition to these defects the Russian peasant is a constitutional
procrastinator. He never does to-day what he thinks he can by hook or
by crook put off till to-morrow. Two of the most precious boons of
his newly-acquired liberty, in his eyes, were the license it allowed
him to postpone his work as long as he liked and to drink as much as
he liked. Under the old system “the proprietor thrashed his serfs if
they were drunk too often, and he kept their pockets so empty, and
the price of the vodki, of which he was the monopolist, so high, that
they had comparatively little opportunity of gratifying their passion
for liquor. This was very well while it lasted, but now that the
control is withdrawn the reaction is all the greater.”[169] This is an
ample answer to the charge brought against the Jew as the promoter of
intemperance.
As to the charge of collusion with Government officials, it can
easily be met. Both culprits, of course, deserve punishment. But it
is scarcely fair that the one should be only fined, dismissed, or
imprisoned, and the other slaughtered or starved with the rest of
his nation. With regard to “boycotting” outsiders and playing into
each other’s hands, is it not natural that people belonging to a sect
which their neighbours scorn should assist their fellow-sufferers in
preference to their persecutors? There is no stronger bond between man
and man than the bond of a common stigma.
The charges of immoral pursuits and habits of depravity may, or
may not, be exaggerated. But, even admitting that the Jew is all
that his Russian enemy considers him to be, a sufficient answer to
the invectives of the latter is supplied by the old saying: “Every
country has the Jews it deserves.” Without having recourse to the
obvious retort--which in the case of the Russian peasant would be
particularly apposite--that, if there was no demand for the facilities
for immorality supplied by the Jew, the Jew would not think it worth
his while to supply them, we may urge the self-evident truth, that
legal disabilities, by barring the way to an honest and honourable
career, drive their victims to the exercise of the lowest and meanest
of callings. The struggle for existence under such banausic conditions
degenerates into a savage warfare in which there is no room for
scruple or shame. The outcast has no reputation to lose. And, the more
unprincipled the contest becomes, the greater grows the necessity for
oppression, in countries where statesmanship has not yet discovered
less rude remedies. It is a vicious circle from which there appears to
be no escape.
Accordingly, the undisciplined fury of the populace in 1881 was
supplemented by a systematic and carefully reasoned-out persecution
on the part of the Government. Instead of endeavouring to raise the
Russian masses to a level of mental and moral strength sufficiently
high to enable them to compete with the Jew, the Czar’s ministers
devoted their ingenuity to the invention of new means for lowering
the Jew to the level of the Russian masses. The disabilities of the
hated race were increased. Jewish property in the open country was
confiscated, and the owners were driven into ghettos. It was enacted
that henceforth no Jew should be allowed to live in a village or to
acquire property therein. The whole of the Russian Empire was, with
reference to the Jews, divided into three distinct sections. The bulk
of the race were confined to the fifteen provinces known as the “Pale
of Jewish Settlement.” Those Jews who belonged to a merchants’ guild
of the first class for ten years, University graduates, and skilled
artisans were permitted to move freely and to settle in any part of
European Russia they chose, except the departments of Moscow and
Taurien, in which no Jewish workman was allowed to reside. The third
section comprised Siberia, and that was closed to all Jews, except
convicts. The result of these enactments was that the few towns within
the “pale” were overcrowded with Jewish residents, herded together and
forced to carry on a fierce competition for existence with each other.
At the same time, laws were passed rendering the admittance of Jewish
youths to the high schools and Universities prohibitive, and the Jews
were forbidden to act as State or municipal officers, or teachers, or
to practise at the bar without a special license from the Minister of
Justice. These and many other measures of restriction were adopted with
the ostensible object of saving the Russian peasant from the clutches
of the Jewish harpy. The joint effect of persecution and legislation on
the Jews was misery. But these crimes proved the reverse of beneficial
to the very peasants on whose behalf they were avowedly committed. In
every village and township the departure of the Jewish traders and
artisans was immediately marked by a rise in the prices of commodities,
and was soon followed by commercial and industrial stagnation.
That regard for the moral and material welfare of the people, however,
was not the sole, or the principal, motive of the Russian Government’s
policy is unwittingly confessed by the fair patriot already quoted.
Referring to the prohibition of the Jews from keeping public houses,
she says: “That our objection is solely to the anti-national Jews, not
the Jews who become Russians in all but their origin, is proved by the
decision of the Commission in favour of allowing the Karaite Jews to
sell drink as freely as any other of their Russian fellow-subjects. It
is only the Talmudist Jews who are forbidden that privilege.”[170] It
is hard for the ordinary man to see how belief in the Bible justifies
a pursuit which is otherwise condemned as injurious to body and soul,
or in what mysterious way the Talmud affects the quality of liquor. The
ordinary man will find it easier to draw from these facts the inference
that the Government’s real end was the suppression of the Jew, the
suppression of the drink-selling Jew being only a means to that end.
In the attitude of the Russian people towards the Jews at the present
moment we recognise all the features made familiar by the history of
the Jewish nation in the past. Social nonconformity and aloofness
led to anti-Judaism in antiquity. To this motive of persecution the
advent of Christianity added religious rancour, and the Middle Ages
economic rivalry. The nineteenth century was destined to strengthen the
texture of hatred by the addition of a new strand--Nationalism. All
these causes, as we have seen, combined to make the Jew an object of
detestation variously disguised. In ancient Rome we found impatience
of dissent justifying itself by the pretext of regard for public
morality; in Catholic and Protestant Europe cruelty and cupidity
hallowed by the cloak of religious zeal; in modern Europe we see
narrow-minded intolerance and jealousy trying to ennoble themselves
by the title of patriotism. Each age has inherited the passions of
the past and has increased the sad inheritance by the addition of new
prejudices. In Russia modern culture spreads a little way over the face
of mediaevalism, as the waters of a river at its mouth spread over
the surface of the ocean, modifying its colour without affecting its
depths. Consequently the Jew is still persecuted for his heresy, as
well as for his usury, exclusiveness, and foreign extraction.
Russian officials and English apologists of Russian anti-Semitism will
not admit that the persecution of the Russian Jews is religious, though
acknowledging that religion, too, plays its part. They claim that it is
essentially economical and social, “and that the main cause has always
been the unhappy relation of a wandering and parasitic race, retaining
its tribal exclusiveness, to the races among which it sojourns, and on
the produce of which it feeds.”[171] This view is natural in a modern
spectator of the West; but it is not quite correct, as it implies
modern and Western conditions and sentiments in a country which only
in a small measure is modern and Western. The late Mr. Lecky wrote:
“The Russian persecution stands in some degree apart from other forms
of the anti-Semitic movement on account of its unparalleled magnitude
and ferocity.” It also stands apart, to the same degree, on account
of its origin. Jew-hatred in Russia is a thoroughly genuine survival.
In Western Europe it is largely an artificial revival. The Russian
Jews have never been emancipated from servitude, because the Russian
Christians, with few exceptions, have never been emancipated from
ignorance and bigotry. In other words, the modern term anti-Semitism,
with all its quasi-scientific connotation, can hardly be applied to
the Russian variety of the epidemic. But, be the causes what they
may, the result is the same. To the slaughtered Jew, it is a matter
of comparative indifference whether he is slain as a parasite or for
the love of Christ. The student also must be very extraordinarily
constituted who can derive any consolation from the fact that the
principles of toleration made dear to us by the experience and the
sacrifices of two thousand years, are violated in so outrageous a
manner not from religious, but from “economical and social” motives.
But, though the source of Russian antipathy to the Jew may be a matter
of dispute, there is no question as to the sincerity and the depth of
the feeling. An authority on the Jewish Question, writing in 1882,
expressed the opinion that the disasters of that and the previous
year were inevitable, and that, “unless the Jews are removed from the
countries in which they have taken place, we may certainly anticipate
their recurrence upon a much larger scale.”[172] This anticipation was
justified by subsequent events. In 1891 and 1892 new anti-Jewish riots,
encouraged by the authorities, were followed by fresh restrictive
enactments.
Many Jews who had contrived to settle in towns outside the “pale” were
driven back into it, and others within the “pale” were forced to quit
the villages and townships in which they had dwelt for years and,
leaving their property and business connections, to take up their abode
in the over-crowded larger towns. The persecution reached its climax in
the winter of 1891–92, when thousands of men, women and little children
were heartlessly expelled from Moscow, at a time of the year when even
soldiers are not suffered to drill in the open air on account of the
cold. These and other measures of unbearable harshness drove, as it was
intended that they should, about a quarter of a million of Jews out of
the Empire; and then the nations of the West, alarmed by the influx of
the destitute refugees, raised a bitter outcry against the barbarity of
the Czar.
The Czar, however, in the words of one of his own servants and
apologists, “remained deaf to protests of the Lord Mayor of London,
for example,” and declared that “he will leave unheeded any and all
such foreign remonstrances demanding a change in methods which have
been deliberately adopted.” In fact, all the measures of repression and
restriction which ignorant foreigners misrepresented as “the barbarous
expulsion of the Jews from Russia” had for their virtuous object to
prevent collision between the Jews and the peasants, to relieve the
latter from what they could not be persuaded was not a Jewish tyranny,
and, in one word, to secure good order and to maintain stability in the
community.[173] It is interesting to hear the Russian version of the
matter. Unfortunately a euphemism does not constitute a refutation.
In 1896 the Jewish Question was re-opened, and the Jews, as well as
other sufferers, ventured to hope for an improvement of their lot
from Nicholas II.’s reputed zeal for reform. Much also was expected
from “the generous and sympathetic instincts of the young Empress.”
But these expectations were not realised, and at the present hour the
country in which the race is most numerous[174] is also the country
in which it suffers most grievously. The treatment of the Jews in
Russia can be summed up in one sentence: deliberate starvation of
body and soul. The Jew, as has been seen, is loathed not only as a
non-Slav and non-Orthodox, but also as a parasite who exhausts the
organism on which he lives. Isolation, it is held, by forcing him
to feed upon himself, will kill him. The Jews are, therefore, only
allowed to reside in certain specified quarters of certain towns in
certain districts, and are forbidden to move from place to place
without special permission or such a special form of passport as is
granted to prostitutes. Overcrowding produces poverty, disease, and
all the filthy degradation of ghetto life. A faint conception of what
such life means may be formed from a recent petition to the Russian
Committee of Ministers signed by many thousands of Russian Jews: “Not
less than 20 per cent. of the entire population of the Jewish Pale of
Settlement,” say the petitioners, “are reduced to such a condition of
wretchedness that they have to be supported from charitable sources. In
great Jewish communities like those of Vilna, Berditcheff, and Odessa,
the number of the Jewish poor amounts to as much as 25 to 33 per cent.
Co-extensive with this widespread poverty there is in all the Jewish
communities an enormous labouring and artisan proletariat that knows
not to-day wherewith it may exist on the morrow. The simple weapon
which the labourer and artisan possesses in his relations with his
employer--the power of leaving his work and seeking better conditions
of employment elsewhere--has become impossible of use on account of
the limitation of freedom of movement and the prohibition of residence
elsewhere than in the few towns of the Pale of Settlement. If they do
not wish to die of hunger or go begging Jewish workmen must submit
unreservedly to the conditions prescribed by the manufacturers. The
Jewish capitalists, too, are seriously injured by the burdensome effect
of the special regulations which have, owing to the restraints of the
May laws, taken from them every freedom of action, and deprived them of
the power of disposing of their products in markets outside the Pale of
Settlement....”[175]
In addition, the Jews are confined to the most ignoble occupations.
They are excluded from the High Schools and the Universities of the
Christians, and are forbidden to keep secular schools of their own.
The only teaching accessible to the ordinary Russian Jew is Rabbinical
teaching. The centre of this education is the Talmudical School of
Walosin, known among the Jews as the “Tree of Life College,” founded
in 1803 by a disciple of Elijah Wilna, a famous Hebrew scholar, and
maintained by contributions collected from all parts of the Russian
“pale.” The institution provides spiritual and bodily food--both very
primitive in quality and meagre in quantity--to some four hundred
hungry students who spend three-fourths of their time poring over the
records of the past, and the other fourth is denouncing a present
of which they know nothing. Ignorance fosters fanaticism, and the
authority of the Synagogue which, under different circumstances, might
have been used as an instrument of conciliation, is turned into a
source of bitterness. The seed of discord between Jew and Gentile,
sown by oppression, is nursed by the benighted Rabbis, who regard
thirst for secular knowledge as more sinful than thirst for alcohol;
and the poisonous plant is assisted in its growth by the young Jews
who, having contrived to obtain abroad an education denied to them
at home, intensify the just animosity of their people against the
Christian oppressors. The ill-feeling is invigorated further still by
the Jewish recruits who, on the expiration of their term of service,
return to their families exasperated by the hardships and the insults
which they have experienced in the ranks, for the Hebrew soldier in the
Russian army is treated exactly as the Christian recruit is treated
in the Turkish Gendarmerie. In both cases, not only is promotion out
of the question,[176] but the infidels are the victims of unmeasured
invective, malice, and injury at the hands of their colleagues and
superiors. They are, as a race, considered unclean and unfriendly.
They form a small minority. They are powerless to protect themselves,
and the officers will not take them under their protection. The less
deserved the insult, the more anxious will the victim be to recover his
self-esteem by revenge. Is it, then, to be wondered at that the Russian
Jews are distinguished among their fellow-slaves for their eager
participation in any insurrectionary movement that offers the faintest
hope of relief and revenge? To turn a population which, by instinct
and interest alike, is the most conservative and peaceful in the world
into a people of anarchists is, indeed, the highest triumph hitherto
achieved by Russian statesmanship.
The hatred towards the Jew is shared by the Russian’s enemy, the
Pole, and for similar reasons--economic preponderance and excessive
addiction to usury and the trade in liquor. In 1863 the revolutionary
Government of Poland endeavoured to enlist the sympathies of the Jews
in the struggle against the common oppressor by conceding to them civic
equality. The experiment was crowned with brilliant success. Justice
turned the Jews of Poland into Polish patriots. But the reconciliation
did not outlive the revolution. After that short spell of liberty the
ancient prejudice revived, and now, though legally the Jews of Poland
are still Polish citizens, the Catholics of Poland, encouraged by their
Orthodox tyrants of Russia, vie with them in their fierce contempt for
the race which stood their common fatherland in so good stead in the
hour of its need. How intense this feeling is, may be seen from the
following account by an English eye-witness:
“To the Jew in Warsaw is meted out a wealth of disfavour and contempt
that is hardly pleasant to witness. The British stranger, however, who
normally lives far from any personal contact with these huge Jewish
populations, is not altogether in a position to pass judgment on
this deeply-seated anti-Semitic rancour. It pervades all classes of
Polish society, and finds expression in a variety of ways. The youth
who obligingly performs my minor marketing for me, in return for
a tolerant attitude on my part on the subject of small change, was
interested in the fate of an egg which I had pronounced to have passed
the age limit of culinary usefulness.
“‘Don’t throw it away,’ he begged; ‘give it to me.’
“‘What do you want it for?’
“‘Oh, it will do to throw at a Jew.’”[177]
One exception to the mutual antipathy which divides the Jew of Poland
from his Gentile fellow-countryman is offered by the upper class of the
Jews of Warsaw. While the masses of the nation, cut-off from all but
commercial intercourse with their Christian neighbours, live huddled
together in separate quarters, fed on the traditions of the past, and
observing, in dress, diet and deportment, the ordinances of the Talmud
in all their ancient strictness, a small minority of their cultured
brethren has overstepped the narrow limits of orthodox Judaism and
identified itself in all things, save creed, with the Poles, whose
national aspirations it shares and with whom it does not even shrink
from intermarrying occasionally. But this reconciliation is confined
to that infinitesimal class which, thanks to its wealth, is free from
persecution, and in temperament, sentiment, and ideas belongs to the
most advanced section of Occidental Jews rather than to the Jewry of
Eastern Europe. Besides, it is a reconciliation strenuously opposed by
the Russian authorities which, while inciting the Poles against the
Jews, encourage the Jews to cling to their exclusiveness and to resist
all Polish national aspirations as alien to them.
Yet, in spite of all disabilities, and as though in quiet mockery
of them, the Russian Jews contrive not only to exist, but, in some
degree, to prosper. Their skill, their sobriety, their industry,
their indomitable patience, their reciprocity, and their cunning--all
fostered by the persecution of centuries--enable them to hold their
own in the struggle, and to evade many of the regulations which are
intended to bring about their extinction. They often obtain a tacit
permission to live in various trading places beyond the “pale,” and
in many villages in which they have no legal right of residence.
Vocations forbidden by law are pursued by the connivance of corrupt
officials, and the despised outcasts frequently succeed in amassing
large fortunes as merchants or contractors, by the practice of
medicine, or at the Bar, or in earning a respectable livelihood as
professors and authors, and even as Government servants!
Even culture is not allowed to die out. National enthusiasm, fomented
by persecution, and denied political self-expression, finds an outlet
in literature. In spite of the State, the Church, and the Synagogue,
the darkness of the Russian ghetto is illumined by gifted writers in
prose and verse, like Perez, Abramovitch, Spektor, Goldfaden, and
others, who have invested the debased Yiddish jargon of the Russian Jew
with the dignity of their own genius, and have produced a literature
popular in form as well as in sentiment--a literature which reflects
with wonderful vividness and fidelity the humour and the sadness of
Russian life, and under a different guise carries on Mendelssohn’s
educational mission. In addition to these original works, there is a
vast activity in every department of foreign literature and science,
including translations from many European languages, and a vigorous
periodical press which disseminates the products of Western thought
among the masses of the ghetto. So that the Russian Jew has access,
through his own Yiddish, not only to works of native creation, but
also to the most popular of foreign books, great and otherwise: from
Goethe’s _Faust_ and Shakespeare’s _Hamlet_ to Sir A. Conan Doyle’s
_Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_. Side by side with these efforts to
foster the Yiddish element proceeds a movement on behalf of the Hebrew
element, while the upper classes of Polish Jews are actively promoting
Polish culture among their poorer Yiddish-speaking brethren. All these
movements, whether conducted on parallel or on mutually antagonistic
lines, supply sure evidence of one thing--the vitality of the Russian
Jewry.
This success, however, while affording consolation to the sufferers,
fans the aversion of the persecutors and spurs the Government to a
periodical renewal of the measures of coercion. It is acknowledged
that, under fair conditions, the Russian Jew, owing to his superior
intelligence, versatility, perseverance, and temperance, would in a
few years beat the Russian Christian in every field of activity. Hence
it is the Russian Christian’s interest and resolve to crush him. This
resolve is cynically avowed by Russians of the highest rank. The late
M. De Plehve, Minister of the Interior, in an audience granted to a
deputation of Jews in April, 1904, confessed with amazing candour that
the barbarous treatment of their race was dictated by no other reason
than its superiority over the Russian. “You are a superior race,” said
the Minister. “Therefore, if free entrance to the High Schools were
to be accorded to you, you would attain, although through worthy and
honest means, too much power. It is not just that the minority should
overrule the majority.” He then proceeded to inform his hearers that
he held the Jews responsible for the revolutionary agitation in the
Empire and for the murders of Imperial functionaries, concluding with a
warning and a threat, and dismissing them with the assurance, “You need
not count on obtaining equal rights with the Christian population.”[178]
The eternal feud found another tragic and characteristic expression
on a large scale in the spring of 1903. It was Easter Day. The good
Christian folk of Kishineff, the capital city of Bessarabia, had
been to church where they had heard the glad tidings of their Lord’s
resurrection, had joined in the hymn of triumph, and then had greeted
one another with the kiss of brotherly love and the salutation, “Christ
is risen!” “He is risen, indeed!” Directly after, they fell upon their
fellow-citizens--whose ancestors crucified Christ nineteen hundred
years ago. The Jewish colony was sacked, many Jews were slaughtered
without distinction of sex or age, and their dwellings, as well as
their shops, were looted. Soldiers were seen helping the rioters in the
work of destruction and carrying off their share of the spoils.
Like its predecessors, this outrage excited profound indignation in
many parts of the civilised world. Protests were raised in France, in
the United States of America, and in Australia. At Melbourne there
was held a crowded meeting, presided over by the Lord Mayor, and the
Anglican Bishop of the city moved a resolution, which was unanimously
carried, expressing “the meeting’s abhorrence of the merciless
outrages committed upon the Kishineff Jews, including helpless women
and children,” and the hope “that the Russian Government would take
effectual measures to prevent the repetition of crimes which were a
stain on humanity at large.” The Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne moved
that the resolution be transmitted to the Lord Mayor of London. Similar
resolutions were adopted at meetings held in Sydney.[179] In London
mass meetings were held at Mile-end and Hyde Park, where thousands
of Jews with their women and children assembled to record their
horror at the massacre of their Russian brethren, in their various
tongues--Russian, German, Yiddish, French, Italian, and English. All
the speakers agreed in tracing the outrages to the instigation or the
encouragement of the Russian Government. The second meeting embodied
its sentiments in the following terms:
“The meeting expresses: (1) Its deep sympathy with all the sufferers
from the riots at Kishineff, and its condolence with the relatives of
the victims. (2) Its admiration for all those who, without distinction
of nationality or creed, risked their lives in defending the helpless
Jewish population. (3) Its indignation at, and abhorrence of, the
conduct of the Russian Government, which, in order to intimidate the
revolutionary forces of the people, failed to take steps to prevent
the cowardly massacre of innocent men, women, and children. (4) Its
belief that only the development of a powerful working-class movement
in Russia can prevent the repetition of similar atrocities. This
meeting also sends fraternal encouragement to all who are working for
the overthrow of the present régime and the advent of Socialism in
Russia.”[180]
The conviction that the massacre was due to the direct inspiration of
the Russian Government was shared by others than the Jews. Dr. Barth,
the German Radical Leader, published in _Die Nation_, a Berlin weekly
journal, an unsigned paper, stated to be from the pen of a Russian
occupying a high position, in which the writer says:
“M. Plehve, Minister of the Interior, is directly responsible for the
Kishineff massacre. He is a patron of M. Kruschevan, the editor of the
anti-Semite paper _Bessarabets_, and has even granted him a subsidy of
25,000 roubles to conduct a second anti-Semite organ at St. Petersburg
called the _Znamya_. M. Plehve desired to increase the subsidy, but M.
Witte, the Minister of Finances, intervened. M. Kruschevan then, thanks
to M. Plehve’s patronage, was enabled to draw money from the National
Bank without security.”
After asserting that General von Raaben, the Governor of Bessarabia,
did nothing to avert or stop the rioting, while M. Ostragoff, the
Vice-Governor, was actually at the same time a contributor to the
_Bessarabets_, and also the censor, the writer proceeds: “M. Plehve
desires to divert Christians from their own grievances, so he conducts
a campaign of Jew-baiting. The Czar was indignant when he heard of the
massacre. He wished to send an aide-de-camp to report on the matter,
but M. Plehve managed to dissuade his Majesty, and sent instead M.
Kopuchin, one of his creatures, who drew up a mild report, which M.
Plehve further doctored before submitting to the Czar.”
Summing up, the writer says; “The Kishineff massacre has nothing to do
with revolutionary tendencies. It is simply the result of systematic
Jew-baiting, organised by M. Plehve, whose position is still unshaken,
and who holds the Czar under his thumb by working upon his feelings
and persuading him that the country is honeycombed with revolution and
anarchy. No change is possible until M. Plehve has ceased to have the
ear of the Czar. Further anti-Semitic disturbances are probable.”[181]
An American diplomatist endorses the statement that M. De Plehve was
really responsible for the massacre,[182] while a Russian Prince
affirms that the instigators of the massacre, such as the Moldavian
Kruschevan, editor of the _Bessarabets_, “were under the personal
protection of the Minister.”[183]
Despite the efforts of the Russian Government to represent the brutal
outrage as due solely to a spontaneous explosion of popular fury
arising from “national, religious, and economic hatred,”[184] certain
facts which came to light during the mock trial, held towards the end
of that year in the very scene of the massacre, seem to prove that,
though such hatred did exist, the spark which set the mine on fire was
not of popular origin. The passions of the people had been carefully
inflamed by a pamphlet entitled _Who is to blame?_--the work of an
anti-Semitic agitator of the name of Pronin, who was in relations
with the proprietor of the _Novoe Vremya_, the eloquent exponent of
Panslavism. But that was not all. Though special envoys of the Ministry
of Justice and the Ministry of the Interior kept a watchful eye on the
course of the proceedings; though the Court exerted itself to prevent
the production of undesirable evidence; and though, in true mediaeval
fashion, an attempt was made to lay the blame for the crime on the
shoulders of the victims--by stories of a Jew’s assault on a Christian
woman, of the desecration of churches and the murder of priests--yet
the evidence given, even under such conditions, without absolving the
populace, tends to establish the deliberate connivance, not to say the
complicity, of the Government.
A Christian ex-mayor of the city and another respectable citizen of
Kishineff both declared that, in their opinion, the contemptuous and
intolerant attitude of the Christian population towards the Jews is
due to the special legislation to which the latter are subjected.
The ex-mayor further stated that throughout the riots the police and
military authorities refused to intervene on behalf of the victims.
The administrator of the properties of the monasteries in Bessarabia
and two other witnesses deposed that they had repeatedly appealed to
the police to protect the Jews, but in vain. A Jew, whose son had been
butchered before his eyes, testified that he had fallen at the feet
of a police officer and, leading him to the spot where the bodies of
his son and another man were lying in pools of blood, had besought
him, with tears in his eyes, to shield the survivors. The officer did
not raise a finger in their defence. Several policemen also confessed
that, on asking for orders from their superiors, the answer they had
received was, “Let the Jews help themselves; we cannot help them.”
General Beckmann deposed that at the commencement of the riots he had
at his disposal a force amply sufficient to quell the disturbance,
but he received no orders to act. “It was only,” he said, “when the
Governor grew alarmed for the safety of the Christian population that
he took measures to allay the fury of the mob.”[185] The myth of Jewish
provocation was also disposed of by a police officer, who stated that,
when the outbreak occurred, there was not a single Jew in the square
in which the outrage was alleged to have taken place. To conclude,
“evidence was given by physicians and others as to the mutilation of
the bodies of murdered Jews, and two priests of the Orthodox Church
testified that the report that the Jews had desecrated a church and
murdered a priest was absolutely without foundation.”[186]
And the punishment for this wholesale assassination of a harmless and
defenceless population?
Two men, convicted of murder, were sentenced to seven and five years’
penal servitude respectively.
Twenty-two others to periods of imprisonment, ranging from one to two
years, and one to six months.
Forty-eight civil actions for damages that were brought against the
accused were all dismissed.[187]
Even Richard the Crusader did better in 1189.
One luminous spot in the gloomy picture is the action of the Eastern
Church. Not only did the priests and monks of Bessarabia exculpate the
Jews from all provocation of the massacre, but even Father John of
Kronstadt publicly condemned the dastardly crime of his co-religionists.
The only genuine result of the trial and of the revelations made
in its course was to intensify the wrath of the fanatical Russian
and Moldavian populace, both of the town and of the open country,
who threatened reprisals for the punishment of a few of their
brother-butchers. The fear of such reprisals forced many thousands
of the poorer Jews of Bessarabia to migrate into the districts of
Russian and Austrian Poland, which were already congested to a terrible
degree, while those who possessed the necessary means determined to
emigrate from the Czar’s dominions and seek a home in the West. While
the trial was still proceeding, a deputation of Bessarabian Jews
arrived in the city. Their object was to confer with the heads of the
Jewish community, on behalf of their co-religionists in various rural
districts of Bessarabia, with a view to leaving the country which had
declared in so sanguinary a manner its unwillingness to harbour them.
It was proposed that a number of Jewish families should emigrate to the
Argentine Republic and join their brethren, already settled in that and
other parts of America by Baron Hirsch at different times, especially
after the exodus of 1892. Four thousand souls, the delegates affirmed,
were anxious to wind up their affairs and quit the inhospitable
country.[188]
Flight, under the apprehension of slaughter, is avowed to be one of
the objects which induced the Russian authorities to connive at the
massacre and to profess their inability to prevent its repetition:
“Russian policy at the present hour,” proudly declares an eminent
Russian anti-Semite, “seems to have one object in view--that of
starting a free emigration of the Jews from Russia. But the total
number of Jewish emigrants during the last twenty years was only
about a million.”[189] Obviously, occasional slaughter alone is sadly
insufficient.
As in 1881 and 1891, so in 1903 the Czar’s ministers hastened to
supplement massacre by measures of administrative coercion. They
decided to forbid Jews, until the revision of the laws concerning them
has been accomplished by means of fresh legislation, to acquire land
or real estate, or to enjoy the usufruct thereof, either within or
without the Governments situated within the residential “pale.” This
decision of the Committee of Ministers was submitted to the Czar and
received his approval. Permission, however, was granted to the Jews to
settle and acquire real estate at places within the “pale,” which in
consequence of their industrial development partake of the character
of towns.[190] A few months later, at the moment when the Kishineff
trial was drawing to a close, the Governor-General at Warsaw issued
peremptory instructions to all the Assistant Governors in the Vistula
Province, directing them to put in rigorous force the Law of 1891,
which prohibits Jews from purchasing or leasing immoveable property in
the rural districts.[191]
This outburst of Jew-hatred was not confined to Bessarabia. Soon after
the Kishineff massacre reports reached this country of further outrages
being apprehended owing to the symptoms of anti-Semitism manifested
by the inhabitants of the western provinces of the Empire. Nor were
these forebodings falsified by events. In the middle of September,
1903, Jew-baiting was once more indulged in at Gomel, a town of
Mohileff within the Jewish “pale.” A petty squabble between a Jew and
a Christian in the bazaar afforded an excuse to the co-religionists of
the latter to wreck the Jewish quarter. Several persons were killed
on both sides; but the only details available are official, which in
Russia is not a synonym for authentic.[192]
The charge most frequently brought against the Jews by the Russian
people is, as has been shown, their aversion from productive labour,
and their exclusive attachment to traffic in goods and money. The
Russian Government some years ago attempted to remove the grievance
by affording to the Jews facilities for the pursuit of agriculture.
In seven out of the fifteen provinces open to the Jews, efforts were
made to form Jewish agricultural settlements. But they do not seem to
have been attended by conspicuous success. Towards the end of 1903 an
inquiry instituted into the matter elicited conflicting answers. Three
of the seven reports, drawn up by provincial Governors, are altogether
discouraging. It is pointed out that the Jewish peasant shirks the
hard work of tilling the soil and only helps to reap the produce. In
one province, the official document asserts, sixty per cent. of the
Jews have already abandoned the settlement and turned to the more
congenial pursuits of commerce and industry. Another report draws an
unfavourable comparison between the Jewish and the Christian farmer,
and repeats the opinion that the former takes little interest in the
culture of the soil, preferring less laborious occupations. All three
reports agree in showing that the experiment of making a husbandman of
the Hebrew is a complete failure. On the other hand, we find a fourth
Governor maintaining that in his province the only difference between
a Christian and a Jewish agriculturist consists in their respective
religions. A fifth, while admitting the Jew’s practical ill-success,
attributes it to the smallness of his farm, which forces him to give up
agriculture as profitless, and he adds that under favourable conditions
the results have been not disappointing. The Governor of Kherson states
that, though at first the Jews evinced little inclination to turn to
the land, upon the revision and improvement of the original conditions,
the settlements became more popular; so that in 1898 seventy-three per
cent. of the Jewish population were exclusively devoted to agriculture,
nineteen per cent. varied the monotony of farming by the combination of
trade, while only eight per cent. were engaged entirely in commerce or
industry. This authority expresses the conviction that, as time goes
on, the Jew will develop into a successful agriculturist, provided he
is allowed to compete on fair terms with the Christian farmers.[193]
An impartial examination of these contradictory opinions seems to lead
to the conclusion that the Jew, by nature and the education of two
thousand years, is too good a tradesman to make a good husbandman. He
is too keen-witted, too enterprising, too ambitious to find adequate
satisfaction in the slow and solitary culture of the soil. In this
respect the modern Jew is like the modern Greek. The drudgery of
field work repels him. The tedium of country life depresses him. “No
profit goes where no pleasure is ta’en.” It is in the bustle of the
market-place, where man meets man, where wit is pitted against wit,
and the intellect is sharpened on the whetstone of competition, that
his restless soul finds its highest gratification and most congenial
employment. He is a born townsman and a born traveller. He has none
of the stolid endurance of the earth-born. Although he can excel in
most pursuits, there is apparently one thing beyond the reach of his
versatility. He cannot dig.
The Russian peasant under normal conditions is the reverse of all this:
indolent, intemperate, improvident, unintelligent, and unambitious,
he lives entirely in the present, unhaunted by regrets of the past,
unharassed by plans for the future, and blissfully unaware of the
existence of any world beyond the world which his eye can see--a very
type of the earth-born, such as England knew him in the glorious
days of Chivalry and Wat Tyler. To such a race even less formidable
and foreign a competitor than the unbelieving Jew would appear a
monster of iniquity. And yet, there is abundant evidence to prove
that it is not the Russian peasant’s instinctive antipathy which is
primarily responsible for the sufferings of the Jew. The Russian Jew,
owing to his difference from the Russian Christian in race, religion,
temperament and mode of living, is by the latter regarded with contempt
and prejudice. These feelings, however, are not the only causes of
persecution. Formerly, as we have seen, the Jews were reproached with
excessive addiction to trade in liquor, whereby, it was alleged, they
ruined the peasantry in health, purse and morals. This charge, whatever
its value may have once been, can no longer be brought against the
Jews; for the Russian Government, since it established a monopoly of
spirits, has become the exclusive public-house keeper in the Empire.
The charge of usury still remains. But it can easily be proved that in
many districts the usurer is the powerful Russian landlord and not the
Jew. As a distinguished Russian Liberal has appositely remarked, “the
usurer must needs be a wealthy person--a poor devil like the Jewish
colonist settled amidst the ‘Little Russian’ peasantry may possibly
long for credit; he certainly is not in a position to give it.”[194]
According to the same authority, in “Little Russia” most of the Jewish
villagers are either shop-keepers and retail dealers, or cobblers,
tailors, smiths and the like. They form the commercial and industrial
element in the rural population, and their expulsion means economic
distress to the Russian husbandman, who, therefore, if left to himself,
is not unwilling to forgive the Jew the Old Crime, and to forget his
own prejudice against the foreigner and the follower of an abhorred
creed. But he is not left to himself. The peasant’s latent antipathy
is stirred to violence by the Nationalist agitators and Government
officials, who collaborate in endeavouring to stifle the alien and
revolutionary Jew through the brutality of the lower classes; assisted
by the artisans and mechanics who by the persecution of the foreigner
and the infidel seek the extinction of a successful competitor. All the
outbreaks of anti-Jewish hatred, from 1881 to this day, were organised
by the police authorities in accordance with a well-matured plan known
as _pogrom_. The procedure consists in deliberately inciting by word
of mouth and printed proclamations the dregs of society against the
classes or sects of the community obnoxious to the Government, and
then, when the work is done, suppressing the riot by the barbarous
methods which are so typical of Russian administration. The same
process is applied for the mutual extermination of others than the
Jews. It is a process based on the maxim _divide et impera_--the last
resource of an incompetent ruler.[195]
♦1904–05♦
The disasters which befell the Russian arms in the Far East,
the discontent which they created at home, and the danger of a
revolutionary upheaval of all the oppressed elements of the Empire
induced the Czar’s Government to reconsider its attitude towards
the suffering subjects of the Czar. The Austrian journal _Pester
Lloyd_ ventured to give some good advice to that effect: “During the
Napoleonic Wars the rulers captivated their subjects by promising
them liberty and constitutions. Whoever wishes well to Russia must
advise her to imitate the example.” In accordance with that policy of
tardy conciliation which circumstances dictated, some Russian Liberals
who had been banished for their championship of the interests of the
people were permitted to return from exile, new Governors-General were
appointed to Finland and Poland, with instructions to pursue a more
lenient policy than their predecessors, a decree was issued ordering
the Finnish Parliament to assemble, its property was restored to the
Armenian Church, and other steps were taken showing that there was
at least a desire to diminish the sources of general discontent by
conceding to necessity what had hitherto been denied to justice.
The Jews, naturally enough, could not be forgotten. Besides the
danger which, in common with the other distressed and disaffected
subjects, they constitute to the Russian State, there were less
negative reasons for their propitiation. The Russian Government was
anxious to replenish the Treasury, emptied by the unfortunate war. The
Jewish financiers of the West constitute a great power, and that power
is known to entertain a deep and abiding hostility towards Russia.
Jewish capitalists the world over are actuated by a strong desire to
avenge the wrongs of their co-religionists, and they have the means of
gratifying that desire. Once more the Jew’s wealth has proved potent
enough to blunt the edge of prejudice. The Czar’s Ministers endeavoured
to pacify the Jewish financiers by making a few trivial concessions
to their persecuted brethren. M. De Plehve in May 1904, acting in
direct contradiction to the views expressed in April, submitted to the
Council of the Empire a Bill for repealing the law under which Jews
were forbidden to reside within fifty versts of the Western frontier.
It is true that the imputation that the Bill was dictated by a Jewish
banker as an indispensable condition for a loan was strongly resented
and repudiated in official circles. The Russians, in proof of the
spontaneous nature of the proposal, declared that the Minister had,
long before the necessity for loans arose, been striving towards a
relaxation of Jewish disabilities. This statement has been partially
corroborated by a distinguished Jewish gentleman, who also affirms from
personal knowledge that M. De Plehve had for some time past endeavoured
to alleviate the lot of the Russian Jews by granting to them every
liberty--save emancipation.[196] It was added that the process had
naturally been gradual, owing to Russian social conditions, that as
early as May 1903 the Council of the Empire had passed a Bill of M. De
Plehve’s permitting the Jews to reside in 103 new places, and that 65
more had been added in the autumn. At the same time a Commission had
been appointed to examine the laws relating to the Jews, especially
those engaged in productive labour. These statements may, of course,
be literally correct. But, until M. De Plehve’s utterances of the
previous April be proved to be a forgery, it is permissible to doubt
their accuracy in so far as the Minister’s good-will towards the Jews
is concerned.
M. De Plehve was in the State what M. Pobiedonostseff was in the
Church. The Minister of the Interior, like the Imperial Procurator of
the Holy Synod, represented and led for the last two decades or more
the party of reaction. By their Panslavist followers these two men
were described as the two pillars of the patriotic edifice of Russian
national life, which is raised on the ruins of the other nationalities.
By their opponents they were denounced as the two ministering demons
of Despotism and Dogmatism under their most repulsive aspects. It
was, therefore, with no surprise that the civilised world heard on
July 28, 1904, that M. De Plehve’s name had been entered on the roll
of Russian victims to that ruthless spirit of revenge, whose cult
their own ruthlessness helps to promote. He died unlamented, as he
had lived unloved; for a tyrant has no friends. But that he was, as
an individual, the incarnate fiend that his enemies depicted, is a
theory improbable in itself, and disproved by those who came into
contact with him. At the very worst he may have been an ambitious man
who, by pursuing the course which he did, “sought to win the favour of
the reactionary faction which at present controls the Czar, and thus
to fight his way towards the highest power.”[197] But a less severe
estimate would, perhaps, be nearer the true one. M. De Plehve was
the champion of an ideal. He honestly believed that in autocracy lay
Russia’s salvation. Though surrounded by dangers, and warned by the
fate of his former master Alexander II., of his predecessor Sipyaghin,
of his instrument in the oppression of Finland Bobrikoff, and of many
of his colleagues and subordinates, he unflinchingly persevered in
the path which he had marked out for himself. A man who imperils his
own life in the pursuit of a certain object is not the man to treat
with tenderness those who strive to thwart him. M. De Plehve’s object
was to silence opposition to the principles of autocracy. He pursued
that object with the unswerving firmness of a strong man, and crushed
the obstacles with the relentless conscientiousness of one who is
absolutely convinced of the righteousness of his cause. To such a man
political virtue means thoroughness combined with an utter lack of
scruple and a total disregard of all moral restraint in the service of
the State and the pursuit of its welfare. He was engaged in a game the
stakes of which were greatness or death. He lost it.
But though the dispassionate student can have nothing but pity for a
brave man perishing in the performance of what he deemed to be his
duty, he can also sympathise with those who hailed their arch-enemy’s
death with savage delight. They saw in M. De Plehve, not a tragic
character drawing upon himself the vengeance of an inexorable Atê, but
only the merciless Minister, the oppressor of those who differed from
him in their political ideals, the executioner of men whose sole crime
was their loyalty to the faith of their fathers and the traditions
of their race. As the lawyer Korobchevsky said before the Court, in
defence of the assassin: “The bomb which killed the late Minister of
the Interior was filled, not with dynamite, but with the burning tears
of the mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters of the men whom he sent
to the gallows, or to die slowly in prison or in Siberia.”
Among the sufferers from M. De Plehve’s policy none had greater reasons
to hate him than the Jews. He regarded them, not without cause, as the
most energetic opponents to his autocratic schemes, and his antipathy
towards them on that account was enhanced by his just appreciation
of their abilities. Hence the exceptional rigour in his treatment of
them. M. De Plehve used to refer to the revolutionary activity of the
Jewish youth as a justification for his own measures of coercion. That
the Jews should be ready to join, or even lead, in every attempt to
overthrow the social and political system under which they suffer so
grievously is only natural. Equally natural it is that the man to
whom that system was everything should have tried to suppress them.
The Kishineff massacre, as we have seen, was universally attributed
to M. De Plehve, and when the news of his assassination went forth
few surpassed the Jews in their exultation. The Jewish daily paper
_Forward_, of New York, immediately organised a meeting under the
auspices of the United Russian Revolutionists. The demonstrators filled
one of the largest halls in New York to overflowing, and at every
mention of M. De Plehve’s assassin, Sazonoff, burst into delirious
applause. He was praised as the worthy son of a noble cause; his victim
was described as the captured Port Arthur of Russian despotism, and the
interference of the police alone checked the enthusiasm.[198]
But, even granting the spontaneity and the disinterestedness of the
concessions which the Russian Government declared itself prepared to
make to the Jews, they would have only affected a limited number of
them. M. De Plehve’s plan at best was to bring about the conciliation
of the race by the absorption of the better class of them and by the
half-hearted application of some palliatives to the grievances of
the poorer, such as the enlargement of the area within which they
are confined, and permission to emigrate.[199] The experiment in
assimilation, of which the Baltic provinces, Poland and Finland,
supplied a sample, was not one that commended itself to the Jews. But,
even if it succeeded, the vast majority of the race would continue in
their normal state of slavery. The same remark applies to a remedial
scheme drafted and adopted a few weeks later by a departmental
conference presided over by M. De Witte. The Financial Minister’s
association with the step lent colour to the suspicion that this
newly-awakened benevolence towards the Jew was not foreign to Russia’s
anxiety to procure fresh supplies of money by the assistance of Jewish
bankers abroad. However that may be, the measures taken do not seem to
have produced any marked effect on the condition of the Russian Jews.
That relief which the wretched people could not gain from the Czar’s
compassion, they failed to obtain even from his fears.
On Aug. 4, 1904, anti-Semitic disturbances broke out at Ostrowez,
in the Government of Radom, where, according to private statements,
twenty Jews were killed; according to the Russian authorities, one
was seriously wounded, and died the following day, while twenty-two
persons were slightly injured. The same official account ascribes the
disturbances to the fact that a Jewish boy struck a Christian--the
blow, it is said, was exaggerated to murder, and the mob set out to
revenge themselves on the Jews. At Partscheff also, in the Government
of Siedlce, on the following day, it was said that hundreds of Jews
perished. The official version of the occurrence stated that “the
police dispersed, without using force, a crowd of Jews who had
assembled to hide a baptized Jew. In a scuffle that ensued twenty
persons were wounded.”[200] On September 4 and 5 anti-Semitic riots
occurred at Smela, in the Province of Kieff. This is the official
account: “A Jewish shopkeeper struck a peasant woman whom he suspected
of having stolen some cloth. Immediately a crowd collected, and
plundered and sacked one hundred houses and one hundred and fifty shops
belonging to Jews. That evening a party of sixty Jews attacked and beat
the Christian inhabitants. When the Jews began to fire on the latter
the police were summoned, who made use of their revolvers, wounding
two persons. The next evening several hundred railway employés, in
spite of the prohibition of the officials, went by train to Smela from
the adjacent station of Bobrinskaia. The rioting was renewed, and the
troops were summoned. The soldiers made use of their weapons, and five
persons were seriously wounded, while a large number were slightly
injured. Many arrests were made.”[201] In reading these official
statements one must constantly bear in mind the Russian Government’s
desire to minimise a misfortune or a misdeed which they dare not deny.
A few days later, on September 11, on the occasion of the Jewish New
Year, another anti-Jewish disturbance occurred at Sosnowice, a town
on the Siberian frontier. A number of boys threw stones at some Jews
who were engaged in their annual ceremony, slightly injuring a child.
This gave rise to a rumour that the Jews had killed a child. Numbers
of workmen marched through the streets in the evening, smashing the
window-panes of Jewish dwelling-houses and of the synagogue. Several
Jews were injured by stones or knives. Doctors were afraid to render
assistance to the injured, owing to the attitude of the mob.[202]
Hardly a month had passed since the last-mentioned event, when a
new outrage occurred in Mohileff. The following is a condensed
description of the occurrence by a well-qualified observer who supports
his statements by references to numerous witnesses: A political
demonstration in the town of Mohileff took place exactly one week
before the anti-Jewish riots. In Russia it is a crime for even four men
to come together in a private room without the knowledge and permission
of the police, and it is, therefore, a heinous atrocity for a crowd
to gather in the streets for a political purpose. Yet that is what
happened on October 15 in Mohileff. The Jewish workmen of the place
assembled by way of protesting against the cruelty of the police, who,
without a word of warning, had shot down harmless and unarmed Hebrew
working women and men; and against the unjust condemnation to twelve
years’ penal servitude of their comrades in Yakootsk; and they recorded
their wish that the war should stop. A few policemen advanced against
the workmen and tried to disperse them, but were themselves scattered
by the crowd. Then an overwhelming police force marched against the
malcontents, but to their disgust found nobody. At this the Prefect of
the Police of Mohileff determined that, during the mobilisation which
was to take place in a few days, from Tsukermann’s synagogue to the
railway station the Jews should be thrashed until not a stone remained
on the pavement.
On October 22 the mobilisation of the Reserves was promulgated.
According to law, the vodka-shops should have been shut on this
occasion, and the Jewish population had earnestly petitioned the
authorities to insist on that precaution against disorders being
observed. But the shops were opened. To the Jewish Reserve soldiers,
who had assembled by order of the military authorities, the Police
Prefect addressed the following remarkable words in the presence of a
great crowd: “You contemptible Jews! You are all foreign democrats!
You ought to kiss the hands and feet of the Christians! You have been
beaten too little as yet! You must be thrashed again!”
“We may pitch into the Jews and loot their shops,” the fellows said;
“there will be no punishment. The police allow it; hurrah!” The
subsequent attitude of the police amply bore out this expectation. At
three p.m. a band of petty local traders, not reserves, who had been
steadily gathering since morning, and were now led by striplings, swept
across the city, crying, “Pitch into the Jews!” and belabouring all
passing Jews with cudgels and stones. That day, however, the matter
did not go beyond the assaulting of individuals and the breaking of
windows. But none the less several persons were grievously wounded and
disfigured in the presence of the police, who looked on approving.
The next morning, Sunday, October 23, the panic-stricken Jews sent a
deputation to the Police Prefect to petition for help and to have the
dram-shops closed. The Prefect consulted the Governor, and then told
the petitioners that he had been authorised to use his own judgment.
This answer was construed as a promise that the taverns would not be
opened. But shortly before noon notices were posted up in the streets,
signed by the Police Prefect himself, informing the public that the
reports to the effect that on the day before there had been disorders
in the town, in the course of which several persons had been grievously
wounded, were misleading. What had really happened was “an ordinary,
insignificant street brawl.” This meant that the deeds of violence
already done were but the flowers, and that the fruits were yet to come.
And they came a few minutes later. On the stroke of twelve all the
brandy shops were opened, and already at one o’clock the sanguinary
battle began. Everything had been organised beforehand. In all
there were about one hundred houses and twenty-five shops plundered
and gutted. A crowd of about 150 men did the business: sacked the
jewellers’ shops, looted the wares, broke the windows and doors of
private houses which were tenanted by Jews, and maltreated the people.
They chose the poorest quarters of the city for the scene of their
depredations, but they advanced to the centre of the town as well. The
unfortunate Jews implored the police to intervene and save them, but
these were the replies they received: “Be off to your democrats! Let
them help you.” “That will teach you to beat the police.” “You have not
been thrashed enough yet; when your throats are being cut we shall see.”
The few Jews who dared to defend themselves were arrested and beaten by
the police, who refused to lay a finger upon the hooligans. One witness
says: “None of the rioters were arrested; but the police said to them,
‘Lads, that’s enough. Now you can go to another place.’”
Why, it may be asked, did the police behave so cruelly and, one may
add, so treacherously towards the Jews? The motives are well known, for
the Police Prefect himself avowed them. Among the witnesses whom the
writer produces in proof of that statement there is one whose words are
well worth noting:
“The Police Prefect sent for me on October 24, and said: ‘You Jews are
being beaten on three grounds. In the first place, you sneak off to
America, and our Russians have to spill their blood instead of you.
Secondly, you are not devoted to the autocracy, and you cry, “Down with
the autocracy!” And in the third place, you have no liking for the
police, and you beat the members of the force.’”
During the height and heat of the riots a deputation from the Jewish
community called upon the Governor, Klingenberg, and respectfully
petitioned him to shield the Jews from the rioters. And the Czar’s
highest representative made answer: “That sort of thing happens
everywhere. I cannot set a soldier to guard every Jew.” And as for the
police, the Governor publicly praised their exemplary conduct, and a
money gratification was given them! Yet the police were morally bound
to save the Jews. Doubly bound, indeed, for, besides their duty to the
Czar, they were bribed by the Jews to protect them. Bribed to do their
duty!
The accusations made against the Jews, and made especially for foreign
consumption, are chiefly these: They sell vodka to the reserve soldiers
at exorbitant prices and thus incense these men, who naturally avenge
themselves by pillaging Jewish shops and houses. They evade military
service, and then Orthodox Russians have to serve in lieu of the Jewish
deserters. That, of course, embitters the Christian recruits and
explains their conduct. These accusations are serious and would, of
course, explain everything except the conduct of the police--if they
were true. But they are false, and not false only, but impossible, as
every Russian knows.
In the first place, it was not reserves who attacked the Jews, but
local loafers and hooligans. In the second place, the Jews could not
raise the price of alcohol, nor sell it at all, because it is the
Imperial Government which alone sells vodka, having a monopoly of
it. In the third place, the Christians have not to serve in the army
in lieu of Jews. The latter are bound to provide a certain number of
reserves, and for all of them who desert the Jewish community must find
members of the same faith. In like manner, Russians must take the place
of fugitive Russians, not of Jews.
Lastly, there remains the charge of desertion. Is it true? Yes, quite
true; but then it is true of Christians and Jews alike, for the war
was very unpopular. The interesting part of the story is that the
Christians shirked their duty far more extensively and successfully
than the Jews. That can be proved by figures, and the following data
are not likely to be challenged by anyone. Before the reserves were
called out at all the total of Jews in the Manchurian army was roughly
thirty thousand men. In all probability it exceeded that number, the
bulk of them serving in Siberian regiments. It is as well, however, to
state the case moderately. Now, since the mobilisation of the reserves
(in the districts where the Jewish element is largely represented,
such as Vilna, Odessa, Warsaw, Kieff), the active Russian army had no
less than fifty thousand soldiers of the Jewish faith. And that is an
enormous percentage. Indeed, so abnormally great is that percentage of
Jews that, if the other nationalities who acknowledge the sway of the
Czar, contributed a proportionate number of soldiers, Kuropatkin’s army
would have numbered approximately one million!
And the people who thus shed their blood more freely than the Christian
Russians would be excusable if they deserted _en masse_, because the
Jews enjoy none of the privileges accorded to the Russians, and they
could not therefore be blamed if they refused to look upon Muscovy
as their fatherland. But, in spite of the injustice done them by the
Czar’s Government, they generously gave their lives to the Czar. And
the Czar’s agents in return egged on the hooligans of all Southern and
Western Russia to pillage, burn, and destroy Jewish property, and to
beat and kill Jewish men and women.[203]
These experiences and the apprehension of massacres on a larger scale
have impelled the Jews to form a great revolutionary association for
organised resistance to the organised forces of their enemies. A secret
society--already notorious as the _Bund_--arose in Lithuania, whence it
spread to Poland and other parts of the Russian Empire. Its aims are
to foster Jewish national feeling and to protect Jewish interests. But
the protection which this body could afford the victims of deliberate
persecution was necessarily limited. If it rescued them from occasional
slaughter, it could not defend them against chronic starvation.
Consequently, the exodus, especially from the Province of Mohileff,
continued: The emigrants were, for the most part, Jewish young people
of both sexes, who, not having any means of existence, left the towns
and villages. Some villages even became quite deserted. In the town
of Mohileff itself, where there are no factories of any kind or
industrial or commercial undertakings except shops which are held by
Jews, business was quite suspended.[204] Within the next five months no
fewer than 75,160 Russian Jews arrived in New York alone.[205]
How this readiness to quit hearth and home, in order to seek a new
life under unknown skies in the furthest corners of the earth, carries
us back across the ages to the flight of Israel from Egypt! To the
Russian Jews groaning in servitude the Czar’s Empire is a foreign
land; his religion a foreign religion. In leaving Russia they leave
a hotbed of idolatry as fierce, as cruel, as Godless as the idolatry
of Egypt, Babylon, Syria, or Rome. To them the Russian god who can
sanction such persecution is a veritable Moloch. He can claim no
kinship with Jehovah. They owe it to themselves to escape from the
house of bondage, and to their God to continue bearing witness to His
unity. They, therefore, like their remote ancestors, seek freedom of
worship by expatriation. Treated as aliens in their native country,
they renounce it with as little regret as if they had not been born and
bred in it. There are, of course, both in Poland and in Russia proper
Jews who would gladly conform in everything except religion. Such Jews
deplore the estrangement of the Jew from the Gentile, and believe that
the lot of the former can be improved only by the removal of the legal
restrictions which perpetuate that estrangement. According to them, if
the Jews were allowed to mingle freely with the other inhabitants of
the Empire, they would in time lose all those characteristics which
mark them off as a people apart, and become patriotic subjects of
the Czar. But the Russian Government in its persecution of the race
makes no invidious distinctions between these “Assimilators” and their
sterner brethren. The Jew who ventures to advise assimilation alienates
his friends without conciliating his masters. By its indiscriminate
severity the Russian autocracy feeds the old spirit of dogged
resistance, sullen resentment, and inflexible arrogance.
It also feeds, as might have been expected, the old dream of Redemption
and national rehabilitation. The Russian Ghetto at the present day
is the citadel of Hebrew orthodoxy and the recruiting ground for the
Zionist movement of which we shall speak in the sequel. It is natural
that it should be. The Jew in the Empire of the Czars finds little or
no scope for development. As we have seen, he is debarred from holding
real property, from pursuing liberal professions, from engaging in
many trades. He is a stranger in the land of his birth, an outcast
among his fellow-countrymen. Chronic contempt and oppression are only
relieved by periodical massacre. Forbidden to be a citizen, he cannot
be a patriot. He has no life in the present. He, therefore, lives in
the future. He is an uncompromising idealist. The same conditions which
deprive him of all inducement to national assimilation also encourage
his religious and social separatism. The intolerance of his Christian
neighbours reacts on his own bigotry. If politically he lives on hopes,
religiously he lives on traditions. Amidst all his calamities, the Jew
of the Russian Ghetto is sustained by the expectation that the real
history of his race is still to come. He believes that the ruins of
the Temple will one day prove the foundations of new greatness. While
awaiting the fulfilment of the ancient prophecies, he clings to the
tribal distinctions, to the ceremonial laws, and to all those rules of
omission and performance which tend to perpetuate his self-isolation.
In the West the Jews have, as patriotic citizens of various states,
succeeded, by generous concessions quite compatible with true loyalty
to their traditions, in the effort to reconcile the old Jewish life
with modern political conditions. In Russia the Jews are denied the
opportunity. But they still love the land. Therein lies the irony and
the hope.
Such is the lot of Israel in Russia. It is hardly better on the western
side of the Pruth--in that other European country which within three
days’ journey of London continues the Middle Ages.