The Slav and the Jew--The Slav's Envy and Jealousy of the Jew.
Now that I have had a glimpse of Russia, you ask me, "Why is the Slav
always so eager to do to death the Jew?" Wherefore this hatred which
so constantly flames out in grievous pillage and wanton murder and
blood-thirsty massacre of the children of Israel?
You say to me that in America for two centuries we have had the Jew;
that we now have millions of Jews, and that they are patriotic and
loyal citizens of the Republic; that Jews sit in our highest courts
and render able and fair decisions, enter the senate of the United
States and sit in congress, are sent to West Point and Annapolis and
prove themselves devoted and efficient officers of the army and navy,
are lawyers and doctors and distinguished members of the learned
professions; that they display intelligence, industry and thrift, and
are among the foremost citizens of the Republic, and that many of
these Jews, or their fathers and mothers, have come direct from
Russia. And you ask me "Why is it then that within the dominion of the
Czar the Slav makes such constant war upon the Jew?"
If I were briefly to sum up my impressions of the real cause of the
Slav's hatred of the Jew, I should say, JEALOUSY and ENVY, and then
ask you to remember that the Slav is yet at heart a semi-Asiatic and a
barbarian.
When journeying from St. Petersburg to Moscow the Russian
lieutenant-colonel said to me: "In America you select real men for
Presidents of whom Roosevelt is the finest type, but in France the
JEWS and financiers set up their tool for President." In a nut shell
this high Russian officer expressed the feeling of his own race toward
the Jew. The Jew is a Jew and the Jew is a financier. The Russians are
jealous of his acquired wealth and of his ability to gather it and
they hate him.
A few days later, traveling from Moscow to Warsaw, we found ourselves
sitting in a dining car with an elaborate bill of fare before us and
yet we were like to starve right then and there. The menu was printed
in Russian; the attendants and waiters talked nothing but Russian. We
knew no Russian and spoke in English, in German, in French, in Danish
without avail. The servants just stood there shaking their heads and
saying, "_Nyett, Nyett_." ("No, No.") We were famishing but could
order no food. Just then a tall woman of courtly manner, elegantly
gowned, came toward us from another table and said in perfect English
that she had long lived in London, though now she resided in Russia,
and then, giving our orders to the waiters, she saved us from
impending famine. She afterward told me that her passport had lapsed,
and that the Russian Government now refused to let her leave Russia
because she was a Jewess, while at the same time, they forbade her to
remain longer in Moscow, she having recently become a widow, and under
the harsh laws of Russia thereby lost her right of domicile within the
city. She hoped to escape to America by bribing the officials at the
border.
At Vilna, I fell into acquaintance with a young Pole from Warsaw, who
spoke seven languages and among them German and English fluently,
although he had never been outside the dominions of the Czar. He was a
strict Jew, and he expressed great surprise when I assured him that in
America a Jew is treated just the same as a Christian. He said he had
heard that to be indeed really the fact, and he expressed the
intention of some day coming to America to see for himself. He seemed
both perplexed and gratified when he found that I showed him the same
consideration I did my Gentile acquaintances.
In Moscow we drove past the imposing front of the great Jewish
Synagogue. The doors were barred. The structure was falling into
decay. I learned that it had been closed for nigh twenty years by
order of the Imperial Governor of Moscow, Prince Vladimir, uncle of
the Czar; nor might any Synagogue now be opened in Moscow; nor might
any Jew now worship in any edifice; nor might any outside Jew now come
and live in Moscow; nor might any Jew living in Moscow come back if
he had once left the limits of the city; nor might he own any land in
the city, nor practice a profession; nor might he marry a Christian,
nor might a Christian marry him. The Jews were also subjected to extra
and particular special taxes, arbitrarily levied and collected by the
autocratic government. The Jew, right here in "Holy Moscow," soul and
heart-center of the vast Russian Empire, was pillaged under the
autocratic rule of the Czar, persecuted under the hand of the Holy
Orthodox Church, plagued and preyed upon by a perpetually jealous and
malevolent populace.
The Russian army officer sneering at Monsieur Loubet, President of
France, whom he called the "tool of Jews and Financiers;" the courtly
Jewish lady; the intelligent Jewish merchant of Warsaw, who was so
much astonished that I should show him the courtesy of an equal, the
lowly _izvostchik_ driving me in his _droschky_ and pointing out the
closed and moldering Synagogue; each and all discovered in their
divers ways the attitude of the Slav toward the Jew; and the officer
revealed in his criticism of the ruler of Russia's ally, the Republic
of France, the real underlying secret cause of the Russian's animosity
and hatred of the Jew. That cause of hatred is the Jew's ability to
prosper without and in spite of the fostering care of the autocracy.
The Jew was a cultivated citizen-of-the-world when the Slavic
ancestors of the Russian were unlettered nomads roving the illimitable
wastes of Scythia. In the temples and libraries of ancient Egypt
the Jew acquired the culture and the learning of the Pharaohs; amidst
the palaces and hanging-gardens of Imperial Babylon and Nineveh the
Jew learned the arts and the sciences of the Assyrian and Persian;
Plato and Aristotle and the Greek philosophers recognized in the Jew a
spiritual culture of exalted type, and granted him to possess a
learning as encompassing as their own; the Roman, practical, and
master of the then known world, paid homage to the cultivated
intelligence of the Jew.
[Illustration: CATCHING A KOPEEK--A BEGGAR.]
The monotonous plains of Russia were yet filled with nomadic hordes of
pagan barbarians when Cordova was a paved city, its streets
illuminated by night, its libraries and its University the center of
the most advanced learning of the age; when the gigantic and splendid
cathedrals of England and France were everywhere raising their mighty
walls and spires for the perpetual glory of God and the inspiration of
mankind; when the fleets of Lisbon and Genoa were discovering the
farthest and most distant splendors of the Orient and Occident; when
Venice was mistress of Byzantium and Florence patron of Rome; when
Hebrew savants, under the benign influence of Saracen rule, were among
the most learned and renowned leaders of Moslem science; when the
Israelites of Italy and France were intermarried among the proudest of
the nobility and were even counselors of Kings; when Hebrew learning
and Hebrew wealth gave added momentum to the impulse of the
Renaissance. While during the centuries of the world's reawakening,
even as during the preceding centuries of the Crusades, just as
throughout the long duration of the dominion of Rome and of the
Eastern Empire, the Jew was ever recognized for his learning, culture
and wealth.
When St. Cyril and his Byzantine monks, in the seventh century, gave
Greek Christianity to the Russian Pagan, the Russian yet remained
content with outward forms and ceremonies. He continued pagan at heart
and persevered in worshiping the ancient ghosts and spirits, even as
in many parts of Russia he does to-day. He put on a Christian coat,
but he kept his pagan hide; and the Russian Orthodox Christian has
always remained a semi-pagan.
The great mass of the Russian people were serfs sold with the land up
to 1860, when Alexander II gave them nominal freedom, but a freedom
without lands and without schools; a so-called freedom which has left
the individual peasant, the _mujik_, as landless, as bitterly poor, as
benightedly ignorant to-day as he was a thousand years ago; nor does
the autocratic-bureaucracy of the Czar give him hope of a better day.
I journeyed through some of the richest farming lands in Russia, and
the farmers, the _mujiks_, whom I saw tilling the soil, plowing and
digging in the fields, were so poor that their feet were wrapped in
plaited straw, too impoverished to afford the luxury of a leathern
boot! The government absorbs all the profits of the crops in payment
for these lands and in taxes, as return for having made the _mujiks_
nominal owners of the soil and emancipating them from serfdom.
On the other hand, the nobles are forbidden by caste spirit and
tradition to enter into any career except the service of the state.
The younger nobles and ruling breeds among the Russian people are all
sucked into the employ of the state by the maelstrom of bureaucracy.
The youths of the nobility and gentry, and the more or less educated
classes, must enter the navy, the army, and the service of the state.
A government job for life is their only hope. They are not permitted
to make money for themselves independently; they can only make money
for the government of the Czar and for themselves through "Graft."
The government wishes to do everything in Russia. It deliberately
invades the spheres of private enterprise; it deliberately seeks all
the profit; it deliberately destroys the ambition and the power of the
person; it deliberately annihilates and stifles individual initiative.
In Russia, the government runs all the railroads, most of the mines,
many of the iron mills. It raises cotton; it raises wheat; it farms
and it manufactures. It buys and sells. It runs all the telegraphs and
telephones and express business. It opens all private letters and
reads all the printed books and newspapers. It permits no letter to go
through the mails, nor book nor newspaper to be read, which it deems
to express sentiments inimical to the supremacy of the autocracy. I
was threatened with imprisonment in Russia for snapping a kodak
without government permit. I was under police and military supervision
and escort all the time I traveled in Russia, even short as it was.
Nor did I dare to send a letter to America from Russia, but wrote my
thoughts with locked doors, and mailed my writings only when safe
beyond the eye of the Russian government spy.
Thus we find that, on the one hand, the peasantry are crushed, thrust
down and pitilessly held in ignorance and superstition and bitter
poverty; on the other hand, all the best ability and brains of the
governing classes are commandeered into the army, or navy, or
life-long government service, and with meager salaries and small pay.
The big grafts, the soft snaps, the juicy chances must all belong to
the government and flow into the coffers of the Czar to keep fat and
easy the Imperial family and the swarms of parasitic tid-bit hunters
who leech them.
But even in autocratic Russia, the grasping clutch of autocracy cannot
hold up all the avenues of commerce, however far-reaching its embrace
may be. Hence, in those lines of enterprise, not absorbed and
appropriated by the government, there is left open a clear path to
whosoever may have the acumen to seize the opportunity. Here is the
chance of the Jew. Endowed with a keen and subtle intellect, educated
by his own masters often to the highest training of the intelligence
and disciplined by the hardships of persecution, he is at once an
overmatch for the ignorant, brutal, poverty-haunted _mujik_, and fully
the equal of the best breeds of governing Slavs. Those intellects
which are the equals of his own are not in competition with him. The
ablest of the Slavs are earning a small salary in the army, in the
navy, or as government officials; making what they can for themselves
by more or less open graft, it is true, but without the incentive of
other personal gain. So the Jew gets on in Russia. This progress is in
spite of the jealousy and the hatred and the pillaging hand of the
envious Slav.
[Illustration: A COLD DAY.]
[Illustration: ALONG THE RIVER MOSKVA, MOSCOW.]
There is, here and there, considerable wealth among many of the Jews
in Russia. This is not true of all the Jews. Most of the Jews are
poor, frightfully poor, made and kept so by the laws; but there is
wealth among some of the Jews. The few wealthy Jews do not always keep
these riches within the dominions of the Czar. The Russians complain
that the rich Jews, while making their money in Russia, yet lay it up
in the banks of Berlin, of Vienna, of Paris and particularly of
London. When a Russian Governor wishes to squeeze a little extra
pocket money out of the Jews of his district, his city, his province,
he cannot always lay hands on their money hoards. Sometimes, then, he
lets the street urchins plague them a little; the squeezed and squalid
peasant is allowed to vent his envy of their wealth, even to knocking
a Jew down; now and then, these meanly-minded boys, these
pinch-bellied peasants get out of hand and, stung by their blood
lust, too hastily massacre more Jews than the Governor intended. This
is about the size of the job that Governor Von Raaben found to his
credit in Kischineff. The poor Jews suffered for the prosperity of
their rich brethren. The embittered and down-crushed _mujik_, galled
and soured by reason of his own hapless and seemingly hopeless
condition, vented his spleen at the first handy object, and the Jew
was handier, though not more hated, than the uniformed official of the
governing autocracy.
The Russian, as an individual, is of a kindly nature. He is good to
his wife, good to his children, good to his beasts. He has none of the
Roman-Spanish pitilessness to dumb creatures. But the Russian, after
all, is an Asiatic. The old saying, "Scratch a Russian and you'll find
a Tartar," is as true to-day as when the Cossacks of Catherine II
impaled and crucified men and women and children of the fleeing Mongol
horde, when these simply sought to migrate beyond the hectoring reach
of Russian rule.
No bloodier chapter mars the annals of history than that of the
Russian slaughter of nigh the entire Tekke Turkoman race in her
warfare of 1881 on the shores of the Caspian, at Geok Tepe, when seven
thousand women and children were stricken down in cold blood as they
fled from Kuropatkin's ruthless Cossacks.
Nor is the world done shuddering yet at the atrocious barbarities
under General Gribski, Governor of Blagoveschensk, who commanded
the deliberate drowning of the Chinese inhabitants of that city but a
few years ago, in 1898, and in a season of prevailing peace, drove
them before the knouts and bayonets of his Cossacks into the hopeless
waters of the river Amoor by unnumbered thousands, old men and women
and little children, so that for many weeks, nay months, the great
river was so choked with the swollen bodies of the dead that
navigation was at a standstill.
[Illustration: A RUSSIAN JEW.]
No Roman sack and pillage of a conquered city, not even the taking and
wreck of Jerusalem by Titus and his legions, equals in horror and cold
blood these late Russian slaughters; not even the fire and sword of
Attila and his avenging Huns wrought such woe and terror as have been
wrought in these recent years by the servants of the Czar; nor are the
tormented souls of Alva and his Spanish veterans more deeply marked
with blood-soaked scars than is the Russian autocracy of to-day; nor
mediaeval, nor modern times, nor pagan, nor Moslem warfare, have known
so monstrous a series of godless massacres of helpless humankind as
those now standing to the credit of the Russian autocracy during the
last twenty-five years.
The crime of Kischineff is no more heinous than have been the
slaughters of Geok Tepe, Blagoveschensk and a thousand lesser human
killings, nor more heart-sickening than were those awful visitations
of Slavic blood-lust upon creatures defenseless, helpless, abjectly
terror-struck. It is only that it was committed in a season of
profound peace, against a peaceful people, and at a time when all the
world had the leisure to hear the dying wails of the hapless women and
helpless children raped and ravished and torn asunder in the open day.
Notwithstanding these crimes which mar the pages of recent Russian
history, none would be more astonished than the Russian himself, if he
were made aware of the world-wide condemnation these crimes provoke.
He would protest against so harsh an estimate of Russian conquest; at
most, when confronted with the facts, he would shrug his shoulders and
urge that the responsibility lies not upon Holy Russia, but upon those
who oppose her destiny to conquer and absorb. The thoughtful Russian
will declare that after all it is no more than the inevitable struggle
of the survival of the fittest, and demonstrate that there are no
feuds of race, other than the universal hatred of the Jew, within the
dominions of the Czar.
From the Russian viewpoint these arguments are not unreasonable; the
vast military establishment upon which rests the autocracy,
necessitates foreign wars with weaker peoples, if for no other reason
than to keep a busied soldiery from thinking too much upon grievances
at home; through commercial expansion in Asia, won by bayonet and
sword, the autocracy has sought to secure compensation for the
suppression of commercial opportunity at home!
The problems of Russia are, after all, economic rather than racial,
and it is up to Russia to solve these in accordance with the
lessons and example of the enlightened nations of the west; let the
nobility and educated classes, who are now sucked into and absorbed by
the bureaucracy, take full part in the commercial and industrial life
of the empire and receive full reward for the exercise of their
energy, intelligence and skill; let them lift from the _mujik_ the
crushing weight of the Imperial taxes, divide with him the almost
illimitable acreage of the Imperial domain; and leave to him his fair
share of the earnings won by his sweat and toil, and there will be no
more Geok Tepes, Blagoveschensks, nor Kischineffs, nor will there be
longer hatred of the Jew.
[Illustration: TAKEN IN RUSSIA--TAKEN IN AMERICA. JEWISH TYPES.]