History of the Jews in Russia and Poland Volume I Part 27

At the same time the Government set out again to realize its devout consummation--the expulsion of the Jews from the villages and hamlets already provided for by the Statute of 1804, though suspended for a time when the cruelty of the measure spelling ruin to tens of thousands of Jewish families had become apparent. The arguments by means of which the Jewish Committee had endeavored in 1812 to convince, and finally did convince, the Government of the impracticability of such a migration of nations, were blotted out from memory. The local and central authorities were again on the war path against the Jews. To renew the campaign against the rural Jews, the methods which had been tried with success in the time of Dyerzhavin were again resorted to. When, in 1821, hapless White Russia was again stricken by a famine, which affected the Jews to a considerable extent, the local n.o.bility was once more on the alert, placing the whole responsibility for the ruin of the peasantry on the Jewish tenants and saloon-keepers. The landlords proposed that the Government expel all the Jews from the province or at least forbid them to sell spirits in the rural settlements, since the Jews "lead the peasants into ruin." The local authorities, in reply to an inquiry of Senator Baranov, who had been dispatched from St. Petersburg to White Russia, expressed a similar opinion.

The question was first brought up before the Committee which was charged with the task of giving relief to the Governments of White Russia, and included several ministers, among them the all-powerful Arakcheyev. The Relief Committee approved the restrictive project of the n.o.bility, and so, a little later, did the Committee of Ministers. The result was a stern ukase of the Tzar, addressed, on April 11, 1823, to the governors of White Russia, to the following effect:

(1) To forbid the Jews in all the settlements of the Governments of Moghilev and Vitebsk to hold land leases, to keep public houses, saloons, hostelries, posts, and even to live in them [in the villages], whereby all farming contracts of this kind are to become null and void by January 1, 1824. (2) To transplant all the Jews in these two Governments from the settlements into the cities and towns by January 1, 1825.

In signing this ukase, which spelled sorrow and misery for thousands of families, Alexander I. gave verbal instructions to the Committee of Ministers, to point out to the White Russian Governor-General Khovanski "ways and means of obtaining employment and designating sources of livelihood for the local Jews in their new places of abode." But no "ways and means" of any kind could mitigate the misery of people doomed to expulsion from their old nests and reduced to beggary and vagrancy.

Immediately on the receipt of the ukase the local authorities embarked upon their task with relentless cruelty. By January, 1824, over twenty thousand Jews of both s.e.xes had been driven from the villages of both Governments. Hordes of hapless refugees, with their wives and children, began to flock into the overcrowded towns and townlets. There they could be seen, stripped almost to their shirts, wandering aimlessly in the streets. They lived in frightful congestion, as many as ten of them being squeezed into a single room. They were huddled together in the synagogues, while many of them, unable to find shelter, remained on the streets with their families facing the winter cold. Sickness and increased mortality began to spread among them, particularly in the city of Nevel. Even the anti-Jewish Governor-General Khovanski, who was making a tour of inspection through the stricken district, was stirred by the spectacle, and advised the Committee of Ministers to stop the disastrous expulsions. But the blow had been dealt. By the beginning of 1825 the majority of rural Jews had been expatriated, and turned out into the wide world.

The question naturally arises, whether this human holocaust was required in the interest of the country. The Government itself gave the answer twelve years later--when it was too late.

As far as White Russia is concerned--quoth the Council of State in 1835--experience has not justified our antic.i.p.ations of the usefulness of the indicated measure [the expulsion from the villages]. Twelve years have pa.s.sed since it was carried into effect, but from the data collected in the Department of Law it is quite manifest, that, while it has ruined the Jews, it does not in the least seem to have improved the condition of the villagers.

The White Russian orgy of destruction was merely the prelude to a new legislative campaign against the Jews. Almost simultaneously with the ukase ordering the expulsion of the Jews from the villages, another ukase was issued on May 1, 1823, calling for the establishment of a new "Committee for the Amelioration of the Jews." The Committee, which included among its members the Ministers of Interior, Finance, Justice, Ecclesiastic Affairs, and Public Instruction, was intrusted with a very comprehensive piece of work--

to examine the enactments concerning Jews pa.s.sed up to date and point out the way in which their presence in the country might be rendered more comfortable and useful, also what obligations they are to a.s.sume towards the Government; in a word, to indicate all that may contribute towards the amelioration of the civil status of this people.

In these soft-spoken terms was couched the _public_ function of the Committee. But its _secret_ function, which later revealed itself in action, is correctly defined in the frank admission of the Committee of Ministers in its report of 1829: "At the very establishment of the Jewish Committee one of the obligations imposed upon it was to devise ways and means looking generally towards the reduction of the number of Jews in the monarchy." This was evidently what "the amelioration of the civil status" of the Jews amounted to. The new Committee was instructed to finish its work by the beginning of 1824, but its reactionary activity was not fully unfolded until the following reign.

In the meantime the legal machinery did not remain idle. The process of the territorial compression of Jews went on as before. To guard the western frontier of the monarchy against smuggling, it was decided, at the suggestion of the Administrator of the Kingdom of Poland, Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich, to expel the Jews from the border zone. Two ukases were issued in 1825 ordering the removal of all the Jews residing outside the cities within fifty versts from the frontier, with the exception of those owning immovable property. Once again human beings were hurled from their lifelong domiciles, when a rational policy would have been content with inst.i.tuting a closer watch. To prevent the undesirable "multiplication of Jews" in the border Governments, Jewish emigrants from neighboring countries, particularly from Austria, were forbidden to settle in Russia (1824).

Needless to say, the Governments of the interior, where the Jews could sojourn only temporarily, and where they had to produce gubernatorial pa.s.sports, like foreigners, were carefully guarded against the invasion of the residents of the Pale. On his last trip from St. Petersburg to Southern Russia in September, 1825, Alexander I. espied, in a little village near Luga,[276] a Jewish family, which was engaged in making tin-plate, and he at once inquired "on what ground" it lived there. The Governor of St. Petersburg was frightened, and gave orders to have the family deported immediately from the district, to censure the local _ispravnik_[277] and to warn the gubernatorial authorities, "that the rules concerning the Jews must be observed with all possible stringency."

5. THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARIES AND THE JEWS

Such was the att.i.tude of the Russian _Government_ towards the Jews. But what was the att.i.tude of the Russian _people_? Considering the character of the age, in which public opinion was not able to express itself even in political literature, an answer to this question would be entirely impossible, had not the revolutionary movement of the Decembrists[278]

disclosed the frame of mind of the most progressive section of Russian society in its relation to the Jewish question. Taken as a whole it was an unfriendly att.i.tude. It reflects the utter estrangement in language, in manners, and in culture between Jews and Russians at that time, an estrangement which breeds suspicion and hostility. The Russian knew no more of the life of the secluded Jewish populace than he did of the life of the Chinese. The educated Russian looked with suspicion upon the exclusiveness of patriarchal Jewish life, the unintelligible religious ceremonies which surrounded it, the rigorism of the rabbis, the ecstasy of the Tzaddiks, the strange emotionalism of the Hasidic ma.s.ses. If he turned to books for an explanation of these strange phenomena, he would find it in the current pamphlet literature of Germany or Poland, with its hackneyed phrases about the fanaticism of the "chosen people," a "state in a state," etc.

The att.i.tude of the Decembrists[279] towards the Jewish problem reflects the conventional ideas of an age of reaction. The "Russian Truth" by Pestel contains a chapter ent.i.tled "On the Tribes Populating Russia," in which the Jewish problem is described as an almost indissoluble political tangle. Pestel enumerates the peculiar Jewish characteristics which, in his opinion, render the Jews entirely unfit for membership in a social order. The Jews "foster among themselves incredibly close ties"; they have "a religion of their own, which instils into them the belief that they are predestined to conquer all nations," and "makes it impossible for them to mix with any other nation." The rabbis[280] wield unlimited sway over the ma.s.ses; they keep the people in spiritual bondage, "forbidding the reading of all books except the Talmud" and other religious writings. The Jews "are waiting for the coming of the Messiah, who is to establish them in their kingdom," and therefore "look upon themselves as temporary residents of the land in which they live." Hence their pa.s.sion for commerce and their neglect of agriculture and handicrafts. Since commerce alone is unable to provide the huge ma.s.ses of Jews with a livelihood, cheating and trickery are considered permissible, to the injury of the Christians.

Pestel has no eye for the heavy burden of Jewish disabilities, and even considers the Jews a privileged cla.s.s of the population, since they do not furnish any recruits, have their own rabbinical tribunals, possess "the right of educating their children in whatever principles they like," and "moreover enjoy all the rights of the Christian nations"(!).

Such was the vein in which a Russian revolutionary leader wrote, not knowing, or perhaps not caring to know, of the iron vise of the Pale of Settlement, of the pitiless expulsions which were taking place just at that time, ignorant altogether of the whole mesh of legal restrictions which placed the Jews on the lowest rung of Russian rightlessness.

After presenting this picture of Jewish life, Pestel suggests to the future revolutionary Government ("The Supreme Provisional Administration") two ways of solving the Jewish problem. One consists in breaking up "the influence of the close relationship among the Jews so injurious to the Christians," because it keeps them apart from the other citizens. For this purpose he advises convoking "the most learned rabbis and the most intelligent Jews"--Pestel had evidently heard of Napoleon's Synhedrion--"listening to their representations," and thereupon adopting measures for eradicating Jewish exclusiveness, for, "inasmuch as Russia does not expel the Jews, they ought to be the more careful not to adopt an unfriendly att.i.tude towards the Christians."

The second way consists in an honorable expulsion of the Jews or, to use his words, "in a.s.sisting the Jews to form a separate commonwealth of their own in some portion of Asia Minor." To this end Pestel makes the proposal to choose a rallying-point for the Jewish people and to supply them with some troops so as to reinforce them. For, as Pestel continues,

were all the Russian and Polish Jews to congregate in one place, they would number over two millions. Such a ma.s.s of people, being in search of a fatherland would not find it difficult to overcome all obstacles which the Turks might place in their way, and, after traversing the whole of European Turkey, might pa.s.s over into Asiatic Turkey, and, having occupied an adequate area, form a separate Jewish State.

Pestel himself felt more attracted towards the latter alternative of solving the Jewish problem,[281] but, being fully aware that "this gigantic undertaking depends on particular circ.u.mstances," he did not formulate it as "a special obligation upon the Supreme Administration."

Accordingly, if Pestel's first plan had materialized, the Jews of Russia would have received from the Supreme Provisional Administration, not civil equality, but a stern _Reglement_ of the Austrian or Old Prussian type, made up of a long string of "correctional measures" aiming at compulsory a.s.similation or Russification, at the demolition of the whole cultural autonomy of Russian Jewry, not excluding "the right of educating their children in whatever principles they like," and finally culminating in the economic "curbing of Jewry," perhaps in the spirit of that very Government against which the Decembrists were fighting.

Pestel's views on Judaism were shared by many Decembrists, but not by all. The const.i.tution drafted by the leader of the "Northern Society,"

Nikita Muravyov, originally proposed to grant political rights to the Jews only within their Pale of Settlement, but in the second draft this limitation was replaced by the principle of perfect equality.

The Lord Baltimore Press BALTIMORE, MD., U. S. A.

FOOTNOTES:

[268] [In Russian, _Tzarstvo Polskoye_. The names Congress-Poland and Russian Poland are also frequently used.]

[269] The statistics of the period are far from being accurate. They are nevertheless nearer the truth than those of the preceding age. The official "revisions" of 1816-1819 brought out the fact that a large number of Jews had not been entered on the lists, and the Government took severe measures against those evading the census. Relying upon official information, Jost (see his _Neuere Geschichte der Israeliten_, ii. 122) computed, in 1845, the total number of Jews in Russia, including those of the Kingdom of Poland, at 1,600,000, but he was careful to point out that, in his opinion, the actual number of Jews was considerably larger.

[270] [See p. 359.]

[271] [See p. 359.]

[272] [Alexis Arakcheyev (b. 1769) had been prominent in Russian military affairs under Paul and Alexander, and had attained to fame on account of his iron discipline. Beginning with 1814, he gradually gained the complete confidence and friendship of Alexander. He died in 1834.]

[273] It was written in French, under the t.i.tle _Memoires (sic!) sur l'etat des Israelites_.

[274] According to subsequent accounts the date was 1806.

[275] [In the original, _Zhydovskaya_, adjective derived from _Zhyd_.

See p. 320, n. 2.]

[276] [A town in the Government of St. Petersburg.]

[277] [Police inspector.]

[278] [See next note.]

[279] [In Russian, _Dyekabristy_, the name by which the revolutionaries of that period are generally designated. They first organized themselves into a secret league consisting of Russian army officers in the latter part of Alexander I.'s reign. Their open revolt took place in December (hence the name), 1825, immediately after the accession of Nicholas I.

The league was divided into a "Northern Society," led by Nikita Muravyov, and a "Southern Society," of which Paul Pestel was the head.

The latter wrote "The Russian Truth," a work in which he expounded the revolutionary program.]

[280] Pestel evidently has in mind the Tzaddiks, whom he had occasion to observe specifically in Tulchyn, his Podolian place of residence, and more generally in the territory controlled by the "Southern Society."

[281] It has been conjectured that Pestel was influenced by his fellow-Decembrist Gregory Peretz, a son of the converted tax-farmer Abraham Peretz in St. Petersburg (see p. 333 and p. 388). Peretz advocated on numerous occasions the necessity of organizing a society for the purpose of liberating the scattered Jews and settling them in the Crimea or in the Orient, "in the shape of a separate nationality."