History of the Jews in Russia and Poland Volume II Part 26

This march voiced the sentiments of those who dreamed of the Promised Land--whether it be on the sh.o.r.es of the Jordan or on the banks of the Mississippi.

2. PINSKER'S "AUTOEMANc.i.p.aTION"

The conception of emigration as a means of national rejuvenation, which had sprung to life amidst the "thunder and lightning" of the pogroms, found a thoughtful exponent in the person of Dr. Leon Pinsker, a prominent communal worker in Odessa, who had at one time looked to a.s.similation as promising a solution of the Jewish problem. In his pamphlet "Autoemanc.i.p.ation" (published in September, 1882), which is marked by profound thinking, Pinsker vividly describes the mental agony experienced by him at the sight of the physical slavery of the Jewry of Russia and the spiritual slavery of the emanc.i.p.ated Jewry of Western Europe. To him the Jewish people in the Diaspora is not a living nation, but rather the ghost of a nation, haunting the globe and scaring all living national organisms. The salvation of Judaism can only be brought about by transforming this ghost into a real being, by re-establishing the Jewish people upon a territory of its own which might be obtained through the common endeavor of Jewry and through international Jewish co-operation in some convenient part of the globe, be it Palestine or America. Such is the way of Jewish autoemanc.i.p.ation, in contradistinction from the civic emanc.i.p.ation, which had been bestowed by the dominant nationalities upon the Jews as an act of grace and which does not safeguard them against anti-Semitism and the humiliating position of second-rate citizens. The Jewish people can be restored, if, instead of many places of refuge scattered all over the globe, it will be concentrated in one politically guaranteed place of refuge. For this purpose a general Jewish congress ought to be called which should be entrusted with the financial and political issues involved in the plan.

The present generation must take the first step towards this national restoration; posterity will do the rest.

Pinsker's pamphlet, which was written in German and printed abroad [1]

with the intention of appealing to the Jews of Western Europe, failed to produce any effect upon that a.s.similated section of the Jewish people.

In Russia, however, it became the catechism of the "Love of Zion"

movement and eventually of Zionism and Territorialism. The theory expounded in Pinsker's pamphlet made a strong appeal to the Russian Jews, not only on account of its close reasoning but also because it gave powerful utterance to that pessimistic frame of mind which seemed to have seized upon them all. Its weakest point lay in the fact that it rested on a wrong historic premise and on a narrow definition of the term "nation" in the sense of a territorial and political organism.

Pinaker seems to have overlooked that the Jews of the Diaspora, taken as a whole, have not ceased to form a nation, though of a type of its own, and that in modern political history nations of this "cultural"

complexion have appeared on the scene more and more frequently.

[Footnote 1: The first edition appeared in Berlin, in 1882. It bears the sub-t.i.tle: "An Appeal to his Brethren by a Russian Jew," It was published anonymously.]

Lacking a definite practical foundation, Pinsker's doctrine could not but accomodate itself to the Palestinian colonization movement, although its insignificant dimensions were entirely out of proportion to the far-reaching plans conceived by the author of "Autoemanc.i.p.ation."

Lilienblum and Pinsker were joined by the old nationalist Smolenskin and the former a.s.similator Levanda. _Ha-Shahar_ and _ha-Melitx_ in Hebrew and the _Razsvyet_ in Russian became the literary vehicles of the new movement. In opposition to these tendencies, the _Voskhod_ of St.

Petersburg[1] reflected the ideas of the progressive Russian-Jewish _intelligenzia_, and defended their old position which was that of civil emanc.i.p.ation and inner Jewish reforms. In the middle between these two extremes stood the Russian weekly _Russki Yevrey_ ("The Russian Jew"), in St. Petersburg, and the Hebrew weekly _ha-Tzefirah_ ("The Dawn"), in Warsaw, voicing the moderate views of the Haskalah period, with a decided bent towards the nationalistic movement.

[Footnote 1: See p. 221, It appeared simultaneously as a weekly and a monthly.]

3. MISCARRIED RELIGIOUS REFORMS

The storm of pogroms not only broke many young twigs on the tree of "enlightenment," which had attained to full bloom in the preceding period, but it also bent others into monstrous shapes. This abnormal development is particularly characteristic of the idea of religious reforms in Judaism which sprang to life in the beginning of the eighties. A fortnight before the pogrom at Yelisavetgrad, which inaugurated another gloomy chapter in the annals of Russian Jewry, the papers reported that a new Jewish sect had appeared in that city under the name of "The Spiritual Biblical Brotherhood." Its members denied all religious dogmas and ceremonies, and acknowledged only the moral doctrines of the Bible; they condemned all mercantile pursuits, and endeavored to live by physical labor, primarily by agriculture.

The founder of this "Brotherhood" was a local teacher and journalist, Jacob Gordin, who stood at that time under the influence of the South-Russian Stundists [1] as well as of the socialistic Russian Populists. [2] The "Spiritual Biblical Brotherhood" was made up altogether of a score of people. In a newspaper appeal which appeared shortly after the spring pogroms of 1881 the leader of the sect, hiding his ident.i.ty under the pen-name of "A Brother-Biblist," called upon the Jews to divest themselves, of those character traits and economic pursuits which excited the hatred of the native population against them: the love of money, the hunt for barter, usury, and petty trading. This appeal, which, sounded in unison with the voice of the Russian Jew-baiters and appeared at a time when the wounds of the pogrom victims were not yet healed, aroused profound indignation among the Jews.

Shortly afterwards the "Spiritual Biblical Brotherhood" fell asunder.

Some of its members joined a like-minded sect in Odessa which had been founded there in the beginning of 1883 by a teacher, Jacob Priluker, under the name of "New Israel."

[Footnote 1: A Russian sect with rationalistic tendencies which are traceable to Western Protestantism.]

[Footnote 2: See above, p. 222.]

The aim of "New Israel" was to facilitate, by means of radical religious reforms conceived in the spirit of rationalism, the contact between Jews and Christians and thereby pave the way for civil emanc.i.p.ation. The twofold religio-social program of the sect was as follows:

The sect recognizes only the teachings of Moses; it rejects the Talmud, the dietary laws, the rite of circ.u.mcision, and the traditional form of worship; the day of rest is transferred from Sat.u.r.day to Sunday; the Russian language is declared to be the "native" tongue of the Jews and made obligatory in every-day life; usury and similar distasteful pursuits are forbidden.

As a reward for all these virtuous endeavors the sect expected from the Russian Government, which it pet.i.tioned to that effect, complete civil equality for its members, permission to intermarry with Christians, and the right to wear a special badge by which they were to be marked off from the "Talmudic Jews." As an expression of grat.i.tude for the antic.i.p.ated governmental benefits, the members of the sect pledged themselves to give their boys and girls who were to be born during the coming year the names of Alexander or Alexandra, in honor of the Russian Tzar.

The first religious half of the program of "New Israel" might possibly have attracted a few adherents. But the second "business-like" part of it opened the eyes of the public to the true aspirations of these "reformers," who, in their eagerness for civil equality, were ready to barter away religion, conscience, and honor, and who did not balk at betraying such low flunkeyism at a time when the blood of the victims of the Balta pogrom had not yet dried.

Thus it was that the withering influence of reactionary Judaeophobia compromised and crippled the second attempt at inner reforms in Judaism.

Both movements soon pa.s.sed out of existence, and their founders subsequently left Russia. Gordin went to America, and, renouncing his sins of youth, became a popular Yiddish playwright. Priluker settled in England, and entered the employ of the missionaries who were anxious to propagate Christianity among the Jews. A few years later, during 1884 and 1885, "New Israel" cropped up in a new shape, this time in Kishinev, where the puny "Congregation of New Testament Israelites" was founded by I. Rabinovich, having for its aim "the fusion of Judaism with Christianity." In the house of prayer, in which this "Congregation,"

consisting altogether of ten members, worshipped, sermons were also delivered by a Protestant clergyman.

A few years later this new missionary device was also abandoned. The pestiferous atmosphere which surrounded Russian-Jewish life at that time could do no more than produce these poisonous growths of "religious reform." For the wholesome seeds of such a reform were bound to wither after the collapse of the ideals which had served as a lode star during the period of "enlightenment."

CHAPTER XXVI

INCREASED JEWISH DISABILITIES

1. THE PAHLEN COMMISSION AND NEW SCHEMES OF OPPRESSION

The "Temporary Rules" of May 3, 1882, had been pa.s.sed, so to speak, as an extraordinary "war measure," outside the usual channel of legislative action. Yet the Russian Government could not but realize that sooner or later it would be bound to adopt the customary legal procedure and place the Jewish question before the highest court of the land, the Council of State. To meet this eventuality, it was necessary to prepare materials of a somewhat better quality than had been manufactured by the "gubernatorial commissions" and the "Central Jewish Committee" which owed their existence to Ignatyev, forming part and parcel of the general anti-Jewish policy of the discharged Minister. Even prior to the promulgation of the "Temporary Rules," the Council of Ministers had called the Tzar's attention to the necessity of appointing a special "High Commission" to deal with the Jewish question and to draft legal measures for submission to the Council of State.

This suggestion was carried out on February 4, 1883, on which day an imperial ukase was issued calling for the formation of a "High Commission for the Revision of the Current Laws concerning the Jews."

The chairmanship of the Commission was first entrusted to Makov, a former Minister of the Interior, and after his untimely death, to Count Pahlen, a former Minister of Justice, who guided the work of the Commission during the five years of its existence--hence its popular designation as the "Pahlen Commission," The membership of the Commission was made up of six officials representing the various departments of the Ministry of the Interior, and of one official for each of the Ministries of Finance, Justice, Public Instruction, Crown Domains, and Foreign Affairs, and, lastly, of a few experts who were consulted casually.

The new bureaucratic body received no definite instructions as to the period of time within which it was expected to complete its labors. It was evidently given to understand that the work entrusted to it could well afford to wait. The first session of the High Commission was held fully ten months after its official appointment by the Tzar, and its business proceeded at a snail's pace, surrounded by the mysterious air characteristic of Russian officialdom. For several years the High Commission had to work its way through the sad inheritance of the defunct "gubernatorial commissions," represented by mounds of paper with the most fantastic projects of solving the Jewish question, endeavoring to bring these materials into some kind of system. It also received a number of memoranda on the Jewish question from outsiders, among them from public-minded Jews, who in most cases used Baron Horace Gunzburg as their go-between--memoranda which sought to put the various aspects of the question in their right perspective. After four years spent on the examination of the material, the Commission undertook to formulate its own conclusions, but, for reasons which will become patent later on, these conclusions were never crystallized in the form of legal provisions.

While the High Commission was a.s.siduously engaged in the "revision of the current laws concerning the Jews," in other words, was repeating the Sisyphus task abandoned by scores of similar bureaucratic creations in the past, the Government pursued with unabated vigor its old-time policy of making the life of the Jews unbearable by turning out endless varieties of new legal restrictions. These restrictions were generally pa.s.sed "outside the law," i.e., without their being previously submitted to the Council of State; they were simply brought up as suggestions before the Council of Ministers, and, after adoption by the latter, received legal sanction through ratification by the Tzar. Without awaiting the results of the revision of Jewish legislation which it had itself undertaken, the Russian Government embarked enthusiastically upon the task of forging new chains for the hapless Jewish race. For a number of years the High Commission was nothing more than a cover to screen these cruel experiments of the powers at the helm of the state. At the very time in which the ministerial officials serving on the High Commission indulged in abstract speculations about the Jewish question and invented various methods for its solution, the Council of Ministers antic.i.p.ated this solution in the spirit of rabid anti-Semitism, and was quick to give it effect in concrete life.

The wind which was blowing from the heights of Russian bureaucracy was decidedly unfavorable to the Jews. The belated coronation of Alexander III., which took place in May, 1883, and, in accordance with Russian tradition, brought, in the form of an imperial manifesto, [1] various privileges and alleviations for different sections of the Russian population, left the Jews severely alone. The Tzar lent an attentive ear to those zealous governors and governors-general, who in their "most humble reports" propounded the new-fangled theory of the "injuriousness"

of the Jews; the marginal remarks frequently attached by him to these reports a.s.sumed the force of binding resolutions. [2] In the beginning of 1883, the governor-general of Odessa, Gurko, took occasion in his report to the Tzar to comment on the excessive growth of the number of Jewish pupils in the _gymn.a.z.ia_ [3] and on their "injurious effect" upon their Christian fellow-pupils. Gurko proposed to fix a limited percentage for the admission of Jews to these schools, and the Tzar made the annotation: "I share this conviction; the matter ought to receive attention."

[Footnote 1: See above, p. 246, n. 1]

[Footnote 2: See on the term "Resolution," Vol. I, p. 253, n. 1.]

[Footnote 3: See above, p. 161, n. 1.]

The matter did of course "receive attention." It was brought up before the Committee of Ministers. But the latter was reluctant to pa.s.s upon it at once, and thought it wiser to have it prepared and duly submitted for legislative action at some future time. However, when the governor-general of Odessa and the governor of Kharkov, in their reports for the following year, expatiated again on the necessity of fixing a school norm for the Jews, the Tzar made another annotation, in a more emphatic tone: "It is desirable to decide this question finally." This sufficed to impress the Committee of Ministers with the conviction "that the growing influx of the non-Christian element into the educational establishments exerts, from a moral and religious point of view, a most injurious influence upon the Christian children." The question was submitted for consideration to the High Commission under the chairmanship of Count Pahlen. The Minister of Public Instruction was ordered to frame post-haste an enactment embodying the spirit of the imperial resolution. Soon the new fruit of the Russian bureaucratic genius was ready to be plucked--"the school norm," which was destined to occupy a prominent place in the fabric of Russian-Jewish disabilities.

The center of gravity of the system of oppression lay, as it always did, in the restrictions attaching to the right of domicile and free movement--restrictions which frequently made life for the Jews physically impossible by cutting off their access to the sources of a livelihood. The "Temporary Rules" of the third of May displayed in this domain a dazzling variety of legal tortures such as might have excited the envy of medieval inquisitors. The "May laws" of 1882 barred the Jews from settling outside the cities "anew," i.e. in the future, exempting those who had settled in the rural districts prior to 1882. These old-time Jewish rustics were a thorn in the flesh of the Russian anti-Semites, who hoped for a sudden disappearance of the Jewish population from the Russian country-side. Accordingly, a whole set of administrative measures was put in motion, with a view to making the life of the village Jews unbearable. In another connection [1] we had occasion to point out that the Russian authorities as well as the Christian compet.i.tors of the Jews made it their business to expel the latter from the rural localities as "vicious members," by having the peasant a.s.semblies render special "verdicts" against them. This method was now supplemented by new contrivances to dislodge the Jews. A village Jew who happened to absent himself for a few days or weeks to go to town was frequently barred by the police from returning to his home, on the ground that he was "a new settler." There are cases of Jewish families on record which, according to custom, had left the village for the High Holidays to attend services in an adjacent town or townlet, and which, on their return home, met with considerable difficulties; because their return was interpreted by the police as a "new settlement." In the dominions of the anti-Jewish satrap Drenteln the administration construed the "Temporary Rules" to mean that Jews were not allowed to move from one village to another, or even from, one house to another within the precincts of their native village. [2]

[Footnote 1: See p. 318 et seq.]

[Footnote 2: Evidence of this is found in the circular of the governor of Chernigov, issued In 1883.]

Moreover, the police was authorized to expel from the villages all those Jews who did not possess their own houses upon their own land, on the ground that these Jews, in renting new quarters, would have to make a new lease with their owners, and such a lease was forbidden by the May laws. [1] These malicious misinterpretations of the law affected some ten thousand Jews in the villages of Chernigov and Poltava. These Jews lived habitually in rented houses or in houses which were their property but were built upon ground belonging to peasants, and they were consequently liable to expulsion. The cry of these unfortunates, who were threatened with eviction in the dead of the winter, was heard not in near-by Kiev but in far-off St. Petersburg. By a senatorial ukase, published in January, 1884, a check was put on these administrative highway methods.

The expulsion was stopped, though a considerable number of Jewish families had in the meantime been evicted and ruined.

[Footnote 1: See p. 312.]

At the same time other restrictions which were in like manner deduced from the "Temporary Rules" were allowed to remain in full force. One of these was the prohibition of removing from one village to another, even though they were contiguous, so that the rural Jews were practically placed in the position of serfs, being affixed to their places of residence. This cruel practice was sanctioned by the law of December 29, 1887. As a contemporary writer puts it, the law implied that when a village in which a Jew lived was burned down, or when a factory in which he worked was closed, he was compelled to remove into one of the towns or townlets, since he was not allowed to search for a shelter and a livelihood in any other rural locality. In accordance with the same law, a Jew had no right to offer shelter to his widowed mother or to his infirm parents who lived in another village. Furthermore, a Jew was barred from taking over a commercial or industrial establishment bequeathed to him by his father, if the latter had lived in another village. He was not even allowed to take charge of a house bequeathed to him by his parents, if they had resided in another village, though situated within the confines of the Pale.

While this network of disabilities was ruining the Jews, it yielded a plentiful harvest for the police, from the highest to the lowest officials. "Graft," the Russian _habeas Corpus_ Act, shielded the persecuted Jew against the caprice and Violence of the authorities in the application of the restrictive laws, and Russian officialdom held on tightly to Jewish rightlessness as their own special benefice. Hatred of the Jews has at all times gone hand in hand with love of Jewish money.

2. JEWISH DISABILITIES OUTSIDE THE PALE

Outside the Pale of Settlement the net of disabilities was stretched out even more widely and was sure to catch the Jew in its meshes. Throughout the length and breadth of the Russian Empire, outside of the fifteen governments of Western Russia and the ten governments of the Kingdom of Poland, there was scattered a handful of "privileged" Jews who were permitted to reside beyond the Pale: men with an academic education, first guild merchants who had for a number of years paid their guild dues within the Pale, and handicraftsmen, so long as they confined themselves to the pursuit of their craft. The influx of "illegal" Jews into this tabooed region was checked by measures of extraordinary severity. The example was set by the Russian capital, "the window towards Europe," which had been broken through by Peter the Great. The city of St. Petersburg, harboring some 20,000 privileged Jews who lived there legally, became the center of attraction for a large number of "illegal" Jews who flocked to the capital with the intention, deemed a criminal offence by the Government, of engaging in some modest business pursuit, without paying the high guild dues, or of devoting themselves to science or literature, without the diploma from a higher educational inst.i.tution in their pockets. The number of these Jews who obtained their right of residence through a legal fiction, by enrolling themselves as artisans or as employees of the "privileged" Jews, was very considerable, and the police expended a vast amount of energy in waging a fierce struggle against them. The city-governor of St.

Petersburg, Gresser, who was notorious for the cruelty of his police regime, made it his specialty to hunt down the Jews. A contemporary writer, in reviewing the events of the year 1883, gives the following description of the exploits of the metropolitan police: