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

The campaign was started at the very beginning of the year and continued uninterruptedly until the end of it. Early in March the metropolitan police received orders to search most rigorously the Jewish residences and examine the pa.s.sports. In the police stations special records were inst.i.tuted for the Jews. St. Petersburg was to be purged of the odious Hebrew tribe. The contrivances employed were no longer novel, and were the same which had been successfully tried in other cities. The Jews were raided in regular fashion. Those that were found with doubtful claims to residence in the capital were, frequently accompanied by their families, immediately dispatched to the proper railroad stations, escorted by policemen.... The time for departure was measured by hours. The term of expulsion was generally limited to twenty-four hours, or forty-eight hours, as if it involved the execution of a court-martial sentence. And yet, the majority of the victims of expulsion were people who had lived in St. Petersburg for many years, and had succeeded in establishing homes and business places, which could not be liquidated within twenty-four hours or thereabout.... The hurried expulsions from the capital resulted in numerous conversions to Christianity.... Amusing stories circulated all over town concerning Jews who had decided to join the Christian Church, and had applied for permission to remain in the capital for one or two weeks--the time required by law for a preliminary training in the truths of the new faith--but whose pet.i.tion was flatly refused because the police believed that a similar training might also be received within the boundaries of the Pale of Settlement.

As a matter of fact, fict.i.tious conversions of this kind were but seldom resorted to in the fight against governmental violence. As a rule, the evasion of the "law" was effected by less harmful, perhaps, but no less humiliating and even tragic fictions. Many a Jewish newcomer would bring with him on his arrival in St. Petersburg an artisan's certificate and enrol himself as an apprentice of some "full-fledged" Jewish artisan.

But woe betide if the police happened to visit the workshop and fail to find the fict.i.tious apprentice at work. He was liable to immediate expulsion, and the owner of the shop was no less exposed to grave risks.

Some Jews, in their eagerness to obtain the right of residence, registered as man-servants in the employ of Jewish physicians or lawyers. [1] These would-be servants were frequently summoned to the police stations and cross-examined as to the character of their "service." The answers expected from them were something like: "I clean my master's boots, carry behind him his portfolio to court," etc.

Several prominent Jewish writers lived for many years in St. Petersburg on this "flunkeyish" basis--among them the talented young poet Simon Frug, [2] the singer of Jewish sorrow who was fast establishing for himself a reputation both in Jewish and in Russian literature.

[Footnote 1: Under the Russian law [see p. 166] Jews possessing a university diploma of the first degree were ent.i.tled to employ two "domestic servants" from among their coreligionists.]

[Footnote 2: See p. 330.]

It can easily be realized how precarious was the position of these men.

Any day their pa.s.sports might be found ornamented by a red police notation ordering their expulsion from the capital within twenty-four hours. All Russia was stirred at that time by the sensational story of a young Jewess, who had come to St. Petersburg or Moscow to enter the college courses for women, and in order to obtain the right of residence found herself compelled to register fict.i.tiously as a prost.i.tute and take out "a yellow ticket." When the police discovered that the young woman was engaged in studying, instead of plying her official "trade,"

she was banished from the capital. In 1886, England was shocked by the expulsion from Moscow of the well-known English Member of Parliament, the banker Sir Samuel Montagu (later Lord Swaythling). Despite his influential position, Montagu was ordered out of the Russian capital "within twenty-four hours," like an itinerant vagrant.

None of these tragedies, however, was able to produce any effect upon the ringleaders and henchmen of the Russian inquisition. The energy of the authorities spent itself primarily in the fight against the natural, yet, according to the Russian code, "illegal" struggle of the Jews for their existence and against the sacred right of man to move about freely. The merciless Russian law, trampling upon this inviolable right, drove human beings from village to town and from one town to another. In the hotbed of militant Judaeophobia, in Kiev, raids upon "illegal"

Jewish residents were the order of the day. During the year 1886 alone more than two thousand Jewish families were evicted from the town. [1]

Not satisfied with the expulsion of the Jews from the towns prohibited to them by law, the authorities contrived to swell the number of these towns by adding new localities which were part of the Pale and as such open to the Jews. In 1887, the large South-Russian cities Rostov-on-the Don and Taganrog were transferred from the Pale of Settlement [2] to the tabooed territory of the Don Army. Those Jews who had lived in these cities before the promulgation of the law were allowed to remain, but the new settling of Jews was strictly forbidden.

[Footnote 1: These intensified persecutions were popularly explained as an act of revenge on the part of the highest administration of the region, owing to a quarrel which had taken place between a rich Kiev Jew and a Russian dignitary.]

[Footnote 2: They formed part of the government of Yekaterinoslav.]

Not satisfied with constantly lessening the area in which, without any further restrictions, the Jewish population was gasping for breath, the Government was on the look-out for ways and means to narrow also the sphere of Jewish economic activity. The medieval system of Russian society with its division into estates and guilds became an instrument of Jewish oppression. The authorities openly followed the maxim that the Jew was to be robbed of his profession, to the end that it may be turned over to his Christian rival. Under Alexander II, the Government had endeavored to promote handicrafts among the Jews as a counterbalance against their commercial pursuits, and had therefore conferred upon Jewish artisans the right of residence all over the Empire. The change of policy under Alexander III is well ill.u.s.trated by the ukase of 1884 closing the Jewish school of handicrafts in Zhitomir which had been in existence for twenty-three years. The reason for the enactment is stated with brazen impudence:

Owing to the fact that the Jews living in the towns and townlets of the south-western region form the majority of handicrafts-men, and thereby hamper the development of handicrafts among the original population of that region, which is exploited by them, the existence of a specific Jewish school of handicrafts seems, in view of the lack of similar schools among the Christians, an additional weapon in the hands of the Jews for the exploitation of the original population of that region.

Here the pursuit of handicrafts is actually stigmatized as a means of "exploitation." The true meaning of that terrible word, an invention of the Russian Government, is thereby put in a glaring light: the Jew is an "exploiter" so long as he follows any pursuit, however honorable and productive, in which a Christian might engage in his stead.

The slightest attempt of the Jew to enlarge his economic activity met with the relentless punishment of the law. The Jewish artisan, though permitted to live outside the Pale, had only the right to sell the products of his own workmanship. When found to sell other merchandise which was not manufactured by him he was liable, under Article 1171 of the Penal Code, not only to be immediately expelled from his place of residence but also to have his goods confiscated. The Christian compet.i.tors of the Jews, shoulder to shoulder with the police, kept a careful watch over the Jewish artisans and saw to it that a Jewish tailor should not dare to sell a piece of material, a watchmaker--a new factory-made watch with a chain (being only allowed to repair old watches), a baker--a pound of flour or a cup of coffee. The discovery of such a "crime" was followed immediately by cutting short the career of the poor artisan, in accordance with the provisions of the law.

3. RESTRICTIONS IN EDUCATION AND IN THE LEGAL PROFESSION

A salient feature of that gloomy era of counter-reforms was the endeavor of the Government to dislodge the Jews from the liberal professions, and, as a corollary, to bar them from the secondary and higher schools which were the training ground for these professions. What the Government had in view was to reduce the number of those "privileged"

Jews, who, under the law pa.s.sed in the time of Alexander II., had been rewarded for their completion of a course of studies in an inst.i.tution of higher learning by the right of unrestricted residence throughout the Empire. The authorities now found it to their purpose to hamper the spread of education among the Jews rather than promote it. The highly-placed obscurantists contended that the Jewish students exerted an injurious influence upon their Christian comrades from the religious and moral point of view, while the political police [1] reported that the Jewish college men "are quick in joining the ranks of the revolutionary workers." The fear of educated Russian subjects who were not of the dominant faith was natural in a country in which Pobyedonostzev, the moving spirit of inner Russian politics, looked upon popular education in general as a destructive force, fraught with danger to throne and altar. There can be but little doubt that the previously-mentioned imperial "resolutions" [2] indicating the necessity of curtailing the number of Jews in the Russian educational establishments were inspired by the "Grand Inquisitor."

[Footnote 1: The secret police charged with tracking the followers of liberal and revolutionary tendencies.]

[Footnote 2: See p. 339_et seq_.]

Notwithstanding the opposition of the majority of the Pahlen Commission, whose members had not yet entirely discarded the enlightened traditions of the reign of Alexander II., the question was decided in accordance with the wishes of the Tzar. Here, too, as in the case of the "Temporary Rules," the Government was resolved to enact the new disabilities by the sovereign will of the emperor, without submitting them to the highest legislative body of the land, the Council of State, for fear that undesirable debates might arise in that august body concerning the expediency of putting an embargo on education. On December 5, 1886, the Tzar, acting on the suggestion of the Committee of Ministers, directed the Minister of Public Instruction, Dyelanov, to adopt measures for the limitation of the admission of Jews to the secondary and higher educational establishments.

For six long months the Minister, whose official duty was the promotion of education, was wavering between a number of schemes designed to restrict education among the Jews. Suggestions for such restrictions came from officials of the ministry and from superintendents of school districts. Some proposed to close the schools only to the children of the lower cla.s.ses among the Jews; in which "the unsympathetic traits of the Jewish character" were particularly conspicuous. Others recommended a restrictive percentage for Jews in general, without any cla.s.s discrimination. Still others pleaded for moderation lest excessive restriction in admission to Russian universities should force the Jewish youth to go to foreign universities and make them even "more dangerous,"

since they were bound to return to Russia with liberal notions concerning the political form of government.

At last, in July, 1887, the Minister of Public Instruction, acting on the above-mentioned imperial "resolution," published his two famous circulars limiting the admission of Jews to the universities and to secondary schools. The following norm was established: in the Pale of Settlement the Jews were to be admitted to the schools to the extent of ten per cent of the Christian school population; outside the Pale the norm was fixed at five per cent, and in the two capitals, St. Petersburg and Moscow, at three per cent. Although decreed before the very beginning of the new scholastic year, the percentage norm was nevertheless immediately applied in the case of the _gymn.a.z.ia,_ the "Real schools," [1] and the universities. In the higher professional inst.i.tutions, such as the technological, veterinarian, and agronomical schools, the restrictions had been, practised even before the promulgation of the circular, or were introduced immediately after it.

[Footnote 1: Or _Real Gymn.a.z.ia_, see above, p. 163, n, 1.]

This was the genesis of the educational "percentage norm," the source of sorrow and tears for two generation of Russian Jews--both fathers and sons now having run the gauntlet. In the months of July and August of every year, thousands of Jewish children were knocking at the doors of the _gymn.a.z.ia_ and universities, but only tens and hundreds obtained admission. In the towns of the Pale where the Jews form from thirty to eighty per cent of the total population, the admission, of Jewish pupils to the _gymn.a.z.ia_ and "Real schools" was limited to ten per cent, so that the majority of Jewish children were deprived of a secondary education.

The position of the _gymn.a.z.ium_ and "Real school" graduates who were unable to continue their studies in the inst.i.tutions of higher learning was particularly tragic. Many of these unfortunates addressed personal appeals to the Minister of Public Instruction, Dyelanov, who, being good-natured, would, despite his reactionary proclivities, frequently sanction the admission of the pet.i.tioners over and above the school norm. But the majority of the young men, barred from the colleges, found themselves compelled to go abroad in search of education, and, being generally without means, suffered untold hardships.

Nevertheless, the cruel restrictions could not suppress the need for education in a people with an ancient culture. Those that had failed to gain admission to the _gymn.a.z.ia_ completed the prescribed course of studies at home, under the guidance of private tutors or by private study, and afterwards presented themselves for examination for the "maturity certificate" [1] as "externs," braving all the difficulties of this th.o.r.n.y path. Having successfully pa.s.sed their secondary course, they found again their way barred as soon as they wished to enter the universities, and the "martyrs of learning" had no choice left except to take up their pilgrim staff and travel abroad. Year in, year out, two processions of emigrants wended their way from Russia to the West: the one was travelling across the Atlantic, in search of bread and liberty; the other was headed towards Germany, Austria, England, and France, in search of a higher education. The former were driven from their homes by a peculiar _interdictio ignis et aquae_; the other--by an _interdictio scientiae_.

[Footnote 1: The name given in Russian (and German) to the diploma of a _gymn.a.z.ium_.]

Having closed the avenues of higher education to the bulk of Russian Jewry, the Government now went a step further and contrived to dispossess even those Jews who had already managed to obtain a higher education, in spite of all difficulties. It was not satisfied with barring college-bred Jews from the civil service and an academic career, thus limiting the Jewish physicians and lawyers to private practice; it was anxious to restrict even this narrow field of activity still open to Jews. In view of the fact that the Jewish jurists had no chance to apply their knowledge in the civil service, and were entirely excluded from the bench, they naturally turned to the bar, with the result that they soon occupied a conspicuous place there, both quant.i.tatively and qualitatively. Their success was a source of annoyance to the Russian anti-Semites, both those who hated the Jews on principle and those who did so selfishly, being themselves members of the bar. These enemies of Judaism called the attention of the Government to the large number of Jewish lawyers at the St. Petersburg bar--a circ.u.mstance due partly to the natural gravitation towards the administrative and legal center of the country, and partly to the fact that the admission of Jews to the bar met with less obstruction from the judicial authorities in the capital than in the provinces, where professional jealousy frequently stood in the way of the Jews.

The reactionary Minister of Justice, Mana.s.sen, managed to convince the Tzar that it was necessary to check the further admission of Jews to the bar. However, from diplomatic considerations, it was thought wiser to carry this restriction into effect not under an anti-Jewish flag, but rather as a general measure directed against all members of "non-Christian persuasions." The restriction was therefore extended to Mohammedans and the handful of privileged Karaites, [1] and the religious intolerance of the new measure was thus thrown into even bolder relief.

[Footnote 1: See on the Karaites, Vol. I, p. 318.]

On November, 1889, an imperial ukase decreed as follows:

That, pending the enactment of a special law dealing with this subject, the admission of public and private attorneys of non-Christian denominations by the competent judicial inst.i.tutions and bar a.s.sociations [1] shall not take place, except with the permission of the Minister of Justice, on the recommendation of the presidents of the above-mentioned inst.i.tutions and a.s.sociations.

[Footnote 1: "Public (literally, sworn) attorneys" are lawyers of academic standing admitted to the bar by the bar a.s.sociations. "Private attorneys" are lawyers without educational qualifications who receive permission to practise from the "judicial inst.i.tutions,"

i.e., the law courts. They are not members of the bar.]

It goes without saying that the Russian Minister of Justice made ample use of the right conferred upon him of denying admission to Jews as public and private attorneys. While readily sanctioning the admission of Mohammedans and Karaites, the Minister almost invariably refused to confirm the election of young Jewish barristers, however warmly they may have been recommended by the judicial inst.i.tutions and bar a.s.sociations. [1] In this way, many a talented Jewish jurist, who might have filled a university chair with distinction or might have attained brilliant success in the legal profession, was forced out of his path and deprived of an opportunity to serve his country by his labors and pursue a career for which he had fitted himself at the university.

Instead, these derailed professionals went to swell the hosts of those who had been wronged and disinherited by the injustice of the law.

[Footnote 1: During the following five years, until 1895, not a single Jew received the sanction of the Minister.]

4. DISCRIMINATION IN MILITARY SERVICE

It seemed as if the Government was intent on making a one-sided compact with Russian Jewry: "We shall deprive you of all the elementary rights due to you as men and citizens; we shall rob you of the right of domicile and freedom of movement, and of the chance of making a livelihood; we shall expose you to physical and spiritual starvation, and shall cast you out of the community of citizens--yet you dare not swerve an inch from the path of your civic obligations." A lurid ill.u.s.tration of this unique exchange of services was provided by the manner in which military duty was imposed upon the Jews. Russian legislation had long since contrived to establish revolting restrictions for the Jews also in this domain. Jews with physical defects which rendered Christians unfit for military service, such as a lower stature and narrower chest, were nevertheless taken into the army. In the case of a shortage of recruits among the Jewish population even only sons, the sole wage-earners of their families or of their widowed mothers, were drafted, whereas the same category of conscripts among Christians were unconditionally exempt. [1] Moreover, a Jew serving in the army always remained a private and could never attain to an officer's rank.

[Footnote 1: Compare p. 201.]

As if the Government intended to make sport of the Jewish soldiers, the latter were deprived of their right of residence in the localities outside the Pale where they had been stationed, and as soon as their term of service had expired, were sent back into the territory of the Russian-Jewish ghetto. Thus, even Nicholas I, was out-Nicholased. The discharged Jewish soldiers who had served under the old recruiting law enjoyed, both for themselves and their families, the right of residence throughout the Empire. [1] The new military statute of 1874 [2] withdrew from the retired Jewish soldiers this reward for faithfully performed duty, and in 1885 the Senate sustained the disfranchis.e.m.e.nt of these Jews who had spent years of their life in the service of their fatherland. A Jew from Berdychev, Vilna, or Odessa, who had served five or six years somewhere in St. Petersburg, Moscow, or Kazan, was forced to leave these tabooed cities and return home on the very day on which he had taken off his soldier's uniform.

[Footnote 1: See above, p. 172.]

[Footnote 2: See p. 199 et seq.]

Yet, despite this curious encouragement of Jewish patriotism, the Government had the audacity to charge the Jews continually with the "evasion of their military duty." That a tendency towards such evasion was in vogue among the Jews admits of no doubt. It would have been contrary to human nature if people who were subject to a.s.saults from above and kicks from below, whose right of residence was limited to one-twentieth of the territory of their fatherland, who were robbed of shelter, air, and bread, and deprived of the hope to place themselves, even by means of military service, on an equal footing with the lowest Russian moujik, should have felt a profound need of sacrificing themselves for their country, and should not have shirked this heaviest of civil obligations to a larger extent than the privileged Russian population, in which cases of evasion were by no means infrequent. In reality, however, the complaints about the shortage of Jewish recruits were vastly exaggerated. Subsequent statistical investigations brought out the fact that, owing to irregular apportionment, the Government demanded annually from the Jews a larger quota of recruits than was justified by their numerical relation to the general population in the Pale of Settlement. On an average, the Jews furnished twelve per cent of the total number of recruits in the Pale, whereas the Jewish population of the Pale formed but eleven per cent of the total population. The Government further refused to consider the fact that, owing to inaccurate registration, the conscription lists often carried the names of persons who had long since died, or who had left the country to emigrate abroad. In fact, the annual emigration of Jews from Russia, the result of uninterrupted persecutions, reduced the number of young men of conscription age. But the Russian authorities were of the opinion that the Jews who remained behind should serve in the Russian army instead of those of their brethren who had become citizens of the free American Republic. The "evasion of military duty" and the annual shortage of a few hundred recruits, as against the many thousands of those enlisted, was charged as a grave crime against that very people towards which the Government on its part failed to fulfil even its most elementary obligations. Reams of paper were covered with all kinds of official devices to "cut short" this evasion of military duty by the Jews. On one beautiful April morning of 1886, the Government came out with the following enactment:

The family of a Jew guilty of evading military service is liable to a fine of three hundred rubles ($150). The collection of the fine shall be decreed by the respective recruiting station and carried out by the police. It shall not be subst.i.tuted by imprisonment in the case of dest.i.tute persons liable to that fine.

In addition, a military reward was promised for the seizure of a Jew who had failed to present himself to the recruiting authorities.

By virtue of this barbarous principle of collective responsibility, new hardships were inflicted upon the Jews of Russia. Since the law provided that the fine for evading military service be imposed upon the _family_ of the culprit, the police interpreted that term "liberally," taking it to include parents, brothers, and near relatives. The following procedure gradually came into vogue. In the autumn of every year, the Russian conscription season, the names of the young Jews who have completed their twenty-first year are called out at the recruiting station from a prepared list. When a Jew whose name has been called has failed to present himself on the same day, the recruiting authorities issue an order on the spot imposing a fine on his family. The police then appear in the house of his parents to collect the sum of three hundred rubles. In default of cash, they attach the property of the paupers and have it subsequently sold at public auction. In the case of those who possess nothing that can be taken from them the police insist on their giving a signed promise not to leave the town. Their pa.s.sports are taken from them, so that, not being able to absent themselves from town to earn a living, they are frequently left to starve. If the parents are dead or absent, the brothers and sisters of the culprit, and then his grandfathers and grandmothers are held answerable with their property.

Thus, a large number of Jewish families were completely ruined, merely because one of their members had emigrated abroad, or, as was frequently the case, had surrendered his soul to G.o.d in his beloved fatherland itself, and the relatives had failed to see to it that the dead soul was stricken from the recruiting lists. Yet, despite all these efforts, there still remained a considerable number of uncollected fines--"arrears," as they were officially termed--to the profound regret of the Russian Jew-baiters, who had to look on while the victims were slipping unpunished from their hands.