History of the Jews in Russia and Poland Volume II Part 30

Solovyov addressed an impa.s.sioned appeal to Alexander III., but received through one of the Ministers the impressive advice to refrain from raising a cry on behalf of the Jews, under pain of administrative penalties. In these circ.u.mstances, the plan of a public protest had to be abandoned. Instead, the following device was resorted to as a makeshift. Solovyov's teacher of Jewish literature, F. Goetz, was publishing an apology of Judaism under the t.i.tle "A Word from the Prisoner at the Bar." Solovyov wrote a preface to this little volume, and turned over to its author for publication the letters of Tolstoi and Korolenko in the defence of the Jews. No sooner had the book left the press than it was confiscated by the censor, and, in spite of all pet.i.tions, the entire edition of this innocent apology was thrown into the flames. In this way the Russian Government succeeded in shutting the mouths of the few defenders of Judaism, while according unrestricted liberty of speech to its ferocious a.s.sailants.

3. THE GUILDHALL MEETING IN LONDON

The cry of indignation against Jewish oppression, which had been smothered in Russia, could not be stifled abroad. The Jews of England took the initiative in this matter. On November 5, 1890, the London _Times_ published a letter from N.S. Joseph, honorary secretary to the Russo-Jewish Committee in London, pa.s.sionately appealing to the public men of England to intercede on behalf of his persecuted coreligionists.

The writer of the letter called attention to the fact that, while the Russian Government was officially denying that it was contemplating new restrictions against the Jews, it was at the same time applying the former restrictions on so comprehensive a scale and with such extraordinary cruelty that the Jews in the Pale of Settlement were like a doomed prisoner in a cell with its opposite walls gradually approaching, contracting by slow degrees his breathing s.p.a.ce, till they at last immure him in a living tomb.

The writer concludes his appeal in these terms:

It may seem a sorry jest but the Russian law, in very truth, now declares: The Jew may live here only and shall not live there; if he lives here he must remain here; but wherever he lives he shall not live--he shall not have the means of living. This is the operation of the law as it stands, without any new edict. This is the sentence of death that silently, insidiously, and in the veiled language of obscurely worded laws has been p.r.o.nounced against hundreds of thousands of human beings.... Shall civilized Europe, shall the Christianity of England behold this slow torture and bloodless ma.s.sacre, and be silent?

The appeal of the Russo-Jewish Committee and the new gloomy tidings from Russia published by the _Times_ decided a number of prominent Englishmen to call the protest meeting which had been postponed half a year previously. Eighty-three foremost representatives of English society addressed a letter to the Lord Mayor of London calling upon him to convene such a meeting. The office of Lord Mayor at that time was occupied by Joseph Savory, a Christian, who did not share the susceptibilities which had troubled his Jewish predecessor. Immediately on a.s.suming office, Savory gave his consent to the holding of the meeting.

On December 10, 1890, the meeting was held in the magnificent Guildhall, belonging to the City of London, and was attended by more than 2000 people. The Lord Mayor who presided over the gathering endeavored in his introductory remarks to soften the bitterness of the protest for the benefit of official Russia.

As I hear--he said--the Emperor of Russia is a good husband and a tender father, and I cannot but think that such a man must necessarily be kindly disposed to all his subjects. On his Majesty the Emperor of Russia the hopes of the Russian Jews are at the present moment fixed. He can by one stroke of his pen annul those laws which now press so grievously upon them and he can thus give a happy life to those Jewish subjects of his who now can hardly be said to live at all.

In conclusion, the Lord Mayor expressed the wish that Alexander III. may become the "emanc.i.p.ator" of the Russian Jews, just as his father Alexander II. had been the emanc.i.p.ator of the Russian serfs.

Cardinal Manning, the warm-hearted champion of Jewish emanc.i.p.ation, who was prevented by illness from being present, sent a long letter which was read to the meeting. The argument against interfering with the inner politics of a foreign country, the cardinal wrote, had found its first expression in Cain's question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" There is a united Jewish race scattered all over the world, and the pain inflicted upon it in Russia is felt by the Jewish race in England. It is wrong to keep silent when we see six million men reduced to the level of criminals, particularly when they belong to a race "with a sacred history of nearly four thousand years."

The speakers who followed the Lord Mayor pictured in vivid colors the political and civil bondage of Russian Jewry.

The first speaker, the Duke of Westminster, after recounting the sufferings of Russian Jewry, moved the adoption of the protest resolution, notwithstanding the fact that the "great protest of 1882"

(at the Mansion House meeting)[1] had brought no results. "We read in the history of the Jewish race that 'G.o.d hardened the heart of Pharaoh so that he would not let the people of Israel go'; but deliverance came at last by the hand of Moses."

[Footnote 1: See p. 288 et seq.]

After brilliant speeches by the Bishop of Ripon, the Earl of Meath, and others, the following resolution was adopted:

That in the opinion of this meeting the renewed sufferings of the Jews in Russia from the operation of severe and exceptional edicts and disabilities are deeply to be deplored, and that in this last decade of the nineteenth century religious liberty is a principle which should be recognized by every Christian community as among the natural human rights.

At the same time a second resolution was adopted to the following effect:

That a suitable memorial be addressed to his Imperial Majesty the Emperor of all the Russias, respectfully praying his Majesty to repeal all the exceptional and restrictive laws and disabilities which afflict his Jewish subjects; and begging his Majesty to confer upon them equal rights with those enjoyed by the rest of his Majesty's subjects; and that the said memorial be signed by the Right Hon. the Lord Mayor, in the name of the citizens of London, and be transmitted by his Lordship to his Majesty.

A few extracts from the memorandum may be quoted by way of ill.u.s.trating the character of this remarkable appeal to the Russian emperor:

We, the citizens of London, respectfully approach your Majesty and humbly beg your gracious leave to plead the cause of the afflicted.

Cries of distress have reached us from thousands of suffering Israelites in your vast empire; and we Englishmen, with pity in our souls for all who suffer, turn to your Majesty to implore for them your Sovereign aid and clemency.

Five millions of your Majesty's subjects groan beneath the yoke of exceptional and restrictive laws. Remnants of a race, whence all religion sprung--ours and yours, and every creed on earth that owns one G.o.d--men who cling with all devotion to their ancient faith and forms of worship, these Hebrews are in your empire subject to such laws that under them they cannot live and thrive....

Pent up in narrow bounds within your Majesty's wide empire, and even within those bounds forced to reside chiefly in towns that reek and overflow with every form of poverty and wretchedness; forbidden all free movement; hedged in every enterprise by restrictive laws; forbidden tenure of land, or all concern in land, their means of livelihood have become so cramped as to render life for them well-nigh impossible.

Nor are they cramped alone in s.p.a.ce and action. The higher education is denied them, except in limits far below the due proportion of their needs and aspirations. They may not freely exercise professions, like other subjects of your Majesty, nor may they gain promotion in the Army, however great their merit and their valour....

Sire! we who have learnt to tolerate all creeds, deeming it a principle of true religion to permit religious liberty, we beseech your Majesty to repeal those laws that afflict these Israelites.

Give them the blessing of equality! In every land where Jews have equal rights, the nation prospers. We pray you, then, annul those special laws and disabilities that crush and cow your Hebrew subjects....

Sire! your Royal Sister, our Empress Queen (whom G.o.d preserve!) bases her throne upon her people's love, making their happiness her own. So may your Majesty gain from your subjects' love all strength and happiness, making your mighty empire mightier still, rendering your Throne firm and impregnable, reaping new blessings for your House and Home.

The memorial was signed by Savory, who was Lord Mayor at that time, and forwarded by him to St. Petersburg. It was accompanied by a letter, dated December 24, from the Lord Mayor to Lieutenant-General de Richter, aide-de-camp of the Tzar for the reception of pet.i.tions, with the request to transmit the doc.u.ment to the emperor.

It is almost unnecessary to add that this touching appeal for justice by the citizens of London failed to receive a direct reply. There were rumors that the London pet.i.tion threw the Tzar into a fury, and the future court annalist of Russia will probably tell of the scene that took place in the imperial palace when this doc.u.ment was read. An indirect reply came through the cringing official press. The mouthpiece of the Russian Government abroad, the newspaper _Le Nord_ in Brussels, which was especially engaged in the task of whitewashing the black politics of its employers, published an article under the heading "A Last Word concerning Semitism," in which the rancor of the highest Government circles in Russia found undisguised expression:

The Semites--quoth the semi-official organ with an impudent disregard of truth--have never yet had such an easy life in Russia as they have at the present time, and yet they have never complained so bitterly. There is a reason for it. It is a peculiarity of Semitism: a Semite is never satisfied with anything; the more you give him the more he wishes to have.

In the evident desire to fool its readers, _Le Nord_ declared that the protesters at the London meeting might have saved themselves the trouble of demanding "religious liberty" for the Jews--which in the London pet.i.tion was understood, of course, to imply civil liberty for the professors of Judaism--since n.o.body in Russia restricted the Jews in their worship. Nor did the civil disabilities weigh heavily upon the Jews. On the contrary, they felt so happy in Russia that even the Jewish emigrants in America dreamt of returning to their homeland.

4. THE PROTEST OF AMERICA

The same att.i.tude of double-dealing was adopted by the smooth-tongued Russian diplomats toward the Government of the United States. Aroused over the inhuman treatment of the Jews in Russia, and alarmed by the effects of a sudden Russian-Jewish immigration to America, which was bound to follow as a result of this treatment, the House of Representatives adopted a resolution on August 20, 1890, requesting the President--

To communicate to the House of Representatives, if not incompatible with the public interests, any information in his possession concerning the enforcement of proscriptive edicts against the Jews in Russia, recently ordered, as reported in the public press; and whether any American citizens have, because of their religion, been ordered to be expelled from Russia, or forbidden the exercise of the ordinary privileges enjoyed by the inhabitants.

In response to this resolution, President Harrison laid before Congress all the correspondence and papers bearing on the Jewish question in Russia. [1]

[Footnote 1: The material was printed as _Executive Doc.u.ment_ No. 470, dated October 1, 1890. It reproduced all the doc.u.ments originally embodied in _Executive Doc.u.ment_ No. 192 (see above, p. 294, n. 1), in addition to the new material.]

A little later, on December 19 of the same year, the following resolution of protest was introduced in the House of Representatives and referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs:

_Resolved_, That the members of the House of Representatives of the United States have heard with profound sorrow, and with feelings akin to horror, the reports of the persecution of the Jews in Russia, reflecting the barbarism of past ages, disgracing humanity, and impeding the progress of civilization.

_Resolved_, That our sorrow is intensified by the fact that such occurrences should happen in a country which has been, and now is, the firm friend of the United States, and in a nation that clothed itself with glory, not long since, by the emanc.i.p.ation of its serfs and by its defense of helpless Christians from the oppression of the Turks.

_Resolved_, That a copy of this resolution be forwarded to the Secretary of State, with a request that he send it to the American Minister at St. Petersburg, and that said Minister be directed to present the same to his Imperial Majesty Alexander III., Czar of all the Russias. [1]

[Footnote 1:_Congressional Record_, Vol. 22, p. 705.--The resolution was reported back on February 5, 1891, in the following amended form (loc. cit., p. 2219):

_Resolved_, That the members of the House of Representatives of the United States have heard with profound sorrow the reports of the sufferings of the Jews in Russia; and this sorrow is intensified by the fact that these occurrences should happen in a country which is, and long has been the friend of the United States, which emanc.i.p.ated millions of its people from serfdom, and which defended helpless Christians in the East from persecution for their religion; and we earnestly hope that the humanity and enlightened spirit then so strikingly shown by His Imperial Majesty will now be manifested in checking and mitigating the severe measures directed against men of the Jewish religion.]

In the meantime the Department of State was flooded with protests against the Russian atrocities.

Almost every day--Secretary of State, James G. Blaine, writes to Charles Emory Smith, United States Minister at St. Petersburg, on February 27, 1891--communications are received on this subject; temperate, and couched in language respectful to the Government of the Czar; but at the same time indicative and strongly expressive of the depth and prevalence of the sentiment of disaprobation and regret. [1]

[Footnote 1: _Foreign Relations of the United States_, 1891, p. 740.]

The American Minister was therefore instructed to exert his influence with the Russian Government in the direction of mitigating the severity of the anti-Jewish measures. He was to point out to the Russian authorities that the maltreatment of the Jews in Russia was not purely an internal affair of the Russian Government, inasmuch as it affected the interests of the United States. Within ten years 200,000 Russian Jews had come over to America, and continued persecutions in Russia were bound to result in a large and sudden immigration which was not unattended with danger. While the United States did not presume to dictate to Russia, "nevertheless, the mutual duties of nations require that each should use his power with a due regard for the other and for the results which its exercise produces on the rest of the world." [1]

[Footnote 1: _Loc. cit_., p. 737.]

The remonstrances of the American people which were voiced by their representatives at St. Petersburg were received by the Russian Government in a manner which strikingly ill.u.s.trates the well-known duplicity of its diplomatic methods. While endeavoring to justify its policy of oppression by all kinds of libellous charges against the Russian Jews, it gave at the same time repeated a.s.surance to the American Minister that no new proscriptive laws were contemplated, and the latter reported accordingly to his Government. [1] On February 10, 1891, the American Minister, writing to Secretary Blaine, gives a detailed account of the conversation he had had with the Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs, de Giers. The latter went out of his way to discuss with him unreservedly the entire Jewish situation in Russia, and, while making all kinds of subtle insinuations against the character of the Russian Jew, he expressed himself in a manner which was calculated to convince the American representative of the conciliatory disposition of the Russian Government. [2] Less than three weeks later followed the cruel expulsion edict against the Jews of Moscow.

[Footnote 1: Compare in particular his dispatch, dated September 25, 1890, published in _Executive Doc.u.ment_ No. 470, p. 141.]

[Footnote 2: _Foreign Relations_, 1891, p. 734.]