History of the Jews in Russia and Poland Volume II Part 33

The fight against the places of Jewish worship was renewed by the police a few years later, during the reign of Nicholas II. The princ.i.p.al synagogue being closed, the Jews of Moscow were compelled to hold services in uncomfortable private premises. There were fourteen houses of prayer of this kind in various parts of the city, but, on the eve of the Jewish Pa.s.sover of 1894, the governor-general gave orders to close nine of these houses, so that the religious needs of a community of ten thousand souls had to be satisfied in five houses of worship, situated in narrow, unsanitary quarters. The Government had achieved its purpose.

The synagogue was humbled into the dust, and its sight no longer offended the eyes of the Greek-Orthodox zealots. The Jews of Moscow were forced to pour out their hearts before G.o.d in some back yards, in the stuffy atmosphere of private dwellings. As in the days of the Spanish inquisition, these private houses of worship would, on the solemn days of Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur, be stealthily visited by the "marranos" of Moscow, those Jews who had saved themselves from the wholesale expulsions by fict.i.tious conversion to Christianity. The pa.s.sionate prayers of repentance of these involuntary apostates rose up to heaven as they had done in centuries gone-by from the underground synagogues of Seville, Toledo, and Saragossa.

By and by, the attempt to take the Jewish citadel by storm gave way to the former regular state of siege, which had for its object to starve out the Jews. The munic.i.p.al counterreform of 1892 dealt a severe political blow to Russian Jewry. Under the old law, the number of Jewish aldermen in the munic.i.p.al administration had been limited to one-third of the total number of aldermen, aside from the prohibition barring the Jews from the office of burgomaster [1]. Notwithstanding these restrictions, the Jews played a conspicuous part in munic.i.p.al self-government, and could boast of a number of prominent munic.i.p.al workers. This activity of the Jews went against the grain of the inquisitorial trio, Pobyedonostzev, Durnovo, and Plehve, and they decided to bar the Jews completely from partic.i.p.ation in the munic.i.p.al elections.

[Footnote 1: See p. 198 et seq.]

The reactionary, anti-democratic "Munic.i.p.al Regulation" of 1892 proclaimed publicly this new Jewish disfranchis.e.m.e.nt. The new law deprived the Jews of their right of pa.s.sive and active election to the munic.i.p.al Dumas, merely granting the local administration the right to _appoint_ at its pleasure a number of Jewish aldermen, not to exceed one-tenth of the total membership of the Duma. Moreover, these Jewish aldermen "by the grace of the police" were prohibited from serving on the executive organs of the Duma, the administrative council, and the various standing committees. As a result, even there where the Jews formed sixty and seventy per cent of the total urban population, their only representatives in the munic.i.p.al administration were men who were the willing tools of the munic.i.p.al powers and who, moreover, were quant.i.tatively restricted to five or ten per cent of the total number of aldermen.

In this wise, the law providing for an inverse ratio of popular representation came into effect: four-fifths of the population were limited to one-tenth of the number of aldermen, while one-fifth of it were granted nine-tenths of aldermen in the city government. The law seemed to tell the Jews: "True, in a given city you may form the overwhelming majority of tax-payers, yet the city property shall not be managed by you but by the small Christian, minority which shall do with you as it pleases."

It goes without saying that the Christian minority, which was not infrequently hostile to the Jews, managed the city affairs in a manner subversive of the interests of the majority. Even the imposts on special Jewish needs, such as the meat and candle tax, were often used by the the munic.i.p.al Dumas towards the maintenance of inst.i.tutions and schools to to which Jews were admitted in an insignificant number or not admitted at at all. This condition of affairs was in full accord with the medieval medieval Church canons: A Jew living in a Christian country has no right to to dispose of any property and must remain in slavish subjection to his his Christian fellow-citizens.

A number of laws pa.s.sed during that period are of such a nature as to admit of but one explanation, the desire to insult and humiliate the Jew and to brand him by the medieval Cain's mark of persecution. The law, issued in 1893, "Concerning Names" threatens with criminal prosecution those Jews who in their private life call themselves by names differing in form from those recorded in the official registers. The practice of many educated Jews to Russianize their names, such as Gregory, instead of Hirsch, Vladimir, instead of Wolf, etc., could now land the culprits in prison. It was even forbidden to correct the disfigurements to which the Jewish names were generally subjected in the registers, such as Yosel, instead of Joseph; Srul, instead of Israel; Itzek, instead of Isaac, and so on. In several cities the police brought action against such Jews "for having adopted Christian names" in newspaper advertis.e.m.e.nts, on visiting cards, or on door signs.

The new Pa.s.sport Regulation of 1894 orders to insert in _all_ Jewish pa.s.sports a physical description of their owners, even in the case of their being literate and, therefore, being able to affix their signature to the pa.s.sport, whereas such description was omitted from the pa.s.sports of literate Christians. In some places the police deliberately tried to make the Jewish pa.s.sports more conspicuous by marking on them the denomination of the owner in red ink. Even in those rare instances in which the law was intended to bring relief, the Government managed to emphasize its hostile intent. The law of 1893, legalizing the Jewish heder and putting an end to the persecutions, which this traditional Jewish school had suffered at the hands of the police, narrowed at the same time its function to that of an exclusively religious inst.i.tution and indirectly forbade the teaching in it of general secular subjects.

There are cases on record in which the keepers of these heders, the so-called melammeds, were put on trial for imparting to their pupils a knowledge of Russian and arithmetic.

However, the most effective whip in the hands of the Government remained as theretofore the expulsion from the governments of the interior. In 1893, this whip cracked over the backs of thousands of Jewish families.

Durnovo, the Minister of the Interior, issued a circular, repealing the old decree of 1880, which had sanctioned the residence outside the Pale of Settlement of all those Jews who had lived there previously.[1] That decree had been prompted by the motive to prevent the complete economic ruin of the Jews who were settled in places outside the Pale and had created there industrial enterprises. But such a motive, which even the anti-Semitic Ministry of Tolstoi had not been bold enough to disregard, did not appeal to the new Hamans. Many thousands of Jewish families, who had lived outside the Pale for decades, were threatened with exile. The difficulties attending the execution of this wholesale expulsion forced the Government to make concessions. In the Baltic provinces the banishment of the old settlers was repealed, while in the Great Russian governments it was postponed for a year or two.

[Footnote 1: Compare p. 404.]

There was a particularly spiteful motive behind the imperial ukase of 1893, excluding the Crimean resort place Yalta from the Pale of Settlement, [1] and ordering the expulsion from there of hundreds of families which were not enrolled in the local town community. No official reason was given for this new disability, but everybody knew it. In the neighborhood of Yalta was the imperial summer residence Livadia, where Alexander III. was fond of spending the autumn, and this circ.u.mstance made it imperative to reduce the number of the local Jewish residents to a negligible quant.i.ty. To avert the complete ruin of the victims, many were granted reprieves, but after the expiration of their terms they were ruthlessly deported. The last batches of exiles were driven from Yalta in the month of October and in the beginning of November, 1894, during the days of public mourning for the death of Alexander III. On October 20, the Tzar was destined to die in the neighborhood of the town which was purged of the Jewish populace for his benefit. While the earthly remains of the dead emperor were carried on the railroad tracks to St. Petersburg, trains filled with Jewish refugees from Yalta were rolling on the parallel tracks, speeding towards the Pale of Settlement.

[Footnote 1: The Crimean peninsula, forming part of the government of Tavrida, is situated within the Pale.]

Such was the symbolic _finale_ of the reign of Alexander III. which lasted fourteen years. Having begun with pogroms, it ended with expulsions. The martyred nation stood at the threshold of the new reign with a silent question on its lip: "What next?"