Jewish Immigration to the United States from 1881 to 1910 Part 4

The early years of Nicholas II were marked by a relaxation in the strict administration and interpretation of the existing restrictive laws. Hopes for the amelioration of the Jewish situation began to be entertained. These hopes were destined shortly to be shattered.

The first decade of the twentieth century opened with threatening unrest. Economic depression began and was accompanied by revolutionary attacks. For the Jews, the most alarming symptom was the rise and uninterrupted progress of a group of antisemitic agitators and Russian loyalists, who sought to counteract the revolutionary movement by denouncing the Jews as the leaders of the revolution and the enemies of the autocracy and the Orthodox religion. Thus was sown the seed of the Kishineff ma.s.sacre of April, 1903, which lasted three days. Before the echoes of Kishineff had died away, the ma.s.sacre at Gomel followed.

But Kishineff proved to be merely a b.l.o.o.d.y prelude. The air was surcharged with explosives. The outbreak of the Russo-j.a.panese war and of the first organized revolution created a dangerous combination of events for the Jews. To the discontent of the peasants, forced to go to the front in a war for which they had no enthusiasm, and sore with the reverses of the Russian army, was added the increased activity of the agitators who declared that the war with j.a.pan had been forced upon Russia by the Jews, eager to profit through its ruin, and who called upon their followers and the peasants through propaganda and proclamations to revenge themselves upon the Jews. The government at bay, on the verge of breakdown under the revolutionary attacks, and anxious to excuse its incompetency and failure in the conduct of the war, sought a means of diverting the peasants from the uprisings against the landed proprietors spreading over the land, and, above all, of stifling the revolution, which had met with such opportune and unlooked-for success among all cla.s.ses. This was a situation alive with danger for the Jews, whose proletarians in the cities had taken an active part in the revolution. The organization of Jewish ma.s.sacres by responsible agents of the government became the central feature of its program of counter-revolution.[38] A veritable holocaust ensued in nearly every province of the Empire for two years, only the climaxes of which became known to the world in Zhitomir, Odessa, Bialystok, and Siedlec.

The rle of the bureaucracy in the creation of the _pogroms_, especially in 1906, in which year there took place hundreds of _pogroms_, was made abundantly clear by the Russian press, by Prince Urussov's disclosures in the Duma, and by the report of the Duma Commission appointed to investigate the causes of the Bialystok _pogrom_ of 1906. As announced in their official report, an investigation had shown that the relations between the Jews and the Christians of Bialystok previous to the bloodshed had been amicable, and that preparations for a _pogrom_ had been deliberately and carefully made by agents of the bureaucracy and carried out with the aid of the local authorities.

Both periods of _pogroms_ in these thirty years were periods of revolution. In both the government had felt the ground shaking under its feet from terroristic attacks and from peasant uprisings. In the first period Jews had taken only slight part. In the late revolution, however, the partic.i.p.ation of the Jews of the Pale, through the Jewish labor organization, the _Bund_, was quite strong. The earlier _pogroms_ gave a hint as to the policy of the new rgime. The later ones occurred at the end of years of repression and persecution, and were a culminating point in the fury of the reactionary forces at their failure to stem the tide of liberalism in the struggle for parliamentary inst.i.tutions and for the rights of citizens in a modern state.

The results of these thirty years of reaction remain to be considered.

Though the effects of the _pogroms_ upon the Russian Jews can hardly be overestimated, the less evident, because less spectacular, methods of restrictive law and administrative action have in the long run left a far more enduring impress.

The introduction of the May Laws at the very beginning of the eighties awakened the Jews to the realization that their future in Russia was threatened. The May Laws and the laws that were developed from them, the obstacles that were placed in the way of Jewish education and, in general, the administrative difficulties that were created, have affected every movement of their life.

Freedom of movement of the individual is the very essence of the life of modern states and the basis of their economic, social and political inst.i.tutions. The lack of this freedom, especially to the extent created by the May Laws, bars the Jews from the possibilities of normal economic growth and progress. The Jewish manufacturers and capitalists are prevented from partic.i.p.ating in the industrial and commercial development of Russia, which is so rapidly proceeding and to which, owing to their economic position and capacities, they could powerfully contribute. Legal interference with economic activities, so frequently the rule in Russia, is emphasized in the case of the Jews.

A far more serious situation confronts the great ma.s.s of the Jewish artisans, petty merchants and factory workers, to which the vast majority of the Jews belong. Largely prevented access to their natural customers, the peasants, by the prohibition of rural residence, and confined to the relatively few towns of the Pale, where over-crowding and over-compet.i.tion are the necessary and unavoidable results, the Jewish artisans and petty merchants have a bitter struggle to maintain a position of economic independence.

Added to this, there is the social pressure to which the Jews have been subjected. Not until this period has the century-long position of the Jews as the "pariahs of the Empire" been so sharply emphasized.

Enmeshed in a net of special laws and regulations, at the mercy of ministerial decree, secret circular, arbitrary administrative act, law has lost all meaning for the Jews. In this atmosphere they exist mainly through bribery, at once their bane and their salvation.

The unusual economic and social pressure exerted by the reactionary rgime upon its Jewish subjects, through the new restrictive laws that were put into operation during the last thirty years, the administrative harrying that became the order of the day and the introduction of the hitherto unused method of physical repression, the _pogrom_, becomes clear in the light of its policy. Beginning as a movement to suppress the Jews in their economic and cultural activities, and to separate them as far as possible from their Russian neighbors, the anti-Jewish program became in its final form the expulsion and extermination of the Jews from Russia. The historic sentence of Count Ignatiev, author of the May Laws, at the very beginning of this period, "the Western borders are open to you Jews", strikes the keynote of this policy. And, in fact, for practically the first time in its history, the Russian government relaxed in 1892 its rigorous rules forbidding emigration, and gave its sanction to Baron de Hirsch's plan of organizing a vast emigration of Jews from Russia, which its author hoped would, at the end of a quarter of a century, result in the complete transplantation of the Jews from Russia. The famous principle of the Russian government, "once a Russian always a Russian", was for once put aside in favor of the Jews. They were given one right not enjoyed by other Russians, that of leaving Russia under the obligation of abandoning Russian citizenship forever.[39]

II. ROUMANIA

Up to very recent years, the history of the Jews in Roumania centers about those resident in Moldavia. Its proximity to ancient Poland and close a.s.sociation with Bessarabia, naturally made for a back-and-forth movement of the Polish and Russian Jews, whose settlement was invited by the boyars or landed n.o.bility because of resulting industrial and commercial advantages.

The position of the Jews in Moldavia up to the middle of the nineteenth century did not differ to any extent from that of their brethren in Russia. Moldavia, as a Christian state, denied civil and political rights to all non-Christians. The Jews in Moldavia were regarded as aliens, whose activities were subject to special regulation. The beginning of the last century witnessed the first special Jewish laws. The Jews were forbidden to buy the products of the soil, to acquire real property; non-resident Jews were debarred unless they could prove an occupation and show the possession of property. Definite restrictions as to occupation, residence in the villages, the ownership, in villages, of houses, land, vineyards, _etc._, existed. As vagabonds they could be expelled from the country by administrative decree. Thus was their legal status fixed.

The emanc.i.p.ation of Jews was first demanded by the liberal party during the revolutionary days of 1848. But no practical change resulted until the Convention of Paris in 1856, which, in granting autonomy to the two provinces, guaranteed civil rights to all Moldavians, regardless of creed. Though political rights were granted only to Christian Moldo-Wallachians, the provision was made that, by legislative arrangements, the enjoyment of political rights could be extended to other creeds. Thus was established the possibility of a gradual emanc.i.p.ation of the Jews, foreshadowed in the communal law of 1864, which granted the right of naturalization to certain cla.s.ses of native Roumanian Jews. Those who had pa.s.sed through college or had a recognized foreign degree, or who had founded a factory in the land employing at least fifty workmen were among the favored cla.s.ses.

Shortly afterwards, this section was abrogated, and, with the abdication of the liberal Couza and the accession of Charles Hohenzollern, the present king, to the throne, the situation changed.

Article VII of the const.i.tution of the newly-created kingdom read that foreigners not of the Christian faith could not be naturalized. As within the term foreigner the great ma.s.s of the Jews residing in the land was included, this was a denial of the conditions laid down in the Treaty of Paris. At the same time, old laws against the Jews which had fallen into abeyance were revived, expulsions of the Jews from the villages into the towns began to take place with great frequency, laws requiring all sellers of liquor in rural communes to be naturalized Roumanians deprived many Jewish families of a livelihood--in short, the usual symptoms of anti-Jewish activity became the order of the day.

It was at the famous Berlin Congress, convened to decide questions created by the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, that the subject of the Jewish disabilities in Roumania was brought up, in connection with the demand of Roumania for recognition as an independent state. The chief objection made especially by the representatives of three of the European powers--France, England and Germany--was Roumania's treatment of the Jews. It was finally decided by the Congress to recognize her independence on the condition that she grant civil and political equality to all her citizens without distinction of race or creed.

This was expressed in Article 44 of the historic Berlin Treaty, which read as follows:

Article 44. In Roumania, difference in religious beliefs and confessions shall not be brought against anyone as a ground for exclusion or unfitness as regards the enjoyment of civil and political rights, admission to public offices, functions, and honors, or the exercise of various professions and industries in any place whatever. Freedom in outward observance of all creeds will be a.s.sured to all subjects of the Roumanian state, as well as to strangers, and no obstacle will be raised either to the ecclesiastical organization of different bodies, or to their intercourse with their spiritual heads.

The citizens of all states, whether merchants or others, shall be dealt with, in Roumania, without distinction of religion, on the basis of perfect equality.

In the _const.i.tuante_ which was convoked soon after to discuss the question of giving the Jews equal political rights, an interesting picture is obtained of the sentiment of the upper and middle cla.s.ses of Roumania.[40] An overwhelming majority was opposed to the granting of political rights to the Jews on the ground that Roumania was a Christian-Latin State, or on the purely nationalistic ground that the Jews were an alien and utterly una.s.similable element of the population. To meet the demands of the Powers the principle of individual naturalization was adopted, by which an alien could be granted naturalization individually and only by a special vote of the Chamber of Deputies. Other onerous conditions, such as the requirement of a ten years' residence in the country for citizenship, and the prohibition of the purchase by aliens of rural estates, showed conclusively that Roumania was prepared to give only formal a.s.sent to the demand of the Powers.[41] After a year of negotiations, the three Powers agreed to the recognition of her independence, expressing the hope that the Roumanian government would recognize the inadequacy of the revised article and especially of the principle of individual naturalization as meeting the conditions of the Berlin Treaty, and would aim towards a complete emanc.i.p.ation of all her subjects.[42]

The situation at the beginning of the eighties presented but little hope of improvement in the political condition of the Jews. Eight hundred and eighty-three Jews who had fought in the war for independence had been naturalized _en ma.s.se_. With the exception of this small number, the Jews were legally cla.s.sed as foreigners.[43]

Shortly after, owing to the fact that Austria-Hungary had withdrawn its protection from several thousands of its Jewish citizens resident in Roumania, the entire body of Jews received a new legal status, that of "foreigners not subject to any foreign Power". In other words, they were stateless, though subject to all the obligations of Roumanian citizens, including military service and the payment of taxes. This legal status of the Jews has received the attention of the world and marks a condition of things which according to Bluntschli is "a denial of the entire development of European states".[44]

Freed from the control of the Powers, Roumania now entered on a new campaign of discrimination against the Jews. The first decade of the eighties saw this begun in a series of laws which for completeness finds no parallel even in Russia. At the very beginning, a law giving the police the right of domiciliary visitation and of expelling under the vagabond law anyone in the rural districts, was employed against the Jews, resulting in their frequent expulsions into the towns. The enforcement of the law against rural residence was so strict as to create practically the same situation as exists in the Russian Pale.

The law of 1883, prohibiting lotteries, and in the following year the law prohibiting hawking or any form of sale from house to house or on the streets deprived several thousands of Jewish families of their livelihood.

It was in 1886 and 1887, however, when the laws which were to create a national industry and commerce were introduced, that a serious step was taken to exclude the Jews from economic activity. On the a.s.sumption that occupations were a civil right to which aliens could or could not be admitted, the Jews were systematically deprived even of the civil rights which had been theirs, to a great extent, before the Berlin Congress sought to make them politically free. As foreigners, the Jews were prohibited the right of choosing electors for the newly-created Chambers of Commerce and Trade, or of becoming members of these chambers although they formed a large majority of the merchants and manufacturers represented in these important bodies. A still more serious provision was that which decreed that five years after the foundation of a factory two-thirds of the workingmen employed therein must be Roumanians. Jews were also partly excluded from the administrative positions in joint-stock companies. They were completely excluded from employment in the financial inst.i.tutions of the state, from the state railway service, and, by a provision that two-thirds of the employes on private railways must be Roumanians, were practically excluded from these as well. The sharpest blow, however, was struck in 1902, when a new law for the organization of trades, popularly known as the Artisans' Bill, was pa.s.sed. In this law there is to be seen a revival of the guild organizations of the Middle Ages. To pursue his occupation every artisan was required to obtain a certificate from a guild. Jewish master artisans and workmen were hit by the requirement that aliens in order to have the right of working in accordance with this law must prove that in their own country reciprocal rights existed for Roumanians, or obtain an authorization from a Chamber of Commerce or Industry. Whatever value this requirement may have had for the protection of Roumanian workmen in foreign countries, its chief effect was to place in a position of economic helplessness the majority of the Jewish workmen as "aliens not subject to any foreign Power", and largely unable to secure authorization from such chambers controlled by compet.i.tors. Other clauses, requiring that all workingmen belong to a guild, and that fifty workmen possessing civil and political rights are empowered to form a guild, put the control of trades into the hands of non-Jews, although the majority of the artisans in many of the trades were Jews.

A similar policy was pursued with reference to the cultural activities of the Jews. A circular of the minister of public instruction, issued in 1887, ordered that preference should be given to Roumanian children, in cases where there was not enough room in the elementary schools for all. This began the gradual exclusion of Jewish children from the Roumanian elementary schools. The formal treatment of the Jews as aliens in the educational system was introduced in 1893, when all aliens were required to pay fees for entrance into the public schools, and were admitted only in case there was enough room for them. The effect of these laws was seen in the diminished proportion of Jewish children in the elementary schools. Similar provisions for the secondary and high schools and universities largely closed the doors of these inst.i.tutions to the Jews. From schools of agriculture and forestry, and of commerce they were completely excluded.

To the educational restrictions were added restrictions to professional service. As aliens, they were forbidden to be employed in the public sanitary service and health department as physicians, pharmacists, _etc._, from owning as well as working in private pharmacies, and from entering other professional fields.

The almost complete agreement of the two princ.i.p.al parties--liberal and conservative--explains the thoroughness and uninterrupted progress of this process of piling up disability upon disability. The explanation is partly to be found in the const.i.tution of Roumania, the electoral law of which places the political powers in the hands of two cla.s.ses--the landed aristocracy and the urban, or middle cla.s.s. The vast majority of the peasants are excluded by educational and property qualifications, obtaining only indirect representation. Had the Jews been granted political rights, they would have shared political power with the other two cla.s.ses. It is through the second electoral college, of both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, that the middle cla.s.s is represented politically. As manufacturers and merchants, as urban dwellers, as members of the liberal professions and as graduates of the elementary schools, the Jews would have become the most important part of this electoral college.

Again, the creation of an industry and commerce along national lines was largely a course of action in the interests of this middle cla.s.s of Roumanian merchants, artisans and laborers. It was in favor of this cla.s.s that the laws were pa.s.sed debarring Jews from various occupations and seeking essentially to wrest the industrial and commercial monopoly from their hands.

In this course of action, powerful aid was extended by the bureaucracy, recruited mainly from the lower n.o.bility and the middle cla.s.ses. Depending for their support upon the urbans, and seeking to prevent the entrance of Jews into state service, which would have resulted from the granting of political rights to the Jews, the bureaucracy have acted in harmony with the middle cla.s.ses in the attempt to make the Jews politically, economically, and culturally powerless.

Thus the situation that the Jews in Roumania have been facing for thirty years is abnormal, from every standpoint. At no time within thirty years has there been any serious question of giving to the Jews the political rights, the granting of which had been made the condition of the recognition of Roumania's independence by the Powers.

The history of the succeeding thirty years has been one of gradual, steady and systematic deprivation of one civil right after another. To the prohibition of freedom of movement has been added that of work; one occupation after another has been prohibited to Jews under the mask of foreigners. From all the branches of state service Jews have been almost completely debarred. Partic.i.p.ation in important private and public enterprises has similarly been limited. The schools have been largely closed to them. The effect has been partly registered in a rate of illiteracy higher in the cities among the Jewish children between seven and fifteen than among the non-Jewish children of the same age.

Thus the conscious policy of Roumania has been that of oppression, political, economic and social, with the deliberate aim of making it impossible for the Jews to live in Roumania. This method of indirect expulsion is the essence of her policy of thirty years. As such it was recognized and openly stated in the only formal protest against her manner of fulfilling the conditions of the Berlin Treaty, made by the United States, through its Secretary of State, John Hay, whose circular to the Powers signatory to the Treaty demanded that Roumania be called to account for her treatment of the Jews, and her dishonesty in violating the pledges given by her to the Powers.[45]

III. AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the legal position of the Jews in Austria-Hungary differed from that of their brethren in Russia and Roumania only in degree. Prohibited the free exercise of their religion, the right to hold real property, and to enter certain occupations, and burdened by special Jewish taxes, the Jews remained a cla.s.s apart and governed in all their activities by special laws.

Their legal emanc.i.p.ation, begun in 1848, was definitely established by the promulgation in each division of the Empire of the Fundamental Law of 1867, declaring that religion should not be a ground for discrimination in civil and political rights.

The civil and political equality of the Jews was a cardinal principle of the creed of German-Austrian liberalism and one of a number of its victories embodied in the Const.i.tution of 1867. Austrian economic and social life at this period was, however, too saturated with medievalism to allow for a complete revolution in the att.i.tude toward the Jews. On the other hand, the influential part played by the Jews in the liberal movement and the fact that a group of wealthy Jews were powerful factors in the _haute finance_ and in the commercial life of the country were made the basis of an attack by the feudal-clericals upon the Jews.

The great financial crash of 1873, in which several Jewish financial houses were concerned, was the starting-point of political antisemitism in Austria. The Jews were denounced as the representatives of the capitalist order of society, with its overwhelming concentration of wealth and its exploitation of the industrial and the agricultural proletariat. The Christian-Socialist movement began with antisemitism as the corner-stone of its economic and social doctrines. Its opposition to the Jews and to capitalism was largely due to medieval prejudices in favor of the Christian-feudal state and the medieval industrial organization. In the early eighties it began to triumph when the "small man" or petty industrialist received political power through an extension of the suffrage.

It reached its height in the nineties, when, under the combined influence of feudal-clerical n.o.bles, the clergy and the lower middle cla.s.s, a period of reaction set in. In Vienna, in 1895, the antisemite Lueger was elected mayor. Powerless though they were to change the legal status of the Jews, the antisemites succeeded in creating in both upper and lower circles of Austrian society an atmosphere of antagonism to the Jews which has prevented the complete fulfillment of the principle of equality as set forth in the const.i.tution.

The clericals have fanned the flames of religious hatred especially among the peasantry by ritual-murder accusations, which have been rife and have played a large part in strengthening the sentiment of hostility toward the Jews.

In Galicia, the position of the Jews became unsettled, owing to a variety of causes.[46] Although one of the least advanced among the Austrian crown lands, Galicia has experienced within the last half-century an industrial and commercial development along with the rest of the Empire. This resulted in the growth of a middle cla.s.s particularly among the Poles, which began to compete for supremacy with the Jews. The improvements in transportation and communication, the organization of agricultural syndicates, for the purpose of directly purchasing and selling the produce of the peasants, and the creation of rural credit societies, helped considerably to displace the Jewish middlemen and traders as well as the Jewish money-lenders, who dealt largely with the peasantry. The movement to develop Galicia industrially was fostered on national lines by these Polish organizations, which carried on an extensive propaganda and systematically organized economic boycotts against the Jews. "Do not buy of Jews", "Do not patronize Jewish artisans", became familiar cries in Galicia as in other parts of Austria.

The process of wrestling the monopoly of industry, trade and commerce from the Jews in favor of the Polish petty merchants and artisans was considerably accelerated by the official bodies, the autonomous Galician _Diet_ and the munic.i.p.al boards, controlled chiefly by the Polish-Catholic n.o.bility, who saw in the national-industry movement a means of capturing the votes of the middle cla.s.s and of thus retaining their position as leaders of the Polish people. Communal funds were used to establish Poles in business. Attempts were made to take away from the Jews the small-salt and tobacco trades. The taxes on the taverns were increased. In the public financial inst.i.tutions organized for various purposes Jews were not given representation. In nearly all the activities designed to promote the interest of the urban population and the peasantry, the Jews were systematically excluded by the local authorities.

Added to this, the increasing distress of the Galician peasants has reacted strongly upon the Jews, who depend so largely upon their buying power. The poverty of the peasantry, the compet.i.tion for the control of the rural market created by public and private agencies, added to the increasing compet.i.tion in the towns from other sections of the population, have all co-operated to create a great surplus, in proportion to the population, of petty merchants and artisans among the Jews. This had its effect in an over-compet.i.tion from the side of the Jews themselves.

The Jews have suffered as well from their historical rle of intermediaries between a most avaricious n.o.bility and a bitterly exploited peasantry. Acting as stewards and as tavern keepers for the Polish n.o.bles, who are mainly absentee landlords, and who, until very recently, enjoyed the right of keeping taverns as one of their feudal privileges, the Jews have become the buffers of the deep-seated antagonism between the two chief cla.s.ses of Galicia.

Agrarian uprisings have been frequent of late, particularly after the failure of the crops, which here as in Russia and Roumania spells a crisis. These, chiefly directed against the n.o.bles, have frequently been diverted toward the Jews, to whom the peasants are largely indebted, and in whom they see the visible instruments of the oppression of their lords.

Economic antagonism has been intensified by the religious hatred which has been fostered by the Polish clergy and which has been the basis of numerous ritual-murder charges.

FOOTNOTES:

[34] Leroy-Beaulieu, _The Empire of the Tsars_ (New York, 1894), vol.

iii, p. 558.