HISTORY OF THE JEWS IN RUSSIA AND POLAND
FROM THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER I UNTIL THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER III
by S.M. Dubnow
A Project Gutenberg EBook
5. THE ECONOMIC PLIGHT OF RUSSIAN JEWRY AND AGRICULTURAL
EXPERIMENTS
The attempt at thinning the Jewish population by
emigration having
failed, the congested Jewish masses continued to gasp for
air in their
Pale of Settlement. The slightest effort to penetrate
beyond the Pale
into the interior was treated as a criminal offence. In
December, 1847,
the Council of State engaged in a protracted and earnest
discussion
about the geographical point up to which the Jewish
coachmen of Polotzk
should be allowed, to drive the inmates of the local
school of cadets on
their annual trips to the Russian capital. The discussion
arose out of
the fact that the road leading from Polotzk to St.
Petersburg is crossed
by the line separating the Pale from the prohibited interior.
A proposal
had been made to permit the coachmen to drive their
passengers as far as
Pskov. But when the report was submitted to the Tzar, he
appended the
following resolution: "Agreeable; though not to
Pskov, but to
Ostrov"--the town nearest to the Pale. Of this
trivial kind were
Russia's methods in curtailing Jewish rights three months
before the
great upheaval which in adjoining Germany and Austria
dealt the
death-blow to absolutism and inaugurated the era of the
"Second
Emancipation."
As for the economic life of the Jews, it had been
completely undermined
by the system of ruthless tutelage, which the Government
had employed
for a quarter of a century in the hope of
"reconstructing" it. All these
drumhead methods, such as the hurling of masses of living
beings from
villages into towns and from the border-zone into the
interior, the
prohibition of certain occupations and the artificial
promotion of
others, could not but result in economic ruin, instead of
leading to
economic reform.
Nor was the governmental system of encouraging
agriculture among Jews
attended by greater success. In consequence of the
expulsion of tens of
thousands of Jews from the villages of White Busier in
1823, some two
thousand refugees had drifted into the agricultural
colonies of New
Russia, but all they did was to replace the human wastage
from increased
mortality, which, owing to the change of climate and the
unaccustomed
conditions of rural life, had decimated the original
settlers. During
the reign of Nicholas, efforts were again made to promote
agricultural
colonization by offering the prospective immigrants
subsidies and
alleviations in taxation. Even more valuable was the
privilege relieving
the colonists from military service for a term of
twenty-five to fifty
years from the time of settlement. Yet only a few tried
to escape
conscription by taking refuge in the colonies. For the
military regime
gradually penetrated into these colonies as well. The
Jewish colonist
was subject to the grim tutelage of Russian
"curators" and
"superintendents," retired army men, who
watched his every step and
punished the slightest carelessness by conscription or
expulsion.
In 1836 the Government conceived the idea of enlarging
the area of
Jewish agricultural colonization. By an imperial rescript
certain lands
in Siberia, situated in the government of Tobolsk and in
the territory
of Omsk, were set aside for this purpose. Within a short
time 1317 Jews
declared their readiness to settle on the new lands; many
had actually
started on their way in batches. But in January, 1837,
the Tzar quite
unexpectedly changed his mind. After reading the report
of the Council
of Ministers on the first results of the immigration, he
put down the
resolution: "The transplantation of Jews to Siberia
is to be stopped." A
few months later orders were issued to intercept those
Jews who were on
their way to Siberia and transfer them to the Jewish
colonies in the
government of Kherson. The unfortunate emigrants were
seized on the way
and conveyed, like criminals, under a military escort
into places in
which they were not in the least interested. Legislative
whims of this
kind, coupled with an uncouth system of tutelage, were
quite sufficient
to crush in many Jews the desire of turning to the soil.
Nevertheless, the colonization made slow progress,
gradually spreading
from the government of Kherson to the neighboring
governments of
Yekaterinoslav and Bessarabia. Stray Jewish agricultural
settlements
also appeared in Lithuania and White Russia. But a
comparative handful
of some ten thousand "Jewish peasants" could
not affect the general
economic make-up of millions of Jews. In spite of all
shocks, the
economic structure of Russian Jewry remained essentially
the same. As
before, the central place in this structure was occupied
by the liquor
traffic, though modified in a certain measure by the
introduction of a
more extensive system of public leases. Above the rank
and file of
tavern keepers, both rural and urban, there had arisen a
class of
wealthy tax-farmers, who kept a monopoly on the sale of
liquor or the
collection of excise in various governments of the Pale.
They functioned
as the financial agents of the exchequer, while the
Jewish employees in
their mills, store-houses, and offices acted as their
sub-agents,
forming a class of "officials" of their own.
The place next in
importance to the liquor traffic was occupied by retail
and wholesale
commerce. The crafts and the spiritual professions came
last. Pauperism
was the inevitable companion of this economic
organization, and "people
without definite occupations" were counted by the
hundreds of thousands.
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