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
3. THE FIGHT AGAINST JEWISH "SEPARATISM"
Another incident which took place about the same time
served in the eyes
of the leading Government circles as an additional
illustration of
Jewish separatism. In 1870 Alexander II. was on a visit
to the Kingdom
of Poland, and there beheld the sight of dense masses of
Hasidim with
their long earlocks and flowing coats. The Tzar, repelled
by this
spectacle, enjoined upon the Polish governors strictly to
enforce in
their domains the old Russian law prohibiting the Jewish
form of
dress. [1] Thereupon the administration of the Kingdom
threw itself with
special zest upon the important task of eradicating
"the ugly costumes
and earlocks" of the Hasidim.
[Footnote 1: See above p. 144.]
Shortly afterwards the question of Jewish separatism was
the subject of
discussion before the Council of State. Under the
unmistakable influence
of the recent revelations of Brafman, the Council of
State arrived at
the conclusion that "the prohibition of external
differences in dress is
yet far from leading to the goal pursued by the
Government, _viz_., to
destroy the exclusiveness of the Jews and the almost
hostile attitude of
the Jewish communities towards Christians, these
communities forming in
our land a secluded religious and civil caste or, one
might say, a state
in a state." Hence the Council proposed to entrust a
special commission
with the task "of considering ways and means to weaken
as far as
possible the communal cohesion among the Jews"
(December, 1870). As a
result, a commission of the kind suggested by the Council
was
established in 1871, consisting of the representatives of
the various
ministries and presided over by the Assistant-Minister of
the Interior,
Lobanov-Rostovski. The Commission received the name
"Commission for the
Amelioration of the Condition of the Jews." [1]
[Footnote 1: Compare above, pp. 161 and 169.]
While the Government was again engaged in one of its
numerous
experiments over the problem of Jewish separatism, an
event, unusual in
those days, took place: the Odessa pogrom [1] of 1871. In
this granary
of the South, which owed its flourishing commerce to Jews
and Greeks, an
unfriendly feeling had sprung up between these two
nationalities, which
competed with one another in the corn trade and in the
grocery business.
This competition, though of great benefit to the
consumers, was a thorn
in the flesh of the Greek merchants. Time and again the Greeks
would
scare the Jews during the Christian Passover by their
barbarous custom
of discharging pistols in front of their church, which
was situated in
the heart of the Jewish district. But in 1871, with the
approach of the
Christian Passover, the Greeks proceeded to organize a
regular pogrom.
[Footnote 1: _Pogrom_, with the accent on the last
syllable, signifies
_ruin_, _devastation_, and was originally applied to the
ravages of an
invading army.]
To arouse the mob the Greeks spread the rumor that the
Jews had stolen a
cross from the church fence and had thrown stones at the
church
building. The pogrom began on Palm Sunday (March 28). The
Jews were
maltreated, and their houses and shops were sacked and
looted. Having
started in the immediate vicinity of the church, the riot
spread to the
neighboring streets and finally engulfed the whole city.
For three days
hordes of Greeks and Russians gave free vent to their mob
instincts,
demolishing, burning, and robbing Jewish property,
desecrating
synagogues and beating Jews to senselessness in all parts
of the city,
undisturbed by the presence of police and troops who did
nothing to stop
the atrocities. The appeal of representative Odessa Jews
to
Governor-General Kotzebue was met by the retort that the
Jews themselves
were to blame, "having started first," and that
the necessary measures
for restoring order had been adopted. The latter
assertion proved to be
false, for on the following day the pogrom was renewed
with even greater
vigor.
Only on the fourth day, when thousands of houses and
shops had already
been destroyed, and the rioters, intoxicated with their
success,
threatened to start a regular massacre, the authorities
decided to step
in and to "pacify" the riff-raff by a rather quaint
method. Soldiers
were posted on the market place with wagon-loads of rods,
and the
rioters, caught red-handed, were given a public whipping
on the spot.
The "fatherly" punishment inflicted by the
local authorities upon their
"naughty" children sufficed to put a stop to
the pogrom.
As for the central Government in St. Petersburg, the only
thing it
wanted to know was whether the pogrom had any connection
with the secret
revolutionary propaganda which, beginning with the Jews,
might next set
the mob against the nobility and Russian bourgeoisie.
Since the official
inquiry failed to reveal any political motives behind the
Odessa riots,
the St. Petersburg authorities were set at ease, and were
only too glad
to take the word of the satraps of the Pale who reported
that the
anti-Jewish movement had started as "a crude protest
of the masses
against the failure to solve the Jewish
question"--_viz_., to solve it
in a reactionary spirit--and as a manifestation, of the
popular
resentment against Jewish exploitation.
The old charge of separatism against the Jews thus found
a companion in
a new accusation: their economic "exploitation"
of the Christian
population of the Pale. The Committee appointed at the
recommendation of
the Council of State was enjoined to conduct a strict
inquiry into both
these "charges." Concretely the work of the
Committee reduced itself to
a consideration of two questions, one relating to the
Kahal, or "the
amelioration of the spiritual life of the Jews," and
the other referring
to the feasibility of thinning out the Pale of Settlement
with the end
in view of weakening the economic competition of the
Jews.
The material bearing on these questions included, apart
from Brafman's
"standard work," a "Memorandum concerning
the more important
Administrative Problems in the South-west," which
had been submitted in
1871 by the governor-general of Kiev, Dondukov-Korsakov,
to the Tzar.
The author of the memorandum voices his conviction that
"the principal
endeavors of the Government must be concentrated upon the
Jewish
question." The Jews are becoming a great economic
power in the
South-western provinces. They purchase or mortgage
estates, and obtain
control of the factories and mills as well as of the
grain, timber, and
liquor trade, thereby arousing the bitter resentment of
the Christian
population, particularly in the rural districts. [1]
Moreover, the Jewish
masses, refusing to follow the lead of the handful of
Russified Jewish
intellectuals, live entirely apart and remain in the
throes of talmudic
fanaticism and hasidie obscurantism. They "possess
complete
self-government in their Kahals, their own system of
finance in the
basket tax, their separate charitable institutions,"
their own
traditional school in the heders, of which there are in
the South-west
no less than six thousand. In addition, the Jews possess
an
international organization, the "World Kahal,"
represented by the
_Alliance Israelite "Universelle_ in Paris, whose
president, Adolph
Cremieux, had had the audacity to protest to the Russian
Government
against acts of violence perpetrated upon the Jews. For
all these
reasons the governor-general is of the opinion that
"the revision of the
whole legislation affecting the Jews has become an imperative
necessity."
[Footnote 1: According to the official figures, quoted in
the
memorandum, the number of Jews in the three South-western
governments,
i.e., Volhynia, Podolia, and the Kiev province, amounted
to 721,080. Of
these, 14 per cent lived in rural districts and 86 per
cent in cities
and towns. They owned 27 sugar refineries out of 105; 619
distilleries
out of 712; 5700 mills out of 6353; and so forth. The
production of the
industrial establishments in the hands of the Jews
reached the sum of
seventy million rubles.]
A similar tone was adopted in the other official
documents which came
into the hands of the "Committee for the
Amelioration of the Condition
of the Jews." The communications of the governors
and the reports of the
members of the Committee were all animated by the same
spirit, the
spirit that spoke through Brafman's "Book of the
Kahal." This was but
natural. The officials, to whom this book had been sent
by the central
Government "for guidance," drew from it their
whole political wisdom in
things Jewish, and in their replies endeavored to fall in
with the
instructions of the Council of State, conveyed to them by
the Committee,
_viz_., "to consider ways and means to weaken the
communal cohesion
among the Jews."
In the Kingdom of Poland the governors complained
similarly in their
reports that the Jews of the province, though accorded
equal rights by
Vyelepolski, [1] had not complied with the conditions
attached to that
act, to wit, "to abandon the use of their own
language and script, in
exchange for the favors bestowed upon them." Outside
of a handful of
assimilated "Poles of the Mosaic Persuasion,"
who were imbued with
Polish chauvinism, [2] the hasidic rank and file was
permeated by
extreme separatism, fostered by "the Kahal through
its various agencies,
the Congregational Boards, the rabbinate, the heders, and
a host of
special institutions."
[Footnote 1: See above, p. 181.]
[Footnote 2: And hence objectionable from the Russian
point of view.]
These and similar communications formed the groundwork of
the reports,
or more correctly, the bills of indictment in which the
members of the
Committee charged the Jews with the terrible crime of
constituting "a
religio-political caste," in other words, a nationality.
Following the
lead of Brafman, the members of the Committee laid
particular emphasis in
their reports on the obnoxiousness of the Talmud and the
danger of
Jewish separatism. Needless to say, the conclusions
offered by them were
of the kind anticipated in the instructions of the
Council of State: the
necessity of wiping out the last vestiges of Jewish
self-government,
such as the Jewish community, the school, the mutual
relief societies,
in a word, everything that tends to foster "the communal
cohesion among
the Jews."
The barbarism of these proposals was covered by the
fig-leaf of
enlightenment. When the benighted Jewish masses will have
fused with the
highly cultured populance of Russia. In other words, when
the Jews will
have ceased to be Jews, then will the Jewish question
find its solution.
In the meantime, however, the Jews are to be curbed by
the bridle of
disabilities. The referee of the Committee on the
question of the Pale
of Settlement, Grigoryev, frankly stated: "What is
important in this
question is not whether the Jews will fare better when
granted the right
of residence all over the Empire, but rather the effect
of this measure
on the economic well-being of an enormous part of the
Russian people."
From this point of view the referee finds that it would
be dangerous to
let the Jews pass beyond the Pale, since "the
plague, which has thus far
been restricted to the Western provinces, will then
spread over the
whole Empire."
For a long time the Committee was at a deadlock, held
down by
bureaucratic reaction. It was only toward the end of its
existence that
the voice from another world, the posthumous voice of
dead and buried
liberalism, resounded in its midst. In 1880 the Committee
was presented
with a memorandum by two of its members, Nekhludov and
Karpov, in which
the bold attempt was made to champion the heretic point
of view of
complete Jewish emancipation. The language of the
memorandum was one
which the Russian Government had not heard for a long
time.
In the name of "morality and justice" the
authors of the memorandum call
upon the Government to abandon its grossly utilitarian
attitude towards
the Jews who are to be denied civil rights so long as
they do not prove
useful to the "original" population. They
expose the selfish motive
underlying the bits of emancipation which had been doled
out to the Jews
during the preceding spell of liberalism: the desire, not
to help the
Jews, but to exploit their services. First-guild
merchants, physicians,
lawyers, artisans were admitted into the interior for the
sole purpose
of developing business in those places and filling the
palpable shortage
in artisans and professional men. "As soon as this
or that category of
Jews was found to be serviceable to the Russian people,
it was relieved,
and relieved only in part, from the pressure of
exceptional laws, and
received into the dominant population of the
Empire." But the millions
of plain Jews, abandoned by the upper classes, have
continued to
languish in the suffocating Pale. [1] The Jewish
population is denied the
elementary rights guaranteeing liberty of pursuit,
freedom of movement
and land ownership, such as only a criminal may be
deprived of by a
verdict of the courts. As it is, discontent is rife among
these
disinherited masses. "The rising generation of Jews
has already begun to
participate in the revolutionary movement to which they
had hitherto
been strangers." The system of oppression must be
set aside. All the
Jewish defects, their separatism and one-sided economic
activity, are
merely the fruits of this oppression. Where the law has
no confidence in
the population, there inevitably the population has no
confidence in the
law, and it naturally becomes an enemy of the existing
order of things,
"Human reason does not admit of any considerations
which might justify
the placing of many millions of the Jewish population, on
a level with
criminal offenders." The first step in the direction
of complete
emancipation ought to be the immediate grant of the right
of domicile
all over the Empire.
[Footnote 1: The narrow utilitarianism of the
governmental policy in the
Jewish question may also be illustrated by the official
attitude towards
the promotion of agriculture among the Jews. Under Alexander
I. and
Nicholas I. Jewish agricultural colonization in the South
of Russia was
encouraged by the grant of special privileges, though the
Jewish
settlers were subjected to the stern tutelage of
bureaucratic
inspectors. But under Alexander II., when Southern Russia
was no longer
in need of artificial colonization, the Government
discontinued its
policy of promoting Jewish colonization, and an ukase
issued in 1866
stopped the settlement of Jews in agricultural colonies
altogether. A
little later the Jewish colonies in the South-west were
deprived of a
large part of their lands, which were distributed among
the peasants.]
These bold words which turned the Jews from defendants
into plaintiffs
ran counter to the fundamental task of the Committee,
which, according
to the original instructions received by it, was expected
to draft its
plans in a spirit of reaction. At any rate, these words
were uttered too
late. A new era was approaching which in solving the
Jewish question
resorted to methods such as would have horrified even the
conservative
statesmen of the seventies: the era of pogroms and cruel
disabilities.
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