A \ B \ C \ D \ E \ F \ G \ H \ I \ J \ K \ L \ M \ N \ O \ P \ R \ S \ T \ U \ V \ W \Z

History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II by S.M. Dubnow

S >> S.M. Dubnow >> History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II




A programmatic circular, issued by him on May 6, declared that the
principal task of the Government consisted in the "extirpation of
sedition," i.e., in carrying on a struggle not only against the
revolutionary movement but also against the spirit of liberalism in
general. In this connection, Ignatyev took occasion to characterize the
anti-Jewish excesses in the following typical sentences:

The movement against the Jews which has come to light during the
last few days in the South is a sad example, showing how men,
otherwise devoted to Throne and Fatherland, yet yielding to the
instigations of ill-minded agitators who fan the evil passions of
the popular masses, give way to self-will and mob rule and, without
being aware of it, act in accordance with the designs of the
anarchists. Such violation of the public order must not only be put
down vigorously, but must also be carefully forestalled, for it is
the first duty of the Government to safeguard the population against
all violence and savage mob rule.

These lines reflect the theory concerning the origin of the pogroms,
which was originally held in the highest Government spheres of St.
Petersburg. This theory assumed that the anti-Jewish campaign had been
entirely engineered by revolutionary agitators and that the latter had
made deliberate endeavors to focus the resentment of the popular masses
upon the Jews, as a pre-eminently mercantile class, for the purpose of
subsequently widening the anti-Jewish campaign into a movement directed
against the Russian mercantile class, land-owners and capitalists in
general. [1] Be this as it may, there can be no question that the
Government was actually afraid lest the revolutionary propaganda attach
itself to the agitation of those "devoted to Throne and Fatherland" for
the purpose of giving the movement a more general scope, "in accordance
with the d signs of the anarchists." As a matter of fact, even outside
of Government circles, the apprehension was voiced that the anti-Jewish
movement would of itself, without any external stimulus, assume the form
of a mob movement, directed not only against the well-to-do classes but
also against the Government officials. On May 4, 1881, Baron Horace
Guenzburg, a leading representative of the Jewish community of St.
Petersburg, waited upon Grand Duke Vladimir, a brother of the Tzar, who
expressed the opinion that the anti-Jewish "disorders, as has now been
ascertained by the Government, are not to be exclusively traced to the
resentment against the Jews, but are rather due to the endeavor to
disturb the peace in general."

[Footnote 1: John W. Poster, United States Minister to Russia, in
reporting to the Secretary of State, on May 24, 1881, about the recent
excesses, which "are more worthy of the dark ages than of the present
century," makes a similar observation: "It is asserted also that the
Nihilist societies have profited by the situation to incite and
encourage the peasants and lower classes of the towns and cities in
order to increase the embarrassments of the Government, but the charge
is probably conjectural and not based on very tangible facts." See
_House of Representatives, 51st Congress, 1st Session. Executive
Document No. 470, p. 53_]

A week after this visit, the deputies of Russian Jewry had occasion to
hear the same opinion expressed by the Tzar himself. The Jewish
deputation, consisting of Baron Guenzburg, the banker Sack, the lawyers
Passover and Bank, and the learned Hebraist Berlin, was awaiting this
audience with, considerable trepidation, anticipating an authoritative
imperial verdict regarding the catastrophe that had befallen the Jews.
On May 11, the audience took place in the palace at Gatchina. Baron
Guenzburg voiced the sentiments of "boundless gratitude for the measures
adopted to safeguard the Jewish population at this sad moment," and
added: "One more imperial word, and the disturbances will disappear." In
reply to the euphemistic utterances concerning "the measures adopted,"
the Tzar stated in the same tone that all Russian subjects were equal
before him, and expressed the assurance "that in the criminal disorders
in the South of Russia the Jews merely serve as a pretext, and that it
is the work of anarchists."

This pacifying portion of the Tzar's answer was published in the press.
What the public was not allowed to learn was the other portion of the
answer, in which the Tzar gave utterance to the view that the source of
the hatred against the Jews lay in their economic "domination" and
"exploitation" of the Russian population. In reply to the arguments of
the talented lawyer Passover and the other deputies, the Tzar declared:
"State all this in a special memorandum."

Such a memorandum was subsequently prepared. But it was not submitted to
the Tzar. For only a few months later the official attitude towards the
Jewish question took a turn for the worse. The Government decided to
abandon its former view on the Jewish pogroms and to adopt, instead, the
theory of Jewish "exploitation," using it as a means of justifying not
only the pogroms which had already been perpetrated upon the Jews but
also the repressive measures which were being contemplated against them.
Under these circumstances, Ignatyev did not see his way clear to allow
the memorandum in defence of Jewry to receive the attention of the Tzar.

It is not impossible that the pacifying portion of the imperial reply
which had been given at the audience of May 11 was also prompted by the
desire to appease the public opinion of Western Europe, for at that time
European opinion still carried some weight with the bureaucratic circles
of Russia. Several days before the audience at Gatchina, [1] the English
Parliament discussed the question of Jewish persecutions in Russia. In
the House of Commons the Jewish members, Baron Henry de Worms and Sir
H.D. Wolff, calling attention to the case of an English Jew who had been
expelled from St. Petersburg, interpellated the Under-Secretary of State
for Foreign Affairs, Sir Charles Dilke, "whether Her Majesty's
Government have made any representations to the Government at St.
Petersburg, with regard to the atrocious outrages committed on the
Jewish population in Southern Russia," Dilke replied that the English
Government was not sure whether such a protest "would be likely to be
efficacious." [2]

[Footnote 1: On May 16 and 19=May 4 and 7, according to the Russian
Calendar.]

[Footnote 2: The Russian original has been amended in a few places in
accordance with the report of the parliamentary proceedings published in
the _Jewish Chronicle_ of May 20, 1881.]

A similar reply was given by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs,
Lord Granville, to a joint deputation of the Anglo-Jewish Association
and the Board of Deputies, two leading Anglo-Jewish bodies, which waited
upon him on May 13, [1] two days after the Gatchina audience. After
expressing his warm sympathy with the objects of the deputation, the
Secretary pointed out the inexpediency of any interference on the part
of England at a moment when the Russian Government itself was adopting
measures against the pogroms, referring to "the cordial reception lately
given by the emperor to a deputation of Jews"

[Footnote 1: May 25, according to the European Calendar. From the issue
of the _Jewish Chronicle_ of May 27, 1881, p. 12b, it would appear that
the deputation was received on Tuesday, May 24.]

Subsequent events soon made it clear that the Government, represented by
Ignatyev, was far from harboring any sympathy for the victims of the
pogroms. The public did not fail to notice the fact that the Russian
Government, which was in the habit of rendering financial help to the
population in the case of elemental catastrophes, such as conflagrations
or inundations, had refrained from granting the slightest monetary
assistance to the Jewish sufferers from the pogroms. Apart from its
material usefulness, such assistance would have had an enormous moral
effect, inasmuch as it would have stood forth in the public eye as an
official condemnation of the violent acts perpetrated against the
Jews--particularly if the Tzar himself had made a large donation for
that purpose, as he was wont to do in other cases of this kind. As it
was, the authorities not only neglected to take such a step, but they
even went so far as to forbid the Jews of St. Petersburg to start a
public collection for the relief of the pogrom victims. Nay, the
governor-general of Odessa refused to accept a large sum of money
offered to him by well-to-do Jews for the benefit of the sufferers.

Nor was this the worst. The local authorities did everything in their
power to manifest their solidarity with the enemies of Judaism. The
street pogroms were followed by administrative pogroms _sui generis_.
Already in the month of May, the police of Kiev began to track all the
Jews residing "illegally" in that city [1] and to expel these "criminals"
by the thousands. Similar wholesale expulsions took place in Moscow,
Oryol, and other places outside the Pale of Settlement. These
persecutions constituted evidently an object-lesson in religious
toleration, and the Russian masses which had but recently shown to what
extent they respected the inviolability of Jewish life and property took
the lesson to heart.

[Footnote 1: It will be remembered that the right of residence in Kiev
was restricted in the case of the Jews to a few categories: first-guild
merchants, graduates from institutions of higher learning, and
artisans.]

One hope was still left to the Jews. The law courts, at least, being the
organs of the public conscience of Russia, were bound to condemn
severely the sinister pogrom heroes. But this hope, too, proved
illusory. In the majority of cases the judges treated act of open
pillage and of violence committed against life and limb as petty street
brawls, as "disturbances of the public peace," and imposed upon their
perpetrators ridiculously slight penalties, such as three months'
imprisonment--penalties, moreover, which were simultaneously inflicted
upon the Jews who, as in the case of Odessa, had resorted to
self-defence. When the terrible Kiev pogrom was tried in the local
Military Circuit Court, the public prosecutor Strelnikov, a well-known
reactionary who subsequently met his fate at the hands of the
revolutionaries, delivered himself on May 18 of a speech which was
rather an indictment against the Jews than against the rioters. He
argued that these disorders had been called forth entirely by the
"exploitation of the Jews," who had seized the principal economic
positions in the province, and he conducted his cross-examination of the
Jewish witnesses in the same hostile spirit. When one of the witnesses
retorted that the aggravation of the economic struggle was due to the
artificial congestion of the Jews in the pent-up Pale of Settlement, the
prosecutor shouted: "If the Eastern frontier is closed to the Jews, the
Western frontier is open to them; why don't they take advantage of it?"
This summons to leave the country, doubly revolting in the mouth of a
guardian of the law, addressed to those who under the influence of the
pogrom panic had already made up their minds to flee from the land of
slavery, produced a staggering effect upon the Jewish public. The last
ray of hope, the hope for legal justice, vanished. The courts of law had
become a weapon in the hands of the anti-Jewish leaders.


2. THE POGROM PANIC AND THE BEGINNING OF THE EXODUS

The feeling of safety, which had been restored by the published portion
of the imperial reply at the audience of May 11, was rapidly
evaporating. The Jews were again filled with alarm, while the
instigators of the pogroms took courage and decided that the time had
arrived to finish their interrupted street performance. The early days
of July marked the inauguration of the second series of riots, the
so-called summer pogroms.

The new conflagration started in the city of Pereyaslav, in the
government of Poltava, which had not yet discarded its anti-Jewish
Cossack traditions. [1] Pereyaslav at that time harbored many fugitives
from Kiev, who had escaped from the spring pogroms in that city. The
increase in the Jewish population of Pereyaslav was evidently
displeasing to the local Christian inhabitants. Four hundred and twenty
Christian burghers of Pereyaslav, avowed believers in the Gospels which
enjoin Christians to love those that suffer, passed a resolution calling
for the expulsion of the Jews from their city, and, in anticipation of
this legalized violence, they decided to teach the Jews a "lesson" on
their own responsibility. On June 30 and July 1, Pereyaslav was the
scene of a pogrom, marked by all the paraphernalia of the Russian
ritual, though unaccompanied this time by human sacrifices. The epilogue
to the pogrom was marked by an originality of its own. A committee
consisting of representatives of the municipal administration, four
Christians and three Jews, was appointed to inquire into the causes of
the disorders. This committee was presented by the local Christian
burghers with a set of demands, some of which were in substance as
follows:

[Footnote 1: Comp. Vol. I, p. 145.]

That the Jewish aldermen of the Town Council, as well as the Jewish
members of the other municipal bodies, shall voluntarily resign from
these honorary posts, "as men deprived of civic honesty" [1]; that
the Jewish women shall not dress themselves in silk, velvet, and
gold; that the Jews shall refrain from keeping Christian domestics,
who are "corrupted" in the Jewish homes religiously and morally;
that all Jewish strangers, who have sought refuge in Pereyaslav,
shall be immediately banished; that the Jews shall be forbidden to
buy provisions in the surrounding villages for reselling them; also,
to carry on business on Sundays and Russian festivals, to keep
saloons, and so on.

[Footnote 1: This insolent demand of the unenlightened Russian burghers
met with the following dignified rebuttal from the Jewish
office-holders: "What bitter mockery! The Jews are accused of a lack of
honesty by the representatives of those very people who, with clubs and
hatchets in their hands, fell in murderous hordes upon their peaceful
neighbors and plundered their property." The replies to the other
demands of the burghers were coached in similar terms.]

Thus, in addition to being ruined, the Jews were presented with an
ultimatum, implying the threat of further "military operations."

As in previous cases, the example of the city of Pereysslav was followed
by the townlets and villages in the surrounding region. The unruliness
of the crowd, which had been trained to destroy and plunder with
impunity, knew no bounds. In the neighboring town of Borispol a crowd of
rioters, stimulated by alcohol, threatened to pass from pillage to
murder. When checked by the police and Cossacks, they threw themselves
with fury upon these untoward defenders of the Jewish population, and
began to maltreat them, until a few rifle shots put them to flight.

The same was the case in Nyezhin, [1] where a pogrom was enacted on July
20 and 22. After several vain attempts to stop the riots, the military
was forced to shoot at the infuriated crowd, killing and wounding some
of them. This was followed by the cry: "Christian blood is flowing--beat
the Jews!"--and the pogrom was renewed with redoubled vigor. It was
stopped only on the third day.

[Footnote 1: In the government of Chernigov.]

The energy of the July pogroms had evidently spent itself in these last
ferocious attempts. The murderous hordes realized that the police and
military were fully in earnest, and this was enough to sober them from
their pogrom intoxication. Towards the end of July, the epidemic of
vandalism came to a stop, though it was followed in many cities by a
large number of conflagrations. The cowardly rioters, deprived of the
opportunity of plundering the Jews with impunity, began to set fire to
Jewish neighborhoods. This was particularly the case in the
north-western provinces, in Lithuania and White Russia, where the
authorities had from the very beginning set their faces firmly against
all organized violence.

The series of pogroms perpetrated during the spring and summer of that
year had inflicted its sufferings on more than one hundred localities
populated by Jews, primarily in the South of Russia. Yet the misery
engendered by the panic, by the horrible apprehension of unbridled
violence, was far more extensive, for the entire Jewish population of
Russia proved its victim. Just as in the bygone Middle Ages whenever
Jewish suffering had reached a sad climax, so now too the persecuted
nation found itself face to face with the problem of emigration. And as
if history had been anxious to link up the end of the nineteenth century
with that of the fifteenth, the Jewish afflictions in Russia found an
echo in that very country, which in 1492 had herself banished the Jews
from her borders: the Spanish Government announced its readiness to
receive and shelter the fugitives from Russia. Ancient Catholic Spain
held forth a welcoming hand to the victims of modern Greek-Orthodox
Spain. However, the Spanish offer was immediately recognized as having
but little practical value. In the forefront of Jewish interest stood
the question as to the land toward which the emigration movement should
be directed: toward the United States of America, which held out the
prospect of bread and liberty, or toward Palestine, which offered a
shelter to the wounded national soul.

While the Jewish writers were busy debating the question, life itself
decided the direction of the emigration movement. Nearly all fugitives
from the South of Russia had left for America by way of the Western
European centers. The movement proceeded with elemental force, and
entirely unorganized, with the result that in the autumn of that year
some ten thousand destitute Jewish wanderers found themselves huddled
together at the first halting-place, the city of Brody, which is
situated on the Russo-Austrian frontier. They had been attracted hither
by the rumor that the agents of the French _Alliance Israelite
Universette_ would supply them with the necessary means for continuing
their journey across the Atlantic. The central committee of the
_Alliance_, caught unprepared for such a huge emigration, was at its
wit's end. It sent out appeals, warning the Jews against wholesale
emigration to America by way of Brody, but it was powerless to stem the
tide. When the representatives of the French _Alliance_, the well-known
Charles Netter and others, arrived in Brody, they beheld a terrible
spectacle. The streets of the city were filled with thousands of Jews
and Jewesses, who were exhausted from material want, with hungry
children in their arms. "From early morning until late at night, the
French delegates were surrounded by a crowd clamoring for help. Their
way was obstructed by mothers who threw their little ones under their
feet, begging to rescue them from starvation."

The delegates did all they could, but the number of fugitives was
constantly swelling, while the process of dispatching them to America
went on at a snail's pace. The exodus of the Jews from Russia was due
not only to the pogroms and the panic resulting from them, but also to
the new blows which were falling upon them from all sides, dealt out by
the liberal hand of Ignatyev.


3. THE GUBERNATORIAL COMMISSIONS

After wavering for some time, the anti-Semitic Government of Ignatyev
finally made up its mind as to the attitude it was henceforth to adopt
towards the Jewish problem. Taken aback at the beginning of the pogrom
movement, the leading spheres of Russia were first inclined to ascribe
it to the effects of the revolutionary propaganda, but they afterwards
came to the conclusion that, in the interest of the reactionary policies
pursued by them and as a means of justifying the disgraceful anti-Jewish
excesses before the eyes of Europe, it was more convenient to throw the
blame upon the Jews themselves. With this end in view, a new theory was
put forward by the Russian Government, the quasi-economic doctrine of
"the exploitation of the original population by the Jews." This doctrine
consisted of two parts, which, properly speaking, were mutually
exclusive:

_First_, the Jews, as a pre-eminently mercantile class, engage in
"unproductive" labor, and thereby "exploit" the productive classes
of the Christian population, the peasantry in particular.

_Second_, the Jews, having "captured" commerce and industry--here
the large participation of the Jews in industrial life, represented
by handicrafts and manufactures, is tacitly admitted--compete with
the Christian urban estates, in other words, interfere with them in
their own "exploitation" of the population.

The first part of this strange theory is based upon, primitive economic
notions, such as are in vogue during periods of transition, when natural
economic production gives way to capitalism, and when all complicated
forms of mediation are regarded as unproductive and harmful. The thought
expressed in the second part of the thesis is implied in the make-up of
a police state, which looks upon the occupation of certain economic
positions by a given national group as an illegitimate "capture" and
regards it as its function to check this competition for the sole
purpose of insuring the success of the dominant nationality.

The Russian Government was disturbed neither by the primitive character
of this theory nor by the resort to brutal police force implied in
it--the idea of supporting the "exploitation" practised by the Russians
at the expense of that carried on by the Jews; nor was it abashed by its
inner logical contradictions. What the Government needed was some means
whereby it could throw off the responsibility for the pogroms and prove
to the world that they were a "popular judgment," the vengeance wreaked
upon the Jews either by the peasants, the victims of exploitation, or by
the Russian burghers, the unsuccessful candidates for the role of
exploiters. This point of view was reflected in the report of Count
Kutaysov, who had been sent by the Tzar to South Russia to inquire into
the causes of the "disorders." [1]

[Footnote 1: It may be added that Kutaysov recognized that the Russian
masses were equally the victims of the commercial exploitation of the
Russian "bosses," but was at a loss to find a reason for the pogroms
perpetrated in the Jewish agricultural colonies, i.e., against those
who, according to this theory, were themselves the victims of
exploitation.]

Ignatyev seized upon this flimsy theory, and embodied it in a more
elaborate form in his report to the Tzar of August 22. In this report he
endeavored to prove the futility of the policy hitherto pursued by the
Russian Government which "for the last twenty years [during the reign of
Alexander II.] had made efforts to bring about the fusion of the Jews
with the remaining population and had nearly equalized the rights of the
Jews with those of the original inhabitants." In the opinion of the
Minister, the recent pogroms had shown that "the injurious influence" of
the Jews could not be suppressed by such liberal measures.

The principal source of this movement [the pogroms], which is so
incompatible with the temper of the Russian people, lies--according
to Ignatyev--in circumstances which are of an exclusively economic
nature. For the last twenty years the Jews have gradually managed to
capture not only commerce and industry but they have also succeeded
in acquiring, by means of purchase and lease, a large amount of
landed property. Owing to their clannishness and solidarity, they
have, with few exceptions, directed their efforts not towards the
increase of the productive forces [of the country] but towards the
exploitation of the original inhabitants, primarily of the poorest
classes of the population, with the result that they have called
forth a protest from this population, manifesting itself in
deplorable forms--In violence.... Having taken energetic means to
suppress the previous disorders and mob rule and to shield the Jews
against violence, the Government recognizes that it is justified in
adopting, without delay, no less energetic measures to remove the
present abnormal relations that exist between the original
inhabitants and the Jews, and to shield the Russian population
against this harmful Jewish activity, which, according to local
information, was responsible for the disturbances.

Alexander III. hastened to express his agreement with these views of his
Minister, who assured him that the Government had taken "energetic
measures" to suppress the pogroms--which was only true in two or three
recent cases. At the same time he authorized Ignatyev to adopt
"energetic measures" of genuine Russian manufacture against those who
had but recently been ruined by these pogroms.

Copyright (c) 2007. bestextbooks.com. All rights reserved.

Compiled by Logan Marshall - "The Wonder Book of Bible Stories"

Thomas Gray - "An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript"

Joseph A. Altsheler - "The Free Rangers"

Robert Kerr - "A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5"