Thirty years have elapsed since the Jews began to enter the United States in numbers sufficiently large to make their immigration conspicuous in the general movement to this country. A study of Jewish immigration, in itself and in relation to the general movement, reveals an interesting phase of this historic and many-sided social phenomenon and throws light upon a number of important problems incident to it.
Especially does it become clear that the Jewish immigration, although in part the result of the same forces as have affected the general immigration and the separate groups composing it, differs, nevertheless, in certain marked respects, from the typical immigration. Some of these differences indeed are fundamental and far-reaching in their effects and practically stamp the Jewish immigration as a movement sui generis.
Generally speaking, in the forces which are behind the emigration of the Jews from the countries of the Old World, in the character of their immigration—its movement and its distinguishing qualities—the Jewish immigration strikes a distinctly individual note.
Three European countries—Russia, Austria-Hungary and Roumania—furnish the vast majority of the Jewish immigrants to the United States.[1] It is to these countries, therefore, that we must turn for light upon the causes of this movement.
Geographically, these countries are closely connected; they form practically the whole of the division of Eastern Europe. Here the Slavonic races so largely predominate that the term Slavonic Europe has been applied to this section of Europe.
Eastern or Slavonic Europe is a social as well as a geographical fact. In racial stratification, economic and social institutions, cultural position and, in part, religious traditions as well, these countries present strong similarities to one another and equally strong differences in most of these respects from the countries of Western Europe.
It is here that the Jews are found concentrated in the greatest numbers. Nearly seven and a half-million Jews—more than half of the Jews of the world—live in these countries. Of this number more than five millions are in Russia, more than two millions in Austria-Hungary, and a quarter of a million in Roumania. The great majority of these are massed on the contiguous borders, in a zone which embraces Poland, and Western Russia, Galicia, and Moldavia. This is the emigration zone. The relative density of the Jews is greatest in these parts. Every seventh man in Poland, every ninth man in Western Russia and in Galicia, and every tenth man in Moldavia, is a Jew. Thus the center of gravity of the Jewish populations is still the former kingdom of Poland, as it was constituted before the partitions at the end of the eighteenth century.
United originally in Poland, the Jews of Eastern Europe still retain the same general characteristics, in spite of the changes that have been brought about by a century of rule under different governments. Speaking a common language, Yiddish, and possessing common religious traditions, as well as similar social and psychological traits, the East-European Jews present on the whole a striking uniformity of character.
Through the centuries they have become deeply rooted in the East-European soil, their economic and social life intimately connected with the economic and social conditions of these countries and their history deeply influenced by the transformations that have been taking place in them for half a century.
As these conditions and transformations furnish the foundation of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, and contain the explanation of the situation that has been largely responsible for the recent Jewish emigration to Western Europe and the United States, a rapid review of the economic, social and political conditions of Russia, Roumania and Austria-Hungary will be made.
[1] Cf. infra, p. 95.
The difficulty of the average American to understand the character of Russian life, some traits of which have been so vividly brought home to him in recent years, may be attributed to a general idea that a country rubbing elbows as it were with Western civilization for several centuries must perforce itself possess the characteristics of modern civilization. A closer survey of the economic, social and political conditions prevailing in Russia to-day, however, reveals many points of difference from those of the countries of Western Europe, and presents a remarkable contrast with those prevailing in the United States. Russia and the United States, indeed, stand, in Leroy-Beaulieu's phrase, at the two poles of modern civilization. So far apart are they in the character of their economic, social and political structures, in the degree in which they utilize the forms and institutions of modern life, and, in the difference in the mental make-up of their peoples, that there exist few, if any, points of real contact.
Up to the middle of the 19th century, Russia was, in nearly all respects, a medieval state. She was a society, which, in the words of Kovalevsky, "preserved still of feudalism, not its political spirit but its economic structure, serfdom, monopoly and the privileges of the nobility, its immunities in the matter of taxes, its exclusive right to landed property, and its seignorial rights."[2] Her modern era dates from the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, when she became, at least in form, a European state. But, though the Russia of our day has witnessed great transformations in the direction of modernization, she still retains many of the conditions and much of the spirit of her medieval past.
A rapid review of the economic, social and political conditions of Russia will serve to make clearer this situation, which has an important bearing upon the exceptional position, legal, economic, social, of the Jews in the Empire, and upon the fateful events of their history for a third of a century.
The most striking fact in the economic life of present-day Russia is that it is overwhelmingly agricultural. More than three-fourths of her population are engaged in some form of agricultural labor. The vast majority are peasants living in villages. Towns are relatively few and sparsely populated. Agricultural products constitute 85 per cent of the annual exports. What a contrast does this agricultural state, this "peasant empire", present to the industrially and commercially developed countries of Western Europe and the United States!
The Russian peasant still practices a primitive system of agriculture. His method of extensive cultivation, the three-field system in vogue, his primitive implements, his domestic economy of half a century ago, with its home production for home consumption, which is still maintained in many parts of Russia to this day—all these present conditions not far removed from those of the middle ages of Western Europe.[3]
The existence to our day of this almost primitive economy finds its explanation in the fact that serfdom existed in Russia, in all its unmitigated cruelty, until comparatively recent times. Its abolition through the Emancipation Act of Alexander II—antedating our own Emancipation Proclamation by a few years—struck off the chains that bound twenty millions of peasants to the soil. The emancipation, however, was not complete. The land the peasants received was insufficient for their needs. Other conditions co-operated in the course of time with this primary one, to create a situation of chronic starvation for the great mass of the Russian peasants. Forced by the government to pay heavy taxes, in addition to redemption dues for the land, which they paid until recently, and receiving little help from either government or the nobility for the improvement of their position, they are virtually exploited almost as completely as before the emancipation.
Thus, though freed in person, the peasants are to a great extent bound by economic ties to their former masters, the nobles. These two social-economic classes maintain towards each other practically the same relative position held by them before the emancipation. The manor still controls the hut.
The former servile relations have persisted psychologically as well. The Russian peasant is still largely a serf in his mentality, in his feeling of dependence, in his inertia and lack of individual enterprise, and, above all, in the smallness of his demands upon life.[4] This fact permeates, as it serves to explain, many aspects of contemporary Russian life.
The industrial and commercial stage of Russian economy began with the emancipation, which set free a great supply of labor. The changes that have taken place have nevertheless not obliterated many of the landmarks of the feudal, pre-reformation period. The economic activities of the last half-century present a curious juxtaposition of old and new, medieval and modern. Cottage and village industries but little removed from the natural economy of the earlier period exist by the side of great factories and industrial establishments employing thousands of workmen. Fairs and markets still play a large part in supplying the needs of the peasants, rapidly as they are being supplanted by the commercial activities of the towns. The industrial laborers, recruited mainly from the country, retain largely their peasant interests, relations and characteristics. The payment of wages in kind, which is still in vogue in many parts, and the right of inflicting corporal punishment retained by the employers, give evidence of the strong impress of the servile conditions of the past.
Vast changes have nevertheless taken place since the emancipation. Capitalism has made rapid, if uneven, progress. Under the fostering care of the government, industry and commerce have made immense strides. The factory system has taken firm root and has been developing a specialized class of industrial laborers. Great industrial centers have sprung up; towns have grown rapidly. The middle class, hitherto insignificant, has increased in number, wealth and influence. Among the peasants as well, freedom has given birth to the spirit of individualism. The differentiation of the peasantry into wealthier peasants and landless agricultural laborers, the great mass of the peasantry occupying the middle ground, and the gradual dissolution of the two great forces of Russian agricultural life—the patriarchal family and the village community—have been the most important results.
Russia is clearly in a state of transition from the agricultural or medieval to the industrial and commercial or modern economic life. This transformation of the economic structure is being effected under great difficulties and the strong opposition of the ruling classes, whose privileges are threatened by the new order of things.
The Russian social and political order reflects the medieval background which formed the setting for her entrance upon the modern stage. The class distinctions, naturally obtaining, are hardened into rigidity by the law, which divides Russian society into a hierarchy of five classes or orders—the nobles, the clergy, the merchants, the townsmen and the peasants—each with separate legal status, rights and obligations.
The individual is thus not an independent unit, as in the legal codes of Western Europe or the United States. Accompanying the legal stratification there is an exceedingly strong, almost caste-like, sense of difference between the members of the different groups.
This emphasis on the person is characteristic of the medieval social order. In Russia it finds additional expression in the control of individual movement by means of the passport, without which document a Russian may be said to have no legal existence.
Even more striking is the position of the Russian Church, as well as the religio-national conception which dominates the Russian mind and according to which orthodoxy and nationality are regarded as one. The Russian Orthodox is the only true Russian; all others are foreigners. In the alliance of church and state—which in Russia reaches a degree of strength not attained in any other European state—in the complete control exercised by the Church over the lives of the faithful and the clergy, in secular as in religious matters, in its intolerant attitude towards other creeds and its unceasing attempts to suppress them—it presents characteristics strongly reminiscent of the position of the medieval church in Western Europe.
The one great political fact of Russia has been the autocracy. The degree of control which the autocratic Czars exercised unopposed over their subjects marks an important difference between the political development of Russia and that of the countries of Western Europe. At an early period the Czars had transformed the nobility into a body of state officials, thus at a blow depriving them of any real powers, apart from the will of the Crown, and making them serve the interests of the state. In this way the nobles, or the landed aristocracy, became the main source from which the members of the bureaucracy were recruited. The lack of a middle class of any real size and influence, which could play a part in the demand for political rights, explains in a measure the strength of the autocratic powers.[5] The autocracy in turn has been largely dependent upon its servant, the bureaucracy. To such an extent has the Russian government been the expression of the will and interests of this all-powerful body as to justify Leroy-Beaulieu's designation of Russia as the "Bureaucratic State".
Thus the autocracy, the nobility-bureaucracy and the church have been the dominating forces in the economic, social and political life of Russia.
In the light of this analysis, the political struggles that have been so conspicuous a feature of Russian life during the last half of the 19th century become an accompaniment as well as an expression of the progressive development of Russia towards modern economic, social and political institutions.
Russian liberalism,—largely revolutionary because of the denial of even elementary rights, such as the freedom of person, of speech, of the press and of meeting,—rights which were secured to Englishmen through the Magna Charta—has had the serious task not only of securing these rights but at the same time of creating in Russia the conditions of modern civilization. For the twenty years in which its spirit ruled, during the reign of Alexander II, the reforms begun under its influence amounted to a veritable revolution. The economic, social, political and juridical reforms of this epoch generated new forces and began the modernization of Russia. These reforms encountered the formidable opposition of the nobility and the church and finally of the autocracy, when the latter felt that its position was gradually being undermined, especially by the demand for a constitution. With the assassination of Alexander II, the liberal era was brought to a close, and a reaction was ushered in which has lasted to our day.
The classes that came into power with Alexander III and Pobedonostseff were, from their economic interests, social outlook and political ideals, essentially medieval and may properly be termed the feudal party. Guided by its economic interests—which had been seriously threatened by the emancipation—and swayed by the Slavophilistic philosophy,[6] this party sought to nullify as far as possible the reforms of the epoch of emancipation and to carry through a many-sided program for putting the order of things backward to the medieval, pre-reform days. Autocracy, Greek Orthodoxy and Russian Nationalism—the famous Slavophilistic trinity—were glorified, the first two as peculiarly national institutions, the policy of russification and the repression of non-orthodox faiths by force were proclaimed as vital to the social health of Russia, the blind ignorance and illiteracy of the peasants were extolled as a virtue and the control over them by the nobility was strengthened in many ways. Freedom of every form was condemned as an aping of the "rotten" civilization of the West with its decaying institutions, and as false to the true Russian national, historical development.
During this period of reaction, however, the liberal movement was kept alive, largely as revolutionary propaganda. The earlier movement had been directed by the educated classes, the "Intelligenzia" of Russia. Lately, with the growth of the middle class and a population of industrial workers in the towns and the factories, and a wealthier class of peasants, the cry for reform has become more insistent, and only recently partly successful in results.
Summarizing his impressions of Russian life and institutions obtained while serving as Ambassador to Russia, Andrew D. White remarked: "During two centuries Russia has been coming slowly out of the middle ages—indeed, out of perhaps the most cruel phases of medieval life."[7] One of the phases of this process has been the bitter struggle between the feudal and the modern forces that has occupied Russia for the last third of a century.
In Roumania,[8] in spite of a liberal constitution modeled upon the Belgian, granting all rights enjoyed by citizens of a free state, the underlying economic, social and, in a measure, political conditions point to a state of things little removed from the medieval forms of life. The main social-economic classes are the large landed proprietors, composed chiefly of the old nobility or boyars, and the peasants, who were formerly serfs. In the hands of the former are concentrated the greater part of the land. Five thousand large landed proprietors together owned nearly half of the cultivable land. Nearly a million of peasants, on the other hand, comprising with their dependents a great majority of the population, together owned a little over two-fifths of the cultivable land.[9]
This situation is an inheritance from the servile system which existed in Roumania until 1864, when it was legally abolished. The freedom granted to the peasants was, however, more formal than real. The land given them being insufficient for their needs, and pasture land especially having been denied them, they were as a rule compelled to lease land or pasture right from their former masters at ruinous rates, often paying by labor on their former masters' estates. Thus the essential feudal services were in the main continued, especially as the lease and labor contracts, generally drawn up in the interests of the landed proprietor, were often usurious and extremely oppressive.[10] In twenty years there was little change from the previous condition of serfdom, so that a law was necessary, in 1882, to permit the peasants to work at least two days during the week on their own land.
Since this period there has been practically little change in this essentially feudal relation of the peasantry to the landed proprietors. As the owners of the great estates are a ruling power in the political life of the country, the greater part of peasants being disqualified from voting through property and educational requirements, the former have been enabled to keep the peasantry in this condition of semi-servitude. The result is a state of ignorance, misery and degradation on the part of the peasantry that is difficult to parallel in another European country. That the peasants are not entirely passive under their wrongs is shown in the repeated uprisings against their masters and in the two great social revolutions of 1888 and 1907, both of which were put down by military force.
Roumania's advent into industry and commerce may be dated from the eighties of the last century, and was initiated by the industrial law of 1887, which sought to create a national industry by means of subsidies, land grants and other favors to undertakers of large industrial enterprises. Since then the growth has been sufficiently rapid to place Roumania as the industrial and commercial leader of the Balkan States. Relatively, however, it is still very backward. Only 14 per cent of the population is urban. The industrial laborers are estimated at no more than 40,000. There are only a few cities. Only the largest—Bucarest—has above 100,000 inhabitants, three other cities have between fifty and seventy-five thousand inhabitants. The chief industrial establishments, such as saw mills, flour mills and distilleries, are concerned mainly in the working up of the raw materials produced in the country. Nevertheless, industrial progress has made for the growth of a small but influential middle class, which divides the control of affairs with the large landed proprietors. Its influence can be traced in the electoral law, which gives the urban classes, constituting the backbone of the liberal party, a majority in the Chamber of Deputies.