The one great power in Europe which has refused to follow the new spirit is Russia. In the middle of the sixteenth century Czar Ivan IV., surnamed the Terrible, voiced the feelings of his nation towards the Jews in his negotiations with Sigismund Augustus, King of Poland. The latter monarch had inserted in the treaty of peace a clause providing that the Jews of Lithuania should be permitted to continue trading freely with the Russian Empire. Ivan answered: “We do not want these men who have brought us poison for our bodies and souls; they have sold deadly herbs among us, and blasphemed our Lord and Saviour.” This speech affords a melancholy insight into the intellectual condition of the people over whom Ivan held his terrible sway. Nor can one wonder. Printing had been popular for upwards of a century in the rest of Europe before a press found its way into the Muscovite Empire, where it aroused among the natives no less astonishment and fear than the first sight of a musket did among the inhabitants of Zululand, and was promptly consigned to the flames by the priests, as a Satanic invention. Things did not improve during the succeeding ages. Till the end of the seventeenth century Russia remained almost as total a stranger to the development of the Western world and to its nations as Tibet is at the present day. Venice or Amsterdam loomed immeasurably larger in contemporary imagination than the vast dominions of the White Czar. British traders at rare intervals brought from the port of Archangel, along with their cargoes of furs, strange tales of the snow-clad plains and sunless forests of those remote regions, and of their savage inhabitants: of their peculiar customs, their poverty, squalor, and superstition. And these accounts, corroborated by the even rarer testimony of diplomatic envoys, who in their books of travel spoke of princes wallowing in filthy magnificence, of starving peasants, and of ravening wolves and bears, excited in the Western mind that kind of wonder, mingled with incredulity, which usually attends the narratives of travellers in unknown lands.

This home of primordial barbarism was suddenly thrust upon the attention of the civilised world by the genius of one man. Peter the Great, a coarse and cruel, but highly gifted barbarian, conceived the colossal plan of bridging over the gulf that separated his empire from Western Europe, and of reaching at a single stride the point of culture towards which others had crept slowly and painfully in the course of many centuries. It was the conception of a great engineer, and it required great workmen for its execution. It is, therefore, no matter for surprise if the work, when the mind and the will of the original designer were removed, made indifferent progress, if it remained stationary at times, if it was partially destroyed at others. It must also be borne in mind that Peter’s dream of a European Russia was far from being shared by the Russian people. The old Russian party, which interpreted the feelings of the nation, had no sympathy with the Emperor’s ambition for a new Russia modelled on a Western pattern. They wanted to remain Asiatic. And this party found a leader in Peter’s own son Alexis, who paid for his disloyalty with his life. The idea for which Alexis and his friends suffered death is still alive. Opposition to Occidental reform and attachment to Oriental modes of thought and conduct continue to exercise a powerful influence in Russian politics. Europe and Asia still fight for supremacy in the heterogeneous mass which constitutes this hybrid Empire, and there are those who believe that, although Russia poses as European in manner, in soul she is an Asiatic power; and that the time will come when the slender ties which bind her to the West will be snapped by the greater force of her Eastern affinities. Whether this view is correct or not the future will show. Our business is with the past.

The history of the Russian Empire from the seventeenth till the twentieth century is largely a history of individual emperors, and its spasmodic character of alternate progress and retrogression is vividly illustrated by the attitude of those emperors towards their Jewish subjects. Peter the Great welcomed them, his daughter Elizabeth expelled them, Catherine II. re-admitted them, Alexander I. favoured them. No democratic visionary was ever animated by a loftier enthusiasm for the happiness of mankind than this noble autocrat. By the Ukase of 1804 all Jews engaged in farming, manufactures, and handicrafts, or those who had been educated in Russian schools, were relieved from the exceptional laws against their race; while special privileges were granted to those who could show proficiency in the Russian, German, or Polish language. Other decrees, issued in 1809, ensured to the Jews full freedom of trade. These concessions, while testifying to the Emperor’s tolerant wisdom, show the severity of the conditions under which the race laboured normally. On the partition of Poland the Russian Empire had received an enormous addition to its Jewish population, and the Czars, with few exceptions, continued towards it the inhuman policy already adopted under Casimir the Great’s successors. The Jews were pent in ghettos, and every care was taken to check their growth and to hamper their activity. Among other forms of oppression, the emperors of Russia initiated towards their Jewish subjects a system analogous to the one formerly enforced by the Sultans of Turkey on the Christian rayahs: the infamous system of “child-tribute.” Boys of tender age were torn from their parents and reared in their master’s faith for the defence of their master’s dominions. Alexander I. determined to lift this heavy yoke, and, as has been seen, he took some initial steps towards that end. But, unfortunately, the closing years of the high-minded idealist’s life witnessed a return to despotism, and consequently a series of conspiracies, which in their turn retarded the progress of freedom and hardened the hearts of its foes.

Alexander’s stern son, Nicholas I., was a nineteenth century Phalaris. His reign was inaugurated with an insurrectionary movement, whose failure accelerated the triumph of the Asiatic ideals in Russian policy. Nicholas, imbued with a strong antipathy to all that was Occidental, and convinced that the greatness of Russia abroad depended on tyranny at home, set himself the task of undoing the little his predecessors had done in the way of reform. ♦1830 and 1848♦ The Poles and the Hungarians experienced his relentless severity in a manner which, while filling Europe with horror, inspired little inclination for interference. In perfect consonance with the character and the principles of Nicholas was his treatment of the Jews, who, under him, lost all the poor privileges conferred upon them by his father, and were not only condemned again to the old sorrows of servitude, but by a special ukase, published in the beginning of September, 1828, they were for the first time subjected to the military conscription.

Under Alexander II., the Czar Liberator, some of those oppressive measures were mitigated, and permission was granted for three Jews to settle at each railway station. But the improvement, limited as it was, did not last long. Like some of his ancestors, Alexander II. vacillated between the two antagonistic forces which wrestle for mastery in Russia: the party of progress and freedom and the party of reaction and despotism. Devoid of initiative and strength of purpose himself, this amiable ruler was led now to right, now to left. The disasters of the Crimean War had already shown that absolutism had failed in the one thing which justified its existence—military efficiency. If Russia could not achieve foreign supremacy, she ought at least to secure domestic prosperity. ♦1855♦ The party of progress carried the day, and the Emperor Nicholas with it, who, however, did not live to work out his repentance, but left the task to his son. As early as 1856 Alexander II. had a plan of a Constitution drawn up; but the design was postponed owing to more pressing needs. The years 1861–1864, however, witnessed the emancipation of the serfs, the abolition of the terrible corporal punishment by the knout, the institution of the zemstvos, or provincial assemblies, and other measures of reform which awakened the hopes and the enthusiasm of the Russian people. Svobodnaya Rossia—Free Russia—was on every man’s lips. A new era had dawned for the cowering masses of the Empire. ♦1863♦ The Polish rebellion diverted this enthusiasm from internal reform to the defence of the Fatherland against its hereditary enemy, who, it was suspected, was aided by some foreign powers.

Military success abroad presupposes union at home, and union often means the sacrifice of the individual and his interests and rights. This common historical phenomenon now received a fresh illustration. Victory took away all the blessings conferred by defeat. The Poles were crushed, and with them the budding liberty of the Russians. The people and the press, in calling for the utter annihilation of the supposed enemy of their country, were unwittingly advocating their own doom—in extinguishing Poland, they extinguished the last hope of their country’s happiness. For the defeat of the Poles decided the struggle in favour of despotism, all schemes of constitutional reform were abandoned, and Alexander II.’s reign closed as Alexander I.’s had done: in a craven recantation of the principles which had distinguished its beginning. This backsliding created bitter disappointment in the hearts of all Russian friends of liberty, and drove the more desperate among them to the declaration of a war which culminated in the unfortunate monarch’s murder. ♦1881 March 13♦ The crime of the Nihilists, however, defeated its own object and ruined the cause it was meant to serve. At the very moment of his death the Czar was actually meditating a plan for some form of representative government, to begin with the convocation of an Assembly of Notables. The intention died with him. Henceforth the relations between the Government and the governed are more than ever marked by mutual distrust.154 The assassination of the humane Emperor, far from weakening, strengthened the hands of the champions of autocracy and intolerance, and these champions were reinforced by the advocates of Nationalism or Panslavism—a movement which, like Nihilism, derives its theories from modern Teutonic speculation, but applies them after a primitive fashion purely Russian.

Russian national consciousness is a recent growth. It sprang up at the beginning of the nineteenth century under the stimulus of Napoleon’s invasion. Hatred of the foreign invader brought patriotism into being, and the exultation of victory forced it to precocious maturity. The Polish rebellions of 1830 and 1863 assisted its development, which was also accelerated by the spread of education and the growth of the press. The extreme partisans of the Nationalist idea, henceforth the ruling body in the Empire, were imbued with the conviction that the preservation of the Russian nation required the forcible assimilation or, failing that, the utter extermination of all that is not Russian. Under the fell influence of that conviction a systematic campaign was entered upon for the Russification of all the alien races which had been incorporated in the Empire during the preceding century. After the complete subjugation of the Poles—brought about by Muravieff in a manner which earned him the title of “Hangman of Warsaw”—came the turn of the inhabitants of the Baltic provinces, who, partly German by blood, had long adopted the German tongue, German culture, and German ideals, and who since their conquest by the Russians, in the eighteenth century, had furnished the Empire with some of its best statesmen, warriors, and scientists. The Panslavic zeal for assimilation was intensified by the fear of German expansion. Prussia by her brilliant war against Austria in 1866 laid the foundations of that national edifice which was completed by the war, even more brilliant, against France in 1870, thus realising the national dream of German unity. It was feared by the Russians that the absorption of the Germanised provinces of the Baltic would be the next step of Pan-germanic ambition. Impelled by those motives, Russia inaugurated the amalgamation of these regions in 1867. Alexander II., notwithstanding his personal sympathies and his public assurances to the natives of the Baltic provinces, was carried away by the Panslavic current, which gained further strength from the national conflict with Turkey in 1877.

Under Alexander III. the period of partial reform, thanks to the industry of MM. Pobiedonostseff, Katkoff, and Count Ignatieff, and the indecision of their Liberal opponents, gave way to one of reaction in all directions. In administrative matters Alexander III., despite the advice of so firm a believer in the divine origin of kingship as the German Emperor William I., reverted to the methods of his own grandfather, Nicholas I.: the press censorship was revived, the village communes were placed under the absolute power of the police, flogging was restored as an instrument of “educating” the peasants; and the very mention of the Czar Liberator’s name became a punishable offence. At the same time the work of Russification proceeded, and side by side with the policy of racial uniformity was carried on a crusade for religious conformity. ♦1880–1890♦ Panslavism rooted out the national institutions and language of the Baltic provinces; Panorthodoxy stamped out their heretical and schismatic doctrines. The Holy Synod in 1893, inspired by the Imperial Procurator, M. Pobiedonostseff—who, though a layman, wielded an absolute control over the Russian Church and was by his opponents nicknamed “Lay Pope”—demanded the suppression of Protestants, Roman Catholics, Mohammedans, Buddhists, and other dissenters throughout the Empire. The thirteen years of Alexander III.’s reign form one of the gloomiest pages in a history not remarkable for brightness.

Comparative tolerance followed upon the Czar’s death, and high hopes were built on the reputed liberality of his successor, Nicholas II. But these hopes have never been fulfilled. On the contrary, obscurantism continued to reign supreme, and of late years the Panslavist and Panorthodox programme has been vigorously pursued in the Caucasus, in Poland, and in Finland, as well as among the Buddhists of the trans-Baikalian district. In all these provinces national institutions have been attacked with a remorseless fury and a brutal thoroughness worthy of the Inquisition in its worst days. The Armenian Church was plundered,155 and Russian bishops were inflicted upon a population whose language they did not understand. The Tartars, once loyal and contented, were roused to appeal to the Sultan of Turkey and the Western Powers for relief from the tyranny of the Czar. In their petition these Russian Mohammedans describe how their religious tribunals have been suppressed, how their children are forced into Russian schools, how when serving in the army they are made to eat food condemned by the law of Islam, and how they are compelled to observe Christian festivals and to abandon their faith.156 But in no part of the Empire was more systematically repeated the process which, under Alexander III., had achieved the Russification of the Baltic provinces than in Finland. Nothing more inhuman or more insane than Russia’s treatment of that country has been known in Europe since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV. The constitution of Finland, which Alexander I. on annexing the country in 1809 had solemnly pledged himself to respect, was abolished; its press was silenced; its University degraded; its religion trampled under foot; its best men were banished; ♦1899–1903♦ and all means were employed in the patriotic endeavour to grind down this highly cultured, but non-Slavonic and non-Orthodox, province of the north to the level of the rest of the Empire; with the result that the most loyal and prosperous section of the Czar’s subjects has been turned into the most disloyal and miserable. Thus Germans, Esthonians, Poles, Finns, Circassians, Georgians, Armenians, Mongols, Tartars—all have experienced the Russian rage for uniformity national and religious; and so have even dissenters of Russian blood, like the Old Believers and the Dukhobors, not to mention the Polish and Lithuanian Uniates, whose churches have been confiscated and converted to other uses, whose clergy has been suppressed, and who are forced, under severe penalties, to worship, to be married and buried, and to have their children christened according to the rites of the Orthodox Church.157

Tyranny is a plant that can only flourish in darkness. The press is, therefore, gagged, public meetings are severely prohibited, and both Church and State assiduously discourage the education of the masses. Elementary schools are insufficient and inefficient, while private initiative is jealously forbidden to supplement the shortcomings of public instruction. The Government does not provide for the people, and will not allow it to provide for itself. The authorities at Moscow have been known to prohibit even factory owners from keeping elementary schools for the improvement of their working people. When such is the state of things in the greatest industrial centre of the Empire, it is not hard to imagine the conditions which prevail in the remote country districts with their dull agricultural population.158 Hence the necessity for employing foreigners in every department of commercial and industrial life. The success of the foreigner, however, arouses the jealousy of the native, and Russian economists are apt to attribute to the predominance of the former that wretchedness of the Russian masses, which is mainly due to their defective education. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising to find that the Jews suffer as grievously as they did in the Middle Ages. The hostility of a people still barbarous in all essentials has always succeeded in defeating the good intentions of the best Czars, and in heightening the horrors consequent on the despotic temper of the worst. If the treatment of Israel in various countries may be taken as an index to their respective progress on the road to civilisation, Russia must be pronounced as standing at this hour where England stood in the thirteenth century.

In 1881 a violent outbreak of anti-Jewish feeling, encouraged by the Nationalist newspapers, on one hand, and by the Nihilists on the other, led to much bloodshed and to the destruction of Jewish property and life in the southern and western provinces of Russia, especially in Russian Poland. Many causes contributed to the explosion. For years past, indeed since the abolition of serfdom, the peasantry, especially in South Russia, had been deteriorating both materially and morally. A contemporary observer thus describes the state of things on the eve of the event: “The bad harvests in the succession of years immediately preceding 1881, and the accompanying ravages of a virulent and widespread cattle plague, have completed the misery which idleness and improvidence were steadily producing; and the removal of restraint, the separation of families, and the assemblage of large numbers of the most ignorant classes amid the strange scenes of town and camp life, have unsettled their minds and degraded their morals.” After relating the effect of these conditions on the relations between peasant and landlord, the writer proceeds to explain some of the causes of the peasant’s ill-feeling towards the Jew. “Besides the landlord, there is another class in the south and west by whom the peasant thinks that he has been defrauded. The Jews, whom Government restrictions prevent from becoming agriculturists, and who are debarred from accepting employment in any ordinary industrial establishment, by the fact of their Sabbath limiting them to four and a half days of labour during the Christian week, have from necessity turned their attention almost exclusively to trade. The improvidence of the agriculturist and his want of capital have rendered the assistance of a money-lender and middleman an absolute necessity to him, and this requirement has been naturally supplied by the presence of the Jew, whose sobriety, thrift, energy, and commercial instincts render him especially fit for the vocation. The more improvident the peasantry, the greater are the immediate profits of the Jews, and whilst the former have become steadily impoverished, many of the latter have acquired comparative wealth. There is nothing astonishing, therefore, in the ill-feeling which has arisen towards the Jews, and that ill-feeling has been accompanied by the persuasion that there must be a special injustice in the superior material prosperity of a race whom the Government, by penal legislation, had emphatically marked out as inferior to the Christians. Religious fanaticism is almost unknown in Russia, and indifferentism is rather the rule among a peasantry which lives in amity with Mahommedans, Roman Catholics, and Lutherans alike; but it requires a strong hand to restrain a semi-civilized and poverty-stricken people from attacking and plundering their richer and defenceless neighbours. The Government did not show this strong hand in defence of the Jews, and political agitators eagerly fanned the flame of animosity against the alien race, and saw with pleasure the spread of disturbances which would either lead to a collision between the people and the authorities, or open the eyes of the masses to the weakness of the latter, and to their own strength.”159

The venerable charge of ritual murder was once more brought against the Jews, and within a few weeks all the provinces from the Baltic to the Black Sea were a theatre of arson, rapine, and slaughter, such as Europe had not witnessed since the tragedy of the Black Death in the fourteenth century. The civilised world shuddered at the appalling spectacle; but the local authorities, both civil and military, looked, for the most part, complacently on. The peasantry, having slaked their thirst for vengeance, plunder, rape, and gin, by sacking the Jewish houses, drinking shops, and brothels, proceeded to embody their grievances against the Jew in the following series of demands:

  1. “That Jews, members of town councils and provincial assemblies, vice-directors of town banks, members of different institutions and committees, should voluntarily give up their present posts, casting off the cloak of pride and braggadocio; as persons not possessing civic honesty, they are unfit to hold such places.

  2. “That the Jews should impress on their wives and daughters not to deck themselves out in silk, velvet, gold, etc., as such attire is neither in keeping with their education nor the position they hold in society.

  3. “That the Jews should dismiss from their service all Russian female servants, who, after living in Jewish houses, certainly become prostitutes, forget their religion, and who are intentionally depraved by the Jews.

  4. “To banish, without delay, all Jews belonging to other places who do not possess any real property in town.

  5. “To close all drinking shops.

  6. “To forbid Jews to abuse the Christians, and, in general, to scoff at them.

  7. “To prohibit Jews from buying up in the markets the first necessaries of life with the intention of selling them to the Russians.

  8. “To impress on wholesale dealers in spirits not to mix with vodka any foreign element which is sometimes injurious to health.

  9. “Not to trade on the Sabbath before noon, and at Christmas and Easter not to trade for three days, and not to work on our holidays.

10. “To prohibit Jews buying wheat for trading purposes within thirty versts of the town of Pereyaslav, and therefore to remove all existing grain and flour stores.

11. “To prohibit Jews from buying up uncut wheat; also to lease land from private individuals.

12. “The Town Council is begged not to let, and the Jews not to hire, the grounds at fairs and at marketplaces, with the object of farming them out.”160

No better proof of the mediaeval character of the Russian peasant’s mind could be desired than that furnished by the above document. Even so hearty an apologist of that peasant as Mr. Goldwin Smith finds himself compelled to remark that these demands “by their grotesque mixture of real and fancied grievances, remind us of the demands made by the ignorant, but suffering, peasants of the Middle Ages.” Their demand that the Jews should be forced “to cast off the cloak of pride and braggadocio,” has its exact parallel in the complaints of the Spanish bigots laid before Don Henry in 1371.161

But the feeling which found so terrible an expression was by no means confined to the lower and illiterate classes of the community. The crime itself was attributed to the deliberate policy of Count Ignatieff. A high-bred and accomplished Russian lady, a few months after the massacres, described the general attitude of her compatriots towards the Jews in very fluent English, as follows:—“Well, we do not like the Jews, that is a fact; and the dislike is reciprocal. But the reason we do not like them is not because of their speculative monotheism, but because of their practical heathenism. To us they are what the relics of the Amorites and Canaanites were to the Hebrews in old times—a debased and demoralized element which is alien to our national life, and a source of indescribable evils to our people. It is not to the Jew as a rejecter of Christianity that we object; it is to the Jew as a bitter enemy of Christian emancipation, the vampire of our rural communes, the tempter of our youth, and the centre of the demoralizing, corrupting agencies which impair our civilization.”162

The modern Russian lady’s denunciation of the Jew, in tone as well as in substance, is a significant, though, of course, quite unconscious, echo of Ivan the Terrible’s cruder statement of more than three centuries ago.163 The sole difference consists in form—the religious objection is minimised and the social emphasised in accordance with Western modes of expression; but fundamentally the two utterances are identical.

The Minister of the Interior, in less emotional language, explained the outbreak as due to causes of a purely economic character. “During the last twenty years,” he said, “the Jews have not only gradually got into their hands the trade and industry, but have also acquired by deed of purchase and leases considerable landed estates, and, owing to their numbers and solidarity, they have, with few exceptions, directed all their efforts, not towards increasing the productiveness of the country, but to the spoliation of the native population, chiefly the poorer classes, by which means they called forth a protest from the latter, which unfortunately expressed itself in a violent form.”164

Vice-Consul Wagstaff in an official despatch, while giving the Jews full credit for their remarkable intelligence, thrift, and business qualities, enumerates the complaints made against them by the Russians—namely, that “the Jews are the principal keepers of drinking shops and houses of ill-fame, receivers of stolen goods, illegal pawnbrokers and usurers. As Government contractors they frequently collude with unscrupulous officials in defrauding the State to vast amounts. They use their religion for business purposes, ‘boycott’ outsiders, play into each other’s hands at land sales, and thus despoil the peasantry. Often the harvest of a peasant who has been entangled in their toils passes into their grasp, as it stands in the field, on their own terms. They themselves do not raise agricultural products, but they reap the benefit of others’ labour, and steadily become rich while proprietors are gradually getting ruined. In their relation to Russia they are compared to parasites that have settled on a plant not vigorous enough to throw them off, and which is being gradually sapped of its vitality.”165

Another witness describes the gradual subjection of the impoverished peasant to the Jewish money-lender and adds, “The Jews’ two great factors in dealing with the Russian peasant are vodka (native gin) and a few roubles at a pinch, and with these powers he enslaves and uses him for his own ends. Many large properties, belonging to influential and hereditary Russian noblemen, are rented out to Jews, because the proprietors find that they pay higher rents than the Russian tenants.” He concludes, however, with the reflection: “The real source of the evil lies in the mental and moral condition of the masses, and it is there the remedy must be applied.”166

These are the reasons alleged for the persecution of the Russian Jews. First as to “productiveness,” the neglect of which is brought forward as a criminal charge against the Jew. It is an old complaint. The Andalusian monk of yore inveighed against the Jews of Spain because “they preferred to gain their livelihood by traffic rather than by manual labour or mechanical arts.”167 Modern economic science teaches us that a country can dispense as little with the distributors as with the producers of wealth. Productiveness, however, is well known to be the pet idea of Russian economists. The last two Ministers of Finance have for close on a quarter of a century been fostering production with a reckless energy which by many unbiassed students is regarded as fatal. Everything is done to encourage production and exportation, with the result that the soil gets exhausted, and the reserves of corn, on which the Russian farmer once relied in time of famine, have disappeared from the country.168 Like all measures carried to excess and without due regard to local conditions, the fever of productiveness is not an unmixed blessing, and the neglect of it will not be laid, by the impartial outsider, as a crime at the door of the Jew, especially when he remembers that the Jew is not a free agent in the choice of his profession. For, even if the law permitted and the Jew wished to devote himself to agriculture, he would be prevented from doing so by the Russian system of village communes—an intrusion into which on the part of non-Christians would be resented by none more bitterly than by the Russian peasant himself. It is thus seen that the Jew could not in any case become a “producer,” but was irresistibly compelled to turn to handicrafts, retail commerce and money-lending.

As to Jewish extortion. The manumission of the serfs opened up fields for money-lending which it would have been impossible to resist the temptation of exploiting even to capitalists whose opportunities for investment are less circumscribed than are those of the Russian Jew. That reform, though undoubtedly beneficial in the long run, was meanwhile bound to upset the social fabric, especially in Little Russia, and to produce the evils which generally accompany a radical change brought about in a country unprepared for it. By the Ukase of 1864 there was created a state of transition. The old was pronounced out of date; the new was not yet born. While ruining many noble landlords, the abolition of serfdom brought into being a vast proletariat of freedmen poor in manual skill and capital, and poorer still in resource. Both these classes, bewildered by the unaccustomed conditions rudely thrust upon them, rushed to the Jew for loans as naturally as the moth rushes to the candle, and, like the moth, they suffered in the act. The Jew had no cause to treat either borrower with lenience; but, as might have been expected, the peasant was by far the greater sufferer of the two. He was less prepared for the struggle. For centuries he had lived under a restraint which, while stunting his manhood, conferred upon him some of the privileges, as well as more than all the punishments, of childhood. If the leading strings deprived the peasant of the freedom to act, they also deprived him of the freedom to ruin himself. These strings were suddenly removed. The peasant, still an infant in mind, was invested with all the responsibilities of an adult. The very qualities which had enabled him to bear his servitude now proved his unfitness for liberty. His utter lack of initiative, of enterprise, of self-reliance, and of self-restraint, and his abject submissiveness to the decrees of fate—all characteristic of the serf—are well summarised in the one word nitchevo, the commonest and most comprehensive expression in the mujik’s vocabulary. It means “no matter,” and corresponds exactly to the malesh of the Egyptian fellah—another peasantry sunk in ignorance and fatalistic resignation, as the results of centuries of serfdom.

In addition to these defects the Russian peasant is a constitutional procrastinator. He never does to-day what he thinks he can by hook or by crook put off till to-morrow. Two of the most precious boons of his newly-acquired liberty, in his eyes, were the license it allowed him to postpone his work as long as he liked and to drink as much as he liked. Under the old system “the proprietor thrashed his serfs if they were drunk too often, and he kept their pockets so empty, and the price of the vodki, of which he was the monopolist, so high, that they had comparatively little opportunity of gratifying their passion for liquor. This was very well while it lasted, but now that the control is withdrawn the reaction is all the greater.”169 This is an ample answer to the charge brought against the Jew as the promoter of intemperance.

As to the charge of collusion with Government officials, it can easily be met. Both culprits, of course, deserve punishment. But it is scarcely fair that the one should be only fined, dismissed, or imprisoned, and the other slaughtered or starved with the rest of his nation. With regard to “boycotting” outsiders and playing into each other’s hands, is it not natural that people belonging to a sect which their neighbours scorn should assist their fellow-sufferers in preference to their persecutors? There is no stronger bond between man and man than the bond of a common stigma.

The charges of immoral pursuits and habits of depravity may, or may not, be exaggerated. But, even admitting that the Jew is all that his Russian enemy considers him to be, a sufficient answer to the invectives of the latter is supplied by the old saying: “Every country has the Jews it deserves.” Without having recourse to the obvious retort—which in the case of the Russian peasant would be particularly apposite—that, if there was no demand for the facilities for immorality supplied by the Jew, the Jew would not think it worth his while to supply them, we may urge the self-evident truth, that legal disabilities, by barring the way to an honest and honourable career, drive their victims to the exercise of the lowest and meanest of callings. The struggle for existence under such banausic conditions degenerates into a savage warfare in which there is no room for scruple or shame. The outcast has no reputation to lose. And, the more unprincipled the contest becomes, the greater grows the necessity for oppression, in countries where statesmanship has not yet discovered less rude remedies. It is a vicious circle from which there appears to be no escape.

Accordingly, the undisciplined fury of the populace in 1881 was supplemented by a systematic and carefully reasoned-out persecution on the part of the Government. Instead of endeavouring to raise the Russian masses to a level of mental and moral strength sufficiently high to enable them to compete with the Jew, the Czar’s ministers devoted their ingenuity to the invention of new means for lowering the Jew to the level of the Russian masses. The disabilities of the hated race were increased. Jewish property in the open country was confiscated, and the owners were driven into ghettos. It was enacted that henceforth no Jew should be allowed to live in a village or to acquire property therein. The whole of the Russian Empire was, with reference to the Jews, divided into three distinct sections. The bulk of the race were confined to the fifteen provinces known as the “Pale of Jewish Settlement.” Those Jews who belonged to a merchants’ guild of the first class for ten years, University graduates, and skilled artisans were permitted to move freely and to settle in any part of European Russia they chose, except the departments of Moscow and Taurien, in which no Jewish workman was allowed to reside. The third section comprised Siberia, and that was closed to all Jews, except convicts. The result of these enactments was that the few towns within the “pale” were overcrowded with Jewish residents, herded together and forced to carry on a fierce competition for existence with each other. At the same time, laws were passed rendering the admittance of Jewish youths to the high schools and Universities prohibitive, and the Jews were forbidden to act as State or municipal officers, or teachers, or to practise at the bar without a special license from the Minister of Justice. These and many other measures of restriction were adopted with the ostensible object of saving the Russian peasant from the clutches of the Jewish harpy. The joint effect of persecution and legislation on the Jews was misery. But these crimes proved the reverse of beneficial to the very peasants on whose behalf they were avowedly committed. In every village and township the departure of the Jewish traders and artisans was immediately marked by a rise in the prices of commodities, and was soon followed by commercial and industrial stagnation.

That regard for the moral and material welfare of the people, however, was not the sole, or the principal, motive of the Russian Government’s policy is unwittingly confessed by the fair patriot already quoted. Referring to the prohibition of the Jews from keeping public houses, she says: “That our objection is solely to the anti-national Jews, not the Jews who become Russians in all but their origin, is proved by the decision of the Commission in favour of allowing the Karaite Jews to sell drink as freely as any other of their Russian fellow-subjects. It is only the Talmudist Jews who are forbidden that privilege.”170 It is hard for the ordinary man to see how belief in the Bible justifies a pursuit which is otherwise condemned as injurious to body and soul, or in what mysterious way the Talmud affects the quality of liquor. The ordinary man will find it easier to draw from these facts the inference that the Government’s real end was the suppression of the Jew, the suppression of the drink-selling Jew being only a means to that end.

In the attitude of the Russian people towards the Jews at the present moment we recognise all the features made familiar by the history of the Jewish nation in the past. Social nonconformity and aloofness led to anti-Judaism in antiquity. To this motive of persecution the advent of Christianity added religious rancour, and the Middle Ages economic rivalry. The nineteenth century was destined to strengthen the texture of hatred by the addition of a new strand—Nationalism. All these causes, as we have seen, combined to make the Jew an object of detestation variously disguised. In ancient Rome we found impatience of dissent justifying itself by the pretext of regard for public morality; in Catholic and Protestant Europe cruelty and cupidity hallowed by the cloak of religious zeal; in modern Europe we see narrow-minded intolerance and jealousy trying to ennoble themselves by the title of patriotism. Each age has inherited the passions of the past and has increased the sad inheritance by the addition of new prejudices. In Russia modern culture spreads a little way over the face of mediaevalism, as the waters of a river at its mouth spread over the surface of the ocean, modifying its colour without affecting its depths. Consequently the Jew is still persecuted for his heresy, as well as for his usury, exclusiveness, and foreign extraction.

Russian officials and English apologists of Russian anti-Semitism will not admit that the persecution of the Russian Jews is religious, though acknowledging that religion, too, plays its part. They claim that it is essentially economical and social, “and that the main cause has always been the unhappy relation of a wandering and parasitic race, retaining its tribal exclusiveness, to the races among which it sojourns, and on the produce of which it feeds.”171 This view is natural in a modern spectator of the West; but it is not quite correct, as it implies modern and Western conditions and sentiments in a country which only in a small measure is modern and Western. The late Mr. Lecky wrote: “The Russian persecution stands in some degree apart from other forms of the anti-Semitic movement on account of its unparalleled magnitude and ferocity.” It also stands apart, to the same degree, on account of its origin. Jew-hatred in Russia is a thoroughly genuine survival. In Western Europe it is largely an artificial revival. The Russian Jews have never been emancipated from servitude, because the Russian Christians, with few exceptions, have never been emancipated from ignorance and bigotry. In other words, the modern term anti-Semitism, with all its quasi-scientific connotation, can hardly be applied to the Russian variety of the epidemic. But, be the causes what they may, the result is the same. To the slaughtered Jew, it is a matter of comparative indifference whether he is slain as a parasite or for the love of Christ. The student also must be very extraordinarily constituted who can derive any consolation from the fact that the principles of toleration made dear to us by the experience and the sacrifices of two thousand years, are violated in so outrageous a manner not from religious, but from “economical and social” motives.

But, though the source of Russian antipathy to the Jew may be a matter of dispute, there is no question as to the sincerity and the depth of the feeling. An authority on the Jewish Question, writing in 1882, expressed the opinion that the disasters of that and the previous year were inevitable, and that, “unless the Jews are removed from the countries in which they have taken place, we may certainly anticipate their recurrence upon a much larger scale.”172 This anticipation was justified by subsequent events. In 1891 and 1892 new anti-Jewish riots, encouraged by the authorities, were followed by fresh restrictive enactments.

Many Jews who had contrived to settle in towns outside the “pale” were driven back into it, and others within the “pale” were forced to quit the villages and townships in which they had dwelt for years and, leaving their property and business connections, to take up their abode in the over-crowded larger towns. The persecution reached its climax in the winter of 1891–92, when thousands of men, women and little children were heartlessly expelled from Moscow, at a time of the year when even soldiers are not suffered to drill in the open air on account of the cold. These and other measures of unbearable harshness drove, as it was intended that they should, about a quarter of a million of Jews out of the Empire; and then the nations of the West, alarmed by the influx of the destitute refugees, raised a bitter outcry against the barbarity of the Czar.

The Czar, however, in the words of one of his own servants and apologists, “remained deaf to protests of the Lord Mayor of London, for example,” and declared that “he will leave unheeded any and all such foreign remonstrances demanding a change in methods which have been deliberately adopted.” In fact, all the measures of repression and restriction which ignorant foreigners misrepresented as “the barbarous expulsion of the Jews from Russia” had for their virtuous object to prevent collision between the Jews and the peasants, to relieve the latter from what they could not be persuaded was not a Jewish tyranny, and, in one word, to secure good order and to maintain stability in the community.173 It is interesting to hear the Russian version of the matter. Unfortunately a euphemism does not constitute a refutation.

In 1896 the Jewish Question was re-opened, and the Jews, as well as other sufferers, ventured to hope for an improvement of their lot from Nicholas II.’s reputed zeal for reform. Much also was expected from “the generous and sympathetic instincts of the young Empress.” But these expectations were not realised, and at the present hour the country in which the race is most numerous174 is also the country in which it suffers most grievously. The treatment of the Jews in Russia can be summed up in one sentence: deliberate starvation of body and soul. The Jew, as has been seen, is loathed not only as a non-Slav and non-Orthodox, but also as a parasite who exhausts the organism on which he lives. Isolation, it is held, by forcing him to feed upon himself, will kill him. The Jews are, therefore, only allowed to reside in certain specified quarters of certain towns in certain districts, and are forbidden to move from place to place without special permission or such a special form of passport as is granted to prostitutes. Overcrowding produces poverty, disease, and all the filthy degradation of ghetto life. A faint conception of what such life means may be formed from a recent petition to the Russian Committee of Ministers signed by many thousands of Russian Jews: “Not less than 20 per cent. of the entire population of the Jewish Pale of Settlement,” say the petitioners, “are reduced to such a condition of wretchedness that they have to be supported from charitable sources. In great Jewish communities like those of Vilna, Berditcheff, and Odessa, the number of the Jewish poor amounts to as much as 25 to 33 per cent. Co-extensive with this widespread poverty there is in all the Jewish communities an enormous labouring and artisan proletariat that knows not to-day wherewith it may exist on the morrow. The simple weapon which the labourer and artisan possesses in his relations with his employer—the power of leaving his work and seeking better conditions of employment elsewhere—has become impossible of use on account of the limitation of freedom of movement and the prohibition of residence elsewhere than in the few towns of the Pale of Settlement. If they do not wish to die of hunger or go begging Jewish workmen must submit unreservedly to the conditions prescribed by the manufacturers. The Jewish capitalists, too, are seriously injured by the burdensome effect of the special regulations which have, owing to the restraints of the May laws, taken from them every freedom of action, and deprived them of the power of disposing of their products in markets outside the Pale of Settlement....”175

In addition, the Jews are confined to the most ignoble occupations. They are excluded from the High Schools and the Universities of the Christians, and are forbidden to keep secular schools of their own. The only teaching accessible to the ordinary Russian Jew is Rabbinical teaching. The centre of this education is the Talmudical School of Walosin, known among the Jews as the “Tree of Life College,” founded in 1803 by a disciple of Elijah Wilna, a famous Hebrew scholar, and maintained by contributions collected from all parts of the Russian “pale.” The institution provides spiritual and bodily food—both very primitive in quality and meagre in quantity—to some four hundred hungry students who spend three-fourths of their time poring over the records of the past, and the other fourth is denouncing a present of which they know nothing. Ignorance fosters fanaticism, and the authority of the Synagogue which, under different circumstances, might have been used as an instrument of conciliation, is turned into a source of bitterness. The seed of discord between Jew and Gentile, sown by oppression, is nursed by the benighted Rabbis, who regard thirst for secular knowledge as more sinful than thirst for alcohol; and the poisonous plant is assisted in its growth by the young Jews who, having contrived to obtain abroad an education denied to them at home, intensify the just animosity of their people against the Christian oppressors. The ill-feeling is invigorated further still by the Jewish recruits who, on the expiration of their term of service, return to their families exasperated by the hardships and the insults which they have experienced in the ranks, for the Hebrew soldier in the Russian army is treated exactly as the Christian recruit is treated in the Turkish Gendarmerie. In both cases, not only is promotion out of the question,176 but the infidels are the victims of unmeasured invective, malice, and injury at the hands of their colleagues and superiors. They are, as a race, considered unclean and unfriendly. They form a small minority. They are powerless to protect themselves, and the officers will not take them under their protection. The less deserved the insult, the more anxious will the victim be to recover his self-esteem by revenge. Is it, then, to be wondered at that the Russian Jews are distinguished among their fellow-slaves for their eager participation in any insurrectionary movement that offers the faintest hope of relief and revenge? To turn a population which, by instinct and interest alike, is the most conservative and peaceful in the world into a people of anarchists is, indeed, the highest triumph hitherto achieved by Russian statesmanship.

The hatred towards the Jew is shared by the Russian’s enemy, the Pole, and for similar reasons—economic preponderance and excessive addiction to usury and the trade in liquor. In 1863 the revolutionary Government of Poland endeavoured to enlist the sympathies of the Jews in the struggle against the common oppressor by conceding to them civic equality. The experiment was crowned with brilliant success. Justice turned the Jews of Poland into Polish patriots. But the reconciliation did not outlive the revolution. After that short spell of liberty the ancient prejudice revived, and now, though legally the Jews of Poland are still Polish citizens, the Catholics of Poland, encouraged by their Orthodox tyrants of Russia, vie with them in their fierce contempt for the race which stood their common fatherland in so good stead in the hour of its need. How intense this feeling is, may be seen from the following account by an English eye-witness:

“To the Jew in Warsaw is meted out a wealth of disfavour and contempt that is hardly pleasant to witness. The British stranger, however, who normally lives far from any personal contact with these huge Jewish populations, is not altogether in a position to pass judgment on this deeply-seated anti-Semitic rancour. It pervades all classes of Polish society, and finds expression in a variety of ways. The youth who obligingly performs my minor marketing for me, in return for a tolerant attitude on my part on the subject of small change, was interested in the fate of an egg which I had pronounced to have passed the age limit of culinary usefulness.

“‘Don’t throw it away,’ he begged; ‘give it to me.’

“‘What do you want it for?’

“‘Oh, it will do to throw at a Jew.’”177

One exception to the mutual antipathy which divides the Jew of Poland from his Gentile fellow-countryman is offered by the upper class of the Jews of Warsaw. While the masses of the nation, cut-off from all but commercial intercourse with their Christian neighbours, live huddled together in separate quarters, fed on the traditions of the past, and observing, in dress, diet and deportment, the ordinances of the Talmud in all their ancient strictness, a small minority of their cultured brethren has overstepped the narrow limits of orthodox Judaism and identified itself in all things, save creed, with the Poles, whose national aspirations it shares and with whom it does not even shrink from intermarrying occasionally. But this reconciliation is confined to that infinitesimal class which, thanks to its wealth, is free from persecution, and in temperament, sentiment, and ideas belongs to the most advanced section of Occidental Jews rather than to the Jewry of Eastern Europe. Besides, it is a reconciliation strenuously opposed by the Russian authorities which, while inciting the Poles against the Jews, encourage the Jews to cling to their exclusiveness and to resist all Polish national aspirations as alien to them.

Yet, in spite of all disabilities, and as though in quiet mockery of them, the Russian Jews contrive not only to exist, but, in some degree, to prosper. Their skill, their sobriety, their industry, their indomitable patience, their reciprocity, and their cunning—all fostered by the persecution of centuries—enable them to hold their own in the struggle, and to evade many of the regulations which are intended to bring about their extinction. They often obtain a tacit permission to live in various trading places beyond the “pale,” and in many villages in which they have no legal right of residence. Vocations forbidden by law are pursued by the connivance of corrupt officials, and the despised outcasts frequently succeed in amassing large fortunes as merchants or contractors, by the practice of medicine, or at the Bar, or in earning a respectable livelihood as professors and authors, and even as Government servants!

Even culture is not allowed to die out. National enthusiasm, fomented by persecution, and denied political self-expression, finds an outlet in literature. In spite of the State, the Church, and the Synagogue, the darkness of the Russian ghetto is illumined by gifted writers in prose and verse, like Perez, Abramovitch, Spektor, Goldfaden, and others, who have invested the debased Yiddish jargon of the Russian Jew with the dignity of their own genius, and have produced a literature popular in form as well as in sentiment—a literature which reflects with wonderful vividness and fidelity the humour and the sadness of Russian life, and under a different guise carries on Mendelssohn’s educational mission. In addition to these original works, there is a vast activity in every department of foreign literature and science, including translations from many European languages, and a vigorous periodical press which disseminates the products of Western thought among the masses of the ghetto. So that the Russian Jew has access, through his own Yiddish, not only to works of native creation, but also to the most popular of foreign books, great and otherwise: from Goethe’s Faust and Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Sir A. Conan Doyle’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Side by side with these efforts to foster the Yiddish element proceeds a movement on behalf of the Hebrew element, while the upper classes of Polish Jews are actively promoting Polish culture among their poorer Yiddish-speaking brethren. All these movements, whether conducted on parallel or on mutually antagonistic lines, supply sure evidence of one thing—the vitality of the Russian Jewry.

This success, however, while affording consolation to the sufferers, fans the aversion of the persecutors and spurs the Government to a periodical renewal of the measures of coercion. It is acknowledged that, under fair conditions, the Russian Jew, owing to his superior intelligence, versatility, perseverance, and temperance, would in a few years beat the Russian Christian in every field of activity. Hence it is the Russian Christian’s interest and resolve to crush him. This resolve is cynically avowed by Russians of the highest rank. The late M. De Plehve, Minister of the Interior, in an audience granted to a deputation of Jews in April, 1904, confessed with amazing candour that the barbarous treatment of their race was dictated by no other reason than its superiority over the Russian. “You are a superior race,” said the Minister. “Therefore, if free entrance to the High Schools were to be accorded to you, you would attain, although through worthy and honest means, too much power. It is not just that the minority should overrule the majority.” He then proceeded to inform his hearers that he held the Jews responsible for the revolutionary agitation in the Empire and for the murders of Imperial functionaries, concluding with a warning and a threat, and dismissing them with the assurance, “You need not count on obtaining equal rights with the Christian population.”178

The eternal feud found another tragic and characteristic expression on a large scale in the spring of 1903. It was Easter Day. The good Christian folk of Kishineff, the capital city of Bessarabia, had been to church where they had heard the glad tidings of their Lord’s resurrection, had joined in the hymn of triumph, and then had greeted one another with the kiss of brotherly love and the salutation, “Christ is risen!” “He is risen, indeed!” Directly after, they fell upon their fellow-citizens—whose ancestors crucified Christ nineteen hundred years ago. The Jewish colony was sacked, many Jews were slaughtered without distinction of sex or age, and their dwellings, as well as their shops, were looted. Soldiers were seen helping the rioters in the work of destruction and carrying off their share of the spoils.

Like its predecessors, this outrage excited profound indignation in many parts of the civilised world. Protests were raised in France, in the United States of America, and in Australia. At Melbourne there was held a crowded meeting, presided over by the Lord Mayor, and the Anglican Bishop of the city moved a resolution, which was unanimously carried, expressing “the meeting’s abhorrence of the merciless outrages committed upon the Kishineff Jews, including helpless women and children,” and the hope “that the Russian Government would take effectual measures to prevent the repetition of crimes which were a stain on humanity at large.” The Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne moved that the resolution be transmitted to the Lord Mayor of London. Similar resolutions were adopted at meetings held in Sydney.179 In London mass meetings were held at Mile-end and Hyde Park, where thousands of Jews with their women and children assembled to record their horror at the massacre of their Russian brethren, in their various tongues—Russian, German, Yiddish, French, Italian, and English. All the speakers agreed in tracing the outrages to the instigation or the encouragement of the Russian Government. The second meeting embodied its sentiments in the following terms:

“The meeting expresses: (1) Its deep sympathy with all the sufferers from the riots at Kishineff, and its condolence with the relatives of the victims. (2) Its admiration for all those who, without distinction of nationality or creed, risked their lives in defending the helpless Jewish population. (3) Its indignation at, and abhorrence of, the conduct of the Russian Government, which, in order to intimidate the revolutionary forces of the people, failed to take steps to prevent the cowardly massacre of innocent men, women, and children. (4) Its belief that only the development of a powerful working-class movement in Russia can prevent the repetition of similar atrocities. This meeting also sends fraternal encouragement to all who are working for the overthrow of the present régime and the advent of Socialism in Russia.”180

The conviction that the massacre was due to the direct inspiration of the Russian Government was shared by others than the Jews. Dr. Barth, the German Radical Leader, published in Die Nation, a Berlin weekly journal, an unsigned paper, stated to be from the pen of a Russian occupying a high position, in which the writer says:

“M. Plehve, Minister of the Interior, is directly responsible for the Kishineff massacre. He is a patron of M. Kruschevan, the editor of the anti-Semite paper Bessarabets, and has even granted him a subsidy of 25,000 roubles to conduct a second anti-Semite organ at St. Petersburg called the Znamya. M. Plehve desired to increase the subsidy, but M. Witte, the Minister of Finances, intervened. M. Kruschevan then, thanks to M. Plehve’s patronage, was enabled to draw money from the National Bank without security.”

After asserting that General von Raaben, the Governor of Bessarabia, did nothing to avert or stop the rioting, while M. Ostragoff, the Vice-Governor, was actually at the same time a contributor to the Bessarabets, and also the censor, the writer proceeds: “M. Plehve desires to divert Christians from their own grievances, so he conducts a campaign of Jew-baiting. The Czar was indignant when he heard of the massacre. He wished to send an aide-de-camp to report on the matter, but M. Plehve managed to dissuade his Majesty, and sent instead M. Kopuchin, one of his creatures, who drew up a mild report, which M. Plehve further doctored before submitting to the Czar.”

Summing up, the writer says; “The Kishineff massacre has nothing to do with revolutionary tendencies. It is simply the result of systematic Jew-baiting, organised by M. Plehve, whose position is still unshaken, and who holds the Czar under his thumb by working upon his feelings and persuading him that the country is honeycombed with revolution and anarchy. No change is possible until M. Plehve has ceased to have the ear of the Czar. Further anti-Semitic disturbances are probable.”181

An American diplomatist endorses the statement that M. De Plehve was really responsible for the massacre,182 while a Russian Prince affirms that the instigators of the massacre, such as the Moldavian Kruschevan, editor of the Bessarabets, “were under the personal protection of the Minister.”183

Despite the efforts of the Russian Government to represent the brutal outrage as due solely to a spontaneous explosion of popular fury arising from “national, religious, and economic hatred,”184 certain facts which came to light during the mock trial, held towards the end of that year in the very scene of the massacre, seem to prove that, though such hatred did exist, the spark which set the mine on fire was not of popular origin. The passions of the people had been carefully inflamed by a pamphlet entitled Who is to blame?—the work of an anti-Semitic agitator of the name of Pronin, who was in relations with the proprietor of the Novoe Vremya, the eloquent exponent of Panslavism. But that was not all. Though special envoys of the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of the Interior kept a watchful eye on the course of the proceedings; though the Court exerted itself to prevent the production of undesirable evidence; and though, in true mediaeval fashion, an attempt was made to lay the blame for the crime on the shoulders of the victims—by stories of a Jew’s assault on a Christian woman, of the desecration of churches and the murder of priests—yet the evidence given, even under such conditions, without absolving the populace, tends to establish the deliberate connivance, not to say the complicity, of the Government.

A Christian ex-mayor of the city and another respectable citizen of Kishineff both declared that, in their opinion, the contemptuous and intolerant attitude of the Christian population towards the Jews is due to the special legislation to which the latter are subjected. The ex-mayor further stated that throughout the riots the police and military authorities refused to intervene on behalf of the victims. The administrator of the properties of the monasteries in Bessarabia and two other witnesses deposed that they had repeatedly appealed to the police to protect the Jews, but in vain. A Jew, whose son had been butchered before his eyes, testified that he had fallen at the feet of a police officer and, leading him to the spot where the bodies of his son and another man were lying in pools of blood, had besought him, with tears in his eyes, to shield the survivors. The officer did not raise a finger in their defence. Several policemen also confessed that, on asking for orders from their superiors, the answer they had received was, “Let the Jews help themselves; we cannot help them.” General Beckmann deposed that at the commencement of the riots he had at his disposal a force amply sufficient to quell the disturbance, but he received no orders to act. “It was only,” he said, “when the Governor grew alarmed for the safety of the Christian population that he took measures to allay the fury of the mob.”185 The myth of Jewish provocation was also disposed of by a police officer, who stated that, when the outbreak occurred, there was not a single Jew in the square in which the outrage was alleged to have taken place. To conclude, “evidence was given by physicians and others as to the mutilation of the bodies of murdered Jews, and two priests of the Orthodox Church testified that the report that the Jews had desecrated a church and murdered a priest was absolutely without foundation.”186

And the punishment for this wholesale assassination of a harmless and defenceless population?

Two men, convicted of murder, were sentenced to seven and five years’ penal servitude respectively.

Twenty-two others to periods of imprisonment, ranging from one to two years, and one to six months.

Forty-eight civil actions for damages that were brought against the accused were all dismissed.187

Even Richard the Crusader did better in 1189.

One luminous spot in the gloomy picture is the action of the Eastern Church. Not only did the priests and monks of Bessarabia exculpate the Jews from all provocation of the massacre, but even Father John of Kronstadt publicly condemned the dastardly crime of his co-religionists.

The only genuine result of the trial and of the revelations made in its course was to intensify the wrath of the fanatical Russian and Moldavian populace, both of the town and of the open country, who threatened reprisals for the punishment of a few of their brother-butchers. The fear of such reprisals forced many thousands of the poorer Jews of Bessarabia to migrate into the districts of Russian and Austrian Poland, which were already congested to a terrible degree, while those who possessed the necessary means determined to emigrate from the Czar’s dominions and seek a home in the West. While the trial was still proceeding, a deputation of Bessarabian Jews arrived in the city. Their object was to confer with the heads of the Jewish community, on behalf of their co-religionists in various rural districts of Bessarabia, with a view to leaving the country which had declared in so sanguinary a manner its unwillingness to harbour them. It was proposed that a number of Jewish families should emigrate to the Argentine Republic and join their brethren, already settled in that and other parts of America by Baron Hirsch at different times, especially after the exodus of 1892. Four thousand souls, the delegates affirmed, were anxious to wind up their affairs and quit the inhospitable country.188

Flight, under the apprehension of slaughter, is avowed to be one of the objects which induced the Russian authorities to connive at the massacre and to profess their inability to prevent its repetition: “Russian policy at the present hour,” proudly declares an eminent Russian anti-Semite, “seems to have one object in view—that of starting a free emigration of the Jews from Russia. But the total number of Jewish emigrants during the last twenty years was only about a million.”189 Obviously, occasional slaughter alone is sadly insufficient.

As in 1881 and 1891, so in 1903 the Czar’s ministers hastened to supplement massacre by measures of administrative coercion. They decided to forbid Jews, until the revision of the laws concerning them has been accomplished by means of fresh legislation, to acquire land or real estate, or to enjoy the usufruct thereof, either within or without the Governments situated within the residential “pale.” This decision of the Committee of Ministers was submitted to the Czar and received his approval. Permission, however, was granted to the Jews to settle and acquire real estate at places within the “pale,” which in consequence of their industrial development partake of the character of towns.190 A few months later, at the moment when the Kishineff trial was drawing to a close, the Governor-General at Warsaw issued peremptory instructions to all the Assistant Governors in the Vistula Province, directing them to put in rigorous force the Law of 1891, which prohibits Jews from purchasing or leasing immoveable property in the rural districts.191

This outburst of Jew-hatred was not confined to Bessarabia. Soon after the Kishineff massacre reports reached this country of further outrages being apprehended owing to the symptoms of anti-Semitism manifested by the inhabitants of the western provinces of the Empire. Nor were these forebodings falsified by events. In the middle of September, 1903, Jew-baiting was once more indulged in at Gomel, a town of Mohileff within the Jewish “pale.” A petty squabble between a Jew and a Christian in the bazaar afforded an excuse to the co-religionists of the latter to wreck the Jewish quarter. Several persons were killed on both sides; but the only details available are official, which in Russia is not a synonym for authentic.192