FOOTNOTES:
[11] Rubinow, Economic Condition of the Jews in Russia (Washington, 1907), p. 500.
[12] Cf. [table IA], p. 158.
[13] Cf. [table IB], p. 158.
Rubinow, op. cit., p. 501.
[14] Margolin puts the number at 600,000.
[15] Ruppin, Die Sozialen Verhältnisse der Juden in Russland (Berlin, 1906), p. 59.
[16] Rubinow, op. cit., p. 537.
[17] Rubinow, op. cit., p. 542.
[18] Ibid., p. 553.
[19] Ruppin, op. cit., p. 62.
[20] Rubinow, op. cit., p. 556.
[21] Ruppin, op. cit., p. 100.
[22] Rubinow, op. cit., p. 493.
[23] Ruppin, op. cit., p. 19.
[24] Ruppin, op. cit., p. 65.
[25] Rubinow, op. cit., pp. 577-578.
[26] In a personal communication to the writer, Dr. Rubinow gives it as his opinion that the Jews as a group consisting primarily of artisans and merchants will show a very much higher rate of literacy than a group of factory employes, and, we may add, of unskilled laborers, to which groups the majority of the non-Jews in the towns belong.
[27] Ruppin, op. cit., p. 62.
[28] On the economic activities and social characteristics of the Jews in Roumania, cf. Ruppin, Die Juden in Rumänien, p. 27 et seq.
[29] Enquête sur les artisans (Bucarest, 1909), p. 157 et seq.
[30] Thon, Die Juden in Oesterreich (Berlin, 1908), p. 112.
[31] Thon, op. cit., p. 124.
[32] Thon, op. cit., p. 127.
[33] Grenzboten: Galizische Wirtschaft, vol. lxii, p. 402.
CHAPTER IV[ToC]
Thirty Years of Jewish History in Eastern Europe
I. RUSSIA
Religious intolerance had been the prime motive of Russia's policy of completely excluding the Jews from her borders. Through the partitions of Poland from 1772 to 1795, she became the unwilling ruler over the destinies of millions of Jews living in Lithuania, Western and Southwestern Russia and Poland proper. The historic medieval principle by which the Jews were regarded as an alien and heretic race living among the Christian peoples—a principle that had, with the growth of modern ideas, been rapidly losing its hold upon the West-European nations—expressed Russia's attitude towards the Jews and conformed to her strongly medieval outlook and organization of this period. Thus, at the time when the emancipation of the Jews had begun to be in Western Europe a concomitant of social progress, Russia set to work to recreate almost typically medieval conditions for a vaster Jewish population than had ever before been assembled in any European country.
The Jews were placed in the position practically of aliens, whose activities were regulated by special laws. The first and the most far-reaching of these laws limited their right of residence to those provinces in which they lived at the time of the Polish partitions. In this way originated that reproduction on a vast scale of the medieval Ghetto—the Pale of Jewish Settlement. The elementary right of free movement and choice of residence, which was denied to the Jews, has remained the principal restriction to which they are subjected.
The Pale of Jewish Settlement, continued with but few changes to our day, includes the fifteen provinces of Western and Southwestern Russia—Vilna, Kovno, Grodno, Minsk, Vitebsk, Mohileff, Volhynia, Podolia, Kiev (except the city of Kiev), Chernigov, Poltava, Bessarabia, Kherson, Jekaterinoslav, Taurida (except the city of Yalta), and the ten provinces into which Poland is divided—Warsaw, Kalisz, Kielce, Lomza, Lublin, Petrikow, Plock, Radom, Suvalk and Siedlec. From the rest of the eighty-nine provinces and territories—constituting nearly 95 per cent of the total territory of the Russian Empire—the Jews were excluded.
In the course of a century the special laws relating to the Jews have multiplied greatly until they now consist of more than a thousand articles, regulating their religious and communal life, economic activities and occupations, military service, property rights, education, etc., and imposing special taxes over and above those borne by all other Russian subjects. The direct consequence of these laws was to mark the status of the Jews as the lowest in the Empire, placing them in the position of aliens as to rights and citizens as to obligations.[34]
The policy of the Russian government throughout the 19th century has been full of contrasts and contradictions. Attempts at forcible russification and assimilation, which with Nicholas I practically spelled conversion, have alternated with methods of repression which sought to prevent closer contact between the Jewish and the native populations.
It was the liberal epoch of Alexander II that gave the first real promise of emancipation to Russian Jewry. The great reforms of this era benefited the Jews along with the other subjects of the Empire. With the influence of the liberals over the government there came a new attitude regarding the Jews and their value as economic and cultural forces. Partly to relieve the intense competition in the Pale, harmful both to the Christian and the Jewish populations, but chiefly to give the provinces of interior Russia the benefit of the superior industrial and commercial, and professional abilities of the Jews, laws were enacted allowing certain classes of Jews to live outside of the Pale. These were, chiefly, master-artisans, merchants of the first guild, students and graduates of universities and higher educational institutions, and members of the liberal professions.
With these laws and with the opening of the high schools and universities to the Jews, the movement for Russianization received a mighty impetus. Though these reforms, hedged about and limited by onerous conditions, affected comparatively few and hardly touched the life of the Jewish masses in a radical way, nevertheless, the impulse which even these relatively slight reforms gave to the current of Jewish life in Russia was far out of proportion to the relief they afforded. Jewish hopes for a final emancipation soared high: it seemed as if the walls of the Pale needed but little more to be broken down.
The reaction that followed the assassination of Alexander II fell upon the Jews as a national calamity. To the feudal party which now came into control, the Jews seemed the very embodiment of the forces in the Empire whose progress they were seeking to stem. No other nationality in the Russian Empire concentrated in itself so many characteristics and tendencies opposed to the ideals and interests of the Russian ruling classes. To the Church, dominated by a religio-national point of view, they were the very opposite of her ideal type of Russian orthodox, their very existence in Russia being regarded as an anomaly and as an actual and possible influence in disintegrating the religious faith of the orthodox peasants. To the nationalists they were an alien people racially and religiously, whose assimilation with the Russian people was neither possible nor desirable. To the autocracy and the bureaucracy there was the added fear from their intellectual superiority and their zeal for education of their playing a powerful part among the liberal forces seeking political freedom. Indeed, the Jews, whose economic and cultural activities and interests bound them closely to Western Europe and were in themselves modernizing and liberalizing influences, growing all the stronger through the greater freedom offered them during the liberal epoch, excited the deep repugnance of the feudal forces now directing the destinies of the state. To them the Jews spelled anathema. Separated from the great masses of the Russian people by race, nationality, religion, occupations and other social and psychological characteristics, they offered an unusually favorable object of attack.
It soon became clear that the new régime had determined upon making the Jews a central feature in their policy of reaction. At once a many-sided campaign against the Jews was begun. A powerful machinery of persecution was at hand in the existing Jewish laws. All that was necessary was to revive them, to interpret them rigorously, to tighten the legislative screws which had become loosened during the preceding liberal régime. This, however, seemed insufficient. It was determined that a powerful and definitive blow must be struck at the roots of their very existence in Russia.
The main attack was economic. The industrial and commercial activities of the Jews, especially in the Pale, make them, as we have seen, among the chief industrial producers for the peasants, as well as the chief buyers of their agricultural produce. This contact between the Jews and the peasants was a vital need in the economic life of both. The familiar charge that the Jews were exploiters of the peasantry was revived. Behind this charge lay the medieval economic prejudice, which attributes no really useful rôle to the merchant or trader.[35] In a custom-ridden economic order, the competitive methods of the Jewish traders smacked of commercial deceit. Principally, however, this charge served for a convenient explanation of the change of policy towards the Jews.
In this wise were introduced the "Temporary Regulations" of May, 1882, or the May Laws, the main clauses of which are the following:
1. As a temporary measure and until a general revision is made of the legal status of the Jews, they are forbidden to settle anew outside of towns and townlets (boroughs), an exception being made only in the case of existing Jewish agricultural colonies.
2. Until further orders, the execution of deeds of sale and mortgage in the names of Jews is forbidden, as well as the registration of Jews as lessees of real estate situated outside of towns and townlets, and also the issuing to Jews of powers of stewardship or attorney to manage and dispose of such real property.
The May Laws may be regarded as an extension of the general principle underlying the creation of the Pale. Through the first clause they were now to be forbidden free movement even within the Pale. As far as possible, their contact with the peasantry was to be cut off. The second clause aimed to put an end to the ownership by Jews of land in rural districts and the employment of Jews as stewards or managers of estates. A further construction of this clause forbade Jews to be connected with any business directly or indirectly depending upon the purchase of landed property outside of the towns of the Pale, thus debarring them from the utilization of land for industrial and commercial, as well as for agricultural purposes.
In the actual execution of these laws, and in the legal interpretations given them by the highest courts, the effect was far greater. A series of wholesale expulsions from the villages into the towns of the Pale began, on the ground of illegal residence. This was increased by the device, which became normal, of renaming towns as villages—easily possible in Russia where towns are frequently only administrative units—the resident Jews then being expelled as illegal settlers. Again, movement within the villages even on the part of Jews who had the right to live in villages was prohibited.
A further effect of this change in policy was upon the position of the Jews outside of the Pale, who enjoyed the right of residence in the interior of Russia, through the laws of the preceding régime. A stricter interpretation of these laws, added to a change in the administrative policy, had the effect not only of stopping the comparatively slight current of Jewish artisans into the interior of Russia, but also of starting a never-ending series of expulsions from the interior to the Pale. These expulsions have since continued, with individuals, families and whole groups, until they have become a constant phenomenon of Jewish life in Russia and a familiar item of world news.
While the May Laws thus touched to the quick the economic life of the Russian Jews, another series of laws sought to break down their cultural life by barring them from the higher educational and professional institutions. The contrast with the policy of the preceding régime was here as complete as possible. The principle of liberal assimilation with regard to the Jews had dictated the policy of opening wide to them the doors of the secondary schools and universities, and the liberal professions. The new régime, however, not only opposed education generally, and higher education particularly, as the means by which the reform and westernization of Russia was being accomplished, but it regarded the russification of the Jews as a special evil. Culturally as well, the Jews were to be separated from the Russian people.
Hence the introduction of the "percentage rule" in 1886 and 1887, restricting the proportion of Jewish students admitted to the secondary and high schools, and universities, within the Pale, to 10 per cent of the total number of students admitted. Outside of the Pale, the proportion was 5 per cent, except in St. Petersburg and Moscow, where it was placed at 3 per cent. In addition, the Jews were completely barred from a number of these institutions. As the Jews constituted so large a part of the populations in the towns of the Pale and had distinguished themselves in Russia as elsewhere by the eagerness with which they grasped the educational and professional opportunities offered them, the introduction of the "percentage rule" meant that the vast majority of the Jewish youth were to be deprived of the normal chances for education. Thus the "percentage rule", which was extended to institutions founded by the Jews themselves, was almost as great a blow as the May Laws. It threatened the cultural ruin of Russian Jewry. Bound up as the admission to these schools was with the liberal professions and with the opportunity of escaping from the limits of the Pale, it meant that one of the main highways to freedom in Russia had been closed to the Jews.
The most striking method of repression introduced by the new régime and its feudal supporters was that combination of murder, outrage and pillage—the pogrom. The revival of this characteristic expression of the antisemitism of the middle ages was not the result of spontaneous outbreaks of fury on the part of the Russian masses, but a deliberate and calculated awakening of latent racial and religious prejudices, evoked as powerful aids to inflame against the Jews the Russian masses, who are, religiously speaking, a tolerant people and whose relations to the Jews had been marked, on the whole, with friendliness.
The first pogroms began a month after the accession of Alexander III to the throne, and extended in the course of a year to 160 places in Southern Russia. Though the connivance of the local authorities was clearly established, the originators of the pogroms were never found.[36] However, moral support was lent by the government in the promulgation of the May Laws which closely followed. The doctrine that the misery of the peasants was due to their exploitation by the Jews, and that the pogroms were the instinctive expression of the fury of the peasants, was officially sanctioned. The pogroms of 1881-2 served as notice to all Russia and particularly to Russian Jewry, that the old order had given place to the new. Apart from the loss of life and damage to property they left the Russian Jews in a state of stupefaction and horror, with the sense of living on the brink of a precipice.
The first decade of Alexander III's reign had opened with these pogroms. The second decade opened with the wholesale expulsions from Moscow. Within six months, more than ten thousand Jews were expelled from the city on the ground of illegal residence. So vast a number of Jewish families was affected and so summary was the manner of executing the decree of expulsion, that several governments, among them our own, protested to the Russian government. President Harrison, discussing this protest in his message to Congress, frankly stated that
the banishment, whether by direct decree or by not less certain indirect methods, of so large a number of men and women is not a local question. A decree to leave one country is in the nature of things an order to enter another—some other. This consideration, as well as the suggestion of humanity, furnishes ample ground for the remonstrances which we have presented to Russia.[37]
The expulsions were preceded by a year of ominous rumors of a program of new restrictions beside which the May Laws would pale into insignificance. An offer of ten million dollars for the cause of Jewish education made by Baron de Hirsch to the Russian government was refused. His scheme, however, for the organization of a mass-emigration of Jews to Argentine was sanctioned. All these facts lent strength to the feeling of the Jews that they had nothing to hope for under the existing régime. Thus closed the reign of Alexander III and a memorable chapter in Russian Jewish history.
The early years of Nicholas II were marked by a relaxation in the strict administration and interpretation of the existing restrictive laws. Hopes for the amelioration of the Jewish situation began to be entertained. These hopes were destined shortly to be shattered.
The first decade of the twentieth century opened with threatening unrest. Economic depression began and was accompanied by revolutionary attacks. For the Jews, the most alarming symptom was the rise and uninterrupted progress of a group of antisemitic agitators and Russian loyalists, who sought to counteract the revolutionary movement by denouncing the Jews as the leaders of the revolution and the enemies of the autocracy and the Orthodox religion. Thus was sown the seed of the Kishineff massacre of April, 1903, which lasted three days. Before the echoes of Kishineff had died away, the massacre at Gomel followed.
But Kishineff proved to be merely a bloody prelude. The air was surcharged with explosives. The outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war and of the first organized revolution created a dangerous combination of events for the Jews. To the discontent of the peasants, forced to go to the front in a war for which they had no enthusiasm, and sore with the reverses of the Russian army, was added the increased activity of the agitators who declared that the war with Japan had been forced upon Russia by the Jews, eager to profit through its ruin, and who called upon their followers and the peasants through propaganda and proclamations to revenge themselves upon the Jews. The government at bay, on the verge of breakdown under the revolutionary attacks, and anxious to excuse its incompetency and failure in the conduct of the war, sought a means of diverting the peasants from the uprisings against the landed proprietors spreading over the land, and, above all, of stifling the revolution, which had met with such opportune and unlooked-for success among all classes. This was a situation alive with danger for the Jews, whose proletarians in the cities had taken an active part in the revolution. The organization of Jewish massacres by responsible agents of the government became the central feature of its program of counter-revolution.[38] A veritable holocaust ensued in nearly every province of the Empire for two years, only the climaxes of which became known to the world in Zhitomir, Odessa, Bialystok, and Siedlec.
The rôle of the bureaucracy in the creation of the pogroms, especially in 1906, in which year there took place hundreds of pogroms, was made abundantly clear by the Russian press, by Prince Urussov's disclosures in the Duma, and by the report of the Duma Commission appointed to investigate the causes of the Bialystok pogrom of 1906. As announced in their official report, an investigation had shown that the relations between the Jews and the Christians of Bialystok previous to the bloodshed had been amicable, and that preparations for a pogrom had been deliberately and carefully made by agents of the bureaucracy and carried out with the aid of the local authorities.
Both periods of pogroms in these thirty years were periods of revolution. In both the government had felt the ground shaking under its feet from terroristic attacks and from peasant uprisings. In the first period Jews had taken only slight part. In the late revolution, however, the participation of the Jews of the Pale, through the Jewish labor organization, the Bund, was quite strong. The earlier pogroms gave a hint as to the policy of the new régime. The later ones occurred at the end of years of repression and persecution, and were a culminating point in the fury of the reactionary forces at their failure to stem the tide of liberalism in the struggle for parliamentary institutions and for the rights of citizens in a modern state.
The results of these thirty years of reaction remain to be considered. Though the effects of the pogroms upon the Russian Jews can hardly be overestimated, the less evident, because less spectacular, methods of restrictive law and administrative action have in the long run left a far more enduring impress.
The introduction of the May Laws at the very beginning of the eighties awakened the Jews to the realization that their future in Russia was threatened. The May Laws and the laws that were developed from them, the obstacles that were placed in the way of Jewish education and, in general, the administrative difficulties that were created, have affected every movement of their life.
Freedom of movement of the individual is the very essence of the life of modern states and the basis of their economic, social and political institutions. The lack of this freedom, especially to the extent created by the May Laws, bars the Jews from the possibilities of normal economic growth and progress. The Jewish manufacturers and capitalists are prevented from participating in the industrial and commercial development of Russia, which is so rapidly proceeding and to which, owing to their economic position and capacities, they could powerfully contribute. Legal interference with economic activities, so frequently the rule in Russia, is emphasized in the case of the Jews.
A far more serious situation confronts the great mass of the Jewish artisans, petty merchants and factory workers, to which the vast majority of the Jews belong. Largely prevented access to their natural customers, the peasants, by the prohibition of rural residence, and confined to the relatively few towns of the Pale, where over-crowding and over-competition are the necessary and unavoidable results, the Jewish artisans and petty merchants have a bitter struggle to maintain a position of economic independence.
Added to this, there is the social pressure to which the Jews have been subjected. Not until this period has the century-long position of the Jews as the "pariahs of the Empire" been so sharply emphasized. Enmeshed in a net of special laws and regulations, at the mercy of ministerial decree, secret circular, arbitrary administrative act, law has lost all meaning for the Jews. In this atmosphere they exist mainly through bribery, at once their bane and their salvation.
The unusual economic and social pressure exerted by the reactionary régime upon its Jewish subjects, through the new restrictive laws that were put into operation during the last thirty years, the administrative harrying that became the order of the day and the introduction of the hitherto unused method of physical repression, the pogrom, becomes clear in the light of its policy. Beginning as a movement to suppress the Jews in their economic and cultural activities, and to separate them as far as possible from their Russian neighbors, the anti-Jewish program became in its final form the expulsion and extermination of the Jews from Russia. The historic sentence of Count Ignatiev, author of the May Laws, at the very beginning of this period, "the Western borders are open to you Jews", strikes the keynote of this policy. And, in fact, for practically the first time in its history, the Russian government relaxed in 1892 its rigorous rules forbidding emigration, and gave its sanction to Baron de Hirsch's plan of organizing a vast emigration of Jews from Russia, which its author hoped would, at the end of a quarter of a century, result in the complete transplantation of the Jews from Russia. The famous principle of the Russian government, "once a Russian always a Russian", was for once put aside in favor of the Jews. They were given one right not enjoyed by other Russians, that of leaving Russia under the obligation of abandoning Russian citizenship forever.[39]
II. ROUMANIA
Up to very recent years, the history of the Jews in Roumania centers about those resident in Moldavia. Its proximity to ancient Poland and close association with Bessarabia, naturally made for a back-and-forth movement of the Polish and Russian Jews, whose settlement was invited by the boyars or landed nobility because of resulting industrial and commercial advantages.
The position of the Jews in Moldavia up to the middle of the nineteenth century did not differ to any extent from that of their brethren in Russia. Moldavia, as a Christian state, denied civil and political rights to all non-Christians. The Jews in Moldavia were regarded as aliens, whose activities were subject to special regulation. The beginning of the last century witnessed the first special Jewish laws. The Jews were forbidden to buy the products of the soil, to acquire real property; non-resident Jews were debarred unless they could prove an occupation and show the possession of property. Definite restrictions as to occupation, residence in the villages, the ownership, in villages, of houses, land, vineyards, etc., existed. As vagabonds they could be expelled from the country by administrative decree. Thus was their legal status fixed.
The emancipation of Jews was first demanded by the liberal party during the revolutionary days of 1848. But no practical change resulted until the Convention of Paris in 1856, which, in granting autonomy to the two provinces, guaranteed civil rights to all Moldavians, regardless of creed. Though political rights were granted only to Christian Moldo-Wallachians, the provision was made that, by legislative arrangements, the enjoyment of political rights could be extended to other creeds. Thus was established the possibility of a gradual emancipation of the Jews, foreshadowed in the communal law of 1864, which granted the right of naturalization to certain classes of native Roumanian Jews. Those who had passed through college or had a recognized foreign degree, or who had founded a factory in the land employing at least fifty workmen were among the favored classes.
Shortly afterwards, this section was abrogated, and, with the abdication of the liberal Couza and the accession of Charles Hohenzollern, the present king, to the throne, the situation changed. Article VII of the constitution of the newly-created kingdom read that foreigners not of the Christian faith could not be naturalized. As within the term foreigner the great mass of the Jews residing in the land was included, this was a denial of the conditions laid down in the Treaty of Paris. At the same time, old laws against the Jews which had fallen into abeyance were revived, expulsions of the Jews from the villages into the towns began to take place with great frequency, laws requiring all sellers of liquor in rural communes to be naturalized Roumanians deprived many Jewish families of a livelihood—in short, the usual symptoms of anti-Jewish activity became the order of the day.
It was at the famous Berlin Congress, convened to decide questions created by the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, that the subject of the Jewish disabilities in Roumania was brought up, in connection with the demand of Roumania for recognition as an independent state. The chief objection made especially by the representatives of three of the European powers—France, England and Germany—was Roumania's treatment of the Jews. It was finally decided by the Congress to recognize her independence on the condition that she grant civil and political equality to all her citizens without distinction of race or creed. This was expressed in Article 44 of the historic Berlin Treaty, which read as follows:
Article 44. In Roumania, difference in religious beliefs and confessions shall not be brought against anyone as a ground for exclusion or unfitness as regards the enjoyment of civil and political rights, admission to public offices, functions, and honors, or the exercise of various professions and industries in any place whatever. Freedom in outward observance of all creeds will be assured to all subjects of the Roumanian state, as well as to strangers, and no obstacle will be raised either to the ecclesiastical organization of different bodies, or to their intercourse with their spiritual heads.
The citizens of all states, whether merchants or others, shall be dealt with, in Roumania, without distinction of religion, on the basis of perfect equality.
In the constituante which was convoked soon after to discuss the question of giving the Jews equal political rights, an interesting picture is obtained of the sentiment of the upper and middle classes of Roumania.[40] An overwhelming majority was opposed to the granting of political rights to the Jews on the ground that Roumania was a Christian-Latin State, or on the purely nationalistic ground that the Jews were an alien and utterly unassimilable element of the population. To meet the demands of the Powers the principle of individual naturalization was adopted, by which an alien could be granted naturalization individually and only by a special vote of the Chamber of Deputies. Other onerous conditions, such as the requirement of a ten years' residence in the country for citizenship, and the prohibition of the purchase by aliens of rural estates, showed conclusively that Roumania was prepared to give only formal assent to the demand of the Powers.[41] After a year of negotiations, the three Powers agreed to the recognition of her independence, expressing the hope that the Roumanian government would recognize the inadequacy of the revised article and especially of the principle of individual naturalization as meeting the conditions of the Berlin Treaty, and would aim towards a complete emancipation of all her subjects.[42]
The situation at the beginning of the eighties presented but little hope of improvement in the political condition of the Jews. Eight hundred and eighty-three Jews who had fought in the war for independence had been naturalized en masse. With the exception of this small number, the Jews were legally classed as foreigners.[43] Shortly after, owing to the fact that Austria-Hungary had withdrawn its protection from several thousands of its Jewish citizens resident in Roumania, the entire body of Jews received a new legal status, that of "foreigners not subject to any foreign Power". In other words, they were stateless, though subject to all the obligations of Roumanian citizens, including military service and the payment of taxes. This legal status of the Jews has received the attention of the world and marks a condition of things which according to Bluntschli is "a denial of the entire development of European states".[44]
Freed from the control of the Powers, Roumania now entered on a new campaign of discrimination against the Jews. The first decade of the eighties saw this begun in a series of laws which for completeness finds no parallel even in Russia. At the very beginning, a law giving the police the right of domiciliary visitation and of expelling under the vagabond law anyone in the rural districts, was employed against the Jews, resulting in their frequent expulsions into the towns. The enforcement of the law against rural residence was so strict as to create practically the same situation as exists in the Russian Pale. The law of 1883, prohibiting lotteries, and in the following year the law prohibiting hawking or any form of sale from house to house or on the streets deprived several thousands of Jewish families of their livelihood.
It was in 1886 and 1887, however, when the laws which were to create a national industry and commerce were introduced, that a serious step was taken to exclude the Jews from economic activity. On the assumption that occupations were a civil right to which aliens could or could not be admitted, the Jews were systematically deprived even of the civil rights which had been theirs, to a great extent, before the Berlin Congress sought to make them politically free. As foreigners, the Jews were prohibited the right of choosing electors for the newly-created Chambers of Commerce and Trade, or of becoming members of these chambers although they formed a large majority of the merchants and manufacturers represented in these important bodies. A still more serious provision was that which decreed that five years after the foundation of a factory two-thirds of the workingmen employed therein must be Roumanians. Jews were also partly excluded from the administrative positions in joint-stock companies. They were completely excluded from employment in the financial institutions of the state, from the state railway service, and, by a provision that two-thirds of the employes on private railways must be Roumanians, were practically excluded from these as well. The sharpest blow, however, was struck in 1902, when a new law for the organization of trades, popularly known as the Artisans' Bill, was passed. In this law there is to be seen a revival of the guild organizations of the Middle Ages. To pursue his occupation every artisan was required to obtain a certificate from a guild. Jewish master artisans and workmen were hit by the requirement that aliens in order to have the right of working in accordance with this law must prove that in their own country reciprocal rights existed for Roumanians, or obtain an authorization from a Chamber of Commerce or Industry. Whatever value this requirement may have had for the protection of Roumanian workmen in foreign countries, its chief effect was to place in a position of economic helplessness the majority of the Jewish workmen as "aliens not subject to any foreign Power", and largely unable to secure authorization from such chambers controlled by competitors. Other clauses, requiring that all workingmen belong to a guild, and that fifty workmen possessing civil and political rights are empowered to form a guild, put the control of trades into the hands of non-Jews, although the majority of the artisans in many of the trades were Jews.
A similar policy was pursued with reference to the cultural activities of the Jews. A circular of the minister of public instruction, issued in 1887, ordered that preference should be given to Roumanian children, in cases where there was not enough room in the elementary schools for all. This began the gradual exclusion of Jewish children from the Roumanian elementary schools. The formal treatment of the Jews as aliens in the educational system was introduced in 1893, when all aliens were required to pay fees for entrance into the public schools, and were admitted only in case there was enough room for them. The effect of these laws was seen in the diminished proportion of Jewish children in the elementary schools. Similar provisions for the secondary and high schools and universities largely closed the doors of these institutions to the Jews. From schools of agriculture and forestry, and of commerce they were completely excluded.
To the educational restrictions were added restrictions to professional service. As aliens, they were forbidden to be employed in the public sanitary service and health department as physicians, pharmacists, etc., from owning as well as working in private pharmacies, and from entering other professional fields.
The almost complete agreement of the two principal parties—liberal and conservative—explains the thoroughness and uninterrupted progress of this process of piling up disability upon disability. The explanation is partly to be found in the constitution of Roumania, the electoral law of which places the political powers in the hands of two classes—the landed aristocracy and the urban, or middle class. The vast majority of the peasants are excluded by educational and property qualifications, obtaining only indirect representation. Had the Jews been granted political rights, they would have shared political power with the other two classes. It is through the second electoral college, of both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, that the middle class is represented politically. As manufacturers and merchants, as urban dwellers, as members of the liberal professions and as graduates of the elementary schools, the Jews would have become the most important part of this electoral college.
Again, the creation of an industry and commerce along national lines was largely a course of action in the interests of this middle class of Roumanian merchants, artisans and laborers. It was in favor of this class that the laws were passed debarring Jews from various occupations and seeking essentially to wrest the industrial and commercial monopoly from their hands.
In this course of action, powerful aid was extended by the bureaucracy, recruited mainly from the lower nobility and the middle classes. Depending for their support upon the urbans, and seeking to prevent the entrance of Jews into state service, which would have resulted from the granting of political rights to the Jews, the bureaucracy have acted in harmony with the middle classes in the attempt to make the Jews politically, economically, and culturally powerless.
Thus the situation that the Jews in Roumania have been facing for thirty years is abnormal, from every standpoint. At no time within thirty years has there been any serious question of giving to the Jews the political rights, the granting of which had been made the condition of the recognition of Roumania's independence by the Powers. The history of the succeeding thirty years has been one of gradual, steady and systematic deprivation of one civil right after another. To the prohibition of freedom of movement has been added that of work; one occupation after another has been prohibited to Jews under the mask of foreigners. From all the branches of state service Jews have been almost completely debarred. Participation in important private and public enterprises has similarly been limited. The schools have been largely closed to them. The effect has been partly registered in a rate of illiteracy higher in the cities among the Jewish children between seven and fifteen than among the non-Jewish children of the same age.
Thus the conscious policy of Roumania has been that of oppression, political, economic and social, with the deliberate aim of making it impossible for the Jews to live in Roumania. This method of indirect expulsion is the essence of her policy of thirty years. As such it was recognized and openly stated in the only formal protest against her manner of fulfilling the conditions of the Berlin Treaty, made by the United States, through its Secretary of State, John Hay, whose circular to the Powers signatory to the Treaty demanded that Roumania be called to account for her treatment of the Jews, and her dishonesty in violating the pledges given by her to the Powers.[45]
III. AUSTRIA-HUNGARY
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the legal position of the Jews in Austria-Hungary differed from that of their brethren in Russia and Roumania only in degree. Prohibited the free exercise of their religion, the right to hold real property, and to enter certain occupations, and burdened by special Jewish taxes, the Jews remained a class apart and governed in all their activities by special laws. Their legal emancipation, begun in 1848, was definitely established by the promulgation in each division of the Empire of the Fundamental Law of 1867, declaring that religion should not be a ground for discrimination in civil and political rights.
The civil and political equality of the Jews was a cardinal principle of the creed of German-Austrian liberalism and one of a number of its victories embodied in the Constitution of 1867. Austrian economic and social life at this period was, however, too saturated with medievalism to allow for a complete revolution in the attitude toward the Jews. On the other hand, the influential part played by the Jews in the liberal movement and the fact that a group of wealthy Jews were powerful factors in the haute finance and in the commercial life of the country were made the basis of an attack by the feudal-clericals upon the Jews.
The great financial crash of 1873, in which several Jewish financial houses were concerned, was the starting-point of political antisemitism in Austria. The Jews were denounced as the representatives of the capitalist order of society, with its overwhelming concentration of wealth and its exploitation of the industrial and the agricultural proletariat. The Christian-Socialist movement began with antisemitism as the corner-stone of its economic and social doctrines. Its opposition to the Jews and to capitalism was largely due to medieval prejudices in favor of the Christian-feudal state and the medieval industrial organization. In the early eighties it began to triumph when the "small man" or petty industrialist received political power through an extension of the suffrage.
It reached its height in the nineties, when, under the combined influence of feudal-clerical nobles, the clergy and the lower middle class, a period of reaction set in. In Vienna, in 1895, the antisemite Lueger was elected mayor. Powerless though they were to change the legal status of the Jews, the antisemites succeeded in creating in both upper and lower circles of Austrian society an atmosphere of antagonism to the Jews which has prevented the complete fulfillment of the principle of equality as set forth in the constitution.
The clericals have fanned the flames of religious hatred especially among the peasantry by ritual-murder accusations, which have been rife and have played a large part in strengthening the sentiment of hostility toward the Jews.
In Galicia, the position of the Jews became unsettled, owing to a variety of causes.[46] Although one of the least advanced among the Austrian crown lands, Galicia has experienced within the last half-century an industrial and commercial development along with the rest of the Empire. This resulted in the growth of a middle class particularly among the Poles, which began to compete for supremacy with the Jews. The improvements in transportation and communication, the organization of agricultural syndicates, for the purpose of directly purchasing and selling the produce of the peasants, and the creation of rural credit societies, helped considerably to displace the Jewish middlemen and traders as well as the Jewish money-lenders, who dealt largely with the peasantry. The movement to develop Galicia industrially was fostered on national lines by these Polish organizations, which carried on an extensive propaganda and systematically organized economic boycotts against the Jews. "Do not buy of Jews", "Do not patronize Jewish artisans", became familiar cries in Galicia as in other parts of Austria.
The process of wrestling the monopoly of industry, trade and commerce from the Jews in favor of the Polish petty merchants and artisans was considerably accelerated by the official bodies, the autonomous Galician Diet and the municipal boards, controlled chiefly by the Polish-Catholic nobility, who saw in the national-industry movement a means of capturing the votes of the middle class and of thus retaining their position as leaders of the Polish people. Communal funds were used to establish Poles in business. Attempts were made to take away from the Jews the small-salt and tobacco trades. The taxes on the taverns were increased. In the public financial institutions organized for various purposes Jews were not given representation. In nearly all the activities designed to promote the interest of the urban population and the peasantry, the Jews were systematically excluded by the local authorities.
Added to this, the increasing distress of the Galician peasants has reacted strongly upon the Jews, who depend so largely upon their buying power. The poverty of the peasantry, the competition for the control of the rural market created by public and private agencies, added to the increasing competition in the towns from other sections of the population, have all co-operated to create a great surplus, in proportion to the population, of petty merchants and artisans among the Jews. This had its effect in an over-competition from the side of the Jews themselves.
The Jews have suffered as well from their historical rôle of intermediaries between a most avaricious nobility and a bitterly exploited peasantry. Acting as stewards and as tavern keepers for the Polish nobles, who are mainly absentee landlords, and who, until very recently, enjoyed the right of keeping taverns as one of their feudal privileges, the Jews have become the buffers of the deep-seated antagonism between the two chief classes of Galicia.
Agrarian uprisings have been frequent of late, particularly after the failure of the crops, which here as in Russia and Roumania spells a crisis. These, chiefly directed against the nobles, have frequently been diverted toward the Jews, to whom the peasants are largely indebted, and in whom they see the visible instruments of the oppression of their lords.
Economic antagonism has been intensified by the religious hatred which has been fostered by the Polish clergy and which has been the basis of numerous ritual-murder charges.