FOOTNOTES:
[234] [In 1766 Catherine convened a Commission, consisting of representatives of the various estates, for the purpose of elaborating a new Russian code of laws. As a guide for this Commission Catherine wrote her famous "Instructions" (in Russian Nakaz), outlining the principles of government, largely in the spirit of Montesquieu.]
[235] [This law laid the foundation for the division of the Russian Empire into "Governments," in Russian gubernia (the English term is a reproduction of the French gouvernement). The chief of a Government is called Governor, in Russian, Gubernator. There are also a few Governors-General, in Russian, Gheneral-Gubernator, placed over several Governments, mostly on the borders of the Empire.]
[236] [According to this new law, the city population is divided into merchants, burghers, and artisans. The burghers—in Russian (also in Polish, see above, p. [44], n. 2), myeshchanye—are placed below the merchants. The former are those possessing less than 500 rubels ($250); they have to pay the head-tax and are subject to corporal punishment. The merchants are those who have a larger capital, and are privileged in the two directions indicated. The artisans are organized in their trade-unions. Each estate is registered and administered separately.]
[238] It consisted of the Governments of Chernigov and Novgorod-Seversk (subsequently Poltava) and a part of the Government of Kiev.
[239] [The present Government of Kovno was constituted as late as 1872. Its territory was up till then included in the Government of Vilna.]
[240] This was in direct violation of the pledge given by the Russian Government at the occupation of the Polish provinces. As recently as in January of the same year (1795) the Lithuanian Governor-General Repnin had replied to the application of the Lithuanian Jews, who pleaded for the maintenance of the Kahal tribunal, that the Jews "may retain the same rights they had been enjoying prior to the last [Polish] mutiny [of 1794]."
[241] [Zhyd, originally the Slavic form of the Latin Judaeus, has assumed in Russian a derogatory connotation. It is interesting to note that in Polish the same word has no unpleasant meaning, although in polite speech other terms are used.]
[242] [See p. [253], n. 1; for "propination" see p. [67], n. 2.]
[243] Dyerzhavin's statement, that he had "borrowed his principal ideas from Prussian institutions," refers in all likelihood to the well-known Prussian Juden-Reglement für Süd- und-Neuostpreussen of 1797, which was at that time operative in the whole of Prussian Poland. There are numerous points of contact between Dyerzhavin's project and the Prussian enactment. The latter may be found in the work of Rönne and Simon, Verhältnisse der Juden in den sämmtlichen Landestheilen des preussischen Staates, ed. 1843, pp. 281-302.
[244] This is the way Dyerzhavin spells the word Synhedrion, or Sanhedrin, which he evidently had picked up casually.
[245] The following sentence in Dyerzhavin's "Opinion" is typical of this mixture of medieval notions with the new system of "enlightened patronage": "Inasmuch as Supreme Providence, in order to attain its unknown ends, leaves this people, despite its dangerous characteristics, on the face of the earth, and refrains from destroying it, the Governments under whose scepter it takes refuge must also suffer it to live; assisting the decree of destiny, they are in duty bound to extend their patronage even to the Jews, but in such wise that they [the Jews] may prove useful both to themselves and to the people in whose midst they are settled."
CHAPTER X
THE "ENLIGHTENED ABSOLUTISM" OF ALEXANDER I.
1. "The Committee for the Amelioration of the Jews."
The liberal breeze which began to stir in the first years of Alexander I.'s reign sent a refreshing current of air through the stuffy atmosphere of the St. Petersburg chancelleries, in which Russian bureaucrats, undisturbed by their utter ignorance of Judaism, were devising ways and means of turning Jewish life upside down. It took some time, however, before the Jewish question was taken up again. In 1801 and 1802 the Government was busy rearranging the whole machinery of the administration. With the formation of the Ministries and of the Council of State the Senate lost its former executive power, and, as a result, the material relating to the Jewish question which had been in its possession had to be transferred to a new official agency.
Such an agency was called into being in November, 1802. By order of the Tzar a special "Committee for the Amelioration of the Jews" was organized, and the following were appointed its members: Kochubay, Minister of the Interior, Dyerzhavin, the "specialist" on Judaism, at that time Minister of Justice, Count Zubov, and two high officials of Polish birth, Adam Chartoriski, Assistant-Minister for Foreign Affairs, an intimate friend of Alexander I., and Severin Pototzki, a member of the Senate. The Committee was charged with the investigation of all the problems touched upon in Dyerzhavin's "Opinion," concerning the curbing of the avaricious pursuits of the Jews in White Russia, with a view to "extending the amelioration of the Jews also to the other Governments acquired from Poland."
Rumors to the effect that a special Committee on Jewish affairs had been instituted at St. Petersburg, and that its work was to follow the lines laid down in the project of Dyerzhavin, caused considerable alarm among the Jews of the Northwest, who knew but too well the anti-Semitic leanings of the former Senator and inspector. The Kahal of Minsk held a special meeting in December, 1802, which passed the following resolution:
Whereas disquieting rumors have reached us from the capital, to the effect that matters involving the Jews as a whole have now been intrusted to the hands of five dignitaries, with power to dispose of them as they see fit, be it resolved that it is necessary to proceed to St. Petersburg and petition our sovereign not to allow them [the dignitaries] to introduce any innovations among us.
A public appeal was made for funds to provide the expenses of the delegates. Moreover, a fast of three days was imposed on all the members of the community, during which prayers were to be offered up in the synagogues for averting the calamity which the Government threatened to bring upon the Jews.
When the Minister of the Interior, Kochubay, learned of the excitement prevailing among the Jews, he sent, in January, 1803, a circular to the governors, instructing them to allay the fears of the Jews. The Kahals were to be informed that "in appointing the Committee for the investigation of Jewish matters," there was "no intention whatsoever to impair their status or to curtail any substantial advantage enjoyed by them," but on the contrary it was proposed to "offer them better conditions and greater security."
This verbal assurance was not nearly so effective in quieting the minds of the Jews as action taken by the Government at the same time. In the beginning of 1803, the "Jewish Committee" resolved to invite deputies from all the gubernatorial Kahals to St. Petersburg for the purpose of ascertaining their views as to the needs of the Jewish people, which the Government had planned to "transform" without its own knowledge. This was the first departure from the red-tape routine of St. Petersburg. Towards the end of January, 1803, active preparations were set afoot by the Kahals for sending such deputies. During the winter and spring the Russian capital witnessed the arrival of Jewish deputies from the Governments of Minsk, Podolia, Moghilev, and Kiev, no information being available about the other Governments. The deputies soon had occasion to rejoice in Dyerzhavin's retirement from membership in the Jewish Committee, following upon his resignation from the post of Minister of Justice. Being a conservative of the "real Russian" type, Dyerzhavin was out of place in a liberal Government such as ruled the destinies of Russia in the early years of Alexander's reign. With his retirement his "Opinion" ceased to serve as an obligatory rule of conduct for the members of the Committee.
On arriving in St. Petersburg, the deputies from the provinces found there a small group of Jews, mostly natives of White Russia, who lived temporarily in the capital, in connection with their business affairs. Though denied the right of permanent domicile in the capital of the Empire, this handful of barely tolerated Jews had managed to secure the right of dying there and of burying their dead in their own cemetery. The opening of the cemetery in 1802 marks symbolically the inception of the Jewish community in St. Petersburg. In the same sign of death the provincial deputies met their metropolitan brethren at a rather strange "celebration" in the summer of 1803: at the suggestion of the deputies and in their presence the remains of three Jews who had been buried in a Christian cemetery were transferred to the newly-acquired Jewish cemetery.
Among the Jews of St. Petersburg there were several men at that time who, owing to their connections with high officials and because of their familiarity with bureaucratic ways, were able to be of substantial service to the deputies from the provinces. One of these Jews, Nota Shklover, who about that time received the family name Notkin, the same public-spirited merchant who in 1800 had submitted his reform project to Dyerzhavin,[246] acted, it would seem, as the official adviser of the deputies, having been invited some time previously to participate in the labors of the Jewish Committee. While on the Committee, he continually insisted on his scheme of promoting agriculture and manufactures among the Jews, but he did not live to see the triumph of his ideas. He died shortly before the enactment of the law of 1804, in which his pet theory found due recognition. Another St. Petersburg Jew, the wealthy contractor and commercial councilor Abraham Peretz, took no immediate part in Jewish affairs. Yet he too was of some service to the deputies, owing to his business relations with the official world.
In the meantime the Committee for the Amelioration of the Jews, after scrutinizing the different projects submitted to it, had worked out a general plan of reform, and communicated it to the Jewish deputies. After "prolonged indecision" the Jewish deputies announced that they were not in a position to submit their conclusions, without previous consultation with the Kahals by which they had been elected. They accordingly asked for a half-year's respite "for the purpose of consultation." The official Jewish Committee, on the other hand, could not agree to so protracted a delay in its labors, and resolved to submit, through the medium of the Government, the principal clauses of the project to the Kahals, with the understanding that the latter, "without making any changes in the aforesaid clauses," should confine themselves to suggestions as to the best ways and means of carrying the proposed reforms into effect.
The epistolary inquiry failed to produce the "desired effect." Restricted beforehand in their free expression of opinion, and having no right to speak their mind as to the substance of the project, the Kahals in replying limited themselves to the request that the "correctional measures" be postponed for twenty years, particularly as far as the proposed prohibition of the sale of liquor and land-tenure was concerned, which prohibition would undermine the whole economic structure of Jewish life. The Committee paid no heed to the plea of the Kahals, which was tantamount to a condemnation of the basic principles of the project, and proceeded to work in the direction originally decided upon.
Nor was there perfect unanimity within the Committee itself. Two tendencies, it seems, were struggling for mastery: utilitarianism, represented by the champions of "correctional measures" and of a compulsory "transformation of Jewish life," and humanitarianism, advocated by the spokesmen of unconditional emancipation. To the latter class belonged Speranski, the brilliant and enlightened statesman who might have succeeded in liberating the Empire of the Tzars a hundred years ago, had he not fallen a victim to the fatal conditions of Russian life. At the time we are speaking of he served in the Ministry of the Interior under Kochubay, and was engaged in elaborating plans of reform for the various departments of the civil service.
Speranski took an active interest in the Committee for the Amelioration of the Jews, and frequently acted as Kochubay's substitute. There was a time when his influence in the Committee was predominant. It was evidently under his influence that the remarkable sentences embodied in the minutes of the Committee meeting of September 20, 1803, were penned:
Reforms brought about by the power of the state are, as a rule, unstable, and are particularly untenable in those cases in which that power has to grapple with the habits of centuries. Hence it seems both better and safer to guide the Jews to perfection by throwing open to them the avenues leading to their own happiness, by observing their movements from a distance, and by removing everything that might turn them away from this path, without using any manner of force, without establishing special agencies for them, without endeavoring to act in their stead, but by merely opening the way for their own activities. As few restrictions as possible, as many liberties as possible—these are the simple elements of every social order.
Since the Government had begun to dabble in the Jewish question, this was the first rational utterance coming from the ranks of the Russian bureaucracy. It implied an emphatic condemnation of the system of state patronage and "correctional measures" by means of which Russian officialdom then and thereafter sought to "transform" a whole nation. Here for the first time was voiced the lofty precept of humanitarianism: grant the Jews untrammeled possibilities of development, give full scope to their energies, and the Jews themselves will in the end choose the way which leads to "perfection" and progress.... But even the liberalizing statesmen of that period could not maintain themselves on that high eminence of political thought. Speranski's conception was too tender a blossom for the rough climate of Russia, even in its springtide. The blossom was bound to wither. As far as the Committee for the Amelioration of the Jews was concerned, the hackneyed political wisdom of the age, the system of patronage and compulsory reforms, came to the fore again. The report submitted by the Jewish Committee to Alexander I. in October, 1804, reveals no trace of that radical liberalism which a year before had come to light in the minutes of the Committee.
The report begins by determining the approximate size of the Jewish population, computing the number of registered, taxable males at 174,385—"a figure which represents less than a fifth of the whole Jewish population." In other words, the total number of Jews, in the estimate of the Committee, approached one million. The report proceeds to point out that this entire mass is huddled together in the annexed Polish and Lithuanian provinces and in Little Russia and Courland, and is barred from the Governments of the interior—a statement followed by an historical excursus tending to show that "the Jews have never been allowed to settle in Russia." The Tzar is further informed that the Jews are obliged to pay double taxes, that, notwithstanding the fact that they are liable to the general courts and municipalities, and that their Kahals are subordinate to the gubernatorial police, the Jews still keep aloof from the institutions of the land and manage their affairs through the Kahals. Finally it is pointed out that the sale of liquor, the most widespread occupation among Jews, is a source of abuses, calling forth complaints from the surrounding population. Basing its deductions on these premises, the Committee drafted a law which in its principal features was embodied in the "Statute Concerning the Organization of the Jews," issued, with the sanction of the Tzar, soon afterwards, on December 9, 1804.
2. The "Jewish Constitution" of 1804
The new charter, a mixture of liberties and disabilities, was prompted, as is stated in the preamble, "by solicitude for the true welfare of the Jews," as well as for "the advantage of the native population of those Governments in which these people are allowed to live." The concluding part of the sentence anticipates the way in which the question of the Jewish area of settlement is solved. It remained limited as theretofore to thirteen Governments: two in Lithuania, two in White Russia, two in Little Russia, those of Minsk, Volhynia, Kiev, and Podolia, and finally three in New Russia. A slightly larger area is conceded by the new statute to the future class of Jewish agriculturists projected in the same statute. They are permitted to settle in addition in two interior Governments, those of Astrakhan and Caucasia.
Economically the new statute establishes two opposite poles: a negative pole as far as the rural occupations of innkeeping and land-tenure are concerned, which are to be exterminated ruthlessly, and a positive pole, as far as agriculture is involved, which on the contrary is to be stimulated and promoted among Jews in every possible manner. Clause 34, the severest provision of the whole act, is directed not only against innkeeping but against rural occupations in general. It reads as follows:
Beginning with January 1, 1807, in the Governments of Astrakhan and Caucasia, also in those of Little Russia and New Russia, and, beginning with January 1, 1808, in the other Governments, no one among the Jews in any village or hamlet shall be permitted to hold any leases on land, to keep taverns, saloons, or inns, whether under his own name or under a strange name, or to sell wine in them, or even to live in them under any pretext whatever, except when passing through.
With one stroke this clause eliminated from the economic life of the Jews an occupation which, though far from being distinguished, had yet afforded a livelihood to almost one-half of the whole Jewish population of Russia. Moreover, the none too extensive territory of the Jewish Pale of Settlement was still more limited by excluding from it the enormous area of villages and hamlets.
The economic and legal blow aimed at the Jews in the Statute of 1804 was to be made good by the privileges held forth to those willing to engage in agriculture. Such Jews were accorded the right of buying unoccupied lands in all the western and in two of the eastern Governments, or of establishing themselves on crown lands. In the latter case the settlers were to be assigned definite parcels of land and, for the first few years, be exempt from state taxes. However, it soon became evident that the proposed remedy was out of proportion to the seriousness of the wound that had been inflicted. While hundreds of thousands of Jews were driven from the rural occupations with which their economic life had been bound up for centuries, the new branch of labor opened to the Jews, the pursuit of agriculture, could, for some time to come, attract at the utmost only a few insignificant groups of the Jewish population.
Among the favored occupations, ranging in importance beneath agriculture, the new law includes industry and handicrafts. Manufacturers and artisans are declared exempt from the double tax imposed on Jews,[247] and the founders of "the most needed factories" are promised, in addition, a Government loan. The Jewish merchants and burghers are placed in the last rank, being merely "tolerated." Manufacturers, artisans, and merchants are given permission to sojourn temporarily for business purposes in "the interior Governments, not excluding the capitals, but not otherwise than with gubernatorial passports," such as are given for going abroad.
In the chapter entitled "On the Civil Organization of the Jews," the new charter establishes, on the one hand, the liability of the Jews to the authority of the municipalities, the common police, and the common law courts, and grants the Jews, on the other hand, the right of electing rabbis and "Kahalmen," who shall be replaced every three years, and shall be ratified by the gubernatorial administration. Special clauses provide that the rabbis are obliged "to look after all the ceremonies of the Jewish faith and decide all disputes bearing on religion," but they are strictly forbidden to resort to "anathemas" and excommunications (the so-called herem). The Kahals in turn are held responsible for the regular payment of the state taxes. The communal autonomy of the Jews was thus calculated to serve two masters, religion and the exchequer, God and mammon, and was expected to adjust its manifold problems to both.
The "Jewish Constitution" of 1804 is provided as it were with a European label. Its first chapter bears the heading "On Enlightenment." Jewish children are granted free access to all public schools, gymnasiums, and universities in the Russian Empire. The Jews are also granted the right of opening their own schools for secular culture, one of three languages, Russian, Polish, or German, to be obligatory. One of these languages is also, within a period of two to six years from the promulgation of the law, to become obligatory for all public documents, promissory notes, commercial ledgers, etc. The Jews elected members of municipalities or chosen as rabbis and Kahal members are obliged, within a definite term (1808-1812), to know one of these three languages to the extent of being able to write and speak it. Moreover, the Jewish members of the municipalities are expected to wear clothes of the Polish, Russian, or German pattern.
This "enlightened" program represents the tribute which the Russian Government felt obliged to render to the spirit of the age, the spirit of enlightened Prussian absolutism rather than that of French emancipation. It was the typical sample of a Prusso-Austrian Reglement, embodying the very system of "reforms brought about by the power of the state" against which Speranski had vainly cautioned. In concrete reality this system resulted in nothing else than the violent break-up of a structure built by centuries, relentless coercion on the one hand and suffering of the patronized masses on the other.
3. The Projected Expulsion from the Villages
The legal enactment of 1804 was appraised by the Russian Jews at its true value: problematic benefits in the future and undeniable hardships for the present. The prospect of future benefits, the attainment of which was conditioned by the weakening of the time-honored foundations of a stalwart Jewish cultural life, expressing itself in language, school, and communal self-government, had no fascination for Russian Jews, who had not yet been touched by the influences of Western Europe. But what the Russian Jews did feel, and feel with sickening pain, was the imminence of a terrible economic catastrophe, the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews from the villages. It soon became evident that the expulsion would affect 60,000 Jewish families, or about half a million Jews. Needless to say, within the two or three years of respite which remained before the catastrophe, this huge mass could not possibly gain access to new fields of labor and establish itself in new domiciles, and it was therefore in danger of being starved to death. In consequence, St. Petersburg was flooded with petitions imploring the authorities to postpone the expulsion for a time. These petitions came not only from the Kahals but also from country squires, for whom the removal of the Jewish tenants and innkepeers from their estates entailed considerable financial losses. With the approach of the year 1808, the time limit set for the expulsion, the shouts of despair from the provinces became louder and louder. It is difficult to say whether the Russian Government would have responded to the terrible outcry, had it not been for an event which set all the political circles of St. Petersburg agog.
It was in the autumn of 1806. The "Jewish Parliament" in Paris, which had been assembled by Napoleon, was concluding its sessions, and was sending out appeals to all the countries of Europe announcing the impending convocation of the "Great Synhedrion." This new fad of Napoleon disturbed all the European Governments which were on terms of enmity with the French Emperor, and had reason to fear the discontent of their Jewish subjects. The Austrian Government went so far as to forbid the Jews to enter into any relations with "dangerous" Paris. St. Petersburg too became alarmed. Napoleon, who had just shattered Prussia, and had already entered her Polish provinces, was gradually approaching the borders of hostile Russia. The awe inspired by the statesmanlike genius of the French Emperor made the Russian Government suspect that the convocation of a universal Jewish Synhedrion in Paris was merely a Napoleonic device to dispose the Jewish masses of Prussia, Austria, and Russia in his favor. In these circumstances it seemed likely that the resentment aroused in the Russian Jews by their imminent expulsion from the villages would provide a favorable soil for the wily agitation of Napoleon, and would create a hotbed of anti-Russian sentiment in the very regions soon to become the theater of war. To avoid such risks it seemed imperative to extinguish the flame of discontent and stop the expulsion.
Thus it came about that in the beginning of February, 1807, at the very moment when the sessions of the Synhedrion were opened in Paris, the Minister of the Interior, Kochubay, submitted a report to Alexander I., in which he pointed out the necessity "of postponing the transplantation of the Jews from the villages into the towns and townlets, so as to guard this nation in general against the intentions of the French Government." The Tzar concurred in this opinion, with the result that a special committee was immediately formed to consider the practical application of the Statute of 1804. Apart from Kochubay and other high officials, the committee included the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Budberg, diplomatic considerations being involved in the question. On February 15, Senator Alexeyev was directed to inspect the western provinces and find out to what extent "the military circumstances and the present condition of the border provinces as well as the economic ruin of the Jews, which is inevitable if their expulsion be enforced," render this expulsion difficult or even impossible of execution.
At the same time the Minister of the Interior instructed the administrators of the western Governments to prevent the slightest contact between the Jews of Russia and the Synhedrion in Paris, which the French Government was using as a tool to curry political favor with the Jews. The same circular letter to the Governors recommends another rather curious device. It suggests that the Jews be impressed with the idea that the Synhedrion in Paris was endeavoring to modify the Jewish religion, and for this reason did not deserve the sympathy of the Russian Jews.
At the same time the Holy Synod was sending out circulars instructing the Greek Orthodox clergy to inform the Russian people that Napoleon was an enemy of the Church and a friend of the Jews.
That he might the more effectively put the Church of Christ to shame—so the Holy Synod proclaimed—Napoleon assembled the Judean Synagogues in France ... and established the Great Synhedrion of the Jews, that same ungodly assembly which had once dared pass the sentence of crucifixion upon our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and he now planneth to unite the Jews, whom the wrath of the Almighty hath scattered over the face of the whole earth, so as to incite them to overthrow the Christian Church and proclaim the pseudo-Messiah in the person of Napoleon.
By these devices the Government, finding itself at its wits' end in the face of a great war, shrewdly attempted to frighten at once the Jewish people by the specter of an anti-Jewish Napoleon and the Orthodox Russians by Napoleon's leaning towards Judaism. The former were made to believe that the Synhedrion was directed against the Jewish religion, and the latter were told that it was established by the Jewish "pseudo-Messiah" for the overthrow of Christianity.
In this precarious situation the Government once more decided to ascertain, by means of a circular inquiry, the views of the representatives of the Jewish communities on the best ways of carrying the "reform" into effect. The ukase of February 19, issued by the Tzar on this occasion, is couched in surprisingly mild terms:
Prompted by the desire to give our subjects of the Jewish nationality another proof of our solicitude about their welfare, we have deemed it right to allow all the Jewish communes in the Governments ... of Vilna, Grodno, Kiev, Minsk, Podolia, Volhynia, Vitebsk, and Moghilev, to elect deputies and to suggest, through them, to the gubernatorial administrators the means which they themselves consider best fitted for the most successful execution of the measures laid down in the Statute of 1804.
The deputies were summoned this time, not to St. Petersburg, but to the provincial capitals in order to present their opinions to the governors.
The expression of opinion on the part of the Jewish deputies, or, as they were officially styled, "the attorneys of the Jewish communes," did not limit itself to the fatal thirty-fourth clause, which all the deputies wished to see repealed or at least postponed for an indefinite period. Serious objections were raised also to the other provisions of the "Jewish Constitution." The deputies advocated the abolition of double taxation for all classes of the Jewish population; they asked for a larger range of authority for the rabbinical tribunals and for a mitigation of the provisions forbidding the use of Hebrew in legal documents, promissory notes, and commercial ledgers. Some of them pleaded for a postponement of the law concerning Hebrew as being inconvenient to business, while others suggested permitting the use of Hebrew for promissory notes up to the sum of one hundred rubels.[248]
The deputies also called attention to the difficulty, on the part of the rabbis and Jewish members of the magistracies, of acquiring the Russian language within so short a period. They were ready to assent to the change of dress for the magistrates and those living temporarily outside the Pale. But they pointed out at the same time that the prescribed German dress was not becoming to Jews, who on account of religious scruples refused to shave their beards, and that in the case of magistrates and visitors to the Russian interior they would prefer to adopt the Russian form of dress. As for the laws relating to education, the deputies observed that it would be useless for Jewish children to go to the common Russian schools as long as they did not understand the Russian language, and that it would for this reason seem more practicable first to have them acquire the Russian language in the Jewish schools, where they are taught the Hebrew language and the "dogmas of the faith."
By the time the opinions of the deputies were conveyed by the governors to St. Petersburg, the political sentiment there had undergone a change. In July, 1807, the Peace of Tilsit had been concluded. An entente cordiale had been established between Napoleon and Alexander I., and Russia no more stood in awe of Bonaparte's "intrigues." There was no more reason to fear a secret understanding between the Russian Jews and the Parisian Synhedrion, which had shortly before been prorogued, and the bureaucratic compassion for the unfortunate Jews vanished into air. The last term set for the expulsion from the villages, January 1, 1808, was drawing near, and two months before this date, on October 19, 1807, the Tzar addressed an ukase, marked by extraordinary severity, to the Governor-General of the Western region:
The circumstances connected with the war—the ukase states in part—were of a nature to complicate and suspend the transplantation of the Jews.... These complications can now, after the cessation of the war, be averted in the future by means of a gradual and most convenient arrangement of the work of transplantation.... For these reasons we deem it right to lay down an arrangement by means of which the transplantation of the Jews, beginning with the date referred to above, may be carried into effect, without the slightest delay and mitigation.
The "arrangement" alluded to consisted in spreading the expulsion from the villages over three years: one-third of the Jews were to be expelled in 1808, another third in 1809, and the last third in 1810. Committees were appointed to assist the governors in carrying out the expulsion decree. These committees were instructed to make it incumbent upon the Kahals to render financial assistance to the expelled, to those who were being pitilessly ruined by the Government.
The horrors of the expulsion began.
Those who did not go willingly were made to leave by force. Many were ejected ruthlessly, under the escort of peasants and soldiers. They were driven like cattle into the townlets and cities, and left there on the public squares in the open air. The way in which the expulsion from the villages was carried out in the Government of Vitebsk was particularly ferocious.[249]
Scores of exiled Jews petitioned the authorities to have them transferred to New Russia, to the agricultural colonies, in which several hundred Jewish families had found some kind of shelter. But the supply of arable land and the funds set aside for the transfer were found to be exhausted; the appeals therefore remained unheeded. The distress of the Jewish masses reached such colossal proportions that the governors themselves, in their reports to the central Government, declared that it was impossible to carry out the expulsion decree without subjecting the Jews to complete ruin. Accordingly a new ukase was issued in the last days of December, 1808, to the effect that the Jews be left in their former domiciles, pending special Imperial orders.
In the beginning of January, 1809, a new Committee (chronologically the third) was appointed in St. Petersburg for the purpose of examining all the phases of the problem of diverting the Jews from the rural liquor traffic to other branches of labor. This time the committee consisted of Senator Alexeyev,[250] who had made a tour of inspection through the western provinces, Privy-Councilor Popov, Assistant Minister of the Interior Kozodavlev, and others. In his instructions to Popov, who was chairman of the Committee, the Tzar admits that the impossibility of removing the Jews from the villages results from the fact that "the Jews themselves, on account of their destitute condition, have no means which would enable them, after leaving their present abodes, to settle and found a home in their new surroundings, while the Government is equally unable to undertake to place them all in new domiciles." It has therefore been found necessary "to seek ways and means whereby the Jews, having been removed from their exclusive pursuit of selling wine in the villages, hamlets, inns, and public houses, may be enabled to earn a livelihood by labor." At the same time the Committee was directed to take into consideration the "opinions" submitted previously by the Jewish deputies. After indulging in cruel vivisectionist experiments on human beings, the Government finally realized that mere paper orders were powerless to remodel an economic order, which centuries of development had created, and that violent expulsions and restrictions might result in ruining people, but not in effecting their "amelioration."
The Committee was at work for three years. The results of its labors were embodied in a remarkable report submitted in March, 1812, to Alexander I. Since Speranski's declaration of 1803, reproduced above,[251] this official document was the first to utter a word of truth on the Jewish problem.
It is proposed—the report declares—to remove the Jews from the rural liquor traffic, because the latter is considered harmful to the population. But it is obvious that the root of the drinking evil is not to be found with the saloon-keepers, but in the right of distilling, or "propination," which constitutes the prerogative of the squires and their main source of income. Let us suppose the sixty thousand Jewish saloon-keepers to be turned out from the villages. The result will be that sixty thousand Russian peasants will take their place, tens of thousands of efficient farm-hands will be lost to the soil, while the Jews cannot be expected to be transformed into capable agriculturists at a moment's notice, the less so as the Government has no resources to effect this sudden transformation of saloon-keepers into corn-growers. It is not true that the village Jew enriches himself at the expense of the peasant. On the contrary, he is generally poor, and ekes out a scanty existence from the sale of liquor and by supplying the peasants with the goods they need. Moreover, by buying the corn on the spot, the Jew saves the peasant from wasting his time in traveling to the city. Altogether in rural economic life the Jew plays the rôle of a go-between, who can be spared neither by the squire nor by the peasant. To transfer all village Jews to the cities and convert them into manufacturers, merchants, and artisans, is a matter of impossibility, for even the Jewish population already settled in the cities is scarcely able to make a living, and to create factories and mills artificially would be throwing money into the water, especially as the exchequer has no free millions at its disposal to enable it to grant subsidies to manufacturers. The recent experiments of the Government have had no effect. On the contrary, the Jewish people "has not only remained in the same state of poverty, but has even been reduced to greater destitution, as a result of having been forced out of a pursuit which had provided it with a livelihood for several centuries." Hence, "the Committee, realizing this situation of a whole people, and being afraid that the continuation of compulsory measures, in the present political circumstances, may only exasperate this people, already restricted to the utmost, deems it necessary ... to put a resolute stop to the now prevailing methods of interference by allowing the Jews to remain in their former abodes and by setting free the pursuits suspended by Clause 34."
The Government submitted. In yielding it was moved not so much by the clear and incontrovertible arguments of the Committee, which amounted to a deadly criticism of the current system of state patronage, as by the "political circumstances" alluded to in the concluding sentences of the report. Napoleon's army was marching towards the Russian frontier. The war which was to embroil the whole of Russia and subsequently the whole of Europe had broken out. At such a moment, when the French army was flooding the whole of Western Russia, it seemed far more dangerous to create groups of persecuted and embittered outcasts than it had been in 1807, when the French invasion was merely a matter of apprehension. In these circumstances the question whether the Jews should be left in the villages and hamlets found a favorable solution of itself, without any special ukase. Stirred to the core, Russia, in the moment of national danger, had to rely for her salvation upon the strenuous exertions of all her inhabitants, Jews included.
4. The Patriotic Attitude of Russian Jewry during the War of 1812
The part played by the Jews in the War of 1812 was not so insignificant as historians are generally disposed to assume, being misled by the fact that the Jews of Russia were not yet drafted into the army. It must be borne in mind that the great war was enacted in western Russia, more particularly in northwestern Russia, on territory inhabited by a compact Jewish population scattered all over the cities, townlets, and villages. The sympathy of this population with one or the other of the belligerents frequently decided the success or failure of the detachment situated in that locality. It is a well-known fact that the Poles of the western region were mostly on the side of Napoleon, from whom they expected the restoration of the Polish kingdom.
As for the Russian Jews, their attitude towards the belligerent parties was of a more complicated character. The recent persecutions of the rural Jews were apt, on the one hand, to set their hearts against the Russian Government, and, had these persecutions continued, the French would have been hailed by the oppressed Jews as their saviors. But the expulsions from the villages had been stopped three years before the war, and the Jews anticipated the complete repeal of the cruel law, which had been so severely condemned in the official report of the Committee laid before the Tzar in the beginning of 1812. Moreover, the deputies of the Kahals, who had been summoned twice to share in the work of the Government (in 1803 and 1807), had an opportunity to convince themselves that Alexander I.'s Government was on the whole favorably disposed towards the Jews, and its mistakes were merely the outcome of the wrong system of state patronage, of the desire of the Government to make the Jews happy, according to its own lights, by employing compulsory and "correctional" measures.
On the other hand, Napoleon's halo had been considerably dimmed even in the eyes of the Jews of Western Europe, now that the results of his "Jewish Parliaments" had come to light. The Jews of Russia, who were all Orthodox, regarded Napoleon's reform schemes as fraught with danger, and looked upon the substitution of Kahal autonomy by a consistorial organization as subversive of Judaism. The Hasidic party, again, which was the most conservative, felt indebted to Alexander I., who, in a clause of the Statute of 1804, bearing on Jewish sects, had bestowed upon the Hasidim the right of segregating themselves in separate synagogues within the communities. The leader of the White Russian Hasidim, Rabbi Shneor Zalman, who at first had suffered from the suspiciousness of the Russian Government, but was afterwards declared to be politically "dependable," voiced the sentiments of the influential Jewish circles towards the two belligerent sovereigns in the following prediction:
Should Bonaparte win, the wealth of the Jews will be increased, and their [civic] position will be raised. At the same time their hearts will be estranged from our Heavenly Father. Should however our Tzar Alexander win, the Jewish hearts will draw nearer to our Heavenly Father, though the poverty of Israel may become greater and his position lower.
This was tantamount to saying that civic rightlessness was preferable to civic equality, inasmuch as the former bade fair to guarantee the inviolability of the religious life, while the latter threatened to bring about its disintegration.
All these circumstances, coupled with the unconscious resentment of the masses against the invading enemy, brought about the result that the Jews of the Northwest everywhere gave tokens of their devotion to the interests of Russia, and frequently rendered substantial services to the Russian army in its commissary and reconnoitring branches. The well-known Russian partisan[252] Davidov relates that
the frame of mind of the Polish inhabitants of Grodno was very unfavorable to us. The Jews living in Poland were, on the other hand, all so devoted to us that they refused to serve the enemy as scouts, and often gave us most valuable information concerning him.
As Polish officials could not be relied upon, it became necessary to intrust the whole police department of Grodno to the Jewish Kahal. The Governor of Vilna testified that "the Jewish people had shown particular devotion to the Russian Government during the presence of the enemy."
The Poles were irritated by this pro-Russian attitude of the Jews. There were rumors afloat that the Poles had made ready to massacre all Jews and Russians in the Governments of Vilna and Minsk and in the province of Bialystok. There were numerous instances of self-sacrifice. It happened more than once that Jews who had sheltered Russian couriers with dispatches in their houses, or had escorted them to the Russian headquarters, or who had furnished information to the Russian commanders as to the position of the enemy's army, were caught by the French, and shot or hanged. Alexander I. was aware of these deeds. While on a visit to Kalish, he granted an audience to the members of the Kahal, and engaged in a lengthy conversation with them. Among the Jews of the district appeals written in the Jewish vernacular were circulated, in which the Jews were called upon to offer up prayers for the success of Alexander I., who would release the Jewish people from bondage. Altogether the wave of patriotism which swept over Russia engulfed the Jewish masses to a considerable extent.
The headquarters of the Russian army, which was now marching towards the West, harbored, during the years 1812-1813, two Jewish deputies, Sundel Sonnenberg of Grodno and Leyser (Eliezer) Dillon of Neswizh. On the one hand they maintained connections with the leading Government officials, and conveyed to them the wishes of the Jewish communities. On the other hand they kept up relations with the Kahals, which they informed regularly of the intentions of the Government. Presumably these two public-spirited men played a twofold rôle at headquarters: that of large purveyors, who received orders directly from the Russian commissariat, and forwarded them to their local agents, and that of representatives of the Kahals, whose needs they communicated to the Tzar and the highest dignitaries of the crown. In those uneasy times the Government found it to its advantage to keep at its headquarters representatives of the Jewish population, who might sway the minds of their coreligionists, in accordance with the character of the political instructions issued by it. In June, 1814, during his stay abroad in Bruchsal (Germany), Alexander requested these deputies to assure "the Jewish Kahals of his most gracious favor," and promised to issue shortly "an ordinance concerning their wishes and requests for the immediate amelioration of their present condition." It seems that Alexander I., who was still under the spell of the accounts of Jewish patriotism, was inclined at that moment to improve their lot. But the general reaction which, after the Vienna Congress of 1815, fell like a blight upon Europe and Russia proved fatal also to the Russian Jews.
5. Economic and Agricultural Experiments
The political upheavals of the transition period (1789-1815) were bound to react violently on the economic status of Russo-Polish Jewry. The vast Jewish population of Western Russia was at that time divided into two parts: the larger part resided in the towns and townlets, the smaller lived in the villages. The efforts made by the Russian Government during that period, to squeeze the whole Jewish population into the urban estates and to single out from its midst a new class of agriculturists, failed to produce the desired effect. Instead it succeeded in disturbing the former equilibrium between the urban and the rural occupations of the Jews.
The urban Jew was either a business man or an artisan or a saloon-keeper. In many cities the Jewish mercantile element was numerically superior to the Christian. The increased Jewish activity in the export trade is particularly noticeable. Jewish merchants traveled annually in large numbers to the fairs abroad, particularly to that of Leipsic, to buy merchandise, principally dry goods, at the same time exporting the products of Poland and Russia, such as furs, skins, etc. The gradual absorption of Polish territory by Russia opened up a new, immense market, that of the central Russian provinces, for the goods imported from abroad. It was natural that the Jews began to flock to those provinces. But their way was at once blocked by the local Russian merchants, who began to clamor against Jewish competition, and forced the Government to recognize the monopoly of native "interests," to the detriment of the consumer.[253]
True, the monopolists did not succeed altogether in shutting the Russian interior to foreign cheap goods and finery, which the Jewish merchants still continued to import, under the clause in the Statute of 1804 which granted Jews the right of visiting the interior Governments on special gubernatorial passports. Yet an untrammeled development of Jewish commerce was rendered impossible by this artificial barrier between Western and Eastern Russia.
The second urban profession, handicrafts, was considered of lower rank than commerce. It was pursued by the poorest class of the population. Artisan labor commanded very low prices. Purely Jewish trade-unions were rare, and when a Jewish artisan summoned enough courage to leave his native townlet and seek employment in a large city, he was sure to encounter the animosity of the organized Christian guilds. We have seen that before the second partition of Poland such an "encounter" assumed the shape of a pogrom in the Polish capital.[254]
By the side of the store and the workshop stood the public house or saloon, which was generally connected with an inn or a hostelry. The sale of liquor in the cities depended primarily on the peasants arriving from the villages on festival and market days. On the whole the liquor traffic occupied a subordinate place in the cities. Its mainstay was in the villages.
All serious observers of the economic status of the Jews at that time bear witness to the fact that in the majority of cities Jewish labor formed the corner-stone of a civilized economic life, that without the Jew it was impossible to buy, or to sell, or to have any kind of article made. The Jew, who was satisfied with small wages and profits, was thereby able to lower both the cost of production and the price of merchandise. He was content with a pittance, his physical needs being extraordinarily limited. Thanks to the mediation of the ubiquitous Jewish business man, the peasant was able to dispose of his products on the spot, even those which because of their small value would not be worth carrying to the city. In spite of all his indefatigable, feverish labors, the Jew was on the average as poor as the peasant, except that he was free from the vice of drunkenness, one of the sources of the peasant's economic misery. The poverty of the Jew was the artificial result of the fact that the cities and townlets were overcrowded with petty tradesmen and artisans, and this congestion was further aggravated by the systematic removal of the Jews from their age-long rural occupations and the consequent influx of village Jews into the towns.
It is necessary to point out that when the official records harp on the "liquor traffic" in the villages as the sole occupation of Jews, they fail to appreciate the many-sidedness of the rural pursuits of the Jews, which were connected with the liquor traffic, to be sure, but were by no means identical with it. While leasing from the squire or the crown the right of distilling, the Jew farmed at the same time other items of rural economy, such as the dairies, the mills, and the fishing ponds. He was furthermore engaged in buying grain from the peasants and selling them at the same time such indispensable articles as salt, utensils, agricultural tools, etc., imported by him from the town. He often combined in his person the occupations of liquor-dealer, shopkeeper, and produce merchant. The road leading from the village to the city was dotted with Jewish inns or public houses, which, before the age of railroads, served as halting-places for travelers. This whole economic structure, which had been built up gradually in the course of centuries, the Russian Government made its business to demolish. As early as the reign of Catherine II. the governors frequently drove the Jewish villagers into the cities, acting under the "organic law" which makes it incumbent upon Jews to "register among the merchants or burghers." The ambiguous ukase of 1795, to the effect, that "endeavors be made to transplant the Jews into the District towns, so that these people may not wander about to the detriment of society," gave the zealous bureaucrats a free hand. When the Law of 1804 ordered the expulsion of all Jews from the villages at the end of three years, many squires, without waiting for the time limit to expire, refused their Jewish tenants the right of residence and trade in their villages. The Jews began to rush into the cities, where even the long-settled residents could not manage to make a living.
True, the Government was luring the persecuted Jews into two new vocations, the establishment of factories and of agricultural colonies. But the impecunious village Jew had neither the capital nor the capacity for opening factories. Moreover, it was of no conceivable use to call industries artificially into being, without having first secured a market for the manufactured products. Several woolen mills had been founded by Jews in Lithuania and Volhynia, but all they could do was to provide work for a few thousand people. It was thus natural that all eyes turned towards agricultural colonization.
The Statute of 1804 promised to provide impecunious Jews desirous of engaging in agriculture with free land in several Governments, to grant them loans for their equipment, and exempt them from taxation for a number of years. The exiled village Jews clutched at this promise as an anchor of salvation. In 1806 several Jewish groups in the Government of Moghilev appealed to the governor to transfer them to New Russia, there to engage in corn-growing. The delegate of one of these groups, Nahum Finkelstein, even traveled to St. Petersburg to lay the matter before Minister Kochubay, and was dispatched by the latter to the Government of Kherson for the purpose of inspecting and selecting the land. The Minister, acting in agreement with the Governor of Kherson, Duke Richelieu, decided to set aside separate parcels of land in the steppes of that region and to settle Jews on them under the auspices of the New Russian "Immigration Bureau." Scarcely had the two Moghilev groups completed the arrangements for their emigration, when scores of similar applications began to come in from Jewish groups in other Governments of the Pale. By the end of 1806 the number of applicants mounted up to fifteen hundred families, numbering some seven thousand souls. The Russian authorities found themselves in an awkward position. They were caught unprepared for the transfer of so many persons at the expense of the state. In 1807 four colonies of Jewish agriculturists were established in the Government of Kherson, the first among the Jewish colonies of South Russia. The number of settlers amounted to some three hundred families, consisting of two thousand souls.
The number of applicants desirous of settling on the land continued to increase. In the course of 1808, when the expulsion from the villages was in full swing, the White Russian governors bombarded the Minister of the Interior with petitions to allow as many Jewish families as possible to proceed to New Russia. The Governor of Vitebsk reported that the rural Jews
have been unseasonably expelled, ruined, and reduced to beggary. A large part of them is without daily bread and without shelter, and they emigrate in considerable numbers to New Russia. Many Jews, in the expectation of being transplanted to New Russia, have sold all their belongings and beg leave persistently to go there, though it be only for a domicile.
At the same time reports from the New Russian Immigration Bureau and from Duke Richelieu were constantly reaching St. Petersburg. They emphasized the necessity of stemming the tide of emigrants, in view of the fact that even the first parties of colonists had found it difficult to establish themselves, while the new ones could not expect to find either huts or any other accommodations. By the beginning of 1808 the Immigration Bureau was in charge of about one thousand colonist families, and, in addition, several thousand immigrants who had arrived "voluntarily" were waiting for their turn to be settled. As a result of the unaccustomed climatic conditions and the lack of housing accommodations and provisions, disease began to spread among the new-comers. All these circumstances decided the Government to put a temporary stop to the settling of Jews in the New Russian colonies (ukase of April 6, 1810).
The attempt to convert a part of the Jewish population into agriculturists would undoubtedly have met with huge success, had the Government been sufficiently prepared for such a momentous economic transformation. Ten thousand emigrants had already gone to New Russia, and the compact starving masses were rushing after them. But the Government was overwhelmed by the difficulties of the task, and brought the whole movement to a standstill. Simultaneously a stop was put to the expulsion from the villages in the western Governments, which threatened to lead to an unparalleled economic catastrophe. Thus, after many vacillations and upheavals, the economic structure of Jewish life was re-established on its old foundations—commerce, handicrafts, and rural occupations.