RUSSIAN JEWRY SINCE 1911
Being loath to cross the threshold of the present, we shall stop at the year 1911, terminating the first decade of the Thirty Years' War waged by Russian Tzardom against Jewry since 1881. The more recent phases of this war are still fresh in our memory. To put the new campaign of Jew-hatred in its proper light, it will suffice to point out its most conspicuous landmarks which stand out by their extraordinarily sinister features. In 1911, the organizations of the Black Hundred, with the help of their accomplices in the Duma and in the Government circles, manufactured the monstrous "Beilis case." The murder of a Russian boy in Kiev, of a family belonging to a band of thieves, and the discovery of the body in the neighborhood of a brickkiln owned by a Jew provided the anti-Semites with an opportunity to bring forward the old charge of ritual murder. In the beginning the Government was somewhat uncertain as to the attitude it should adopt towards the mysterious Kiev murder. But a political occurrence which took place at the time put an end to its vacillation. In September, 1911, Premier Stolypin was assassinated in a Kiev theatre in the presence of the Tzar and the dignitaries of State. The assassin, by the name of Bogrov, proved to be the son of a lawyer who was of Jewish extraction, though he had long before turned his back upon his people—a semi-anarchist, who at one time had been active as police agent for some mysterious revolutionary purposes. The Jewish extraction of the father of the assassin was enough to produce a paroxysm of fury in the camp of the anti-Semitic reactionaries who had lost in the person of Stolypin an exalted patron. In Kiev preparations were openly made for a Jewish massacre, but the Government was afraid that the proposed wholesale execution of Jews would mar the festive solemnity of the Tzar's visit to Kiev. The authorities made it known that the Tzar was not in favor of riots, and a bloody street pogrom was averted.
In its place, however, a bloodless pogrom, extending over two years, was arranged in the form of the Beilis case. Minister of Justice Shcheglovitov, a former Liberal, who had become a fanatical partisan of the Black Hundred, made up his mind to impart to the trial a glaring ritual coloring. The original Judicial inquiry having failed to uncover any traces of Jewish complicity, the Minister of Justice ordered a new special inquiry and constantly changed the personnel of the investigating and prosecuting officials, until he finally secured a bill of indictment in which the whole case was represented as a ritual crime, committed by the Jew Beilis with the participation of "undiscovered persons."
For two years, the Beilis case provided the pabulum for a wild anti-Semitic campaign which was carried on among the so-called better classes, on the streets, in the press, and in the Imperial Duma. The court trial which took place in Kiev in October, 1913, was expected to crown with success the criminal design harbored by the Minister of Justice and the Black Hundred, but the expectations of the Government were disappointed. In spite of a carefully selected court personnel, which consisted of anti-Semitic judges representing the Crown, and of sworn jurymen, ignorant peasants and burghers who believed in the ritual murder legend, Beilis was acquitted, and the authorities found it impossible to fasten the guilt upon the Jews.
Exasperated by the failure, the Government wreaked its vengeance upon the liberal-minded intellectuals and newspaper men, who, by their agitation against the hideous libel, had wrested the prey from the hands of the Black Hundred. Scores of legal actions were instituted not only against newspaper editors and contributors but also against the St. Petersburg Bar Association, which had adopted a resolution protesting against the method pursued by Shcheglovitov in the Beilis trial. The sensational case against the metropolitan lawyers was tried in June, 1914, one month before the declaration of the World War, and terminated in a verdict of guilty for twenty-five lawyers, on the charge of "having agitated against the Government."
The triennium preceding the World War witnessed the rise of a new danger for Judaism, this time coming from Poland. The extraordinary intensity of the national and religious sentiment of the Poles, accentuated by the political oppression which for more than a hundred years had been inflicted upon them, particularly by the hands of Russian despotism, has, during the last decade, been directed against the Jewish people. The economic progress made by the Jews in the two industrial centers of Russian Poland, in Warsaw and Lodz, gave rise to the boycott agitation. Polish anti-Semites proclaimed the slogan "Do not buy from Jews!", aiming the cry specifically against the "Litvaks," that is, the hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews who, in the course of the last few decades, had been chiefly instrumental in the economic advancement of those two centers. The cloak beneath which this agitation was carried on was purely that of Polish nationalism: the Russian Jews were alleged, on the one hand, "to Russify Poland," and, accused, on the other hand, of an opposite tendency, of asserting themselves as the members of a separate Jewish nationality, with a press and a social organization of their own, which refuses to be merged in the Polish people.
The anti-Semitic movement in Poland, which began shortly after the revolution of 1905, assumed extraordinary dimensions in 1910-1911, when the boycott became a fierce economic pogrom, reaching its culmination in 1912, during the election campaign to the fourth Imperial Duma. The Jewish electors of Warsaw formed a majority, and were, therefore, in a position to send a Jewish deputy to the Duma. Yet out of consideration for the national susceptibilities of the Poles who insisted on sending as a representative of the Polish capital one of their "own," a Christian, the Jews were willing to accept a Polish candidate, provided the latter was not an anti-Semite. When, however, the Polish election committee, disregarding the feelings of the Jews, nominated the anti-Semitic candidate Kukhazhevski, the Jews gave their votes to the Polish Socialistic nominee Yaghello, who carried the election. This attitude of the Jews aroused a storm of indignation among the higher classes of Polish society. An anti-Jewish campaign, marked by extraordinary bitterness, was set in motion, and in the press and on the streets the Jews were nicknamed "Beilises," an echo of the ritual murder legend which had given rise to such horrors in ancient Catholic Poland. The economic boycott was carried on with incredible fury, and in a number of towns and villages the cowardly enemies of the Jews, being afraid of attacking them openly, set fire to Jewish houses, with the result that in many cases entire families were consumed in the flames.
The furor Polonicus assumed more and more dangerous forms, so that at the beginning of the World War, in 1914, almost the entire Polish nation, from the "progressive anti-Semites" down to the clericals, were up in arms against the Jews. From this armed camp came the defiant war cry: "On the banks of the Vistula there is no room for two nationalities," thus sentencing to death the two millions of Polish Jewry who consider themselves a part of the Jewish, and not of the Polish nation. Out of this soil of national hatred crawled forth the snake of the terrible "military libel," which during the first year of the war drenched Polish Jewry in rivers of blood. Over the bleeding body of the Jewish people Polish and Russian anti-Semitism joined hands. Horrors upon horrors were perpetrated before which the ancient annals of Jewish martyrdom fade into insignificance.
Nearly twenty centuries have passed since the ancient Judæo-Hellenic Diaspora sent forth a handful of men who established a Jewish colony upon the northern Scythian, now Russian, shores of the Black Sea. More than a thousand years ago the Jews of Byzantium from one direction, and those of the Arabian Caliphate from another, went forth to colonize the land of the Scythians. The Jew stood at the cradle of ancient Kiovian Russia, which received Christianity from the hands of the Byzantines. The Jew witnessed the birth of Catholic Poland, and, during the stormy days of the Crusades, fled from the West of Europe to this haven of refuge which was not yet entirely in the hands of the Catholic Church. He has seen Poland in its bloom and decay; he has witnessed the rise of Muscovite Russia, tying the fate of one-half of his nation to the new Russian Empire. Here the power that dominates history opened up before the Jewish people a black abyss of mediævalism in the midst of the blazing light of modern civilization, and finally threw it into the flames of the gigantic struggle of nations. What may the World War be expected to bring to the World-Nation? Full of agitation, the Jew is looking into the future, and the question of his ancient prophet is trembling on his lips: "Ah Lord God! wilt Thou make a full end of the remnant of Israel?"[61].... Let the entire past of the Jewish people serve as an answer to this question—a people which, in the maelstrom of human history, has succeeded in conquering the two cosmic forces: Time and Space.