The result of the percentage norm applied to the admission of Jews to secondary schools and universities is that in the towns to which the Jews are restricted by the domiciliary regulations and where they constitute in many cases a very large proportion of the population, the great majority of the Jewish youth are denied the means of a higher education. In Warsaw, the Jews constitute 36.30 per cent. of the population; in Lodz, 47.59 per cent.; in Lomza, 39.42 per cent.; in Kovno, 54.60 per cent.; in Vilna, 40 per cent.; in Grodno, 52.45 per cent.; in Bialostock, 65.62 per cent.; in Brest Litovsk, 78.81 per cent.; in Pinsk, 80.10 per cent.; in Berditcheff, 87.52 per cent., etc., yet in all these towns only the stipulated percentage of Jewish students may be admitted.
In addition to this restriction, many secondary schools (School of Military Medical Hygiene, School of Railroad Engineering, School of Electricity, etc.), are entirely closed to Jews. Even commercial schools, maintained by Merchants’ Guilds, admit Jews only in proportion to the Jewish membership of the Guilds.
The Government also restricts the establishment of higher schools under Jewish auspices. In 1884, it closed the Technical Institute of Zhitomir (founded in 1862), on the ground that, in the southwestern Pale provinces, the Jews contributed a majority of the artisans, and a special Jewish technical school would increase this disproportion. In 1885 it closed the Teachers’ Institute (a noted center of Jewish learning) because “there was no further need for it.”
As a consequence of these limitations and restrictions there has been a scramble among Jews to gain admission to these institutions. Parents have employed every expedient to have their children enrolled. Another consequence is that many Jewish young men emigrated to Switzerland, Germany and France, to obtain a higher education, and thereafter to return to Russia to enter professional life. A recent calculation shows that about 3,000 Jewish students from Russia annually exile themselves in order to attend foreign universities.
6. Military Service
The Jews constitute only 4.05 per cent. of the population of the Empire, but the proportion of Jews in the annual army contingent was estimated, at the outbreak of the Japanese war, at 5.7 per cent. This is due to the fact that a great many exemptions which the law provides for non-Jews are made inapplicable to Jews. In the army the Jews can achieve no rank higher than that of corporal. A penalty of 300 rubles ($150) is placed upon each Jewish defection, and the whole family, including parents and relatives by marriage of the person accused, is held responsible therefor.
The results of these repressions and persecutions are known. Politically outlawed, socially and economically degraded, the Jewish population imprisoned in the Pale has festered in misery. The merchants have been obliged to resort to fearful competition. Workingmen, overcrowding their industries, have been compelled to work for starvation wages. Most of the Jewish homes in Russia are miserable hovels, with little air or light. In the great cities, the proportion of paupers approximates a fifth of the Jewish population. In Odessa in 1900, of a population of 150,000 Jews no less than 48,500 were supported by charity; 63 per cent. of the dead had pauper burials, and a further 20 per cent. were buried at the lowest possible rate. In the Governments of Ekaterinoslav, Bessarabia, Pietrikov, Chernigov and Siedlets, the number of charity cases at the Passover festival increased from 41.9 per cent. to 46.8 per cent. in four years.
THE OUTBREAK OF THE WAR
It was against this background of ever-spreading persecution and misery that the great war broke upon the Jews. They accepted it as loyal Russian citizens, and not without hope that it might lead to some improvement in their own conditions.
The Kehillas (communities) of Petrograd, Odessa and other cities officially sent large sums in gold for the reservists, established hospitals for the use of the wounded without distinction of race or creed, held great patriotic demonstrations in the synagogues, at which the Rabbis urged the Jewish youth to render their full share of military service, and in other ways, presented, as the Mayor of Odessa said, “an example of readiness to sacrifice everything for the army.”