From the Heart of Israel: Jewish Tales and Types

by Bernard Drachman

His plan, in brief, was to separate the parents and the children. With the old Jews, he knew nothing could be done. They would go to the stake or the dungeon, and would not recant; but if, he reasoned, the young Jews could be removed from parental influence, could be caught, so to speak, before their characters were formed, and be placed in charge of priests or other Christian officials, they would be unable to resist, but would succumb to the powerful pressure brought to bear upon them and would become genuine Christians.

This fiendish plan he proceeded, with icy deliberation, to put into execution. What cared he for the cruelty or violent dissolution of natural relations, for the tears of terrified children, for the immeasurable woes and heart-breakings of bereaved parents. His tyrant’s view of statecraft approved the plan and other considerations had no weight. Then were legions of brutal emissaries sent into the provinces reserved for the habitation of the children of Jacob. Their conduct resembled that of brigands rather than of officers of the law. In numbers so great as to defy resistance, they would fall upon some unsuspecting Hebrew settlement, generally at dead of night; would burst into the houses, and with utter disregard of all considerations of justice or frenzied appeals for mercy, would tear the weeping and terror-stricken children from the arms of their screaming and frantically resisting parents, would throw them into the ready standing wagons and would carry them off, never more to return.

It would take the pen of a Dante and the brush of their own Verestchagin fitly to depict the awful scenes which occurred on the occasions of these visitations, the demoniacal brutality of the despot’s henchmen, the helpless terror of the childish victims, and the unutterable, paralyzed agony of the wretched fathers and mothers who saw their beloved ones dragged away to that which for them was worse than death, and could do nothing to save them from their fate.

The same fate befell our Saul Isaac. It was a cold midwinter night. The Rabbinowitz family were sleeping peacefully, all unsuspecting of evil. Suddenly the sound of powerful blows upon the door caused them to awake in terror. Too well they knew what those sounds meant, although there had been no report that the “chappers,” as they were called, were coming to their province. Hastily the agonized parents sought to find some place of concealment for their son. A second later the door fell beneath the shower of blows rained upon it, and several ruffianly looking men, dressed in uniform, burst into the room. Without showing any warrant or offering a word of explanation, they seized the shrinking lad. Roughly they thrust aside Israel, who would have protested, and flung off Malka Feige, who clung to them in a half-insane effort to rescue her boy. The lad himself they tossed into the wagon, into the midst of twenty or more other lads, who already cowered there, and drove off.

Let us draw a veil over the unutterable sorrows of that parent pair, thus foully deprived of the beloved of their souls. Heaven alone has power to right wrongs such as these, and to the mercy and justice of heaven we must commend them.

Let us follow Saul Isaac on the course which he was obliged to pursue. His experience was not at first different from that of thousands of others. He was taken to the convent of St. Sophia in the neighborhood of Moscow. There a thorough Russian and Christian education was given him, and every effort was made, by means of mingled kindness and severity, to induce him voluntarily to accept baptism, for even the perverted and tyrannical minds of his captors perceived that a compulsory administration of the rite could have no binding obligation upon the conscience. To be sure, their notions of voluntary action were rather remarkably casuistical. Severe beatings, periodical starvation, and longer or shorter terms of imprisonment were all considered legitimate forms of missionary effort with which to persuade the cantonists, as the abducted Hebrew children were called, of the superiority of Christianity to Judaism, and to induce them voluntarily to accept it.

It is a glorious tribute to the power of Jewish teachings that most of these helpless victims, despite their tender years and pitiful condition, were by no means quick to yield to the maltreatment or blandishments of their masters. Most of them resisted for years; some never yielded.

Four years were required to bring our Saul Isaac into the frame of mind requisite for the acceptance of Christianity. At first he wept and wailed constantly and would touch no food except dry bread and water; and, young as he was, he refused to listen to the instruction of the Russian monks. But as the weeks rolled into months and the months into years, without seeing other than Gentile faces and without any word from his parents or any other Jews, gradually his recollections grew dimmer and his resolution weaker. Finally he no longer objected to the Christian instructions, and in his twelfth year he was baptized with great pomp and parade in the chapel of the monastery, receiving the name of Sergei Pavlowitz. From this time on his advancement was rapid. After three years of general education he decided to enter upon the military career, and in his fifteenth year he entered the Imperial Cadet School at St. Petersburg.

The memory of his parents had quite faded from his mind; or if the thought of them ever came to him, they seemed like ghostly figures of an unreal world, entirely devoid of actuality or connection with his present existence.

Sergei Pavlowitz was one of the most popular students at the Cadet School. His quick intellect, which had enabled him to comprehend the abstruse debates of the Talmud, stood him in good stead in mastering the details of military science, while his handsome figure in the neat Russian uniform and his polite and obliging ways were universally pleasing. In due course of time he graduated as a lieutenant of artillery.