Tyranny is a plant that can only flourish in darkness. The press is, therefore, gagged, public meetings are severely prohibited, and both Church and State assiduously discourage the education of the masses. Elementary schools are insufficient and inefficient, while private initiative is jealously forbidden to supplement the shortcomings of public instruction. The Government does not provide for the people, and will not allow it to provide for itself. The authorities at Moscow have been known to prohibit even factory owners from keeping elementary schools for the improvement of their working people. When such is the state of things in the greatest industrial centre of the Empire, it is not hard to imagine the conditions which prevail in the remote country districts with their dull agricultural population.[158] Hence the necessity for employing foreigners in every department of commercial and industrial life. The success of the foreigner, however, arouses the jealousy of the native, and Russian economists are apt to attribute to the predominance of the former that wretchedness of the Russian masses, which is mainly due to their defective education. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising to find that the Jews suffer as grievously as they did in the Middle Ages. The hostility of a people still barbarous in all essentials has always succeeded in defeating the good intentions of the best Czars, and in heightening the horrors consequent on the despotic temper of the worst. If the treatment of Israel in various countries may be taken as an index to their respective progress on the road to civilisation, Russia must be pronounced as standing at this hour where England stood in the thirteenth century.
In 1881 a violent outbreak of anti-Jewish feeling, encouraged by the Nationalist newspapers, on one hand, and by the Nihilists on the other, led to much bloodshed and to the destruction of Jewish property and life in the southern and western provinces of Russia, especially in Russian Poland. Many causes contributed to the explosion. For years past, indeed since the abolition of serfdom, the peasantry, especially in South Russia, had been deteriorating both materially and morally. A contemporary observer thus describes the state of things on the eve of the event: “The bad harvests in the succession of years immediately preceding 1881, and the accompanying ravages of a virulent and widespread cattle plague, have completed the misery which idleness and improvidence were steadily producing; and the removal of restraint, the separation of families, and the assemblage of large numbers of the most ignorant classes amid the strange scenes of town and camp life, have unsettled their minds and degraded their morals.” After relating the effect of these conditions on the relations between peasant and landlord, the writer proceeds to explain some of the causes of the peasant’s ill-feeling towards the Jew. “Besides the landlord, there is another class in the south and west by whom the peasant thinks that he has been defrauded. The Jews, whom Government restrictions prevent from becoming agriculturists, and who are debarred from accepting employment in any ordinary industrial establishment, by the fact of their Sabbath limiting them to four and a half days of labour during the Christian week, have from necessity turned their attention almost exclusively to trade. The improvidence of the agriculturist and his want of capital have rendered the assistance of a money-lender and middleman an absolute necessity to him, and this requirement has been naturally supplied by the presence of the Jew, whose sobriety, thrift, energy, and commercial instincts render him especially fit for the vocation. The more improvident the peasantry, the greater are the immediate profits of the Jews, and whilst the former have become steadily impoverished, many of the latter have acquired comparative wealth. There is nothing astonishing, therefore, in the ill-feeling which has arisen towards the Jews, and that ill-feeling has been accompanied by the persuasion that there must be a special injustice in the superior material prosperity of a race whom the Government, by penal legislation, had emphatically marked out as inferior to the Christians. Religious fanaticism is almost unknown in Russia, and indifferentism is rather the rule among a peasantry which lives in amity with Mahommedans, Roman Catholics, and Lutherans alike; but it requires a strong hand to restrain a semi-civilized and poverty-stricken people from attacking and plundering their richer and defenceless neighbours. The Government did not show this strong hand in defence of the Jews, and political agitators eagerly fanned the flame of animosity against the alien race, and saw with pleasure the spread of disturbances which would either lead to a collision between the people and the authorities, or open the eyes of the masses to the weakness of the latter, and to their own strength.”[159]
The venerable charge of ritual murder was once more brought against the Jews, and within a few weeks all the provinces from the Baltic to the Black Sea were a theatre of arson, rapine, and slaughter, such as Europe had not witnessed since the tragedy of the Black Death in the fourteenth century. The civilised world shuddered at the appalling spectacle; but the local authorities, both civil and military, looked, for the most part, complacently on. The peasantry, having slaked their thirst for vengeance, plunder, rape, and gin, by sacking the Jewish houses, drinking shops, and brothels, proceeded to embody their grievances against the Jew in the following series of demands:
1. “That Jews, members of town councils and provincial assemblies, vice-directors of town banks, members of different institutions and committees, should voluntarily give up their present posts, casting off the cloak of pride and braggadocio; as persons not possessing civic honesty, they are unfit to hold such places.
2. “That the Jews should impress on their wives and daughters not to deck themselves out in silk, velvet, gold, etc., as such attire is neither in keeping with their education nor the position they hold in society.
3. “That the Jews should dismiss from their service all Russian female servants, who, after living in Jewish houses, certainly become prostitutes, forget their religion, and who are intentionally depraved by the Jews.
4. “To banish, without delay, all Jews belonging to other places who do not possess any real property in town.
5. “To close all drinking shops.
6. “To forbid Jews to abuse the Christians, and, in general, to scoff at them.
7. “To prohibit Jews from buying up in the markets the first necessaries of life with the intention of selling them to the Russians.