8. “To impress on wholesale dealers in spirits not to mix with vodka any foreign element which is sometimes injurious to health.
9. “Not to trade on the Sabbath before noon, and at Christmas and Easter not to trade for three days, and not to work on our holidays.
10. “To prohibit Jews buying wheat for trading purposes within thirty versts of the town of Pereyaslav, and therefore to remove all existing grain and flour stores.
11. “To prohibit Jews from buying up uncut wheat; also to lease land from private individuals.
12. “The Town Council is begged not to let, and the Jews not to hire, the grounds at fairs and at marketplaces, with the object of farming them out.”[160]
No better proof of the mediaeval character of the Russian peasant’s mind could be desired than that furnished by the above document. Even so hearty an apologist of that peasant as Mr. Goldwin Smith finds himself compelled to remark that these demands “by their grotesque mixture of real and fancied grievances, remind us of the demands made by the ignorant, but suffering, peasants of the Middle Ages.” Their demand that the Jews should be forced “to cast off the cloak of pride and braggadocio,” has its exact parallel in the complaints of the Spanish bigots laid before Don Henry in 1371.[161]
But the feeling which found so terrible an expression was by no means confined to the lower and illiterate classes of the community. The crime itself was attributed to the deliberate policy of Count Ignatieff. A high-bred and accomplished Russian lady, a few months after the massacres, described the general attitude of her compatriots towards the Jews in very fluent English, as follows:—“Well, we do not like the Jews, that is a fact; and the dislike is reciprocal. But the reason we do not like them is not because of their speculative monotheism, but because of their practical heathenism. To us they are what the relics of the Amorites and Canaanites were to the Hebrews in old times—a debased and demoralized element which is alien to our national life, and a source of indescribable evils to our people. It is not to the Jew as a rejecter of Christianity that we object; it is to the Jew as a bitter enemy of Christian emancipation, the vampire of our rural communes, the tempter of our youth, and the centre of the demoralizing, corrupting agencies which impair our civilization.”[162]
The modern Russian lady’s denunciation of the Jew, in tone as well as in substance, is a significant, though, of course, quite unconscious, echo of Ivan the Terrible’s cruder statement of more than three centuries ago.[163] The sole difference consists in form—the religious objection is minimised and the social emphasised in accordance with Western modes of expression; but fundamentally the two utterances are identical.
The Minister of the Interior, in less emotional language, explained the outbreak as due to causes of a purely economic character. “During the last twenty years,” he said, “the Jews have not only gradually got into their hands the trade and industry, but have also acquired by deed of purchase and leases considerable landed estates, and, owing to their numbers and solidarity, they have, with few exceptions, directed all their efforts, not towards increasing the productiveness of the country, but to the spoliation of the native population, chiefly the poorer classes, by which means they called forth a protest from the latter, which unfortunately expressed itself in a violent form.”[164]
Vice-Consul Wagstaff in an official despatch, while giving the Jews full credit for their remarkable intelligence, thrift, and business qualities, enumerates the complaints made against them by the Russians—namely, that “the Jews are the principal keepers of drinking shops and houses of ill-fame, receivers of stolen goods, illegal pawnbrokers and usurers. As Government contractors they frequently collude with unscrupulous officials in defrauding the State to vast amounts. They use their religion for business purposes, ‘boycott’ outsiders, play into each other’s hands at land sales, and thus despoil the peasantry. Often the harvest of a peasant who has been entangled in their toils passes into their grasp, as it stands in the field, on their own terms. They themselves do not raise agricultural products, but they reap the benefit of others’ labour, and steadily become rich while proprietors are gradually getting ruined. In their relation to Russia they are compared to parasites that have settled on a plant not vigorous enough to throw them off, and which is being gradually sapped of its vitality.”[165]