Israel in Europe

by G. F. Abbott

Another witness describes the gradual subjection of the impoverished peasant to the Jewish money-lender and adds, “The Jews’ two great factors in dealing with the Russian peasant are vodka (native gin) and a few roubles at a pinch, and with these powers he enslaves and uses him for his own ends. Many large properties, belonging to influential and hereditary Russian noblemen, are rented out to Jews, because the proprietors find that they pay higher rents than the Russian tenants.” He concludes, however, with the reflection: “The real source of the evil lies in the mental and moral condition of the masses, and it is there the remedy must be applied.”[166]

These are the reasons alleged for the persecution of the Russian Jews. First as to “productiveness,” the neglect of which is brought forward as a criminal charge against the Jew. It is an old complaint. The Andalusian monk of yore inveighed against the Jews of Spain because “they preferred to gain their livelihood by traffic rather than by manual labour or mechanical arts.”[167] Modern economic science teaches us that a country can dispense as little with the distributors as with the producers of wealth. Productiveness, however, is well known to be the pet idea of Russian economists. The last two Ministers of Finance have for close on a quarter of a century been fostering production with a reckless energy which by many unbiassed students is regarded as fatal. Everything is done to encourage production and exportation, with the result that the soil gets exhausted, and the reserves of corn, on which the Russian farmer once relied in time of famine, have disappeared from the country.[168] Like all measures carried to excess and without due regard to local conditions, the fever of productiveness is not an unmixed blessing, and the neglect of it will not be laid, by the impartial outsider, as a crime at the door of the Jew, especially when he remembers that the Jew is not a free agent in the choice of his profession. For, even if the law permitted and the Jew wished to devote himself to agriculture, he would be prevented from doing so by the Russian system of village communes—an intrusion into which on the part of non-Christians would be resented by none more bitterly than by the Russian peasant himself. It is thus seen that the Jew could not in any case become a “producer,” but was irresistibly compelled to turn to handicrafts, retail commerce and money-lending.

As to Jewish extortion. The manumission of the serfs opened up fields for money-lending which it would have been impossible to resist the temptation of exploiting even to capitalists whose opportunities for investment are less circumscribed than are those of the Russian Jew. That reform, though undoubtedly beneficial in the long run, was meanwhile bound to upset the social fabric, especially in Little Russia, and to produce the evils which generally accompany a radical change brought about in a country unprepared for it. By the Ukase of 1864 there was created a state of transition. The old was pronounced out of date; the new was not yet born. While ruining many noble landlords, the abolition of serfdom brought into being a vast proletariat of freedmen poor in manual skill and capital, and poorer still in resource. Both these classes, bewildered by the unaccustomed conditions rudely thrust upon them, rushed to the Jew for loans as naturally as the moth rushes to the candle, and, like the moth, they suffered in the act. The Jew had no cause to treat either borrower with lenience; but, as might have been expected, the peasant was by far the greater sufferer of the two. He was less prepared for the struggle. For centuries he had lived under a restraint which, while stunting his manhood, conferred upon him some of the privileges, as well as more than all the punishments, of childhood. If the leading strings deprived the peasant of the freedom to act, they also deprived him of the freedom to ruin himself. These strings were suddenly removed. The peasant, still an infant in mind, was invested with all the responsibilities of an adult. The very qualities which had enabled him to bear his servitude now proved his unfitness for liberty. His utter lack of initiative, of enterprise, of self-reliance, and of self-restraint, and his abject submissiveness to the decrees of fate—all characteristic of the serf—are well summarised in the one word nitchevo, the commonest and most comprehensive expression in the mujik’s vocabulary. It means “no matter,” and corresponds exactly to the malesh of the Egyptian fellah—another peasantry sunk in ignorance and fatalistic resignation, as the results of centuries of serfdom.

In addition to these defects the Russian peasant is a constitutional procrastinator. He never does to-day what he thinks he can by hook or by crook put off till to-morrow. Two of the most precious boons of his newly-acquired liberty, in his eyes, were the license it allowed him to postpone his work as long as he liked and to drink as much as he liked. Under the old system “the proprietor thrashed his serfs if they were drunk too often, and he kept their pockets so empty, and the price of the vodki, of which he was the monopolist, so high, that they had comparatively little opportunity of gratifying their passion for liquor. This was very well while it lasted, but now that the control is withdrawn the reaction is all the greater.”[169] This is an ample answer to the charge brought against the Jew as the promoter of intemperance.

As to the charge of collusion with Government officials, it can easily be met. Both culprits, of course, deserve punishment. But it is scarcely fair that the one should be only fined, dismissed, or imprisoned, and the other slaughtered or starved with the rest of his nation. With regard to “boycotting” outsiders and playing into each other’s hands, is it not natural that people belonging to a sect which their neighbours scorn should assist their fellow-sufferers in preference to their persecutors? There is no stronger bond between man and man than the bond of a common stigma.

The charges of immoral pursuits and habits of depravity may, or may not, be exaggerated. But, even admitting that the Jew is all that his Russian enemy considers him to be, a sufficient answer to the invectives of the latter is supplied by the old saying: “Every country has the Jews it deserves.” Without having recourse to the obvious retort—which in the case of the Russian peasant would be particularly apposite—that, if there was no demand for the facilities for immorality supplied by the Jew, the Jew would not think it worth his while to supply them, we may urge the self-evident truth, that legal disabilities, by barring the way to an honest and honourable career, drive their victims to the exercise of the lowest and meanest of callings. The struggle for existence under such banausic conditions degenerates into a savage warfare in which there is no room for scruple or shame. The outcast has no reputation to lose. And, the more unprincipled the contest becomes, the greater grows the necessity for oppression, in countries where statesmanship has not yet discovered less rude remedies. It is a vicious circle from which there appears to be no escape.

Accordingly, the undisciplined fury of the populace in 1881 was supplemented by a systematic and carefully reasoned-out persecution on the part of the Government. Instead of endeavouring to raise the Russian masses to a level of mental and moral strength sufficiently high to enable them to compete with the Jew, the Czar’s ministers devoted their ingenuity to the invention of new means for lowering the Jew to the level of the Russian masses. The disabilities of the hated race were increased. Jewish property in the open country was confiscated, and the owners were driven into ghettos. It was enacted that henceforth no Jew should be allowed to live in a village or to acquire property therein. The whole of the Russian Empire was, with reference to the Jews, divided into three distinct sections. The bulk of the race were confined to the fifteen provinces known as the “Pale of Jewish Settlement.” Those Jews who belonged to a merchants’ guild of the first class for ten years, University graduates, and skilled artisans were permitted to move freely and to settle in any part of European Russia they chose, except the departments of Moscow and Taurien, in which no Jewish workman was allowed to reside. The third section comprised Siberia, and that was closed to all Jews, except convicts. The result of these enactments was that the few towns within the “pale” were overcrowded with Jewish residents, herded together and forced to carry on a fierce competition for existence with each other. At the same time, laws were passed rendering the admittance of Jewish youths to the high schools and Universities prohibitive, and the Jews were forbidden to act as State or municipal officers, or teachers, or to practise at the bar without a special license from the Minister of Justice. These and many other measures of restriction were adopted with the ostensible object of saving the Russian peasant from the clutches of the Jewish harpy. The joint effect of persecution and legislation on the Jews was misery. But these crimes proved the reverse of beneficial to the very peasants on whose behalf they were avowedly committed. In every village and township the departure of the Jewish traders and artisans was immediately marked by a rise in the prices of commodities, and was soon followed by commercial and industrial stagnation.

That regard for the moral and material welfare of the people, however, was not the sole, or the principal, motive of the Russian Government’s policy is unwittingly confessed by the fair patriot already quoted. Referring to the prohibition of the Jews from keeping public houses, she says: “That our objection is solely to the anti-national Jews, not the Jews who become Russians in all but their origin, is proved by the decision of the Commission in favour of allowing the Karaite Jews to sell drink as freely as any other of their Russian fellow-subjects. It is only the Talmudist Jews who are forbidden that privilege.”[170] It is hard for the ordinary man to see how belief in the Bible justifies a pursuit which is otherwise condemned as injurious to body and soul, or in what mysterious way the Talmud affects the quality of liquor. The ordinary man will find it easier to draw from these facts the inference that the Government’s real end was the suppression of the Jew, the suppression of the drink-selling Jew being only a means to that end.

In the attitude of the Russian people towards the Jews at the present moment we recognise all the features made familiar by the history of the Jewish nation in the past. Social nonconformity and aloofness led to anti-Judaism in antiquity. To this motive of persecution the advent of Christianity added religious rancour, and the Middle Ages economic rivalry. The nineteenth century was destined to strengthen the texture of hatred by the addition of a new strand—Nationalism. All these causes, as we have seen, combined to make the Jew an object of detestation variously disguised. In ancient Rome we found impatience of dissent justifying itself by the pretext of regard for public morality; in Catholic and Protestant Europe cruelty and cupidity hallowed by the cloak of religious zeal; in modern Europe we see narrow-minded intolerance and jealousy trying to ennoble themselves by the title of patriotism. Each age has inherited the passions of the past and has increased the sad inheritance by the addition of new prejudices. In Russia modern culture spreads a little way over the face of mediaevalism, as the waters of a river at its mouth spread over the surface of the ocean, modifying its colour without affecting its depths. Consequently the Jew is still persecuted for his heresy, as well as for his usury, exclusiveness, and foreign extraction.

Russian officials and English apologists of Russian anti-Semitism will not admit that the persecution of the Russian Jews is religious, though acknowledging that religion, too, plays its part. They claim that it is essentially economical and social, “and that the main cause has always been the unhappy relation of a wandering and parasitic race, retaining its tribal exclusiveness, to the races among which it sojourns, and on the produce of which it feeds.”[171] This view is natural in a modern spectator of the West; but it is not quite correct, as it implies modern and Western conditions and sentiments in a country which only in a small measure is modern and Western. The late Mr. Lecky wrote: “The Russian persecution stands in some degree apart from other forms of the anti-Semitic movement on account of its unparalleled magnitude and ferocity.” It also stands apart, to the same degree, on account of its origin. Jew-hatred in Russia is a thoroughly genuine survival. In Western Europe it is largely an artificial revival. The Russian Jews have never been emancipated from servitude, because the Russian Christians, with few exceptions, have never been emancipated from ignorance and bigotry. In other words, the modern term anti-Semitism, with all its quasi-scientific connotation, can hardly be applied to the Russian variety of the epidemic. But, be the causes what they may, the result is the same. To the slaughtered Jew, it is a matter of comparative indifference whether he is slain as a parasite or for the love of Christ. The student also must be very extraordinarily constituted who can derive any consolation from the fact that the principles of toleration made dear to us by the experience and the sacrifices of two thousand years, are violated in so outrageous a manner not from religious, but from “economical and social” motives.