The only genuine result of the trial and of the revelations made in its course was to intensify the wrath of the fanatical Russian and Moldavian populace, both of the town and of the open country, who threatened reprisals for the punishment of a few of their brother-butchers. The fear of such reprisals forced many thousands of the poorer Jews of Bessarabia to migrate into the districts of Russian and Austrian Poland, which were already congested to a terrible degree, while those who possessed the necessary means determined to emigrate from the Czar’s dominions and seek a home in the West. While the trial was still proceeding, a deputation of Bessarabian Jews arrived in the city. Their object was to confer with the heads of the Jewish community, on behalf of their co-religionists in various rural districts of Bessarabia, with a view to leaving the country which had declared in so sanguinary a manner its unwillingness to harbour them. It was proposed that a number of Jewish families should emigrate to the Argentine Republic and join their brethren, already settled in that and other parts of America by Baron Hirsch at different times, especially after the exodus of 1892. Four thousand souls, the delegates affirmed, were anxious to wind up their affairs and quit the inhospitable country.[188]

Flight, under the apprehension of slaughter, is avowed to be one of the objects which induced the Russian authorities to connive at the massacre and to profess their inability to prevent its repetition: “Russian policy at the present hour,” proudly declares an eminent Russian anti-Semite, “seems to have one object in view—that of starting a free emigration of the Jews from Russia. But the total number of Jewish emigrants during the last twenty years was only about a million.”[189] Obviously, occasional slaughter alone is sadly insufficient.

As in 1881 and 1891, so in 1903 the Czar’s ministers hastened to supplement massacre by measures of administrative coercion. They decided to forbid Jews, until the revision of the laws concerning them has been accomplished by means of fresh legislation, to acquire land or real estate, or to enjoy the usufruct thereof, either within or without the Governments situated within the residential “pale.” This decision of the Committee of Ministers was submitted to the Czar and received his approval. Permission, however, was granted to the Jews to settle and acquire real estate at places within the “pale,” which in consequence of their industrial development partake of the character of towns.[190] A few months later, at the moment when the Kishineff trial was drawing to a close, the Governor-General at Warsaw issued peremptory instructions to all the Assistant Governors in the Vistula Province, directing them to put in rigorous force the Law of 1891, which prohibits Jews from purchasing or leasing immoveable property in the rural districts.[191]

This outburst of Jew-hatred was not confined to Bessarabia. Soon after the Kishineff massacre reports reached this country of further outrages being apprehended owing to the symptoms of anti-Semitism manifested by the inhabitants of the western provinces of the Empire. Nor were these forebodings falsified by events. In the middle of September, 1903, Jew-baiting was once more indulged in at Gomel, a town of Mohileff within the Jewish “pale.” A petty squabble between a Jew and a Christian in the bazaar afforded an excuse to the co-religionists of the latter to wreck the Jewish quarter. Several persons were killed on both sides; but the only details available are official, which in Russia is not a synonym for authentic.[192]

The charge most frequently brought against the Jews by the Russian people is, as has been shown, their aversion from productive labour, and their exclusive attachment to traffic in goods and money. The Russian Government some years ago attempted to remove the grievance by affording to the Jews facilities for the pursuit of agriculture. In seven out of the fifteen provinces open to the Jews, efforts were made to form Jewish agricultural settlements. But they do not seem to have been attended by conspicuous success. Towards the end of 1903 an inquiry instituted into the matter elicited conflicting answers. Three of the seven reports, drawn up by provincial Governors, are altogether discouraging. It is pointed out that the Jewish peasant shirks the hard work of tilling the soil and only helps to reap the produce. In one province, the official document asserts, sixty per cent. of the Jews have already abandoned the settlement and turned to the more congenial pursuits of commerce and industry. Another report draws an unfavourable comparison between the Jewish and the Christian farmer, and repeats the opinion that the former takes little interest in the culture of the soil, preferring less laborious occupations. All three reports agree in showing that the experiment of making a husbandman of the Hebrew is a complete failure. On the other hand, we find a fourth Governor maintaining that in his province the only difference between a Christian and a Jewish agriculturist consists in their respective religions. A fifth, while admitting the Jew’s practical ill-success, attributes it to the smallness of his farm, which forces him to give up agriculture as profitless, and he adds that under favourable conditions the results have been not disappointing. The Governor of Kherson states that, though at first the Jews evinced little inclination to turn to the land, upon the revision and improvement of the original conditions, the settlements became more popular; so that in 1898 seventy-three per cent. of the Jewish population were exclusively devoted to agriculture, nineteen per cent. varied the monotony of farming by the combination of trade, while only eight per cent. were engaged entirely in commerce or industry. This authority expresses the conviction that, as time goes on, the Jew will develop into a successful agriculturist, provided he is allowed to compete on fair terms with the Christian farmers.[193]

An impartial examination of these contradictory opinions seems to lead to the conclusion that the Jew, by nature and the education of two thousand years, is too good a tradesman to make a good husbandman. He is too keen-witted, too enterprising, too ambitious to find adequate satisfaction in the slow and solitary culture of the soil. In this respect the modern Jew is like the modern Greek. The drudgery of field work repels him. The tedium of country life depresses him. “No profit goes where no pleasure is ta’en.” It is in the bustle of the market-place, where man meets man, where wit is pitted against wit, and the intellect is sharpened on the whetstone of competition, that his restless soul finds its highest gratification and most congenial employment. He is a born townsman and a born traveller. He has none of the stolid endurance of the earth-born. Although he can excel in most pursuits, there is apparently one thing beyond the reach of his versatility. He cannot dig.

The Russian peasant under normal conditions is the reverse of all this: indolent, intemperate, improvident, unintelligent, and unambitious, he lives entirely in the present, unhaunted by regrets of the past, unharassed by plans for the future, and blissfully unaware of the existence of any world beyond the world which his eye can see—a very type of the earth-born, such as England knew him in the glorious days of Chivalry and Wat Tyler. To such a race even less formidable and foreign a competitor than the unbelieving Jew would appear a monster of iniquity. And yet, there is abundant evidence to prove that it is not the Russian peasant’s instinctive antipathy which is primarily responsible for the sufferings of the Jew. The Russian Jew, owing to his difference from the Russian Christian in race, religion, temperament and mode of living, is by the latter regarded with contempt and prejudice. These feelings, however, are not the only causes of persecution. Formerly, as we have seen, the Jews were reproached with excessive addiction to trade in liquor, whereby, it was alleged, they ruined the peasantry in health, purse and morals. This charge, whatever its value may have once been, can no longer be brought against the Jews; for the Russian Government, since it established a monopoly of spirits, has become the exclusive public-house keeper in the Empire. The charge of usury still remains. But it can easily be proved that in many districts the usurer is the powerful Russian landlord and not the Jew. As a distinguished Russian Liberal has appositely remarked, “the usurer must needs be a wealthy person—a poor devil like the Jewish colonist settled amidst the ‘Little Russian’ peasantry may possibly long for credit; he certainly is not in a position to give it.”[194]

According to the same authority, in “Little Russia” most of the Jewish villagers are either shop-keepers and retail dealers, or cobblers, tailors, smiths and the like. They form the commercial and industrial element in the rural population, and their expulsion means economic distress to the Russian husbandman, who, therefore, if left to himself, is not unwilling to forgive the Jew the Old Crime, and to forget his own prejudice against the foreigner and the follower of an abhorred creed. But he is not left to himself. The peasant’s latent antipathy is stirred to violence by the Nationalist agitators and Government officials, who collaborate in endeavouring to stifle the alien and revolutionary Jew through the brutality of the lower classes; assisted by the artisans and mechanics who by the persecution of the foreigner and the infidel seek the extinction of a successful competitor. All the outbreaks of anti-Jewish hatred, from 1881 to this day, were organised by the police authorities in accordance with a well-matured plan known as pogrom. The procedure consists in deliberately inciting by word of mouth and printed proclamations the dregs of society against the classes or sects of the community obnoxious to the Government, and then, when the work is done, suppressing the riot by the barbarous methods which are so typical of Russian administration. The same process is applied for the mutual extermination of others than the Jews. It is a process based on the maxim divide et impera—the last resource of an incompetent ruler.[195]

♦1904–05♦

The disasters which befell the Russian arms in the Far East, the discontent which they created at home, and the danger of a revolutionary upheaval of all the oppressed elements of the Empire induced the Czar’s Government to reconsider its attitude towards the suffering subjects of the Czar. The Austrian journal Pester Lloyd ventured to give some good advice to that effect: “During the Napoleonic Wars the rulers captivated their subjects by promising them liberty and constitutions. Whoever wishes well to Russia must advise her to imitate the example.” In accordance with that policy of tardy conciliation which circumstances dictated, some Russian Liberals who had been banished for their championship of the interests of the people were permitted to return from exile, new Governors-General were appointed to Finland and Poland, with instructions to pursue a more lenient policy than their predecessors, a decree was issued ordering the Finnish Parliament to assemble, its property was restored to the Armenian Church, and other steps were taken showing that there was at least a desire to diminish the sources of general discontent by conceding to necessity what had hitherto been denied to justice.