The reign of Alexander III, like that of Nicholas I, was devoid of even that faint glamor of liberalism which, in the days of Alexander I and Alexander II, had aroused deceptive hopes of better times. During the thirteen years of Alexander III's autocracy (1881-1894) not a ray of light was permitted to penetrate into Holy Russia. On May 14, 1881, the manifesto prohibiting the slightest infringement of the absolute power of the czar was promulgated, to continue unbroken till the Russo-Japanese war.
The liberal current which had carried away his predecessors when they first mounted the throne was checked, the sluices of Slavophilism were opened, the history of Russian thinkers became again, as Herzen said, "a long list of martyrs and a register of convicts."
Nicholas Ignatiev, a rabid reactionary, a second Jeffreys, became chief of the Ministry of the Interior; Katkoff, a repentant liberal and exile, was appointed the czar's chief adviser, the Richelieu behind the throne; and Pobyedonostsev, whom Turgenief called the "Russian Torquemada," obtained supremacy over Melikoff, and was appointed procurator of the Holy Synod. With such as these at the head of the Russian bureaucracy, there may have been some foundations for the rumor that an imperial ukase decreed the pillage and slaughter of the Jews, and the muzhiks, obedient to the behests of the "little father," and smarting under the pain of disappointment, vented their venom on their Jewish compatriots. Before the new czar had been on his throne three months, Russia was drenched with Jewish blood. There began saturnalia of rape, plunder, and murder, the like of which had been witnessed nowhere in Europe. For half a year the pogroms which began in Yelisavetgrad (April 27, 28) swept like a tornado over southern Russia, visiting more than one hundred and sixty communities with fire and sword, resulting in outrages on women, in the murder of old and young, in the ruin of millions of dollars of property. The Black Hundreds of the nineteenth century put to shame the Haidamacks of the eighteenth and the Cossacks of the seventeenth. In the words of the Bishop of Canterbury to Sir Moses Montefiore, it looked "as if the enemy of mankind was let loose to destroy the souls of so many Christians and the bodies of so many Jewish people."
But it would be a vain attempt, and out of keeping with the object of this work, to describe in detail the "bloody assizes" and the infernal tragedies that ensued upon the accession of Alexander III; the moral degeneracy and the economic ruin that spread over the mighty empire; the shudder that passed over the civilized world, and was expressed in indignation meetings held everywhere, especially in Great Britain and in the United States (February, 1882), to protest, "in the name of civilization, against the spirit of medieval persecution thus revived in Russia." Suffice it to say that even when the mob, tired of carnage, ceased its work of extermination, the bloodthirstiness of those in authority was not assuaged. Such a policy was inaugurated against the Jews as would, according to Pobyedonostsev, "force one-third of them to emigrate, another third to embrace Christianity, and the remainder to die of starvation." With this in view, his Majesty the Emperor, "prompted by a desire to protect the Jews against the Christians," was graciously pleased to give his assent to the Resolutions of the Committee of Ministers, on the third of May, 1882, i.e. to the notorious "temporary measures," or "May laws," framed by Ignatiev, against the will of the Council of the Empire.
These "temporary measures" have remained in force to this day. With them was resuscitated all the inimical legislation of the past, beginning with the time of Elizabeta Petrovna. What was favorable was suppressed; the unfavorable was most rigorously enforced. Jews living outside the Pale were driven back into it on the slightest pretext and in the most inhuman manner. To increase the already unendurable congestion, the Pale was made smaller than before. In accordance with the first clause of the "May laws," Jews were expelled from the villages within the Pale itself. In 1888 the districts of Rostov and Taganrog, which till then had belonged to the Pale, and had been developed largely through Jewish enterprise, were torn away and amalgamated with the Don district, in which Jews were not permitted to reside. This was followed by expulsions from St. Petersburg (1890), Moscow, (1891), Novgorod, Riga, and Yalta (1893), and the abrogation of the time-honored privileges of the Jews of Bokhara (1896). Even those who, as skilled artisans or discharged soldiers, had been privileged to reside wherever they chose, were expelled with their wives and the children born in their adopted city. Their only salvation lay in conversion. Converts were especially favored, and were offered liberal inducements. By becoming a convert to the Orthodox Russian Church, a Jew is immediately freed from all the degrading restrictions on his freedom of movement and his choice of a profession. Converts, without distinction of sex, are helped financially by an immediate payment of sums from thirteen to thirty rubles, and until recently were granted freedom from taxation for five years. If a candidate for Greek Christianity is married, his conversion procures him a divorce, and, unless she likewise is converted, his wife may not marry again. By conversion, a Jew may escape the consequence of any misdeed against a fellow-Jew, for, to quote the Russian code, "in actions concerning Jews who have embraced Christianity Jews may not be admitted as witnesses, if any objection is raised against them as such." The penal code provides that Jews shall pay twice and treble the amount of the fine to which non-Jews are liable under similar circumstances. Jews were excluded from the professions to which they had turned in the "sixties" and "seventies," and in which they had been eminently successful; they were not allowed to hold any civil or municipal office; they were forbidden even to be nurses in the hospitals or to give private instruction to children in the homes.
And still persecution did not cease. Not satisfied with starving the bodies of five millions of Jews, Russian legislators were determined to crush them intellectually. The Slavophils could not brook seeing "non-Russians" surpass their own people in the higher walks of life. The Jews, finally successful in emancipating themselves from the trammels of rabbinism, had transferred their extraordinary devotion from the Talmud to secular studies. They filled the schools and the universities of the empire with zealous and intelligent pupils, who carried off most of the honors. They contributed forty-eight pupils to the gymnasia out of every ten thousand, while the Christians contributed only twenty-two. This was regarded an unpardonable sin. "These Jews have the audacity to excel us pure Russians," Pobyedonostsev is reported to have exclaimed, and measures were taken to suppress their dangerous tendency. As early as 1875 a law was passed withholding from Jewish students the stipends they had hitherto received from a fund set aside for that purpose. In 1882 the number of Jewish students in the Military Academy of Medicine was limited to five per cent, and later it was reduced to zero. Thereafter one professional school after another adopted a percentage provision, and some excluded Jews altogether. Finally, "seeing that many Jewish young men, eager to benefit by a higher classical, technical, or professional education," presented themselves every year for admission to the universities, that they passed their examination and continued their studies at the various schools of the empire, the Government deemed it "desirable to put a stop to a state of affairs which is so unsatisfactory." Consequently the ministry limited the attendance of Jews residing in places within the Pale to ten per cent in all schools and universities (December 5, 1886; June 26, 1887), in places without the Pale to five per cent, and in Moscow and St. Petersburg to three per cent, of the total number of pupils in each school and university. Of the four hundred young Jews who had successfully passed their matriculation examination at the beginning of the scholastic year 1887-1888, and had thus acquired the right of entering the university, three hundred and twenty-six were refused admission, and in many schools and universities they were denied even the small per cent the law permitted.
When, nevertheless, in spite of the many restrictions, the Jew at last obtained the coveted degree, the Government rendered it nugatory by depriving him of the right of enjoying the fruit of his labor and self-sacrifice. He could not practice as an army physician or jurist, nor obtain a position as an engineer or a Government or municipal clerk. In the army, he was not allowed to hold any office, and, though he might be an expert chemist, he could never fill the post of a dispenser (March 1, 1888). He was excluded from the schools for the training of officers, and if he passed the examination on the subjects taught there, his certificate could not contain the usual statement that there "was no objection to admitting him to the military schools."[1]
These restrictive measures were not relaxed when Alexander III was succeeded by his son Nicholas II (1894). If anything, they were more rigorously executed, and the mob was encouraged to multiply its outrages upon the defenceless Jews. The closing years of the nineteenth century wiped out the promises of its opening years. Blood accusations followed by riots became of frequent occurrence. Irkutsk (1896), Shpola, and Kiev (1897), Kantakuzov (Kherson), Vladimir, and Nikolayev (1899) gave the Jews a foretaste of what they had to expect when the Black Hundreds, encouraged by the Government and incited by Kruzhevan and Pronin, would be let loose to enact the scenes that took place in Kishinev and Homel before the Russo-Japanese war, and in hundreds of towns after it. The difficulties in the way of securing an education were increased. Russia did not believe in an "irreducible minimum" where the rights of her Jews were concerned. Under Nicholas II the number of Jewish women admitted to medical schools was put at three per cent of the total number of students; the newly-established School for Engineers in Moscow was closed to Jewish young men altogether; and the students of both sexes in the schools were constantly harassed by the police because of the harsh laws concerning the rights of residence. Some splendidly equipped institutions of learning were allowed to remain almost empty rather than admit Jewish students.[2]
This was the worst punishment of all, the most relentless vengeance wreaked on a helpless victim. "Of all the laws which swept down upon them from St. Petersburg and Moscow," says Leroy-Beaulieu with characteristic insight into the soul of Israel, "those which they [the Jews] find hardest to bear are the regulations that block their entrance to the Russian universities." The bloodless weighed heavier than the bloody pogroms. Consumed with a desire for education, wealthy Russian Jews made an attempt to establish higher schools of their own, without even drawing upon the surplus money of the kosher-meat fund, which had originally been created for such purposes. Baron de Hirsch, too, offered two million dollars for the higher and technical education of the Jews. But every attempt proved fruitless. Baron de Hirsch's munificence was flatly refused. In the school which Mr. Weinstein opened at Vinitza, Podolia, no more than eight Jews were allowed to attend among eighty Christians, and in the one at Gorlovka, founded by another Jew (Polyakov), only five per cent were admitted.[3]
Writers are wont to speak of this as a reactionary period. The description applies to the Russians; among the Jews it was a period of reawakening.[4] They were disillusioned. They saw that Russification without emancipation, as their unsophisticated fathers had told Lilienthal, meant extermination. The first and worst pogroms were perpetrated in those places where the Jews were like their Russian neighbors in every respect, except in the eyes of the law, and with the approval of some who were devotees of the Narodnaya Volya. The Jewish consciousness reasserted itself. If Pobyedonostsev accomplished his fiendish design as regards emigration, more than a million Jews having left Russia within the last twenty years; if he has almost succeeded in causing them to die of starvation; yet his hope of forcing a third of them to conversion was a disappointment and a delusion. The Jews showed that the traditional description applied to them, "stiff-necked," was not undeserved. While the Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Armenians have undergone conversion in multitudes, they whose suffering by far exceeded that of any other "non-Russian" nationality remained, with insignificant exceptions, loyal to the religion of their fathers.[5]