All the vengeance of the mobs seems to have been directed against the very poorest of the Jews. Shops were only looted, but artisans were killed.
Much greater help than that already received will be required to prevent starvation.
Letter II
Kishineff, May 25th.
During a brief halt in the South Russian capital, Odessa, I availed myself of an opportunity of visiting the retiring Civil Governor, Lieutenant General Count P. P. Schouvaloff, elder son of Count Paul Schouvaloff, formerly Russian Ambassador at Berlin, and subsequently the most popular Viceroy of Poland who reigned in Warsaw since the stormy days of 1863. The Count received me with courtesy and affability at his private palace, on the Nicolai Boulevard. His Excellency had, he informed me, been abroad during the last two months, and had only just returned to take adieux of the local officials and citizens of Odessa before assuming the functions of his new post in the Ministry of the Interior. Had he been in Odessa during the terrible events in Kishineff he would, ex-officio, have been in possession of intimate knowledge of the tragic occurrences, upon which he should have had no hesitation, he was good enough to say, to have given me the frank expression of his views. As it was, the Count regretted he could say very little indeed. Like the rest of his countrymen who had a jealous regard for the good repute of Russia abroad, his Excellency sincerely deplored the frightful popular émeute in the Bessarabian capital. But there were one or two things to be borne in mind by a foreign observer and commentator, he was anxious to point out. He need not, perhaps, he remarked, dwell upon the unsophisticated condition of the Russian peasant or artisan; his simplicity, ignorance, and the practically unlimited credence he gave to sinister and plausibly mischievous counsellors. Against these qualities in the simple Russian, there was to be set, he insisted, the vastly superior intelligence of the Jew, of all grades and conditions. It was, unfortunately, an indisputable fact, in his opinion, that the Jews, more especially where they were numerically equal to their orthodox neighbours—and in South Russian centres they formed the predominant elements—exploited the Christians in a hundred unscrupulous ways, to their own aggrandisement. The Jew not only knew the law better than his Christian neighbour, but he was an adept in circumventing it. Consequently the exploited Russian failed to obtain legal redress, and occasionally the ignorant people, instigated by the worst class of criminals, whose only object was plunder, took the law—according to their own primitive conception of it—into their own hands, with such frightful results as were lately seen in Bessarabia.
In his Excellency’s opinion the limitations placed upon the Jews in this country should be made somewhat more stringent, in the protective interests of the Jews themselves. That was to say, he remarked, they should be deprived of much of the immunity under which they now exploited the uneducated Christians. On the other hand, improvement might be effected by a more careful choice being made in the appointment of Governors in Jewish centres. Younger and more active men are required, who will keep themselves fully and exactly au courant with every latent movement among the people under their jurisdiction. They should be just, intelligent, and alert Governors, his Excellency said, upon whom it would be practically impossible to spring any sudden outbreak, and they should be prepared to apply instantly repressive measures at all time.
Count Schouvaloff would not enter into any discussion of the Jewish question in Russia, but he might be permitted to observe that it was, in his opinion, one for Jews themselves, in the main, to solve. Generally speaking, he had little hope in any change for the better in the inimical feeling between Jew and Christian in Russia, so long as there existed no standard of commercial rectitude among Jews. There was no question of religious intolerance, although, unfortunately, it was no difficult thing for agents provocateurs, whose object, as already said, was plunder, to arouse the fanaticism of simple people on occasions like Easter festivals.
Such is the view, briefly expressed, of a Russian Governor whom I believe to be, from the evidence of my own countrymen in Odessa, as well as from common repute, a singularly honest and high-minded member of the gubernatorial class in this country.
Count Schouvaloff, on parting, cordially expressed his great admiration for “the most progressive and enlightened nation in the world,” and fervently trusted the United States and Russia, as the two great Pacific powers, would ever remain the firmest of good friends and neighbours.
Interviews with three prominent Russian merchants—all men of good social standing and repute—failed almost entirely to elicit any more friendly expression towards the Jews. They denounced as inhuman the iniquities of the ignorant, savage mob at Kishineff, but could not shut their eyes to “the trade trickeries and treacheries,” to use their own words, which, at the hands of grossly ignorant, lower-class Russians, brought such terribly retributive punishment upon the Jews. None of these gentlemen could, or would, admit that religious hatred or Paschal rancour were the incentive motives of the terrible outbreaks against the Hebrews. There were exceptions, of course, they were careful to remark, but, generally speaking, the Russian Jew was very largely the author of his own persecution.