The city, in its chief business and fashionable districts, has the look of a comfortable, fairly wealthy, up-to-date bourgeois centre, and a well-governed municipal community; a most unlikely place, in the eyes of a visitor, to offer itself as a theatre for one of the most abominable tragedies in modern times.
Kishineff owes its success and prosperity almost exclusively to the Jews. Thirty years ago it was little more than a rough Bessarabian village. To-day it ranks, in South Russia, next to Odessa—where there are over 200,000 of the same race—in population, commercial standing, and wealth, and all this is freely admitted by educated Russians.
Jews in Russia are compelled by law to reside inside a Pale of Settlement, or territory comprising some fifteen governments, or provinces, of western and southern Russia, extending south from the coast of the southern Baltic to the Crimea, and westward from Charkov and Smolensk to the borders of Roumania, Galicia, and Prussian Poland. The area thus embraced in the Jewish Pale is about equal to that of France, and the number of people of this section of Russia is upward of 27,000,000.
Under the ukase of 1882, which compelled Jews to leave the villages and live within the towns, these centres became crowded inside of what thus became virtual economic concentration camps.
Within these limits of legal domicile the density of Hebrew population is at the rate of some 2800 per square mile. In the non-Jewish towns of Russia the average is about 60 of urban to 1000 of rural population. Within the fifteen provinces included in the Jewish Pale, the average is close upon 230 of urban to every 1000 of country population.
The effects of this crowding of Jews into the towns of the Pale are as obvious as they are inevitable. There is a dense population, restricted by necessity and disposition to certain pursuits and occupations, in places where the economic conditions do not provide opportunities for the healthy exercise of one-fourth of the industry or abilities which could under normal conditions find opportunities for profitable employment.
There are towns in which Jewish tradesmen and artisans are 50 per cent. of the total population. They are literally penned in within these places.
This is the economic side of the problem of the Russian Jew. The political side is even more serious to the Russian administration, and here we are approaching the consideration of what was the real underlying cause of the outbreak of a month ago.
All the Jews of the Pale are not poor. Quite the contrary. Despite the restricted area allowed them, large numbers of them are wealthy through successful trading. Another and larger section exploit inferior Russian intelligence and capacity, and earn money in legally forbidden ways by making it fairly profitable for the obliging Christian to act as a shield or deputy for the legally boycotted Jew.
Saloons are owned in this way by Jews, and are worked for them by Christians.