The Jew must not own land. But he can organise a company, place a Russian in nominal headship of the concern, and in this manner make a profit out of Russian agriculture.
In many other ways the keen intelligence, the inherited racial capacity for financial undertakings, the greater natural ability and better education of the business Jew, and also of the higher artisan Hebrew section, enable them, even in the face of all the obstacles put in their way, to give their sons and daughters an education which is gradually evolving out of an oppressed and degraded race a people of progressive thought and of political aspirations, who are deemed to be a most dangerous menace to the government and administration of an autocratically ruled country.
The educated Jew in Russia is more than an accidental ally of what may be termed Russian liberal tendencies. He occupies within this huge empire a semi-penalised political and racial status.
None of the higher state schools must admit more than 5 per cent. of Jew pupils, even where, as in Kishineff, the Jews are five times more numerous than the Russians proper.
The Jew cannot buy land.
He is debarred from administrative positions, except in lower grades of employment, and while he is compelled to serve in the army, he cannot claim the usual rewards or aspire to the ordinary ambition of men who make no greater sacrifice than he in the common military service of the empire.
All these facts, disabilities, and oppressive and depressing conditions, acting upon the thoughts and ideals of a brainy people, are producing a powerful anti-Russian political force along the southwestern portion of the Tsar’s most vulnerable frontier—that bordering upon the Austrian and Germanic empires. In other words, the Jewish Pale is becoming the nursery of revolutionary Socialist ideas and the active centre of an anti-autocratic propaganda.
The riots and terrorism of April, with their attendant horrors, were deliberately planned, not by robbers or murderers, not on account of religious bigotry, but for the reasons I have just given—namely, the feeling of hostility in the minds of administrative employés to a race believed to be plotting against the Empire, combined with the jealousy of local artisans and proletarians of the cheaper, better, and pushing Hebrew workingmen, compelled by absolute necessity to earn a living within a legally circumscribed sphere of industrial activity.
Hence, on the direct incitation of the local anti-Semite Bessarabetz newspaper, edited by a Russian, who is really a Moldavian, and which is the only paper published here and read by administrative employés, Seminarists, and other enemies of Jews, it was resolved, in an organised riot, to strike terror into the Jewish community of Kishineff, with the double object of punishing what is believed to be a hostile element conspiring against the Government, and of forcing the Jews to leave the city.