PART I
THE STORY OF THE RUSSIAN JEW
CHAPTER I
FROM ANCIENT TIMES TO 1804
THE time when Jews first settled in Russia is a subject of mere historical conjecture. Some accounts assert that colonies of the race were founded in the country bordering on the Black Sea several centuries before the Christian era. All the probabilities favour this view. Both before and after their dispersion by the Romans, a people so intelligent and resourceful as the Hebrews would learn of the fruitful regions watered by the four great rivers which flow into the southern sea-boundaries of the vast territory now under the sway of the Tsar. They would have a choice of land and sea routes for the voyages of emigration, trade, or adventure.
The distance from Jerusalem to the mouth of the Volga, through Asia Minor and the Caucasus, is not much more than from Astrakhan to St. Petersburg, while the journey by sea from Joppa to where the city of Odessa stands to-day for Russia’s richest seaport, is much less than that from Athens to Marseilles. The Caucasus, Taurida (Crimea), Cherson, and Bessarabia, known in the days of King Solomon by other names, would be within the zone of trading intercourse with the Kingdom of Israel, while these rich and interesting parts of Southern Russia would naturally attract the footsteps of the scattered race after Titus had destroyed their nation and dispersed its people, as well as during the existence of the Byzantine Empire.
Whether the race known as the Khazars, who governed the territory stretching north from Astrakhan over the eastern watershed of the Volga as far as Kazan, were civilised by Semitic colonists, as alleged by some writers, is now only an interesting speculation. One fact offered in support of this theory is that the Israelites were driven out of this country by its rulers in the eleventh century, at a time when Jews in Christian Europe began to be objects of race persecution.
The period of the Crusades may be taken as that in which the systematic oppression of the Jews began. The source of this persecution was the religious influence upon uneducated minds of the gospel of the Crucifixion, coupled with legends about ritual murders, and fables recording the sacrifice of the blood of Christian children and maidens during the sacred rites of Paschal time.
It is on record that, in the year 1298, a fanatic in a city of Franconia circulated a story that the Sacred Host in a church had been polluted by a Jew, and that the Almighty had chosen an avenger of this crime in the person of the narrator of the act of sacrilege. The populace rose en masse and burned all the Jews in the city. The massacre extended to the country, and, before the murderous fury unchained by this fanatic and his falsehood could be stilled, over 100,000 victims were slaughtered in Germany, Bavaria, and Austria.
It was following these and similar ferocities that the first great movement of the Semitic race into Poland occurred. They were encouraged to move into this country by the toleration extended to smaller colonies of their race who had settled in Polish dominions in earlier times. All accounts agree in crediting to this ancient Kingdom a far more enlightened rule of the proscribed Israelites than to any other Christian nation during the Middle Ages. Casimir the Great protected them in both their religious and civil liberties, in return for which freedom they helped to organise and develop the commerce and crafts of the country. They flourished and multiplied under such rule, and became the trading link between producer and consumer, in the economic life of Poland, as well as tillers of the soil and expert artisans.
It is an error to assume that the Jews have not thriven anywhere in agricultural industry. Wherever they were sure of protection against spoliation, they took to land labour as readily as to other pursuits, and succeeded. This was so in Poland during the two centuries in which they shared in the general rights guaranteed by the state. Accounts of Jewish agricultural colonies in various parts of Russia, in later days, also support the same testimony. In fact there was no better foundation for this charge in times anterior to our own than the circumstance that a people who were not permitted to own land anywhere, or even to cultivate it in some countries, were, in consequence, subjected to the imputation of having a racial prejudice against this means of obtaining a livelihood.
The halcyon period of Jewish freedom in Poland came to an end in the middle of the seventeenth century. That proud and ancient nation was itself the victim of invasion and oppression, and its Semitic population lost over 200,000 men, women, and children in the ferocious campaigns waged by the conquering Cossack Hetman, and his Tartar and Russian allies, against Poles and Jews alike.