Opposed in cities and towns in this manner, after being turned out of country districts in obedience to a similar spirit, the authors of these coercion laws began to find it a serious administrative problem what to do with subjects for whose systematic oppression they were alone responsible. Agricultural colonies were planned in Cherson (Southwestern Russia) and even in Siberia, to which Jews were induced to go in order to escape from the intolerable hardships of incessant wrong. Failure followed these benevolent designs of the Government; not from the reluctance or incapacity of the migrating Jews to work the land, but owing to the corruption and incompetence of officials who were charged with the superintendence of these colonies. Money advanced for the building of dwellings and purchase of stock was disbursed in the erection of unsuitable houses, in most unsanitary places, and in other wasteful and ignorant directions. Great hardships were thus entailed upon the unfortunate victims of this crass official stupidity; a cruelty of deliberate neglect adding, in the instances of the migrations to Siberia, its penalties of suffering and death to the bitter disappointments and the blasting of hopes caused by the callous miscarriage of the well-meant enterprise of the Government by its blundering officials.
One unexpected good result followed both to Russia and to large numbers of Jews by the failure of these contemplated agricultural settlements in the Governments of Cherson and Ekaterinoslav; where, at a later time, similar colonies grew and flourished. Odessa, to-day the richest and busiest maritime city of the Empire, owes its prosperity and progress largely to Jewish enterprise. Both the forced and voluntary migration from the north to the south of the Pale brought this resourceful race near where they were to find an outlet in a young and rising commercial centre for qualities essential to its rapid development which Russians do not themselves possess in any marked degree,—commercial genius. The city and its varied opportunities attracted both those who succeeded and those who had obtained no fair chance of thriving as agriculturists, and to-day over two hundred thousand of the Jewish population of Odessa embrace the wealthiest and most enterprising bankers, merchants, brokers, contractors, and business men of the Empire.
From the codification of the ukases and laws relating to Jews in 1835, down to the Ignatieff or “May Laws” of 1882, the treatment of the Jews, as regulated by these measures, is consistent with their experience as already briefly described. In some of these laws, Jews would appear from the text to be on a footing of theoretic equality with other citizens, while again special provisions are made to limit the application of these general rights to residence within the selected sphere of domicile, and to be further curtailed within this area, in the light and meaning of the law of 1804. There is a bewildering mass and maze of contradictory purpose in this code of special laws which no summary can hope intelligently to disentangle. It is obvious, however, that the vigour of direct persecution is meant to be modified to the extent of promoting the utilities of the State by Jewish abilities, while reserving all the powers necessary to dispense with the objectionable artisan, trader, or mechanic when his services or example are no longer needed in hamlet or village. This is one of the most objectionable features of indefensible laws. It wears a character of state meanness which can well compare in odious rivalry with the methods and morals of Jewish usury. The spirit of fair play is totally absent from regulations which give the state, by virtue of permissive coercion, the benefits of subjects’ services which are ultimately repaid in penalties and expulsion.
In 1843 the Pale of Settlement was further contracted by a law forbidding Jews to reside within a distance of fifty versts (about thirty-three miles) of the Austrian or German frontiers. The necessity for this regulation was said to be the smuggling operations of the Jews. They probably excelled in this as in other illegal practices, to which they were driven on being denied the chances of living by more reputable means. The injustice of punishing thousands of families who had resided in these frontier districts for generations, for the wrongdoing of a few people, would not be calculated to lessen the feeling of settled disloyalty which persistent oppression must inevitably create in the minds of an intellectual race. And, these accumulating measures of an insensate injustice are now responsible for the existence of four millions of disaffected subjects adjacent to the frontiers of Russia’s two most formidable rival powers, Germany and Austro-Hungary. The Pale of Settlement has thus become, by the lex talionis of a poetic justice, the most vulnerable part of the Russian Empire. It is not alone the seed-bed and centre of Socialism, born of persecution, it is a military weakness well measured and noted in the army bureaus of Berlin and Vienna.
Under the Emperor Alexander II., the emancipator of the serfs, the Jews obtained a respite from many of the most oppressive and vexatious of the penal ukases. Schools hitherto closed to Hebrew children were thrown open to their admission. Restrictions upon attendance at fairs in the interior were removed, while in many other respects the original plan and purpose of the Pale were forgotten, and the dawn of happier days began to rise above the troubled and darkened horizon of the Russian Jew. The freedom of the peasants gave rise to the hope that the same liberal-minded Tsar would break the bonds of his Semitic subjects, when there fell upon all this promise of brighter times the bolt of Nihilist vengeance, in the assassination of the best of Russia’s rulers. The abominable deed, which shocked the world by its terrible character and results, shattered the hopes of Hebrew emancipation, and led to the savage onslaught which was made upon the objects of peasant fury in 1881 and 1882, in many parts of the Empire.
Beyond doubt there were some Jews concerned in Nihilist plots. The man who attempted to kill General Loris Melikoff was of Jewish blood. The women Lewinsohn and Helfman, who were sent to Siberia for complicity in murder conspiracies, were Jewesses, while several prominent Nihilists were believed to be half Hebrew in parentage. But the history of human oppression always explains, even where it may not justify, deeds of savage political vengeance. No race can be denied the ordinary franchises of personal freedom—the right to live secure from the insult and intrusion of a tyrannical law, and the unfair infliction of exceptional burdens—without rousing into dangerous activity passions which appeal to the wild impulse of revenge. The assassination of Alexander II. had nothing to do with the coercion of the Jews. He was not their enemy; he was their friend. But the revolutionary spirit which germinates under despotic rule is generally blind in selecting the objects of its unreasoning fury; just as many Governments are deaf to the pleadings of an enlightened justice in the rule of a country until the shock of some desperate deed compels them to think of that which, if listened to in time, would protect both subjects and monarchs from the fear and consequences of criminal acts. If some Jews were guilty accomplices in the murder of a humane Emperor, so were Russians. And it would have been no greater wrong to punish guiltless peasants for the acts of the Nihilists than to wreak vengeance upon equally innocent Jews.
In Warsaw, Kiev, Rostov, and elsewhere Jews were killed, their houses wrecked, and their shops looted. Outrages occurred throughout the whole Pale of Settlement, and thousands of terrified people fled across the frontiers into Germany, Bohemia, and Roumania. These outbreaks occurred near the end of 1881 and early in the following year and, like the recent massacres in Bessarabia, aroused a widespread expression of sympathy in Europe and America for the hapless objects of Russian popular fury. Manifestations of international feeling greatly impressed the Tsar’s Government, and earnest efforts appeared to have been made to curb the lawless conduct of the mobs. This action, however, instead of being a promise of better things, turned out to be but a prelude to sterner measures than ever against the victims of exceptional laws.
On the 3d of May, 1882, General Ignatieff obtained the Emperor’s sanction and signature to what have since been known as the “May Laws”; the purpose of these being to add more rigorous provisions, as a supplement to the law of 1804. This latter law ordered all the Jews of the Empire to retire within the Pale of Settlement, excepting those who possessed special permits, passports, or privileges to live outside. The May Laws ordered Jews living inside the Pale to remove from the villages into the towns within that area. In a word, General Ignatieff created a Pale within a Pale, and contracted the territory of life and livelihood for upwards of four millions of people within the boundaries of the cities and towns inside the already limited domain of legal domicile. These measures read as follows:
“The Committee of Ministers, having heard the report of the Minister of the Interior on the execution of the temporary orders concerning the Jews, resolved:
“1. As a temporary measure, and until a general revision has been made in a proper manner of the laws concerning the Jews, to forbid the Jews henceforth to settle outside the towns and townlets, the only exceptions admitted being in those Jewish colonies that have existed before and whose inhabitants are agriculturists.