“2. To suspend temporarily the completion of instruments of purchase of real property mortgages in the name of Jews; as also the registration of Jews as lessees of landed estates, situated outside the precincts of towns and townlets, and the issue of powers of attorney to enable them to manage and dispose of such property.
“3. To forbid Jews to carry on business on Sundays and on Christian holidays, and that the same laws in force, about the closing on such days of places of business belonging to Christians, shall, in the same way, apply to places of business owned by Jews.
“4. That the measures laid down in paragraphs 1, 2, and 3, apply only to the Governments within the Pale of Jewish Settlement. His Majesty the Emperor was graciously pleased to give his assent to the above resolutions of the Committee of Ministers, on the 3d of May, 1882.”
These Laws did not apply to the Jews of Poland.
These “temporary measures” remain to-day the potential law of Russia regarding Jews. They were not immediately enforced. Russia is never in a hurry in matters of this kind. She waits and notes the material results of such enactments at home, and the moral effects upon opinion abroad. In the case of the May Laws, there was a universal chorus of condemnation in Western Europe. It was felt everywhere that any attempt to put such savage measures into operation must either lead to the flight of hundreds of thousands of wretched Jews over the borders, or to their death within the crowded towns of the Pale, from starvation induced by an overwhelming congestion of labour without means of employment. The laws were, therefore, left inoperative, but in terrorem; General Ignatieff being conveniently superseded, while a Commission presided over by Count Pahlen was appointed by the Emperor to prepare a report upon the whole Jewish question.
CHAPTER III
FROM THE IGNATIEFF LAWS TO THE KISHINEFF MASSACRES
PRINCE DEMIDOFF SAN DONATO was a member of the Pahlen Commission, and in his admirable work “La Question Juive en Russie” (published at Bruxelles, 1884,) he gives, in his own proposed solution of the problem of the Russian Jew, the broad and liberal measures which forced themselves upon the Commission as an essential basis for a settlement of the question on just and rational lines. He recommended the three following proposals:
“(1) For the re-establishment of more healthy relations between the Jews and the other inhabitants and counteracting Jewish industrial and other exploitation in the western region [the Pale of Settlement], it is necessary to grant the Jews complete civil equality and freedom of choice of residence. This would lead to a greater dissemination of the Jewish population, which is now crowded together in particular districts; to the alleviation of the poverty and hopeless condition of the Jewish masses, and would relieve the part of the country they now occupy from excessive industrial and other competition.
“(2) In order to destroy Jewish exclusiveness and to facilitate the fusion of the Jews with the rest of the population it is necessary to incorporate the Jews with the local rural and urban communities, and to subject them completely in fiscal, administrative, and other respects to the rules and regulations established for these communities. Those Jews who would wish to settle in the interior provinces should be allowed to enjoy the right of joining peasant and burgher communities in the places of their domicile in the ordinary way.
“(3) It is at the same time necessary that serious attention should be directed towards the organisation of elementary schools for the juvenile Jewish population, inasmuch as the school must always be one of the principal instruments for the moral training and Russification of the Jewish masses.”