Religious intolerance had been the prime motive of Russia's policy of completely excluding the Jews from her borders. Through the partitions of Poland from 1772 to 1795, she became the unwilling ruler over the destinies of millions of Jews living in Lithuania, Western and Southwestern Russia and Poland proper. The historic medieval principle by which the Jews were regarded as an alien and heretic race living among the Christian peoples—a principle that had, with the growth of modern ideas, been rapidly losing its hold upon the West-European nations—expressed Russia's attitude towards the Jews and conformed to her strongly medieval outlook and organization of this period. Thus, at the time when the emancipation of the Jews had begun to be in Western Europe a concomitant of social progress, Russia set to work to recreate almost typically medieval conditions for a vaster Jewish population than had ever before been assembled in any European country.
The Jews were placed in the position practically of aliens, whose activities were regulated by special laws. The first and the most far-reaching of these laws limited their right of residence to those provinces in which they lived at the time of the Polish partitions. In this way originated that reproduction on a vast scale of the medieval Ghetto—the Pale of Jewish Settlement. The elementary right of free movement and choice of residence, which was denied to the Jews, has remained the principal restriction to which they are subjected.
The Pale of Jewish Settlement, continued with but few changes to our day, includes the fifteen provinces of Western and Southwestern Russia—Vilna, Kovno, Grodno, Minsk, Vitebsk, Mohileff, Volhynia, Podolia, Kiev (except the city of Kiev), Chernigov, Poltava, Bessarabia, Kherson, Jekaterinoslav, Taurida (except the city of Yalta), and the ten provinces into which Poland is divided—Warsaw, Kalisz, Kielce, Lomza, Lublin, Petrikow, Plock, Radom, Suvalk and Siedlec. From the rest of the eighty-nine provinces and territories—constituting nearly 95 per cent of the total territory of the Russian Empire—the Jews were excluded.
In the course of a century the special laws relating to the Jews have multiplied greatly until they now consist of more than a thousand articles, regulating their religious and communal life, economic activities and occupations, military service, property rights, education, etc., and imposing special taxes over and above those borne by all other Russian subjects. The direct consequence of these laws was to mark the status of the Jews as the lowest in the Empire, placing them in the position of aliens as to rights and citizens as to obligations.[34]
The policy of the Russian government throughout the 19th century has been full of contrasts and contradictions. Attempts at forcible russification and assimilation, which with Nicholas I practically spelled conversion, have alternated with methods of repression which sought to prevent closer contact between the Jewish and the native populations.
It was the liberal epoch of Alexander II that gave the first real promise of emancipation to Russian Jewry. The great reforms of this era benefited the Jews along with the other subjects of the Empire. With the influence of the liberals over the government there came a new attitude regarding the Jews and their value as economic and cultural forces. Partly to relieve the intense competition in the Pale, harmful both to the Christian and the Jewish populations, but chiefly to give the provinces of interior Russia the benefit of the superior industrial and commercial, and professional abilities of the Jews, laws were enacted allowing certain classes of Jews to live outside of the Pale. These were, chiefly, master-artisans, merchants of the first guild, students and graduates of universities and higher educational institutions, and members of the liberal professions.
With these laws and with the opening of the high schools and universities to the Jews, the movement for Russianization received a mighty impetus. Though these reforms, hedged about and limited by onerous conditions, affected comparatively few and hardly touched the life of the Jewish masses in a radical way, nevertheless, the impulse which even these relatively slight reforms gave to the current of Jewish life in Russia was far out of proportion to the relief they afforded. Jewish hopes for a final emancipation soared high: it seemed as if the walls of the Pale needed but little more to be broken down.
The reaction that followed the assassination of Alexander II fell upon the Jews as a national calamity. To the feudal party which now came into control, the Jews seemed the very embodiment of the forces in the Empire whose progress they were seeking to stem. No other nationality in the Russian Empire concentrated in itself so many characteristics and tendencies opposed to the ideals and interests of the Russian ruling classes. To the Church, dominated by a religio-national point of view, they were the very opposite of her ideal type of Russian orthodox, their very existence in Russia being regarded as an anomaly and as an actual and possible influence in disintegrating the religious faith of the orthodox peasants. To the nationalists they were an alien people racially and religiously, whose assimilation with the Russian people was neither possible nor desirable. To the autocracy and the bureaucracy there was the added fear from their intellectual superiority and their zeal for education of their playing a powerful part among the liberal forces seeking political freedom. Indeed, the Jews, whose economic and cultural activities and interests bound them closely to Western Europe and were in themselves modernizing and liberalizing influences, growing all the stronger through the greater freedom offered them during the liberal epoch, excited the deep repugnance of the feudal forces now directing the destinies of the state. To them the Jews spelled anathema. Separated from the great masses of the Russian people by race, nationality, religion, occupations and other social and psychological characteristics, they offered an unusually favorable object of attack.
It soon became clear that the new régime had determined upon making the Jews a central feature in their policy of reaction. At once a many-sided campaign against the Jews was begun. A powerful machinery of persecution was at hand in the existing Jewish laws. All that was necessary was to revive them, to interpret them rigorously, to tighten the legislative screws which had become loosened during the preceding liberal régime. This, however, seemed insufficient. It was determined that a powerful and definitive blow must be struck at the roots of their very existence in Russia.
The main attack was economic. The industrial and commercial activities of the Jews, especially in the Pale, make them, as we have seen, among the chief industrial producers for the peasants, as well as the chief buyers of their agricultural produce. This contact between the Jews and the peasants was a vital need in the economic life of both. The familiar charge that the Jews were exploiters of the peasantry was revived. Behind this charge lay the medieval economic prejudice, which attributes no really useful rôle to the merchant or trader.[35] In a custom-ridden economic order, the competitive methods of the Jewish traders smacked of commercial deceit. Principally, however, this charge served for a convenient explanation of the change of policy towards the Jews.