In this course of action, powerful aid was extended by the bureaucracy, recruited mainly from the lower nobility and the middle classes. Depending for their support upon the urbans, and seeking to prevent the entrance of Jews into state service, which would have resulted from the granting of political rights to the Jews, the bureaucracy have acted in harmony with the middle classes in the attempt to make the Jews politically, economically, and culturally powerless.
Thus the situation that the Jews in Roumania have been facing for thirty years is abnormal, from every standpoint. At no time within thirty years has there been any serious question of giving to the Jews the political rights, the granting of which had been made the condition of the recognition of Roumania's independence by the Powers. The history of the succeeding thirty years has been one of gradual, steady and systematic deprivation of one civil right after another. To the prohibition of freedom of movement has been added that of work; one occupation after another has been prohibited to Jews under the mask of foreigners. From all the branches of state service Jews have been almost completely debarred. Participation in important private and public enterprises has similarly been limited. The schools have been largely closed to them. The effect has been partly registered in a rate of illiteracy higher in the cities among the Jewish children between seven and fifteen than among the non-Jewish children of the same age.
Thus the conscious policy of Roumania has been that of oppression, political, economic and social, with the deliberate aim of making it impossible for the Jews to live in Roumania. This method of indirect expulsion is the essence of her policy of thirty years. As such it was recognized and openly stated in the only formal protest against her manner of fulfilling the conditions of the Berlin Treaty, made by the United States, through its Secretary of State, John Hay, whose circular to the Powers signatory to the Treaty demanded that Roumania be called to account for her treatment of the Jews, and her dishonesty in violating the pledges given by her to the Powers.[45]
III. AUSTRIA-HUNGARY
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the legal position of the Jews in Austria-Hungary differed from that of their brethren in Russia and Roumania only in degree. Prohibited the free exercise of their religion, the right to hold real property, and to enter certain occupations, and burdened by special Jewish taxes, the Jews remained a class apart and governed in all their activities by special laws. Their legal emancipation, begun in 1848, was definitely established by the promulgation in each division of the Empire of the Fundamental Law of 1867, declaring that religion should not be a ground for discrimination in civil and political rights.
The civil and political equality of the Jews was a cardinal principle of the creed of German-Austrian liberalism and one of a number of its victories embodied in the Constitution of 1867. Austrian economic and social life at this period was, however, too saturated with medievalism to allow for a complete revolution in the attitude toward the Jews. On the other hand, the influential part played by the Jews in the liberal movement and the fact that a group of wealthy Jews were powerful factors in the haute finance and in the commercial life of the country were made the basis of an attack by the feudal-clericals upon the Jews.
The great financial crash of 1873, in which several Jewish financial houses were concerned, was the starting-point of political antisemitism in Austria. The Jews were denounced as the representatives of the capitalist order of society, with its overwhelming concentration of wealth and its exploitation of the industrial and the agricultural proletariat. The Christian-Socialist movement began with antisemitism as the corner-stone of its economic and social doctrines. Its opposition to the Jews and to capitalism was largely due to medieval prejudices in favor of the Christian-feudal state and the medieval industrial organization. In the early eighties it began to triumph when the "small man" or petty industrialist received political power through an extension of the suffrage.
It reached its height in the nineties, when, under the combined influence of feudal-clerical nobles, the clergy and the lower middle class, a period of reaction set in. In Vienna, in 1895, the antisemite Lueger was elected mayor. Powerless though they were to change the legal status of the Jews, the antisemites succeeded in creating in both upper and lower circles of Austrian society an atmosphere of antagonism to the Jews which has prevented the complete fulfillment of the principle of equality as set forth in the constitution.
The clericals have fanned the flames of religious hatred especially among the peasantry by ritual-murder accusations, which have been rife and have played a large part in strengthening the sentiment of hostility toward the Jews.
In Galicia, the position of the Jews became unsettled, owing to a variety of causes.[46] Although one of the least advanced among the Austrian crown lands, Galicia has experienced within the last half-century an industrial and commercial development along with the rest of the Empire. This resulted in the growth of a middle class particularly among the Poles, which began to compete for supremacy with the Jews. The improvements in transportation and communication, the organization of agricultural syndicates, for the purpose of directly purchasing and selling the produce of the peasants, and the creation of rural credit societies, helped considerably to displace the Jewish middlemen and traders as well as the Jewish money-lenders, who dealt largely with the peasantry. The movement to develop Galicia industrially was fostered on national lines by these Polish organizations, which carried on an extensive propaganda and systematically organized economic boycotts against the Jews. "Do not buy of Jews", "Do not patronize Jewish artisans", became familiar cries in Galicia as in other parts of Austria.