Friesel urges the necessity of a "general reform," and professes to take Western Europe as a model, but all he adopted thence was the most objectionable tactics of "enlightened absolutism." In his opinion "the education of the Jewish people must begin with their religion." It is necessary "to wipe out all Jewish sects with their superstitions and to forbid strictly the introduction of any innovations whereby impostors might seduce the masses and plunge them into ever greater ignorance," a veiled allusion to the Hasidim and in particular to their Tzaddiks, whose strife with the anti-Hasidic rabbis was engaging the attention of the Russian Government at the time. He further recommends that the Jews be forced to send their children to the Government schools, to conduct all their business in Polish, to wear the customary non-Jewish form of dress, and not to marry before the age of twenty. Finally the Jews are to be classified in three categories, merchants, artisans, and tillers of the soil, these three estates to form part of the general class stratification of the Empire. In this way the fiscal services of the Kahals could be dispensed with, and the Kahals themselves would pass out of existence automatically.
The suggestions of the leaders of the nobility as well as the proposals of the governors were turned over in the spring of 1800 to the Senate, whose function was to examine and utilize them for a new legal enactment or "statute." Here they happened to fall into the hands of one of the Senators, Gabriel Dyerzhavin, the celebrated Russian poet, who by the whim of fate was soon to blossom forth into a "specialist" in rebus Judaicis.
3. Dyerzhavin's "Opinion" on the Jewish Problem
Dyerzhavin was born in one of the remote eastern provinces of Russia, and spent the greater part of his life in the Government offices of St. Petersburg. He had never come in contact with the Jewish population, until, in 1799, he was dispatched to the little town of Shklov in White Russia, to look into the case of the owner of the town, a retired general by the name of Zorich. The latter had been one of the favorites of Catherine, and lived the fast and extravagant life of a Russian country squire in the town which was his private property. His typically Russian devil-may-care conduct was not calculated to spare the large Jewish population of the town. Zorich evidently fancied that the Jews living on his land were just as much his serfs as were the peasants, and he handled them in the way serfs were dealt with in those days. He expelled several of them from the town, and seized their houses. Others he beat with his own hands, and still others he forced to supply him with drink free of charge. The Jews appealed to the Government against this attempt to turn them into serfs, and it was in response to their appeal that Emperor Paul dispatched Senator Dyerzhavin, with instructions to curb the violence of the boisterous squire. Dyerzhavin, who was imbued with the spirit of serfdom, could not but take a mild view of the high-handed methods of Zorich, and came to the conclusion that the Jews were partly to blame for the disorders that had taken place. The death of Zorich in 1800 put a stop to the case, but theoretically the Senate decided that, according to Russian law, the Jews, by virtue of their being members of the merchant and burgher class, could not be regarded as serfs even in the towns and settlements owned by squires.
A year later Dyerzhavin was again dispatched to White Russia, this time invested with very large powers. The province was in the throes of a terrible famine, brought about not only by bad crops but also by the outrageous conduct of the landed proprietors. These gentlemen, instead of supplying their peasants with foodstuffs, preferred to send large quantities of grain either abroad, for sale, or into their distilleries, for the production of whiskey, which, instead of feeding the peasants, poisoned them. In dispatching Dyerzhavin to White Russia, Emperor Paul gave him full power to put a stop to these abuses and to inflict severe penalties on the squires, who, "moved by unexampled greed, leave their peasants without assistance." They were to be dispossessed, and their estates placed under state control (June 16, 1800). In a supplementary instruction added by the Procurator-General of the Senate, Obolanin, the following clause was added: "And whereas, according to information received, the exhaustion of the White Russian peasants is to a rather considerable extent caused by the Zhyds, it is his Majesty's wish that your Excellency may give particular attention to their part in it and submit an opinion how to avert the general damage inflicted by them." This unmistakably anti-Semitic postscript, to which Dyerzhavin was in all likelihood a party, to which at all events he gave his approval, was designed to mitigate the blow aimed at the squires and turn it against the Jews. The conspiracy of these two bureaucrats, who believed in serfdom and sided with the squires, put an altogether different complexion on Dyerzhavin's mission.
The pacification of White Russia was speedily accomplished. Dyerzhavin placed the estate of one Polish magnate under state control, and personally closed up a Jewish distillery in the town of Lozno, the residence of the famous Hasidic Tzaddik, Rabbi Zalman Shneorsohn. He proceeded with such energy that one Jewish woman complained of having received blows at his hands. After having "installed order," Dyerzhavin set out to do what he considered to be his main task—prepare an elaborate memorandum concerning the Jews, under the characteristic title, "Opinion of Senator Dyerzhavin Concerning the Averting of the Want of Foodstuffs in White Russia by Curbing the Avaricious Pursuits of the Jews, also Concerning Their Re-education, and Other Matters."
The very title betrays the underlying motive of the writer, to make the Jews the scapegoat for the economic ruin of the province, in which the squires had always been the masters of the situation. But Dyerzhavin did not confine himself to the evaluation of the economic activity of the Jews. He was no less anxious to depict their inner life, their beliefs, their training and education, their communal institutions, their "moral situation." For all these purposes he drew upon a multitude of sources. While writing his memorandum in Vitebsk, in the fall of 1800, he gathered information about the Jews from the local anti-Jewish merchants and burghers, and from the "scientific" instructors at the Jesuit College in the same city, in the court-houses, and—from "the very Cossacks themselves."
It must be added that Dyerzhavin also had in his possession two projects from the pen of "enlightened Jews." The author of one of them, Nota Shklover by name, a wealthy merchant, who had served as purveyor to Potemkin's army, and, living at that time in St. Petersburg, knew the drift of opinion in Government circles, proposed to attract the Jews to manufacturing, which should be introduced, in connection with agriculture and cattle-breeding, into colonies set apart for this purpose "in the neighborhood of the Black Sea ports." The originator of the second project, a physician from Kreslavka, in the Government of Vitebsk, by the name of Frank,—evidently a German Jew of the Mendelssohnian type—suggested that the Government through Dyerzhavin focus its attention on the reform of the Jewish religion, which "in its original purity rested on unadulterated Deism and the postulates of pure morality," but in the course of time was distorted by "the absurdities of the Talmud." Frank accordingly proposes to follow the example set by Mendelssohn in Germany, to throw open the Russian public schools to the Jews, and to teach their children Russian, German, and Hebrew, implying of course that the Jew thus educated will not fail to prove himself of unquestionable benefit to the country.