The political upheavals of the transition period (1789-1815) were bound to react violently on the economic status of Russo-Polish Jewry. The vast Jewish population of Western Russia was at that time divided into two parts: the larger part resided in the towns and townlets, the smaller lived in the villages. The efforts made by the Russian Government during that period, to squeeze the whole Jewish population into the urban estates and to single out from its midst a new class of agriculturists, failed to produce the desired effect. Instead it succeeded in disturbing the former equilibrium between the urban and the rural occupations of the Jews.
The urban Jew was either a business man or an artisan or a saloon-keeper. In many cities the Jewish mercantile element was numerically superior to the Christian. The increased Jewish activity in the export trade is particularly noticeable. Jewish merchants traveled annually in large numbers to the fairs abroad, particularly to that of Leipsic, to buy merchandise, principally dry goods, at the same time exporting the products of Poland and Russia, such as furs, skins, etc. The gradual absorption of Polish territory by Russia opened up a new, immense market, that of the central Russian provinces, for the goods imported from abroad. It was natural that the Jews began to flock to those provinces. But their way was at once blocked by the local Russian merchants, who began to clamor against Jewish competition, and forced the Government to recognize the monopoly of native "interests," to the detriment of the consumer.[253]
True, the monopolists did not succeed altogether in shutting the Russian interior to foreign cheap goods and finery, which the Jewish merchants still continued to import, under the clause in the Statute of 1804 which granted Jews the right of visiting the interior Governments on special gubernatorial passports. Yet an untrammeled development of Jewish commerce was rendered impossible by this artificial barrier between Western and Eastern Russia.
The second urban profession, handicrafts, was considered of lower rank than commerce. It was pursued by the poorest class of the population. Artisan labor commanded very low prices. Purely Jewish trade-unions were rare, and when a Jewish artisan summoned enough courage to leave his native townlet and seek employment in a large city, he was sure to encounter the animosity of the organized Christian guilds. We have seen that before the second partition of Poland such an "encounter" assumed the shape of a pogrom in the Polish capital.[254]
By the side of the store and the workshop stood the public house or saloon, which was generally connected with an inn or a hostelry. The sale of liquor in the cities depended primarily on the peasants arriving from the villages on festival and market days. On the whole the liquor traffic occupied a subordinate place in the cities. Its mainstay was in the villages.
All serious observers of the economic status of the Jews at that time bear witness to the fact that in the majority of cities Jewish labor formed the corner-stone of a civilized economic life, that without the Jew it was impossible to buy, or to sell, or to have any kind of article made. The Jew, who was satisfied with small wages and profits, was thereby able to lower both the cost of production and the price of merchandise. He was content with a pittance, his physical needs being extraordinarily limited. Thanks to the mediation of the ubiquitous Jewish business man, the peasant was able to dispose of his products on the spot, even those which because of their small value would not be worth carrying to the city. In spite of all his indefatigable, feverish labors, the Jew was on the average as poor as the peasant, except that he was free from the vice of drunkenness, one of the sources of the peasant's economic misery. The poverty of the Jew was the artificial result of the fact that the cities and townlets were overcrowded with petty tradesmen and artisans, and this congestion was further aggravated by the systematic removal of the Jews from their age-long rural occupations and the consequent influx of village Jews into the towns.
It is necessary to point out that when the official records harp on the "liquor traffic" in the villages as the sole occupation of Jews, they fail to appreciate the many-sidedness of the rural pursuits of the Jews, which were connected with the liquor traffic, to be sure, but were by no means identical with it. While leasing from the squire or the crown the right of distilling, the Jew farmed at the same time other items of rural economy, such as the dairies, the mills, and the fishing ponds. He was furthermore engaged in buying grain from the peasants and selling them at the same time such indispensable articles as salt, utensils, agricultural tools, etc., imported by him from the town. He often combined in his person the occupations of liquor-dealer, shopkeeper, and produce merchant. The road leading from the village to the city was dotted with Jewish inns or public houses, which, before the age of railroads, served as halting-places for travelers. This whole economic structure, which had been built up gradually in the course of centuries, the Russian Government made its business to demolish. As early as the reign of Catherine II. the governors frequently drove the Jewish villagers into the cities, acting under the "organic law" which makes it incumbent upon Jews to "register among the merchants or burghers." The ambiguous ukase of 1795, to the effect, that "endeavors be made to transplant the Jews into the District towns, so that these people may not wander about to the detriment of society," gave the zealous bureaucrats a free hand. When the Law of 1804 ordered the expulsion of all Jews from the villages at the end of three years, many squires, without waiting for the time limit to expire, refused their Jewish tenants the right of residence and trade in their villages. The Jews began to rush into the cities, where even the long-settled residents could not manage to make a living.
True, the Government was luring the persecuted Jews into two new vocations, the establishment of factories and of agricultural colonies. But the impecunious village Jew had neither the capital nor the capacity for opening factories. Moreover, it was of no conceivable use to call industries artificially into being, without having first secured a market for the manufactured products. Several woolen mills had been founded by Jews in Lithuania and Volhynia, but all they could do was to provide work for a few thousand people. It was thus natural that all eyes turned towards agricultural colonization.
The Statute of 1804 promised to provide impecunious Jews desirous of engaging in agriculture with free land in several Governments, to grant them loans for their equipment, and exempt them from taxation for a number of years. The exiled village Jews clutched at this promise as an anchor of salvation. In 1806 several Jewish groups in the Government of Moghilev appealed to the governor to transfer them to New Russia, there to engage in corn-growing. The delegate of one of these groups, Nahum Finkelstein, even traveled to St. Petersburg to lay the matter before Minister Kochubay, and was dispatched by the latter to the Government of Kherson for the purpose of inspecting and selecting the land. The Minister, acting in agreement with the Governor of Kherson, Duke Richelieu, decided to set aside separate parcels of land in the steppes of that region and to settle Jews on them under the auspices of the New Russian "Immigration Bureau." Scarcely had the two Moghilev groups completed the arrangements for their emigration, when scores of similar applications began to come in from Jewish groups in other Governments of the Pale. By the end of 1806 the number of applicants mounted up to fifteen hundred families, numbering some seven thousand souls. The Russian authorities found themselves in an awkward position. They were caught unprepared for the transfer of so many persons at the expense of the state. In 1807 four colonies of Jewish agriculturists were established in the Government of Kherson, the first among the Jewish colonies of South Russia. The number of settlers amounted to some three hundred families, consisting of two thousand souls.