This extension of Jewish autonomy was a concession wrested from the Government by the force of circumstances, by the power of a compact population living a life of its own and refusing to efface itself to the point of merging with the surrounding population and fusing all its public interests with the affairs of the general city administration. Yet it was just this "municipalization" of the Jewish communities that the Russian Government had been aiming at for a long time. From the time of Catherine II. it cherished the thought of "destroying Jewish separateness," by forcing the Jews into the framework of the Russian class organization, particularly into the estates of the merchants and burghers.
When, shortly after 1780, the Jews were accorded the hitherto unheard-of privilege of participating in the city government with the right of active and passive suffrage for the magistracies and municipal courts, the lawgivers of St. Petersburg were confident that Russian Jewry, in a transport of delight, would throw overboard its old Kahal autonomy, and eagerly coalesce with the Christian urban estates, to form a common municipal organization. But neither the Jews nor the Christians justified these confident expectations. The former, while clinging as heretofore to their time-honored communal organization, were glad to participate in the elections to the magistracies, in which up till then their traditional enemies, the Christian merchants and burghers, had been the masters, and in which they frankly proposed to protect their interests, representing as they did a considerable portion of the urban population.
But here they encountered furious opposition on the part of their Christian fellow-residents. In the two White Russian Governments of Vitebsk and Moghilev several Jews had been elected to the magistracies as aldermen and members of the law courts. But in the majority of cases the Christians managed to obtain an artificial majority and keep the Jews out of the municipal administration. Complaints lodged with the central authorities in St. Petersburg were of no avail, for the Russian, and even more so the Polish, burghers regarded the bestowal of municipal rights upon the Jews as a violation of their own chartered privileges. Yielding to this mood of the Christian population, the administrators of the southwestern Governments established on their own responsibility a restrictive percentage for the participation of Jews in the magistracies, by limiting, even in places with a predominatingly Jewish population, the number of Jewish members to be elected to the magistracies to one-third. The representatives of the Jewish majority of the population in the city administration were thus invariably reduced to a minority, and were not in a position to protect the interests of their coreligionists, either in the assessment of the municipal taxes or in the cases brought before the municipal law courts. Here, too, the protest addressed to St. Petersburg by a delegate acting on behalf of the Podolian Jews did not remedy the situation.
In the two Lithuanian Governments which had fallen into the hands of Russia after the third partition of Poland, in 1795, the Christian opposition scored even a greater success. For here it became necessary to suspend altogether the operation of the law granting the Jews representation in the magistracies. When the Senatorial ukase of 1802, making the Jews eligible for public office, became known in Vilna, the local Christian population raised a cry of indignation. The Philistine arrogance of the old "city fathers," combined with the low motives of religious and class hatred, manifested itself in a petition addressed in February, 1803, by the Christian burghers of Vilna to Alexander I.
In this petition the residents of Vilna protest against the violation of their ancient privilege, in pursuance of which "Jews and members of other faiths are forbidden to hold office" in Lithuania. The admission of Jews to the magistracies is a misfortune and a disgrace for the capital of Lithuania, for
they [the Jews] have not the slightest conception of morality, while their form of education does not fit them for the calling of a judge, and altogether this people can only maintain itself by all kinds of trickery.... The Christians will lose all interest in accepting public office once the Jews are given the right to dominate them.
The petitioners point out threateningly that the domination of the Jews, i. e. their participation in the magistracies, though it be limited to one-third of the number of aldermen, will undermine the people's confidence in the municipal administration and judiciary. "For the obedience of the mob will be turned into defamation when the Christian who enters the sacred place [of justice] beholds a Jew as his superior and judge, submission to whom is unnatural, by reason of class and religion."
The Christian population of Kovno resorted, in presenting a similar petition, to another incontrovertible argument against the admission of Jews to municipal offices. Referring to the cross with the "sacred figure" of the crucifixion, which is placed on the court table for the administration of the oath, the petitioners assert that the Jewish members of the court "will refuse to look upon it, but, by reason of their faith, will think disrespectfully of it, so that, instead of judicial impartiality, there will be mockery of the Christian law." The Government found these arguments convincing, and in 1805 repealed the ukase of the Senate concerning the election of Jews to the magistracies of Lithuania.
In this way the stolid rancor of the "privileged" burghers in some places handicapped the activity of the Jews in the city administration, and in others entirely suppressed it. The Jewish communities, backward though they were, displayed sufficient civic courage to send their representatives to the camp of the enemy to work in common with him for the benefit of the whole urban population. But the narrow-minded burghers, who were thoroughly saturated with medieval prejudices, would not recognize the Jews as their fellow-townsmen. The Jews had to reckon with this coarse conservatism of the surrounding population. They were still able to fall back upon their own communal self-government, and, had their social energies been directed towards that end, the old Kahal autonomy, in spite of all Government restrictions, might to a certain extent have come into its own again. But another factor thwarted this revival—the deep rift in the Russian Jewish community, which began with the rise of Hasidism in the second half of the eighteenth century, and was an accomplished fact at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
2. The Hasidic Schism and the Intervention of the Government