The central authorities were alarmed, and resorted to extraordinary measures to check the spread of the schism. The Committee of Ministers approved the following draconian project submitted by Count Kochubay in 1823:
The chiefs and teachers of the Judaizing sects are to be impressed into military service, and those unfit to serve deported to Siberia. All Jews are to be expelled from the districts in which the sect of Sabbatarians or "Judeans" has made its appearance. Intercourse between the Orthodox inhabitants and the sectarians is to be thwarted in every possible manner. Every outward display of the sect, such as the holding of prayer-meetings and the observance of ceremonies which bear no resemblance to those of Christians, is to be forbidden. Finally, to make the sectarians an object of contempt, instructions are to be given to designate the Sabbatarians as a Jewish[275] sect and to publish far and wide that they are in reality Zhyds, inasmuch as their present designation as Sabbatarians, or adherents of the Mosaic law, does not give the people a proper idea concerning this sect, and does not excite in them that feeling of disgust which must be produced by the realization that what is actually aimed at is to turn them into Zhyds.
All these police regulations, in addition to a scheme of disciplinary ecclesiastic measures, proposed by the Synod for the purpose "of uprooting the Judean sect," were sanctioned by Alexander I. (February and September, 1825). The tragic consequences of these reprisals came to light only during the following reign. Entire settlements were laid waste, thousands of sectarians were banished to Siberia and the Caucasus. Many of them, unable to endure the persecution, returned to the Orthodox faith, but in many cases they did so outwardly, continuing in secret to cling to their sectarian tenets.
4. Recrudescence of Anti-Jewish Legislation
As far as the Jews are concerned, the immediate result of these measures was insignificant. The number of Jews involved in the decree of expulsion from the affected Great Russian Governments was infinitesimal, since, owing to the restriction of the Jewish right of residence, the only Jews occasionally to be found there were a few traveling salesmen or distillers. Yet, indirectly, the Judaizing movement had a harmful effect upon the position of Russian Jewry. The Government circles of St. Petersburg, which were religiously attuned, were irritated by the fact that so many from the Orthodox fold went over to the camp of the very people among whom the Government had been hunting vainly for proselytes, and while the colonies so hospitably prepared for the Israelitish Christians were clamoring for inhabitants, many Great Russian villages had to be stripped of their inhabitants, who were deported to Siberia, on account of their Jewish leanings. In the mind of Golitzin, the Minister of Ecclesiastic Affairs, the opinion gained ground that "the Jews are enjoined by their tenets to convert everybody to their religion." These circumstances produced in Russian official circles a frame of mind conducive to repressive measures, and helped to provide a moral justification for them. Accordingly, the last years of Alexander I.'s reign were marked by a recrudescence of religious oppression, which at times assumed the dimensions of wholesale persecutions.
Sentiments of this kind were responsible for the medieval prohibition against keeping Christian domestics. The prohibition was suggested by Golitzin, a man otherwise far removed from anti-Semitic prejudices, and was officially justified in the Senatorial ukase of April 22, 1820, by the alleged proselytism of the Jews. As instances of the latter the Senate quotes the Judaizing movement in the Government of Voronyezh, the communication of the Governor of Kherson concerning certain Christian domestics in Jewish homes, who had adopted Jewish customs and ceremonies, and so forth.
The same motives, strengthened by the tendency of removing the Jews from the villages, long since pursued by the Government, suggested harsher restrictions in letting to Jews manorial estates with the peasant "souls" attached to them. Ukases issued in 1819 and in subsequent years enjoin the local administration to prosecute all so-called "krestentzya" contracts, transactions whereby the squire leased the harvest of a given year to a Jew, entitling him to employ the peasants for gathering the grain and hay and for other agricultural labors. Such transactions were looked upon as a criminal encroachment of the Jews upon the right of owning slaves, which was the prerogative of the nobles. Orders were accordingly given, that all such farm leases be taken away from the Jews, in spite of the complete ruin of the Jewish lessees, who were left to settle their accounts with the squires.
At the same time the Government set out again to realize its devout consummation—the expulsion of the Jews from the villages and hamlets already provided for by the Statute of 1804, though suspended for a time when the cruelty of the measure spelling ruin to tens of thousands of Jewish families had become apparent. The arguments by means of which the Jewish Committee had endeavored in 1812 to convince, and finally did convince, the Government of the impracticability of such a migration of nations, were blotted out from memory. The local and central authorities were again on the war path against the Jews. To renew the campaign against the rural Jews, the methods which had been tried with success in the time of Dyerzhavin were again resorted to. When, in 1821, hapless White Russia was again stricken by a famine, which affected the Jews to a considerable extent, the local nobility was once more on the alert, placing the whole responsibility for the ruin of the peasantry on the Jewish tenants and saloon-keepers. The landlords proposed that the Government expel all the Jews from the province or at least forbid them to sell spirits in the rural settlements, since the Jews "lead the peasants into ruin." The local authorities, in reply to an inquiry of Senator Baranov, who had been dispatched from St. Petersburg to White Russia, expressed a similar opinion.
The question was first brought up before the Committee which was charged with the task of giving relief to the Governments of White Russia, and included several ministers, among them the all-powerful Arakcheyev. The Relief Committee approved the restrictive project of the nobility, and so, a little later, did the Committee of Ministers. The result was a stern ukase of the Tzar, addressed, on April 11, 1823, to the governors of White Russia, to the following effect:
(1) To forbid the Jews in all the settlements of the Governments of Moghilev and Vitebsk to hold land leases, to keep public houses, saloons, hostelries, posts, and even to live in them [in the villages], whereby all farming contracts of this kind are to become null and void by January 1, 1824. (2) To transplant all the Jews in these two Governments from the settlements into the cities and towns by January 1, 1825.