Her Majesty desires to have it pointed out that, inasmuch as the aforesaid persons of the Jewish religion have been placed by the ordinances of her Majesty in the same position as the others, it is necessary in every case to observe the rule that everyone is entitled to the advantages and rights appertaining to his calling or estate, without distinction of religion or nationality.
The Senate had to comply with the comprehensive and liberal-minded injunction of the Empress in endeavoring to solve the burning problems affecting Jewish life. The solution finally arrived at was a feeble compromise between the economic, national, and class interests which were contradictory to one another. In its ukase of May 7, 1786, the Senate partly fulfilled and partly declined the demands of the White Russian Jews. The right of pursuing freely the liquor trade in the cities was refused, in view of the fact that, according to the new law, liquor-dealing constituted a monopoly of the city administration. On the other hand, the Jews were accorded the rights of participating on equal terms with non-Jews in the public bids for the lease of the pothouses. Passek's rescript forbidding the landowners to let out distilleries and inns to the Jews was declared an illegal infringement of the rights of the landowners, and therefore ordered to be countermanded.
The complicated question as to the compatibility of municipal self-government with Jewish Kahal autonomy was equally solved by a compromise. With respect to the magistracies, town councils, boards of aldermen, and law courts, the Jews were accorded proportionate representation in agreement with the general provisions of the new city government. The common municipal courts, in which Jews were to be represented by elective jurymen of their own, were to handle both civil and criminal cases, not only between persons of different denominations, but also between Jew and Jew. The District and Government Kahals were to deal with spiritual affairs only. They were also to be charged with the distribution of the state and communal taxes in the various Jewish communities.
As for the complaints of the Jews against the oppression of the administration as well as of the magistracies and the landowners, all the Senate did was to point to the principle by which all the members of a given estate are equally vouchsafed the rights appertaining to it. The Senate even went so far as to bar all references to the former Polish laws with their discriminations against the Jews, "for, inasmuch as they [the Jews] are enrolled among the merchants and burghers on the same terms, and pay equal taxes to the exchequer, they ought in all circumstances to be given the same protection and satisfaction as the other subjects." Yet in the very same ukase the Senate refuses to grant the petition of several White Russian Jews who asked to be enrolled in the merchant corporation of Riga, basing its refusal on the absence of a special Imperial permit allowing the Jews to register as merchants outside of White Russian territory.
Here we have the first application of the ignominious principle of subsequent Russian legislation, that everything is forbidden to Jews unless permitted by special law. The ukase of 1786, with all its liberal phrases about the equality of the members of all classes irrespective of religion, imperceptibly instituted a Pale of Settlement by attaching the Jews to definite localities, which had been wrested from Poland, and refusing them the right of residence in other parts of Russia. The implied criticism of the Senate, directed against "the former Polish laws with their discriminations against the Jews," could with far greater justice be leveled in much sharper form against the Russian legislation which subsequently curtailed the Jewish right of transit and commerce to an extent undreamt-of even by the fiercest anti-Jewish restrictionists of Poland.
While in the first two decades after the occupation of White Russia the Russian Government observed a comparatively liberal, at least a well-intentioned, attitude towards the Jewish question, in later years it openly embarked upon a policy of exceptional laws and restrictions. The general reactionary tendency, which was partly the result of the "ominous" successes of the great French Revolution, and gained the upper hand in Russia towards the end of Catherine's reign, was mirrored also in the position of the Jews. At that juncture the second and third partitions of Poland (1793, 1795) were effected, and hundreds of thousands of Jews from Lithuania, Volhynia, and Podolia were added to the numbers of Russian subjects. The country, which barely a generation before had not tolerated a single Jew within its borders, now included a territory more densely populated by Jews than any other. Some means of reconciliation had to be found between these historic opposites, the traditional anti-Jewish policy of Russia, on the one hand, and the presence of millions of Jews within its dominions, on the other, and such means were found in that system of Jewish rightlessness which since that time has become one of the principal characteristics of the political genius of Russian autocracy. The ancient Muscovite policy peeped out with ever greater boldness from beneath the European mask of St. Petersburg.
On the very eve of the second partition of Poland, when the Russian Government merely anticipated an influx of Jews, it had a fatal gift in store for them: the law of the Pale of Settlement, which was to create within the monarchy of peasant serfs a special class of territorially restricted city serfs. It should be added that the impulse towards the creation of this disability did not come from above but from below, from the influential Christian middle class, which, fearing free competition, began to shout for protection.
The first step in robbing the Jews of Russia of their freedom of movement was made a few years after the occupation of White Russia. The Jewish merchants of the White Russian Governments Moghilev and Polotzk (or, as the latter is called at present, Vitebsk) which border on the Great Russian Governments of Smolensk and Moscow, began to visit the two cities of the same name and carry on trade, wholesale and retail, in imported dry goods. They did a good business, for the Jewish merchants sold goods of a higher quality at a lower figure than their Christian competitors. This set the merchants of Moscow agog, and in February, 1790, they lodged a complaint with the commander-in-chief of Moscow against the Jews who sell "foreign goods by lowering the current prices, and thereby inflict very considerable damage upon the local trade." The complainants point to the ancient tradition of the Muscovite Empire excluding the Jews from its borders, and assure the authorities that Jewish rivalry will throw the trade of Moscow into complete "disorder," and bring the Russian merchants to the verge of ruin.