In the meantime, in the land of the Tzars events went their own course. The Moscow tragedy was nearing its end, but its last stages were marked by scenes reminiscent of the times of the inquisition. After banishing from Moscow the larger part of the Jewish population, the governor-general, Grand Duke Sergius, made up his mind to humble the remaining Jewish population of the second Russian capital so thoroughly that its existence in the center of Greek Orthodoxy might escape public public notice. The eyes of the Russian officials at Moscow were offended by the sight of the new beautiful synagogue structure which had been finished in the fateful year of the expulsion. At first, orders were given to remove from the top of the building the large cupola capped by the Shield of David, which attracted the attention of all passers-by. Later on, the police, without any further ado, shut down the synagogue, in which services had already begun to be held, pending the receipt of a new special permit to re-open it. Rabbi Minor of Moscow and the warden of the synagogue addressed a petition to the governor-general, in which they begged permission to hold services in the building, the construction of which had been duly sanctioned by the Government, pointing to the fact that Judaism was one of the religions tolerated in Russia. In answer to their petition, they received the following stern reply from St. Petersburg, dated September 23, 1892:
His Imperial Majesty, after listening to a report of the Minister of the Interior concerning the willful opening of the Moscow Synagogue by Rabbi Minor and Warden Schneider, was graciously pleased to command as follows:
First. Rabbi Minor of Moscow shall be dismissed from his post and transferred for permanent residence to the Pale of Jewish Settlement.
Second. Warden Schneider shall be removed from the precincts of Moscow for two years.
Third. The Jewish Synagogue Society shall be notified that, unless, by January 1, 1893, the synagogue structure will have been sold or transformed into a charitable institution, it will be sold at public auction by the gubernatorial administration of Moscow.
The rabbi and the warden went into exile, while the dead body of the murdered synagogue—its structure—was saved from desecration by placing in it one of the schools of the Moscow community.
The fight against the places of Jewish worship was renewed by the police a few years later, during the reign of Nicholas II. The principal synagogue being closed, the Jews of Moscow were compelled to hold services in uncomfortable private premises. There were fourteen houses of prayer of this kind in various parts of the city, but, on the eve of the Jewish Passover of 1894, the governor-general gave orders to close nine of these houses, so that the religious needs of a community of ten thousand souls had to be satisfied in five houses of worship, situated in narrow, unsanitary quarters. The Government had achieved its purpose. The synagogue was humbled into the dust, and its sight no longer offended the eyes of the Greek-Orthodox zealots. The Jews of Moscow were forced to pour out their hearts before God in some back yards, in the stuffy atmosphere of private dwellings. As in the days of the Spanish inquisition, these private houses of worship would, on the solemn days of Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur, be stealthily visited by the "marranos" of Moscow, those Jews who had saved themselves from the wholesale expulsions by fictitious conversion to Christianity. The passionate prayers of repentance of these involuntary apostates rose up to heaven as they had done in centuries gone-by from the underground synagogues of Seville, Toledo, and Saragossa.
By and by, the attempt to take the Jewish citadel by storm gave way to the former regular state of siege, which had for its object to starve out the Jews. The municipal counterreform of 1892 dealt a severe political blow to Russian Jewry. Under the old law, the number of Jewish aldermen in the municipal administration had been limited to one-third of the total number of aldermen, aside from the prohibition barring the Jews from the office of burgomaster [1]. Notwithstanding these restrictions, the Jews played a conspicuous part in municipal self-government, and could boast of a number of prominent municipal workers. This activity of the Jews went against the grain of the inquisitorial trio, Pobyedonostzev, Durnovo, and Plehve, and they decided to bar the Jews completely from participation in the municipal elections.
[Footnote 1: See p. 198 et seq.]
The reactionary, anti-democratic "Municipal Regulation" of 1892 proclaimed publicly this new Jewish disfranchisement. The new law deprived the Jews of their right of passive and active election to the municipal Dumas, merely granting the local administration the right to appoint at its pleasure a number of Jewish aldermen, not to exceed one-tenth of the total membership of the Duma. Moreover, these Jewish aldermen "by the grace of the police" were prohibited from serving on the executive organs of the Duma, the administrative council, and the various standing committees. As a result, even there where the Jews formed sixty and seventy per cent of the total urban population, their only representatives in the municipal administration were men who were the willing tools of the municipal powers and who, moreover, were quantitatively restricted to five or ten per cent of the total number of aldermen.