[Footnote 4: The governments of Chernigov and Poltava.]
[Footnote 5: The governments of Kherson, Yekaterinoslav, Tavrida, and
Bessarabia.]
[Footnote 6: St. Petersburg and Moscow.]
[Footnote 7: The time-limit was six months for the merchants of the first guild and three months for those of the second.]
The Jews were further forbidden to employ Christian domestics for permanent employment. They could hire Christians for occasional services only, on condition that the latter live in separate quarters. Marriages at an earlier age than eighteen for the bridegroom and sixteen for the bride were forbidden under the pain of imprisonment—a prohibition which the defective registration of births and marriages then in vogue made it easy to evade. The language to be employed by the Jews in their public documents was to be Russian or any other local dialect, but "under no circumstances the Hebrew language."
The function of the Kahal, according to the Statute, is to see to it that the "instructions of the authorities" are carried out precisely and that the state taxes and communal assessments are "correctly remitted." The Kahal elders are to be elected by the community every three years from among persons who can read and write Russian, subject to their being ratified by the gubernatorial administration. At the same time the Jews are entitled to participation in the municipal elections; those who can read and write Russian are eligible as members of the town councils and magistracies—the supplementary law of 1836 fixed the rate at one-third, [1] excepting the city of Vilna where the Jews were entirely excluded from municipal self-government.
[Footnote 1: Compare Vol. I, p. 368.]
Synagogues may not be built in the vicinity of churches. The Russian schools of all grades are to be open to Jewish children, who "are not compelled to change their religion" (Clause 106)—a welcome provision in view of the compulsory methods which had then become habitual. The coercive baptism of Jewish children was provided for in a separate enactment, the Statute on Conscription, which is declared "to remain in force." In this way the Statute of 1835 reduces itself to a codification of the whole mass of the preceding anti-Jewish legislation. Its only positive feature was that it put a stop to the expulsion from the villages which had ruined the Jewish population during the years 1804-1830.
6. THE RUSSIAN CENSORSHIP AND CONVERSIONIST ENDEAVORS
With all its discriminations, the promulgation of this general statute was far from checking the feverish activity of the Government. With indefatigable zeal, its hands went on turning the legislative wheel and squeezing ever tighter the already unbearable vise of Jewish life. The slightest attempt to escape from its pressure was punished ruthlessly. In 1838 the police of St. Petersburg discovered a group of Jews in the capital "with expired passports," these Jews having extended their stay there a little beyond the term fixed for Jewish travellers, and the Tzar curtly decreed: "to be sent to serve in the penal companies of Kronstadt." [1] In 1840 heavy fines were imposed upon the landed proprietors in the Great Russian governments for "keeping over" Jews on their estates.