The barbarism of these proposals was covered by the fig-leaf of enlightenment. When the benighted Jewish masses will have fused with the highly cultured populance of Russia. In other words, when the Jews will have ceased to be Jews, then will the Jewish question find its solution. In the meantime, however, the Jews are to be curbed by the bridle of disabilities. The referee of the Committee on the question of the Pale of Settlement, Grigoryev, frankly stated: "What is important in this question is not whether the Jews will fare better when granted the right of residence all over the Empire, but rather the effect of this measure on the economic well-being of an enormous part of the Russian people." From this point of view the referee finds that it would be dangerous to let the Jews pass beyond the Pale, since "the plague, which has thus far been restricted to the Western provinces, will then spread over the whole Empire."
For a long time the Committee was at a deadlock, held down by bureaucratic reaction. It was only toward the end of its existence that the voice from another world, the posthumous voice of dead and buried liberalism, resounded in its midst. In 1880 the Committee was presented with a memorandum by two of its members, Nekhludov and Karpov, in which the bold attempt was made to champion the heretic point of view of complete Jewish emancipation. The language of the memorandum was one which the Russian Government had not heard for a long time.
In the name of "morality and justice" the authors of the memorandum call upon the Government to abandon its grossly utilitarian attitude towards the Jews who are to be denied civil rights so long as they do not prove useful to the "original" population. They expose the selfish motive underlying the bits of emancipation which had been doled out to the Jews during the preceding spell of liberalism: the desire, not to help the Jews, but to exploit their services. First-guild merchants, physicians, lawyers, artisans were admitted into the interior for the sole purpose of developing business in those places and filling the palpable shortage in artisans and professional men. "As soon as this or that category of Jews was found to be serviceable to the Russian people, it was relieved, and relieved only in part, from the pressure of exceptional laws, and received into the dominant population of the Empire." But the millions of plain Jews, abandoned by the upper classes, have continued to languish in the suffocating Pale. [1] The Jewish population is denied the elementary rights guaranteeing liberty of pursuit, freedom of movement and land ownership, such as only a criminal may be deprived of by a verdict of the courts. As it is, discontent is rife among these disinherited masses. "The rising generation of Jews has already begun to participate in the revolutionary movement to which they had hitherto been strangers." The system of oppression must be set aside. All the Jewish defects, their separatism and one-sided economic activity, are merely the fruits of this oppression. Where the law has no confidence in the population, there inevitably the population has no confidence in the law, and it naturally becomes an enemy of the existing order of things, "Human reason does not admit of any considerations which might justify the placing of many millions of the Jewish population, on a level with criminal offenders." The first step in the direction of complete emancipation ought to be the immediate grant of the right of domicile all over the Empire.
[Footnote 1: The narrow utilitarianism of the governmental policy in the Jewish question may also be illustrated by the official attitude towards the promotion of agriculture among the Jews. Under Alexander I. and Nicholas I. Jewish agricultural colonization in the South of Russia was encouraged by the grant of special privileges, though the Jewish settlers were subjected to the stern tutelage of bureaucratic inspectors. But under Alexander II., when Southern Russia was no longer in need of artificial colonization, the Government discontinued its policy of promoting Jewish colonization, and an ukase issued in 1866 stopped the settlement of Jews in agricultural colonies altogether. A little later the Jewish colonies in the South-west were deprived of a large part of their lands, which were distributed among the peasants.]
These bold words which turned the Jews from defendants into plaintiffs ran counter to the fundamental task of the Committee, which, according to the original instructions received by it, was expected to draft its plans in a spirit of reaction. At any rate, these words were uttered too late. A new era was approaching which in solving the Jewish question resorted to methods such as would have horrified even the conservative statesmen of the seventies: the era of pogroms and cruel disabilities.
4. THE DRIFT TOWARD OPPRESSION
During the last decade of Alexander's reign, the machinery of Jewish legislation was working at a slow rate, pending the full "revision" of Jewish rights. Yet the steps of the approaching reaction could well be discerned. Thus in 1870, during the discussion of the draft of the new Municipal Statute by a special committee of the Ministry of the Interior, which included as "experts" the burgomasters of the most important Russian cities, the question arose whether the former limitation of the number of Jewish aldermen in the municipal councils to one-third of the whole number of aldermen [1] should be upheld or not. The cities involved were those of the Pale where the Jews formed the majority of the population, and the committee was searching for ways and means to weaken "the excessive influence" of this majority upon the city administration and to subordinate it to the Christian minority.
[Footnote 1: See above, p. 41.]
One solitary member, Novoselski, the burgomaster of Odessa, advocated the repeal of the old restriction, with the one proviso that the Jewish aldermen should be required to possess certain educational qualifications, inasmuch as educated Jews were "not quite as harmful" as uneducated ones.
A minority of the members of the Committee favored the limitation of the number of Jewish aldermen to one-half, but the majority staunchly defended the old norm, which was one-third. The representatives of the majority, in particular Count Cherkaski, the burgomaster of Moscow, argued that the Jews constituted not only a religious but also a national entity, that they were still widely removed from assimilation or Russification, that education, far from transforming the Jews into Russians, made them only more successful in the struggle for existence, that it was inadvisable for this reason "to subject the whole Russian element (of the population) to the risk of falling under the domination of Judaism."