This being the case, it is not to be wondered at that the commissions brought in their "verdicts" in the spirit of the indictment framed by the authorities. The anti-Semitic officials exhibited their "learning" in ignorant criticisms of the "spirit of Judaism," of the Talmud and the national separatism of the Jews, and they proposed to extirpate all these influences by means of cultural repression, such as the destruction of the autonomy of the Jewish communities, the closing up of all special Jewish schools, and the placing of all phases of the inner life of the Jews under Government control. The representatives of the Russian burghers and peasants, many of whom had but recently co-operated or, at least, sympathized with the perpetrators of the pogroms, endeavored to prove the economic "injuriousness" of the Jews, and demanded that they should be restricted in their urban and rural pursuits, as well as in their right of residence outside the cities. Notwithstanding the prevailing spirit, five commissions voiced the opinion, which, from the point of view of the Russian Government, seemed rank heresy, that it was necessary to grant the Jews the right of domicile all over the empire so as to relieve the excessive congestion of the Jewish population in the Pale of Settlement.
4. THE SPREAD OF ANTI-SEMITISM
While the gubernatorial commissions—gubernatorial in the literal sense of the word, because entirely dominated by the governors—were holding their sessions, the satraps-in-chief of the Pale of Settlement, the governors-general, were busy sending their expressions of opinion to St. Petersburg. The governor-general of Kiev, Drenteln, who himself was liable to prosecution for allowing a two days' pogrom in his own residential city, condemned the entire Jewish people in emphatic terms, and demanded the adoption of measures calculated "to shield the Christian population against so arrogant a tribe as the Jews, who refuse on religions grounds to have close contact with the Christians." It was necessary, in his opinion, to resort to legal repression in order to counteract "the intellectual superiority of the Jews," which enables them to emerge victorious in the straggle for existence.
Similar condemnations of Judaism came from the governors-general of Odessa, Vilna, and Kharkov, although they disagreed as to the dimensions which this repression should assume. Totleben, the master of the Vilna province, who had refused to countenance the perpetration of pogroms in Lithuania, nevertheless agreed that the Jews should henceforth be forbidden to settle in the villages, though he was generous enough to add that he found it somewhat inconvenient "to rob the whole Jewish nation of the possibility of earning a livelihood by its labor." The impression prevailed that militant Judaeophobia was determined to deprive the Jews even of the right of securing a piece of bread.
The Government was well aware beforehand that the labors of the gubernatorial commissions would yield results satisfactory to it. It, therefore, found it unnecessary to wait for their reports and resolutions, and proceeded to establish in St. Petersburg, on October 19, "a Central Committee for the Revision of the Jewish Question." The committee was attached to the Ministry of the Interior, and consisted of several officials, under the chairmanship of Assistant-Minister Gotovtzev. The officials were soon busy framing "temporary measures" in the spirit of their patron Ignatyev, and, as the resolutions of the gubernatorial commissions were coming in, they were endeavoring to strengthen the foundations for the projected enactment. In January, 1882, the machinery for the manufacture of Jewish disabilities was in full swing.
This organized campaign of the enemies of Judaism, who were preparing administrative pogroms as a sequel to the street pogroms, met with no organized resistance on the part of Russian Jewry. The small conference of Jewish notables in St. Petersburg, which met in September in secret session, presented a sorry spectacle. The guests from the provinces, who had been invited by Baron Günzburg, engaged in discussions about the problem of emigration, the struggle with the anti-Semitic press, and similar questions. After being presented to Ignatyev, who assured them in diplomatic fashion of the "benevolent intentions of the Government," they returned to their homes, without having achieved anything.
The only social factor in Jewish life was the press, particularly the three periodicals published in Russian, the Razsvyet ("the Dawn"), the Russki Yevrey ("the Russian Jew"), and the Voskhod ("the Sunrise"), [1] but even they revealed the lack of a well-defined policy.
[Footnote 1: See on these papers, p. 219 et seq.]
The political movements in Russian Jewry were yet in an embryonic stage, and their rise and development were reserved for a later period. True, the Russian-Jewish press applied itself assiduously to the task of defending the rights of the Jews, but its voice remained unheard in those circles of Russia in which the poisonous waters of Judaeophobia gushed forth in a broad current from the columns of the semi-official Novoye Vremya, the pan-Slavic Russ, and many of their anti-Semitic contemporaries.
While the summer pogroms were in full swing, the Novoye Vremya, reflecting the views of the official spheres, seriously formulated the Jewish question in the paraphrase of Hamlet: "to beat or not to beat." Its conclusion was that it was necessary to "beat" the Jews, but, in view of the fact that Russia was a monarchical state with conservative tendencies, this function ought not to be discharged by the people but by the Government, which by its method of legal repression could beat the Jews much more effectively than the crowds on the streets.