In a few of the cases where plunder and murder of a Jewish population in Russia have taken place, the outrages have partly been excused, or at any rate explained, through the almost incomprehensible ignorance of the peasants. Russia's most famous political economist, who at the same time is a great estate owner, has told me himself that when the elections to the First Duma took place he was informed that each of the peasants on his estate had voted for himself. He asked them, surprised, what they meant, and explained to them that in this way none of them could be elected; but they answered with the question, "Does not each Deputy get so many rubles a day? Yes. And do you think that we should let so much money go to another if we, perhaps, might get it ourselves?"
The same prominent estate owner told me that one day he asked some of his peasants if they really had partaken in a Pogrom which had taken place in the neighboring parish—he could not believe it, as they looked so good-natured. To his astonishment they answered yes, and when he asked them about the reason they replied: "You know it very well." They then explained that they had killed these Jews because the Jews had killed their Saviour. He: "But that was so long ago and it was not they who did it and it did not happen in this country." To which they, again astonished, exclaimed: "Was it long ago? We thought it was last week." It appeared that they had understood from the priest's explanation that the crucifixion had taken place then and there.
Under such conditions one is not surprised by any outrage. But to see the hatred of the Jews spread in Russian Poland, where people understand how to read and write, that must surely fill one with wonder. The great number of Jews in the old Polish Kingdom originated in the days of Casimir the Great (1309-1370), who out of love for his concubine, Esther, opened his country to the Jews and made conditions favorable for them. Since then the number has increased, as the Czars locked up all their Jewish subjects there. So they have been living separated and with a special dress like the Jews of Denmark at the time of Holberg. They have, however, felt and suffered as Polish patriots. As early as 1794 a regiment of Jewish volunteers fought under Kosciusko; their Colonel fell in 1809. In 1830 the shallow Polish national Government refused the Jews' petition to be allowed to enter the army. As they then ventured to apply for admission to the Polish public schools Nicholas I. punished them, allowing 36,000 families to be carried away to the steppes of South Russia, where the regulation for the enlistment of children overtook them. All their small boys from the age of 6 years were sent to Archangel in Cossack custody to be trained as sailors. They died in multitudes on the way.
The evils which befell all the inhabitants of Poland regardless of their creed for some time suppressed the hatred of the Jews which is always lurking in the masses. The great men of Poland checked its development. Adam Mickiewicz, Poland's greatest author, went so far that in his chief work, Poland's national epic, "Pan Tadeusz" (1834) he makes a Jewish innkeeper one of the most sympathetic leading characters. He is introduced in the fourth canto as a genius in music, the great master of the national instrument, the cymbal; and Mickiewicz makes the culmination of his poem the moment when Jankiel before Dombrowski himself plays the Dombrowski marche, symbolical of the whole history of Poland from 1791-1812, the year in which the poem takes place, the Napoleon year.
In the year 1860 the equalization of the Jews with the Catholics was a reality in Warsaw, and when, in February, 1861, at two large public places in Warsaw, the Russians had shot on the kneeling masses singing the national anthem, ("Zdymem pozarow,") the Jews felt impelled to show their national feeling through an unmistakable manifestation.
In masses they accompanied their rabbis into the Catholic churches just as the Christians in crowds entered the synagogues to sing the same hymn.
This last feature, the processions of the two creeds into each other's churches singing the same song, made such an impression on Henrik Ibsen, the great Scandinavian poet, that again and again he returned in his conversations to this as one of the greatest and most beautiful experiences he had ever had.
And now under the whirlstorm of madness which nationalism has driven across Europe, all this is lost; nay, from a religious reconciliation it has been turned into flaming hatred between the races.
II.
In 1912 the election of a Deputy to the Duma was to take place in Warsaw. The population of the town consists of between seven and eight hundred thousand. As among them there are 300,000 Jews, the majority of the electors, it was in the power of that majority to elect a Jewish Deputy. Because of their Polish national feeling, however, they gave up this right, as they wanted Warsaw, as the capital of the Kingdom of Poland, to be represented by a man who not only in spirit, but also by race, was a Pole. Of the Polish committee they only demanded that the party concerned be no enemy to the Jews. It proved, however, that the committee in its arrogance would not deal with them at all and proposed Kucharschewski, a pronounced anti-Semitic candidate and a man who publicly declared that he desired the election to the Duma only to work for the extermination of the Jews of Poland. By the way, it is strange to notice how the word "exterminate," which thirty years ago in the days of Bismarck and Eduard von Hartmann as Ausrotten was subject to the curse and condemnation of the Poles, has now come to honor, and how easily it passes their lips.