E-text prepared by Jeannie Howse, Fritz Ohrenschall,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net)

Transcriber's Note:

This document was produced from an AMS Press reprint. All modern material has been removed. The original, printed in 1914, is an article in a journal, with it's own page numbering (as well as the journal page numbering, which has been removed from this transcription).

Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has been preserved.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For a complete list, please see the [end of this document].

4
JEWISH IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES

STUDIES IN HISTORY, ECONOMICS AND PUBLIC LAW

EDITED BY THE FACULTY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Volume LIX] [Number 4

Whole Number 145

JEWISH IMMIGRATION TO
THE UNITED STATES

FROM 1881 TO 1910

BY

SAMUEL JOSEPH

1914

To
MY FATHER AND MY MOTHER

PREFACE

In this survey of Jewish immigration to the United States for the past thirty years, my purpose has been to present the main features of a movement of population that is one of the most striking of modern times. The causes of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe, the course of Jewish immigration to the United States and the most important social qualities of the Jewish immigrants are studied, for the light they throw upon the character of this movement. The method employed in this investigation has been largely statistical and comparative, a fact which is partly due to the kind of material that was available and partly to the point of view that has been taken. Certain economic and social factors, having a close bearing upon the past and present situation of the Jews in Eastern Europe and frequently neglected in the discussion of the various phases of this movement, have been emphasized in the examination into the causes of the emigration of the Jews from Eastern Europe and have been found vital in determining the specific character of the Jewish immigration to this country.

I desire gratefully to acknowledge my deep indebtedness to Mr. A.S. Freidus, head of the Jewish department of the New York Public Library, for his ever-ready assistance in the preparation of this work. Thanks are due as well to Dr. C.C. Williamson, head of the Economics department of the library, and to his able and courteous staff; to Professor Robert E. Chaddock for his many valuable suggestions and aid in the making of the statistical tables and in the reading of the proof; and to Professor Edwin R.A. Seligman for his painstaking reading of the manuscript.

Samuel Joseph.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

[STATISTICAL TABLES]

CHAPTER I[ToC]

Introduction

Thirty years have elapsed since the Jews began to enter the United States in numbers sufficiently large to make their immigration conspicuous in the general movement to this country. A study of Jewish immigration, in itself and in relation to the general movement, reveals an interesting phase of this historic and many-sided social phenomenon and throws light upon a number of important problems incident to it.

Especially does it become clear that the Jewish immigration, although in part the result of the same forces as have affected the general immigration and the separate groups composing it, differs, nevertheless, in certain marked respects, from the typical immigration. Some of these differences indeed are fundamental and far-reaching in their effects and practically stamp the Jewish immigration as a movement sui generis.

Generally speaking, in the forces which are behind the emigration of the Jews from the countries of the Old World, in the character of their immigration—its movement and its distinguishing qualities—the Jewish immigration strikes a distinctly individual note.

Three European countries—Russia, Austria-Hungary and Roumania—furnish the vast majority of the Jewish immigrants to the United States.[1] It is to these countries, therefore, that we must turn for light upon the causes of this movement.

Geographically, these countries are closely connected; they form practically the whole of the division of Eastern Europe. Here the Slavonic races so largely predominate that the term Slavonic Europe has been applied to this section of Europe.

Eastern or Slavonic Europe is a social as well as a geographical fact. In racial stratification, economic and social institutions, cultural position and, in part, religious traditions as well, these countries present strong similarities to one another and equally strong differences in most of these respects from the countries of Western Europe.

It is here that the Jews are found concentrated in the greatest numbers. Nearly seven and a half-million Jews—more than half of the Jews of the world—live in these countries. Of this number more than five millions are in Russia, more than two millions in Austria-Hungary, and a quarter of a million in Roumania. The great majority of these are massed on the contiguous borders, in a zone which embraces Poland, and Western Russia, Galicia, and Moldavia. This is the emigration zone. The relative density of the Jews is greatest in these parts. Every seventh man in Poland, every ninth man in Western Russia and in Galicia, and every tenth man in Moldavia, is a Jew. Thus the center of gravity of the Jewish populations is still the former kingdom of Poland, as it was constituted before the partitions at the end of the eighteenth century.

United originally in Poland, the Jews of Eastern Europe still retain the same general characteristics, in spite of the changes that have been brought about by a century of rule under different governments. Speaking a common language, Yiddish, and possessing common religious traditions, as well as similar social and psychological traits, the East-European Jews present on the whole a striking uniformity of character.

Through the centuries they have become deeply rooted in the East-European soil, their economic and social life intimately connected with the economic and social conditions of these countries and their history deeply influenced by the transformations that have been taking place in them for half a century.

As these conditions and transformations furnish the foundation of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, and contain the explanation of the situation that has been largely responsible for the recent Jewish emigration to Western Europe and the United States, a rapid review of the economic, social and political conditions of Russia, Roumania and Austria-Hungary will be made.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Cf. infra, p. 95.

PART I

THE CAUSES OF JEWISH EMIGRATION

CHAPTER II[ToC]

Eastern Europe: Economic, Social and Political Conditions

I. RUSSIA

The difficulty of the average American to understand the character of Russian life, some traits of which have been so vividly brought home to him in recent years, may be attributed to a general idea that a country rubbing elbows as it were with Western civilization for several centuries must perforce itself possess the characteristics of modern civilization. A closer survey of the economic, social and political conditions prevailing in Russia to-day, however, reveals many points of difference from those of the countries of Western Europe, and presents a remarkable contrast with those prevailing in the United States. Russia and the United States, indeed, stand, in Leroy-Beaulieu's phrase, at the two poles of modern civilization. So far apart are they in the character of their economic, social and political structures, in the degree in which they utilize the forms and institutions of modern life, and, in the difference in the mental make-up of their peoples, that there exist few, if any, points of real contact.

Up to the middle of the 19th century, Russia was, in nearly all respects, a medieval state. She was a society, which, in the words of Kovalevsky, "preserved still of feudalism, not its political spirit but its economic structure, serfdom, monopoly and the privileges of the nobility, its immunities in the matter of taxes, its exclusive right to landed property, and its seignorial rights."[2] Her modern era dates from the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, when she became, at least in form, a European state. But, though the Russia of our day has witnessed great transformations in the direction of modernization, she still retains many of the conditions and much of the spirit of her medieval past.

A rapid review of the economic, social and political conditions of Russia will serve to make clearer this situation, which has an important bearing upon the exceptional position, legal, economic, social, of the Jews in the Empire, and upon the fateful events of their history for a third of a century.

The most striking fact in the economic life of present-day Russia is that it is overwhelmingly agricultural. More than three-fourths of her population are engaged in some form of agricultural labor. The vast majority are peasants living in villages. Towns are relatively few and sparsely populated. Agricultural products constitute 85 per cent of the annual exports. What a contrast does this agricultural state, this "peasant empire", present to the industrially and commercially developed countries of Western Europe and the United States!

The Russian peasant still practices a primitive system of agriculture. His method of extensive cultivation, the three-field system in vogue, his primitive implements, his domestic economy of half a century ago, with its home production for home consumption, which is still maintained in many parts of Russia to this day—all these present conditions not far removed from those of the middle ages of Western Europe.[3]

The existence to our day of this almost primitive economy finds its explanation in the fact that serfdom existed in Russia, in all its unmitigated cruelty, until comparatively recent times. Its abolition through the Emancipation Act of Alexander II—antedating our own Emancipation Proclamation by a few years—struck off the chains that bound twenty millions of peasants to the soil. The emancipation, however, was not complete. The land the peasants received was insufficient for their needs. Other conditions co-operated in the course of time with this primary one, to create a situation of chronic starvation for the great mass of the Russian peasants. Forced by the government to pay heavy taxes, in addition to redemption dues for the land, which they paid until recently, and receiving little help from either government or the nobility for the improvement of their position, they are virtually exploited almost as completely as before the emancipation.

Thus, though freed in person, the peasants are to a great extent bound by economic ties to their former masters, the nobles. These two social-economic classes maintain towards each other practically the same relative position held by them before the emancipation. The manor still controls the hut.

The former servile relations have persisted psychologically as well. The Russian peasant is still largely a serf in his mentality, in his feeling of dependence, in his inertia and lack of individual enterprise, and, above all, in the smallness of his demands upon life.[4] This fact permeates, as it serves to explain, many aspects of contemporary Russian life.

The industrial and commercial stage of Russian economy began with the emancipation, which set free a great supply of labor. The changes that have taken place have nevertheless not obliterated many of the landmarks of the feudal, pre-reformation period. The economic activities of the last half-century present a curious juxtaposition of old and new, medieval and modern. Cottage and village industries but little removed from the natural economy of the earlier period exist by the side of great factories and industrial establishments employing thousands of workmen. Fairs and markets still play a large part in supplying the needs of the peasants, rapidly as they are being supplanted by the commercial activities of the towns. The industrial laborers, recruited mainly from the country, retain largely their peasant interests, relations and characteristics. The payment of wages in kind, which is still in vogue in many parts, and the right of inflicting corporal punishment retained by the employers, give evidence of the strong impress of the servile conditions of the past.

Vast changes have nevertheless taken place since the emancipation. Capitalism has made rapid, if uneven, progress. Under the fostering care of the government, industry and commerce have made immense strides. The factory system has taken firm root and has been developing a specialized class of industrial laborers. Great industrial centers have sprung up; towns have grown rapidly. The middle class, hitherto insignificant, has increased in number, wealth and influence. Among the peasants as well, freedom has given birth to the spirit of individualism. The differentiation of the peasantry into wealthier peasants and landless agricultural laborers, the great mass of the peasantry occupying the middle ground, and the gradual dissolution of the two great forces of Russian agricultural life—the patriarchal family and the village community—have been the most important results.

Russia is clearly in a state of transition from the agricultural or medieval to the industrial and commercial or modern economic life. This transformation of the economic structure is being effected under great difficulties and the strong opposition of the ruling classes, whose privileges are threatened by the new order of things.

The Russian social and political order reflects the medieval background which formed the setting for her entrance upon the modern stage. The class distinctions, naturally obtaining, are hardened into rigidity by the law, which divides Russian society into a hierarchy of five classes or orders—the nobles, the clergy, the merchants, the townsmen and the peasants—each with separate legal status, rights and obligations.

The individual is thus not an independent unit, as in the legal codes of Western Europe or the United States. Accompanying the legal stratification there is an exceedingly strong, almost caste-like, sense of difference between the members of the different groups.

This emphasis on the person is characteristic of the medieval social order. In Russia it finds additional expression in the control of individual movement by means of the passport, without which document a Russian may be said to have no legal existence.

Even more striking is the position of the Russian Church, as well as the religio-national conception which dominates the Russian mind and according to which orthodoxy and nationality are regarded as one. The Russian Orthodox is the only true Russian; all others are foreigners. In the alliance of church and state—which in Russia reaches a degree of strength not attained in any other European state—in the complete control exercised by the Church over the lives of the faithful and the clergy, in secular as in religious matters, in its intolerant attitude towards other creeds and its unceasing attempts to suppress them—it presents characteristics strongly reminiscent of the position of the medieval church in Western Europe.

The one great political fact of Russia has been the autocracy. The degree of control which the autocratic Czars exercised unopposed over their subjects marks an important difference between the political development of Russia and that of the countries of Western Europe. At an early period the Czars had transformed the nobility into a body of state officials, thus at a blow depriving them of any real powers, apart from the will of the Crown, and making them serve the interests of the state. In this way the nobles, or the landed aristocracy, became the main source from which the members of the bureaucracy were recruited. The lack of a middle class of any real size and influence, which could play a part in the demand for political rights, explains in a measure the strength of the autocratic powers.[5] The autocracy in turn has been largely dependent upon its servant, the bureaucracy. To such an extent has the Russian government been the expression of the will and interests of this all-powerful body as to justify Leroy-Beaulieu's designation of Russia as the "Bureaucratic State".

Thus the autocracy, the nobility-bureaucracy and the church have been the dominating forces in the economic, social and political life of Russia.

In the light of this analysis, the political struggles that have been so conspicuous a feature of Russian life during the last half of the 19th century become an accompaniment as well as an expression of the progressive development of Russia towards modern economic, social and political institutions.

Russian liberalism,—largely revolutionary because of the denial of even elementary rights, such as the freedom of person, of speech, of the press and of meeting,—rights which were secured to Englishmen through the Magna Charta—has had the serious task not only of securing these rights but at the same time of creating in Russia the conditions of modern civilization. For the twenty years in which its spirit ruled, during the reign of Alexander II, the reforms begun under its influence amounted to a veritable revolution. The economic, social, political and juridical reforms of this epoch generated new forces and began the modernization of Russia. These reforms encountered the formidable opposition of the nobility and the church and finally of the autocracy, when the latter felt that its position was gradually being undermined, especially by the demand for a constitution. With the assassination of Alexander II, the liberal era was brought to a close, and a reaction was ushered in which has lasted to our day.

The classes that came into power with Alexander III and Pobedonostseff were, from their economic interests, social outlook and political ideals, essentially medieval and may properly be termed the feudal party. Guided by its economic interests—which had been seriously threatened by the emancipation—and swayed by the Slavophilistic philosophy,[6] this party sought to nullify as far as possible the reforms of the epoch of emancipation and to carry through a many-sided program for putting the order of things backward to the medieval, pre-reform days. Autocracy, Greek Orthodoxy and Russian Nationalism—the famous Slavophilistic trinity—were glorified, the first two as peculiarly national institutions, the policy of russification and the repression of non-orthodox faiths by force were proclaimed as vital to the social health of Russia, the blind ignorance and illiteracy of the peasants were extolled as a virtue and the control over them by the nobility was strengthened in many ways. Freedom of every form was condemned as an aping of the "rotten" civilization of the West with its decaying institutions, and as false to the true Russian national, historical development.

During this period of reaction, however, the liberal movement was kept alive, largely as revolutionary propaganda. The earlier movement had been directed by the educated classes, the "Intelligenzia" of Russia. Lately, with the growth of the middle class and a population of industrial workers in the towns and the factories, and a wealthier class of peasants, the cry for reform has become more insistent, and only recently partly successful in results.

Summarizing his impressions of Russian life and institutions obtained while serving as Ambassador to Russia, Andrew D. White remarked: "During two centuries Russia has been coming slowly out of the middle ages—indeed, out of perhaps the most cruel phases of medieval life."[7] One of the phases of this process has been the bitter struggle between the feudal and the modern forces that has occupied Russia for the last third of a century.

II. ROUMANIA

In Roumania,[8] in spite of a liberal constitution modeled upon the Belgian, granting all rights enjoyed by citizens of a free state, the underlying economic, social and, in a measure, political conditions point to a state of things little removed from the medieval forms of life. The main social-economic classes are the large landed proprietors, composed chiefly of the old nobility or boyars, and the peasants, who were formerly serfs. In the hands of the former are concentrated the greater part of the land. Five thousand large landed proprietors together owned nearly half of the cultivable land. Nearly a million of peasants, on the other hand, comprising with their dependents a great majority of the population, together owned a little over two-fifths of the cultivable land.[9]

This situation is an inheritance from the servile system which existed in Roumania until 1864, when it was legally abolished. The freedom granted to the peasants was, however, more formal than real. The land given them being insufficient for their needs, and pasture land especially having been denied them, they were as a rule compelled to lease land or pasture right from their former masters at ruinous rates, often paying by labor on their former masters' estates. Thus the essential feudal services were in the main continued, especially as the lease and labor contracts, generally drawn up in the interests of the landed proprietor, were often usurious and extremely oppressive.[10] In twenty years there was little change from the previous condition of serfdom, so that a law was necessary, in 1882, to permit the peasants to work at least two days during the week on their own land.

Since this period there has been practically little change in this essentially feudal relation of the peasantry to the landed proprietors. As the owners of the great estates are a ruling power in the political life of the country, the greater part of peasants being disqualified from voting through property and educational requirements, the former have been enabled to keep the peasantry in this condition of semi-servitude. The result is a state of ignorance, misery and degradation on the part of the peasantry that is difficult to parallel in another European country. That the peasants are not entirely passive under their wrongs is shown in the repeated uprisings against their masters and in the two great social revolutions of 1888 and 1907, both of which were put down by military force.

Roumania's advent into industry and commerce may be dated from the eighties of the last century, and was initiated by the industrial law of 1887, which sought to create a national industry by means of subsidies, land grants and other favors to undertakers of large industrial enterprises. Since then the growth has been sufficiently rapid to place Roumania as the industrial and commercial leader of the Balkan States. Relatively, however, it is still very backward. Only 14 per cent of the population is urban. The industrial laborers are estimated at no more than 40,000. There are only a few cities. Only the largest—Bucarest—has above 100,000 inhabitants, three other cities have between fifty and seventy-five thousand inhabitants. The chief industrial establishments, such as saw mills, flour mills and distilleries, are concerned mainly in the working up of the raw materials produced in the country. Nevertheless, industrial progress has made for the growth of a small but influential middle class, which divides the control of affairs with the large landed proprietors. Its influence can be traced in the electoral law, which gives the urban classes, constituting the backbone of the liberal party, a majority in the Chamber of Deputies.

III. AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

Though relatively far advanced along the road of modern civilization, Austria-Hungary, through its prevailing mode of economic and social life, and through its large Slavic populations, belongs rather to Eastern than to Western Europe. Historically, it began its modern career about the same time as Russia, when it abolished, in 1867, the feudal services and dues, survivals of the previous servile institutions. Nevertheless, in its large agricultural population, in the primitive system of cultivation generally in vogue, in the scattered character of the peasant holdings, in the strong contrast between the great landed estates or Latifundia, held chiefly by the nobility, and the small, even minute, estates of the majority of the peasant proprietors, and in the natural economy prevailing in many parts of the Dual Monarchy and constituting the main foundation upon which the life of the peasants rests—in all these characteristics, is reflected the almost medieval economy which existed in the empire before 1848 and which is not yet entirely outgrown.

Industrially and commercially, Austria, far more than Hungary, has indeed made really remarkable progress. Yet in this respect the greatest contrast exists between the various Austrian provinces. Certain of these—Galicia and Bukowina, for instance—are not only the most backward in these pursuits, but their agricultural population is even relatively increasing. Even in the industrially advanced provinces, such as Lower Austria and Bohemia, the transitional nature of the industrial life is evident in the unspecialized character of a larger portion of the town laborers, many of whom are peasants temporarily employed in factories and mines.

The Austrian organization of industry and commerce is a modernized version of the guilds and crafts of medieval Western Europe. How these medieval economic forms with their underlying psychologic forces still live and dominate Austria, especially its Slavic nationalities, is shown by the revival in 1859 of the Austrian guilds, the direct descendants of the medieval Innungen. These were, in 1883, developed in the form of Zwangsgenossenschaften or compulsory trade-guilds, which, in their regulations concerning the Befähigungsnachweis or certificate of capacity, the three orders of master, journeyman and apprentice, the principle of compulsory entrance into the local guild, the workman's passport or Arbeitsbuch, unite the methods of regulating and restricting industry and trade characteristic of the Middle Ages, with modern methods of combination, arbitration, and assistance of members. By the side of these compulsory guilds are to be found the Gewerkschaften, or the modern voluntary trade-unions.

The transition to modern economic and social conditions is, nevertheless, well advanced. This is seen in a decrease of the agricultural classes and an increase of the industrial and commercial classes in the thirty years from 1869 to 1900. Another sign is the fairly strong differentiation of the economic-social classes, in both the agricultural and the industrial groups, which has advanced quite rapidly. The middle class, while neither as large nor as influential as in the countries of Western Europe, has played an important rôle towards hastening this transition.

Politically, the Dual Monarchy occupies a middle ground between absolutist Russia and constitutional England. The court, the nobility and the Roman Church with its strong aristocratic leanings, represent the dominant power in Austria. The economic and social changes of the transitional period have been accompanied by politico-economic struggles which have played a vital part and have cut through and across the racial, national and religious conflicts of this much-distracted conglomeration of peoples. Amid the confusion of parties, with their complexity of programs, may be distinguished the German-Austrian liberals, representatives of the middle class or industrialists, whose historic mission was to create a modern state in Austria, and who carried out, in large measure, their program of constitutionalism, economic freedom and the secular state. Against them were arrayed the powerful forces of the agrarian party or the landed aristocracy—the upholders of the feudal economic-social order of privilege and class distinction, the clericals—the upholders of the idea of the Christian State—and the representatives of the lower middle class, composed chiefly of petty artisans and traders, whose ideal was the medieval industrial organization, largely co-operative and regulated, as opposed to the individualistic and competitive system of the modern era, with its great concentration of wealth, capital and power in the hands of the middle class. That the present structure of Austria is so much of a compromise and crosspatch between modern and medieval economic, social and political forms, and contains so much that is essentially incongruous, is due largely to the successful struggle which the chief parties of the medieval order—the feudal-clericals—the party of the upper classes, and the Christian Socialists—the party of the lower classes—have waged against the growing constitutionalization, industrialization and secularization of Austria—in short, against the transformation of Austria into a modern state.

It is in Galicia that the conditions obtaining in Russia are largely duplicated. Geographically, racially and socially, Galicia is a part of Russia. Galicia is a preponderatingly agricultural land and possesses the densest agricultural population in Europe. Modern industry is relatively little developed, its place being held to a great extent by the domestic system of industry. The contrast between the large and small estates is sharper here than perhaps in any other section of Europe. The Polish nobility, in whose hands the large estates are mostly found, are the ruling social and political, as well as economic, power in Galicia. The autonomous Galician Diet is practically the instrument of their interests. A middle class has been gradually rising and contesting their supremacy. The peasantry is one of the most illiterate, degraded, and oppressed in all Europe.

IV. SUMMARY

This brief review of the economic and social conditions in Russia, Roumania and Austria-Hungary has shown that, broadly speaking, these countries present points of similarity in their situation and their recent movement. In all of these countries, economic and social conditions closely resembling those that obtained in the countries of Western Europe several centuries ago were found until comparatively recent times. The abolition of serfdom in Russia and in Roumania, and of feudal dues in Austria-Hungary, paved the way for the entrance of these states into modern European civilization. The succeeding period has been marked by a rapid transition from the old domestic economy to a modern exchange economy, through the growth of industry and commerce. The medieval conditions of the earlier period have nevertheless not been entirely obliterated. They exist, in Russia, in the privileges and powers of the nobility, in the inferior status and oppressed condition of the peasantry, in the strong class distinctions, in the restraints upon economic activity and upon movement. Though in smaller measure, the same conditions are found in Austria-Hungary, especially in Galicia. In Roumania, so far as the peasantry is concerned, the pre-emancipation conditions remain practically, if not legally, in force. Owing to the increase of population, the minute subdivision of the estates of the peasants, the backwardness of their agricultural methods, and their over-taxation, the position of the peasants has been rendered precarious. Revolutionary uprisings directed chiefly against the landed proprietors have been a recurring expression of their discontent.

An important consequence has been the rapid evolution of the industrial and commercial, or the middle class. The growth of the middle class has been accompanied by a struggle in each of these countries between the privileged classes of the feudal state and the middle class, including in the latter the educated classes and the industrial workers of the towns.

It is in this middle class that the Jews are chiefly to be found. Owing to this fact, as well as through the action of historical conditions, the Jews occupy an exceptional position in the economic activities and the social life of each of the countries of Eastern Europe. A survey of their economic and social position in each country will serve to clarify the last thirty years of their history in Eastern Europe and to give some of the causes underlying their vast movement from these countries to Western Europe and particularly to the United States.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Kovalevsky, La crise russe (Paris, 1906), p. 111.

[3] Cf. Witte, Vorlesungen über Volks- und Staatswirtschaft (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1913), p. 40.

Milyoukov, Russia and its Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 1905), p. 439.

[4] Cf. Witte, op. cit., p. 52.

[5] Cf. Milyoukov, op. cit., p. 246 et seq.

[6] An interesting statement of the principles of the Slavophiles may be obtained from Simkhovitch (International Quarterly, Oct., 1904).

[7] White, Autobiography (New York, 1905), vol. ii, p. 35.

[8] Owing to the similarity of conditions in Russia and Roumania, particularly as regards the Jews, Roumania has been considered, practically throughout, immediately after Russia.

[9] Kogalniceancu, "Die Agrarfrage in Rumänien" Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, vol. xxxii, p. 804.

[10] Ibid., p. 184.

Jorga, Geschichte des Rumänischen Volkes (Gotha, 1905), vol. ii, p. 374.

CHAPTER III[ToC]

The Jews in Eastern Europe: Economic and Social Position

The economic and social life of the Jews in Eastern Europe has moved along the familiar channels of commerce, industry and urban life characteristic of the Jews in all countries during the middle ages. An examination of the economic position and function and the principal social characteristics of the Jews reveals the fact that they play an important part in each of these countries. This we shall see by tracing their principal economic activities and some significant phases of their social life.

I. RUSSIA

A review of the occupations of the Jews in the Russian Empire shows that those engaged in the manufacturing and mechanical pursuits constituted 39 per cent of the total Jewish population gainfully employed. This was the largest occupational group. Commerce engaged 32 per cent. Together the industrial and commercial classes comprised seven-tenths of all Jews engaged in gainful occupations. On the other hand, only 3 per cent were employed in agricultural pursuits.

It is in comparison with the occupations of the non-Jewish population in Russia that the significance of this distribution becomes evident. Of the non-Jews in Russia, agricultural pursuits engaged 61 per cent, manufacturing and mechanical pursuits 15 per cent, and commerce only 3 per cent. The non-Jews engaged in industry and commerce thus constituted somewhat less than one-fifth of the total non-Jewish population gainfully employed. More than twice as many Jews, relatively, as non-Jews were engaged in industrial pursuits and practically twelve times as many Jews as non-Jews in commercial pursuits.[11]

This difference of occupational grouping makes itself felt in the participation of the Jews in the principal occupational groups. Of the total Russian population gainfully employed, the Jews were 5 per cent. They constituted, however, 11 per cent of all engaged in industry, and 36 per cent of all engaged in commerce.[12] Thus, in the Russian Empire the Jews formed a considerable proportion of the commercial classes and a large proportion of those engaged in industrial pursuits.

Properly to gauge the economic function of the Jews in Russia, comparison should be made not with the population of the Russian Empire but rather with that of the Pale of Settlement, where nearly 95 per cent of the Jews live. There the contrast was even stronger. Of the Jews, 70 per cent were employed in industry and commerce as compared with 13 per cent on the part of the non-Jews. Though the Jews are only 12 per cent of the total working population of the Pale, they formed 32 per cent of all engaged in industry and 77 per cent of all engaged in commerce.[13] This clearly shows that the Jews constituted the commercial classes and a significant part of the industrial classes of the Pale. In other words, what is true of the place of the Jews in the occupational distribution of all Russia is still more true of the Pale. The Jews are preponderatingly industrial and commercial, in striking contrast to the rest of the population, which is preponderatingly agricultural.

What is the nature of their activities and their function in the industrial and commercial life of Russia? The great majority of Jews engaged in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits are artisans. In the present relatively backward stage of Russian industrial development these are chiefly handicraftsmen, who mainly supply the needs of local consumers. These artisans, who number more than half a million,[14] support nearly one-third of the Jewish population.

The most important industry is the manufacture of clothing and wearing apparel, which employed more than one-third of the Jewish working population and supported more than one-seventh of the total Jewish population. It is in effect a Jewish industry: practically all the tailors and shoemakers in the Pale are Jews. They predominate as well in the preparation of food products, in the building trades, in the metal, wood and tobacco industries.[15] Hampered by legal restrictions, lack of technical education, and lack of capital, they nevertheless have become an essential part of the economic life of the Pale, supplying the needs for industrial products not only of the Jews but of the entire Pale, and, especially of the peasants.

In the development of large-scale industry, the Jews have taken a smaller part than the Germans or foreigners, owing to the conditions above referred to. Yet, in 1898, in the fifteen provinces of the Pale, more than one-third of the factories were in Jewish hands.[16] Jewish factory workers were estimated at one-fifth of all the factory workers in the Pale.[17]

Trade and commerce engage Jews chiefly, supporting nearly two-thirds of the total Jewish population.[18]

As Russia is essentially an agricultural country, trade in agricultural products, such as grain, cattle, furs and hides, etc., is of prime importance. Nearly half of the Jewish merchants in the Pale were dealers in these products. Of the dealers in the principal grain products, Jews formed an overwhelming majority. Relatively twenty-six times as many Jews as Russians, in the Pale, were grain dealers.[19] Four-fifths of all the dealers in furs and hides, three-fourths of all the dealers in cattle were Jews.[20] The Jewish traders are agents in the movement of the crops, in the various stages from the direct purchase of the grain from the peasant to its export for the world markets. In view of the lack of development in Russia of modern methods for marketing the agricultural produce, and in view of the fact that the Russian peasant is ignorant of the most elementary principles of trade, the Jewish merchants, with their knowledge of the market and their skillful use of credit, play a vital part in the organization of the Russian grain trade, and control this trade in the Pale and on the Black Sea.

In other branches of commerce, the Jews are almost as strongly represented. As sellers to the village and city populations, they carry on the largest part of the retail trade of the Pale. The great majority of the merchants, however, are petty traders or store-keepers. The wholesale merchants enrolled in the guilds, on the other hand, constitute a large proportion of all the guild merchants.

Thus, through their activity as petty artisans, traders and merchants, the Jews preponderate in the industrial and commercial life of the Pale. As manufacturers and wholesale merchants they play a less important but nevertheless significant part in all Russia.

In general the Jewish merchants are quite strongly distinguished from the Russian merchants in their employment of the competitive principles and methods common to the commercial operations of Western Europe and the United States. Their principle of a quick turnover with a small profit, and their use of credit, are not in vogue among the Russian merchants who operate on the basis of customary prices and long credits.

In their social characteristics as well, the Jews are strongly set off from the rest of the population. The Jews are essentially urban, the non-Jews are overwhelmingly rural. In all Russia, 51 per cent of the Jews lived in incorporated towns, as against only 12 per cent of the non-Jews. Though the Jews constituted 4 per cent of the total population, they constituted 16 per cent of the town population.[21] In the Pale, where they constituted 12 per cent of the total population, they comprised 38 per cent of the urban population.[22] Their concentration in the cities of the Pale is striking. In nine out of the fifteen provinces of the Pale, they constituted a majority of the urban population. In twenty-four towns, they were from two-fifths to seven-tenths of the population. In the important cities of Warsaw and Odessa they were one-third of the population.[23]

The urban and occupational distribution of the Jews places them higher than the great majority of the non-Jews among the social classes into which the Russian people are legally divided. Townsmen are of a higher rank than peasants. Nearly 95 per cent of the Jews belong to this category and only 7 per cent of the Russians. The vast majority of the Russians—86 per cent—are peasants. Only 4 per cent of the Jews are of this class. Again, 2 per cent of the Jews are merchants, as against only .2 per cent of the Russians. Thus in these two classes of townsmen and merchants there were twelve times as many Jews, relatively, as Russians.[24]

The higher cultural standing of the Jews may be partly measured by the relative literacy of the Jews and of the total population. According to the census of 1897, in the Jewish population ten years of age or over there were relatively one and a half times as many literates as in the total population of the corresponding group. In each of the age-groups there were relatively more literates among the Jews than among the total population. In the highest age-group, that of sixty years of age and over, the Jews had relatively more literates than any of the age-groups of the total population, indicating that the educational standing of the Jews half a century ago was higher than that of the Russian population of to-day.[25]

The fact that the Jews dwell chiefly in towns has considerably to do with their higher educational standing. If the statistics of relative literacy of the Jewish and the non-Jewish population in the towns were obtainable, the chances are strong that they would not show a much higher rate of literacy on the part of the Jews. At the same time the difficulties that are put in the way of Jewish attendance in the elementary schools must be regarded as a considerable factor in explaining this possibility.[26]

The participation of the Jews in the liberal professions, which implies the possession of a higher education, is also very large, even with the great obstacles that have been placed in the way of the entrance of the Jews into the universities, into the liberal professions and the state service. Relatively seven times as many Jews as Russians are found in the liberal professions.[27]

II. ROUMANIA

The economic activities of the Jews in Roumanian industry and commerce closely resemble those of their Russian brethren.[28] The large part taken by the Jews in Roumanian commerce may be gathered from the fact that, in 1904, one-fifth of those who paid the merchant-license tax were Jews. Equally great is their participation in large-scale industry, where, as an inquiry in 1901-2 shows, nearly one-fifth of the large industries were conducted by Jewish entrepreneurs. In some of the most important ones—the glass industry, the clothing industry, the wood and furniture industry and the textile industry—from one-fourth to one-half of the total number of entrepreneurs were Jews.

As in the case of Russia, it is in Klein-industrie or handicraft, which is more nearly characteristic of the present form of Roumanian industrial economy, that the Jews are mostly concentrated and where they participate so largely as to constitute "the backbone of the young Roumanian industry".

The latest inquiry—that of 1908—shows that the Jews were one-fifth of all inscribed in the corporations as artisans. They formed more than one-fourth of the master-workmen and nearly one-sixth of the laborers. In the five principal industries Jewish master-workmen formed from nearly one-tenth to nearly one-half. In the following trades Jews formed between one-fourth and nearly two-thirds of the entire workers: watchmakers, tinners, modistes, tailors, glazers, housepainters, coopers and bookbinders. In all the garment industries nearly one-third of the workers were Jews. The principal trades of the Jews, in which two-thirds of the Jewish industrial workers were found, were, in order: tailors, shoemakers, tinners, joiners and planers, and bakers.[29] The Jews in Roumania were thus more strongly concentrated in industry and less in commerce than their Russian brethren.

As masters and workmen they play a part in Roumanian large-scale and small-scale industry nearly four and a half times as large as their proportion in the total population. Their participation in commerce is equally large.

The Jews in Roumania present the same social characteristics, relatively to the surrounding population, as the Jews in Russia. The Jews were overwhelmingly concentrated in the towns. 80 per cent of the Jews dwelt in the towns; 84 per cent of the non-Jews dwelt in the villages. Of the population in the department-capitals the Jews constituted one-fifth. Of the population of the other towns they constituted more than one-tenth. In some of the department-capitals, notably Jassi, the Jews were a majority of the total population. In six other department-capitals they constituted from one-fourth to one-half of the population.

That the Jews are of a higher educational standing than the Roumanians is seen in the fact that they possessed a higher rate of literacy, having relatively twice as many literates among the males and nearly twice as many among the females. Confining this comparison to the cities, however, we find that the Jews had a higher literacy only in the age-groups above fifteen. The Roumanian urban population between the ages of seven and fifteen showed a higher literacy than the corresponding group among the Jews, indicating the influence of the special restrictions on Jewish education which will later be discussed.

While the higher literacy of the Jews in Russia and Roumania is due partly to residence in towns, the restrictions on the Jewish participation in the educational facilities afforded by the Russian and Roumanian governments have been so great as to make the higher educational standing of the Jews practically a product of their own efforts.

III. AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

The economic position of the Jews in Austria-Hungary presents a close parallel to that in Russia. The largest proportion of the Jews—44 per cent—were engaged in commerce and in trade, and 29 per cent were engaged in industry.[30] A significantly large proportion were engaged in public service and in the liberal professions. A surprisingly large proportion—11 per cent—were engaged in agriculture and allied occupations. Thus, a little over seven-tenths of the Jews were concentrated in commerce and trade, and industry.

The contrast between the Jewish and the non-Jewish population is most striking in the relative proportions of those engaged in agriculture, and commerce and trade. 54 per cent of the non-Jews were engaged in agriculture, or five times as many, relatively, as Jews. On the other hand, only 8 per cent were engaged in commerce and trade, or relatively one-fifth as many as Jews.

Of the total population engaged in commerce and trade the Jews constituted 21 per cent. They constituted, on the other hand, 5 per cent of all engaged in industry. Thus, the Jews in Austria-Hungary were concentrated in commerce and trade to a much larger extent than in all other occupations, constituting an important part of all engaged in this branch.

It is in Galicia, however, where conditions in general most resemble those in Russia, that the Jews are seen to occupy relatively the same position as their brethren in Russia. In Galicia, 29 per cent of the Jews were engaged in commerce and trade, and 26 per cent in industry. Together the Jews engaged in these two branches constituted more than half of the total Jewish working population.

By far the largest part of the non-Jewish population—86 per cent—were engaged in agriculture. In industry only 4 per cent of the non-Jews were engaged and in commerce only 1 per cent. Thus the Jews were largely concentrated in commerce and industry, the non-Jews preponderatingly concentrated in agriculture.

As compared with the Jews in Russia and Roumania the Galician Jews engaged in agriculture show a surprising proportion—18 per cent being so engaged—a larger proportion than in any other country.

The Jews in East Galicia were 13 per cent of the total population.[31] Of all the "independents" engaged in commerce in East Galicia 92 per cent were Jews; of all the "independents" engaged in industry 48 per cent were Jews. The Jews in West Galicia were 8 per cent of the total population. Of all "independents" engaged in commerce they constituted 82 per cent; of all "independents" engaged in industry they constituted 33 per cent. This gives the crux of the economic position of the Jews in Galicia. They play an overwhelming part in its commercial life, practically monopolizing it. In industry their participation is very significant.

Socially the Jews in Austria-Hungary and especially in Galicia, present characteristics similar to those in Russia and Roumania. In the forty cities in Galicia with a population above five thousand there dwelt 34 per cent of the total Jewish population. Only 7 per cent of the non-Jewish population lived in these cities. Thus, relatively five times as many Jews as non-Jews were urban. Though the Jews in Galicia were 11 per cent of the total population, they constituted 37 per cent of the population in these cities, thus being represented in the cities by more than three times their proportion in the total population. In nine of these towns they formed a majority of the population. They were more than one-third in twelve, and more than one-fourth in eleven other towns. In the two chief cities in Galicia—Lemberg and Cracow—they constituted a third of the total population.

The figures regarding literacy are not available for Austria-Hungary or Galicia, but there is every reason to believe that essentially the same situation exists as in Russia and Roumania. In the liberal professions in Austria-Hungary there were 16 per cent of the Jews so engaged as compared with 11 per cent of the non-Jews. In Galicia the contrast is much sharper. Relatively ten times as many Jews as non-Jews were represented in the liberal professions.[32]

IV. SUMMARY

A review of the occupations, economic function and social characteristics of the Jews in the countries of Eastern Europe reveals them in an important and essentially similar rôle in each country. Pursuing mainly industrial and commercial occupations, the Jews constitute by far the largest part of the middle classes of each country. The historical position which they held in the ancient kingdom of Poland as the middle class has been practically maintained to this day.

By virtue of their occupations, the Jews are possessed of liquid wealth to a greater extent than the nobility or the peasantry, and in the lack of proper credit facilities still serve as bankers and money-lenders. The Jews have also been conspicuous in Eastern Europe as stewards or administrators of the estates of the nobility, who are, as a rule, absentee landlords, distinguished as a class by their serious lack of interest or ability in the management of their estates. The Jewish Hofjuden, as they were known, were particularly useful in the utilization of the products of the soil, through distilleries, mills, trade with agricultural products and exploitation of the forests.[33] In this way, however, Jews often acted as intermediaries in the oppression of the peasantry by the nobles. They were often keepers or lessees of the taverns, the ownership of which was formerly vested in the nobles as one of their feudal privileges.

It is, however, as artisans, industrial laborers and merchants, retail and wholesale, that Jews chiefly obtain their living. Their monopoly of industry and commerce has given them an influence far above their numerical proportions.

In each of these countries, again, the Jews are essentially town dwellers in the midst of preponderatingly rural populations. That the degree of the contrast is due to the artificial workings of restrictive laws is unquestioned. The chief reason for this, however, is occupational. The Jews as an industrial and commercial people constitute one of the main elements out of which the town populations are recruited. Towns are ordinarily the foci of all the cultural forces and the movement and enterprise of a country. In Eastern Europe, where the number of towns is so few, this is much more the case than in Western Europe. The fact that the Jews are so largely concentrated in these comparatively few towns serves to give them a cultural position and influence far out of proportion to their numbers. Their economic activities and their relatively large participation in the liberal professions strengthens this position considerably.

Amidst populations preponderatingly devoted to agricultural occupations and dwelling in villages, the Jews represent an industrial and commercial people, strongly concentrated in towns. This economic and social position of the Jews is of the greatest significance, especially in the present period of transition in these countries. Possessed of the characteristics of a modern people in their economic and social life and in their mentality, they present a sharp contrast with the peoples among whom they dwell and whose economic and social life are only now taking on modern forms. It is this that makes the Jews personify in a large degree the forces of economic enterprise and of social progress in these countries.

On the other hand, the exceptional economic and social position held by the Jews among the East-European peoples has made them peculiarly susceptible to the changes that have been taking place, as their inferior legal status and sharp differentiation from the mass of the people have made them favorable objects of attack in the politico-economic struggles that have largely accompanied the transition.

A consideration of the legal status of the Jews in each of the countries of Eastern Europe and of the chief forces that have ruled their history for more than a third of a century will enable us to see some of the dynamic aspects of the recent history of the East-European Jews and the underlying causes of their recent emigration.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] Rubinow, Economic Condition of the Jews in Russia (Washington, 1907), p. 500.

[12] Cf. [table IA], p. 158.

[13] Cf. [table IB], p. 158.

Rubinow, op. cit., p. 501.

[14] Margolin puts the number at 600,000.

[15] Ruppin, Die Sozialen Verhältnisse der Juden in Russland (Berlin, 1906), p. 59.

[16] Rubinow, op. cit., p. 537.

[17] Rubinow, op. cit., p. 542.

[18] Ibid., p. 553.

[19] Ruppin, op. cit., p. 62.

[20] Rubinow, op. cit., p. 556.

[21] Ruppin, op. cit., p. 100.

[22] Rubinow, op. cit., p. 493.

[23] Ruppin, op. cit., p. 19.

[24] Ruppin, op. cit., p. 65.

[25] Rubinow, op. cit., pp. 577-578.

[26] In a personal communication to the writer, Dr. Rubinow gives it as his opinion that the Jews as a group consisting primarily of artisans and merchants will show a very much higher rate of literacy than a group of factory employes, and, we may add, of unskilled laborers, to which groups the majority of the non-Jews in the towns belong.

[27] Ruppin, op. cit., p. 62.

[28] On the economic activities and social characteristics of the Jews in Roumania, cf. Ruppin, Die Juden in Rumänien, p. 27 et seq.

[29] Enquête sur les artisans (Bucarest, 1909), p. 157 et seq.

[30] Thon, Die Juden in Oesterreich (Berlin, 1908), p. 112.

[31] Thon, op. cit., p. 124.

[32] Thon, op. cit., p. 127.

[33] Grenzboten: Galizische Wirtschaft, vol. lxii, p. 402.

CHAPTER IV[ToC]

Thirty Years of Jewish History in Eastern Europe

I. RUSSIA

Religious intolerance had been the prime motive of Russia's policy of completely excluding the Jews from her borders. Through the partitions of Poland from 1772 to 1795, she became the unwilling ruler over the destinies of millions of Jews living in Lithuania, Western and Southwestern Russia and Poland proper. The historic medieval principle by which the Jews were regarded as an alien and heretic race living among the Christian peoples—a principle that had, with the growth of modern ideas, been rapidly losing its hold upon the West-European nations—expressed Russia's attitude towards the Jews and conformed to her strongly medieval outlook and organization of this period. Thus, at the time when the emancipation of the Jews had begun to be in Western Europe a concomitant of social progress, Russia set to work to recreate almost typically medieval conditions for a vaster Jewish population than had ever before been assembled in any European country.

The Jews were placed in the position practically of aliens, whose activities were regulated by special laws. The first and the most far-reaching of these laws limited their right of residence to those provinces in which they lived at the time of the Polish partitions. In this way originated that reproduction on a vast scale of the medieval Ghetto—the Pale of Jewish Settlement. The elementary right of free movement and choice of residence, which was denied to the Jews, has remained the principal restriction to which they are subjected.

The Pale of Jewish Settlement, continued with but few changes to our day, includes the fifteen provinces of Western and Southwestern Russia—Vilna, Kovno, Grodno, Minsk, Vitebsk, Mohileff, Volhynia, Podolia, Kiev (except the city of Kiev), Chernigov, Poltava, Bessarabia, Kherson, Jekaterinoslav, Taurida (except the city of Yalta), and the ten provinces into which Poland is divided—Warsaw, Kalisz, Kielce, Lomza, Lublin, Petrikow, Plock, Radom, Suvalk and Siedlec. From the rest of the eighty-nine provinces and territories—constituting nearly 95 per cent of the total territory of the Russian Empire—the Jews were excluded.

In the course of a century the special laws relating to the Jews have multiplied greatly until they now consist of more than a thousand articles, regulating their religious and communal life, economic activities and occupations, military service, property rights, education, etc., and imposing special taxes over and above those borne by all other Russian subjects. The direct consequence of these laws was to mark the status of the Jews as the lowest in the Empire, placing them in the position of aliens as to rights and citizens as to obligations.[34]

The policy of the Russian government throughout the 19th century has been full of contrasts and contradictions. Attempts at forcible russification and assimilation, which with Nicholas I practically spelled conversion, have alternated with methods of repression which sought to prevent closer contact between the Jewish and the native populations.

It was the liberal epoch of Alexander II that gave the first real promise of emancipation to Russian Jewry. The great reforms of this era benefited the Jews along with the other subjects of the Empire. With the influence of the liberals over the government there came a new attitude regarding the Jews and their value as economic and cultural forces. Partly to relieve the intense competition in the Pale, harmful both to the Christian and the Jewish populations, but chiefly to give the provinces of interior Russia the benefit of the superior industrial and commercial, and professional abilities of the Jews, laws were enacted allowing certain classes of Jews to live outside of the Pale. These were, chiefly, master-artisans, merchants of the first guild, students and graduates of universities and higher educational institutions, and members of the liberal professions.

With these laws and with the opening of the high schools and universities to the Jews, the movement for Russianization received a mighty impetus. Though these reforms, hedged about and limited by onerous conditions, affected comparatively few and hardly touched the life of the Jewish masses in a radical way, nevertheless, the impulse which even these relatively slight reforms gave to the current of Jewish life in Russia was far out of proportion to the relief they afforded. Jewish hopes for a final emancipation soared high: it seemed as if the walls of the Pale needed but little more to be broken down.

The reaction that followed the assassination of Alexander II fell upon the Jews as a national calamity. To the feudal party which now came into control, the Jews seemed the very embodiment of the forces in the Empire whose progress they were seeking to stem. No other nationality in the Russian Empire concentrated in itself so many characteristics and tendencies opposed to the ideals and interests of the Russian ruling classes. To the Church, dominated by a religio-national point of view, they were the very opposite of her ideal type of Russian orthodox, their very existence in Russia being regarded as an anomaly and as an actual and possible influence in disintegrating the religious faith of the orthodox peasants. To the nationalists they were an alien people racially and religiously, whose assimilation with the Russian people was neither possible nor desirable. To the autocracy and the bureaucracy there was the added fear from their intellectual superiority and their zeal for education of their playing a powerful part among the liberal forces seeking political freedom. Indeed, the Jews, whose economic and cultural activities and interests bound them closely to Western Europe and were in themselves modernizing and liberalizing influences, growing all the stronger through the greater freedom offered them during the liberal epoch, excited the deep repugnance of the feudal forces now directing the destinies of the state. To them the Jews spelled anathema. Separated from the great masses of the Russian people by race, nationality, religion, occupations and other social and psychological characteristics, they offered an unusually favorable object of attack.

It soon became clear that the new régime had determined upon making the Jews a central feature in their policy of reaction. At once a many-sided campaign against the Jews was begun. A powerful machinery of persecution was at hand in the existing Jewish laws. All that was necessary was to revive them, to interpret them rigorously, to tighten the legislative screws which had become loosened during the preceding liberal régime. This, however, seemed insufficient. It was determined that a powerful and definitive blow must be struck at the roots of their very existence in Russia.

The main attack was economic. The industrial and commercial activities of the Jews, especially in the Pale, make them, as we have seen, among the chief industrial producers for the peasants, as well as the chief buyers of their agricultural produce. This contact between the Jews and the peasants was a vital need in the economic life of both. The familiar charge that the Jews were exploiters of the peasantry was revived. Behind this charge lay the medieval economic prejudice, which attributes no really useful rôle to the merchant or trader.[35] In a custom-ridden economic order, the competitive methods of the Jewish traders smacked of commercial deceit. Principally, however, this charge served for a convenient explanation of the change of policy towards the Jews.

In this wise were introduced the "Temporary Regulations" of May, 1882, or the May Laws, the main clauses of which are the following:

1. As a temporary measure and until a general revision is made of the legal status of the Jews, they are forbidden to settle anew outside of towns and townlets (boroughs), an exception being made only in the case of existing Jewish agricultural colonies.

2. Until further orders, the execution of deeds of sale and mortgage in the names of Jews is forbidden, as well as the registration of Jews as lessees of real estate situated outside of towns and townlets, and also the issuing to Jews of powers of stewardship or attorney to manage and dispose of such real property.

The May Laws may be regarded as an extension of the general principle underlying the creation of the Pale. Through the first clause they were now to be forbidden free movement even within the Pale. As far as possible, their contact with the peasantry was to be cut off. The second clause aimed to put an end to the ownership by Jews of land in rural districts and the employment of Jews as stewards or managers of estates. A further construction of this clause forbade Jews to be connected with any business directly or indirectly depending upon the purchase of landed property outside of the towns of the Pale, thus debarring them from the utilization of land for industrial and commercial, as well as for agricultural purposes.

In the actual execution of these laws, and in the legal interpretations given them by the highest courts, the effect was far greater. A series of wholesale expulsions from the villages into the towns of the Pale began, on the ground of illegal residence. This was increased by the device, which became normal, of renaming towns as villages—easily possible in Russia where towns are frequently only administrative units—the resident Jews then being expelled as illegal settlers. Again, movement within the villages even on the part of Jews who had the right to live in villages was prohibited.

A further effect of this change in policy was upon the position of the Jews outside of the Pale, who enjoyed the right of residence in the interior of Russia, through the laws of the preceding régime. A stricter interpretation of these laws, added to a change in the administrative policy, had the effect not only of stopping the comparatively slight current of Jewish artisans into the interior of Russia, but also of starting a never-ending series of expulsions from the interior to the Pale. These expulsions have since continued, with individuals, families and whole groups, until they have become a constant phenomenon of Jewish life in Russia and a familiar item of world news.

While the May Laws thus touched to the quick the economic life of the Russian Jews, another series of laws sought to break down their cultural life by barring them from the higher educational and professional institutions. The contrast with the policy of the preceding régime was here as complete as possible. The principle of liberal assimilation with regard to the Jews had dictated the policy of opening wide to them the doors of the secondary schools and universities, and the liberal professions. The new régime, however, not only opposed education generally, and higher education particularly, as the means by which the reform and westernization of Russia was being accomplished, but it regarded the russification of the Jews as a special evil. Culturally as well, the Jews were to be separated from the Russian people.

Hence the introduction of the "percentage rule" in 1886 and 1887, restricting the proportion of Jewish students admitted to the secondary and high schools, and universities, within the Pale, to 10 per cent of the total number of students admitted. Outside of the Pale, the proportion was 5 per cent, except in St. Petersburg and Moscow, where it was placed at 3 per cent. In addition, the Jews were completely barred from a number of these institutions. As the Jews constituted so large a part of the populations in the towns of the Pale and had distinguished themselves in Russia as elsewhere by the eagerness with which they grasped the educational and professional opportunities offered them, the introduction of the "percentage rule" meant that the vast majority of the Jewish youth were to be deprived of the normal chances for education. Thus the "percentage rule", which was extended to institutions founded by the Jews themselves, was almost as great a blow as the May Laws. It threatened the cultural ruin of Russian Jewry. Bound up as the admission to these schools was with the liberal professions and with the opportunity of escaping from the limits of the Pale, it meant that one of the main highways to freedom in Russia had been closed to the Jews.

The most striking method of repression introduced by the new régime and its feudal supporters was that combination of murder, outrage and pillage—the pogrom. The revival of this characteristic expression of the antisemitism of the middle ages was not the result of spontaneous outbreaks of fury on the part of the Russian masses, but a deliberate and calculated awakening of latent racial and religious prejudices, evoked as powerful aids to inflame against the Jews the Russian masses, who are, religiously speaking, a tolerant people and whose relations to the Jews had been marked, on the whole, with friendliness.

The first pogroms began a month after the accession of Alexander III to the throne, and extended in the course of a year to 160 places in Southern Russia. Though the connivance of the local authorities was clearly established, the originators of the pogroms were never found.[36] However, moral support was lent by the government in the promulgation of the May Laws which closely followed. The doctrine that the misery of the peasants was due to their exploitation by the Jews, and that the pogroms were the instinctive expression of the fury of the peasants, was officially sanctioned. The pogroms of 1881-2 served as notice to all Russia and particularly to Russian Jewry, that the old order had given place to the new. Apart from the loss of life and damage to property they left the Russian Jews in a state of stupefaction and horror, with the sense of living on the brink of a precipice.

The first decade of Alexander III's reign had opened with these pogroms. The second decade opened with the wholesale expulsions from Moscow. Within six months, more than ten thousand Jews were expelled from the city on the ground of illegal residence. So vast a number of Jewish families was affected and so summary was the manner of executing the decree of expulsion, that several governments, among them our own, protested to the Russian government. President Harrison, discussing this protest in his message to Congress, frankly stated that

the banishment, whether by direct decree or by not less certain indirect methods, of so large a number of men and women is not a local question. A decree to leave one country is in the nature of things an order to enter another—some other. This consideration, as well as the suggestion of humanity, furnishes ample ground for the remonstrances which we have presented to Russia.[37]

The expulsions were preceded by a year of ominous rumors of a program of new restrictions beside which the May Laws would pale into insignificance. An offer of ten million dollars for the cause of Jewish education made by Baron de Hirsch to the Russian government was refused. His scheme, however, for the organization of a mass-emigration of Jews to Argentine was sanctioned. All these facts lent strength to the feeling of the Jews that they had nothing to hope for under the existing régime. Thus closed the reign of Alexander III and a memorable chapter in Russian Jewish history.

The early years of Nicholas II were marked by a relaxation in the strict administration and interpretation of the existing restrictive laws. Hopes for the amelioration of the Jewish situation began to be entertained. These hopes were destined shortly to be shattered.

The first decade of the twentieth century opened with threatening unrest. Economic depression began and was accompanied by revolutionary attacks. For the Jews, the most alarming symptom was the rise and uninterrupted progress of a group of antisemitic agitators and Russian loyalists, who sought to counteract the revolutionary movement by denouncing the Jews as the leaders of the revolution and the enemies of the autocracy and the Orthodox religion. Thus was sown the seed of the Kishineff massacre of April, 1903, which lasted three days. Before the echoes of Kishineff had died away, the massacre at Gomel followed.

But Kishineff proved to be merely a bloody prelude. The air was surcharged with explosives. The outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war and of the first organized revolution created a dangerous combination of events for the Jews. To the discontent of the peasants, forced to go to the front in a war for which they had no enthusiasm, and sore with the reverses of the Russian army, was added the increased activity of the agitators who declared that the war with Japan had been forced upon Russia by the Jews, eager to profit through its ruin, and who called upon their followers and the peasants through propaganda and proclamations to revenge themselves upon the Jews. The government at bay, on the verge of breakdown under the revolutionary attacks, and anxious to excuse its incompetency and failure in the conduct of the war, sought a means of diverting the peasants from the uprisings against the landed proprietors spreading over the land, and, above all, of stifling the revolution, which had met with such opportune and unlooked-for success among all classes. This was a situation alive with danger for the Jews, whose proletarians in the cities had taken an active part in the revolution. The organization of Jewish massacres by responsible agents of the government became the central feature of its program of counter-revolution.[38] A veritable holocaust ensued in nearly every province of the Empire for two years, only the climaxes of which became known to the world in Zhitomir, Odessa, Bialystok, and Siedlec.

The rôle of the bureaucracy in the creation of the pogroms, especially in 1906, in which year there took place hundreds of pogroms, was made abundantly clear by the Russian press, by Prince Urussov's disclosures in the Duma, and by the report of the Duma Commission appointed to investigate the causes of the Bialystok pogrom of 1906. As announced in their official report, an investigation had shown that the relations between the Jews and the Christians of Bialystok previous to the bloodshed had been amicable, and that preparations for a pogrom had been deliberately and carefully made by agents of the bureaucracy and carried out with the aid of the local authorities.

Both periods of pogroms in these thirty years were periods of revolution. In both the government had felt the ground shaking under its feet from terroristic attacks and from peasant uprisings. In the first period Jews had taken only slight part. In the late revolution, however, the participation of the Jews of the Pale, through the Jewish labor organization, the Bund, was quite strong. The earlier pogroms gave a hint as to the policy of the new régime. The later ones occurred at the end of years of repression and persecution, and were a culminating point in the fury of the reactionary forces at their failure to stem the tide of liberalism in the struggle for parliamentary institutions and for the rights of citizens in a modern state.

The results of these thirty years of reaction remain to be considered. Though the effects of the pogroms upon the Russian Jews can hardly be overestimated, the less evident, because less spectacular, methods of restrictive law and administrative action have in the long run left a far more enduring impress.

The introduction of the May Laws at the very beginning of the eighties awakened the Jews to the realization that their future in Russia was threatened. The May Laws and the laws that were developed from them, the obstacles that were placed in the way of Jewish education and, in general, the administrative difficulties that were created, have affected every movement of their life.

Freedom of movement of the individual is the very essence of the life of modern states and the basis of their economic, social and political institutions. The lack of this freedom, especially to the extent created by the May Laws, bars the Jews from the possibilities of normal economic growth and progress. The Jewish manufacturers and capitalists are prevented from participating in the industrial and commercial development of Russia, which is so rapidly proceeding and to which, owing to their economic position and capacities, they could powerfully contribute. Legal interference with economic activities, so frequently the rule in Russia, is emphasized in the case of the Jews.

A far more serious situation confronts the great mass of the Jewish artisans, petty merchants and factory workers, to which the vast majority of the Jews belong. Largely prevented access to their natural customers, the peasants, by the prohibition of rural residence, and confined to the relatively few towns of the Pale, where over-crowding and over-competition are the necessary and unavoidable results, the Jewish artisans and petty merchants have a bitter struggle to maintain a position of economic independence.

Added to this, there is the social pressure to which the Jews have been subjected. Not until this period has the century-long position of the Jews as the "pariahs of the Empire" been so sharply emphasized. Enmeshed in a net of special laws and regulations, at the mercy of ministerial decree, secret circular, arbitrary administrative act, law has lost all meaning for the Jews. In this atmosphere they exist mainly through bribery, at once their bane and their salvation.

The unusual economic and social pressure exerted by the reactionary régime upon its Jewish subjects, through the new restrictive laws that were put into operation during the last thirty years, the administrative harrying that became the order of the day and the introduction of the hitherto unused method of physical repression, the pogrom, becomes clear in the light of its policy. Beginning as a movement to suppress the Jews in their economic and cultural activities, and to separate them as far as possible from their Russian neighbors, the anti-Jewish program became in its final form the expulsion and extermination of the Jews from Russia. The historic sentence of Count Ignatiev, author of the May Laws, at the very beginning of this period, "the Western borders are open to you Jews", strikes the keynote of this policy. And, in fact, for practically the first time in its history, the Russian government relaxed in 1892 its rigorous rules forbidding emigration, and gave its sanction to Baron de Hirsch's plan of organizing a vast emigration of Jews from Russia, which its author hoped would, at the end of a quarter of a century, result in the complete transplantation of the Jews from Russia. The famous principle of the Russian government, "once a Russian always a Russian", was for once put aside in favor of the Jews. They were given one right not enjoyed by other Russians, that of leaving Russia under the obligation of abandoning Russian citizenship forever.[39]

II. ROUMANIA

Up to very recent years, the history of the Jews in Roumania centers about those resident in Moldavia. Its proximity to ancient Poland and close association with Bessarabia, naturally made for a back-and-forth movement of the Polish and Russian Jews, whose settlement was invited by the boyars or landed nobility because of resulting industrial and commercial advantages.

The position of the Jews in Moldavia up to the middle of the nineteenth century did not differ to any extent from that of their brethren in Russia. Moldavia, as a Christian state, denied civil and political rights to all non-Christians. The Jews in Moldavia were regarded as aliens, whose activities were subject to special regulation. The beginning of the last century witnessed the first special Jewish laws. The Jews were forbidden to buy the products of the soil, to acquire real property; non-resident Jews were debarred unless they could prove an occupation and show the possession of property. Definite restrictions as to occupation, residence in the villages, the ownership, in villages, of houses, land, vineyards, etc., existed. As vagabonds they could be expelled from the country by administrative decree. Thus was their legal status fixed.

The emancipation of Jews was first demanded by the liberal party during the revolutionary days of 1848. But no practical change resulted until the Convention of Paris in 1856, which, in granting autonomy to the two provinces, guaranteed civil rights to all Moldavians, regardless of creed. Though political rights were granted only to Christian Moldo-Wallachians, the provision was made that, by legislative arrangements, the enjoyment of political rights could be extended to other creeds. Thus was established the possibility of a gradual emancipation of the Jews, foreshadowed in the communal law of 1864, which granted the right of naturalization to certain classes of native Roumanian Jews. Those who had passed through college or had a recognized foreign degree, or who had founded a factory in the land employing at least fifty workmen were among the favored classes.

Shortly afterwards, this section was abrogated, and, with the abdication of the liberal Couza and the accession of Charles Hohenzollern, the present king, to the throne, the situation changed. Article VII of the constitution of the newly-created kingdom read that foreigners not of the Christian faith could not be naturalized. As within the term foreigner the great mass of the Jews residing in the land was included, this was a denial of the conditions laid down in the Treaty of Paris. At the same time, old laws against the Jews which had fallen into abeyance were revived, expulsions of the Jews from the villages into the towns began to take place with great frequency, laws requiring all sellers of liquor in rural communes to be naturalized Roumanians deprived many Jewish families of a livelihood—in short, the usual symptoms of anti-Jewish activity became the order of the day.

It was at the famous Berlin Congress, convened to decide questions created by the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, that the subject of the Jewish disabilities in Roumania was brought up, in connection with the demand of Roumania for recognition as an independent state. The chief objection made especially by the representatives of three of the European powers—France, England and Germany—was Roumania's treatment of the Jews. It was finally decided by the Congress to recognize her independence on the condition that she grant civil and political equality to all her citizens without distinction of race or creed. This was expressed in Article 44 of the historic Berlin Treaty, which read as follows:

Article 44. In Roumania, difference in religious beliefs and confessions shall not be brought against anyone as a ground for exclusion or unfitness as regards the enjoyment of civil and political rights, admission to public offices, functions, and honors, or the exercise of various professions and industries in any place whatever. Freedom in outward observance of all creeds will be assured to all subjects of the Roumanian state, as well as to strangers, and no obstacle will be raised either to the ecclesiastical organization of different bodies, or to their intercourse with their spiritual heads.

The citizens of all states, whether merchants or others, shall be dealt with, in Roumania, without distinction of religion, on the basis of perfect equality.

In the constituante which was convoked soon after to discuss the question of giving the Jews equal political rights, an interesting picture is obtained of the sentiment of the upper and middle classes of Roumania.[40] An overwhelming majority was opposed to the granting of political rights to the Jews on the ground that Roumania was a Christian-Latin State, or on the purely nationalistic ground that the Jews were an alien and utterly unassimilable element of the population. To meet the demands of the Powers the principle of individual naturalization was adopted, by which an alien could be granted naturalization individually and only by a special vote of the Chamber of Deputies. Other onerous conditions, such as the requirement of a ten years' residence in the country for citizenship, and the prohibition of the purchase by aliens of rural estates, showed conclusively that Roumania was prepared to give only formal assent to the demand of the Powers.[41] After a year of negotiations, the three Powers agreed to the recognition of her independence, expressing the hope that the Roumanian government would recognize the inadequacy of the revised article and especially of the principle of individual naturalization as meeting the conditions of the Berlin Treaty, and would aim towards a complete emancipation of all her subjects.[42]

The situation at the beginning of the eighties presented but little hope of improvement in the political condition of the Jews. Eight hundred and eighty-three Jews who had fought in the war for independence had been naturalized en masse. With the exception of this small number, the Jews were legally classed as foreigners.[43] Shortly after, owing to the fact that Austria-Hungary had withdrawn its protection from several thousands of its Jewish citizens resident in Roumania, the entire body of Jews received a new legal status, that of "foreigners not subject to any foreign Power". In other words, they were stateless, though subject to all the obligations of Roumanian citizens, including military service and the payment of taxes. This legal status of the Jews has received the attention of the world and marks a condition of things which according to Bluntschli is "a denial of the entire development of European states".[44]

Freed from the control of the Powers, Roumania now entered on a new campaign of discrimination against the Jews. The first decade of the eighties saw this begun in a series of laws which for completeness finds no parallel even in Russia. At the very beginning, a law giving the police the right of domiciliary visitation and of expelling under the vagabond law anyone in the rural districts, was employed against the Jews, resulting in their frequent expulsions into the towns. The enforcement of the law against rural residence was so strict as to create practically the same situation as exists in the Russian Pale. The law of 1883, prohibiting lotteries, and in the following year the law prohibiting hawking or any form of sale from house to house or on the streets deprived several thousands of Jewish families of their livelihood.

It was in 1886 and 1887, however, when the laws which were to create a national industry and commerce were introduced, that a serious step was taken to exclude the Jews from economic activity. On the assumption that occupations were a civil right to which aliens could or could not be admitted, the Jews were systematically deprived even of the civil rights which had been theirs, to a great extent, before the Berlin Congress sought to make them politically free. As foreigners, the Jews were prohibited the right of choosing electors for the newly-created Chambers of Commerce and Trade, or of becoming members of these chambers although they formed a large majority of the merchants and manufacturers represented in these important bodies. A still more serious provision was that which decreed that five years after the foundation of a factory two-thirds of the workingmen employed therein must be Roumanians. Jews were also partly excluded from the administrative positions in joint-stock companies. They were completely excluded from employment in the financial institutions of the state, from the state railway service, and, by a provision that two-thirds of the employes on private railways must be Roumanians, were practically excluded from these as well. The sharpest blow, however, was struck in 1902, when a new law for the organization of trades, popularly known as the Artisans' Bill, was passed. In this law there is to be seen a revival of the guild organizations of the Middle Ages. To pursue his occupation every artisan was required to obtain a certificate from a guild. Jewish master artisans and workmen were hit by the requirement that aliens in order to have the right of working in accordance with this law must prove that in their own country reciprocal rights existed for Roumanians, or obtain an authorization from a Chamber of Commerce or Industry. Whatever value this requirement may have had for the protection of Roumanian workmen in foreign countries, its chief effect was to place in a position of economic helplessness the majority of the Jewish workmen as "aliens not subject to any foreign Power", and largely unable to secure authorization from such chambers controlled by competitors. Other clauses, requiring that all workingmen belong to a guild, and that fifty workmen possessing civil and political rights are empowered to form a guild, put the control of trades into the hands of non-Jews, although the majority of the artisans in many of the trades were Jews.

A similar policy was pursued with reference to the cultural activities of the Jews. A circular of the minister of public instruction, issued in 1887, ordered that preference should be given to Roumanian children, in cases where there was not enough room in the elementary schools for all. This began the gradual exclusion of Jewish children from the Roumanian elementary schools. The formal treatment of the Jews as aliens in the educational system was introduced in 1893, when all aliens were required to pay fees for entrance into the public schools, and were admitted only in case there was enough room for them. The effect of these laws was seen in the diminished proportion of Jewish children in the elementary schools. Similar provisions for the secondary and high schools and universities largely closed the doors of these institutions to the Jews. From schools of agriculture and forestry, and of commerce they were completely excluded.

To the educational restrictions were added restrictions to professional service. As aliens, they were forbidden to be employed in the public sanitary service and health department as physicians, pharmacists, etc., from owning as well as working in private pharmacies, and from entering other professional fields.

The almost complete agreement of the two principal parties—liberal and conservative—explains the thoroughness and uninterrupted progress of this process of piling up disability upon disability. The explanation is partly to be found in the constitution of Roumania, the electoral law of which places the political powers in the hands of two classes—the landed aristocracy and the urban, or middle class. The vast majority of the peasants are excluded by educational and property qualifications, obtaining only indirect representation. Had the Jews been granted political rights, they would have shared political power with the other two classes. It is through the second electoral college, of both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, that the middle class is represented politically. As manufacturers and merchants, as urban dwellers, as members of the liberal professions and as graduates of the elementary schools, the Jews would have become the most important part of this electoral college.

Again, the creation of an industry and commerce along national lines was largely a course of action in the interests of this middle class of Roumanian merchants, artisans and laborers. It was in favor of this class that the laws were passed debarring Jews from various occupations and seeking essentially to wrest the industrial and commercial monopoly from their hands.

In this course of action, powerful aid was extended by the bureaucracy, recruited mainly from the lower nobility and the middle classes. Depending for their support upon the urbans, and seeking to prevent the entrance of Jews into state service, which would have resulted from the granting of political rights to the Jews, the bureaucracy have acted in harmony with the middle classes in the attempt to make the Jews politically, economically, and culturally powerless.

Thus the situation that the Jews in Roumania have been facing for thirty years is abnormal, from every standpoint. At no time within thirty years has there been any serious question of giving to the Jews the political rights, the granting of which had been made the condition of the recognition of Roumania's independence by the Powers. The history of the succeeding thirty years has been one of gradual, steady and systematic deprivation of one civil right after another. To the prohibition of freedom of movement has been added that of work; one occupation after another has been prohibited to Jews under the mask of foreigners. From all the branches of state service Jews have been almost completely debarred. Participation in important private and public enterprises has similarly been limited. The schools have been largely closed to them. The effect has been partly registered in a rate of illiteracy higher in the cities among the Jewish children between seven and fifteen than among the non-Jewish children of the same age.

Thus the conscious policy of Roumania has been that of oppression, political, economic and social, with the deliberate aim of making it impossible for the Jews to live in Roumania. This method of indirect expulsion is the essence of her policy of thirty years. As such it was recognized and openly stated in the only formal protest against her manner of fulfilling the conditions of the Berlin Treaty, made by the United States, through its Secretary of State, John Hay, whose circular to the Powers signatory to the Treaty demanded that Roumania be called to account for her treatment of the Jews, and her dishonesty in violating the pledges given by her to the Powers.[45]

III. AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the legal position of the Jews in Austria-Hungary differed from that of their brethren in Russia and Roumania only in degree. Prohibited the free exercise of their religion, the right to hold real property, and to enter certain occupations, and burdened by special Jewish taxes, the Jews remained a class apart and governed in all their activities by special laws. Their legal emancipation, begun in 1848, was definitely established by the promulgation in each division of the Empire of the Fundamental Law of 1867, declaring that religion should not be a ground for discrimination in civil and political rights.

The civil and political equality of the Jews was a cardinal principle of the creed of German-Austrian liberalism and one of a number of its victories embodied in the Constitution of 1867. Austrian economic and social life at this period was, however, too saturated with medievalism to allow for a complete revolution in the attitude toward the Jews. On the other hand, the influential part played by the Jews in the liberal movement and the fact that a group of wealthy Jews were powerful factors in the haute finance and in the commercial life of the country were made the basis of an attack by the feudal-clericals upon the Jews.

The great financial crash of 1873, in which several Jewish financial houses were concerned, was the starting-point of political antisemitism in Austria. The Jews were denounced as the representatives of the capitalist order of society, with its overwhelming concentration of wealth and its exploitation of the industrial and the agricultural proletariat. The Christian-Socialist movement began with antisemitism as the corner-stone of its economic and social doctrines. Its opposition to the Jews and to capitalism was largely due to medieval prejudices in favor of the Christian-feudal state and the medieval industrial organization. In the early eighties it began to triumph when the "small man" or petty industrialist received political power through an extension of the suffrage.

It reached its height in the nineties, when, under the combined influence of feudal-clerical nobles, the clergy and the lower middle class, a period of reaction set in. In Vienna, in 1895, the antisemite Lueger was elected mayor. Powerless though they were to change the legal status of the Jews, the antisemites succeeded in creating in both upper and lower circles of Austrian society an atmosphere of antagonism to the Jews which has prevented the complete fulfillment of the principle of equality as set forth in the constitution.

The clericals have fanned the flames of religious hatred especially among the peasantry by ritual-murder accusations, which have been rife and have played a large part in strengthening the sentiment of hostility toward the Jews.

In Galicia, the position of the Jews became unsettled, owing to a variety of causes.[46] Although one of the least advanced among the Austrian crown lands, Galicia has experienced within the last half-century an industrial and commercial development along with the rest of the Empire. This resulted in the growth of a middle class particularly among the Poles, which began to compete for supremacy with the Jews. The improvements in transportation and communication, the organization of agricultural syndicates, for the purpose of directly purchasing and selling the produce of the peasants, and the creation of rural credit societies, helped considerably to displace the Jewish middlemen and traders as well as the Jewish money-lenders, who dealt largely with the peasantry. The movement to develop Galicia industrially was fostered on national lines by these Polish organizations, which carried on an extensive propaganda and systematically organized economic boycotts against the Jews. "Do not buy of Jews", "Do not patronize Jewish artisans", became familiar cries in Galicia as in other parts of Austria.

The process of wrestling the monopoly of industry, trade and commerce from the Jews in favor of the Polish petty merchants and artisans was considerably accelerated by the official bodies, the autonomous Galician Diet and the municipal boards, controlled chiefly by the Polish-Catholic nobility, who saw in the national-industry movement a means of capturing the votes of the middle class and of thus retaining their position as leaders of the Polish people. Communal funds were used to establish Poles in business. Attempts were made to take away from the Jews the small-salt and tobacco trades. The taxes on the taverns were increased. In the public financial institutions organized for various purposes Jews were not given representation. In nearly all the activities designed to promote the interest of the urban population and the peasantry, the Jews were systematically excluded by the local authorities.

Added to this, the increasing distress of the Galician peasants has reacted strongly upon the Jews, who depend so largely upon their buying power. The poverty of the peasantry, the competition for the control of the rural market created by public and private agencies, added to the increasing competition in the towns from other sections of the population, have all co-operated to create a great surplus, in proportion to the population, of petty merchants and artisans among the Jews. This had its effect in an over-competition from the side of the Jews themselves.

The Jews have suffered as well from their historical rôle of intermediaries between a most avaricious nobility and a bitterly exploited peasantry. Acting as stewards and as tavern keepers for the Polish nobles, who are mainly absentee landlords, and who, until very recently, enjoyed the right of keeping taverns as one of their feudal privileges, the Jews have become the buffers of the deep-seated antagonism between the two chief classes of Galicia.

Agrarian uprisings have been frequent of late, particularly after the failure of the crops, which here as in Russia and Roumania spells a crisis. These, chiefly directed against the nobles, have frequently been diverted toward the Jews, to whom the peasants are largely indebted, and in whom they see the visible instruments of the oppression of their lords.

Economic antagonism has been intensified by the religious hatred which has been fostered by the Polish clergy and which has been the basis of numerous ritual-murder charges.

FOOTNOTES:

[34] Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars (New York, 1894), vol. iii, p. 558.

[35] For an example of typically medieval economic notions regarding trade and commerce prevalent among the feudal classes of Eastern Europe, cf. Carmen Sylva's criticism on the economic activities of the Jews in Roumania in Century, March, 1906.

[36] The part played by the authorities in these pogroms is discussed by A. Linden in Die Judenpogromen, vol. i, pp. 12-96.

[37] President Harrison's Message is given in [Appendix A], page 199.

[38] Séménoff, The Russian Government and the Jewish Massacres (London, 1907), pp. 147-167.

[39] Immigration Commission: Emigration Conditions in Europe, pp. 261-262.

[40] The discussions are presented in La question juive.

[41] Article VII is given in [Appendix B], p. 200.

[42] Cf. English Parliamentary Papers, 1880, vol. lxxix, Correspondence relative to the recognition of Roumania.

[43] In the following twenty years only 85 Jews were granted citizenship.

[44] Bluntschli's pamphlet is a valuable statement of the situation. For title cf. [Bibliography].

[45] The Hay note is given in [Appendix C], pp. 201-206.

[46] Jüdische Statistik, p. 208 et seq.

CHAPTER V[ToC]

Conclusion

An intimate connection has thus been established between the present state of economic and social transition through which the countries of Eastern Europe are passing and the situation which has confronted the Jews in each of these countries and has profoundly influenced their position and their history for the last third of a century. What the forces are behind the emigration of the Jews from these countries to Western Europe and the United States during this period now become clear.

The industrial and commercial development of the recent decades brought about changes in themselves unfavorable to the economic activities of the Jews. The improvements in communication and transportation through the extension of railroads, the building of roads, and the creation of credit facilities especially for the peasantry served partly to displace the Jews, whose economic position had been largely based upon the services they rendered in a relatively backward industrial and commercial civilization. The rise of a middle class among the Christian populations, chiefly engaged in industry, added an element of competition not before present. Not the least important in its effects was the increasing poverty of the peasantry, which seriously affected the Jews, as the principal buyers of their produce and sellers of finished products. Agricultural crises, so frequent in recent years in Eastern Europe, have often involved the Jews in financial ruin.[47]

These purely economic factors served to weaken the position of the Jews and to cause an over-concentration in trade and industry, to their detriment. The gradual readjustment that would have followed naturally was, however, prevented by the existence of other forces, in the action of which we find the key to the situation faced by the Jews and the impelling forces of Jewish emigration.

One of these was the economic antisemitism that rose partly from the competition of the middle classes of both populations. This competitive jealousy awakened racial and religious prejudices and found particularly in Galicia an active expression in the organization of economic boycotts, and in the co-operative agencies that were created to foster the growth of the Christian artisans and merchants. The sufferings of the agricultural population, again, were charged to the Jews, with whom the peasants were in close business relations and to whom they were deeply indebted. Preached from platform, press and pulpit, the doctrine of Jewish exploitation of the peasantry found a ready acceptance among all classes.

Economic and social hostility was furthered by the feudal ruling classes whose antagonism to the Jews was deep-seated and many-sided. As these formed the ruling economic, social and political power in Eastern Europe, they were the chief instrument in creating a situation that was full of danger for the Jews. In the politico-economic struggles between these privileged classes and the liberal middle classes that accompanied the transition, the Jews were found, consciously or unconsciously, on the side of the liberals, who sought to introduce the economic, social and political conditions of modern civilization. Thus they served as a convenient object of attack. In Russia, where, since the reaction, the control of the feudal classes over the government was complete, the new laws restricting residence, movement, occupations and economic activity in general, checked the economic growth of the Jews and put them at a great disadvantage in the struggle for existence. This situation was created to an even greater degree in Roumania, where the economic interests of the Roumanian middle class were furthered at the expense of the Jews. Economic helplessness was essentially the condition created for the Jews, so narrow was the margin left for the exercise of their powers. The social pressure that was added, through laws limiting the entrance of Jews to the educational institutions and the liberal professions, seeking to limit their cultural influence, was part and parcel of the same policy. In the case of Russia, repression reached the form of massacres of Jews, when these were found politically useful.

Governmental oppression was thus the chief force in unsettling the economic and social position of the Jews. Throughout the course of thirty years the leading motive of the Russian and Roumanian governments was the reduction, through every possible means, of the number of their Jewish populations.

This governmental pressure which began to be applied at the beginning of the eighties became equivalent in the course of time to an expulsive force. The only outlet to the intolerable conditions that had been created by the forces of governmental repression and oppression was emigration. This was sensed by the Jews at the very beginning of the period. How eagerly it has been seized upon the following pages will show. It is enough for the moment to point out that the vast and steadily increasing stream of Russian Jewish immigrants to the United States alone, has risen to such proportions that its average for the past decade has approached the estimated annual increase of the Jews in Russia. In other words, emigration has begun to mean the decline, not only relatively, but even absolutely, of the Jewish population in Russia.

The fact that the persecution of the Jews in the case of Russia and Roumania amounts to a force of rejection has been widely recognized during the course of the emigration of the Jews from Eastern Europe. In England, where the number of Jewish immigrants increased rapidly, it found expression in the official reports, and in the United States, it became a subject of direct diplomatic correspondence in the formal protest to Russia in 1891 by President Harrison, and in 1902 in the circular note to the Powers by Secretary Hay, regarding Roumania's treatment of the Jews.

A still more significant recognition of the exceptional forces behind the Jewish immigration was given by the Jews of Western Europe and the United States, living in a state of freedom, security and comparative wealth, to whom the oncoming of thousands of Jewish refugees at all the critical periods, and the steady stream of Jewish immigrants at other times has meant a taking-up of onerous burdens and a sharing of the hardships of the situation thus suddenly thrust upon them. The attempt to organize and regulate Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe was a task early undertaken by the Alliance Israélite Universelle. The Jewish Colonization Association was expressly founded by Baron de Hirsch to open up, in various countries, new paths for the Jewish emigrants. At all periods of exceptional emigration, national and international committees met to consider the problems of the immigrants thrown upon their responsibility.

The vast majority of the emigrants made the United States their goal. In their movement and their economic and social characteristics we shall find a striking reflection of the impelling forces of their emigration.

FOOTNOTES:

[47] Cf. Hersch, chap. v. He gives to this factor far more importance than it deserves. For criticism of his method, cf. p. 92, note I.