 Section 30 of History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, Volume 2, From the Deaths of Alexander I until the Deaths of Alexander III, 1825 to 1894, by Szymon Duvnoff, translated by Israel Friedlander. This Livrivox recording is in the public domain, recording by Assy Schim, Manicked Baisho, Portugal. Chapter 28, Judeo-phobia triumphant, Part 1, Intensified Reaction The poisonous Judeo-phobia baseline seemed to thrive more than ever in the highest government circles of St. Petersburg. However, not only the hatred against the Jews, but also the fury of general political reaction became more rapid than ever even after the miraculous escape of the imperial family in the railroad accident near Borke on October 17, 1888. The ministery ecclesiastic and mystic haze with each pro-Vietnamese chief and his associates managed to veil this episode. The conviction became deeply ingrained in the mind of the Tsar that it was the finger of God which pointed to him the way in which Russia might be saved from Western reforms and brought back into the fold of traditional Russian autotoxy. This conviction of Alexander III led to the counter reforms which marked the concluding years of his reign having for their purpose the strengthening of the police and church regime in Russia, such as the curtailment of rural and urban self-government, the increase of power of the nobility and clutch, the institution of James W. Chipps, and the multiplication of Greek orthodox parochial schools at the expense of secular schools. The same influences also stimulated the luxurious growth of Judeo-phobia which from now on assumed in the highest government circles a most mollivant character. A manifestation of this frame of mind may be found in the words of the Tsar which he penned on the margin of a report submitted to him in 1890 by a high official describing the sufferings of the Jews and pleading for the necessity of stopping the police of oppression. But we must not forget that it was the Jews who classified our Lord and spilled his priceless blood. Representatives of the court-clutch publicly preached that a Christian ought not to cultivate friendly relations with the Jew since it was the command of the Gospel to hate the murderers of the Savior. The ministry of the interior under the direction of two fanatic reactionaries, Durnov and Pleb said on foot all the inquisitorial contrivances of the police department of which both these officials had formerly been the chiefs. Footnote, Borki is a village in the government of Kursun. Of the 15 cars of the imperial train, only 5 remained intact. 58 persons were injured, 21 fatally. The members of the imperial family were saved, although their car had been completely wrecked. The following quotation from Harold Frederick, the New Exodus page 168 at Sik is of interest in this connection. It was reported about that the Tsar regarded the escape life of himself and family from the terrible railway accident at Borki as the direct and miraculous intervention of Providence. The fact was that the imperial train was being driven at the rate of 91st an hour over a road calculated to withstand at the utmost a speed of 35 bursts. That the engineer humbly warned the Tsar of the danger and was gruffly ordered to go still faster if possible and that the miracle would have been the avoidance of calamity. Footnote, The press was either tamed or used as tool of the government policies. The most widely read press organs of the capital with the exception of the moderately liberal diversity, the news which managed to survive the shift wreck of the liberal press became either openly or secretly the official mouthpiece of the government. The venal Novoe vremia, which the Russian satirist Shedrin had branded as the sewer, embarked toward the end of the 80s on the noble enterprise of hunting down the Jews with a zeal which was clear evidence of higher demand for Judeophobia in the official world. There was no accusation however hideous which Suburban's paper steered simultaneously by the Holy Synod and by the police department failed to hold in the face of the Jews. As an organ generally reflecting the views of the government, the Novoe vremia served at the time as a source of political information for all the dignitaries and officials. The ministers, governors and the vast army of subordinate officials who wished to ascertain the political cause at the given moment consulted this well informed daily which as far as the Jewish question was concerned pursued but one aim to make the life of the Jews in Russia unbearable. Apart from the Novoe vremia which was read by the Tsar himself, the work of true baiting was also carried on with considerable zeal by the Russian weekly Grasdanin, the citizen whose editor Count Mechelski enjoyed not only the personal favor of Alexander III but also a substantial government subsidy. These metropolitan organs of publicity gave the tone to the whole official and semi-official press in the provinces and the public opinion of Russia was systematically poisoned by the venom of Judeophobia. When the parliament commission was discharged, the Tsar having attacked himself to the opinion of the minority, the government had no difficulty in finding new kind-hearted officials who were eager to carry the project framed by this reactionary minority into effect. The project itself, which had been elaborated in the Ministry of the Interior under the direction of PLEV, the sinister chief of police was guarded with great secrecy as if it concerned a plan of military operations against the religion power but the secret leaked out very soon. The minister had sent out copies of the project to the governor's general, soliciting their opinions and, alone, copies of the project were circulating in London, Paris and Vienna. In the spring of 1890, Russia and Western Europe were filled with alarming rumors concerning an enactment of some 40 clauses which were designed to curtail the commercial activities of the Jews to increase the rigor of the temporary rules within the pale and restrict the privileged comfort upon several categories of Jews outside of it to establish medieval Jewish ghettos in St. Petersburg, Moscow and Kiev and similar measures. The foreign press made a terrible outcry against these contemplated new acts of barbarism. The voice of protest was particularly strong in England. The London Times or sailed in violent terms the reactionary policies of Russia and a special organ called Darkest Russia was published for this purpose by Russian political refugees in England. The Russian government denied these rumors through its diplomatic channels, though at the very same time the well-informed Norway-Bremia and Grazdanian were not bad from printing news items concerning the projected disabilities were from recommending virtuous measures against the Jews for the purpose of removing them from all branches of labor. This committee was well understood abroad. At the end of July and in the beginning of August, interpolations were introduced in both houses of English parliament as to whether a majestic government found it possible to make diplomatic representations in defense of the persecuted Russian Jews for whom England would have to provide war day to arrive there in large messes. Premier Salisbury in the House of Lords and Ferguson, the Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs in the House of Commons, replied that these proceedings which if rightly reported to us are deeply to be regretted concern the internal affairs of the Russian Empire and do not admit of any interference on the part of her Majesty's government. When shortly afterwards preparations were set on foot for calling a protest meeting in London, the Russian government hastened to announce through British Ambassador in St. Petersburg that no new measures against the Jews were in contemplation and the meeting was called off. Rumor had it that the Lord Mayor of London, Henry Isaacs, who was a Jew, did not approve of this meeting, of which according to the English custom, he would have to preside. The action of the Lord Mayor may have been tactful, but it was certainly not free from an admixture of timidity. Two, continued harassing. While anxiously endeavouring to appease public opinion abroad, the Russian government at home did all it could to keep the Jews in an agitated state of mind. The legal draft and the circulars which had been sent out secretly by the central government in St. Petersburg elicited the liveliest sympathy on the part of the provincial administrators. Not satisfied with signifying to the ministry of their approval of the contemplated disabilities, many officials of high rank began to display openly their bitter hatred of the Jews. At one and the same time during the months of June, July and August of 1890, the heads of various local provincial administrations published circulars calling the attention of the police to the audacious conduct of the Jews who on meeting Russian officials failed to take off their heads by way of greeting. The governor of Mogilev instructed the police of his province to impress the local Jewish population with the necessity of polite manners in the sense of more reverent attitude towards the representatives of Russian authority. In compliance with this order, the district chiefs of police compelled the rabbis to inculcate their flock in the synagogues with reverence for Russian officialdom. In Mr Slavl, a town in the government of Mogilev, the president of the nobility assumed the leading members of the Jewish community and cautioned them that those Jews who would fail to comply with the governor's circular would be subjected to a public whipping by the police. The governor of Odessa, the well-known death boat Zelenoy, issued a police ordinance for the purpose of curving the impudence displayed by the Jews in places of public gathering and particularly in the suburban trolley cars where they do not give up their seats and altogether show disrespect towards persons of advanced age or those wearing a uniform testifying to their high position. Even more brutal was the conduct of the governor general of Vilma, Kavanaugh, who, despite his high rank, allowed himself in replying to the speech of welcome of a Jewish deputation to animadvert not only on Jewish clenishness but also on the licentiousness of the Jewish population manifesting itself in congregating on the streets and similar grave crimes. The simultaneous occurrence of this sort of official actions in widely separated places point to a common source probably to some secret instructions from St. Petersburg. It does seem, however, that the provincial henchmen of the central government had overached themselves in their eagerness to carry out the behest of curving the Jews. The pettiness of their demands, which moreover were illegal, such as the order to take off the heads before the officials or to give up the seats in the trolley cars, merely served to ridicule the representatives of Russian officialdom, giving frequent rise to tragic comic conflicts in public and to utterances of indignation in the press. The public pronouncements of these gentle chinovniks who were anxious to train the Jewish masses in the fear of Russian bureaucracy and inculcate in them alike manners, allows the attention both of the Russian and the foreign press. It was universally felt that these partial performances of uncouth administrators were only the manifestations of a bottomless hatred, of morbid desire to insult and to humble the Jews, and that these administrators were capable at any moment to proceed from moralizing to more tangible forms of ill-treatment. This danger intensified the state of alarm. While making the preparations for storming the citadel of Russian Jewry, the government took good care to keep it meanwhile in its normal state of siege. The resourcefulness of the administration brought the technique of repression to perfection. The officials were no longer content with inventing cunning devices for expelling old Jewish residents from the villages. They now made endeavours to reduce even the area of the urban pale in which the Jews were huddled together, panting for breath. In 1890, the provincial authorities acting evidently on a signal from above began to change numerous little towns and villages, which as rural settlements would be closed to the Jews. As a result, all the Jews who had settled in these localities after the issuance of the temporary rules of May 3, 1882 were now expelled, and even the older residents who were exempt from the operation of the male laws shared the same fate unless they were able, which in many cases they were not to produce documentary evidence that they had lived there prior to 1882. Simultaneously, a new attempt was made to drive the Jews from the forbidden 50th verse zone along the western border of the empire, particularly in Bessarabia. These explosions had the effect of feeling the already overcrowded cities of the pale with many more thousands of ruined people. At the same time, the life of the outlawed Jews were made unbearable in the cities outside the pale, particularly in the large centres such as Kiev, Moscow and St. Petersburg. The Governor General of Kiev prohibited the wives of Jewish artisans who were legally entitled to residence in the city to sell eatables in the market on the technical ground that under the law, artisans could only trade in the articles of their own manufacture, thus robbing the poor Jewish workmen of the miserable pittance which his wife was anxious to contribute by honest labor towards the maintenance of the family. A great political blow for the Jews was the close in the new reactionary statute concerning the seized organizations, each on June 12, 1890, under which the Jews, though paying the local taxes, were completely barred from participating in the election of deputies to the organization of local self-government. This close was inserted in the legal draft by the three shining lights of the political inquisition active at the time, Pobetonoshev, Drunov and Plev. They justified this restriction on the following grounds. The object of the new law is to transform local self-government into a state administration and to strengthen in the former the influence of the central government at the expense of the local government. Hence the Jews being altogether unelement hostile to government are not fit to participate in the James 4 administration. The council of state agreed with this bureaucratic motivation and the humiliating clause passed into law. While a large part of the Russian public and of the Russian press had succumbed to the prevailing tendencies under the high pressure of the anti-Semitic atmosphere, the progressive elements of the Russian intelligentsia were gradually allows to a feeling of protest. Vladimir Solovyov, the Christian philosopher and the friend of the Jewish people who had familiarized himself thoroughly with its history and literature, conceived the idea of issuing a public protest against the anti-Semitic movement in the Russian press to be signed by the most prominent Russian writers and other well-known men. During the months of May and June 1890, he succeeded under great difficulties to collect for his protest 66 signatures in Moscow and over 50 signatures in St. Petersburg, including those of Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Kololenko and other literary celebrities. Despite his mild tones, the protest which had been framed by Solovyov was bad from publication by the Russian censor. Professor Iloviski of Moscow, a historian of doubtful reputation by the high-bound Jew-bater, had informed the authorities of St. Petersburg of the attempt to collect signatures in Moscow for a pro-Jewish petition. As a result, all newspapers received orders from the Russian press department to refuse their columns to any collective pronouncements touching the Jewish question. Footnote. The following extracts from this MiG appeal deserved to be quoted. The movement against the Jews, which is propagated by the Russian press, represents an unprecedented violation of the most fundamental demands of righteousness and humanity. We consider it our duty to recall these elementary demands to the mind of the Russian public. In all nationalities, there are bad and ill-minded persons, but there is not and cannot be any bad and ill-minded nationality, for this would abrogate the moral responsibility of the individual. It is unjust to make the Jews responsible for these phenomena in their lives, which are the result of thousands of years of persecution in Europe and of the abnormal conditions in which these people have been placed. The fact of belonging to a Semitic tribe and professing the mosaic creed is nothing prejudicial and cannot of itself serve as a basis for an exceptional civil position of the Jews as compared with the Russian subjects of other nationalities and denominations. The recognition and application of these simple truths is important and is first of all necessary for ourselves. The increased endeavor to kindle national and religious hatred, which is so contradictory to the spirit of Christianity, and suppresses the feeling of justice and humanness, is bound to demoralize society at its very root and bring about a state of moral anarchy, particularly so in view of the decline of humanitarian ideas and the weakness of the principle of justice already noticeable in our life. For this reason, acting from the mere instinct of national self-preservation, we must infertically condemn the anti-Semitic movement, not only as immoral in itself, but also as extremely dangerous for the future of Russia. End of footnote. Soloviev addressed an impatient appeal to Alexander III but received through one of the ministers the impressive advice to refrain from raising a cry on behalf of the Jews on the pain of administrative penalties. In these circumstances, the plan of a public protest had to be abandoned. Instead, the following device was resorted to as a makeshift. Soloviev's teacher of Jewish literature, Effugets, was publishing an apology of Judaism under the title of award from the prisoner at the bar. Soloviev wrote the preface to this little volume and turned over to its author for publication the letters of Tolstoy and Korolenko in the defense of the Jews. No sooner had the book left the press than it was confiscated by the censor, and in spite of all petitions, the entire edition of this innocent apology was thrown into the flames. In this way, the Russian government succeeded in shutting the mouth of a few defenders of Judaism while according on restricted liberty of speech to its voracious assailants. End of section 30. Section 31 of History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume 2. From the death of Alexander I until the death of Alexander III. 1825 to 1894. By Shimon Duvnoff. Translated by Israel Friedlander. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Eseskin. Manicked by Shear. Portugal. Chapter 28. The Judeo-phobia Triumphant. Part 2. 3. The Guilder Meeting in London. The cry of indignation against Jewish oppression, which had been smothered in Russia, could not be stifled abroad. The Jews of England took the initiative in this matter. On November 5th, 1890, the London Times published a letter from NS Joseph, honorary secretary to the Russo-Jewish Committee in London, passionately appealing to the public men of England to intercede on behalf of his persecuted co-religionists. The writer of the letter called attention to the fact that while the Russian government was officially denying that it was contemplating new restrictions against the Jews. It was at the same time applying the formal restrictions on so comprehensive a scale and with such extraordinary cruelty that the Jews in the period of settlement were like a doomed prisoner in a cell with its opposite worlds gradually approaching, contracting by slow degrees his breathing space till they at last immune him in a living tomb. The writer concludes his appeal in these terms. It may seem a surrogate but the Russian law in very truth now declares. The Jew may live here only and shall not live there. If he lives here, he must remain here. But wherever he lives, he shall not live. He shall not have the means of living. This is the operation of the law as it stands without any new edict. This is the sentence of death that silently insidiously and in the veiled language of obscurity what it allows has been pronounced against hundreds of thousands of human beings. Shall civilized Europe, shall the Christianity of England behold this slow torture and bloodless massacre and be silent. The appeal of the Russo-Jewish committee and the new gloomy tidings from Russia, published by the Times, decided a number of prominent Englishmen to call the protest meeting which had been postponed half a year previously. 83 foremost representatives of English society addressed the letter to the Lord Mayor of London calling upon him to convene such a meeting. The office of Lord Mayor at the time was occupied by Joseph Savery, a Christian, who did not share the susceptibilities which had troubled his Jewish predecessor. Immediately unassuming office, Savery gave his consent to the holding of the meeting. On December 10, 1890, the meeting was held in the magnificent Guildhall belonging to the city of London and was attended by more than 2,000 people. The Lord Mayor, who presided over the gathering, endeavored in his introductory remarks to soften the bitterness of the protest for the benefit of official Russia. As I hear, he said, the Emperor of Russia is a good husband and a tender father, and I cannot but think that such a man must necessarily be kindly disposed to all his subjects. On his majesty, the Emperor of Russia, the hopes of the Russian Jews are at present moment fixed. He can by one stroke of his pen annul those laws which now press so grievously upon them, and he can thus give a happy life to those Jewish subjects of his who now can hardly be said to live at all. In conclusion, the Lord Mayor expressed the wish that Alexander III may become the emancipator of the Russian Jews just as his father, Alexander II, had been the emancipator of the Russian Serfs. Cardinal Manning, the warm-hearted champion of Jewish emancipation who was prevented by his illness from being present, sent a long letter which was read to the meeting. The argument against interfering with the inner politics of a foreign country, the Cardinal Road, had found his first expression in Kane's question, am I my brother's keeper? There is a united Jewish race scattered all over the world and the pain inflicted upon it in Russia is felt by the Jewish race in England. It is wrong to keep silent when we see 6 million men reduced to the level of criminals, particularly when they belong to a race with a sacred history of nearly 4,000 years. The speaker who followed the Lord Mayor pictured in vivid colors the political and civil bondage of Russian Jewry. The first speaker, the Duke of Westminster after recounting the sufferings of Russian Jewry, moved the adoption of the protest resolution, notwithstanding the fact that the Great Protest of 1882 at the Mansion House meeting had brought no results. We read in the history of the Jewish race that God hardened the heart of Pharaoh so that he would not let the people of Israel call, but deliverance came at last by the hand of Moses. After brilliant speeches by the Bishop of Rippon, the All of Mith and others, the following resolution was adopted, that in the opinion of this meeting, the renewed sufferings of the Jews in Russia from the oppression of severe and exceptional edicts and disabilities are deeply to be deployed, and that in this last decade of the 19th century, religious liberty is a principle which should be recognized by every Christian community as among the natural human rights. At the same time, a second resolution was adopted to the following effect, that a suitable memorial be addressed to his Imperial Majesty, the Emperor of all the Russians, respectively praying his Majesty to repeal all the exceptional and restrictive laws and disabilities which afflicts his Jewish subjects, and begging his Majesty to confer upon them equal rights with those enjoyed by the rest of his Majesty's subjects, and that the sad memorial be signed by the right honoree, the Lord Mayor, in the name of the citizens of London, and be transmitted by his lordship to his Majesty. A few excerpts from the memorandum may be quoted by a way of illustrating the character of this remarkable appeal to the Russian Emperor. We, the citizens of London, respectfully approach your Majesty and humbly beg your gracious leave to plead the cause of the afflicted. Christ of distress have reached us from thousands of suffering Israelites in your vast empire, and we Englishmen with pity in our souls for all who suffer, turn to your Majesty to implore for them your sovereign aid and clemency. Five millions of your Majesty's subjects grown beneath the yoke of exceptional and restrictive laws. Remnants of a race, when all religions sprung, ours and yours, and every creed on earth that own one God, men who cling with all devotion to their ancient faiths and forms of worship, these Hebrews are in your empire, subject to such laws that under them they cannot live and thrive. Pentateuch in narrow bounds within your Majesty's wide empire, and even within those bounds, forced to reside cheaply in towns that reek and overflow with every form of poverty and wretchedness. Forbidden all three movements hatched in every enterprise by restrictive laws, forbidden tenure of land or all concerning land, their means of livelihood have become so cramped as to render life for them well not impossible. Nor are they cramped alone in space and action. The higher education is denied them, except in limits far below the due proportion of their needs and aspirations. They may not freely exercise professions like other subjects of your Majesty, nor may they gain promotion in the army, however great their merit and their valor. Sire, we who have learned to tolerate all creeds, deeming a principle of true religion to permit religious liberty, we beseech your Majesty to repeal those laws that afflict these Israelites. Give them the blessing of equality, in every land where Jews have equal rights, the nation prospers. We pray you then annul those special laws and disabilities that crush and cower your Hebrew subjects. Sire, your royal sister, our Empress Queen, whom God preserved, bases her throne upon our people's love, making their happiness her own. So may your Majesty gain from your subject's love all strength and happiness, making your mighty empire mightier still, rendering your throne form an impregnable, reaping new blessings for your house and home. The memorial was signed by Savioury, who was Lord Mayor at that time, and forwarded by him to St. Petersburg. It was accompanied by a letter dated December 24 from the Lord Mayor to Lieutenant-General Richter, aid the camp of the Tsar for the reception of petitions with the request to transmit the document to the Emperor. It is almost unnecessary to add that this touching appeal for justice by the citizens of London failed to receive a direct reply. There were rumors that the London petition through the Tsar into a fury, and a future court analyst of Russia will probably tell of the scene that took place in the Imperial Palace when this document was read. An indirect reply came through the cleaning official press. The mouthpiece of Russian government abroad, the newspaper Renaud in Brussels, which was especially engaged in the task of whitewashing the black politics of its employers, published an article under the heading, A Last Word Concerning Semitism, in which the rank of the highest government circles in Russia found undisguised expression. The Semites, quote the semi-official organ with an impudent disregard of truth, have never yet had such an easy life in Russia as they have at the present time, and yet they have never complained so bitterly. There is a reason for it. It is a peculiarity of Semitism. A Semite is never satisfied with anything. The more you give him, the more he wishes to have. In the evident desire to fool its readers, Renaud declared that the protesters at the London meeting might have saved themselves the trouble of demanding religious liberty for the Jews, which in the London petition was understood, of course, to imply civil liberty for the professors of Judaism, since nobody in Russia restricted the Jews in their worship. Nor did the civil disabilities weigh heavily upon the Jews. On the contrary, they felt so happy in Russia that even the Jewish immigrants in America dreamt of returning to their homelands. 4. The protest of America. The same attitude of double dealing was adopted by the smooth-tongued Russian diplomats toward the government of the United States. 5. Aroused over the inhuman treatment of the Jews in Russia and alarmed by the effects of a sudden Russian-Jewish immigration to America, which was bound to follow as a result of this treatment, the House of Representatives adopted a resolution on August 20, 1890, requesting the President to communicate to the House of Representatives if not incompatible with the public interests. Any information in his possession concerning the enforcement of proscriptive edict against the Jews in Russia recently ordered as reported in the public press and whether any American citizens have, because of their religion, been ordered to be expelled from Russia or forbidden the exercise of the ordinary privileges enjoyed by the inhabitants. In response to this resolution, President Harrison laid before Congress all the correspondence and papers bearing on the Jewish question in Russia. A little later, on December 19 of the same year, the following resolution of protest was introduced in the House of Representatives and referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs. Resolved that the members of the House of Representatives of the United States have heard with profound sorrow and with feelings akin to horror, the reports of the persecution of the Jews in Russia, reflecting the barbarism of past ages, disgracing humanity and impeding the progress of civilization. Resolved that our sorrow is intensified by the fact that such occurrences should happen in a country which has been and now is the firm friend of the United States and in a nation that clawed itself with glory not long since by the emancipation of its serves and by defense of helpless Christians from the oppression of the Turks. Resolved that a copy of this resolution be forwarded to the Secretary of State with the request that he sent it to the American minister at St. Petersburg and that said minister be directed to present the same to his Imperial Majesty, Alexander III, Tsar of all the Russians. Resolved that the members of the House of Representatives of the United States have heard with profound sorrow the reports of the sufferings of the Jews in Russia and this sorrow is intensified by the fact that these occurrences should happen in a country which is and long has been the friend of the United States which emancipated millions of its people from Sovdom and which defended helpless Christians in the East from persecution for their religion and we honestly hope that humanity and enlightened spirit then so strikingly shown by his Imperial Majesty will now be manifested in checking and mitigating the severe measures directed against men of the Jewish religion. In the meantime, the Department of State was flooded with protests against the Russian atrocities. Almost every day, Secretary of State James G. Blaine writes to the Charles Emery Smith United States Minister at St. Petersburg on February 27, 1891 Communications are received on these subjects, temperate and couched in language respectful to the government of the Tsar but at the same time, indicative and strongly expressive of the depth and prevalence of the sentiments of desperation and regret. The American Minister was therefore instructed to exert his influence with the Russian government in the direction of mitigating the severity of the anti-Jewish measures. He was to point out to the Russian authorities that the male treatment of the Jews in Russia was not purely an internal affair of the Russian government in as much as it affected the interests of the United States. Within 10 years, 200,000 Russian Jews had come over to America and continued the persecutions in Russia were bound to result in a large and certain immigration which was not unattended with danger. While the United States did not presume to dictate to Russia, nevertheless, the mutual duties of nations require that it should use his power with a due regard for the other and for the results which his exercise produces on the rest of the world. The remonstrances of the American people which were voiced by their representatives at St. Petersburg were received by the Russian government in a manner which strikingly illustrates the well-known duplicity of its diplomatic methods. While endeavoring to justify its policy of oppression by all kinds of libelous charges against the Russian Jews, it gave at the same time repeated assurance to the American Minister that no new proscriptive laws were contemplated and the letter reported according to his government. On February 10, 1891, the American Minister, writing to Secretary Blaine, gives a detailed account of the conversation he had had with the Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs, the Gears. The letter went out of his way to discuss with him, unreservedly, the entire Jewish situation in Russia, and while making all kinds of subtle insinuations against the character of the Russian Jew, he expressed himself in a manner which was calculated to convince the American representative of the conciliatory disposition of the Russian government. Less than three weeks later, followed the cruel expulsion edict against the Jews of Moscow. While the Russian government, obeyed by the voice of protest, made an effort to justify itself in the eyes of Europe and America and perverted the truth with its well-known diplomatic skill, the Ruskaya season, the Russian life, the St. Petersburg paper, which was far from being produced, published a number of art-rending facts illustrating the trials of the outlawed Jews at Moscow. It told of a young talented Jew who maintained himself and his family by working on a Moscow newspaper and not having the right of residence in the city was one to save himself from the night raids of the police by hiding himself on a signal of his landlord in the wardrobe. Many Jews who lived honestly by the sweat of their brow were cruelly expelled by the police when their certificates of residence contained even the slightest technical inaccuracy. By way of illustrating the religious liberty of the Jews in the narrow sense of the word, the paper mentioned the fact that after the opening of the new synagogue in Moscow, which accommodated 500 worshipers, the police ordered the closing of all the other houses of prayer to the number of 20, which had been attended by some 10,000 people. The governor of St. Petersburg, Grasso, made the regular sports of taunting the Jews. One ordinance of his prescribed that the signs on the stores and workshops belonging to the Jews should indicate not only the family names of their owners, but also their full first names, as well as their father's names, exactly as they were spelled in their pastures with the ending view of averting possible misunderstandings. The object of this ordinance was to enable the Christian public to boycott the Jewish stores and in addition to poke fun at the names of the owners, which as a rule were mutilated in the Russian registers and passports to the point of ridiculousness by semi-illiterate clubs. Grasso's ordinance was issued on November 17, 1890, a few days before the protest meeting in London. As the Russian government was at that time assuring Europe that the Jews were particularly happy in Russia, the ordinance was not published in the newspapers, but nevertheless applied secretly. The Jewish storekeepers, who realized the malicious intent of the new edict, tried to minimize the damage resulting from it by having their names painted in small letters so as not to catch the eyes of the Russian anti-Semites. Therefore, Grasso directed the police officials in March 1891 to see to it that the Jewish names on the store signs should be indicated clearly and in a conspicuous place in accordance with the prescribed drawings and to report immediately to him in an attempt to violate the law. In this manner, St. Petersburg reacted upon the cries of indignation which rang at that time through Europe and America. End of section 31. Section 32 of History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume 2. From the deaths of Alexander I until the deaths of Alexander III. 1825-1894 by Shimon Duvnov. Translated by Israel Friedlander. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by SS Kim, Manicked By Show, Polchka, Chapter 29, The Expulsion from Moscow. 1. Preparing the blow. The year 1891 had arrived. The air was full of evil forwardings. In the solitude of the government chancelors of St. Petersburg, the anti-Jewish conspirators were assiduously at work, preparing for a new blow to be dealt to the martyred nation. A secret committee attached to the Ministry of the Interior under the chairman's work plan was engaged in framing a monstrous enactment of Jewish counter reforms which were practically designed to annul the privileges conferred upon certain categories of Jews by Alexander II. The principal object of the proposed enactment was to slam the doors to the Russian interior, which had been slightly opened by the laws of 1859 and 1865 by withdrawing the privilege of residing outside the pail, which these laws had conferred upon Jewish first-guild merchant and artisans subject to a number of onerous conditions. The first object of the reactionary conspirators was to get rid of those privileged Jews who lived in the two Russian capitals. In St. Petersburg, this object was to be attained by the edict of Gressa referred to previously, which were followed by other similar harassing regulations. In February 1891, the governor of St. Petersburg ordered the police to examine the kind of trade pursued by the Jewish artisans of St. Petersburg with the end in view of expelling from the city and confiscating the goods of all those who should be caught with articles that manufactured by themselves. A large number of expulsion followed upon this order. The principal blow, however, was to fall in Moscow. The ancient Moskovite capital was in the throes of great changes. The post of governor general of Moscow, which had been occupied by Count Dolgorsky, was entrusted in February 1891 to a brother of Dotsar, Grand Duke Sirgius. The Grand Duke, who enjoyed an unenviable reputation in the gambling circles of both capitals, was not burdened by any consciously formulated political principles. But this deficiency was made up by his steadfast loyalty to the political and religious prejudices of his environment, among which the blind hatred of Judaism occupied a prominent place. The Russian public was inclined to attach extraordinary importance to the appointment of the Tsar's brother. It was generally felt that his selection was designed to serve as a preliminary step to the transfer of the imperial capital from St. Petersburg to Moscow, symbolizing the return home to the old Moskovite political ideals. It is almost superfluous to add that the contemplated change made it necessary to purge the ancient capital of its Jewish inhabitants. The Jewish community of Moscow, numbering some 30,000 souls who lived there legally or semi-legally, had long been atone in the flesh of certain influential Russian merchants. The bogomest of Moscow, Alexeyev, an ignorant merchant with a very shady reputation, was greatly wrought up over the far-reaching financial influence of local Jewish capitalist Lazarus Polakov, the director of a rural bank with whom he had clashed over some commercial transaction. Alexeyev was only too grateful for an occasion to impress upon the highest government spheres that it was necessary to clear Moscow of the Jews who were crowding the city owing to the indulgence of Dolvursky, the former governor-general. The reactionaries of Moscow and St. Petersburg joined hands in the worthy cause of extubating Judaism and received the blessing of the head of the Holy Synod, Povetanuschev. This inquirter-in-chief appointed Istomin, a ferocious antisemite, who had been his general-utility man at the Holy Synod, the bureau manager of the new governor-general, and thus succeeded in establishing his influence in Moscow through his acting representative, who was practically the master of the second capital. The secret council of Jewish haters decided to accomplish the Jewish evacuation of Moscow prior to the solemn entrance of Grand Duke Sergius into the city, either for the purpose of clearing the way for the new set-trap or in order to avoid the unpleasantness of having his name connected with the first chorale act of expulsion. Pending the arrival of Sergius, the administration of Moscow was entrusted to Kostanda, the chief of Moscow military district on Adroit Greek, who was to begin the military operations against the Jewish population. The first blow was timed to take place on the festival of Israel's liberation from Egyptian bondage, as if the eternal people needed to be reminded of the new bondage and of the new pharaohs. Two, the horrors of expulsion. It was March 29, 1891, the first day of Jewish Passover, when, in the synagogues of Moscow, which were filled with worshipers, an alarming whisper ran from mouth to mouth, telling of the publication of an imperial case ordering the expulsion of the Jews from the city. Soon afterwards, the Harastrikan Jews read in the papers the following imperial order dated March 28. Jewish mechanics, distillers, gruers, and in general, master workmen and artisans shall be forbidden to remove from the Jewish payload settlement, as well as to come over from other places of the empire to the city and government of Moscow. This prohibition of settling in Moscow or new was only one half of the edict. The second, more terrible half was published on the following day. A recommendation shall be made to the minister of the interior after consultation with the governor general of Moscow to see to it that measures be taken to the effect that the above mentioned Jews should gradually depart from the city and government of Moscow into the places established for the permanent residents of the Jews. At first sight, it seemed difficult to realize that this harmless surface of the UK's with its ambiguous formulation concealed a cruel decree of ordering the uprooting of thousands of human beings. But those who were to execute this written law received definite unwritten instructions which were carried out according to all the rules of the strategic game. Footnote. The Byzantine profidity of this formulation lies in the phrase above mentioned Jews, which gives the impression of referring to those that had removed to Moscow from other parts of the empire. I settled there on you, whereas the real object of the law was to expel all the Jews of the above mentioned categories of master workmen and artisans, even though they may have lived in the city for many years. This amounted to repeal illegally enacted outside the council of state of the law of 1865 conferring the right of universal residence upon Jewish artisans. Moreover, the enactment was given retroactive force, a step which even the originators of the temporary rules of May 3rd were not bold enough to make. In distinction from the May laws, the present decree was not even submitted to the council of ministers where a discussion might have been demanded. It was passed as an extraordinary measure at the suggestion of the Ministry of the Interior represented by Durnubu and Klev. This is indicated by the heading of the UK's. The Minister of the Interior has applied most humbly to his imperial majesty begging permission to adopt the following measures. This succession of illegalities was to be veiled by the ambiguous formulation of the UK's and the addition of the hackneyed stipulation pending the revision of the enactments concerning the Jews in the ordinary course of legislation. End of footnote. The first victims were the Jews who resided in Moscow illegally or semi-illegally, the latter living in the suburbs. They were subjected to a certain nocturnal attack, a raid which was directed by the savage Cossack general Yurkovsky, the police commissioner-in-chief. During the night following the promulgation of the UK's, a large detachment of policemen and firemen made their appearance in the section of the city called Zaredie, where the bulk of the illegal Jewish residents were huddled together, more particularly in the immense so-called Glebof Yad, the former ghetto of Moscow. The police invaded the Jewish homes, aroused the skilled inhabitants from their beds and drove the semi-naked men, women and children to the police stations where they were kept in filthy cells for a day and sometimes longer. Some of the prisoners were released by the police, which first rested from them on a written pledge to leave the city immediately. Others were evicted under a police convoy and sent out of the city like criminals through the transportation prison. Many families, having been warned of the impending raid, decided to spend the night outside their homes to avoid arrest and maltreatment at hands of the police. They hid themselves in the outline sections of the city and on the cemeteries. They walked or rode all over the city the whole night. Many an estimable Jew was forced to shelter his wife and children, stiffened from cold, in the houses of ill-repute, which were open all night. But even these fugitives ultimately fell into the hands of the police in addition. Such were the methods by which Moscow was purged of its right-less Jewish inhabitants for whole months before Grand Duke's reviews made his entrance into the city. The Grand Duke was followed soon afterwards in the months of May by the Tsar himself, who stopped in the second Russian capital on his way to the Crimea. A retired Jewish soldier was courageous enough to address the petition to the Tsar, imploring him in touching terms to allow the former Jewish soldiers to remain in Moscow. The request of the Jewish soldier met with a quick response. He was sent to jail and subsequently evicted. The establishment of the new regime in Moscow was followed in accordance with provisions of the recent UK's by the gradual explosion of the huge number of master workmen and artisans who had enjoyed for many years the right of residence in the city and were now suddenly deprived of this right by despotic capris. The local authorities included among the victims of explosion even the so-called circular Jews, i.e. those who had been allowed to remain in Moscow by virtue of the ministerial circular of 1880, granting the right of domicile to the Jews living there before that date. This vast host of honest and hardworking men, artisans, tradesmen, clerks, teachers were ordered to leave Moscow in three installments. Those having lived there for not more than three years and those unmerited and childless were to depart within three to six months. Those having lived there for not more than six years and having children or apprentices to the number of four were allowed to postpone their departure for six to nine months. Finally, the old Jewish settlers who had big families and employed a large number of working men were given a reproof from nine to twelve months. It would almost seem as if the maximum and minimum dates within each term were granted specifically for the purpose of yielding an enormous income to the police, which for a substantial consideration could postpone the expulsion of the victims for three months and thereby enable them to wind up their affairs. At the expiration of the final terms, the unfortunate Jews were not allowed to remain in the city even for one single day. Those that stayed behind were ruthlessly evicted. An eyewitness in summing up the information at his disposal, the details of which are even more heart-rending than the general facts, eaves the following description of the Moscow events. People who had lived in Moscow for 20, 30, or even 40 years were forced to sell their property within a short time and leave the city. Those who were too poor to comply with the orders of the police or who did not succeed in selling their property for a mere sum, there were cases of poor people disposing of their whole furniture for one or two rubbers, were thrown into jail or sent to the transportation prison together with criminals and all kinds of riffraffs that were awaiting their turn to be dispatched under convoy. Men who had all their lives earned their bread by the sweat of their brow found themselves under the thumb of prison inspectors who placed them at once on an equal footing with criminals sentenced to hard labor. In these surroundings, they were sometimes kept for several weeks and then dispatched in batches to their homes which many of them never saw again. At the threshold of the prison, the people belonging to the unprivileged estates, the artisans were almost without exception members of the burger class had wooden handcuffs put on them. It is difficult to state accurately how many people were made to endure these tortures inflicted on them without the due process of law. Some died in prison pending their transportation, those who could manage to scrape together or a few pennies left for the paid-off settlement at their own expense. The sums speedily collected by their coalitionists, though not inconsiderable, could do nothing more than rescue a number of the unfortunate from jail, convoy, and handcuffs. But what can they be done when thousands of humanists lived in for so many years suddenly destroyed, when the catastrophe comes with the fall of an avalanche so that even the Jewish heart, which is open to sorrow, cannot grasp to them. The whole misfortune. Despite the winter cold, people hid themselves on cemeteries to avoid jail and transportation. We were confined in railroad cars. There were many cases of explosions of sick people who were brought to the railroad station in conveyance and carried into the cars on stretchers. In those rare instances in which the police physician pronounced the transportation to be dangerous, the authorities insisted on the chronic character of the illness and the sufferers were brought to the station in writing pain as the police could not well be expected to wait until the invalids were cured of their chronic ailments. Eyewitnesses will never forget one bitterly cold night in January, 1892. Crowds of Jews dressed in beggarly fashion, among them women, children, and old men, with remnants of their household belongings lying around them, filled the station of the breast railroad. Threatened by the police convoy and transportation prison, and having failed to obtain a reprieve, they have made up their mind to leave despite a temperature of 30 degrees below zero. Threat, it would seem, want to play a practical joke on them. At the representations of the police commission in chief, the governor general of Moscow had ordered to stop the explosions until the great cold had passed, but the orders were not published until the explosion had been carried out. In this way, some 20,000 Jews who had lived in Moscow 15, 25, and even 40 years were forcibly removed to the Jewish payload settlement. Threat, effect of protests. All these horrors, which remind one of the explosion from Spain in 1492, were passed over in complete silence by the Russian public press. The clinging and reactionary papers would not, and the liberal paper could not, report the exploits of the Russian government in the war against the Jews. The liberal press was ordered by the Russian censor to refrain altogether from touching on Jewish question. The only Russian Jewish press organ, which defined the threat of the censor, had dared to fight against official Russian Judeo-phobia, the Voskode, had been suppressed already in March before the promulgation of the Moscow Expulsion Edict for the extremely detrimental cause pursued by it. A similar fate overtook the Novosti of St. Petersburg, which had printed a couple of sympathetic articles on the Jews. In this way, the government managed to get the independent press on the eve of its surprise attack upon Moscow Jewry, so that everything could be carried out noiselessly under the veil of state secret. Fortunately, the foreign press managed to unveil the mystery. The government of the United States, faced by a huge immigration tide from Russia, sent in June 1891, two commissioners, Weber and Campster, to that country. They visited Moscow at the height of the expulsion fever, and traveling through the principal centers of the veil of settlement, gathered carefully sifted documentary evidence of what was being perpetrated upon the Jews in the Empire of the Tsar. While decimating the Jews, the Russian government was at the same time anxious that their cries of distress should not penetrate beyond the Russian border. Just about that time, Russia was negotiating a foreign loan, in which the Rothschild of Paris were expected to take a leading part, and found it rather inconvenient to stand forth in the eyes of Europe as the ghost of medieval Spain. It was this consideration which prompted the softened and ambiguous formulation of the Moscow Expulsion Degree and made the government suppress systematically all mention of what happened afterwards. Notwithstanding these efforts, the cries of distress were soon heard all over Europe. The Russian censorship had no power over the public opinion outside of Russia. The first Moscow refugees who had reached Berlin, Paris and London reported what was going on at Moscow. Already in April 1891, the European Financial Press began to comment on the fact that the Jewish population of Russia is altogether irreplaceable in Russian commercial life, forming a substantial element which contributes to the prosperity of the country, and that therefore the explosion of the Jews, most of necessity, greatly alarmed the owners of Russian securities who are interested in the economic progress of Russia. Soon afterwards, it became known that Alphonse the Rothschild, the head of the great financial firm in Paris, refused to take a hand in floating the Russian loan of half a billion. The first protest of the financial king against the anti-Semitic policy of the Russian government produced a sensation and it was intensified by the fact that it was uttered in France at a time when the diplomats of both countries were preparing to celebrate the Franco-Russian alliance which was consummated a few months afterwards. The explosion from Moscow found the sympathetic echo on the other side of the Atlantic. President Harrison took occasion in a message to Congress to refer to the suffering of the Jews and to the probable effects of the Russian explosion upon America. This government has found occasion to express in a friendly spirit but with much honestness to the government of the Tsar is serious concern because of the harsh measures now being enforced against the Hebrews in Russia. By the revival of anti-Semitic laws, long in obedience, great numbers of those unfortunate people have been constrained to abandon their homes and leave the empire by a reason of the impossibility of finding subsistence within the pale to which it is sought to confine them. The immigration of these people to the United States, many other countries being close to them, is largely increasing and is likely to assume proportions which may make it difficult to find homes and employment for them here and to seriously affect the labor market. It is estimated that over one million will be forced from Russia within a few years. The Hebrew is never a beggar. He has always kept the law, life by toy, often under severe and oppressive restrictions. It is also true that no race, sect or class has more fully cared for its own than the Hebrew race. But a certain transport of such a multitude under condition that tend to strip them of their small accumulations and to depress their energies in courage is neither good for them nor for us. The punishment, 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 leave one country is in the nature of things in order to enter another, some other. This consideration as well as the suggestion of humanity punishes ample ground for the remonstrances which we have presented to Russia. While our historic friendship for the government cannot fail to give assurance that our representations are those of a sincere well-wisher, the sentiments of the American people were voiced less guardedly in the resolution which was passed by the House of Representatives on July 21st, 1892. Resolved that the American people, through their senators and representatives in Congress assembled, do hereby express sympathy for the Russian Hebrews in their present condition and the hope that the government of Russia, a power with which the United States has always been on terms of enmity and goodwill, will mitigate as well as possible the civility of the laws and decrees issued respecting them and the President is requested to use his good offices to notify the government of Russia to mitigate the sad laws and decrees. The highly-placed Chewbaters of St. Petersburg were filled with rage. The Novoe vremya emptied its invectives upon the Tzotovsky financials, referring to the refusal of Alfonso Loschild to participate in the Russian loan. Nevertheless, the government found itself compelled to stem the tide of operation for a short while. We have already had occasion to point out that the government had originally planned to reduce the Jewish elements also in the city of St. Petersburg, whose head, the brutal Gressa, had manifested his attitude towards the Jews in the cities of police circulars. Following upon the first raid of the Moscow police on the Jews, Gressa ordered his gendams to search at the St. Petersburg railroad stations for all Jewish fugitives from the city, who might have ventured to flee to St. Petersburg and to deport them immediately. In April, there were persistent rumors afloat that the government had decided to remove, by degrees, all Jews from St. Petersburg and thus make both Russian capitals Udenrhein, the financial blow from Paris' schools somewhat the other of the Chewbaters on the shores of the Neva. The wholesale explosions from St. Petersburg were postponed and the Russian anti-Semites were forced to satisfy their cannibal appetite with the consumption of Moscow Jewelry, whose annihilation was carried out systematically under the cover of bureaucratic secrecy. 4. Fogrom Interludes Under the effect of the officially perpetrated legal pogroms, little attention was paid to the street pogrom which occurred on September 29, 1891, in the city of Starodov in the government of Chernigov, recalling the horrors of the 80s. Though caused by economic factors, the pogrom of Starodov assumed religious colouring. The Russian merchants of the city had long been gnashing their teeth at their Jewish competitors. Led by a Russian fanatic by the name of Gladikov, they forced the regulation through the local town council, buying all business on Sundays and Christian holidays. The regulation was directed against the Jews who refused to do business on the Sabbath and the Jewish holidays and who would have been ruined had they also refrained from training on Sundays and numerous Greek Orthodox holidays, thus remaining idle on twice as many days as the Christians. The Jews appealed to the governor of Chernigov to revoke or at least to mitigate the new regulation. The governor's decision fell in favour of the Jews who were allowed to keep their stores open on Christian holidays from noontime until 6 o'clock in the evening. The reply of the local Jew-baters took the form of a pogrom. On Sunday, the day before Yom Kippur, when the Jews opened their stores for a few hours, a hired crowd of ruffians from among the local street mob fell upon the Jewish stores and began to destroy and loot whatever goods it could lay its hands on. The stores having been rapidly closed, the rioters invaded the residences of the Jews, destroying the property contained there and filling the streets with fragments of broken furniture and letters from torn bedding. The plunderers were assisted by the peasants who had arrived from the adjacent villages. In the evening, a drunken mob which had assembled on the marketplace laid fire to a number of Jewish stores and houses inflicting on their owners or lots of many millions. All this took place during the Holy Yom Kippur Eve. The Jews who did not dare to worship in their synagogues or even to remain in their homes, hid themselves with their wives and children in the garret and orchards or in the houses of strangers. Many Jews spent the night in a field outside the city where, shivering from cold, they could watch the glare of the guestly flames which destroyed all their belongings. The police, small in numbers, proved powerless against the huge halls of plunderers and incendiaries. On the second day, the program was over, the work of destruction having been duly accomplished. The subsequent judicial inquiry brought out the fact clearly that the program had been engineered by Gladkov and his associates, a fact of which the local authorities could not have been ignorant. Gladkov fled from the city but returned subsequently, paying but a slight penalty for his monstrous crime. It should be added, however, that the government was greatly displeased with the reappearance of the terrible specter of 1881 as it only tended to draw into bold relief the police of legal programs by which Western Europe was alarmed. As a matter of fact, already in October, the semi-official Krasdanian had occasion to print the following news item. Yesterday, October 15, the financial market abroad was marked by depression. Our securities have fallen, owing to the new rumors concerning alleged contemplated measures against the Jews. Commenting upon this, the paper declared that these rumors were entirely unfounded for the reason that at the present time all our government departments are weighed down with problems of first-rate national importance which broke no delay and they could scarcely find time to visit themselves with such matters as the Jewish question, which requires mature consideration and slow progress in action. The subdued tone adopted by Count Mechelski, the court journalist, was only partially in accord with the facts. He was right in stating that the terrible country-wide distress had compelled the deadly enemies of Judaism to pause in the execution of their entire program. But he forgot to add that on close of that program, the realization of which had already begun, the explosion from Moscow was being carried into effect with merciless cruelty. The huge emigration wave resulting from this explosion drew upon the shores of Europe and America, the victims of persecution who re-echoed the cries of distress from the land of the Tsars. Soon afterwards, a new surprise without parallel in history was sprung upon a baffled world. The Russian government was negotiating with the Jewish philanthropist Baron Hirsch concerning the gradual removal of the three millions of its Jewish subjects from Russia to Argentina. End of Section 32. Section 33 of History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume 2, From the Death of Alexander I until the Death of Alexander III. 1825-1894 by Shimon Duvnov, translated by Israel Friedländer. This Livrivox recording is in the public domain. Recording by S.S. Kim, Manik Tobysho, Portugal. Chapter 30. Baron Hirsch's Emigration Scheme and Unrelieved Suffering. 1. Negotiations with the Russian government. Towards the end of the 80s, the plan of promoting Jewish emigration from Russia, which had been abandoned with the retirement of Count Ignatiev, was again looked upon favorably by the leading government circles. The sentiment of the tsar was expressed in a marginal note, which he attached to the report of the governor of Podolia for the year 1888. The passage of the report in which it was pointed out that the removal of the Jewish proletariat from the monarchy would be very desirable was supplemented in the tsar's handwriting by words and even very useful. In reply to the proposal of the governor of Odessa to deprive Jewish emigrants of the right to return to Russia, the tsar answered with a decided yes. The official Russian chronicler goes even so far as to confess that it was part of the plan to stimulate the emigration of the Jews as well as that of the German colonists by a more rigorous enforcement of the military duty, a design which from the political point of view may well be pronounced criminal and which was evidently at the bottom of the severe military fines imposed upon the Jews. The same open-hearted chronicler adds. It may be easily understood how sympathetically the government received the proposal of the Jewish Colonization Association in London which had been founded by Baron de Hirsch in 1891 to remove in the course of 25 years 3,250,000 Jews from Russia. The name of Boris de Hirsch was not unknown to the Russian government. For a few years previously, it had had occasion to carry on negotiations with him with result of which it had scant reason to boast. This great German Jewish philanthropist who was resolved to spend hundreds of millions on the economic and agricultural advancement of his co-religionist in Eastern Europe had donated in 1888 15 million francs for the purpose of establishing in Russia arts and craft schools as well as workshops and agricultural farms for the Jews. It was natural for him to assume that the Russian government would only be too glad to accept his enormous contribution which was bound to stimulate productive labor in the country and raise the welfare of its destitute masses. But he had forgotten that the benefits expected from the fund would accrue to the Jewish proletariat which according to the catechism of Jew hatred was to be removed from the monarchy. The stipulation made by the Russian government to the representatives of Baron Hirsch was entirely unacceptable. It insisted that the money should not be handed over to Jewish public agencies but to the Russian government which would expand it as its sole fit. Somebody conceived the shameful idea which was accepted by the representatives of Baron Hirsch of propitiating poor Vietnam's chef by a gift of a million francs for the needs of his pet institution the Greek Orthodox parochial schools. The gift was accepted but Hirsch's proposal was declined. Thus it came about that the Russian Jews were deprived of a network of model schools and educational establishments while a million of Jewish money went to swell the number of the ecclesiastic Russian schools which imbued the Russian masses with class ignorance and anti-Semitic prejudices. The Hirsch millions originally intended for Russia went partly towards the establishment of Jewish schools in Galicia or work which met with every possible encouragement from the Austrian government. The generous Jewish philanthropist now realized that the assistance he was anxious to render to his Russian colleagues could not take the form of improving their condition in their own country but rather that of settling them outside of it by organizing the emigration movement. Hirsch's attention was called to the fact that beginning with 1889 several group of Russian Jews had settled in Argentina and after incredible hardships had succeeded in establishing their several agricultural colonies. The Baron sent an expedition to Argentina under the direction of Professor Leventhal on authority on hygiene for the purpose of investigating the country and finding out the places fit for colonization. The expedition returned in March 1891 and Hirsch decided to begin with the purchase of land in Argentina in accordance with the recommendations of the expedition. This happened at the very moment when the Moscow catastrophe had broken out resulting in a panic flight from Russia to North and South America and partly to Palestine. Baron Hirsch decided that it was his first duty to regulate the emigration movement from Russia and he made another attempt to enter into negotiations with the Russian government. At the end of this ending duo, he sent his representative to St. Petersburg, the Englishman Arnold White, a member of parliament belonging to the parliamentary anti-alien group who was opposed to foreign emigration to England on the ground of its harmful effect upon the interest of the native working men. Simultaneously, White was commissioned to travel through the pale of settlement whether it would be possible to obtain an element fit for agricultural colonization in Argentina. White arrived in St. Petersburg in May and was received by Porbetonov's chief and several ministers. The martyrdom of the Moscow Jews was then at its height. Shouts of indignation were ringing through the air of Europe and America, protesting against the barbarism of the Russian government that was insulated both by these protests and the recent refusal of Russia to participate in the Russian norm. The high dignitaries of St. Petersburg who had been disturbed in their work of dubating by the outcry of civilized world gave full vent to their hatred in their conversations with Baron Hirsch's deputy. White reported afterwards that the functionaries of St. Petersburg had painted to him the Russian Jew as a compound of thief and usurer. Porbetonov's chief delivered himself of the following malicious observation. The Jew is a parasite. Remove him from the living organism in each and on each he exists and put this parasite on a rock and he will die. White thus justifying before the distinguished foreigner their system of destroying the 5 million Jewish parasites the Russian ministers were nevertheless glad to lend a helping hand in removing them from Russia on condition that in the course of 12 years a large part of the Jews should be transferred from the country in the confidential talks with White 3 million immigrants were mentioned as the proposed figure. White was furnished with letters of recommendation from the Porbetonov's chief and the minister of the interior to the highest officials in the provinces with the London delegate who took himself to get acquainted with the living export material. He visited Moscow, Kiev, British chef, Odessa, Kerson and the Jewish agricultural colonies in South Russia. After looking closely at Jewish conditions White became convinced that the perverted type of Jew which had been painted to him in St. Petersburg was evolved from the inner consciousness of certain Orthodox statement and has no existence in fact. Wherever he went he saw men who were sober, industrious, enterprising businessman, efficient artisans whose physical weakness was merely the result of insufficient nourishment. His visit to the South Russian colonies convinced him of the fitness of the Jews for colonization. In short, he writes in his report if courage, moral courage, hope, patience, temperance are of fine qualities then the Jews are of fine people. Such a people on the wise direction is destined to make a success of any well-organized plan of colonization whether in Argentina, Siberia or South Africa. On his return to London White submitted a report to Baron Hirsch stating the above facts and also pointing out that the assistance which should be rendered to the immigration work by the Russian government ought to take the form of granting permission to organize in Russia immigration committees of relieving the immigrants of the passport tax and of allowing them free transportation up to the Russian border. Two, the Jewish Colonization Association and collapse of the Argentinian scheme. White's report was discussed by Baron Hirsch in conjunction with the leading Jews of Western Europe. As a result, the decision was reached to establish a society which should undertake on a large scale the colonization of Argentina and other American territories with Russian Jews. The society was founded in London in the autumn of 1891 under the name of the Jewish Colonization Association, JCA in the form of a stock company with a capital of 50 billion francs which was almost entirely subscribed by Baron Hirsch. White was dispatched to St. Petersburg a second time to obtain permission for organizing the immigration committees in Russia and to secure the necessary privileges for the immigrants. The English delegates who was familiar with the frame of mind of the leading government circles in Russia unfolded before them the far-reaching plans of Baron Hirsch. The Jewish Colonization Association was to transplant 25,000 Jews to Argentina in the course of 1892 and hence forward to increase progressively the ratio of immigrants so that in the course of 25 years 3,250,000 Jews would be taken out of Russia. This brilliant perspective of a Jewish Exodus cheered the hearts of the neo-Egyptian dignitaries. Their imagination caught fire. When the question came up before the Committee of Ministers the Minister of the Navy, Chikachev, proposed to pay the Jewish Colonization Association a bonus of a few rubles for each immigrant and thus enabled it to transfer no less than 130,000 people during the very first year so that the contemplated number of 3,250,000 might be distributed evenly over 25 years. A suggestion was also made to transplant the Jews with their own money i.e. to use the residue of the Jewish meat tax for that purpose. But the suggestion was not considered feasible. The official clinical testifies that the fascinating proposition of Baron Hirsch appeared to the Russian government hardly capable of realization. Nevertheless, prompted by the hope that at least part of the contemplated millions of Jews would leave Russia, the government sanctioned the establishment of a Central Committee of the Jewish Colonization Association in St. Petersburg with branches in the provinces. It further promised to esch to the immigrants free of charge permits to leave the country and to relieve them from military duty on condition that they never return to Russia. In May 1893, the constitution of the Jewish Colonization Association was ratified by the Tsar. At the time, the emigration tide of the previous year was gradually ebbing. The flight from Russia to North and South America had reached its climax in the summer and autumn of 1891. The explosion from Moscow as well as alarming rumors of imminent persecutions on the one hand and exaggerated news about the plans of Baron Hirsch on the other had resulted in uprooting tens of thousands of people. Huge masses of refugees had flocked to Berlin, Hamburg, Antwerp and London imploring to be transported to the United States or to the Argentinian colonies. Everywhere, relief committees were being organized but there was no way of forwarding the immigrants to their new destination particularly to Argentina where the large territories purchased by Hirsch were not yet ready for the reception of colonists. Baron Hirsch was compelled to send out an appeal to all Jewish communities calling upon them to stem for the present this orderly human avalanche. Along Baron Hirsch's stream of transplanting millions of people with millions of money proved an utter failure. When, after long preparations the selected Jewish colonists were at last dispatched to Argentina it was found that the original figure of 25,000 immigrants calculated for the first year had shrunk to about 2,500. Altogether, during the first three years from 1892 to 1894 the Argentinian emigration absorbed some 6,000 people. Half of these remained in the capital of the Republic in Buenos Aires while the other half managed to settle in the colonies after enduring all the hardships connected with agricultural colonization in the new land and under new climatic conditions. A few years later it was commonly realized that the mountain had even burst to a mouth. Instead of the million Jews as originally planned the Jewish Colonization Association succeeded in transplanting during the first decade only 10,000 Jews who were distributed over six Argentinian colonies. The main current of Jewish emigration flowed as year to fall in the direction of North America towards the United States and Canada. In the course of the year 1891 with its numerous panics the United States alone observed more than 100,000 immigrants over 42,000 homes succeeded in arriving the same year while 76,000 were held back in various European centers and managed to come over the year after. The following two years show again the former annual ratio of emigration wavering between 30,000 to 35,000. The same fate for the year of 1891 gave rise to a colonization fever even in quiet Palestine. Already in the beginning of 1890 the Russian government had legalized the Palestinian colonization movement in Russia by sanctioning the constitution of the society for granting assistance to Jewish colonists and artisans in Syria and Palestine which had its headquarters in Odessa. This sanction enabled the Hubebe Zion societies which were scattered all over the country to group themselves around the legalized center and collect money openly for their purposes. The Palestinian propaganda gained a new lease of life. This propaganda which was intensified in its effect by the emigration panic of the terrible year resulted in the formation of a number of societies in Russia with the object of purchasing land in Palestine. In the beginning of 1891 delegates of these societies suddenly appeared in Palestine and Mass and with the cooperation of the Jaffa representative of the Odessa-Palestine society began feverishly buy off the land from the Arabs. This led to a real estate speculation which artificially raised the price of land. Moreover, the Turkish government became alarmed and forbade the wholesale colonization of Jews from Russia. The result was a financial crash. The attempt at a wholesale immigration into destitute Palestine with its primitive patriarchal conditions proved a failure. During the following years, the colonization of the holy land with Russian Jews proceeded again at a slow pace. One colony after another rose gradually into being. A large part of the old and the new settlers were under the charge of Baron Rochild administration with the exception of two or three colonies which were maintained by the Palestine society in Odessa. It was evident that in view of the slow advance of the Palestinian colonization its political and economic importance for the Russian Jewish millions was practically nil and that its only advantage over and against the American immigration day in its spiritual significance. In the fact that on the historic soil of Judaism it rose into being a small Jewish center with a pure national culture that was possible in the diaspora. This idea was championed by Ahad Ham the exponent of the neo-Palestinian movement who had made his first appearance in Hebrew literature in 1889 and in a short time forged his way to the front. Three, continued the humiliations and death of Alexander III. In the meantime, in the land of the Tzar's event went their own course. The Moscow tragedy was nearing its end but its last stages were marked by since reminiscent of the times of the Inquisition. After vanishing from Moscow the larger part of the Jewish population Grand Duke Sergius made up his mind to humble the remaining Jewish population of the second Russian capital so thoroughly that its existence in the center of Greek orthodoxy might escape public notice. The eyes of the Russian officials at Moscow were offended by the sight of the new beautiful Sinovul structure which had been finished in the fateful year of the expression. At first, orders were given to remove from the top of the building the large cupola kept by the shield of David which attracted the attention of all passersby. Later on, the police without any further ado shut down the synagogue in each services had already begun to be held pending the receipt of a new special permit to reopen it. By the way, mine of Moscow and the warden of the synagogue addressed petition to the governor general in which they begged permission to hold services in the building, the construction of which had been duly sanctioned by the government pointing to the fact that Judaism was one of the religions tolerated in Russia. In answer to their petition, they received the following stern reply from St. Petersburg on September 23, 1892. His imperial majesty, after listening to report of the minister of the interior concerning the willful opening of the Moscow synagogue by Rabbi Mino and Warden Schneider was graciously pleased to comment as follows. First, Rabbi Mino of Moscow shall be dismissed from his post and transferred for permanent residence to the pale of Jewish settlement. Second, Warden Schneider shall be removed from the precincts of Moscow for two years. Third, the Jewish synagogue society shall be notified that unless by January 1, 1893, the synagogue structure will have been sold or transformed into a charitable institution. It will be sold at public auction by the administration of Moscow. The Rabbi and Warden went to exile while the dead body of the mothered synagogue structure was saved from desecration by placing in it one of the schools of the Moscow community. The fight against the places of Jewish worship was renewed by the police a few years later during the reign of Nicholas II. The principal synagogue being closed, the Jews of Moscow were compelled to hold services in uncomfortable private premises. There were 14 houses of prayer of this kind in various parts of the city, but on the eve of the Jewish Passover of 1894 the Governor General gave orders to close nine of these houses so that the religious needs of a community of 10,000 souls had to be satisfied with the service of worship situated in narrow, unsanitary quarters. The government had achieved its purpose. The synagogue was humbled into the dust and its site no longer offended the eyes of the Greek Orthodox zealots. The Jews of Moscow were forced to pour out their hearts before God in some backyard in the stuffy atmosphere of private dwellings. On the eve of the Spanish Inquisition, these private houses of worship would, on the solemn days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, be steadily visited by the Maranos of Moscow, those Jews who had saved themselves from the wholesale expulsions by fictitious conversion to Christianity. The passionate prayers of repentance of these involuntary apostates rose up to heaven as they had done in centuries gone by from the underground synagogues of Seville, Toledo and Saragosa. By and by, the attempt to take the Jewish citadel by storm gave way to the former regular state of Siege, which had for its object to starve out the Jews. The municipal county form of 1892 dealt a severe political blow to Russian Jewry. Under the old law, the number of Jewish aldermen in the municipal administration had been limited to one third of the total number of aldermen, aside from the prohibition barring the Jews from the office of Burger Master. Notwithstanding these restrictions, the Jews played a conspicuous part in municipal self-government and could boast of a number of prominent municipal workers. The Jews went against the grain of the Inquisitorial Trio, Pobiodonoshev, Duranovo, and Klev and they decided to bar the Jews completely from participation in the municipal elections. The reactionary anti-democratic municipal regulation of 1892 proclaimed publicly this new Jewish disfranchisement. The new law deprived the Jews of their right to passive and active election to the municipal dumas, merely granting the local administration the right to appoint at its pleasure a number of Jewish aldermen not to exceed one tenth of the total membership of the duma. Moreover, these Jewish aldermen by the grace of the police were prohibited from serving on the executive organs of the duma, the administrative council and the various standing committees. As a result, even there where the Jews formed 60 or 70% of the total urban population, there were only representatives in the municipal administration or men who were the willing tools of the municipal powers and who moreover were quantitatively restricted to 5 or 10% of the total number of aldermen. In this wise, the law providing for an inverse ratio of popular representation came into effect. Four fifths of the population were limited to one tenth of the number of aldermen while one fifth of it were granted nine tenths of aldermen in the city government. The law seemed to tell the Jews true, in the given city you may form the overwhelming majority of taxpayers yet the city property shall not be managed by you but by the small Christian minority which shall do with you as it pleases. It goes without saying that the Christian minority which was not intricately hostile to the Jews managed the city affairs in a manner subversive of the interest of the majority. Even the imports on special Jewish needs such as the meat and candle tags were often used by the municipal Dumas towards the maintenance of institutions and schools to which Jews were admitted in an insignificant number or not admitted at all. This condition of affairs was in full accord with the medieval church canons. A Jew living in a Christian country has no right to dispose of any property and must remain in slavish subjection to his Christian fellow citizens. A number of laws passed during that period are of such a nature as to admit of but one explanation the desire to insert and humiliate the Jews and to blend him by the medieval case mark of persecution. The law issued in 1893 concerning names threatened with criminal persecution those Jews who in their private life call themselves by names differing in form from those recorded in the official registers. The practice of many educated Jews to rationalize their names such as Gregory instead of Hirsch Vladimir instead of Wolf etc. could now lend the culprits in prison. It was even forbidden to collect the disfigurements to which the Jewish names were generally subjected in the registers such as Yosef instead of Joseph, Shrull instead of Israel Yitzhak instead of Isaac and so on. In several cities the police brought actions against such Jews for having adopted Christian names in newspaper advertisements and visiting cards on door signs. The new passport regulation of 1894 orders to insert in all Jewish passports a physical description of their owners even in the case of their being literate and therefore being able to affix their signature to the passports whereas such description was omitted from the passports of literate Christians. In some places the police deliberately tried to make the Jewish passport more conspicuous by marking on them the denomination of the owner in red ink. Even in those rare instances in which the law was intended to bring relief the government managed to emphasize its hostile intent. The law of 1893 legalizing the Jewish header and putting an end to the persecution which this traditional Jewish school had suffered at the hands of the police narrowed at the same time its function to that of an exclusively religious institution and indirectly obeyed the teaching in it of the general secular subjects. There are cases on record in each of these headers so-called melamets were put on trial for imparting to their peoples a knowledge of Russian and arithmetic. However, the most effective whip in the hands of the government remained as therefore the expulsion from the governments of the interior. In 1893 this whip crept over the backs of thousands of Jewish families. Durunov, the minister of the interior, issued a circular repealing the old decree of 1880 which had sanctioned the residents outside the pale of settlement of all those Jews who had lived there previously. That decree had been prompted by the motive to prevent the complete economic ruin of the Jews who were settled in places outside the pale and had created their industrial enterprises. But such a motive which even the anti-Semitic ministry of Tolstoy had not been bold enough to disregard did not appeal to the new Hamans. Many thousands of Jewish families who had lived outside the pale for decades were threatened with exile. The difficulties attending the execution of this wholesale expulsion forced the government to make concessions. In the Baltic provinces the banishment of the old settlers was repealed while in the great Russian governments it was postponed for a year or two. There was a particularly spiteful motive behind the Imperial UK's of 1893 excluding the Crimean resort place Yarta from the pale of settlement and ordering the expulsion from there of hundreds of families which were not enrolled in the Yarta town community. No official reason was given for this new disability but everybody knew it. In the neighborhood of Yarta was the Imperial summer residence Rivadia where Alexander III was fond of spending the autumn and this circumstance made it imperative to reduce the number of the local Jewish residents to a negligible quantity. The last batch of the victims many were granted reprieves but after the expulsion of their terms they were ruthlessly deported. The last batches of exiles were driven from Yarta in the month of October and in the beginning of November 1894 during the days of public mourning for the death of Alexander III. This was the last batch of the Yarta town which was purged of the Jewish populace for his benefit. While the early remains of the dead Emperor were carried on the railroad tracks to St. Petersburg trains filled with Jewish refugees from Yarta were rolling on the parallel tracks spinning towards the pale of settlement. Such was the symbolic finale of the reign of Alexander III which lasted 14 years. It ended with explosions. The martyred nation stood at the threshold of a new reign with a silent question on its lip. What next? End of history of the Jews in Russia and Poland Volume 2 from the death of Alexander I until the death of Alexander III 1825 to 1894 by Szymon Dubnov translated by Israel Friedlander