200 years together 100-200

intensify their education. He warned that the categorisation would probably arouse indignation in Europe.308) Scalded by the way Europe had reacted to the attempt to expel the Jews from the border area, the Russian government drew up a detailed statement on the new measure in 1846: in Poland, Jews had neither citizenship nor the right to own immovable property, and was therefore restricted to petty trading and the sale of alcohol; incorporated in Russia, they saw the limits of their residence extended, they received civil rights, access to the class of merchants in the cities, the right to own real estate, to enter the category of farmers, the right to education, including access to universities and academies.309 It must be admitted that the Jews did receive all these rights from the first decades of their presence in the famous “prison of the peoples”. Nevertheless, a century later, in a collection written by Jewish authors, one finds the following assessment: “When the annexation to Russia of the Polish provinces with their Jewish population, promises were made concerning Rights, and attempts to realise them [italics are mine, A. S.; said promises were kept, and the attempts were not without success]. But at the same time, mass expulsions outside villages had begun (indeed, they had been outlined, but were never effective), double taxation was implemented [which was not levied in a systematic way, and eventually abandoned] and to the institution of the Pale of Settlement was undertaken”310 [we have seen that the borders of this area were originally a geographical heritage]. If one thinks that this way of exposing history is objective, then one will never reach the truth. Unfortunately, however, the government communiqué of 1846 pointed out that the Jews did not take advantage of many of these measures: “Constantly defying integration with the civil society in which they live, most kept their old way of life, taking advantage of the work of others, which, on all sides, legitimately entails the complaints of the inhabitants.” “For the purpose [of raising the standard of living of the Jews], it is important to free them from their dependence on the elders of the community, the heirs of the former leaders of the Kahal, to spread education and practical knowledge in the Jewish population, to create Jewish schools of general education, to provide means for their passage to agriculture, to blur the differences of clothing which are unfair to many Jews. As for the government, “it esteems itself entitled to hope that the Jews will abandon all their reprehensible ways of living and turn to a truly productive and useful work.” Only those who refuse to do so will be subject to “incentivised measures for parasitic members affecting society and harming it.”311 In his reply to this text, Montefiore condemned the categorisation by insisting that all the misfortune came from the limitations imposed on the free
308Ibidem, pp. 100 103. ‒ 309Ibidem, p.103. 310Dinour, in BJWR‐1. p. 319. 311Hessen*. t. 2. pp. 103 104. ‒
circulation of the Jews and their trade. Nicolas retorted that if the passage of the Jews to productive work was successful, time, “of itself, would gradually mitigate these limitations.”312 He was counting on the possibility of re‐education through work… Being held in check here and there, and elsewhere in his efforts to transform the way of life of the Jews, he had the ambition to break the Jews’ tendency to close in on themselves and to solve the problem of their integration with the surrounding population through labour, and the problem of labour by drastically reinforced conscription. The reduction of the length of military service for the Jews (from 25 to ten years) and the intention of providing them with vocational training was scarcely clear; what was perceived concretely was the levying of recruits, now proportionately three times more numerous than among Christians: “Ten recruits per year per thousand male inhabitants, and for Christians seven recruits per thousand once every two years.”313 Faced with this increase in recruitment, more people sought to escape. Those who were designated for conscription went into hiding. In retaliation, at the end of 1850, a decree stipulated that all recruits not delivered on time should be compensated by three additional recruits in addition to the defaulter! Now Jewish communities were interested in capturing the fugitives or replacing them with innocent people. (In 1853 a decree was issued enabling Jewish communities and private individuals to present as a recruit any person taken without papers.) The Jewish communities were seen to have paid “takers” or “snatchers” who captured their “catch”314; they received from the community a receipt attesting that the community had used their services when handing over those who did not respond to the call, or who carried expired passports—even if they were from another province—or teenagers without a family. But that was not enough to compensate for the missing recruits. In 1852 two new decrees were added: the first provided for each recruit provided in excess of the quota imposed, to relieve the community of 300 rubles of arrears315; the second “prohibited the concealment of Jews who evaded military service and demanded severe punishment for those who had fled conscription, imposed fines on the communities that had hidden them, and, instead of the missing recruits, to enlist their relatives or the community leaders responsible for the delivery of the recruits within the prescribed time limits. Seeking by all means to escape recruitment, many Jews fled abroad or went to other provinces.”316 From then on, the recruitment gave rise to a real bacchanale: the “snatchers” became more and more fierce; on the contrary, men in good health and capable of working scurried off, went into hiding, and the backlogs of the communities grew. The sedentary and productive part uttered protests and demands: if recruitment began to strike to an equal extent the “useful elements” 312Ibidem, pp. 107 110. ‒ 313LJE. t. 4. p. 75. 314JE, t. 9. p. 243. 315Hessen, 1.2. p. 115. 316LJE, t. 7, p. 323.
and those which do not exercise productive work, then the vagabonds will always find means of hiding and all the weight of the recruitment would fall on the “useful”, which would spread among them disorder and the ruin.”317 The administrative overflows made the absurdity of the situation clear because of the difficulties that ensued; questions were raised, for example, about the different types of activity: are they “useful” or not? This fired up the Saint Petersburg ministries.318 The Council of State demanded that the social categorisation be delayed so long as the regulations of the workshops were not elaborated. The Emperor, however, did not want to wait. In 1851, the “Provisional Rules for the Categorisation of Jews”, and “Special Rules for Jewish Workshops” were published. The Jewish population was deeply concerned, but according to the testimony of the Governor General of the South‐West, it no longer believed that this categorisation would enter into force.”319 And, in fact, “… it did not take place; the Jewish population was not divided into categories.”320 In 1855, Nicholas I died suddenly, and categorisation was abandoned forever. Throughout the years 1850 1855, the sovereign had, on the whole, ‒ displayed a limitless sense of pride and self‐confidence, accumulating gross blunders which stupidly led us into the Crimean war against a coalition of States, before suddenly dying while the conflict was raging. The sudden death of the Emperor saved the Jews from a difficult situation, just as they were to be saved a century later by the death of Stalin. Thus ended the first six decades of massive presence of Jews in Russia. It must be acknowledged that neither their level nor their lack of clarity prepared the Russian authorities at that time to face such an ingrained, gnarled and complex problem. But to put on these Russian leaders the stamp “persecutors of the Jews” amounts to distorting their intentions and compounding their abilities.
317Hessen, t. 2, pp. 114 118. ‒ 318Ibidem, p. 112. 319JE, 1.13, p. 274. 320Hessen, t. 2, p. 118.
Chapter 4. In the Age of Reforms
At the moment of the ascension of Alexander II to the throne, the Peasant Question in Russia had been overripe for a century and demanded immediate resolution. Then suddenly, the Jewish Question surfaced and demanded a no less urgent solution  as well. In Russia, the Jewish Question was not as ancient as the deep-rooted and barbaric institution of serfdom and up to this time it did not seem to loom so large in the country. Yet henceforth, for the rest of 19th century, and right to the very year of 1917 in the State Duma, the Jewish and the Peasant questions would cross over and over again; they would contend with each other and thus become intertwined in their competing destiny. Alexander II had taken the throne during the difficult impasse of the Crimean War against a united Europe. This situation demanded  a difficult decision, whether to hold out or to surrender. Upon his ascension, “voices were immediately raised in defense of the Jewish population.”— After several weeks, His Majesty gave orders “to make the Jews equal with the rest of population in respect to military duty, and to end acceptance of underage recruits.” (Soon after, the “skill-category” draft of Jewish philistines was cancelled; this meant that “all classes of the Jewish population were made equal with respect to compulsory military service.”321) This decision was confirmed in the Coronation Manifesto of 1856: “Jewish recruits of the same age and qualities which are defined for recruits from other population groups are to be admitted while acceptance of underage Jewish recruits was to be abolished.”322 Right then the institution of military cantonists was also completely abolished; Jewish cantonists who were younger than 20 years of age were returned to their parents even if they already had been turned into soldiers. [Cantonists were the sons of Russian conscripts who, from 1721, were educated in special “canton (garrison) schools” for future military service]. The lower ranks who had served out their full term (and their descendents) received the right to live anywhere on the territory of the Russian Empire. (They usually settled where they terminated their service. They could settle
321Evreyskaya Entsiklopediya [The Jewish Encyclopedia] (henceforth—EE [JE]): V 16 T. Sankt-St.Petersburg.: Obshchestvo dlya Nauchnikh Evreyskikh Izdaniy I Izd-vo BrokrauzEfron [Society for Scientific Jewish Publications and Brokrauz-Efron Publishing House], 1906-1913. T 13, p. 373-374. 322EE* [JE], T 3, p. 163.
permanently and had often become the founders of new Jewish communities.323 In a twist of fate and as a historical punishment, Russia and the Romanov Dynasty got Yakov Sverdlov from the descendents of one such cantonist settler.324) By the same manifesto the Jewish population “was forgiven all [considerable] back taxes” from previous years. (“Yet already in the course of the next five years new tax liabilities accumulated amounting to 22% of the total expected tax sum.325) More broadly, Alexander II expressed his intention to resolve the Jewish Question — and in the most favorable manner. For this, the approach to the question was changed drastically. If during the reign of Nicholas I the government saw its task as first reforming the Jewish inner life, gradually clearing it out through productive work and education with consequent removal of administrative restrictions, then during the reign of Alexander II the policy was the opposite: to begin “with the intention of integrating this population with the native inhabitants of the country” as stated in the Imperial Decree of 1856.326 So the government had began quick removal of external constraints and restrictions not looking for possible inner causes of Jewish seclusion and morbidity; it thereby hoped that all the remaining problems would then solve themselves. To this end, still another Committee for Arranging the Jewish Way of Life was established in 1856. (This was already the seventh committee on Jewish affairs, but by no means the last). Its chairman, the above-mentioned Count Kiselyov, reported to His Majesty that “the goal of integrating Jews with the general population” “is hindered by various temporary restrictions, which, when considered in the context of general laws, contain many contradictions and beget bewilderment.” In response, His Majesty ordered “a revision of all existing statutes on Jews to harmonize them with the general strategy directed toward integration of this people with the native inhabitants, to the extent afforded by the moral condition of Jews”; that is, “the fanaticism and economic harmfulness ascribed to them.”327 No, not for nothing had Herzen struggled with his Kolokol, or Belinsky and Granovsky, or Gogol! (For although not having such goals, the latter acted in the same direction as the former three did.) Under the shell of the austere reign of Nicholas I, the demand for decisive reforms and the will for them and the 323Ibid. T 11, p. 698; Yu Gessen*. Istoriya evreyskogo naroda v Rossii [History of the Jewish People in Russia] (henceforth—Yu. Gessen): V 2 T. L., 1925-1927. T 2, p. 160. 324Kratkaya Evreyskaya Entsiklopedia [The Short Jewish Encyclopedia] (henceforth KEE [SJE] ): [V 10 T.] Jerusalem, 1976-2001. T 4, p. 79. 325Yu. Gessen. T 2, p. 183. 326M. Kovalevskiy*. Ravnopravie evreyev i ego vragi [Jewish Equal Rights and its Opponents] // Shchit: Literaturniy sbornik [Shchit: A Literary Anthology] / Under the Editorship of L. Andreyev, M Gor’kiy, and F. Sologub. 3rd Edition., dop. M.: Russkoe Obshchestvo dly izucheniya evreyskoy zhizni [Russian Society for the Study of Jewish Life], 1916, p. 117118. 327EE [JE], T 1, p. 812-813.
people to implement them were building up, and, astonishingly, new projects were taken by the educated high governmental dignitaries more enthusiastically than by educated public in general. And this immediately impacted the Jewish Question. Time after time, the ministers of Internal Affairs (first Lanskoi and then Valuev) and the Governors General of the Western and Southwestern Krais [administrative divisions of Tsarist Russia] shared their suggestions with His Majesty who was quite interested in them. “Partial improvements in the legal situation of the Jews were enacted by the government on its own initiative, yet under direct supervision by His Majesty.”328 These changes went along with the general liberating reforms which affected Jews as well as the rest of population. In 1858, Novorossiysk Governor General Stroganov suggested immediate, instant, and complete equalization of the Jews in all rights — but the Committee, now under the chairmanship of Bludov, stopped short, finding itself unprepared for such a measure. In 1859 it pointed out, for comparison, that “while the Western-European Jews began sending their children to public schools at the first invitation of the government, more or less turning themselves to useful occupations, the Russian government has to wrestle with Jewish prejudices and fanaticism”; therefore, “making Jews equal in rights with the native inhabitants cannot happen in any other way than a gradual change, following the spread of true enlightenment among them, changes in their inner life, and turning their activity toward useful occupations.”329 The Committee also developed arguments against equal rights. It suggested that the question being considered was not so much a Jewish question, as it was a Russian one; that it would be precipitous to grant equal rights to Jews before raising the educational and cultural level of Russian population whose dark masses would not be able to defend themselves in the face of the economic pressure of Jewish solidarity; that the Jews hardly aspire toward integration with the rest of the citizens of the country, that they strive toward achieving all civil rights while retaining their isolation and cohesion which Russians do not possess among themselves. However, these voices did not attain influence. One after another, restrictions had been removed. In 1859 the Prohibition of 1835 was removed: it had forbidden the Jews to take a lease or manage populated landowner’s lands. (And thus, the right to rule over the peasants; though that prohibition was “in some cases … secretly violated.” Although after 1861 lands remaining in the property of landowners were not formally “populated.”) The new changes were aimed “to make it easier for landowners to turn for help to Jews if necessary” in case of deterioration of in the manorial economy, but also “in order to somewhat widen the restricted field of economic activity of the Jews.” Now the Jews could lease these lands and settle on them though they could not buy them.330 Meanwhile in the Southwestern Krai “capital that could be turned to the
328Ibid. p. 808. 329Ibid. p. 814-815; Yu Gessen*, T 2, p. 147-148. 330Yu Gessen, T 2, p. 163.
purchase of land was concentrated in the hands of some Jews … yet the Jews refused to credit landowners against security of the estate because estates could not be purchased by Jews.” Soon afterwards Jews were granted the right to buy land from landowners inside the Pale of Settlement.331 With development of railroads and steamships, Jewish businesses such as keeping of inns and postal stations had declined. In addition, because of new liberal customs tariffs introduced in1857 and 1868, which lowered customs duties on goods imported into Russia, “profits on contraband trade” had immediately and sharply decreased.332 In 1861 the prohibition on Jews to acquire exclusive rights to some sources of revenue from estates was abolished. In the same year the systems of tax farming and ‘wine farming’ [translator’s note: concessions from the state to private entrepreneurs to sell vodka to the populace in particular regions] were abolished. This was a huge blow to a major Jewish enterprise. “Among Jews, ‘tax collector’ and ‘contractor’ were synonyms for wealth”; now Orshansky writes, they could just dream about “the time of the Crimean War, when contractors made millions, thanks to the flexible conscience and peculiar view of the Treasury in certain circles”; “thousands of Jews lived and got rich under the beneficial wing of tax farming.” Now the interests of the state had begun to be enforced and contracts had become much less profitable. And “trading in spirits” had become “far less profitable than … under … the tax farming system.”333 However, as the excise was introduced in the wine industry in place of the wine farming system, no special restrictions were laid on Jews and so now they could sell and rent  distillation factories on a common basis in the Pale of Settlement provinces.334 And they had so successfully exercised this right to rent and purchase over next two decades that by the 1880s between 32 % and 76 % of all distillation factories in the Jewish Pale of Settlement belonged to Jews, and almost all of them fell under category of a ‘major enterprise’.335 By 1872, 89 % of distillation factories in the Southwestern Krai were rented by Jews.336 From 1863 Jews were permitted to run distillation in Western and Eastern Siberia (for “the most remarkable specialists in the distillation industry almost exclusively came from among the Jews”), and from 1865 the Jewish distillers were permitted to reside everywhere.337
331Yu Gessen, T 2, p. 164. 332Ibid. p. 161-162. 333I. Orshanskiy. Evrei v Rossii: Ocherki i issledovaniya [The Jews in Russia: Essays and Research]. Vip. 1 (henceforth—I. Orshanskiy). Sankt-St. Petersburg., 1872, p. 10-11. 334V.N. Nikitin. Evrei zemledel’tsi: Istoricheskoe, zakonodatel’noe, administrativnoe i bitovoe polozhenie kolonii co vremeni ikh vozniknoveniya do nashikh dney 1807-1887 [ Jewish Farmers: the Historical, Legal, Administrative, and Everyday Condition of the Colonies, from the Time of Their Origin to Our Days. 1807-1887]. (henceforth—V.N. Nikitin). SanktSt. Petersburg, 1887, p. 557. 335EE [JE], T 5, p. 610-611. 336Ibid. T 13, p. 663. 337Ibid*, T 5, p. 622.
Regarding the spirits trade in the villages, about one-third of the whole Jewish population of the Pale lived in villages at the start of 1880s, with two or three families in each village,338 as remnants of the korchemstvo [from “tavern” — the state-regulated business of retail spirits sale]. An official government report of 1870 stated that “the drinking business in the Western Krai is almost exclusively concentrated in the hands of Jews, and the abuses encountered in these institutions exceed any bounds of tolerance.”339 Thus it was demanded of Jews to carry on the drinking business only from their own homes. The logic of this demand was explained by G. B. Sliozberg: in the villages of Little Russia [Ukraine], that is, outside of the legal limits of the Polish autonomy, the landowners did not have the right to carry on trade in spirits — and this meant that the Jews could not buy spirits from landowners for resale. Yet at the same time the Jews might not buy even a small plot of peasant land; therefore, the Jews rented peasant homes and conducted the drinking business from them. When such trade was also prohibited — the prohibition was often evaded by using a ‘front’ business: a dummy patent on a spirits business was issued to a Christian to which a Jew supposedly only served as an ‘attendant.’340 Also, the ‘punitive clause’ (as it is worded in the Jewish Encyclopedia), that is, a punishment accompanying the prohibition against Jews hiring a Christian as a personal servant, was repealed in 1865 as “incompatible with the general spirit of the  official policy of tolerance.” And so “from the end of the 1860s many Jewish families began to hire Christian servants.”341 Unfortunately, it is so typical for many scholars studying the history of Jewry in Russia to disregard  hard-won victories: if yesterday all strength and attention were focused on the fight for some civil right and today that right is attained — then very quickly afterwards that victory is considered a trifle. There was so much said about the “double tax” on the Jews as though it existed for centuries and not for very few short years, and even then it was never really enforced in practice. The law of 1835, which was at the time greeted by Jews with a sense of relief, was, at the threshold of 20th century dubbed by S. Dubnov as a ‘Charter of Arbitrariness.’ To the future revolutionary Leo Deutsch, who in the 1860s was a young and still faithful subject, it looked like the administration “did not strictly [enforce] some essential … restrictions on … the rights” of Jews, “they turned a blind eye to … violations”; “in general, the life of Jews in Russia in the sixties was not bad…. Among my Jewish peers I did not see anyone suffering from depression, despondence, or estrangement as a result of oppression” by their Christian mates.342 But then he suddenly
338Yu. Larin. Evrei i antisemitizm v SSSR [The Jews and Anti-Semitism in the USSR]. Moscow; Leningrad: GIZ, 1929, p. 49. 339I. Orshanskiy, p. 193. 340G.B. Sliozberg. Dela minuvshikh dney: Zapiski russkogo evreya [Affairs of the Past: the Notes of a Russian Jew] (henceforth—G.B. Sliozberg): V 3 T. Paris, 1933-1934. T 1, p. 95. 341EE*, T 11, p. 495. 342L. Deych. Rol’ evreyev v russkom revolyutsionnom dvizhenii [The Role of the Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement]. T 1. Second Edition. Moscow,; Leningrad.: GIZ, 1925,
recollects his revolutionary duty and calls everything given to the Jews during the reign of Alexander I as, “in essence, insignificant alleviations” and, without losing a beat, mentions “the crimes of Alexander II”— although, in his opinion, the Tsar shouldn’t have been killed.343 And from the middle of the 20th century it already looks like for the whole of 19th century that various committees and commissions were being created for review of Jewish legal restrictions “and they came to the conclusion that the existing legal restrictions did not achieve their aims and should be … abolished…. Yet not a single one of the projects worked out by the Committees … was implemented.”344 It’s rid of, forgotten, and no toasts made. After the first Jewish reforms by Alexander II, the existence of the Pale of Settlement had become the most painful issue. “Once a hope about a possibility of future state reforms had emerged, and first harbingers of expected renewal of public life had barely appeared, the Jewish intelligentsia began contemplating the daring step of raising the question of abolishing the Jewish Pale of Settlement altogether.”345 Yet still fresh in the Jewish memory was the idea of ‘selectivity’: to impose additional obligations on not-permanently-settled and unproductive Jews. And so in 1856 an idea to petition His Majesty appeared in the social strata of “Jewish merchants, citizens of St. Petersburg, and out-oftowners,” who “by their social standing and by the nature of their activity, more closely interacted with the central authorities.”346 The petition asked His Majesty “not to give privileges to the whole Jewish population, but only to certain categories,” to the young generation “raised in the spirit and under the supervision of the government,” “to the upper merchant class,” and “to the good craftsmen, who earn their bread by sweat of their brow”; so that they would be “distinguished by the government with more rights than those who still exhibited nothing special about their good intentions, usefulness, and industriousness…. Our petition is so that the Merciful Monarch, distinguishing wheat from chaff, would be kindly disposed to grant several, however modest privileges to the worthy and cultivated among us, thus encouraging good and praiseworthy actions.”347 (Even in all their excited hopes they could not even imagine how quickly the changes in the position of the Jews would be implemented in practice —already in 1862 some of the authors of this petition would ask “about extending equal rights to all who graduate from secondary
p. 14, 21-22. 343Ibid. p. 28. 344A.A. Gal’denveyzer. Pravovoe polozhenie evreyev v Rossii // [Sb.] Kniga o russkom evreystve: Ot 1860-kh godov do Revolyutsii 1917g [The Legal Position of the Jews in Russia // [Anthology] The Book of Russian Jewry: from the 1860s to the Revolution of 1917]. (henceforth—KRE-1). New York: Soyuz Russkikh Evreyev [Union of Russian Jews], 1960, p. 119. 345Yu Gessen. T 2, p. 143. 346EE [JE], T 1, p. 813. 347Yu. Gessen*, T 2, p. 144-145; EE [JE] T 1, p. 813.
educational institutions,” for the grammar school graduates “of course, must be considered people with a European education.”348 And yes, “in principle, the Tsar did not mind violations of the laws concerning the Jewish Pale of Settlement in favor of individual groups of the Jewish population.” In 1859 Jewish merchants of the 1st Guild were granted the right of residency in all of Russia (and the 2nd Guild in Kiev from 1861; and also for all three guilds in Nikolayev, Sevastopol, and Yalta)349 with the right of arranging manufacturing businesses, contracts, and acquiring real estate. Earlier, doctors and holders of masters degrees in science had already enjoyed the right of universal residency (including the right to occupy posts in government service; here we should note a professor of medicine G.A. Zakharyin, who in the future would pronounce the fatal judgment about the illness of Alexander III). From 1861 this right was granted to “candidates of universities,” that is, simply to university graduates,350 and also “to persons of free professions.”351 The Pale of Settlement restrictions were now lifted even from the “persons, desiring to obtain higher education … namely to persons, entering medical academies, universities, and technical institutes.”352 Then, as a result of petitions from individual ministers, governors, and influential Jewish merchants (e.g., Evzel Ginzburg), from 1865 the whole territory of Russia including St. Petersburg was opened to Jewish artisans, though only for the period of actual professional activity. (The notion of artisans was then widened to include all kinds of technicians such as typesetters and typographic workers.)353 Here it is worth keeping in mind that merchants relocated with their clerks, office workers, various assistants, and Jewish service personnel, craftsmen, and also with apprentices and pupils. Taken altogether, this already made up a notable stream. Thus, a Jew with a right of residency outside of the Pale was free to move from the Pale, and not only with his family. Yet new relaxations were outpaced by new petitions. In 1861, immediately after granting privileges for the “candidates of universities,” the Governor General of the Southwestern Krai had asked to allow exit from the Pale to those who completed state professional schools for the Jews, that is, incomplete high school-level establishments. He had vividly described the condition of such graduates: “Young people graduating from such schools find themselves completely cut off from Jewish society…. If they do not find occupations according to their qualifications within their own circles, they get accustomed to idleness and thus, by being unworthy representatives of their profession, they often discredit the prestige of education in the eyes of people they live among.”354
348Yu Gessen, T 2, p. 158. 349Yu Gessen, T 2, p. 144, 154-155. 350EE [JE], T 1, p. 817. 351KEE [SJE], T 4, p. 255. 352Sm.: M. Kovalevskiy // Shchit, p. 118. 353EE [JE], T 1, p. 818; T 11, p. 458-459; T 14, p. 841. 354Yu Gessen, T 2, p. 150.
In that same year, the Ministers of Internal Affairs and Education declared in unison “that a paramount cause of the disastrous condition of Jews is hidden in the abnormal share of Jews occupied in commerce and industry versus the rest engaged in agriculture”; and because of this “the peasant is unavoidably preyed upon by Jews as if he is obligated to surrender a part of his income to their maintenance.” Yet the internal competition between the Jews creates a “nearly impossible situation of providing for themselves by legal means.” And therefore, it is necessary to “grant the right of universal residence to merchants” of the 2nd and 3rd Guilds, and also to graduates of high or equivalent schools.355 In 1862 the Novorossiysk Governor General again called for “complete abolition of the Jewish Pale of Settlement” by asking “to grant the right of universal residency to the entire [Jewish] people.”356 Targeted permissions for universal residency of certain Jewish groups were being issued at a slower but constant rate. From 1865 acceptance of Jews as military doctors was permitted, and right after that (1866-1867), Jewish doctors were allowed to work in the ministries of Education and Interior.357 From 1879 they were permitted to serve as pharmacists and veterinarians; permission was also granted “to those preparing for the corresponding type of activity,”358 and also to midwives and feldshers, and “those desiring to study medical assistant arts.”359 Finally, a decree by the Minister of Internal Affairs Makov was issued allowing residence outside the Pale to all those Jews who had already illegally settled there.360 Here it is appropriate to add that in the 1860s “Jewish lawyers … in the absence of the official Bar College during that period were able to get jobs in government service without any difficulties.”361 Relaxations had also affected the Jews living in border regions. In 1856, when, according to the Treaty of Paris, the Russian state boundary retreated close to Kishinev and Akkerman, the Jews were not forced out of this newlyformed frontier zone. And in 1858 “the decrees of Nicholas I, which directed Jews to abandon the fifty versts [an obsolete Russian measure, a verst is slightly more than a kilometer] boundary zone, were conclusively repealed.”362 And from 1868 movement of Jews between the western provinces of Russia and Polish Kingdom was allowed (where previously it was formally prohibited).363
355Ibid*, p. 148. 356Ibid, p. 150. 357Ibid. p. 169. 358Yu Gessen, T 2, p. 208. 359EE [JE], T 15, p. 209; T 1, p. 824. 360Perezhitoe: Sbornik, posvyashchenniy obshchestvennoy i kul’turnoy istorii evreyev v Rossii [Past Experiences: An Anthology Dedicated to the Social and Cultural History of the Jews in Russia]. T 2, Sankt-St. Petersburg, 1910, p. 102. 361G.B. Sliozberg, T 1, p. 137. 362KEE [SJE], T 7, p. 327. 363EE [JE], T 1, p. 819.
Alongside official relaxations to the legal restrictions, there were also exceptions and loopholes in regulations. For example, in the capital city of St. Petersburg “despite … prohibitions, the Jews all the same settled in for extended times”; and “with the ascension of Alexander II … the number of Jews in St. Petersburg began to grow quickly. Jewish capitalists emerged who began dedicating significant attention to the organization of the Jewish community” there; “Baron Goratsy Ginzburg, for example … L. Rozental, A Varshavsky, and others.”364 Toward the end of Alexander II’s reign, E. A. Peretz (the son of the tax farmer Abram Peretz) became the Russian Secretary of State. In the 1860s “St. Petersburg started to attract quite a few members of the commercial, industrial and intellectual [circles] of Jewry.”365 According to the data of the Commission for Arranging the Jewish Way of Life, in 1880-81, 6,290 Jews were officially registered in St. Petersburg,366 while according to other official figures, 8,993; and according to a local census from 1881, there were 16,826 Jews in St. Petersburg, i.e., around 2% of the total city population.367 In Moscow in 1856 the obligation of arriving Jewish merchants to exclusively reside in the Glebovsky Quarter was repealed; “the Jews were allowed to stay in any part of the city. During the reign of Alexander II … the Jewish population of Moscow grew quickly”; by 1880 it was around 16,000.”368 It was a similar situation in Kiev. After 1861, “a quick growth of the Jewish population of Kiev had began” (from 1,500 in 1862, to 81,000 by 1913). From the 1880s there was an influx of Jews to Kiev. “Despite frequent police roundups, which Kiev was famous for, the numbers of Jews there considerably exceeded the official figures…. By the end of the 19th century, the Jews accounted for 44% of Kiev merchants.”369 Yu. I. Hessen calls “the granting of the right of universal residency (1865) to artisans” most important. Yet Jews apparently did not hurry to move out of the Pale. Well, if it was so overcrowded in there, so constraining, and so deprived with respect to markets and earnings, why then did they make “almost no use of the right to leave the Pale of Settlement?” By 1881, in thirty-one of the interior provinces, Jewish artisans numbered 28,000 altogether (and Jews in general numbered 34,000). Hessen explains this paradox in the following way: prosperous artisans did not need to seek new places while the destitute did not have the means for the move, and the middle group, “which somehow managed from day to day without enduring any particular poverty,” feared that after their departure the elders of their community would refuse to extend an annual
364Also, T 13, p. 943-944. 365I.M. Trotskiy. Samodeyatel’nost i samopomoshch’ evreyev v Rossii [The Individual Initiative and Self-Help of the Jews in Russia] (OPE, ORT, EKO, OZE, EKOPO) // KRE-1, p. 471. 366Yu. Gessen. T 2, p. 210. 367EE [JE], T 13, p. 947; KEE [SJE], T 4, p. 770. 368KEE [SJE], T 5, p. 473. 369Also, T 4, p. 255.
passport to them for tax considerations, or even “demand that the outgoing parties return home.”370 But one can strongly doubt all this statistics. We have just read that in St. Petersburg alone there were at least twice as many Jews than according to official data. Could the slow Russian state apparatus really account for the mercury-quick Jewish population within a definite time and in all places? And the growth of Jewish population of Russia was rapid and confident. In 1864 it amounted to 1,500,000 without counting Jews in Poland.371 And together with Poland in 1850 it was 2,350,000; and in 1860 it was already 3,980,000. From the initial population of around 1,000,000 at the time of the first partitions of Poland, to 5,175,000 by the census of 1897 — that is, after a century, it grew more than five times. (At the start of the 19th century Russian Jewry amounted to 30% of the world’s Jewish population, while in 1880 it was already 51%).372 This was a major historical event.At the time, its significance was grasped neither by Russian society, nor by Russian administration. This fast numerical growth alone, without all other peculiarities of the Jewish Question, had already put a huge state problem for Russia. And here it is necessary, as always in any question, to try to understand both points of view. With such an enormous growth of Russian Jewry, two national needs were clashing ever more strongly. On one hand was the need of Jews (and a distinct feature of their dynamic 3,000-year existence) to spread and settle as wide as possible among non-Jews, so that a greater number of Jews would be able to engage in manufacturing, commerce, and serve as intermediaries (and to get involved into the culture of the surrounding population). On the other was the need of Russians, as the government understood it, to have control over their economic (and then cultural) life, and develop it themselves at their own pace. Let’s not forget that simultaneously with all these relief measures for the Jews, the universal liberating reforms of Alexander II were implemented one after another, and so benefiting Jews as well as all other peoples of Russia. For example, in 1863 the capitation [i.e., poll or head] tax from the urban population was repealed, which meant the tax relief for the main part of Jewish masses; only land taxes remained after that, which were paid from the collected kosher tax.373 Yet precisely the most important of these Alexandrian reforms, the most historically significant turning point in the Russian history — the liberation of peasants and the abolition of the Serfdom in 1861 — turned out to be highly unprofitable for Russian Jews, and indeed ruinous for many. “The general social and economic changes resulting from the abolition of peasant servitude … had significantly worsened the material situation of broad Jewish masses during that 370Yu Gessen. T 2, p. 159-160, 210. 371Also, p. 159. 372B.Ts. Dinur. Religiozno-natsional’niy oblik russkogo evreystva [The Religious-National Look of Russian Jewry] // KRE-1, p. 311-312. 373EE [JE], T 12, p. 640.
transitional period.”374 The social change was such that the multi-million disenfranchised and immobile peasant class ceased to exist, reducing the relative advantage of Jewish personal freedom. And the economic change was such that “the peasant, liberated from the servitude, … was less in the need of services by the Jew”; that is, the peasant was now at liberty from the strict prohibition against trading his products and purchasing goods himself — that is, through anyone other than a pre-assigned middleman (in the western provinces, almost always a Jew). And now, as the landowners were deprived of free serf labor, in order not to be ruined, “they were compelled to get personally engaged in the economy of their estates — an occupation where earlier Jews played a conspicuous role as renters and middlemen in all kinds of commercial and manufacturing deals.”375 It’s noteworthy that the land credit introduced in those years was displacing the Jew “as the financial manager of the manorial economy.”376 The development of consumer and credit associations led to “the liberation of people from the tyranny of usury.”377 An intelligent contemporary conveys to us the Jewish mood of the time. Although access to government service and free professions was open to the Jews and although “the industrial rights of the Jews were broadened” and there were “more opportunities for education” and “on every … corner” the “rapprochement  between the Jewish and Christian populations was visible” and although the remaining “restrictions … were far from being strictly enforced” and “the officials now treated the Jewish population with far more respect than before,” yet the situation of Jews in Russia “at the present time … is very dismal.” “Not without reason,” Jews “express regret … for good old times.” Everywhere in the Pale of Settlement one could hear “the Jewish lamentations about the past.” For under serfdom an “extraordinary development of mediation” took place; the lazy landowner could not take a step without the “Jewish trader or agent,” and the browbeaten peasant also could not manage without him; he could only sell the harvest through him, and borrowed from him also. Before, the Jewish business class “derived enormous benefit from the helplessness, wastefulness, and impracticality of landowners,” but now the landowner had to do everything himself. Also, the peasant became “less pliant and timid”; now he often establishes contacts with wholesale traders himself and he drinks less; and this “naturally has a harmful effect on the trade in spirits, which an enormous number of Jews lives on.” The author concludes with the wish that the Jews, as happened in Europe, “would side with the productive classes and would not become redundant in the national economy.”378 Now Jews had begun renting and purchasing land. The Novorossiysk Governor General (1869) requested in a staff report to forbid Jews in his region 374Yu Gessen, T 2, p. 161. 375Also. 376Also. 377Yu. Orshanskiy, p. 12. 378I. Orshanskiy, p. 1-15.
to buy land as was already prohibited in nine western provinces. Then in 1872 there was a memorandum by the Governor General of the Southwestern Krai stating that “Jews rent land not for agricultural occupations but only for industrial aims; they hand over the rented land to peasants, not for money but for a certain amount of work, which exceeds the value of the usual rent on that land, and thereby they “establish a sort of their own form of servitude.” And though “they undoubtedly reinvigorate the countryside with their capital and commerce,” the Governor General “considered concentration of manufacture and agriculture in the same hands un-conducive, since only under free competition can peasant farms and businesses avoid the “burdensome subordination of their work and land to Jewish capital, which is tantamount to their inevitable and impending material and moral perdition.” However, thinking to limit the renting of land to Jews in his Krai, he proposed to “give the Jews an opportunity to settle in all of the Greater Russian provinces.”379 The memorandum was put forward to the just-created Commission for Arranging the Jewish Way of Life (the eighth of the ‘Jewish Commissions’, according to count), which was then highly sympathetic to the situation of the Jews. It received a negative review which was later confirmed by the government: to forbid the Jewish rent of land would be “a complete violation of rights” of … landowners. Moreover, the interests of the major Jewish renter “merge completely with those of other landowners…. Well, it is true, that the Jewish proletarians group around the major [Jewish] renters and live off the work and means of the rural population. But the same also happens in the estates managed by the landowners themselves who to this time cannot manage without the help of the Jews.”380 However, in the areas inhabited by the Don Cossacks, the energetic economic advancement of the Jews was restricted by the prohibition of 1880 to own or rent the real estate. The provincial government found that “in view of the exclusive situation of the Don Province, the Cossack population  which is obligated to military service to a man, [this] is the only reliable way to save the Cossack economy from ruin, to secure the nascent manufacturing and commerce in the area.” For “a too hasty exploitation of a region’s wealth and quick development of industry … are usually accompanied by an extremely uneven distribution of capital, and the swift enrichment of some and the impoverishment of others. Meanwhile, the Cossacks must prosper, since they carry out their military service on their own horses and with their own equipment.”381 And thus they had prevented a possible Cossack explosion. So what happened with the conscription of Jews into military service after all those Alexandrian relief measures of 1856? For the 1860s, this was the picture: “When Jews manage to find out about the impending Imperial Manifest about recruit enrollment before it is officially published … all members of
379Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 224-225. 380EE [JE], T 3, p. 83-84. 381EE* [JE], T 7, p. 301-302.
Jewish families fit for military service flee from their homes in all directions….” Because of the peculiarities of their faith and “lack of comradeship and the perpetual isolation of the Jewish soldier … the military service for the Jews was the most threatening, the most ruinous, and the most burdensome of duties.”382 Although from 1860 the Jewish service in the Guards was permitted, and from 1861promotions to petty officer ranks and service as clerks,383 there was still no access to officer ranks. I. G. Orshansky, a witness to the 1860s, certifies: “It is true, there is much data supporting the opinion that in the recent years the Jews in fact had not fulfilled their conscription obligations number-wise. They purchase old recruit discharges and present them to the authorities”; peasants sometimes keep them without knowing their value as far back as from 1812; so now Jewish resourcefulness puts them to use. Or, they “hire volunteers” in place of themselves and “pay a certain sum to the treasury.” “Also they try to divide their families into smaller units,” and by this each family claims the privilege of “the only son,” (the only son was exempt from the military service). Yet, he notes “all the tricks for avoiding recruitment … are similarly encountered among the ‘pure-blooded’ Russians” and provides comparative figures for Ekaterinoslav Guberniya. I. G. Orshansky had even expressed surprise that Russian peasants prefer “to return to the favorite occupation of the Russian people, farming,” instead of wanting to remain in the highly-paid military service.384 In 1874 a unified regulation about universal military service had replaced the old recruit conscription obligation giving the Jews a “significant relief.” “The text of the regulation did not contain any articles that discriminated against Jews.”385 However, now Jews were not permitted to remain in residence in the interior provinces after completion of military service. Also, special regulations aimed “to specify the figure of male Jewish population” were introduced, for to that day it largely remained undetermined and unaccounted.” The governors received “information about abuses of law by Jews wishing to evade military service”386. In 1876 the first “measures for ensuring the proper fulfillment of military duty by Jews”387 were adopted. The Jewish Encyclopedia saw “a heavy net of repressive measures” in them. “Regulations were issued about the registration of Jews at conscription districts and about the replacement of Jews not fit for service by Jews who were fit”; and about verification of the validity of exemptions for family conditions: for violation of these regulations “conscription … of only sons was permitted.”388 A contemporary and then influential St. Petersburg newspaper, Golos [The Voice] cites quite amazing figures from the official governmental “Report on the
382G.B. Sliozberg, T 2, p. 155-156. 383EE [JE], T 3, p. 164. 384I. Orshanskiy, p. 65-68. 385KEE [SJE], T 7, p. 332. 386EE [JE], T 1, p. 824. 387Also*, T 3, p. 164. 388Also, T 1, p. 824; KEE [SJE], T 7, p. 332.
Results of Conscription in 1880…. For all [of the Russian Empire] the shortfall of recruits was 3,309; out of this, the shortfall of Jews was 3,054, which amounts to 92%.”389 Shmakov, a prominent attorney, not well-disposed toward Jews, cites such statistics from the reference, Pravitelstvenniy Vestnik [The Government Bulletin]: for the period 1876-1883: “out of 282,466 Jews subject to conscription, 89,105 — that is, 31.6% — did not show up.” (The general shortfall for the whole Empire was 0.19%.) The Administration could not help but notice this, and a number of “steps toward the elimination of such abuse” were introduced. This had an effect, but only short-term. In 1889 46,190 Jews were subjected to call-up, and 4,255 did not appear, that is 9.2%. But in 1891 “from a general number of 51,248 Jews recorded on the draft list, 7,658, or 14.94%, failed to report; at that time the percentage of Christians not reporting was barely 2.67%. In 1892, 16.38% of Jews failed to report as compared with 3.18% of Christians. In 1894 6,289 Jews did not report for the draft, that is, 13.6%. Compare this to the Russian average of 2.6%.390 However, the same document on the 1894 draft states that “in total, 873,143 Christians, 45,801 Jews, 27,424 Mohammedans, and 1,311 Pagans” were to be drafted. These are striking figures — in Russia, there were 8.7% Muslims (according to the 1870 count) but their share in the draft was only 2.9%! The Jews were in an unfavorable position not only in comparison with the Mohammedans but with the general population too: their share of the draft was assigned 4.8% though they constituted only 3.2% of Russian population (in 1870). (The Christian share in the draft was 92% (87% of Russian population).391 From everything said here one should not conclude that at the time of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, Jewish soldiers did not display courage and resourcefulness during combat. In the journal Russkiy Evrei [The Russian Jew] we can find convincing examples of both virtues.392 Yet during that war much irritation against Jews arose in the army, mainly because of dishonest contractor-quartermasters — and “such were almost exclusively Jews, starting with the main contractors of the Horovits, Greger, and Kagan Company.”393 The quartermasters supplied (undoubtedly under protection of higher circles) overpriced poor-quality equipment including the famous “cardboard soles”, due to which the feet of Russian soldiers fighting in the Shipka Pass were frostbitten.
389Golos [The Voice], 1881, No46, 15 (27) February, p. 1. 390A. Shmakov. “Evreyskie” rechi [“Jewish” Questions]. Moscow, 1897, p. 101-103. 391Entsiklopedicheskiy slovar’ [Encyclopedic Dictionary]: V 82 T. Sankt-St. Petersburg.: Brokgauz i Efron, 1890-1904. T 54, p. 86. 392EE [JE], T 3, p. 164-167. 393G.B. Sliozberg, T 1, p. 116.
In the Age of Alexander II, the half-century-old official drive to accustom the Jews to agriculture was ending in failure. After the repeal of disproportionate Jewish recruitment, farming had “immediately lost all its appeal” for Jews, or, in words of one government official, a “false interpretation of the Manifest by them” had occurred, “according to which they now considered themselves free of the obligation to engage in farming,” and that they could now migrate freely. “The petitions from the Jews about resettling with the intent to work in agriculture had ended almost completely.”394 Conditions in the existing colonies remained the same if not worse: “fields … were plowed and sowed pathetically, just for a laugh, or for appearance’s sake only.” For instance, in 1859 “the grain yield in several colonies was even smaller than the amount sown.” In the new ‘paradigmatic’ colonies, not only barns were lacking, there was even no overhangs or pens for livestock. The Jewish colonists leased most of their land to others, to local peasants or German colonists. Many asked permission to hire Christians as workers, otherwise threatening to cut back on sowing even further — and they were granted such a right, regardless of the size of the actual crop.395 Of course, there were affluent Jewish farmers among the colonists. Arrival of German colonists was very helpful too as their experience could now be adopted by Jews. And the young generation born there was already more accepting toward agriculture and German experience; they were more “convinced in the advantageousness of farming in comparison to their previous life in the congestion and exasperating competition of shtetls and towns.”396 Yet the incomparably larger majority was trying to get away from agriculture. Gradually, inspectors’ reports became invariably monotonic: “What strikes most is the general Jewish dislike for farm work and their regrets about their former artisan occupations, trade, and business”; they displayed “tireless zeal in any business opportunity,” for example, “at the very high point of field work … they could leave the fields if they discovered that they could profitably buy or sell a horse, an ox, or something else, in the vicinity.” [They had] a predilection for penny-wise trade,” demanding, according to their “conviction, less work and giving more means for living.” “Making money was easier for Jews in nearby German, Russian, or Greek villages, where the Jewish colonist would engage in tavern-keeping and small trade.” Yet more damaging for the arable land were long absences of the workers who left the area for distant places, leaving only one or two family members at home in the colonies, while the rest went to earn money in brokerages. In the 1860s (a half-century after the founding of colonies) such departure was permitted for the entire families or many family members simultaneously; in the colonies quite a few people were listed who had never lived there. After leaving the colonies, they often evaded
394V.N. Nikitin*, p. 448, 483, 529. 395Also*, p 473, 490, 501, 506-507, 530-531, 537-538, 547-548, 667. 396Also, p. 474-475, 502, 547.
registering with their trade guild in the new place, and “many stayed there for several consecutive years, with family, unregistered to any guild, and thus not subject to any kind of tax or obligation.” And in the colonies, the houses built for them stood empty, and fell into disrepair. In 1861, Jews were permitted to maintain drinking houses in the colonies.397 Finally, the situation regarding Jewish agriculture had dawned on the St. Petersburg authorities in all its stark and dismal reality. Back taxes (forgiven on numerous occasions, such as an imperial marriage) grew, and each amnesty had encouraged Jews not to pay taxes or repay loans from now on. (In 1857, when the ten years granted to collect past due taxes had expired, five additional years were added. But even in 1863 the debt was still not collected.) So what was all that resettling, privileges and loans for? On the one hand, the whole 60-year epic project had temporarily provided Jews with means “of avoiding their duties before the state” while at the same time failing to instill love for agriculture among the colonists.” “The ends were not worthy of the means.” On the other hand, “simply a permission to live outside of the Pale, even without any privileges, attracted a huge number of Jewish farmers” who stopped at nothing to get there.398 If in 1858 there were officially 64,000 Jewish colonists, that is, eight to ten thousand families, then by 1880 the Ministry had found only 14,000, that is, less than two thousand families.399 For example, in the whole Southwestern Krai in 1872 the commission responsible for verifying whether or not the land is in use or lay unattended had found fewer than 800 families of Jewish colonists.400 Russian authorities had clearly seen now that the entire affair of turning Jews into farmers had failed. They no longer believed that “their cherished hope for the prosperity of colonies could be realized.” It was particularly difficult for the Minister Kiselyov to part with this dream, but he retired in 1856. Official documents admitted failure, one after another: “resettlement of the Jews for agricultural occupation ‘has not been accompanied by favorable results’.” Meanwhile “enormous areas of rich productive black topsoil remain in the hands of the Jews unexploited.” After all, the best soil was selected and reserved for Jewish colonization. That portion, which was temporarily rented to those willing, gave a large income (Jewish colonies lived off it) as the population in the South grew and everyone asked for land. And now even the worst land from the reserve, beyond that allotted for Jewish colonization, had also quickly risen in value.401 The Novorossiysk Krai had already absorbed many active settlers and “no longer needed any state-promoted colonization.”402 So the Jewish colonization had become irrelevant for state purposes.
397V.N. Nikitin*, p. 502-505, 519, 542, 558, 632, 656, 667. 398Also*, p. 473, 510, 514, 529-533, 550, 572. 399Also, p. 447, 647. 400EE [JE], T 7, p. 756. 401V.N. Nikitin*, p. 478-479, 524, 529-533, 550-551. 402EE [JE], T 7, p. 756.
And in 1866 Alexander II had ordered and end to the enforcement of several laws aimed at turning Jews into farmers. Now the task was to equalize Jewish farmers with the rest of the farmers of the Empire. Everywhere, Jewish colonies turned out to be incapable of independent existence in the new free situation. So now it was necessary to provide legal means for Jews to abandon agriculture, even individually and not in whole families (1868), so they could become artisans and merchants. They had been permitted to redeem their parcels of land; and so they redeemed and resold their land at a profit.403 However, in the dispute over various projects in the Ministry of State Property, the question about the reform of Jewish colonies dragged out and even stopped altogether by 1880. In the meantime with a new recruit statute of 1874, Jews were stripped of their recruiting privileges, and with that any vestiges of their interest in farming were conclusively lost. By 1881 “in the colonies ‘there was a preponderance of farmsteads with only one apartment house, around which there were no signs of settlement; that is, no fence, no housing for livestock, no farm buildings, no beds for vegetables, nor even a single tree or shrub; there were very few exceptions.’”404 The state councilor Ivashintsev, an official with 40 years experience in agriculture, was sent in 1880 to investigate the situation with the colonies. He had reported that in all of Russia “no other peasant community enjoyed such generous benefits as had been given [to Jews]” and “these benefits were not a secret from other peasants, and could not help but arouse hostile feelings in them.” Peasants adjacent to the Jewish colonies “‘were indignant … because due to a shortage of land they had to rent the land from Jews for an expensive price, the land which was given cheaply to the Jews by the state in amounts in fact exceeding the actual Jewish needs.’ It was namely this circumstance which in part explained …  ‘the hostility of peasants toward Jewish farmers, which manifested itself in the destruction of several Jewish settlements’” (in 188182).405 In those years, there were commissions allotting land to peasants from the excess land of the Jewish settlements. Unused or neglected sectors were taken back by the government. “In Volynsk, Podolsk, and Kiev guberniyas, out of 39,000 desyatins [one desyatin = 2.7 acres] only 4,082 remained [under Jewish cultivation].”406 Yet several quite extensive Jewish farming settlements remained: Yakshitsa in the Minsk Guberniya, not known for its rich land, had 740 desyatins for 46 [Jewish] families;407 that is, an average of 16 desyatins per family, something you will rarely find among peasants in Central Russia; in 1848 in Annengof of Mogilyov Guberniya, also not vast in land, twenty Jewish families received 20 desyatins of state land each, but by 1872 it was discovered that there were only ten families remaining, and a large part of the land was not 403V.N. Nikitin, p. 534, 540, 555, 571, 611-616, 659. 404V.N. Nikitin, p. 635, 660-666. 405Also*, p. 658-661. 406EE [JE], T 7, p. 756. 407Also, T 16, p. 399.
cultivated and was choked with weeds.408 In Vishenki of Mogilyov Guberniya, they had 16 desyatins per family;409 and in Ordynovshchina of Grodno Guberniya 12 desyatins per [Jewish] family. In the more spacious southern guberniyas in the original settlements there remained: 17 desyatins per [Jewish] family in Bolshoi Nagartav; 16 desyatins per [Jewish] family in Seidemenukh; and 17 desyatins per family in Novo-Berislav. In the settlement of Roskoshnaya in Ekaterinoslav Guberniya they had 15 desyatins per family, but if total colony land is considered, then 42 desyatins per family.410 In Veselaya (by 1897) there were 28 desyatins per family. In Sagaidak, there were 9 desyatins, which was considered a small allotment.411 And in Kiev Province’s Elyuvka, there were 6 Jewish families with 400 desyatins among them, or 67 desyatins per family! And land was rented to the Germans.”412 Yet from a Soviet author of the 1920s we read a categorical statement that “Tsarism had almost completely forbidden the Jews to engage in agriculture.”413 On the pages which summarize his painstaking work, the researcher of Jewish agriculture V. N. Nikitin concludes: “The reproaches against the Jews for having poor diligence in farming, for leaving without official permission for the cities to engage in commercial and artisan occupations, are entirely justified ….We by no means deny the Jewish responsibility for such a small number of them actually working in agriculture after the last 80 years.” Yet he puts forward several excuses for them: “[The authorities] had no faith in Jews; the rules of the colonization were changed repeatedly”; sometimes “officials who knew nothing about agriculture or who were completely indifferent to Jews were sent to regulate their lives….  Jews who used to be independent city dwellers were transformed into villagers without any preparation for life in the country.”414 At around the same time, in 1884, N. S. Leskov, in a memorandum intended for yet another governmental commission on Jewish affairs headed by Palen, had suggested that the Jewish “lack of habituation to agricultural living had developed over generations” and that it is “so strong, that it is equal to the loss of ability in farming,” and that the Jew would not become a plowman again unless the habit is revived gradually.415 (Lev Tolstoy had allegedly pondered: who are those “confining the entire nation to the squeeze of city life, and not giving it a chance to settle on the land and begin to do the only natural man’s occupation, farming. After all, it’s the same as not to give the people air to breathe. … What’s wrong with …  Jews
408Also, T 2, p. 596. 409Also, T 5, p. 650. 410Also, T 13, p. 606. 411Also, T 5, p. 518; T 13, p. 808. 412Also, T 16, p. 251. 413Yu Larin. Evrei i antisemitizm v SSSR [The Jews and Antisemitism in the USSR], p. 36. 414V.N. Nikitin, p. xii-xiii. 415N.S. Leskov. Evrei v Rossii: Neskol’ko zamechaniy po evreyskomu voprosu [The Jews in Russia: Several Observations on the Jewish Question]. Pg., 1919 [reprint s izd. 1884], p. 61, 63.
settling in villages and starting to live a pure working life, which, probably, this ancient, intelligent, and wonderful people has already yearned for?…”416 — On what planet was he living? What did he know about the 80 years of practical experience with [Jewish] agricultural colonization?) And yet the experience of the development of Palestine where the Jewish settlers felt themselves at home had showed their excellent ability to work the land; moreover, they did it in conditions much more unfavorable than in Novorossiya. Still, all the attempts to persuade or compel the Jews toward arable farming in Russia (and afterwards in the USSR) had failed (and from that came the degrading legend that the Jews in general are incapable of farming). And thus, after 80 years of effort by the Russian government it turned out that all that agricultural colonization was a grandiose but empty affair; all the effort, all the massive expenditures, the delay of the development of Novorossiya — all were for nothing. The resulting experience shows that it shouldn’t have been undertaken at all.
Generally examining Jewish commercial and industrial entrepreneurship, I. G. Orshansky justly wrote at the start of the 1870s that the question about Jewish business activity is “the essence of the Jewish Question,” on which “fate of Jewish people in any country depends.” “[An entrepreneur] from the quick, mercantile, resourceful Jewish tribe” turns over a ruble five times “while a Russian turns it two times.” There is stagnation, drowsiness, and monopoly among the Russian merchants. (For example, after the expulsion of the Jews from Kiev, life there had become more expensive). The strong side of Jewish participation in commercial life lies in the acceleration of capital turnover, even of the most insignificant working capital. Debunking the opinion, that so-called Jewish corporate spirit gives them a crucial advantage in any competition, that “Jewish [merchants] always support each other, having their bankers, contractors, and carriers,” Orshansky attributed the Jewish corporate spirit only to social and religious matters, and not to commerce, where, he claimed, Jews fiercely compete against each other (which is in contradiction with the Hazaka prescribing separation of spheres of activity, which, according to him, “had gradually disappeared following the change in legal standing of Jews”417). He had also contested the opinion that any Jewish trade does not enrich the country, that “it exclusively consists of exploitation of the productive and working classes,” and that “the profit of the Jews is a pure loss for the nation.” He disagreed, suggesting that Jews constantly look for and find new sales markets
416L.N. Tolstoy o evreyakh / Predisl. O.Ya. Pergamenta [L.N. Tolstoy on the Jews / Foreword O.Ya. Pergamenta], Sankt-PeterburgSt. Petersburg.: Vremya [Time], 1908, p. 15. 417EE [JE], T 15, p. 492.
and thereby “open new sources of earnings for the poor Christian population as well.”418 Jewish commercial and industrial entrepreneurship in Russia had quickly recovered from the two noticeable blows of 1861, the abolition of serfdom and the abolition of wine farming. “The financial role of Jews had become particularly significant by the 1860s, when previous activities amassed capital in their hands, while liberation of peasants and the associated impoverishment of landowners created a huge demand for money on the part of landowners statewide. Jewish capitalists played a prominent role in organization of land banks.”419 The whole economic life of the country quickly changed in many directions and the invariable Jewish determination, inventiveness, and capital were keeping pace with the changes and were even ahead of them. Jewish capital flowed, for example, to the sugar industry of the Southwest (so that in 1872 one fourth of all sugar factories had a Jewish owner, as well as one third of joint-stock sugar companies),420 and to the flour-milling and other factory industries both in the Pale of Settlement and outside. After the Crimean War “an intensive construction of railroads” was underway; “all kinds of industrial and commercial enterprises, joint stock companies and banks arose” and “many Jews … found wide application for their strengths and talents in those undertakings … with a few of them getting very rich incredibly fast.”421 “Jews were involved in the grain business for a long time but their role had become particularly significant after the peasant liberation and from the beginning of large-scale railroad construction.” “Already in 1878, 60% of grain export was in the hands of Jews and afterwards it was almost completely controlled by Jews.” And “thanks to Jewish industrialists, lumber had become the second most important article of Russian export (after grain).” Woodcutting contracts and the acquisition of forest estates by Jews were not prohibited since 1835. “The lumber industry and timber trade were developed by Jews. Also, Jews had established timber export.” “The timber trade is a major aspect of Jewish commerce, and, at the same time, a major area of concentration of capital…. Intensive growth of the Jewish timber trade began in the 1860-1870s, when as a result of the abolition of serfdom, landowners unloaded a great number of estates and forests on the market.” “The 1870s were the years of the first massive surge of Jews into industries” such as manufacturing, flax, foodstuff, leather, cabinetry, and furniture industries, while “tobacco industry had long since been concentrated in the hands of Jews.”422 In the words of Jewish authors: “In the epoch of Alexander II, the wealthy Jewish bourgeoisie was … completely loyal … to the monarchy. The great
418I. Orshanskiy, p. 71-72, 95-98, 106-107, 158-160. 419EE [JE], T 13, p. 646. 420I.M. Dizhur. Evrei v ekonomicheskoy zhizni Rossii [The Jews in the Economic Life of Russia] // KRE-1, p. 168; EE [JE], T 13, p.662. 421L. Deych. Rol’ evreyev…[The Role of the Jews..], T 1, p. 14-15. 422EE [JE], T 13, p. 647, 656-658, 663-664; G.B. Sliozberg, T 3, p. 93; KEE [SJE], T 7, p. 337.
wealth of the Gintsburgs, the Polyakovs, the Brodskys, the Zaitsevs, the Balakhovskys, and the Ashkenazis was amassed exactly at that time.” As already mentioned, “the tax-farmer Evzel Gintsburg had founded his own bank in St. Petersburg.” Samuil Polyakov had built six railroad lines; the three Polyakov brothers were granted hereditary nobility titles.423 “Thanks to railroad construction, which was guaranteed and to a large extent subsidized by the government, the prominent capital of the Polyakovs, I. Bliokh, A. Varshavsky and others were created.” Needless to say, many more smaller fortunes were made as well, such as that of  A. I. Zaks, the former assistant to E. Gintsburg in tax-farming, who had moved to St. Petersburg and created the Savings and Loan Bank there; “he arranged jobs for his and his wife’s many relatives at the enterprises he was in charge of.”424 Not just the economy, the entire public life had been transformed in the course of Alexandrian reforms, opening new opportunities for mercurial Jewry. “In the government resolutions permitting certain groups of Jews with higher education to enter government service, there was no restriction in regard to movement up the job ladder. With the attainment of the Full State Advisor rank, a Jew could be elevated to the status of hereditary nobility on common grounds.”425 In 1864 the land reform began. It “affected all social classes and strata. Its statute … did not in any way restrict the eligibility of Jews to vote in country administrative elections or occupy elected country offices. In the course of twenty-six years of the statute being in effect, Jews could be seen in many places among town councilors and in the municipal executive councils.”426 Similarly, the judicial statutes of 1864 stipulated no restrictions for Jews. As a result of the judicial reform, an independent judicial authority was created, and in place of private mediators the legal bar guild was established as an independent class with a special corporate structure (and notably, even with the un-appealable right to refuse legal assistance to an applicant “on the basis of moral evaluation of his person,” including evaluation of his political views). And there were no restrictions on Jews entering this class. Gessen wrote: “Apart from the legal profession, in which Jews had come to prominence, we begin noticing them in court registries among investigative officials and in the ranks of public prosecutors; in some places we already see Jews in the magistrate and district court offices”; they also served as jurors”427 without any quota restrictions (during the first decades after the reform). (Remarkably, during civil trials the Jews were taking conventional juror’s oath without any provision made for the Jewish religion).
423M.A. Aldanov. Russkie evrei v 70-80-kh godakh: Istoricheskiy etyud [The Russian Jews in the 1870-1880s: An Historical Essay] // KRE-1, p. 45-46. 424G.B. Sliozberg, T 1, p. 141-142. 425KEE [SJE], T 7, p. 328, 331. 426EE [JE], T 7, p. 762. 427Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 168.
At the same time municipal reform was being implemented. Initially it was proposed to restrict Jewish representation among town councilors and in the municipal executive councils by fifty percent, but because of objections by the Minister of Internal Affairs, the City Statute of 1870 had reduced the maximal share to one third; further, Jews were forbidden from occupying the post of mayor.428 It was feared “that otherwise Jewish internal cohesion and selfsegregation would allow them to obtain a leading role in town institutions and give them an advantage in resolution of public issues.”429 On the other hand, Jews were equalized in electoral rights (earlier they could vote only as a faction), which led to “the increased influence of Jews in all city governing matters (though in the free city of Odessa these rules were in place from the very beginning; later, it was adopted in Kishinev too. “Generally speaking, in the south of Russia the social atmosphere was not permeated by contempt toward Jews, unlike in Poland where it was diligently cultivated.”430) Thus “perhaps … the best period in Russian history for Jews” went on. “An access to civil service was opened for Jews…. The easing of legal restrictions and the general atmosphere of ‘the Age of Great Reforms’ had affected the spirit of the Jewish people beneficially.”431 It appeared that under the influence of the Age of Great Reforms “the traditional daily life of the Jewish populace had turned toward the surrounding world” and that Jewry “had begun participating as far as possible in the struggle for rights and liberty…. There was not a single area in the economic, public and spiritual life of Russia unaffected by the creative energies of Russian Jews.”432 And remember that from the beginning of the century the doors of Russian general education were opened wide for Jews, though it took a long time for the unwilling Jews to enter. Later, a well-known lawyer and public figure, Ya. L. Teytel thus recalled the Mozyr grammar school of the 1860s: “The director of the school … often … appealed to the Jews of Mozyr, telling them about the benefits of education and about the desire of government to see more Jews in grammar schools. Unfortunately, such pleas had fallen on deaf ears.”433 So they were not enthusiastic to enroll during the first years after the reform, even when they were offered free education paid for by state and when school charters (1864) declared that schools are open to everyone regardless confession.434 “The Ministry of National Education … tried to make admission of Jews into general education institutions easier”; it exhibited “benevolence toward young Jewish
428Also, p. 168. 429Also, p. 206. 430EE [JE], T 6, p. 712, 715-716. 431Also, T 13, p. 618. 432KRE-1, Predislovie [Foreword], p. iii-iv. 433Y.L. Teytel’. Iz moey zhizni za 40 let [From My Life of 40 Years]. Paris: Y. Povolotskiy and Company, 1925, p. 15. 434I.M. Trotskiy. Evrei v russkoy shkole [The Jews in Russian School] // KRE-1, p. 354.
students.”435 (Here L. Deutsch had particularly distinguished the famous surgeon N. I. Pirogov, then a trustee of the Novorossiysk school district, suggesting that he had “strongly contributed to the alleviation of hostility among my tribesmen toward ‘goyish’ schools and sciences.”436) Soon after the ascension of Alexander II, the Minister of Education thus formulated the government plan: “It is necessary to spread, by any means, the teaching of subjects of general education, while avoiding interference with the religious education of children, allowing parents to take care of it without any restrictions or hindrances on the part of government.”437 Education in state public schools was made mandatory for children of Jewish merchants and honorary citizens.438 Yet all these measures, privileges and invitations, did not lead to a drastic increase in Jewish admissions. By 1863 the share of Jewish students in Russian schools reached 3.2%,439 that is, equal to their percentage in the population of the empire. Apart from the rejection of Russian education by the Jewry, there was a certain influence from Jewish public leaders who now saw their task differently: “With the advent of the Age of Great Reforms, ‘the friends of enlightenment’ had merged the question of mass education with the question of the legal situation of Jews,”440 that is, they began struggling for the immediate removal of all remaining restrictions. After the shock of the Crimean War, such a liberal possibility seemed quite realistic. But after 1874, following enactment of the new military statute which “granted military service privileges to educated individuals,” almost a magical change happened with Jewish education. Jews began entering public schools in mass.441 “After the military reform of 1874, even Orthodox Jewish families started sending their sons into high schools and institutions of higher learning to reduce their term of military service.”442 Among these privileges were not only draft deferral and easement of service but also, according to the recollections of Mark Aldanov, the possibility of taking the officer’s examination “and receiving officer rank.” “Sometimes they attained titles of nobility.”443 In the 1870s “an enormous increase in the number of Jewish students in public education institutions” occurred, leading to creation of numerous degreed Jewish intelligentsia.” In 1881 Jews composed around 9% of all university students; by 1887, their share increased to 13.5%, i.e., one out of every seven students. In some universities Jewish representation was much higher: in the Department of Medicine of Kharkov University Jews comprised 42% of student body; in the Department of Medicine of Odessa University — 31%, and in the
435Yu. Gessen. T 2, p. 179. 436L. Deych. Rol’ evreyev…, T 1, p. 14. 437EE [JE]*, T 13, p. 48. 438Also, p. 49. 439Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 179. 440EE [JE], T 13, p. 48. 441Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 208 442KEE [SJE], T 7, p. 333. 443M.A. Aldanov // KRE-1, p. 45.
School of Law — 41%.444 In all schools of the country, the percentage of Jews doubled to 12% from 1870 to 1880 (and compared to 1865, it had quadrupled). In the Odessa school district it reached 32% by 1886, and in some schools it was 75% and even more.445 (When D. A. Tolstoy, the Minister of Education from 1866, had begun  school reforms in 1871 by introducing the Classical education standard with emphasis on antiquity, the ethnic Russian intelligentsia boiled over, while Jews did not mind). However, for a while, these educational developments affected only “the Jewish bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. The wide masses remained faithful … to their cheders and yeshivas,” as the Russian elementary school offered nothing in the way of privileges.”446 “The Jewish masses remained in isolation as before due to specific conditions of their internal and outside life.”447 Propagation of modern universal culture was extremely slow and new things took root with great difficulty among the masses of people living in shtetls and towns of the Pale of Settlement in the atmosphere of very strict religious traditions and discipline.”448 “Concentrated within the Pale of Settlement, the Jewish masses felt no need for the Russian language in their daily lives…. As before, the masses were still confined to the familiar hold of the primitive cheder education.”449 And whoever had just learned how to read had to immediately proceed to reading the Bible in Hebrew.450 From the government’s point of view, opening up general education to Jews rendered state Jewish schools unnecessary. From 1862 Jews were permitted to take posts of senior supervisors in such schools and so “the personnel in these schools was being gradually replenished with committed Jewish pedagogues, who, acting in the spirit of the time, worked to improve mastery of Russian language and reduce teaching of specifically Jewish subjects.”451 In 1873 these specialized schools were partially abolished and partially transformed, some into primary specialized Jewish schools of general standard, with 3 or 6 years study courses, and two specialized rabbinical schools in Vilna and Zhitomir were transformed into teacher training colleges.452 The government … sought to overcome Jewish alienation through integrated education; however, the Commission for Arranging the Jewish Way of Life was receiving reports both from Jewish advocates, often high-ranked, and from the opponents of reform who insisted that “Jews must never be treated … in the same way as other 444I.M. Trotskiy. Evrei v russkoy shkole [The Jews in Russian Schools] // KRE-1, p. 355-356. 445EE [JE], T 13, p. 50. 446I.M. Trotskiy. Evrei v russkoy shkole [The Jews in Russian Schools] // KRE-1, p. 355-356. 447EE [JE], T 13, p. 618. 448G.Ya. Aronson. V bor’be za grazhdanskie i natsional’nie prava: Obshchestvennie techeniya v russkom evreystve [In the Struggle for Civil and National Rights: Social Currents in Russian Jewry] // KRE-1, p. 207. 449Yu. Gessen. T 2, p. 178, 180. 450Ya.G. Frumkin. Iz istorii russkogo evreystva: Vospominaniya, materiali, dokumenti [From the History of Russian Jewry: Memoirs, Materials, and Documents] // KRE-1, p. 51. 451Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 180. 452EE [JE], T 1, p. 823.
ethnic groups of the Empire, that they should not be permitted unrestricted residence all over the country; it might be allowed only after all possible measures were tried to turn Jews into useful productive citizens in the places where they live now and when these measures would prove their success beyond any doubt.”453 Meanwhile, through the shock of ongoing reforms, especially of the abolition of the burdensome recruiting obligation in 1856 (and through it the negation of the corresponding power of Jewish leaders over their communities), and then of the repeal of the associated special taxation in 1863, “the administrative power of the community leaders was significantly weakened in comparison to their almost unrestricted authority in the past” inherited from the Qahal (abolished in 1844), that omnipotent arbiter of the Jewish life.454 It was then, at the end of 1850s and during the 1860s, when the baptized Jew, Yakov Brafman, appeared before the government and later came out publicly in an energetic attempt at radical reformation of the Jewish way of life. He had petitioned the Tsar with a memorandum and was summoned to St. Petersburg for consultations in the Synod. He set about exposing and explaining the Qahal system (though a little bit late, since the Qahal had already been abolished). For that purpose he had translated into Russian the resolutions of the Minsk Qahal issued in the period between the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries. Initially he published the documents in parts and later (in 1869 and 1875) as a compilation, The Book of Qahal, which revealed the allencompassing absoluteness of the personal and material powerlessness of the community member. The book “had acquired exceptional weight in the eyes of the authorities and was accepted as an official guidebook; it won recognition (often by hearsay) in wide circles of Russian society”; it was referred to as the “Brafman’s triumph” and lauded as an “extraordinary success.”455 (Later the book was translated into French, German, and Polish.)456 The Book of Qahal managed to instill in a great number of individuals a fanatical hatred toward Jews as the ‘worldwide enemy of Christians’; it had succeeded in spreading misconceptions about Jewish way of life.”457 The ‘mission’ of Brafman, the collection and translation of the acts issued by the Qahal had “alarmed the Jewish community”; At their demand, a government commission which included the participation of Jewish community representatives was created to verify Brafman’s work. Some “Jewish writers were quick to come forward with evidence that Brafman distorted some of the Qahal documents and wrongly interpreted others”; one detractor had even had doubts about their authenticity.”458 (A century later in 1976, The Short Jewish Encyclopedia confirmed the authenticity of Brafman’s documents and the good 453Yu Gessen*, T 2, p. 205. 454Also, p. 170. 455Also, p. 200-201. 456KEE [JEE], T 1, p. 532. 457Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 200-201. 458EE [JE], T 4, p. 918.
quality of his translation but blamed him for false interpretation.459 The Russian Jewish Encyclopedia (1994) pointed out that “the documents published by Brafman are a valuable source for studying the history of Jews in Russia at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries.”460 (Apropos, the poet Khodasevich was the grand-nephew of Brafman). Brafman claimed “that governmental laws cannot destroy the malicious force lurking in the Jewish self-administration … According to him, Jewish self-rule is not limited to Qahals … but allegedly involves the entire Jewish people all over the world … and because of that the Christian peoples cannot get rid of Jewish exploitation until everything that enables Jewish selfsegregation is eliminated.” Further, Brafman  “view[ed] the Talmud not as a national and religious code but as a ‘civil and political code’ going ‘against the political and moral development of Christian nations’”461 and creating a ‘Talmudic republic’. He insisted that “Jews form a nation within a nation”; that they “do not consider themselves subject to national laws”;462 that one of the main goals of the Jewish community is to confuse the Christians to turn the latter into no more than fictitious owners of their property.”463 On a larger scale, he “accused the Society for the Advancement of Enlightenment among the Jews of Russia and the Alliance Israélite Universelle for their role in the ‘Jewish world conspiracy’.”464 According to Yu. Gessen’s opinion, “the only demand of The Book of Qahal … was the radical extermination of Jewish self-governance” regardless of all their civil powerlessness.465 The State Council, “having mitigated the uncompromised style of The Book of Qahal, declared that even if administrative measures would succeed in erasing the outward differences between Jews and the rest of population, “it will not in the least eliminate the attitudes of seclusion and nearly the outright hostility toward Christians which thrive in Jewish communities. This Jewish separation, harmful for the country, can be destroyed, on one hand, through the weakening of social connections between the Jews and reduction of the abusive power of Jewish elders to the extent possible, and, on the other hand, through spreading of education among Jews, which is actually more important.”466 And precisely the latter process — education — was already underway in the Jewish community. A previous Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah Movement of the 1840s, was predominantly based on German culture; they were completely ignorant of Russian culture (they were familiar with Goethe
459KEE [SJE], T 1, p. 532. 460Rossiyskaya Evreyskaya Entsiklopediya [The Russian Jewish Encyclopedia] (henceforth REE). Moscow, 1994–…T 1, p. 164. 461Yu. Gessen. T 2, p. 200-201. 462EE [JE], T 4, p. 918, 920. 463KEE [SJE], T 1, p. 532. 464REE [RJE], T 1, p. 164. 465Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 202. 466Also*, p. 202-203.
and Schiller but did not know Pushkin and Lermontov).467 “Until the mid-19th century, even educated Jews, with rare exceptions, having mastered the German language, at the same time did not know the Russian language and literature.”468 However, as those Maskilim sought self-enlightenment and not the mass education of the Jewish people, the movement died out by the 1860s.469 “In the 1860s, Russian influences burst into the Jewish society. Until then Jews were not living but rather residing in Russia,470 perceiving their problems as completely unconnected to the surrounding Russian life. Before the Crimean War the Jewish intelligentsia in Russia acknowledged German culture exclusively but after the reforms it began gravitating toward Russian culture. Mastery of the Russian language “increases … self-esteem.”471 From now on the Jewish Enlightenment developed under the strong influence of the Russian culture. “The best … Russian Jewish intellectuals abandoned their people no longer”; they did not depart into the “area of exclusively personal interests”, but cared “about making their people’s lot easier.” Well, after all, Russian literature taught that the strong should devote themselves to the weak.472 However, this new enlightenment of the Jewish masses was greatly complicated by the strong religiosity of said masses, which in the eyes of progressives was doubtlessly a regressive factor,473 whereas the emerging Jewish Enlightenment movement was quite secular for that time. Secularization of the Jewish public consciousness “was particularly difficult because of the exceptional role religion played in the Diaspora as the foundation of Jewish national consciousness over the course of the many centuries.” And so “the wide development of secular Jewish national consciousness” began, in essence, only at the end of the century.474 “It was not because of inertia but due to a completely deliberate stance as the Jew did not want risking separation from his God.”475
467S.M. Sliozberg. O russko-evreyskoy intelligentsia [On the Russo-Jewish Intelligentsia] // Evreyskiy mir: Ezhegodnik na 1939g. [Jewish World: Yearbook for 1939] (henceforth— EM-1 [JW-1]). Paris: Ob’edinenie russko-evreyskoy intelligentsia [Association of the Russo-Jewish Intelligentsia], p. 34. 468EE [JE], T 3, p. 334. 469Yudl. Mark. Literatura na idish v Rossii [Literature in Yiddish in Russia] // KRE-1, p. 521; G.Ya. Aronson. Russko-Evreyskaya pechat’ [Russo-Jewish Press] // Also, p. 548. 470B. Orlov. Ne te vi uchili alfaviti // Vremya i mi: Mezhdunarodniy zhurnal literature i obshchestvennikh problem (henceforth-VM). Tel’-Aviv, 1975, No1, p. 130. 471M. Osherovich. Russkie evrei v Soedinennikh Shtatakh Ameriki [Russian Jews in the United States of America] // KRE-1, p. 289-290. 472S.M. Sliozberg // EM-1, p. 35. 473G.Ya. Aronson*. V bor’be za…[In the Struggle for…] // KRE-1, p 210. 474S. Shvarts. Evrei v Sovetskom Soyuze c nachala Vtoroy mirovoy voyni. 1939-1965 [The Jews in the Soviet Union from the Start of the Second World War. 1939-1965]. New York: Amerikanskiy evreyskiy rabochiy komitet [American Jewish Workers Committee], 1966, p. 290. 475I.M. Bikerman. K samopoznaniyu evreya: Chem mi bili, chem mi stali, chem mi dolzhni bit’. [What We Were, What We Became, and What We Should Be]. Paris, 1939, p. 48.
So the Russian Jewish intelligentsia met the Russian culture at the moment of birth. Moreover, it happened at the time when the Russian intelligentsia was also developing expansively and at the time when Western culture gushed into Russian life (Buckle, Hegel, Heine, Hugo, Comte, and Spencer). It was pointed out that several prominent figures of the first generation of Russian Jewish intelligentsia (S. Dubnov, M. Krol, G. Sliozberg, O. Gruzenberg, and Saul Ginzburg) were born in that period, 1860-1866476 (though their equally distinguished Jewish revolutionary peers — M. Gots, G. Gershuni, F. Dan, Azef, and L. Akselrod — were also born during those years and many other Jewish revolutionaries, such as P. Akselrod and L. Deych, were born still earlier, in the 1850s). In St. Petersburg in 1863 the authorities permitted establishment of the Society for the Spreading of Enlightenment among the Jews in Russia (SSE) supported by the wealthy Evzel Gintsburg and A. M. Brodsky. Initially, during the first decade of its existence, its membership and activities were limited; the Society was preoccupied with publishing activities and not with school education; yet still its activities caused a violent reaction on the part of Jewish conservatives477 (who also protested against publication of the Pentateuch in Russian as a blasphemous encroachment on the holiness of the Torah). From the 1870s, the SSE provided financial support to Jewish schools. Their cultural work was conducted in Russian, with a concession for Hebrew, but not Yiddish, which was then universally recognized as a ‘jargon’.478 In the opinion of Osip Rabinovich, a belletrist, the “‘spoiled jargon’ used by Jews in Russia cannot ‘facilitate enlightenment, because it is not only impossible to express abstract notions in it, but one cannot even express a decent thought with it’.”479 “Instead of mastering the wonderful Russian language, we Jews in Russia stick to our spoiled, cacophonous, erratic, and poor jargon.”480 (In their day, the German Maskilim ridiculed the jargon even more sharply.) And so “a new social force arose in Russian Jewry, which did not hesitate entering the struggle against the union … of capital and synagogue”, as expressed by the liberal Yu. I. Gessen. That force, nascent and for the time being weak, was the Jewish periodical press in the Russian language.481 Its first-born was the Odessa magazine Rassvet [Dawn], published for two years from 1859 to 1861 by the above-mentioned O. Rabinovich. The magazine was positioned to serve “as a medium for dissemination of ‘useful knowledge, true religiousness, rules of communal life and morality’; it was supposed to predispose Jews to learn the Russian language and to ‘become friends with the
476K. Leytes. Pamyati M.A. Krolya [The Memoirs of M.A. Krol’] // Evreyskiy mir [Jewish World]: Anthology 2 (henceforth EM-2 [JW-2]). New York: Soyuz russkikh evreyev v N’yu Yorke [Union of Russian Jews in New York], 1944, p. 408-411. 477EE [JE], T 13, p. 59. 478I.M. Trotskiy. Samodeyatel’nost’…[Individual Initiative…] // KRE-1, p. 471-474. 479Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 172. 480EE [JE]*, T 3, p. 335. 481Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 170.
national scholarship’”482 Rassvet also reported on politics, expressing “love for the Fatherland” and the intention to promote “the government’s views”483 with the goal “of communal living with other peoples, participating in their education and sharing their successes, while at the same time preserving, developing, and perfecting our distinct national heritage.”484 The leading Rassvetpublicist, L. Levanda, defined the goal of the magazine as twofold: “to act defensively and offensively: defensively against attacks from the outside, when our human rights and confessional (religious) interests must be defended, and offensively against our internal enemy: obscurantism, everydayness, social life troubles, and our tribal vices and weaknesses.”485 This last direction, “to reveal the ill places of the inner Jewish life,” aroused a fear in Jewish circles that it “might lead to new legislative repressions.” So the existing Jewish newspapers (in Yiddish) “saw the Rassvet’s direction as extremely radical.” Yet these same moderate newspapers by their mere appearance had already shaken “‘the patriarchal structure’ of [Jewish] community life maintained by the silence of the people.”486 Needless to say, the struggle between the rabbinate and Hasidic Judaism went on unabated during that period and this new 1860s’ struggle of the leading publicists against the stagnant foundations of daily life had added to it. Gessen noted that “in the 1860s, the system of repressive measures against ideological opponents did not seem offensive even for the conscience of intelligent people.” For example, publicist A. Kovner, ‘the Jewish Pisarev’ [a radical Russian writer and social critic], could not refrain from tipping off a Jewish newspaper to the Governor General of Novorossiysk.487 (In the 1870s Pisarev “was extremely popular among Jewish intellectuals.”)488 M. Aldanov thinks that Jewish participation in Russian cultural and political life had effectively begun at the end of the 1870s (and possibly a decade earlier in the revolutionary movement).489 In the 1870s new Jewish publicists (L. Levanda, the critic S. Vengerov, the poet N. Minsky) began working with the general Russian press. (According to G. Aronson, Minsky expressed his desire to go to the Russo-Turkish War to fight for his brothers Slavs). The Minister of Education Count Ignatiev then expressed his faith in Jewish loyalty to Russia. After the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, rumors about major auspicious reforms began circulating among the Jews. In the meantime, the center of Jewish intellectual life shifted from Odessa to St. Petersburg, where new writers and attorneys gained prominence as leaders of public opinion. In that hopeful atmosphere, publication of Rassvet was
482Also, p. 171. 483G.Ya. Aronson*. Russko-Evreyskaya pechat’ [Russo-Jewish Press] // KRE-1, p. 562. 484S.M. Ginzburg* // EM-1 [JW-1], p. 36. 485Yu. Gessen*, T 2, p. 173. 486Also*, p. 174. 487Also, p. 174-175. 488EE [JE], T 3, p. 480. 489M.A. Aldanov // KRE-1, p. 44.
resumed in St. Petersburg in 1879. In the opening editorial, M. I. Kulisher wrote: “Our mission is to be an organ of expression of the necessities of Russian Jews … for promoting the awakening of the huge mass of Russian Jews from mental hibernation … it is also in the interests of Russia…. In that goal the Russian Jewish intelligentsia does not separate itself from the rest of Russian citizens.”490 Alongside the development of the Jewish press, Jewish literature could not help but advance —first in Hebrew, then in Yiddish, and then in Russian, inspired by the best of Russian literature.491 Under Alexander II, “there were quite a few Jewish authors who persuaded their co-religionists to study the Russian language and look at Russia as their homeland.”492 Naturally, in the conditions of the 1860s-1870s, the Jewish educators, still few in numbers and immersed in Russian culture, could not avoid moving toward assimilation, in the same direction “which under analogous conditions led the intelligent Jews of Western Europe to unilateral assimilation with the dominant people.”493 However, there was a difference: in Europe the general cultural level of the native peoples was consistently higher and so in Russia these Jews could not assimilate with the Russian people, still weakly touched by culture, nor with the Russian ruling class (who rejected them); they could only assimilate with the Russian intelligentsia, which was then very small in number but already completely secular, rejecting, among other things, their God. Now Jewish educators also tore away from Jewish religiosity and, “being unable to find an alternative bond with their people, they were becoming completely estranged from them and spiritually considered themselves solely as Russian citizens.”494 “A worldly rapprochement between the Russian and Jewish intelligentsias” was developing.495 It was facilitated by the general revitalization of Jewish life with several categories of Jews now allowed to live outside the Pale of Settlement. Development of railroad communications and possibilities of travel abroad — “all this contributed to a closer contact of the Jewish ghetto with the surrounding world.”496 Moreover, by the 1860s “up to one-third … of Odessa’s Jews could speak Russian.”497 The population there grew quickly, “because of massive resettlement to Odessa of both Russian and foreign Jews, the latter primarily from Germany and Galicia.”498 The blossoming of Odessa by the middle of the 19th century presaged the prosperity of all Russian Jewry toward 490G.Ya. Aronson*. Russko-evreyskaya pechat’ [Russo-Jewish Press] // KRE-1, p. 558-561. 491M. Krol’. Natsionalizm i assimilyatsiya v evreyskoy istorii [Nationalism and Assimilation in Jewish History] // EM-1 [JW-1], p. 188-189. 492James Parkes. The Jew and his Neighbor: a Study of the Causes of anti-Semitism. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1932, p. 41. 493Yu Gessen, T 2, p. 198. 494Also. 495Also, p. 177. 496EE [JE], T 13, p. 638. 497G.Ya. Aronson. Russko-Evreyskaya pechat’ [Russo-Jewish Press] // KRE-1, p. 551. 498KEE [SJE], T 6, p. 117.
the end of the 19th – to the beginning of 20th century. Free Odessa developed according to its own special laws, differing from the All-Russian statutes since the beginning of the 19th century. It used to be a free port and was even open to Turkish ships during the war with Turkey. “The main occupation of Odessa’s Jews in this period was the grain trade. Many Jews were small traders and middlemen (mainly between the landowners and the exporters), as well as agents of prominent foreign and local (mainly Greek) wheat trading companies. At the grain exchange, Jews worked as stockbrokers, appraisers, cashiers, scalers, and loaders”; “the Jews were in a dominant position in grain commerce: by 1870 most of grain export was in their hands. In 1910 … 89.2% of grain exports was under their control.”499 In comparison with other cities in the Pale of Settlement, more Jews of the independent professions lived in Odessa and they had better relations with educated Russian circles, and were favorably looked upon and protected by the high administration of the city…. N. Pirogov [a prominent Russian scientist and surgeon], the Trustee of the Odessa School District from 1856-1858, particularly patronized the Jews.”500 A contemporary observer had vividly described this Odessa’s clutter with fierce competition between Jewish and Greek merchants, where “in some years half the city, from the major bread bigwigs, to the thrift store owners, lived off the sale of grain products.” In Odessa, with her non-stop business commotion bonded by the Russian language, “it was impossible to draw a line, to separate clearly a ‘wheat’ merchant or a banker from a man of an intellectual profession.”501 Thus in general “among the educated Jews … the process of adopting all things Russian … had accelerated.”502 “European education and knowledge of the Russian language had become necessities”; “everyone hurried to learn the Russian language and Russian literature; they thought only about hastening integration and complete blending with their social surroundings”; they aspired not only for the mastery of the Russian language but for “for the complete Russification and adoption of ‘the Russian spirit’, so that “the Jew would not differ from the rest of citizens in anything but religion.” The contemporary observer M. G. Morgulis wrote: “Everybody had begun thinking of themselves as citizens of their homeland; everybody now had a new Fatherland.”503 “Members of the Jewish intelligentsia believed that ‘for the state and public good they had to get rid of their ethnic traits and … to merge with the dominant nationality.’ A contemporary Jewish progressive wrote, that ‘Jews, as a nation, do not exist’, that they ‘consider themselves Russians of the Mosaic faith…’‘Jews recognize that their salvation lies in the merging with the Russian people’.”504
499Also, p. 117-118. 500Also, p. 118. 501K. Itskovich. Odessa-khlebniy gorod [Odessa—City of Bread] // Novoe russkoe slovo [The New Russian Word], New York, 1984, 21 March, p. 6. 502EE [JE], T 3, p. 334-335. 503Also*, T 13, p. 638. 504G.Ya. Aronson. V bor’be za…[In the Struggle for…] // KRE-1, p. 207.
It is perhaps worth naming here Veniamin Portugalov, a doctor and publicist. In his youth he harbored revolutionary sentiments and because of that he even spent some time as a prisoner in the Peter and Paul Fortress. From 1871 he lived in Samara. He “played a prominent role in development of rural health service and public health science. He was one of the pioneers of therapy for alcoholism and the struggle against alcohol abuse in Russia.” He also organized public lectures. “From a young age he shared the ideas of Narodniks [a segment of the Ruslsian intelligentsia, who left the cities and went to the people (‘narod’) in the villages, preaching on the moral right to revolt against the established order] about the pernicious role of Jews in the economic life of the Russian peasantry. These ideas laid the foundation for the dogmas of the JudeoChristian movement of the 1880s” (The Spiritual Biblical Brotherhood). Portugalov deemed it necessary to free Jewish life from ritualism, and believed that “Jewry could exist and develop a culture and civilization only after being dissolved in European peoples” (he had meant the Russian [people]).505 A substantial reduction in the number of Jewish conversions to Christianity was observed during the reign of Alexander II as it became unnecessary after the abolishment of the institution of military cantonists and the widening of Jewish rights.506 And from now on the sect of Skhariya the Jew began to be professed openly too.507 Such an attitude on the part of affluent Jews, especially those living outside the Pale of Settlement and those with Russian education, toward Russia as undeniably a homeland is noteworthy. And so it had to be noticed and was. “In view of the great reforms, all responsible Russian Jews were, without exaggeration, patriots and monarchists and adored Alexander II. M. N. Muravyov, then Governor General of the Northwest Krai famous for his ruthlessness toward the Poles [who rebelled in 1863], patronized Jews in the pursuit of the sound objective of winning the loyalty of a significant portion of the Jewish population to the Russian state.”508 Though during the Polish uprising of 1863 Polish Jewry was mainly on the side of the Poles;509 “a healthy national instinct prompted” the Jews of the Vilnius, Kaunas, and Grodno Guberniyas “to side with Russia because they expected more justice and humane treatment from Russians than from the Poles, who, though historically tolerating the Jews, had always treated them as a lower race.”510 (This is how Ya. Teitel described it: “The Polish Jews were always detached from the
505KEE [SJE], T 6, p. 692-693. 506EE, T 11, p. 894. 507KEE [SJE], T 2, p. 510. 508V.S. Mandel’. Konservativnie i razrushitel’nie elemente v evreystve [Conservative and Destructive Elements in Jewry] // Rossiya i evrei: Sb. 1 [Russia and the Jews: Anthology 1 (henceforth—RiE [RandJ]) / Otechestvennoe obedinenie russkikh evreyev za granitsey [The Patriotic Union of Russian Jews Abroad]. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1978 [1st Publication— Berlin: Osnova, 1924], p. 195. 509I.M. Trotskiy. Evrei v russkoy shkole [The Jews in Russian Schools] // KRE-1, p. 356. 510V.S. Mandel’ // RiE [RandJ], p. 195.
Russian Jews”; they looked at Russian Jews from the Polish perspective. On the other hand, the Poles in private shared their opinion on the Russian Jews in Poland: “The best of these Jews are our real enemy.  Russian Jews, who had infested Warsaw, Lodz, and other major centers of Poland, brought with them Russian culture, which we do not like.”)511 In those years, the Russification of Jews on its territory was “highly desirable” for the Tsarist government.512 Russian authorities recognized “socialization with Russian youth … as a sure method of re-education of the Jewish youth to eradicate their ‘hostility toward Christians’.”513 Still, this newborn Russian patriotism among Jews had clear limits. The lawyer and publicist I. G. Orshansky specified that to accelerate the process “it was necessary to create conditions for the Jews such that they could consider themselves as free citizens of a free civilized country.”514 The above-mentioned Lev Levanda, ‘a Jewish scholar’ living under the jurisdiction of the Governor of Vilnius, then wrote: “I will become a Russian patriot only when the Jewish Question is resolved conclusively and satisfactory.” A modern Jewish author who experienced the long and bitter 20th century and then had finally emigrated to Israel, replied to him looking back across the chasm of a century: “Levanda does not notice that one cannot lay down conditions to Motherland. She must be loved unconditionally, without conditions or pre-conditions; she is loved simply because she is the Mother. This stipulation — love under conditions — was extremely consistently maintained by the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia for one hundred years, though in all other respects they were ideal Russians”515 And yet in the described period “only small and isolated groups of Jewry became integrated into ‘Russian civil society; moreover, it was happening in the larger commercial and industrial centers … leading to the appearance of an exaggerated notion about victorious advance of the Russian language deep into Jewish life,” all the while “the wide Jewish masses were untouched by the new trends … isolated not only from the Russian society but from the Jewish intelligentsia as well.”516 In the 1860s and 1870s, the Jewish people en masse were still unaffected by assimilation, and the danger of the Jewish intelligentsia breaking away from the Jewish masses was real. (In Germany, Jewish assimilation went smoother as there were no “Jewish popular masses” there — the Jews were better off socially and did not historically live in such crowded enclaves).517 However, as early as the end of the 1860s, some members of the Jewish intelligentsia began voicing opposition to such a conversion of Jewish intellectuals into simple Russian patriots. Perets Smolensky was the first to
511Ya. Teytel’. Iz moey zhizni…[From My Life…], p. 239. 512See.: EE [JE], T 3, p. 335; and others. 513Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 208. 514EE [JE], T 3, p. 335. 515B. Orlov // VM, 1975, No1, p. 132. 516Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 181. 517G.Ya. Aronson. V bor’be za…[In the Struggle for…] // KRE-1, p. 208-209.
speak of this in 1868: that assimilation with the Russian character is fraught with ‘national danger’ for the Jews; that although education should not be feared, it is necessary to hold on to the Jewish historical past; that acceptance of the surrounding national culture still requires perservation of the Jewish national character518; and that the Jews are not a religious sect, but a nation.”519 So if the Jewish intelligentsia withdraws from its people, the latter would never liberate itself from administrative oppression and spiritual stupor. (The poet I. Gordon had put it this way: “Be a man on the street and a Jew at home.”) The St. Petersburg journals Rassvet (1879-1882) and Russkiy Evrei [Russian Jew] had already followed this direction.520 They successfully promoted the study of Jewish history and contemporary life among Jewish youth. At the end of the 1870s and the beginning of the 1880s, cosmopolitan and national directions in Russian Jewry became distinct.521 “In essence, the owners of Rassvet had already abandoned the belief in the truth of assimilation…. Rassvet unconsciously went by the path … of the awakening of ethnic identity … it was clearly expressing aJewish national bias…. The illusions of Russification … were disappearing.”522 The general European situation of the latter half of the 19th century facilitated development of national identity. There was a violent Polish uprising, the war for the unification of Italy, and then of Germany, and later of the Balkan Slavs. The national idea blazed and triumphed everywhere. Obviously, these developments would continue among the Jewish intelligentsia even without the events of 1881-1882. Meanwhile, in the 1870s, the generally favorable attitudes of Russians toward Jews, which had developed during the Alexandrian reforms, began to change. Russian society was concerned with Brafman’s publications, which were taken quite seriously. All this coincided with the loud creation of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris in 1860; its goal was “to defend the interests of Jewry” all over the world; its Central Committee was headed by Adolphe Cremieux.523 “Insufficiently well-informed … about the situation of Jews in Russia,” the Alliance “took interest in Russian Jewry” and soon “began consistently working on behalf of Russian Jews.” The Alliance did not have Russian branches and did not function within Russia. Apart from charitable and educational work, the Alliance, in defending Russian Jews, several times addressed Russian government directly, though often inappropriately. (For example, in 1866 the Alliance appealed to prevent the execution of Itska Borodai who was convicted of politically motivated arson. However, he was not sentenced to death at all,
518Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 198-199. 519EE [JE], T 3, p. 336. 520Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 232-233. 521S.M. Ginzburg. Nastroeniya evreyskoy molodezhi v 80-kh godakh proshlogo stoletiya. // EM-2, p. 380. 522G.Ya. Aronson. Russko-evreyskaya pechat’ [Russo-Jewish Press] // KRE-1, p. 561-562. 523EE [JE], T 1, p. 932; KEE [SJE], T 1, p. 103.
and other Jews implicated in the affair were acquitted even without the petition. In another case, Cremieux protested against the resettlement of Jews to the Caucasus and the Amur region — although there was no such Russian government plan whatsoever. In 1869 he again protested, this time against the nonexistent persecution of Jews in St. Petersburg.524  Cremieux had also complained to the President of the United States about similarly nonexistent persecutions against the Jewish religion by the Russian government). Nevertheless, according to the report of the Russian ambassador in Paris, the newly-formed Alliance (with the Mosaic Tablets over the Earth on its emblem) had already enjoyed “extraordinary influence on Jewish societies in all countries.” All this alarmed the Russian government as well as Russian public. Yakov Brafman actively campaigned against the Universal Jewish Alliance. He claimed that the Alliance, “like all Jewish societies, is double-faced (its official documents proclaim one thing while the secret ones say another)” and that the task of the Alliance is “to shield the Jewry from the perilous influence of Christian civilization.”525 As a result, the Society for the Spreading of Enlightenment among the Jews in Russia was also accused of having a mission “to achieve and foster universal Jewish solidarity and caste-like seclusion.”526) Fears of the Alliance were also nurtured by the very emotional opening proclamation of its founders “to the Jews of all nations” and by the dissemination of false Alliance documents. Regarding Jewish unity the proclamation contained the following wording: “Jews! … If you believe that the Alliance is good for you, that while being the parts of different nations you nevertheless can have common feelings, desires, and hopes … if you think that your disparate efforts, good aspirations and individual ambitions could become a major force when united and moving in one direction and toward one goal … then please support us with your sympathy and assistance.”527 Later in France a document surfaced containing an alleged proclamation “To Jews of the Universe” by Aldolphe Cremieux himself. It was very likely a forgery. Perhaps it was one of the drafts of the opening proclamation not accepted by the Alliance founders. However it had resonated well with Brafman’s accusations of the Alliance having hidden goals: “We live in alien lands and we cannot take an interest in the variable concerns of those nations until our own moral and material interests are endangered … the Jewish teachings must fill the entire world….” Heated arguments were exchanged in this regard in Russian press. I. S. Aksakov concluded in his newspaper Rus that “the question of the document under discussion being … a falsehood is rather irrelevant in this case because of veracity of the expressed herein Jewish views and aspirations.”528 524EE [JE], T 1, p. 945-950. 525Also, p. 948-950. 526Also*, T 2, p. 742. 527Also, T 1, p. 933-936. 528EE [JE], T 1, p. 950-951; I.S. Aksakov. Soch. [Essays].: V7 T Moscow., 1886-1887. T 3, p. 843-844.
The pre-revolutionary Jewish Encyclopedia writes that from the 1870s “fewer voices were heard in defense of Jews” in the Russian press. “The notion of Jews allegedly united under the aegis of a powerful political organization administered by the Alliance Israélite Universelle was taking root in Russian society.”529 Thus the foundation of the Alliance produced in Russia (and possibly not only in Russia) a reaction counterproductive to the goals that the Alliance had specified. If the founders of the Alliance could have foreseen the sheer scale of condemnations against the idea of worldwide Jewish solidarity and even the accusations of conspiracy which had erupted after the creation of the organization, they might have refrained from following that route, especially considering that the Alliance did not alter the course of Jewish history. After 1874, when a new military charter introducing the universal military service obligation in Russia came into force, “numerous news article on draft evasion by Jews began fueling resentment against the Jews in the Russian society .”530 The Alliance Israélite Universelle was accused of intending “to care about young Jews leaving Russia to escape conscription enforced by the new law” so that “using support from abroad, the Jews would have more opportunities than other subjects to move out of the country.” (This question would arise once again precisely a century later in the 1970s.) Cremieux replied that the mission of the Alliance was “the struggle against religious persecution” and that the Alliance had decided “henceforth not to assist Jews trying to evade military obligation in Russia.” Rather it would issue “an appeal to our coreligionists in Russia in order to motivate them to comply with all the requirements of the new law.”531 Besides crossing the border, another way to evade military service was selfmutilation. General Denikin (who was quite a liberal before and even during the revolution) described hundreds of bitter cases of the self-mutilation he personally saw during several years of service at the military medical examination board in Volyn Guberniya. Such numerous and desperate selfinjuries are all the more striking considering that it was already the beginning of the 20th century.532 As previously mentioned, the influx of Jews into public schools, professional schools and institutions of higher learning had sharply increased after 1874 when a new military charter stipulating educational privileges came into force. This increase was dramatic. While calls to restrict Jewish enrollment in public education institutions were heard from the Northwestern Krai even before, in 1875, the Ministry of Public Education informed the government that
529EE [JE], T 2, p. 738. 530Also, p. 738-739. 531Also, T 1, p. 948-949. 532A.I. Denikin. Put’ russkogo ofitsera [The Path of a Russian Officer]. New York: Publishernamed-Chekov, 1953, p. 284.
it was impossible to admit all Jews trying to enter public educational institutions without constraining the Christian population.”533 It is worth mentioning here the G. Aronson’s regretful note that even D. Mendeleev of St. Petersburg University “showed anti-Semitism.”534 The Jewish Encyclopedia summarizes all of the 1870s period as “a turnaround in the attitudes of a part of Russian intelligentsia … which rejected the ideals of the previous decade especially in regard to … the Jewish Question.”535 An interesting feature of that time was that it was the press (the rightist one, of course) and not governmental circles that was highly skeptical (and in no way hostile) towards the project of full legal emancipation of the Jews. The following quotes are typical. How can “all the citizenship rights be granted to this … stubbornly fanatical tribe, allowing them to occupy the highest administrative posts? … Only education … and social progress can truly bring together Jews and Christians…. Introduce them into the universal family of civilization, and we will be the first to say words of love and reconciliation to them.” “ Civilization will generally benefit from such a rapprochement as the intelligent and energetic tribe will contribute much to it. The Jews … will realize that time is ripe to throw off the yoke of intolerance which originates in the overly strict interpretations of the Talmud.” “Until education brings the Jews to the thought that it is necessary to live not only at the expense of Russian society but also for the good of this society, no discussion could be held about granting them more rights than those they have now.” “Even if it is possible to grant the Jews all civil rights, then in any case they cannot be allowed into any official positions ‘where Christians would be subject to their authority and where they could have influence on the administration and legislation of a Christian country.’”536 The attitude of the Russian press of that time is well reflected in the words of the prominent St. Petersburg newspaper Golos: “Russian Jews have no right to complain that the Russian press is biased against their interests. Most Russian periodicals favor equal civil rights for Jews;” it is understandable “that Jews strive to expand their rights toward equality with the rest of Russian citizens”; yet … ”some dark forces drive Jewish youth into the craziness of political agitation. Why is that only a few political trials do not list Jews among defendants, and, importantly, among the most prominent defendants? … That and the common Jewish practice of evading military service are counterproductive for the cause of expanding the civil rights of Jews”; “one aspiring to achieve rights must prove beforehand his ability to fulfill the duties which come with those rights” and “avoid putting himself into an extremely unfavorable and dismal position with respect to the interests of state and society.”537 533EE [JE], T 13, p. 50-51. 534G.Ya. Aronson. Russko-evreyskaya pechet’ [Russo-Jewish Press] // KRE-1, p. 558. 535EE [JE], T 12, p. 525-526. 536EE [JE]*, T 2, p. 736, 740. 537Golos [The Voice], 1881, No46, 15 (27) February, p. 1.
Yet, the Encyclopedia notes, “despite all this propaganda, bureaucratic circles were dominated by the idea that the Jewish Question could only be resolved through emancipation. For instance, in March 1881 a majority of the members of the Commission for Arranging the Jewish Way of Life tended to think that it was necessary to equalize the Jews in rights with the rest of the population.”538 Raised during the two decades of Alexandrian reforms, the bureaucrats of that period were in many respects taken by the reforms’ triumphant advances. And so proposals quite radical and favorable to Jews were put forward on several occasions by Governors General of the regions constituting the Pale of Settlement. Let’s not overlook the new initiatives of the influential Sir Moses Montefiore, who paid another visit to Russia in 1872; and the pressure of both Benjamin Disraeli and Bismarck on Russian State Chancellor Gorchakov at the Berlin Congress of 1878. Gorchakov had to uneasily explain that Russia was not in the least against religious freedom and did grant it fully, but “religious freedom should not be confused with Jews having equal political and civil rights.”539 Yet the situation in Russia developed toward emancipation. And when in 1880 the Count Loris-Melikov was made the Minister of the Interior with exceptional powers, the hopes of Russian Jews for emancipation had become really great and well-founded. Emancipation seemed impending and inevitable. And at this very moment the members of Narodnaya Volya assassinated Alexander II, thus destroying in the bud many liberal developments in Russia, among them the hopes for full Jewish civil equality. Sliozberg noted that the Tsar was killed on the eve of Purim. After a series of attempts, the Jews were not surprised at this coincidence, but they became restless about the future.540
538EE [JE], T 2, p. 740. 539Also, T 4, p. 246, 594. 540G.B. Sliozberg, T 1, p. 99.
Chapter 5. After the Murder of Alexander II
The murder of the Tsar-Liberator, Alexander II, shocked the people’s consciousness – something the Narodovol’tsi intended, but that has been intentionally or unintentionally ignored by historians with the passing of decades. The deaths of heirs or tsars of the previous century – Aleksei Petrovich, Ivan Antonovich, Peter III, and Paul – were violent, but that was unknown to the people. The murder of March 1st, 1881, caused a panic in minds nationwide. For the common people, and particularly for the peasant masses it was as if the very foundations of their lives were shaken. Again, as the Narodovol’tsi calculated, this could not help but invite some explosion. And an explosion did occur, but an unpredictable one: Jewish pogroms in Novorossiya and Ukraine. Six weeks after the regicide, the pogroms of Jewish shops, institutions, and homes “suddenly engulfed a vast territory, with tremendous, epidemic force.”541 “Indeed, it was rather spontaneous. … Local people, who, for the most different reasons desired to get even with the Jews, posted incendiary posters and organized basic cadres of pogromists, which were quickly joined by hundreds of volunteers, who joined without any exhortation, caught up in the generally wild atmosphere and promise of easy money. In this there was something spontaneous. However, …  even the crowds, fueled by alcohol, while committing theft and violence, directed their blows in one direction only: in the direction of the Jews – the unruliness  only stopping at the thresholds of Christian homes.”542 The first pogrom occurred in Elizavetgrad, on 15 April. “Disorder intensified, when peasants from the neighboring settlements arrived, in order to profit off the goods of the Jews.” At first the military did not act, because of uncertainty; finally “significant cavalry forces succeeded in ending the pogrom.”543 “The arrival of fresh forces put an end to the pogrom.”544 “There
541Evreyskaya Entsiklopediya (dalee – EE). [The Jewish Encyclopedia (from here – JE)]. V 16 T. Sankt-Peterburg.: Obshchestvo dlya Nauchnikh Evreyskikh Izdaniy i Izdatel’stvo Brokgauz-Efron, 1906-1913. T. 12, s. 611.  Society for Scientific Jewish Publications and Publisher Brokgauz-Efron. 542Yu. Gessen. Istoriya evreyskogo naroda v Rossii (dalee – Yu. Gessen): V2 T. L., 1925-1927. T2., s. 215-216.  History of the Jewish People of Russia (from here – Yu. Gessen). 543Ibid. Pages 216-217. 544EE, T 12, page 612.
was no rape and murder in this pogrom.”545 According to other sources: “one Jew was killed. The pogrom was put down on 17 April by troops, who fired into the crowd of thugs.”546 However, “from Elizavetgrad the stirring spread to neighboring settlements; in the majority of cases, the disorders were confined to plundering of taverns.” And after a week, a pogrom occurred in the Anan’evskiy Uezd [district] of Odessa Guberniya [province], then in Anan’ev itself, “where it was caused by some petty bourgeois, who spread a rumor that the Tsar was killed by Jews, and that there was an official order for the massacre of Jews, but the authorities were hiding this.”547 On 23 April there was a brief pogrom in Kiev, but it was soon stopped with military forces. However, in Kiev on 26 April a new pogrom broke out, and by the following day it had spread to the Kiev suburbs – and this was the largest pogrom in the whole chain of them; but they ended without human fatalities.”548 (Another tome of the same Encyclopedia reports the opposite, that “several Jews were killed.”549) After Kiev, pogroms took place again in approximately fifty settlements in the Kiev Guberniya, during which “property of the Jews was subjected to plunder, and in isolated cases battery occurred.” At the end of the same April a pogrom took place in Konotop, “caused mainly by workers and railroad hands, accompanied by one human fatality; in Konotop there were instances of selfdefense from the Jewish side.” There was still an echo of the Kiev Pogrom in Zhmerinka, in “several settlements of Chernigov Guberniya;” at the start of May, in the small town of Smel, where “it was suppressed with arriving troops the next day” (“an apparel store was plundered”). With echoes in the course of May, at the start of summer pogroms still broke out in separate areas in Ekaterinoslav and Poltava guberniyas (Aleksandrovsk, Romni, Nezhin, Pereyaslavl, and Borisov). Insignificant disorders took place somewhere in Melitopol Uezd. There were cases, when peasants immediately compensated Jews for their losses.”550 “The pogrom movement in Kishinev, which began on 20 April, was nipped in the bud.”551 There were no pogroms in all of Byelorussia – not in that year, nor in the following years,552 although in Minsk a panic started among the Jews during rumors about pogroms in the Southwestern Krai – on account of a completely unexpected occurrence.553
545L. Praysman [Priceman]. Pogromi i samooborona. [Pogroms and Self-defense] //”22”: Obshchestvenno-politicheskiy i literaturniy zhurnal evreyskoy intelligentsii iz SSSR v Izraile [Public-Political and Literary Journal of the Jewish Intelligentsia from the USSR in Israel]. Tel-Aviv, 1986/87, No51, p. 174. 546Kratkaya Evreyskaya Entsiklopediya (dale – KEE) [The Short Jewish Encyclopedia (from here – SJE)]: [V10 T.] Jerusalem, 1976-2001. T 6, p. 562. 547EE [JE], T 12, p. 612. 548KEE [SJE], T 4, p.256. 549Ibid. T 6, p. 562. 550EE [JE], T 12, p 612-613. 551Ibid., p. 612. 552KEE [SJE], T 1, p. 325.
And next in Odessa. Only Odessa already knew Jewish pogroms in the 19th Century – in 1821, 1859, and 1871. “Those were sporadic events, caused mainly by unfriendliness toward Jews on the part of the local Greek population,”554 that is, on account of the commercial competition of the Jews and Greeks; in 1871 there was a three-day pogrom of hundreds of Jewish taverns, shops, and homes, but without human fatalities. I.G. Orshanskiy writes in more detail about this pogrom, and states, that Jewish property was being intentionally destroyed: heaps of watches from the jewelers – they did not steal them, but carried them out to the roadway and smashed them. He agrees that the “nerve center” of the pogrom was hostility toward the Jews on the part of the Greek merchants, particularly owing to the fact, that after the Crimean War the Odessa Jews took the grocery trade and colonial commodities from the Greeks. But there was “a general dislike toward the Jews on the part of the Christian population of Odessa. … This hostility manifested far more consciously and prominently among the intelligent and affluent class than among the common working people.” You see, however, that different peoples get along in Odessa; “why then did only Jews arouse general dislike toward themselves, which sometimes turns into severe hatred?” One high school teacher explained to his class: “The Jews are engaged in incorrect economic relations with the rest of population.” Orshanskiy objects that such an explanation removes “the heavy burden of moral responsibility.” He sees the same reason in the psychological influence of Russian legislation, which singles out the Jews, namely and only to place restrictions on them. And in the attempt of Jews to break free from restrictions, people see “impudence, insatiableness, and grabbing.”555 As a result, in 1881 the Odessa administration, already having experience with pogroms – which other local authorities did not have – immediately put down disorders which were reignited several times, and “the masses of thugs were placed in vessels and dragged away from the shore”556 – a highly resourceful method. (In contradiction to the pre-revolutionary, the modern Encyclopedia writes, that this time the pogrom in Odessa continued for three days).557 The pre-revolutionary Encyclopedia recognizes, that “the government considered it necessary to decisively put down violent attempts against the Jews”;558 so it was the new Minister of Interior Affairs, Count N.P. Ignatiev,
553S. Ginzburg. Nastroeniya evreyskoy molodezhi v 80-kh godakh proshlogo stoletiya. [The attitudes of Jewish Youth in the 80s Years of the Previous Century] // Evreyskiy mir [Jewish World]: Sb 2 [Anthology 2] (dalee – EM-2) [from here – JW-2]. New York: Soyuz russkikh evreyev v N’yu Yorke [Union of Russian Jews in New York], 1944, p. 383. 554EE [EJ], T 12, p 611. 555I. Orshanskiy. Evrei v Rossii: Ocherki i issledovaniya [The Jews in Russia: Essays and Research].  Vip. 1. Sankt-Peterburg, 1872, p 212-222. 556EE [EJ] T 12,, p.613. 557KEE [SJE], T 6, p. 562. 558EE [JE] T 1, p. 826.
(who replaced Loris-Melikov in May, 1881), who firmly suppressed the pogroms; although it was not easy to cope with rising disturbances of “epidemic strength” – in view of the complete unexpectedness of events, the extremely small number of Russian police at that time (Russia’s police force was then incomparably smaller than the police forces in the West European states, much less than those in the Soviet Union), and the rare stationing of military garrisons in those areas. “Firearms were used for defense of the Jews against pogromists.”559 There was firing in the crowd, and [people] were shot dead. For example, in Borisov “soldiers shot and killed several peasants.”560 Also, in Nezhin “troops stopped a pogrom, by opening fire at the crowd of peasant pogromists; several people were killed and wounded.”561 In Kiev 1,400 people were arrested.562 All this together indicates a highly energetic picture of enforcement. But the government acknowledged its insufficient preparedness. An official statement said that during the Kiev pogrom “the measures to restrain the crowds were not taken with sufficient timeliness and energy.”563 In a report to His Majesty in June 1881 the Director of the Police Department, V.K. Plehve, named the fact that courts martial “treated the accused extremely leniently and in general dealt with the matter quite superficially” as “one of the reasons for the development and insufficiently quick suppression of the disorders’” Alexander III made a note in the report: “This is inexcusable.”564 But forthwith and later it did not end without accusations, that the pogroms were arranged by the government itself – a completely unsubstantiated accusation, much less absurd, since in April 1881 the same liberal reformer Loris Melikov headed the government, and all his people were in power in the upper administration. After 1917, a group of researchers – S. Dubnov, G. Krasniy-Admoni, and S. Lozinskiy – thoroughly searched for the proof in all the opened government archives – and only found the opposite, beginning with the fact that, Alexander III himself demanded an energetic investigation. (But to utterly ruin Tsar Alexander III’s reputation a nameless someone invented the malicious slander: that the Tsar – unknown to anyone, when, and under what circumstances – said: “And I admit, that I myself am happy, when they beat Jews!” And this was accepted and printed in émigré liberation brochures, it went into liberal folklore, and even until now, after 100 years, it has turned up in publications as historically reliable.565 And even in the Short Jewish 559Yu. Gessen, T 12, p. 222. 560EE [JE], T 12, p. 613. 561KEE [SJE], T 6, p 562-563. 562S.M. Dubnov. Noveyshaya Istoriya: Ot frantsuzkoy revolutsii 1789 goda do mirovoy voyni 1914 goda [A New History: from the French Revolution of 1789 to the First World War of 1914]: V3 T. Berlin: Grani, 1923. T3 (1881-1914), p. 107. 563EE [JE], T  6, p. 612. 564R. Kantor*.  Aleksandr III o evreyskikh pogromakh 1881-1883 gg. [Aleksandr III on the Jewish Pogroms, 1881-1883]//Evreyskaya letopis’ [The Jewish Chronicle]: Sb. [Anthology] 1. M.; Pg.: Paduga, 1923, p. 154. 565A. L’vov // Novaya gazeta [New Gazette], New York, 1981, No70, 5-11 September, p. 26.
Encyclopedia: “The authorities acted in close contact with the arrivals,”566 that is, with outsiders. And it was ‘clear’ to Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana that it was “obvious”: all matters were in the hands of the authorities. If “they wanted one – they could bring on a pogrom; if they didn’t want one – there would be no pogrom.”)567 As a matter of fact, not only was there no incitement on the part of the government, but as Gessen points out: “the rise of numerous pogrom brigades in a short time in a vast area and the very character of their actions, eliminates the thought of the presence of a single organizational center.”568 And here is another contemporary, living testimony from a pretty much unexpected quarter – from The Black Repartition’s Worker’s Leaflet; that is, a proclamation to the people, in June 1881. The revolutionary leaflet thus described the picture: “Not only all the governors, but all other officials, police, troops, priests, zemstvo [elected district councils], and journalists – stood up for the Kulak-Jews…The government protects the person and property of the Jews”; threats are announced by the governors “that the perpetrators of the riots will be dealt with according to the full extent of the law…The police looked for people who were in the crowd [of pogromists], arrested them, dragged them to the police station…Soldiers and Cossacks used the rifle butt and the whip… they beat the people with rifles and whips…some were prosecuted and locked up in jail or sent to do hard labor, and others were thrashed with birches on the spot by the police.”569 Next year, in the spring of 1881, “pogroms renewed but already not in the same numbers and not in the same scale as in the previous year.”570 “The Jews of the city of Balta experienced a particularly heavy pogrom,” riots also occurred in the Baltskiy Uezd and still in a few others. “However, according to the number of incidents, and according to their character, the riots of 1882 were significantly inferior to the movement of 1881 – the destruction of the property of Jews was not so frequent a phenomenon.”571 The pre-revolutionary Jewish Encyclopedia reports, that at the time of the pogrom in Balta, one Jew was killed.572 A famous Jewish contemporary wrote: in the pogroms of the 1880s, “they robbed unlucky Jews, and they beat them, but they did not kill them.”573
566KEE [SJE], T 6, p. 563. 567Mezhdunarodnaya evreyskaya gazeta [International Jewish Gazette], 1992, March, No6 (70), p. 7. 568Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 215. 569Zerno: Rabochiy listok [The Truth, (Grain of)]: Worker’s Leaflet, June 1881, No3 //Istoriko-Revolyutsioniy Sbornik (dalee – IPC) [Historical-Revolutionary Anthology (from here – HRA)] / Under the Editorship of V.I. Nevskiy: V 3 T.M.; L.: GIZ, 1924-1926. T 2, p. 360-361. 570Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 217. 571EE [JE], T 12, p. 614. 572Ibid. T 3, p. 723. 573M. Krol’. Kishinevskiy pogrom 1903 goda i Kishinevskiy pogromniy protsess [The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 and the Kishinev Pogrom Process] // EM-2, p. 370.
(According to other sources, 6 – 7 deaths were recorded.) At the time of the 1880 – 1890s, no one remembered mass killings and rapes. However, more than a half-century passed – and many publicists, not having the need to delve into the ancient [official] Russian facts, but then having an extensive and credulous audience, now began to write about massive and premeditated atrocities. For example, we read in Max Raisin’s frequently published book: that the pogroms of 1881 led to the “rape of women, murder, and maiming of thousands of men, women, and children. It was later revealed, that these riots were inspired and thought out by the very government, which had incited the pogromists and hindered the Jews in their self-defense.”574 A G.B. Sliozberg, so rationally familiar with the workings of the Russian state apparatus – suddenly declared out-of-country in 1933, that the pogroms of 1881 originated not from below, but from above, with Minister Ignatiev (who at that time was still not Minister – the old man’s memory failed him), and “there was no…doubt, that threads of the work of the pogrom could be found in the Department of Police”575 – thus the experienced jurist afforded himself dangerous and ugly groundlessness. And yes, here in a serious present-day Jewish journal – from a modern Jewish author we find that, contrary to all the facts and without bringing in new documents: that in Odessa in 1881 a “three-day pogrom” took place; and that in the Balta pogrom there was “direct participation of soldiers and police”; “40 Jews were killed and seriously wounded, 170 lightly wounded.”576 (We just read in the old Jewish Encyclopedia: in Balta one Jew was killed, and wounded – several. But in the new Jewish Encyclopedia, after a century from the events, we read: in Balta “soldiers joined the pogromists…Several Jews were killed, hundreds wounded, many women were raped.”577) Pogroms are too savage and horrible a form of reprisal, for one to so lightly manipulate casualty figures. There – spattered, basted – is it necessary to begin excavations again? The causes of those first pogroms were persistently examined and discussed by contemporaries. As early as 1872, after the Odessa pogrom, the General-Governor of the Southwestern Krai warned in a report, that similar events could happen in his Krai also, for “here the hatred and hostility toward Jews has an historical basis, and only the material dependence of the peasants upon Jews together with the measures of the administration currently holds back an indignant explosion of the Russian population against the Jewish tribe.” The General-Governor reduced the essence of the matter to economics, as he “reckoned and evaluated the business and manufacturing property in Jewish hands in the Southwestern Krai, and pointed to the fact, that, being increasingly engaged in the rent of landed estates, the Jews have re-rented and shifted this 574Max Raisin. A History of the Jews in Modern Times. 2nd ed., New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1923, p. 163. 575G.B. Sliozberg.  Dela minuvshikh dney: Zapiski russkogo evreya [Things of Days Bygone: Notes of a Russian Jew]: V 3 T. Paris, 1933-1934. T 1, p. 118; T 3, p.53. 576L. Praysman // “22,” 1986, No51, p. 175. 577KEE [SJE] T 6, p. 562-563.
land to the peasants on very difficult terms.” And such a causation “received wide recognition in 1881 which was full of pogroms.”578 In the spring of 1881, Loris-Melikov also reported to His Majesty: “The deep hatred of the local population toward the Jews who enslave it lies at the foundation of the present disorders, but ill-intentioned people have undoubtedly exploited this opportunity.”579 And thus explained the newspapers of the time: “Examining the causes which provoked the pogroms, only a few organs of the periodical press refer to the tribal and religious hatred; the rest think that the pogrom movement arose on economic grounds; in so doing, some see a protest in the unruly behaviors directed specially against the Jews, in light of their economic dominance over the Russian population”. Yet others maintained that the mass of the people, in general squeezed economically, “looked for someone to vent their anger out on” and the Jews fit this purpose because of their having little rights.580 A contemporary of these pogroms, the cited educator, V. Portugalov, also said “In the Jewish pogroms of the 1880s, I saw an expression of protest by the peasants and the urban poor against social injustice.”581 Ten years later, Yu. I. Gessen emphasized, that “the Jewish population of the southern Guberniyas” in general was able to “find sources of livelihood among the Jewish capitalists, while the local peasantry went through extremely difficult times” as it did not have enough land, “to which the wealthy Jews contributed in part, by re-renting the landowner’s lands and raising the rental fee beyond the ability of the peasants.”582 Let us not leave out still another witness, known for his impartiality and thoughtfulness, whom no one accused of being “reactionary” or of “antiSemitism” – Gleb Uspenskiy. At the beginning of the 1980s, he wrote: “The Jews were beaten up, namely because they amassed a fortune on other people’s needs, other people’s work, and did not make bread with their own hands”; “under canes and lashes…you see, the people endured the rule of the Tatar and the German but when the Yid began to harass the people for a ruble – they did not take it!”583 But we should note that when soon after the pogroms a deputation of prominent Jews from the capital, headed by Baron G. Gintsburg, came to Alexander III at the beginning of May 1881, His Majesty confidently estimated that “in the criminal disorders in the south of Russia, the Jews served only as a pretext, that this business was the hand of the anarchists.”584 And in those same
578Yu. Gessen. T 2, p. 216, 220. 579R. Kantor* // Evreyskaya letopis’ [The Jewish Chonicle]: Sb. [Anthology] 1, M.; Pg.: Raduga, 1923, p. 152. 580Yu. Gessen. T 2, p 218. 581KEE [SJE], T 6, p. 692. 582Yu. Gessen, T 2, p 219-220. 583Gleb Uspenskiy. Vlast’ zemli [The Authority of the Land]. L.: Khudozh. Lit., 1967, p. 67, 88. 584EE* [JE], T 1, p. 826.
days, the brother of the Tsar, the Grand Prince Vladimir Alexandrovich, announced to the same Gintsburg, that: “the disorders, as is now known by the government, have their sources not exclusively agitation against the Jews, but an aspiration to the work of sedition in general.” And the General-Governor of the Southwestern Krai also reported, that “the general excited condition of the population is the responsibility of propagandists.”585 And in this the authorities turned out to be well-informed. Such quick statements from them reveal that the authorities did not waste time in the investigation. But because of the usual misunderstanding of the Russian administration of that time, and its incomprehension of the role of publicity, they did not report the results of the investigation to the public. Sliozberg blames that on the central authority in that it did not even make “attempts to vindicate itself of accusations of permitting the pogroms.”586 (True, but after all, it accused the government, as we saw, of deliberate instigation and guidance of the pogroms. It is absurd to start with proof that you are not a criminal.) Yet not everyone wanted to believe that the incitements came from the revolutionaries. Here a Jewish memoirist from Minsk recalls: for Jews, Alexander II was not a “Liberator” – he did not do away with the Jewish Pale of Settlement, and although the Jews sincerely mourned his death, they did not say a single bad word against the revolutionaries; they spoke with respect about them, that they were driven by heroism and purity of thought. And during the spring and summer pogroms of 1881, they did not in any way believe that the socialists incited toward them: it was all because of the new Tsar and his government. “The government wished for the pogroms, it had to have a scapegoat.” And now, when reliable witnesses from the South later indeed confirmed that the socialists engineered them, they continued to believe that it was the fault of the government.587 However, toward the start of the 20th Century, thorough authors admitted: “In the press there is information about the participation of separate members of the party, Narodnaya Vol’ya [People’s Will] in the pogroms; but the extent of this participation is still not clear. … Judging by the party organ, members of the party considered the pogroms as a sort of revolutionary activity, suggesting that the pogroms were training the people for revolutionary action”;588 “that the action which was easiest of all to direct against the Jews now, could, in its further development, come down on the nobles and officials. Accordingly, proclamations calling for an attack on the Jews were prepared.”589 Today, it is only superficially talked about, like something generally known: “the active propaganda of the Narodniks (both members of Narodnaya Vol’ya and the Black
585Ibid*, T 12, p. 614 586G.B. Sliozberg. Dela minuvshikh dney… [Things of Days Bygone], T 1, p. 106. 587A. Lesin. Epizodi iz moey zhizni [Episodes from My Life] // EM-2, p. 385-387. 588EE [JE], T 12, p. 617-618. 589Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 218.
Repartition was prepared to stir rebellion to any fertile soil, including antiSemitism.”590 From emigration, Tkachev, irrepressible predecessor of Lenin in conspiratorial tactics, welcomed the broadening pogrom movement. Indeed, the Narodovol’tsi (and the weaker Chernoperedel’tsi [members of Black Repartition) could not wait much longer after the murder of the Tsar which did not cause instantaneous mass revolution which had been predicted and expected by them. With such a state of general bewilderment of minds after the murder of the Tsar-Liberator, only a slight push was needed for the reeling minds to re-incline into any direction. In that generally unenlightened time, that re-inclination could probably have happened in different ways. (For example, there was then such a popular conception, that the Tsar was killed by nobles, in revenge for the liberation of the peasants.) In Ukraine, anti-Jewish motives existed. Still, it is possible the first movements of spring 1881 anticipated the plot of the Narodovol’tsi – but right then and there they suggested which way the wind would blow: it went against the Jews – never lose touch with the people! A movement from the heart of the masses – Of course! Why not use it? Beat the Jews, and later we will get to the landowners! And now the unsuccessful pogroms in Odessa and Ekaterinoslav were most likely exaggerated by the Narodniks. And the movement of the pogromists along the railroads, and participation of the railroad workers in the pogroms  –  everything points to the instigation of pogroms by easily mobile agitators, especially with that particularly inciting rumor that “they are hiding the order of the Tsar,” namely to beat the Jews for the murder of his father. (The public prosecutor of the Odessa Judicial Bureau thus emphasized, “that, in perpetrating the Jewish pogroms, the people were completely convinced of the legality of their actions, firmly believing in the existence of a Tsar’s decree, allowing and even authorizing the destruction of Jewish property.”591 And according to Gessen, “the realization that had taken root in the people, that the Jews stood outside of the law, and that the authorities defending the Jews could not come out against the people”592 – had now taken effect. The Narodovol’tsi wanted to use this imaginary notion.) A few such revolutionary leaflets are preserved for history. Such a leaflet from 30 August 1881 is signed by the Executive Committee of the Narodnaya Vol’ya and reads straight away in Ukrainian: “Who seized the land, forests, and taverns? – The Yid – From whom, muzhik [peasant], do you have to ask for access to your land, at times hiding tears?…From Yids. – Wherever you look, wherever you ask – the Yids are everywhere. The Yid insults people and cheats them; drinks their blood”…and it concludes with the appeal: “Honest working people! Free yourselves!…”593 And later, in the newspaper, Narodnaya Vol’ya, 590L. Praisman // “22,” 1986, No51, p. 173. 591EE [JE]*, T 1, p. 826. 592Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 215. 593Katorga i ssilka: Istoriko-revolyutsioniy vestnik [Hard Labor and Exile: The HistoricalRevolutionary Bulletin] Book 48, Moscow, 1928, p. 50-52.
No. 6: “All attention of the defending people is now concentrated, hastily and passionately, on the merchants, tavern keepers, and moneylenders; in a word, on the Jews, on this local “bourgeoisie,” who avariciously rob working people like nowhere else.” And after, in a forward to a leaflet of the Narodnaya Vol’ya (already in 1883), some “corrections”: “the pogroms began as a nationwide movement, ‘but not against the Jews as Jews, but against Yids; that is, exploiter peoples.’”594 And in the said leaflet, Zerno, the Chernoperedel’tsi: “The working people cannot withstand the Jewish robbery anymore. Wherever one goes, almost everywhere he runs into the Jew-Kulak. The Jew owns the taverns and pubs; the Jew rents land from the landowners, and then re-rents it at three times higher to the peasant; he buys the wholesale yields of crop and engages in usury, and in the process charges such interest rates, that the people outright call them “Yiddish [rates]”…”This is our blood!” said the peasants to the police officials, who came to seize the Jewish property back from them.” But the same “correction” is in Zerno: “…and far from all among the Jews are wealthy…not all of them are kulaks…Discard with the hostility toward differing peoples and differing faiths” – and unite with them “against the common enemy”: the Tsar, the police, the landowners, and the capitalists.595 However these “corrections” already came late. Such leaflets were later reproduced in Elizavetgrad and other cities of the South; and in the “South Russian Worker’s Soviet” in Kiev, where the pogroms were already over, the Narodniks tried to stir them up again in 1883, hoping to renew, and through them – to spread the Russian-wide revolution. Of course, the pogrom wave in the South was extensively covered in the contemporary press in the capital. In the “reactionary” Moskovskiye Vedomosti, M.N. Katkov, who always defended the Jews, branded the pogroms as originating with “malicious intriguers,” “who intentionally darkened the popular consciousness, forcing people to solve the Jewish Question, albeit not by a path of thorough study, but with the help of “raised fists.”596 The articles by prominent writers stand out. I.S. Aksakov, a steadfast opponent of complete civil liberty for the Jews, attempted to warn the government “against too daring steps” on this path, as early as the end of the 1850s. When a law came out allowing Jews with higher degrees to be employed in the administration, he objected (1862) saying that the Jews are “a bunch of people, who completely reject Christian teachings, the Christian ideal and code of morality (and, therefore, the entire foundation of Russian society), and practice a hostile and antagonistic faith.” He was against political emancipation of the Jews, though he did not reject their equalization in purely civil rights, in order that the Jewish people could be provided complete freedom in daily life, self-management, development, enlightenment, commerce, and even allowing them to reside in all of Russia.” In 1867 he wrote, that economically speaking
594D. Shub. Evrei v russkoy revolyutsii [Jews in the Russian Revolution] // EM-2, p. 129-130. 595IPC [IRS], T 2, p. 360-361. 596EE [JE], T 9, p. 381.
“we should talk not about emancipation for Jews, but rather about the emancipation of Russians from Jews.” He noted the blank indifference of the liberal press to the conditions of peasant’s life and their needs. And now Aksakov explained the wave of pogroms in 1881 as a manifestation of the popular anger against “Jewish yoke over the Russian local people”; that’s why during the pogroms, there was “an absence of theft,” only the destruction of property and “a kind of simple-hearted conviction in the justness of their actions”; and he repeated, that it was worth putting the question “not about Jews enjoying equal rights with Christians, but about the equal rights of Christians with Jews, about abolishing factual inequality of the Russian population in the face of the Jews.”597 On the other hand, an article by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin was full of indignation: “The history has never drawn on its pages a question more difficult, more devoid of humanity, and more tortuous, than the Jewish Question…There is not a more inhumane and mad legend than that coming out from the dark ravines of the distant past…carrying the mark of disgrace, alienation, and hatred…Whatever the Jew undertakes, he always remains stigmatized.”598 Shchedrin did not deny, “that a significant contingent of moneylenders and exploiters of various kinds are enlisted from the Jews,” but he asked, can we really place blame on the whole Jewish tribe, on account of one type?599 Examining the whole discussion of that time, a present-day Jewish author writes: “the liberal, and conditionally speaking, progressive press was defending the thugs.”600 And the pre-revolutionary Jewish Encyclopedia comes to a similar conclusion: “Yet in the progressive circles, sympathies toward the woes of the Jewish people were not displayed sufficiently …they looked at this catastrophe from the viewpoint of the aggressor, presenting him as destitute peasant, and completely ignoring the moral sufferings and material situation of the mobbed Jewish people.” And even the radical Patriotic Notes evaluated it thus: the people rose up against the Jews because “they took upon themselves the role of pioneers of Capitalism, because they live according to the new truth and confidently draw their own comfortable prosperity from that new source at the expense of the surrounding community,” and therefore, “it was necessary that ‘the people are protected from the Jew, and the Jew from the people’, and for this the condition of the peasant needs to be improved.”601 In A Letter from a Christian on the Jewish Question, published in the Jewish magazine Rassvet, D. Mordovtsev, a writer sympathetic to the Jews,
597I.S. Aksakov. Sochineniya [Essays]: V 7 T. Moscow, 1886-1887. T 3, p. 690, 693, 708, 716, 717, 719, 722. 598M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin. Iyul’skoe veyanie [The July’s Spirit] // Otechestvennie zapiski [Homeland Notes], 1882, No 8. 599EE [JE], T 16, p. 142. 600Sh. Markish. O evreyskoy nenavisti k Rossii [About Jewish Hatred toward Russia] // “22,” 1984, No38, p. 216. 601EE [JE], T 2, p. 741.
pessimistically urged the Jews “to emigrate to Palestine and America, seeing only in this a solution to the Jewish Question in Russia.”602 Jewish social-political journalism and the memoirs of this period expressed grievance because the printed publications against the Jews, both from the right and from the revolutionary left, followed immediately after the pogroms. Soon (and all the more energetically because of the pogroms) the government would strengthen restrictive measures against the Jews. It is necessary to take note of and understand this insult. It is necessary to thoroughly examine the position of the government. The general solutions to the problem were being sought in discussions in government and administrative spheres. In a report to His Majesty, N.P. Ignatiev, the new Minister of Internal Affairs, outlined the scope of the problem for the entire previous reign: “Recognizing the harm to the Christian population from the Jewish economic activity, their tribal exclusivity and religious fanaticism, in the last 20 years the government has tried to blend the Jews with the rest of the population using a whole row of initiatives, and has almost made the Jews equal in rights with the native inhabitants.” However, the present antiJewish movement “incontrovertibly proves, that despite all the efforts of the government, the relations between the Jews and the native population of these regions remain abnormal as in the past,” because of the economic issues: after the easing of civil restrictions, the Jews have not only seized commerce and trade, but they have acquired significant landed property. “Moreover, because of their cohesion and solidarity, they have, with few exceptions, directed all their efforts not toward the increase of the productive strength of the state, but primarily toward the exploitation of the poorest classes of the surrounding population.” And now, after we have crushed the disorders and defended the Jews from violence, “it seems ‘just and urgent to adopt no less energetic measures for the elimination of these abnormal conditions…between the native inhabitants and the Jews, and to protect the population from that harmful activity of the Jews.’”603 And in accordance with that, in November 1881, the governmental commissions, comprised of “representatives of all social strata and groups (including Jewish), were established in 15 guberniyas of the Jewish Pale of Settlement, and also in Kharkov Guberniya.604 The commissions ought to examine the Jewish Question and propose their ideas on its resolution.”605 It was expected that the commissions will provide answers on many factual questions, such as: “In general, which aspects of Jewish economic activity are most harmful for the way of life of the native population in the region?” Which difficulties hinder the enforcement of laws regulating the purchase and rental of land, trade in spirits, and usury by Jews? Which changes are necessary to
602KEE [SJE], T 5, p. 463. 603Yu. Gessen*, T 2, p. 220-221. 604EE [JE], T 1, p. 827. 605Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 221.
eliminate evasion of these laws by Jews? “Which legislative and administrative measures in general are necessary to negate the harmful influence of the Jews” in various kinds of economic activity?606 The liberal “Palenskaya” interministerial “High Commission” established two years later for the revision of laws on the Jews, noted that “the harm from the Jews, their bad qualities, and traits” were  somewhat recognized a priori in the program that was given to the provincial commissions.607 Yet many administrators in those commissions were pretty much liberal as they were brought up in the stormy epoch of Tsar Alexander II’s reforms, and moreover, public delegates participated also. And Ignatiev’s ministry received rather inconsistent answers. Several commissions were in favor of abolishing the Jewish Pale of Settlement. “Individual members [of the commissions] – and they were not few” – declared that the only just solution to the Jewish Question was the general repeal of all restrictions.608 On the other hand, the Vilnius Commission stated that “because of mistakenly understood notion of universal human equality wrongly applied to Judaism to the detriment of the native people, the Jews managed to “seize economic supremacy”; that the Jewish law permits [them] “to profit from any weakness and gullibility of gentile.” “Let the Jews renounce their seclusion and isolation, let them reveal the secrets of their social organization allowing light where only darkness appeared to outsiders; and only then can one think about opening new spheres of activity to the Jews, without fear that Jews wish to use the benefits of the nation, [while] not being members of the nation, and not taking upon themselves a share of the national burden.”609 “Regarding residence in the villages and hamlets, the commissions found it necessary to restrict the rights of the Jews”: to forbid them to live there altogether or to make it conditional upon the agreement of the village communities. Some commissions recommended completely depriving the Jews of the right to possess real estate outside of the cities and small towns, and others proposed establishing restrictions. The commissions showed the most unanimity in prohibiting any Jewish monopoly on alcohol sales in villages. The Ministry gathered the opinions of the governors, and “with rare exceptions, comments from the regional authorities were not favorable to the Jews”: to protect the Christian population “from so haughty a tribe as the Jews”; “one can never expect the Jewish tribe to dedicate its talents…to the benefit of the homeland”; “Talmudic morals do not place any obstacles before the Jews if it is a question of making money at the expense of someone outside of the tribe.” Yet the Kharkov General-Governor did not consider it possible to take restrictive measures against the whole Jewish population, “without
606EE [JE], T 1, p. 827. 607Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 221. 608EE [JE], T 1, p. 827-828. 609Ibid*. T 2, p. 742-743.
distinguishing the lawful from the guilty”; he proposed to “expand the right of movement for Jews and spread enlightenment among them.”610 That same autumn, by Ignatiev’s initiative, a special “Committee on the Jews” was established (the ninth by count already, with three permanent members, two of them professors), with the task of analyzing the materials of the provincial commissions and in order to draft a legislative bill.611 (The previous “Commission for the Organization of the Life of the Jews” – that is, the eighth committee on Jews, which existed since 1872 – was soon abolished, “due to mismatch between its purpose and the present state of the Jewish Question.”) The new Committee proceeded with the conviction that the goal of integrating the Jews with the rest of the population, toward which the government had striven for the last 25 years, had turned out to be unattainable.612 Therefore, “the difficulty of resolving the complicated Jewish Question compels [us] to turn for the instruction to the old times, when various novelties did not yet penetrate neither ours, nor foreign legislations, and did not bring with them the regrettable consequences, which usually appear upon adoption of new things that are contrary to the national spirit of the country.” From time immemorial the Jews were considered aliens, and should be considered as such.613 Gessen comments: “the reactionary could not go further”. And if you were so concerned about the national foundations then why you didn’t worry about genuine emancipation of the peasantry during the past 20 years? And it was also true that Tsar Alexander II’s emancipation of the peasants proceeded in a confused, unwholesome and corrupt environment. However: “in government circles there were still people, who did not consider it possible, in general, to change the policy of the preceding reign”614 – and they were in important posts and strong. And some ministers opposed Ignatiev’s proposals. Seeing resistance, he divided the proposed measures into fundamental (for which passing in the regular way required moving through the government and the State Council) and provisional, which could by law be adopted through an accelerated and simplified process. “To convince the rural population that the government protects them from the exploitation by Jews, the permanent residence of Jews outside of their towns and shtetls (and the “government was powerless to protect them from pogroms in the scattered villages”), and buying and renting real estate there, and also trading in spirits was prohibited. And regarding the Jews already living there: it granted to the rural communities the right “to evict the Jews from the villages, based upon a verdict of the village meeting.” But other ministers – particularly the Minister of Finance, N. Kh. Bunge, and the Minister of Justice, D.N. Nabokov, did not let Ignatiev implement these measures: they rejected the bill, claiming that it was 610Ibid*, T 1, p. 827-828. 611Ibid, T 9, p. 690-691. 612EE [JE], T 2, p. 744. 613Yu. Gessen*, T 2, p. 222. 614EE [JE] T 2, p. 744.
impossible to adopt such extensive prohibitive measures, “without debating them within the usual legislative process.”615 So much for the boundless and malicious arbitrariness of the Russian autocracy. Ignatiev’s fundamental measures did not pass, and the provisional ones passed only in a greatly truncated form. Rejected were the provisions to evict the Jews already living in the villages, to forbid their trade in alcohol or their renting and buying land in villages. And only because of the fear that the pogroms might happen again around Easter of 1882, a temporary measure (until passing of comprehensive legislation about the Jews) was passed which prohibited the Jews again, henceforth to take residence and enter into ownership, or make use of real estate property outside of their towns and shtetls (that is, in the villages), and also forbade them “to trade on Sundays and Christian holidays.”616 Concerning the Jewish ownership of local real estate, the government acted “to suspend temporarily the completion of sales and purchase agreements and loans in the name of the Jews…the notarization…of real estate rental agreements … and the proxy management and disposal of property by them”.617 This mere relic of Ignatiev’s proposed measures was approved on 3 May 1882, under title of Temporary Regulations (known as the May Regulations). And Ignatiev himself went into retirement after a month and his “Committee on the Jews” ceased its brief existence, and a new Minister of Internal Affairs, Count D.A. Tolstoy, issued a stern directive against possible new pogroms, placing full responsibility on the provincial authorities for the timely prevention of disorders.618 Thus, according to the Temporary Regulations of 1882, the Jews who had settled in rural regions before the 3rd of May, were not evicted; their economic activity there was essentially unrestricted. Moreover, these regulations only applied to the “guberniyas of permanent Jewish settlement,” not to the guberniyas of the Russian interior. And these restrictions did not extend to doctors, attorneys, and engineers – i.e., individuals with “the right of universal residence according to educational requirement.” These restrictions also did not affect any “existing Jewish colonies engaged in agriculture”; and there was still a considerable (and later growing) list of rural settlements, according to which, “in exception” to the Temporary Regulations, Jews were permitted to settle.619 After issuance of the “Regulations,” inquiries began flowing from the regions and Senate explanations were issued in response. For example: that “journeys through rural regions, temporary stops and even temporary stays of individuals without the right of permanent residence are not prohibited by the Law of 3 May 1882”; that “only the rent of real estates and agrarian lands is prohibited, while rent of all other types of real estate property, such as 615Ibid. T 1, p. 829-830. 616Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 226-227; KEE [SJE], T 7, p. 341. 617EE [JE], T 5, p. 815-817. 618Ibid. T 12, p. 616. 619EE* [JE], T 5, p 815-817.
distillation plants, … buildings for trade and industry, and living quarters is not prohibited.” Also, “the Senate deems permissible the notarization of lumbering agreements with the Jews, even if the clearing of a forest was scheduled for a prolonged period, and even if the buyer of the forest was allowed use of the underbrush land”; and finally, that violations of the Law of 3rd May would not be subjected to criminal prosecution.620 It is necessary to recognize these Senate clarifications as mitigating, and in many respects, good-natured; “in the 1880s the Senate wrestled with … the arbitrary interpretation of the laws.”621 However, the regulations forbidding the Jews to settle “outside the towns and shtetls” and/or to own “real estate”… “extremely restricted alcohol distillation business by Jews,” as “Jewish participation in distillation before the 3rd May Regulations was very significant.”622 It was exactly this measure to restrict the Jews in the rural wine trade (first proposed as early as 1804) that stirred universal indignation at the “extraordinary severity” “of the May Regulations,” even though it was only implemented, and incompletely at that, in 1882. The government stood before a difficult choice: to expand the wine industry in the face of peasant proneness [to drunkeness] and thus to deepen the peasant poverty, or to restrict the free growth of this trade by letting the Jews already living in the villages to remain while stopping others from coming. And that choice – restriction – was deemed cruel. Yet how many Jews lived in rural regions in 1882? We have already come across post-revolutionary estimates from the state archives: one third of the entire Jewish population of “the Pale” lived in villages, another third lived in shtetls, 29% lived in mid-size cities, and 5% in the major cities.623 So the Regulations now prevented the “village” third from further growth? Today these May Regulations are portrayed as a decisive and irrevocably repressive boundary of Russian history. A Jewish author writes: this was the first push toward emigration! – first “internal” migration, then massive overseas migration.624 – The first cause of Jewish emigration was the “Ignatiev Temporary Regulations, which violently threw around one million Jews out of the hamlets and villages, and into the towns and shtetls of the Jewish Pale.”625
620Ibid. p. 816-819. 621KEE [SJE], T 7, p. 342. 622EE [JE], T 5, p. 610-611. 623Yu. Larin. Evrei i antisemitizm v SSSR [Jews and Anti-Semitism in the USSR]. M.; L.: GIZ, 1929, p. 49-50. 624I.M. Dizhur. Evrei v ekonomicheskoy zhizni Rossii [Jews in the Economic Life of Russia] // [Sankt-Peterburg.] Kniga o russkom evreystve: Ot 1860-kh godov do Revolyutsii 1917 g. [The Book of Russian Jewry: from the 1860s to the Revolution of 1917]. (dalee – KRE-1) [henceforth – KRE-1]. New York: Soyuz Russkikh Evreyev [Union of Russian Jews], 1960, p. 160. 625I.M. Dizhur. Itogi i perspektivi evreyskoy emigratsii [Outcomes and Perspectives of Jewish Emigration] // EM-2, p. 34.
Wait a second, how did they throw the Jews out and an entire million at that? Didn’t they apparently only prevent new arrivals? No, no! It was already picked up and sent rolling: that from 1882 the Jews were not only forbidden to live in the villages everywhere, but in all the cities, too, except in the 13 guberniyas; that they were moved back to the shtetls of “the Pale” – that is why the mass emigration of Jews from Russia began!626 Well, set the record straight. The first time the idea about Jewish emigration from Russia to America voiced was as early as in 1869 at the Conference of the Alliance (of the World Jewish Union) – with the thought that the first who settled there with the help of the Alliance and local Jews “would become a magnet for their Russian co-religionists.”627 Moreover, “the beginning of the emigration [of Jews from Russia] dates back to the mid-19th Century and gains significant momentum… after the pogroms of 1881. But only since the mid1890s does emigration become a major phenomenon of Jewish economic life, assuming a massive scale”628 –  note that it says economic life, not political life. From a global viewpoint Jewish immigration into the United States in the 19th Century was part of an enormous century-long and worldwide historical process. There were three successive waves of Jewish emigration to America: first the Spanish-Portuguese (Sephardic) wave, then the German wave (from Germany and Austria-Hungary), and only then from Eastern Europe and Russia (Ashkenazik).629 For reasons not addressed here, a major historical movement of Jewish emigration to the U.S. took place in the 19th Century, and not  only from Russia. In light of the very lengthy Jewish history, it is difficult to overestimate the significance of this emigration. And from the Russian Empire “a river of Jewish emigration went from all the guberniyas that made up the Jewish Pale of Settlement; but Poland, Lithuania, and Byelorussia gave the greatest number of emigrants”;630 meaning they did not come from Ukraine, which was just experiencing the pogroms. The reason for this was this emigration was the same throughout  –  overcrowding, which created inter-Jewish economic competition. Moreover, relying on Russian state statistics, V. Tel’nikov turns our attention to the last two decades of the 19th Century; just after the pogroms of 1881 – 1882, comparing the resettlement of Jews from the Western Krai, where there were no pogroms, to the Southwest, where they were. The latter was numerically not less and was possibly more than the Jewish departure out of Russia.631 In addition, in 1880, 626Yu. Larin. The Jews and Anti-Semitism in the USSR, p. 52-53. 627EE [JE] T 1, p. 947. 628Ibid. T 16, p. 264. 629M. Osherovich. Russkie evrei v Soedinenikh Shtatakh Ameriki [Russian Jews in the United Statees of America] // KRE-1, p. 287. 630Ya. D. Leshchinskiy. Evreyskoe naselenie Rossii i evreyskii trud. The Jewish Population of Russia and Jewish Trouble] // KRE-1, p. 190. 631Sbornik materialov ob ekonomicheskom polozheniya evreyev v Rossii [An Anthology of Materials about the Economic Condition of the Jews in Russia]. Sankt-Peterburg.: Evreyskoe Kolonizatsionnoe Obshchestvo [Jewish Colonization Society], 1904. T 1. p. xxxiii-xxxv, xiv-xivi.
according to official data, 34,000 Jews lived in the internal guberniyas, while seventeen years later (according to the census of 1897) there were already 315,000 – a nine-fold increase.632 Of course, the pogroms of 1881 – 1882 caused a shock but was it really a shock for the whole of Ukraine? For example, Sliozberg writes: “The 1881 pogroms did not alarm the Jews in Poltava, and soon they forgot about them.” In the 1880s in Poltava “the Jewish youth did not know about the existence of the Jewish Question, and in general, did not feel isolated from the Russian youth.”633 The pogroms of 1881 – 82, in their complete suddenness, could have seemed unrepeatable, and the unchanging Jewish economic pull was prevailing: go settle hither, where less Jews live. But undoubtedly and inarguably, a decisive turn of progressive and educated Jewry away from the hopes of a complete integration with the nation of “Russia” and the Russian population began in 1881. G. Aronson even concluded hastily, that “the 1871 Odessa Pogrom” “shattered the illusions of assimilation.”634 No, it wasn’t that way yet! But if, for example, we follow the biographies of prominent and educated Russian Jews, then around 1881 – 1882 we will note in many of them a drastic change in their attitudes toward Russia and about possibilities of complete assimilation. By then it was already clear and not contested that the pogrom wave was indubitably spontaneous without any evidence for the complicity of the authorities. On the contrary, the involvement of the revolutionary narodniks was proven. However, the Jews did not forgive the Russian Government for these pogroms  –  and never have since. And although the pogroms originated mainly with the Ukrainian population, the Russians have not been forgiven and the pogroms have always been tied with the name of Russia. “The pogroms of the 1880s … sobered many [of the advocates] of assimilation” (but not all: the idea of assimilation still remained alive). And here, other Jewish publicists moved to the other extreme: in general it was impossible for Jews to live among other peoples, [for] they will always be looked upon as alien. And the “Palestinian Movement… began…’to grow quickly.’”635 It was under the influence of the 1881 pogroms that the Odessa doctor, Lev Pinsker, published his brochure, Auto-Emancipation. The Appeal of a Russian Jew to his Fellow Tribesmen (in Berlin in 1882, and anonymously). “It made a huge impression on Russian and West European Jewry.” It was an appeal about
632Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 210; EE [JE], T 11, p. 534-539. 633G.B. Sliozberg. Dela minuvshikh dney…T 1, p. 98, 105. 634G.Ya. Aronson. V bor’be za grazhdanskie i natsional’nie prava: Obshchestvennie techeniya v russkom evreystve [In the Struggle for the Civil and National Rights: Social Currents in Russian Jewry] // KRE-1, p. 208. 635Gershon Svet. Russkie evrei v sionizme i v stroitel’stve Palestini i Izrailya [Russian Jews in Zionism and in the Building of Palestine and Israel] // KRE-1, p. 241-242.
the ineradicable foreignness of Jews in eyes of surrounding peoples.636 We will discuss this further in Chapter 7. P. Aksel’rod claims that it was then that radical Jewish youths discovered that Russian society would not accept them as their own and thus they began to depart from the revolutionary movement. However, this assertion appears to be too far-fetched. In the revolutionary circles, except the Narodnaya Vol’ya, they did always thnik of the Jews as their own. However, despite the cooling of attitudes of the Jewish intelligentsia toward assimilation, the government, as a result of inertia from Alexander II’s reign, for a while maintained a sympathetic attitude toward the Jewish problem and did not yet fully replace it by a harshly-restrictive approach. After the yearlong ministerial activities of Count Ignatiev, who experienced such persistent opposition on the Jewish Question from liberal forces in the upper governmental spheres, an Imperial “High Commission for Revision of the Active Laws about the Jews in the Empire” was established in the beginning of 1883 – or as it was named for its chairman, Count Palen – “The Palenskaya Commission” (so that by then, it became the tenth such ‘Jewish Committee’). It consisted of fifteen to twenty individuals from the upper administration, members of ministerial councils, department directors (some were members of great families, such as Bestuzhev-Ryumin, Golytsin, and Speranskiy), and it also included seven “Jewish experts” – influential financiers, including Baron Goratsiy Gintsburg and Samuil Polyakov, and prominent public figures, such as Ya. Gal’pern, physiologist and publicist N. Bakst (“it is highly likely that the favorable attitude of the majority of the members of the Commission toward resolution of the Jewish Question was caused, to certain degree, by the influence” of Bakst), and Rabbi A. Drabkin.637 In large part, it was these Jewish experts who prepared the materials for the Commission’s consideration. The majority of the Palenskaya Commission expressed the conviction, that “the final goal of legislation concerning the Jews [should be] nothing other than its abolition,” that “there is only one outcome and only one path: the path of liberation and unification of the Jews with the whole population, under the protection of the same laws.”638 (Indeed, rarely in Russian legislation did such complicated and contradictory laws pile up as the laws about Jews that accumulated over the decades: 626 statutes by 1885! And they were still added later and in the Senate they constantly researched and interpreted their wording…). And even if the Jews did not perform their duties as citizens in equal measure with others, nevertheless it was impossible to “deprive the Jew of those fundamentals, on which his existence was based – his equal rights as a subject.” Agreeing “that several aspects of internal Jewish life require reforming and that certain Jewish activities constituted exploitation of the surrounding population,” the majority of the Commission condemned the system of
636EE [JE], T 12, p. 526. 637Ibid. T 5, p. 862, T 3, p. 700. 638Ibid*, T 1, p. 832-833.
“repressive and exclusionary measures.” The Commission set as the legislative goal “to equalize the rights of Jews, with those of all other subjects,” although it recommended “the utmost caution and gradualness” with this.639 Practically, however, the Commission only succeeded in carrying out a partial mitigation of the restrictive laws. Its greatest efforts were directed of the Temporary Regulations of 1882, particularly in regard to the renting of land by Jews. The Commission made the argument as if in the defense of the landowners, not the Jews: prohibiting Jews to rent manorial lands not only impedes the development of agriculture, but also leads to a situation when certain types of agriculture remain in complete idleness in the Western Krai – to the loss of the landowners as there is nobody to whom they could lease them. However, the Minister of Interior Affairs, D.A. Tolstoy, agreed with the minority of the Commission: the prohibition against new land-leasing transactions would not be repealed.640 The Palenskaya Commission lasted for five years, until 1888, and in its work the liberal majority always clashed with the conservative minority. From the beginning, “Count Tolstoy certainly had no intention to revise the laws to increase the repressive measures,” and the 5-year existence of the Palenskaya Commission confirms this. At that moment “His Majesty [also] did not wish to influence the decisions of his government on the matter of the increase of repressions against Jews.” Ascending to the throne at such a dramatic moment, Alexander III did not hasten either  to replace liberal officials, nor to choose a harsh political course: for long time he carefully examined things. “In the course of the entire reign of Alexander III, the question about a general revision of the legislation about the Jews remained open.”641 But by 1886-87, His Majesty’s view already leaned toward hardening of the partial restrictions on the Jews and so the work of the Commission did not produce any visible result. One of the first motivations for stricter control or more constraint on the Jews than during his father’s reign was the constant shortfall of Jewish conscripts for military service; it was particularly noticeable when compared to conscription of Christians. According to the Charter of 1874, which abolished recruiting, compulsory military service was now laid on all citizens, without any difference in social standing, but with the stipulation that those unfit for service would be replaced: Christians with Christians, and Jews with Jews. In the case of Jews there were difficulties in implementation of that rule as there were both straightforward emigration of conscripts and their evasion which all benefited from great confusion and negligence in the official records on Jewish population, in the keeping of vital statistics, in the reliability of information about the family situation and exact place of residence of conscripts. (The tradition of all these uncertainties stretched back to the times of the Qahals (a theocratic organizational structure that originated in ancient Israelite society),
639Yu. Gessen*, T2, p. 227-228. 640EE [JE], T 3, p. 85. 641Ibid. T 1, p. 832-834.
and was consciously maintained for easing the tax burden.) “In 1883 and 1884, there were many occasions when Jewish recruits, contrary to the law, were arrested simply upon suspicion that they might disappear.”642 (This method was first applied to Christian recruits, but sporadically). In some places they began to demand photographs from the Jewish recruits  –  a very unusual requirement for that time. And in 1886 a “highly constraining” law was issued, “about several measures for providing for regular fulfillment of military conscription by Jews,” which established a “300-ruble fine from the relatives of each Jew who evaded military call-up.”643 “From 1887 they stopped allowing Jews to apply for the examination for officer rank [educated soldiers had privileges in choosing military specialty in the course of service].”644 (During the reign of Alexander II, the Jews could serve in the officers’ ranks.) But officer positions in military medicine always remained open to Jews. Yet if we consider that in the same period up to 20 million other “aliens” of the Empire were completely freed from compulsory military service, then wouldn’t it be better to free the Jews of it altogether, thus offsetting their other constraints with such a privilege? … Or was it the legacy of the idea of Nicholas I continuing here – to graft the Jews into Russian society through military service? To occupy the idle?” At the same time, Jews on the whole flocked into institutions of learning. From 1876 to 1883, the number of Jews in gymnasiums and gymnasium preparatory schools almost doubled, and from 1878 to 1886 – for an 8-year period – the number of Jewish students in the universities increased six times and reached 14.5%.645 By the end of the reign of Alexander II they were receiving alarming complaints from the regional authorities about this. Thus, in 1878 the Governor of the Minsk Guberniya reported, “that being wealthier, the Jews can bring up their children better than the Russians; that the material condition of the Jewish pupils is better than that of Christians, and therefore in order that the Jewish element does not overwhelm the remaining population, it is necessary to introduce a quota system for the admission of Jews into secondary schools.”646 Next, after disturbances in several southern gymnasiums in 1880, the Trustee of the Odessa School District publicly came out with a similar idea. And in 1883 and 1885 two successive Novorossiysk (Odessa) General-Governors stated that an “over-filling of learning institutions with Jews” was taking place there, and it is either necessary “to limit the number of Jews in the gymnasiums and gymnasium preparatory schools” to 15% “of the general number of pupils,” or “to a fairer norm, equal to the proportion of the Jewish population to the whole.”647 (By 1881, Jews made up 75% of the general
642Ibid, T 3, p. 167. 643Ibid. T 1, p. 836. 644Ibid. T 3, p. 167. 645Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 230. 646Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 229. 647EE [JE], T 13, p. 51; T 1, p. 834-835.
number of pupils in several gymnasiums of the Odessa District.648) In 1886, a report was made by the Governor of Kharkov Guberniya, “complaining about the influx of Jews to the common schools.”649 In all these instances, the ministers did not deem it possible to adopt general restrictive solutions, and only directed the reports for consideration to the Palenskaya Commission, where they did not receive support. From the 1870s students become primary participants in the revolutionary excitement. After the assassination of Alexander II, the general intention to put down the revolutionary movement could not avoid student “revolutionary nests” (and the senior classes of the gymnasiums were already supplying them). Within the government there arose the alarming connection that together with the increase of Jews among the students, the participation of students in the revolutionary movement noticeably increased. Among the higher institutions of learning, the Medical-Surgical Academy (later the Military-Medical Academy) was particularly revolutionized. Jews were very eager to enter it and the names of Jewish students of this academy began already appearing in the court trials of the 1870s. And so the first special restrictive measure of 1882 restricted Jewish admissions to the Military-Medical Academy to an upper limit of 5%. In 1883, a similar order followed with respect to the Mining Institute; and in 1884 a similar quota was established at the Institute of Communications.650 In 1885, the admission of Jews to the Kharkov Technological Institute was limited to 10%, and in 1886 their admission to the Kharkov Veterinary Institute was completely discontinued, since “the city of Kharkov was always a center of political agitation, and the residence of Jews there in more or less significant numbers is generally undesirable and even dangerous.”651 Thus, they thought to weaken the crescendo of revolutionary waves.
648Yu. Gessen, T 2, p. 231. 649EE [JE], T 1, p. 835. 650Ibid. p. 834. 651Ibid*, T 13, p. 51.
Chapter 6. In the Russian Revolutionary Movement
In the Russia of the 60 70s of the nineteenth century, when reforms moved ‒ rapidly, there were no economic or social motives for a far‐reaching revolutionary movement. Yet it was indeed under Alexander II, from the beginning of his reforming work, that this movement was born, as the prematurely‐ripened fruit of ideology: in 1861 there were student demonstrations in Saint Petersburg; in 1862, violent fires of criminal origin in Saint Petersburg as well, and the sanguinary proclamation of Young Russia652 (Molodaia Rossiia); in 1866, Karakozov’s653 gunshot, the prodromes of the terrorist era, half a century in advance. And it was also under Alexander II, when the restrictions on the rights of the Jews were so relaxed, that Jewish names appeared among the revolutionaries. Neither in the circles of Stankyevich654, Herzen655 and Ogariov656 nor in that of Petrachevsky, there had been only one Jew. (We do not speak here of Poland.) But at the student demonstrations of 1861 Mikhoels, Outine657 and Guen will participate. And we shall find Outine in the circle of Nechayev658.
652Molodaia Rossiia: Revolutionary proclamation of the Russian Jacobins dated May 1862, written by P. G. Zaychnevsky. 653Dmitri Vladimirovich Karakozov (1840 1866) fired a shot at Alexander II on 4/16 April ‒ 1866: the first in a long series of attacks. Condemned to death and executed. 654Nikolai Vladimirovich Stankevich (1813 1840): philosopher and poet, humanist. Founded ‒ in 1831 the “Stankevich circle” where great intellectuals such as Bielinsky, Aksakov, Granovsky, Katkov, etc. meet. Emigrated in 1837. 655Alexander Ivanovich Herzen (1812 1870): writer, philosopher and “Occidentalist” Russian ‒ revolutionary. Spent six years in exile. Emigrated in 1847 and founded the first anti‐war newspaper published abroad, Kolokol (The Bell). Author of Memoirs on his time, Past and Thoughts. 656Nikolai Platonovich Ogariov (1813 1877): poet, Russian revolutionary publicist. Friend ‒ and companion in arms of Herzen. Emigrated in 1856. Participated in the foundation of Land and Liberty. 657Nikolai Isaakovich Outine (1841 1883): revolutionary, leading member of Earth and ‒ Freedom. Condemned to death in absentia. Emigrated in 1863, returned to Russia in 1878. 658Sergei Gennadyevich Nechayev (1847 1882): revolutionary and Russian conspirator, ‒ author of the famous Catechism of the Revolutionary. Organised in 1869 the murder of the student Ivanov, supposedly a traitor to the Cause (which inspired Dostoevsky’s The Demons). Leaves abroad. Delivered by Switzerland to Russia, sentenced to twenty years of imprisonment. Dies in prison.
The participation of the Jews in the Russian revolutionary movement must get our attention; indeed, radical revolutionary action became a more and more widespread form of activity among Jewish youth. The Jewish revolutionary movement is a qualitatively important component of the Russian revolutionary movement in general. As for the ratio of Jewish and Russian revolutionaries over the years, it surprises us. Of course, if in the following pages we speak mainly of Jews, this in no way implies that there was not a large number of influential revolutionaries among the Russians: our focus is warranted by the subject of our study. In fact, until the early 70s, only a very small number of Jews had joined the revolutionary movement, and in secondary roles at that. (In part, no doubt, because there were still very few Jews among the students.) One learns, for example, that Leon Deutsch at the age of ten was outraged about Karakozov’s gunshot because he felt “patriotic”. Similarly, few Jews adhered to the Russian nihilism of the 60s that, nevertheless, by their rationalism, they assimilated easily. “Nihilism has played an even more beneficial role in Jewish student youth than in Christian youth.”659 However, as early as the early 70s, the circle of young Jews of the rabbinical school in Vilnius began to play an important role. (Among them, V. Yokhelson, whom we mention later, and the well‐known terrorist A. Zundelevich—both brilliant pupils, destined to be excellent rabbis, A. Liebermann, future editor of La Pravda of Vienna, and Anna Einstein, Maxim Romm, Finkelstein.) This circle was influential because it was in close contact with the “smugglers”660 and permitted clandestine literature, as well as illegal immigrants themselves, to cross the border.661 It was in 1868, after high school, that Mark Natanson entered the Academy of Medicine and Surgery (which would become the Academy of Military Medicine). He will be an organiser and a leading figure in the revolutionary movement. Soon, with the young student Olga Schleisner, his future wife (whom Tikhomirov calls “the second Sophia Perovskaya”, although at the time she was rather the first **), he laid the foundations of a system of so‐called “pedagogical” circles, that is to say of propaganda (“preparatory, cultural and revolutionary work with intellectual youth”662) in several large cities. (These circles were wrongly dubbed “Tchaikovskyists”, named after one of their less influential members, N.V. Tchaikovsky.) Natanson distinguished himself very quickly and resolutely from the circle of Nechayev (and he did not hesitate,
659L. Deutsch, King evreiev v rousskom revolioutsionnom dvijenii (The role of the Jews in the Russian revolutionary movement), vol. 1, 2nd ed., M.L., GIZ, 1925, pp. 20 22. ‒ 660People who succeed in passing, illegally through the borders, revolutionary writings banned in Russia. 661D. Schub, Evro vrousskoï revolyutsii (The Jews in the Russian Revolution). JW‐2; Hessen, t. 2, p. 213. 662O. V. Aptekman, Dvc doroguiie teni (Two Dear Shadows); Byloie: newspaper Posviaschionnyi istorii osvoboditclnogo dvijeniia (Past: a review of the history of the liberation movement), M. 1921, No. 16, p. 9.
subsequently, to present his views to the examining magistrate). In 1872 he went to Zurich with Pierre Lavrov, the principal representative of the “current of pacific propaganda”663, which rejected the rebellion; Natanson wanted to establish a permanent revolutionary organ there. In the same year he was sent to Shenkursk in close exile and, through the intercession of his father‐in‐law, the father of Olga Schleiser, he was transferred to Voronezh, then Finland, and finally released to Saint Petersburg. He found there nothing but discouragement, dilapidation, inertia. He endeavoured to visit the disunited groups, to connect them, to weld them, and thus founded the first Land and Freedom organisation and spending hundreds of thousands of Rubles. Among the principal organisers of Russian populism, Natanson is the most eminent revolutionary. It was in his wake that the famous Leon Deutsch appeared; As for the ironclad populist Alexander Mikhailov, he was a disciple of “Mark the Wise”. Natanson knew many revolutionaries personally. Neither an orator nor a writer, he was a born organiser, endowed with an astonishing quality: he did not regard opinions and ideology, he did not enter into any theoretical discussions with anyone, he was in accord with all tendencies (with the exception of the extremist positions of Tkachev, Lenin’s predecessor), placed each and everyone where they could be useful. In those years when Bakunin supporters and Lavrov supporters were irreconcilable, Natanson proposed to put an end to “discussions about the music of the future” and to focus instead on the real needs of the cause. It was he who, in the summer of 1876, organised the sensational escape of Piotr Kropotkin * on the “Barbarian”, that half‐blood who would often be spoken of. In December of the same year, he conceived and set up the first public meeting in front of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, at the end of the Mass, on the day of Saint Nicholas: all the revolutionaries gathered there and for the first time, the red flag of Land and Liberty was displayed. Natanson was arrested in 1877, sentenced to three years’ detention, then relegated to Yakutia and dismissed from revolutionary action until 1890.664 There were a number of Jews in the circle of “Tchaikovskyists” in Saint Petersburg as well as in its branches in Moscow, Kiev, Odessa. (In Kiev, notably, P.B. Axelrod, whom we have already mentioned, the future Danish publisher and diplomat Grigori Gurevitch, future teachers Semion Lourie and Leiser Lœwenthal, his brother Nahman Lœwenthal, and the two Kaminer sisters.) As for the first Nihilist circle of Leon Deutsch in Kiev, it was “constituted exclusively of young Jewish students”665. After the demonstration in front of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, three Jews were tried, but not Natanson himself. At the trial of the “fifty”666 which took place in the summer of 1877 in Moscow, several Jews were charged for spreading propaganda 663Piotr Lavrovich Lavrov (1823 1900): famous theorist of populism. Emigrated in 1870. ‒ Published the magazine Vperiod (Forward). 664L. Deutsch, pp. 97, 108, 164, 169 174, 196. ‒ 665Ibidem, pp. 20, 130, 139. 666Held in March 1877, also said trial of “Muscovites”, of which sixteen women.
among factory workers. At the trial of the “one hundred and ninety‐three667”, there were thirteen Jews accused. Among the early populists, we can also cite Lossif Aptekman and Alexander Khotinsky, who were highly influential.668 Natanson’s idea was that revolutionaries should involve the people (peasants) and be for them like lay spiritual guides. This “march to the people”, which has become so famous since then, began in 1873 in the “dolgushinian” circle (Dolgushin, Dmokhovsky, Gamov, etc.) where no Jews were counted. Later, the Jews also “went to the people.” (The opposite also happened: in Odessa, P. Axelrod tried to attract Jeliabov669 in a secret revolutionary organisation, but he refused: at the time, he was still a Kulturtrasser.) In the mid‐70s, there were only about twenty of these “populists”, all or almost all Lavrov and not Bakunin. (Only the most extreme were listening to calls for the insurrection of Bakunin, such as Deutsch, who, with the help of Stefanovitch, had raised the “Tchiguirine revolt670” by having pushed the peasants into thinking that the tsar, surrounded by the enemy, had the people saying: turn back all these authorities, seize the land, and establish a regime of freedom!) It is interesting to note that almost no Jewish revolutionary launched into the revolution because of poverty, but most of them came from wealthy families. (In the three volumes of the Russian Jewish Encyclopædia there is no shortage of examples.) Only Paul Axelrod came from a very poor family, and, as we have already said, he had been sent by the Kahal to an institution solely to supplement the established quota. (From there, very naturally, he entered the gymnasium of Mogilev, then the high school of Nejine.) Came from wealthy merchant environments: Natanson, Deutsch, Aptekman (whose family had many Talmudists, doctors of the law—including all his uncles. Khotinsky, Gurevitch, Semion Lourie (whose family, even in this milieu, was considered “aristocratic”, “little Simon was also destined to be a rabbi”, but under the influence of the Enlightenment, his father, Gerts Lourie, had entrusted his son to college to become a professor); the first Italian Marxist, Anne Rosenstein (surrounded from childhood by governesses speaking several languages), the tragic figures of Moses Rabinovitch and Betty Kaminskaya, Felicie Cheftel, Joseph Guetsov, member of the Black Repartition, among many others. And then again Khrystyna (Khasia) Grinberg, “of a wealthy traditionalist merchant family”, who in 1880 joined the Will of the People: her dwelling housed clandestine meetings, she was an accomplice in the attacks on Alexander II, and even became in 1882 the owner of a clandestine dynamite factory—then was
667Held from October 1877 to February 1878: the most important political trial of Russia before 1917 (there were four thousand arrests among the populists of the “march to the people”). 668Ibidem, pp. 33, 86 88, 185. ‒ 669Andrei Ivanovich Jeliabov (1851 1881): one of the founders of The Will of the People. ‒ Named the “Russian Robespierre”. Organiser of the attacks against Alexander II. Executed in April 1881. 670In 1876 77. A group of revolutionary populists tried to raise a peasant insurrection in the ‒ district of Tchiguirine in Ukraine.
condemned to deportation.671 Neither did Fanny Moreinis come from a poor family; she also “participated in the preparations of attacks against the Emperor Alexander II”, and spent two years in the prison of Kara.672 Some came from families of rabbis, such as the future doctor of philosophy Lioubov Axelrod or Ida Axelrod. There were also families of the petty bourgeoisie, but wealthy enough to put their children through college, such as Aizik Aronchik (after college, he entered the School of Engineers of Saint Petersburg, which he soon abandoned to embark in revolutionary activities), Alexander Bibergal, Vladimir Bogoraz, Lazarus Goldenberg, the Lœwenthal brothers. Often, mention is made in the biographies of the aforementioned, of the Academy of Military Medicine, notably in those of Natanson, Bibergal, Isaac Pavlovsky (future counterrevolutionary673), M. Rabinovitch, A. Khotinsky, Solomon Chudnovsky, Solomon Aronson (who happened to be involved in these circles), among others.674 Therefore it was not material need that drove them, but the strength of their convictions. It is not without interest to note that in these Jewish families the adhesion of young people to the revolution has rarely—or not at all—provoked a break between “fathers and sons”, between parents and their children. “The ‘fathers’ did not go after the ‘sons’ very much, as was then the case in Christian families. (Although Gesya Gelfman had to leave her family, a traditional Old Alliance family, in secret.) The “fathers” were often very far from opposing their children. Thus Guerz Lourie, as well as Isaac Kaminer, a doctor from Kiev: the whole family participated in the revolutionary movement of the 70s, and himself, as a “sympathiser…, rendered great service” to the revolutionaries; three of them became the husbands of his daughters. (In the 1990s, he joined the Zionist movement and became the friend of Achad‐Haam.675 676) Neither can we attribute anti‐Russian motivations to these early Jewish revolutionaries, as some do in Russia today. In no way! It all began with the same “nihilism” of the 60s. “Having initiated itself to Russian education and to ‘goy’ culture”, having been imbued with Russian literature, “Jewish youth was quick to join the most progressive movement of the time”, nihilism, and with an ease all the greater as it broke with the prescriptions of the past. Even “the most fanatical of the students of a yeshiva, immersed in the study of the Talmud,” after “two or three minutes of
671RJE, t. 1, M. 1994, p. 377. 672RJE, t. 2, p. 309. 673Isaac Yakovlevich Pavlovsky, known as I. Yakovlev: journalist, one of the accused of the trial of the one hundred and ninety‐three. Emigre, protected by Turgenev, became the correspondent in Paris of the New Times. 674Deutsch, pp. 77 79, 85, 89 112, 140, 21X: V. I. Iohelsohn, Daliokoie prochloie (A distant ‒ ‒ Past); Byloie, 1918, No. 13, pp. 54 55. ‒ 675Deutsch, pp. 18, 149, 151, 154. 676Ahad‐Haam (ie “One of his people”), says Asher Finzberg: Yiddish writer very involved in the Zionist movement.
conversation with a nihilist”, broke with the “patriarchal mode of thought”. “He [the Jew, even pious] had only barely grazed the surface of ‘goy’ culture, he had only carried out a breach in his vision of the traditional world, but already he was able to go far, very far, to the extremes.” These young men were suddenly gripped by the great universal ideals, dreaming of seeing all men become brothers and all enjoying the same prosperity. The task was sublime: to liberate mankind from misery and slavery!677 And there played the role of Russian literature. Pavel Axelrod, in high school, had as his teachers Turgenev, Bielinsky, Dobrolyubov (and later Lassalle678 who would make him turn to the revolution). Aptekman was fond of Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Pissarev (and also Bukle). Lazare Goldenberg, too, had read and re‐read Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky, Pissarev, Nekrasov— and Rudin679, who died on the barricades, was his hero. Solomon Tchudnovsky, a great admirer of Pissarev, wept when he died. The nihilism of Semion Lourie was born of Russian literature, he had fed on it. This was the case for a very large number—the list would be too long. But today, a century later, there are few who remember the atmosphere of those years. No serious political action was taking place in the “street of the Jews”, as it was then called, while, in the “Street of the Russians”, populism was rising. It was quite simple: it was enough to “sink, and merge into the movement of Russian liberation”680! Now this fusion was more easily facilitated, accelerated by Russian literature and the writings of radical publicists. By turning to the Russian world, these young people turned away from the Jewish world. “Many of them conceived hostility and disdain to the Judaism of their fathers, just like towards a parasitic anomaly.”681 In the 70s “there were small groups of radical Jewish youths who, in the name of the ideals of populism, moved more and more away from their people…, began to assimilate vigorously and to appropriate the Russian national spirit.”682 Until the mid‐70s, the socialist Jews did not consider it necessary to do political work with their fellow men, because, they thought, the Jews have never possessed land and thus cannot assimilate socialist ideas. The Jews never had peasants of their own. “None of the Jewish revolutionaries of the 70s could conceive of the idea of acting for one’s own nation alone.” It was clear that one only acted in the 677Ibidem, pp. 17 18. ‒ 678Ferdinand Lassalle (1825 1864): philosopher, economist, jurist and famous German ‒ socialist. 679Rudin, the hero of Turgenev’s novel, Rudin (1856), whom the author put to death on the barricades in Paris in 1848. 680K. Leites, Pamiati M. A. Krolia (The memory of M. A. Krol), JW‐2, p. 410. 681B. Frumkin. Iz istorii revolioutsionnogo dvijeniia sredi evreiev v 1870‐x godakh (Pages of the history of the revolutionary movement among the Jews in the 70s) Sb. Soblazn Sotsializma: Revolutionsiia v Rossii i evrei (Rec. The Temptation of Socialism Revolution in Russia and the Jews), composed by A. Serebrennikov, Paris, YMCA Press; Rousskii Put (The Russian Way), 1995. p. 49. 682JE, L 3, p. 336.
dominant language and only for the Russian peasants. “For us… there were no Jewish workers. We looked at them with the eyes of russifiers: the Jew must assimilate completely with the native population”; even artisans were regarded as potential exploiters, since they had apprentices and employees. In fact, Russian workers and craftsmen were not accorded any importance as an autonomous class: they existed only as future socialists who would facilitate work in the peasant world.683 Assimilation once accepted, these young people, by their situation, naturally tended towards radicalism, having lost on this new soil the solid conservative roots of their former environment. “We were preparing to go to the people and, of course, to the Russian people. We deny the Jewish religion, like any other religion; we considered our jargon an artificial language, and Hebrew a dead language… We were sincere assimilators and we saw in the Russian education and culture salvation for the Jews… Why then did we seek to act among the Russian people, not the Jewish people? It comes from the fact that we had become strangers to the spiritual culture of the Jews of Russia and that we rejected their thinkers who belonged to a traditionalist bourgeoisie… from the ranks of which we had left ourselves… We thought that, when the Russian people would be freed from the despotism and yoke of the ruling classes, the economic and political freedom of all the peoples of Russia, including the Jewish people, would arise. And it must be admitted that Russian literature has also somewhat inculcated the idea that the Jewish people were not a people but a parasitic class.”684 Also came into play the feeling of debt owed to the people of Great Russia, as well as “the faith of the populist rebels in the imminence of a popular insurrection.”685 In the 70s, “the Jewish intellectual youth… ‘went to the people’ in the hope of launching, with its feeble hands, the peasant revolution in Russia.”686 As Aptekman writes, Natanson, “like the hero of the Mtsyri of Lermontov, Knew the hold of only one thought, lived only one, but burning passion. This thought was the happiness of the people; this passion, the struggle for liberation.”687 Aptekman himself, as depicted by Deutsch, was “emaciated, of small stature, pale complexion,” “with very pronounced national features”; having become a village nurse, he announced socialism to the peasants through the Gospel.688
683Deutsch, pp. 56, 67 68. ‒ 684Iohelson, Byloie, 1918, No. 13, pp. 56 57. ‒ 685Ibidem, pp. 61, 66. 686G. J. Aronson, V. borbe za grajdanskiie i nalsionalnyie prava: obschcstvcnnyie tetcheniia v rousskom evreistve (In the struggle for national civil rights: the social currents among the Jews of Russia), UR‐1, p. 210. 687Aptekman. Byloie, 1921, No. 16, pp. 11 12. ‒ 688Deutsch, pp. 183 185 ‒
It was a little under the influence of their predecessors, the members of the Dolgouchin circle, whom inscribed on the branches of the crucifix: “In the name of Christ, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” and almost all preached the Gospel, that the first Jewish populists turned to Christianity, which they used as a support point and as an instrument. Aptekman writes about himself: “I have converted to Christianity by a movement from the heart and love for Christ.”689 (Not to be confused with the motives of Tan Bogoraz, who in the 80s had converted to Christianity “to escape the vexations of his Jewish origin.”690 Nor with the feint of Deutsch who went to preach the molokanes691 by presenting himself as a ‘good orthodox’.”) But, adds Aptekman, “in order to give oneself to the people, there is no need to repent”: with regard to the Russian people, “I had no trace of repentance. Moreover, where could it have come from? Is it not rather for me, the descendant of an oppressed nation, to demand the settlement of this dealing, instead of paying the repayment of some, I am not sure which, fantastic loan? Nor have I observed this feeling of repentance among my comrades of the nobility who were walking with me on the same path.”692 Let us note in this connection that the idea of a rapprochement between the desired socialism and historical Christianity was not unconnected with many Russian revolutionaries at the time, and as justification for their action, and as a convenient tactical procedure. V. V. Flerovsky693 wrote: “I always had in mind the comparison between this youth who was preparing for action and the first Christians.” And, immediately after, the next step: “By constantly turning this idea into my head, I have come to the conviction that we will reach our goal only by one means—by creating a new religion… It is necessary to teach the people to devote all their forces to oneself exclusively… I wanted to create the religion of brotherhood”— and the young disciples of Flerovsky tried to “lead the experiment by wondering how a religion that would have neither God nor saints would be received by the people.” His disciple Gamov, from the circle of Dolgouchine, wrote even more crudely: “We must invent a religion that would be against the tsar and the government… We must write a catechism and prayers in this spirit.”694 The revolutionary action of the Jews in Russia is also explained in another way. We find it exposed and then refuted by A. Srebrennikov: “There is a view that if, through the reforms of the years 1860 1863, the ‘Pale of Settlement’ had ‒ been abolished, our whole history would have unfolded otherwise… If 689O. V. Aptekman, Flerovski‐Bervi i kroujok Dolgouchina (Bervi‐Flerovsky and the circle of Dolgouchine), Byloie, 1922, No. 18, p. 63. 690JE, t. 4, p. 714. 691Molokanes or “milk drinkers” (they consume milk during Lent) are a Russian sect that goes back to the eighteenth century. They were persecuted, exiled in 1800 north of the Sea of Azov, and some immigrated to the United States. 692Aptekman, Byloie, 1922, No. 18, p. 63. 693Vassili Vasilievich Bervi‐Flerovsky (1829 1918): Russian publicist, sociologist, economist. ‒ Participated in the populism of the 60s. In exile from 1862 to 1887. Wrote the Notes of a Revolutionary Utopian. 694Ibidem*.
Alexander II had abolished the ‘Pale of Settlement’, there would have been neither the Bund695 nor Trotskyism!” Then he mentioned the internationalist and socialist ideas that flowed from the West, and wrote: “If the suppression of the Pale of Settlement had been of capital importance to them, all their struggle would have stretched towards it. Now they were occupied with everything else: they dreamed of overthrowing tsarism!”696 And, one after the other, driven by the same passion, they abandoned their studies (notably the Academy of Military Medicine) to “go to the people”. Every diploma was marked with the seal of infamy as a means of exploitation of the people. They renounced any career, and some broke with their families. For them, “every day not put to good use [constitutes] an irreparable loss, criminal for the realisation of the well‐being and happiness of the disinherited masses.”697 But in order to “go to the people”, it was necessary to “make oneself simple”, both internally, for oneself, and practically, “to inspire confidence to the masses of the people, one had to infiltrate it under the guise of a workman or a moujik.”698 However, writes Deutsch, how can you go to the people, be heard and be believed, when you are betrayed by your language, your appearance and your manners? And still, to seduce the listeners, you must throw jokes and good words in popular language! And we must also be skilful in the work of the fields, so painful to townspeople. For this reason, Khotinsky worked on the farm with his brother, and worked there as a ploughman. The Lœwenthal brothers learned shoemaking and carpentry. Betty Kamenskaya entered as a worker in a spinning mill to a very hard position. Many became caregivers. (Deutsch writes that, on the whole, other activities were better suited to these revolutionary Jews: work within factions, conspiracy, communications, typography, border‐crossing.)699 The “march to the people” began with short visits, stays of a few months— a “fluid” march. At first, they relied only on the work of agitation. It was imagined that it would suffice to convince the peasants to open their eyes to the regime in power and the exploitation of the masses, and to promise that the land and the instruments of production would become the property of all. In fact, this whole “march to the people” of the populists ended in failure. And not only because of some inadvertent gunshot directed against the Tsar (Solovyov, 1879), which obliged them all to flee the country and to hide very far from the cities. But above all because the peasants, perfectly deaf to their preaching, were even sometimes ready to hand them over to the authorities. The populists, the Russians (hardly more fortunate) like the Jews, lost “the faith… in
695The Bund (in Yiddish: the Union): the “General Union of Jewish Workers of Lithuania, Poland and Russia”, founded in Vilnius in 1897, related to the SD party in 1898 1903; then ‒ again in 1906 1918 close to the Mensheviks. Dissolved in 1921. ‒ 696Obschaia gazela (General Gazette), No. 35, 31 August 6 Sept. 1995, p. 11. ‒ 697Deutsch, pp. 106, 205 206. ‒ 698Iohelson, Byloie, 1918, No. 13, p. 74. 699Deutsch, pp. 34 37, 183. ‒
a spontaneous revolutionary will and in the socialist instincts of the peasantry”, and “transformed into impenitent pessimists.”700 Clandestine action, however, worked better. Three residents of Minsk, Lossif Guetsov, Saul Levkov, and Saul Grinfest, succeeded in setting up a clandestine press in their city that would serve the country as a whole. It survived until 1881. It was there that was printed in gold letters the leaflet on “the execution of Alexander II”. It printed the newspaper The Black Repartition701, and then the proclamations of The Will of the People. Deutsche referred to them as “peaceful propagandists”. Apparently, the term “peaceful” embraced everything that was not bombing—smuggling, illegal bordercrossing, and even the call to avoid paying taxes (appeal to the peasants of Lazare Goldenberg). Many of these Jewish revolutionaries were heavily condemned (heavily, even by the measures of our time). Some benefited from a reduction of their punishment—like Semion Lourie, thanks to his father who obtained for him a less severe regime in prison. There was also public opinion, which leaned towards indulgence. Aptekman tells us that in 1881—after the assassination of Alexander II—“they lived relatively freely in the prison of Krasnoyarsk” where “the director of the prison, a real wild beast, was suddenly tamed and gave us all kinds of permissions to contact the deportees and our friends.” Then “we were received in transit prisons not as detainees, but as noble captives”; “the prison director came in, accompanied by soldiers carrying trays with tea, biscuits, jam for everyone, and, as a bonus, a small glass of vodka. Was it not idyllic? We were touched.”702 The biographies of these early populists reveal a certain exaltation, a certain lack of mental equilibrium. Leo Deutsch testifies: Leon Zlatopolsky, a terrorist, “was not a mentally balanced person”. Aptekman himself, in his cell, after his arrest, “was not far from madness, as his nerves were shaken.” Betty Kamenskaya, “… from the second month of detention… lost her mind”; she was transferred to the hospital, then her father, a merchant, took her back on bail. Having read in the indictment that she would not be brought before the court, she wanted to tell the prosecutor that she was in good health and could appear, but soon after, she swallowed poison and died.703 Moses Rabinovitch, in his cell, “had hallucinations… his nerves were exhausted”; he resolved to feign repentance, to name those whom the instruction was surely already acquainted with, in order to be liberated. He drew up a declaration promising to say everything he knew and even, upon his release from prison, to seek and transmit information. The result was that he confessed everything without being released and that he was sent to the province of Irkutsk where he went mad and died “barely over the age of 20.” Examples of this kind are not lacking. Leiser 700Ibidem, pp. 194 et suiv. ; Iohelson, Byloie, 1918, No. 13, p. 69. 701The Black Repartition, a clandestine newspaper bearing the same name as the organisation, which knew five issues in 1880 1881 Minsk‐Geneva. ‒ 702Aptekman, Byloie. 1922, No. 18. pp. 73, 75. 703Deutsch, pp. 38, 41, 94, 189.
Tsukerman, immigrated to New York, and put an end to his life. Nahman Lœwenthal, after having immigrated to Berlin, “was sent into the dizzying downward spiral of a nervous breakdown,” to which was added an unhappy love; “he swallowed sulphuric acid and threw himself into the river”—at the age of about 19.704 These young individuals had thrown themselves away by overestimating their strength and the resistance of their nerves. And even Grigori Goldenberg, who, in cold blood, had defeated the governor of Kharkov and asked his comrades, as a supreme honor, to kill by his own hand the Tsar (but his comrades, fearing popular anger, had apparently dismissed him as a Jew; apparently, this argument often prompted populists to designate most often Russians, to perpetrate attacks): after being arrested while carrying a charge of dynamite, he was seized by unbearable anguish in his cell of the Troubetskoy bastion, his spirit was broken, he made a full confession that affected the whole movement, petitioned that Aaron Zundelevich come share his cell (who showed more indulgence than others towards his actions). When it was refused, he committed suicide.705 Others, who were not directly involved, suffered, such as Moses Edelstein, who was by no means an ideologist, who had “slipped”, for a price, clandestine literature; he suffered much in prison, prayed to Yahweh for himself and his family: he repented during the judgment: “I did not imagine that there could be such bad books.” Or S. Aronson who, after the trial of the “one hundred and ninety‐three”, disappeared completely from the revolutionary scene.706 Another point is worthy of noting; it was the facility with which many of them left that Russia which they had long ago intended to save. In fact, in the 70s emigration was regarded as desertion in revolutionary circles: even if the police seek you, go underground, but do not run away!707—Tan Bogoraz left to live twenty years in New York.—Lazar Goldenberg‐Getroitman also “left to New York in 1885, where he gave classes on the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia”; he returned to Russia in 1906, after the amnesty, to leave again rather quickly to Britain, where he remained until his death.”708—In London, one of the Vayner brothers became the owner of a furniture workshop and Mr. Aronson and Mr. Romm became Clinical Doctors in New York.—After a few years in Switzerland, I. Guetsov went to live in America, having radically broken with the Socialist movement.—Leiser Lœwenthal, emigrated to Switzerland, completed his medical studies in Geneva, became the assistant of a great physiologist before obtaining a chair of histology in Lausanne.—Semion Lourie also finished his studies in a faculty of medicine in Italy, but died shortly
704Ibidem, pp. 78 79, 156 157. ‒ ‒ 705Grigori Goldenberg v Petropavolvskoi kreposti (Grigori Goldenberg in prison Saint‐Pierreel‐Saint‐Paul); Krasnyi arkhiv: istorilcheskii journal Tsentrarkhiva RSFSR (The Red Archives: Historical Review of the FSSR Archives Center), M., 1922 1941, t. 10; 1925, pp. ‒ 328 331. ‒ 706Deutsch*, pp. 85 86. ‒ 707Ibidem, p.132. 708RJE, t. 1. p. 344.
after.—Liubov Axelrod (“the Orthodox”709) remained for a long time in immigration, where he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Berlin (later he inculcated dialectical materialism to students of Soviet graduate schools.) A. Khotinsky also entered the Faculty of Medicine of Bern (but died the following year from a galloping consumption). Grigory Gurayev made a fine career in Denmark; he returned to Russia as the country’s ambassador in Kiev, where he stayed until 1918.710 All this also shows how many talented men there were among these revolutionaries. Men such as these, endowed with such lively intelligence, when they found themselves in Siberia, far from wasting or losing their reason, they opened their eyes to the tribes which surrounded them, studied their languages and their customs, and wrote ethnographic studies about them: Leon Sternberg on the Ghiliaks,711 Tan‐Bogoraz on the Tchouktches,712 Vladimir Yokhelson on the Yukaghirs,713 and Naoum Guekker on the physical type of the lakuts.714715 Some studies on the Buryats716 are due to Moses Krohl. Some of these Jewish revolutionaries willingly joined the socialist movement in the West. Thus V. Yokhelson and A. Zundelevich, during the Reichstag elections in Germany, campaigned on the side of the Social Democrats. Zundelevich was even arrested for having used fraudulent methods. Anne Rosenstein, in France, was convicted for organising a street demonstration in defiance of the regulations governing traffic on the street; Turgenev intervened for her and she was expelled to Italy where she was twice condemned for anarchist agitation (she later married F. Turati,717 converted him to socialism and became herself the first Marxist of Italy). Abram Valt‐Lessine, a native of Minsk, published articles for seventeen years in New York in the socialist organ of America Vorwarts and exerted a great influence on the formation of the American labour movement.718 (That road was going to be taken by many others of our Socialists…) It sometimes happened that revolutionary emigrants were disappointed by the revolution. Thus Moses Veller, having distanced himself from the
709Liubov Issaakovna Axelrod: philosopher, writer, member of the Menshevik party. His pen name is “the Orthodox” (in the non‐confessional sense of the word). 710Deutsch, pp. 61 62, 198 201, 203 216. ‒ ‒ ‒ 711The Ghiliaks are a tribe of the north of the island of Sakhalin and the valley of the lower Amur. 712The Tchouktches, a tribe of eastern Siberia occupying a territory ranging from the Sea of Behring to the Kolyma. Nomads and sedentary. Opposed the Russian conquest. 713The Yukaghirs are a tribe of the north‐east of Siberia, very small in number. 714JE, t. 6, p. 284. 715The lakuts are a people of northeastern Siberia, occupying both banks of the Lena, extending east to the Kolyma River, north to the Arctic Ocean, south to the Yablovoi mountains. 716The Buryats, people of Siberia around Lake Baikal, partly repressed towards Mongolia. 717Filippo Turati (1857 1932): one of the founders of the Italian Socialist Party. Emigrated in ‒ 1926. 718RJE, t. 2, p. 166; t. l, p. 205.
movement, succeeded, thanks to Turgenev’s intervention with Loris‐Melikov, to return to Russia. More extravagant was the journey of Isaac Pavlovsky: living in Paris, as “illustrious revolutionary”, he had connections with Turgenev, who made him know Emile Zola and Alphonse Daudet; he wrote a novel about the Russian nihilists that Turgenev published in the Vestnik Evropy719 (The Messenger of Europe), and then he became the correspondent in Paris of Novoye Vremia720 “the New Times” under the pseudonym of I. Iakovlev—and even, as Deutsch writes, he portrayed himself as “anti‐Semite”, sent a petition in high places, was pardoned and returned to Russia.721 That said, the majority of the Jewish revolutionaries blended in, just like the Russians, and their track was lost. “With the exception of two or three prominent figures… all my other compatriots were minor players,” writes Deutsch.722 A Soviet collection, published the day after the revolution under the title of “Historical and Revolutionary Collection”,723 quotes many names of humble soldiers unknown to the revolution. We find there dozens, even hundreds of Jewish names. Who remembers them now? However, all have taken action, all have brought their contribution, all have shaken more or less strongly the edifice of the State. Let us add: this very first contingent of Jewish revolutionaries did not fully join the ranks of the Russian revolution, all did not deny their Judaism. A. Liebermann, a great connoisseur of the Talmud, a little older than his populist fellow students, proposed in 1875 to carry out a specific campaign in favour of socialism among the Jewish population. With the help of G. Gurevich, he published a socialist magazine in Yiddish called Emes (Pravda = Truth) in Vienna in 1877. Shortly before, in the 70s, A. Zundelevich “undertook a publication in the Hebrew language”, also entitled Truth. (L. Shapiro hypothesises that this publication was “the distant ancestor of Trotsky’s The Pravda.724 The tradition of this appellation was durable.) Some, like ValtLessine, insisted on the convergence of internationalism with Judaic nationalism. “In his improvised conferences and sermons, the prophet Isaiah and Karl Marx figured as authorities of equal importance.”725 In Geneva was founded the Jewish Free Typography,726 intended to print leaflets addressed to the Jewish working‐class population.
719The Messenger of Europe: 1) a journal founded by Karamzin and published from 1802 to 1830; 2) a monthly magazine with a liberal orientation, which appeared from 1866 to 1918 in Saint Petersburg. 720The New Times: ultra‐conservative Petersburg daily founded by the publicist Suvorin. Which appeared from 1868 to 1917. 721Deutsch, pp. 84 85; Lohelsohn. Byloe, 1918, no. 13, pp. 53 75; L. Goumtch. Pervyie ‒ ‒ evreiskiie rabotchiie kroujki (The first Jewish workers’ circles), Byloie, 1907, n. 6/18, p. 68. 722Deutsch, p. 231. 723RHC, t. 1, 2. 724Leonard Schapiro, The Role of the Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement, The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 40, London, Athlone Press, 1961 62, p. 157. ‒ 725JW.‐2*, p. 392. 726JE, t. 13, p. 644.
Specifically Jewish circles were formed in some cities. A “Statute for the Organisation of a Social‐Revolutionary Union of the Jews of Russia”, formulated at the beginning of 1876, showed the need for propaganda in the Hebrew language and even to organise between Jews of the western region “a network of social‐revolutionary sections, federated with each other and with other sections of the same type found abroad”. “The Socialists of the whole world formed a single brotherhood,” and this organisation was to be called the Jewish Section of the Russian Social‐Revolutionary Party.727 Hessen comments: the action of this Union among the Jewish masses “has not met with sufficient sympathies”, and that is why these Jewish socialists, in their majority, “lent a hand to the common cause”, that is to say, to the Russian cause.728 In fact, circles were created in Vilnius, Grodno, Minsk, Dvinsk, Odessa, but also, for example, in Elts, Saratov, Rostov‐on‐Don. In the very detailed founding act of this “Social‐Revolutionary Union of all Jews in Russia”, one can read surprising ideas, statements such as: “Nothing ordinary has the right to exist if it has no rational justification”729 (!) By the end of the 70s, the Russian revolutionary movement was already sliding towards terrorism. The appeal to the revolt of Bakunin had definitely prevailed over the concern for instruction of the masses of Lavrov. Beginning in 1879, the idea of populist presence among the peasants had no effect—the idea that dominated in The Will of the People—gained the upper hand over the rejection of terror by The Black Repartition. Terror, nothing but terror!!—much more: a systematic terror! (That the people did not have a voice in the matter, that the ranks of the intelligentsia were so sparse, did not disturb them.) Terrorist acts—including against the Tsar in person!—thus succeeded one another. According to Leo Deutsch’s assessment, only ten to twelve Jews took part in this growing terror, beginning with Aron Gobst (executed), Solomon Wittenberg (prepared an attack on Alexander II in 1878, executed in 1879), Aizik Aronchik (was involved in the explosion of the imperial train, condemned to a penal colony for life) and Gregory Goldenberg, already named. Like Goldenberg, A. Zundelevich—brilliant organiser of terror, but who was not given the time to participate in the assassination of the Tsar—was arrested very early. There was also another quite active terrorist: Mlodetsky. As for Rosa Grossman, Krystyna Grinberg and the brothers Leo and Saveli Zlatopolsky, they played a secondary role. (In fact, Saveli, as of March 1st, 1881730, was a member of the Executive Committee); As for Gesya Gelfman, she was part of the basic group of the “actors of March 1st.”731
727Hessen, t. 2, pp. 213 214. ‒ 728Ibidem, p. 214. 729RHC, 1.1, p. 45. 730March 1st, 1881: day of the assassination of Alexander II. 731Deutsch, pp. 38 39, Protses dvadtsati narodovoltsev v 1882 g. (The trial of the members of ‒ The Will of the People in 1882), Byloie, 1906, no. 1, pp. 227 234. ‒
Then it was the 80s that saw the decline and dissolution of populism. Government power took over; belonging to a revolutionary organisation cost a firm eight to ten years of imprisonment. But if the revolutionary movement was caught by inertia, its members continued to exist. One can quote here Sofia Ginzburg: she did not engage in revolutionary action until 1877; she tried to restore the Will of the People, which had been decimated by arrests; she prepared, just after the Ulyanov group732, an attack on Alexander III.733 So‐andso was forgotten in deportation, another was coming back from it, a third was only leaving for it—but they continued the battle. Thusly was a famous deflagration described by the memorialists: the rebellion in the prison of Yakutsk in 1889. An important contingent of political prisoners had been told that they were going to be transferred to Verkhoyansk and, from there, even further, to Srednie‐Kolymsk, which they wanted to avoid at all costs. The majority of the group were Jewish inmates. In addition, they were informed that the amount of baggage allowed was reduced: instead of five poods734 of books, clothes, linen, five poods also of bread and flour, two poods of meat, plus oil, sugar and tea (the whole, of course, loaded on horses or reindeer), a reduction of five poods in all. The deportees decided to resist. In fact, it had already been six months that they had been walking freely in the city of Yakutsk, and some had obtained weapons from the inhabitants. “While you’re at it, might as well perish like this, and may the people discover all the abomination of the Russian government—perishing so that the spirit of combat is revived among the living!” When they were picked up to be taken to the police station, they first opened fire on the officers, and the soldiers answered with a salvo. Condemned to death, together with N. Zotov, were those who fired the first shots at the vice‐governor: L. Kogan‐Bernstein and A. Gausman. Condemned to forced labour in perpetuity were: the memorialist himself, O. Minor, the celebrated M. Gotz735, and also “A. Gurevitch and M. Orlov, Mr. Bramson, Mr. Braguinsky, Mr. Fundaminsky, Mr. Ufland, S. Ratine, O. Estrovitch, Sofia Gurevitch, Vera Gotz, Pauline Perly, A. Bolotina, N. KoganBernstein.” The Jewish Encyclopædia informs us that for this mutiny twenty‐six Jews and six Russians were tried.736 That same year, 1889, Mark Natanson returned from exile and undertook to forge, in place of the old dismantled populist organisations, a new organisation called The Right of the People (Narodnoie Pravo). Natanson had already witnessed the emergence of Marxism in Russia, imported from Europe, and its competition with populism. He made every effort to save the revolutionary
732The “Ulyanov group”, named after Alexander Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin’s elder brother. Faction of the Will of the People. Alexander Ulyanov prepared an attack on Alexander III in 1887. He was condemned to death and executed. 733RJE, t. 1, p. 314. 734One pood is equivalent to 16.38 kilos. 735Mikhail Rafaelovich Gotz (1866 1906): member of the S.‐R. party. Emigrated in 1900. ‒ 736O. S. Minor, lakutskaia drama 22 marta 1889 goda (The drama of Yakutia of 22 March 1889), Byloie, 1906, no. 9, pp. 138 141, 144; JE, t. 5, p. 599. ‒
movement from decadence and to maintain ties with the Liberals (‘the best liberals are also semi‐socialists”). Not more than before did he look at nuances of convictions: what mattered to him was that all should unite to overthrow the autocracy, and when Russia was democratic, then it would be figured out. But the organisation he set up this time proved to be amorphous, apathetic and ephemeral. Besides, respecting the rules of the conspiracy was no longer necessary. As Isaac Gurvitch very eloquently pointed out, “because of the absence of conspiracy, a mass of people fall into the clutches of the police, but the revolutionaries are now so numerous that these losses do not count—trees are knocked down, and chips go flying!”737 The fracture that had occurred in the Jewish consciousness after 1881‒ 1882 could not but be reflected somewhat in the consciousness of Jewish revolutionaries in Russia. These young men had begun by drifting away from Judaism, and many had returned to it. They had “left the ‘street of the Jews’ and then returned to their people”: “Our entire historical destiny is linked to the Jewish ghetto, it is from it that our national essence is forged.”738 Until the pogroms of 1881 1882, “absolutely none of us revolutionaries thought for a ‒ moment” that we should publicly explain the participation of the Jews in the revolutionary movement. But then came the pogroms, which caused “among… the majority of our countrymen an explosion of indignation.” And now “it was not only the cultivated Jews, but some Jewish revolutionaries who had no affinity with their nation, who suddenly felt obliged to devote their strength and talents to their unjustly persecuted brothers.”739 “The pogroms have awakened sleeping feelings, they have made young people more susceptible to the sufferings of their people, and the people more receptive to revolutionary ideas. Let this serve as a basis for an autonomous action of the Jewish mass”: “We are obstinately pursuing our goal: the destruction of the current political regime.”740 But behold, the unexpected support to the anti‐Jewish pogroms brought by the leaflets of The Will of the People! Leo Deutsch expresses his perplexity in a letter to Axelrod, who also wonders: “The Jewish question is now, in practice, really insoluble for a revolutionary. What would one do, for example, in Balta, where the Jews are being attacked? To defend them is tantamount to “arousing hatred against the revolutionaries who not only killed the Tsar, but also support the Jews”… Reconciliation propaganda is now extremely difficult for the party.”741 This perplexity, P. L. Lavrov himself, the venerated chief, expresses it in his turn: “I recognise that the Jewish question is extremely complex, and for the party, which intends to draw itself closer to the people and raise it against the government, it is difficult in the highest degree… because of the passionate 737Gounitch, Byloie. 1907, no. 6/18, p. 68. 738I. Mark, Pamiati I. M. Tcherikover (In memory of I. M. Tcherikover), JW‐2, pp. 424 425. ‒ 739Deutsch, pp. 3 4. ‒ 740I. lliacheviich (I. Rubinovilch), Chto delay evreiam v Rossii? (What can the Jews do in Russia?), Soblazn Sotsializma (The Temptation of Socialism), pp. 185 186. ‒ 741Schub, JW‐2*, p. 134.
state in which the people find themselves and the need to have it on our side.”742 He was not the only one of the Russian revolutionaries to reason this way. In the 80s, a current reappeared among the socialists, advocating directing attention and propaganda to specifically Jewish circles, and preferably the ones of workers. But, as proletariat, there were not many people among the Jews— some carpenters, binders, shoemakers. The easiest was certainly to act among the most educated printers. Isaac Gurvitch recounts: with Moses Khourguine, Leon Rogaller, Joseph Reznik, “in Minsk we had set ourselves the task of creating a nucleus of educated workers.” But if we take, for example, Belostok or Grodno, “we found no working class”: the recruitment was too weak. The creation of these circles was not done openly; it was necessary to conspire either to organise the meeting outside the city, or to hold it in a private apartment in the city, but then systematically beginning with lessons of Russian grammar or natural sciences… and then only by recruiting volunteers to preach socialism to them. As I. Martar explains: it was these preliminary lessons that attracted people to the revolutionary circles. “Skilled and wise,” capable of becoming their own masters, “those who had attended our meetings had received instruction there, and especially mastery of Russian, for language is a precious weapon in the competitive struggle of petty commerce and industry”; After that, our “lucky guys”, freed from the role of hired labourers and swearing to their great gods that they themselves would never employ hired labour, had to have recourse to it, due to the requirements of the market.”743 Or, once formed in these circles, “the worker abandoned his trade and went away to take examinations ‘externally’.”744 The local Jewish bourgeoisie disliked the participation of young people in the revolutionary circles, for it had understood—faster and better than the police —where all of this would lead.745 Here and there, however, things advanced; with the aid of socialist pamphlets and proclamations provided by the printing press in London, the young revolutionaries themselves drafted “social‐democrat formulations on all programmatic questions”. Thus, for ten years, a slow propaganda led little by little to the creation of the Bund. But, “even more than police persecution, it was the emerging immigration to America that hampered our work. In fact, we trained socialist workers for America.” The concise recollections of Isaac Gurvitch on the first Jewish workers’ circles are enamelled by obiter dicta such as: Schwartz, a student who participated in revolutionary agitation, “subsequently immigrated to America; he lives in New York”.—as well, at a meeting in Joseph Reznik’s apartment: “There were two workers present, a carpenter and a joiner: both are now in 742Ibidem, pp. 133 134. ‒ 743I. Martov, Zapiski sotsial‐demokrata (Notebooks of a Social‐Democrat), Berlin, ed. Grjebine, 1922, pp. 187 189. ‒ 744N. A. Buchbinder, Rabotchiie o propagandistskikh kroujkakh (Workers in regard to circles of propagandists), Soblazn sotsializma (The temptation of socialism), p. 230. 745Gurvitch, Byloie, op. cit., pp. 65 68, 74. ‒
America.” And, two pages later, we learn that Reznik himself, after his return from exile, “went to live in America.” Conversely, a young man named Guirchfeld, who came from America to do revolutionary work, “is currently a doctor in Minneapolis” and was a Socialist candidate for the post of governor. —“One of the most active members of the first Abramovich circle, a certain Jacob Zvirine…, after serving his twelve months in the Kresty prison… immigrated to America and now lives in New York.”—“Shmulevich (“Kivel”) … in 1889… was forced to flee from Russia; he lived until 1896 in Switzerland where he was an active member of the social democratic organisations”, then “he moved to America… and lives in Chicago”. Finally, the narrator himself: “In 1890 I myself left Russia,” although a few years earlier “we were considering things differently. To lead a socialist propaganda among the workers is the obligation of every honest educated man: it is our way of paying our “historical debt” to the people. And since I have the obligation to make propaganda, it follows very obviously that I have the right to demand that I be given the opportunity to fulfil this obligation.” Arriving in New York in 1890, Gurvich found there a “Russian workers’ association of self‐development,” consisting almost exclusively of artisans from Minsk, and in order to celebrate the Russian New Year they organised in New York “The Ball of the Socialists of Minsk.”746 In New York, “the local socialist movement… predominantly was Jewish.”747 As we can see, from that time the ocean did not constitute a major obstacle to the cohesion and the pursuit of the revolutionary action carried out by the Jews. This living link would have oh so striking effects in Russia. Yet all Jewish young people had not abandoned the Russian revolutionary tradition, far from it; many even stood there in the 80s and 90s. As D. Schub shows, the pogroms and the restrictive measures of Alexander III only excited them even more strongly for combat. Then it became necessary to explain as well as possible to the little Russian people why so many Jews participated in the revolutionary movement. Addressing uneducated people, the popular pamphlets gradually forged a whole phraseology that had its effects until 1917—including 1917. It is a booklet of this kind that allows us to reconstruct their arguments. Hard is the fate of the Russian, the subject of the Tsar; the government holds him in his iron fist. But “still more bitter is the lot of the indigent Jew”: “the government makes fun of him, pressures him to death. His existence is only a life of famine, a long agony”, and “his brothers of misery and toil, the peasants and the Russian workers…, as long as they are in ignorance, treat him as a foreigner.” There followed, one after the other, didactic questions: “Are Jewish capitalists enemies of the working people of Russia?” The enemies are all capitalists without distinction, and it is of little importance to the working people to be plundered by such and such: one should not concentrate their anger
746Ibidem  , pp. 66 68, 72 77. ‒ ‒ 747J. Krepliak  , Poslesloviie k statie Lessina (Postface to the article by Lessine), JW‐2, p. 392.
on those who are Jews.—“The Jew has no land… he has no means to prosper. If the Jews do not devote themselves to the labour of the land, it is because “the Russian government has not allowed them to reside in the countryside”; but in their colonies they are “excellent cultivators.” The fields are superbly enhanced… by the work of their arms. They do not use any outside labour, and do not practice any extra trade… they like the hard work of the land.”—“Are destitute Jews harming the economic interests of Russian workers? If the Jews do business, “it is out of necessity, not out of taste; all other ways are closed to them, and one has to live”; “they would cease with joy to trade if they were allowed to leave their cage.” And if there are thieves among them, we must accuse the Tsarist government. “The Jewish workers began the struggle for the improvement of their condition at the time when the Russian working people were subjected. The Jewish workers “before all the others have lost patience”; “And even now tens of thousands of Jews are members of Russian Socialist parties. They spread the hatred of the capitalist system and the tsarist government through the country”; they have rendered “a proud service to the Russian working people”, and that is why Russian capitalists hate them. The government, through the police, assisted in the preparation of the pogroms; it sent the police and the army to lend a helping hand to the looters”; “Fortunately, very few workers and peasants were among them.”—“Yes, the Jewish masses hate this irresponsible tsarist government”, because “it was the will of the government that the skull of Jewish children be smashed against walls… that Jewish women, elderly and children alike, be raped in the streets. And yet, “He lies boldly, the one who treats the Jews as enemies of the Russian people… And besides, how could they hate Russia? Could they have another country?”748 There are amazing resurgences in the revolutionary tradition. In 1876, A. Biebergal had been convicted for taking part in the demonstration on the square in front of Our Lady of Kazan. And it was there that his eldest daughter, a student of graduate studies of Saint Petersburg, was apprehended on the same spot in Kazan on the anniversary of this demonstration, twenty‐five years later, in 1901. (In 1908, Member of a group S.‐R.749, she was condemned to the penal colonies for the attack on the Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich.750) In fact, over the years, Russian revolutionaries increasingly needed the input of the Jews; they understood more and more what advantage they derived from them—of their dual struggle: against the vexations on the plane of nationality, and against those of an economic order—as a detonator for the revolution.
748Abramova, Vragi li trudovomou narodou evrei? (Are the Jews enemies of the working people?), Tiflis, Izdatelskaia Komissiia Kraicvogo Soveta Kavkazskoi armii (Editorial Commission of the Regional Soviet of the Caucasian Army), 1917, pp. 3 31. ‒ 749S.‐R.: Social‐Revolutionary party. Born in 1901, it preached terror. Subjected to splits after the revolution of 1905. Remained powerful among the intelligentsia. 750Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich (1847 1909): brother of Alexander III, father of the ‒ Grand Duke Cyril.
In 1883, in Geneva, appears what can be considered as the head of the emerging social democracy: the “Liberation of Labour” group. Its founders were, along with Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich, L. Deutsch and P. Axelrod.751 (When Ignatov died in 1885, he was replaced by Ingerman.) In Russia comes to life a current that supports them. Constituted of former members of the dismantled Black Repartition (they considerably exceeded those of the Will of the People), they will be called “liberationists” (osvobojdentsy). Among them are a number of young Jews, among whom we can name the two best known: Israel Guelfand (the future and famous Parvus) and Raphael Soloveitchik. In 1889 Soloveitchik, who had travelled through Russia to set up revolutionary action in several cities, was arrested and tried with other members of the Liberation of Labour group, which included several Jewish names.752 Others who belonged to this social revolutionary trend were David Goldendach, the future, well‐known Bolshevik “Riazanov” (who had fled Odessa in 1889 and had taken refuge abroad to escape military service753). Nevertheless, what remained of the Will of the People after its collapse was a fairly large group. Among them were Dembo, Rudevitch, Mandelstam, Boris Reinchtein, Ludwig Nagel, Bek, Sofia Chentsis, Filippeo, Leventis, Cheftel, Barnekhovsky, etc.754 Thus a certain amount of energy had been preserved to fuel the rivalries between small groups—The Will of the People, The Black Repartition, Liberation of Labour—and theoretical debates. The three volumes of the “Historical and Revolutionary Collection” published in the (Soviet) 20s, which we use here, offer us, in an interminable and tedious logorrhea, an account of the cut and thrust, allegedly much more important and sublime than all the questions of universal thought and history. The detail of these debates constitute a deadly material on the spiritual fabric of the Russian revolutionaries of the years 80 90, and it still awaits its historian. ‒ But from the thirties of the Soviet era onwards, it was no longer possible to enumerate with pride and detail all those who had had their share in the revolution; a sort of taboo settled in historical and political publications, the role and name of the Jews in the Russian revolutionary movement ceased to be evoked—and even now, this kind of evocation creates uneasiness. Now, nothing is more immoral and dangerous than to silence anything when History is being written: it only creates a distortion of opposite meaning. If, as can be read in the Jewish Encyclopædia, “to account for the genuine importance of the Jewish component in the Russian liberation movement, to express it in precise figures, does not seem possible,”755 one can nevertheless, based on various sources, give an approximate picture.
751Deutsch, p. 136. 752RHC, t. 2, pp. 36, 38 40. ‒ 753Ibidem, t. 2, pp. 198 199. ‒ 754Ibidem, p. 36. 755JE, t. 13, p. 645.
Hessen informs us that “of the 376 defendants, accused of crimes against the State in the first half of 1879, there were only 4% Jews,” and “out of the 1,054 persons tried before the Senate during the year 1880…, there were 6.5% of Jews.”756 Similar estimates are found among other authors. However, from decade to decade, the number of Jews participating in the revolutionary movement increases, their role becomes more influential, more recognised. In the early years of Soviet rule, when it was still a matter of pride, a prominent communist, Lourie‐Larine, said: “In tsarist prisons and in exile, Jews usually constituted nearly a quarter of all prisoners and exiles.”757 Marxist historian M. N. Pokrovsky, basing himself on the workforce of the various congresses, concludes that “the Jews represent between a quarter and a third of the organisations of all the revolutionary parties.”758 (The modern Jewish Encyclopædia has some reservations about this estimate). In 1903, in a meeting with Herzl, Witte endeavoured to show that, while representing only 5% of the population of Russia, i.e. 6 million out of 136 million, the Jews had in their midst no less than 50% of revolutionaries.759 General N. Sukhotin, commander‐in‐chief of the Siberian region, compiled statistics on January 1st, 1905 of political prisoners under surveillance for all of Siberia and by nationality. This resulted in 1,898 Russians (42%), 1,678 Jews (37%), 624 Poles (14%), 167 Caucasians, 85 Baltic and 94 of other nationalities. (Only the exiles are counted there, prisons and penal colony convicts are not taken into account, and the figures are only valid for the year 1904, but this, however, gives a certain overview.) There is, moreover, an interesting precision in connection with those who “went into hiding”: 17% of Russians, 64% of Jews, 19% of other nationalities.760 Here is the testimony of V. Choulguine: in 1889, the news relating to the student demonstrations of Saint Petersburg reached Kiev. “The long corridors of the university were teeming with a crowd of young people in effervescence. I was struck by the predominance of the Jews. Were they more or less numerous than the Russians, I could not say, but they ‘predominated’ incontestably, for it was they who were in charge of this tumultuous melee in jackets. Some time later, the professors and the non‐striking students began to be chased out of lecture halls. Then this ‘pure and holy youth’ took false photographs of the Cossacks beating the students; these photographs were said to have been taken ‘on the fly’ when they were made from drawings: “Not all Jewish students are left‐wingers, some were on our side, but those ones suffered a lot afterwards, they were harassed by society.” Choulguine adds: “The role of the Jews in the
756Hessen, t. 2, p. 212. 757I. Larme, Evrei i Anti‐Semitism v SSSR (The Jews and Anti‐Semitism in the USSR), ML, 1929, p. 31. 758SJE, t. 7*, 1994, p. 258. 759G. Svet, Rousskiie evrei v sionizme i v stroitelstve Palestiny i Izrailia (The Russian Jews in Zionism and the Edification of Israel), p. 258. 760Iz islorii borby s revolioutsici v 1905 g. (Fragments of the History of the Fight with the Revolution of 1905), Krasnyi arkhiv (Red Archives), 1929, vol. 32, p. 229.
revolutionary effervescence within universities was notorious and unrelated to their number across the country.”761 Milyukov described all this as “legends about the revolutionary spirit of the Jews… They [government officials] need legends, just like the primitive man needs rhymed prose.”762 Conversely, G. P. Fedotov wrote: “The Jewish nation, morally liberated from the 80s onwards, like the Russian intelligentsia under Peter the Great, is in the highest degree uprooted, internationalist and active… It immediately assumed the leading role in the Russian revolution… It marked the moral profile of the Russian revolutionary with its incisive and sombre character.”763 From the 80s onwards, the Russian and Jewish elites merged not only in a common revolutionary action, but also in all spiritual fads, and especially in the passion for non‐rootedness. In the eyes of a contemporary, simple witness to the facts (Zinaida Altanskaya, who corresponded from the town of Orel with Fyodor Kryukov764), this Jewish youth of the beginning of the century appeared as follows: “… with them, there is the art and the love of fighting. And what projects!—vast, bold! They have something of their own, a halo of suffering, something precious. We envy them, we are vexed” (that the Russian youth is not the same). M. Agursky states the following hypothesis: “Participation in the revolutionary movement was, so to speak, a form of assimilation [more] ‘suitable’ than the common assimilation through baptism”; and it appears all the more worthy because it also meant a sort of revolt against one’s own Jewish bourgeoisie765—and against one’s own religion, which counted for nothing for the revolutionaries. However, this “proper” assimilation was neither complete nor even real: many of these young men, in their haste, tore themselves from their own soil without really taking root in Russian soil, and remained outside these two nations and two cultures, to be nothing more than this material of which internationalism is so fond of. But as the equal rights of the Jews remained one of the major demands of the Russian revolutionary movement, these young people, by embarking in the revolution, kept in their hearts and minds, the idea they were still serving the interests of their people. This was the thesis that Parvus had adopted as a course
761V. V. Choulguine, “Chto nam v nikh ne nravitsa…”: Ob antisemitizme v Rossii. (“What we do not like about them”: anti‐Semitism in Russia), Paris, 1929, pp. 53 54, 191. ‒ 762Duma State, 4th Legislature, Transcripts of Meetings, Session 5, Meeting 18, 16 Dec. 1916, p. 1174. 763G. P. Fedotov, Litso Rossii; Sbornik stratei (The Face of Russia, collection of articles) (1918 1931), Paris, YMCA Press, 1967, pp. 113 114. ‒ ‒ 764Fyodor Dmitrievich Kryukov (1870 1920): writer of the Gift, populist, died of typhus ‒ during the civil war. He has been attributed the true paternity of the Peaceful Gift of the Cholokov Nobel prize. 765M. Agursky, Sovmcslimy li sionizm i sotsializm? (Are Zionism and socialism compatible?), “22”, Obschestvenno‐polititchcskii i literaturnyi journal evreiskoi intellignntsii iz SSSR V Izrail (“22”: social and political review of Jewish intellectuals emigrated from the USSR in Israel), Tel‐Aviv, 1984, No. 36. p. 130.
of action during his entire life, which he had formulated, defended and inculcated to the young people: the liberation of the Jews from Russia can only be done by overthrowing the Tsarist regime. This thesis found significant support for a particular layer of Jewish society —middle‐aged people, well‐off, set, incredibly estranged from the spirit of adventure, but who, since the end of the nineteenth century, fed a permanent irritation against the Russian mode of government. It was in this ideological field that their children grew up before they even received the sap of Judaism to subsist from. An influential member of the Bund, Mr. Raies, points out that at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries “the Jewish bourgeoisie did not hide the hopes and expectations it placed in the progress of the revolutionary movement… it, which it once rejected, now had the bourgeoisie’s favours.”766 G. Gershuni explained to his judges: “It is your persecutions that have driven us to the revolution.” In fact, the explanation is to be found both in Jewish history and in Russian history—at their intersection. Let us listen to G. A. Landau, a renowned Jewish publicist. He wrote after 1917: “There were many Jewish families, both small and middle‐class, in which the parents, bourgeois themselves, saw with their benevolent eyes, sometimes proud, always quiet, their offspring being marked by the seal in fashion of one of the social‐revolutionary ideologies in vogue.” They also, in fact, “leaned vaguely in favour of this ideology which protested against the persecutors, but without asking what was the nature of this protest or what were these persecutions.” And it was thus that “little by little, the hegemony of socialism took root in Jewish society…”—the negation of civil society and of the State, contempt for bourgeois culture, and of the inheritance of past centuries, an inheritance from which the Jews had less difficulty to tear themselves away from since they already had, by Europeanising themselves, renounced their own inheritance.” The revolutionary ideas “in the Jewish milieu… were… doubly destructive,” and for Russia and for themselves. But they penetrated the Jewish milieu much more deeply than the Russian milieu.”767 A jeweller from Kiev, Marchak (who even created some pieces to decorate the churches of the city), testifies that “while I was frequenting the bourgeoisie, I was contaminated [by the revolutionary spirit].”768 Moreover, this is what we see with the young Bogrov769: that energy, that passion which grows in him 766M. Rafes, Natsionalistitcheskii “ouklon” Bunda (The nationalist “tendency” of the Bund), Soblazn Sotsializma (The temptation of socialism), p. 276. 767G. A. Landau, Rcvolioutsionnyie idei v evreiskoi obschestvennosti (Revolutionary ideas in Jewish public opinion), Rossiia i evrei: Sb. 1 (Russia and the Jews, Collection 1). Otetchestvennoie obiedineniie ruskikh evreiev zagranitsei (Patriotic Union of Russian Jews Abroad), Paris, YMCA Press, 1978 (Berlin, Osnova, 1924), pp. 106 109. ‒ 768A. O. Marchak, Inlerviou radiostanlsii “Svoboda” (Interview at “Radio Liberty”), Vospominaniia o revolioutsii 1917 goda (Memories on the Revolution of 1917), Int. No. 17, Munich, 1965, p. 9 769Dmitry Grigoryevich Bogrov: young secret service agent. Shot and killed the minister A. Stolypine in Kiev (1911). Condemned to death and executed.
during his youth spent in the bosom of a very rich family. His father, a wealthy liberal, gave full liberty to his young terrorist son.—And the Gotz brothers, also terrorists, had for grandfathers two Muscovites rich as Croesus, Gotz on the one hand, and on the other, Vyssotsky, a multi‐millionaire tea maker, and these, far from retaining their grandchildren, paid to the S.‐R. hundreds of thousands of rubles. “Many Jews have come to swell the ranks of the Socialists,” continues Landau.770 In one of his speeches in the Duma (1909), A. I. Guchkov quotes the testimony of a young S.‐R.: among other causes of her disenchantment, “she said that the revolutionary movement was entirely monopolised by the Jews and that they saw in the triumph of the revolution their own triumph.”771 The enthusiasm for the revolution has seized Jewish society from the bottom to the top, says I. O. Levin: “It is not only the lower strata of the Jewish population of Russia that have devoted themselves to the revolutionary passion,” but this movement “could not fail to catch a large part of the intellectuals and semi‐intellectuals of the Jewish people” (semi‐intellectuals who, in the 20s, constituted the active executives of the Soviet regime). “They were even more numerous among the liberal professions, from dentists to university teachers—those who could settle outside the Pale of Settlement. Having lost the cultural heritage of traditional Judaism, these people were nonetheless foreign to Russian culture and any other national culture. This spiritual vacuum, hidden under a superficially assimilated European culture, made the Jews, already inclined to materialism, by their trades as tradesmen or craftsmen, very receptive to materialistic political theories… The rationalist mode of thought peculiar to the Jews… predisposes them to adhere to doctrines such as that of revolutionary Marxism.”772 The co‐author of this collection, V. S. Mandel, remarks: “Russian Marxism in its purest state, copied from the original German, was never a Russian national movement, and Jews in Russia, who were animated by a revolutionary spirit, for which nothing could be easier than assimilating a doctrine exhibited in books in German, were naturally led to take an important part in the work of transplanting this foreign fruit on Russian soil.”773 F. A. Stepun expressed it thus: “The Jewish youth boldly discussed, quoting Marx in support, the question of the form in which the Russian moujik should possess the land. The
770Landau, op. cit., p. 109. 771A. Guchkov, Retch v Gosoudarstvennoi Doume 16 dek. 1909; Po zaprosou o vzryvc na Astrakhanskoi oulitse (Speech to the State Duma of 16 Dec. 1909, enquiry into the explosion of Astrakhan Street), A. I. Goutchkov v Tretei Gosoudarstvennoi Doume (1907‒ 1912 Gg.): Cb. Retchei (A. I. Guchkov to the third State Duma) (1907 1912), Collection of ‒ speeches, Saint Petersburg, 1912, pp. 143 144. ‒ 772I. O. Levin, Evrei u revolioutsi (The Jews and the Revolution), Rossia i evrei (Russia and the Jews), op. Cit., pp. 130 132. ‒ 773V. S. Mandel, Konservativnyiee i razrouchitelnyie idei v evreistve (Conservative ideas and destructive ideas in Jewish society), ibidem, p 199.
Marxist movement began in Russia with the Jewish youth inside the Pale of Settlement.” Developing this idea, V. S. Mandel recalls “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”…, this stupid and hateful falsity.” Well, “these Jews see in the delusions of the ‘Protocols’ the malicious intention of the anti‐Semites to eradicate Judaism,” but they themselves are “ready, in varying degrees, to organise the world on new principles, and believe that the revolution marks a step forward towards the establishment of the heavenly Kingdom on earth, and attribute to the Jewish people, for its greatest glory, the role of leader of the popular movements for freedom, equality and justice—a leader who, of course, does not hesitate to break down the existing political and social regime.” And he gives as an example a quotation from the book of Fritz Kahn, The Hebrews as a Race and People of Culture: “Moses, one thousand two hundred and fifty years before Jesus Christ, proclaimed the rights of man… Christ paid with his life the preaching of Communist manifestos in a capitalist state”, then “in 1848, the star of Bethlehem rose for the second time… and it rose again above the roofs of Judea: Marx.”774 Thus, “of this common veneration for the revolution emerge and distinguish certain currents of opinion in Jewish society—all desperately unrealistic, childishly pretentious, thereby irresistibly aspiring to a troubled era, and not in Russia alone, but encompassing the entire century.”775 With what casualness and what gravity at the same time, with what beautiful promises Marxism penetrates into the consciousness of cultivated Russia! Finally, the revolution has found its scientific foundation with its cortège of infallible deductions and inevitable predictions! Among the young Marxists, there is Julius Tsederbaum; Martov, the future great leader of the Mensheviks, who, together with his best friend Lenin, will first found the “Union for the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class” (of all Russia)—only he will not enjoy the same protection as Lenin, exiled in the merciful country of Minousine: he will have to serve his three years in the tough region of Tourukhan. It was he, too, who, together with Lenin, designed the Iskra776 and set up a whole network for its dissemination. But even before collaborating with Lenin to found the All‐Russian SocialDemocratic Party, Martov, then exiled to Vilnius, had set up the ideological and organisational foundations of a “Jewish Joint Labour Union for Lithuania, Poland and Russia”. Martov’s idea was that, from now on, propaganda within the masses should be favoured as work within the circles, and, for this, make it “more specifically Jewish”, and, in particular, translate it into Yiddish. In his lecture, Martov described the principles of the new Union: “We expected 774Mandel, ibidem, pp. 172 173. ‒ 775I. M. Biekerman, Rossiya i rouskoie evreistvo (Russia and the Jews of Russia), ibidem, p. 34. 776The Iskra (The Spark) is the first Marxist newspaper created by Lenin abroad. Was published from 1900 to 1903. Was resumed by the Mensheviks and was published until 1905.
everything from the movement of the Russian working class and considered ourselves as an appendix of the pan‐Russian workers’ movement… we had forgotten to maintain the link with the Jewish mass who does not know Russian. But at the same time, “without suspecting it, we hoisted the Jewish movement to a height unmatched by the Russians.” Now is the time to free the Jewish movement “from the mental oppression to which the [Jewish] bourgeoisie has subjected it,” which is “the lowest and lowest bourgeoisie in the world”, “to create a specifically Jewish workers’ organisation, which will serve as guide and instructor for the Jewish proletariat.” In the “national character of the movement,” Martov saw a victory over the bourgeoisie, and with this “we are perfectly safe… from nationalism.”777 In the following year, Plekhanov, at the Congress of the International Socialist, described the Jewish Social‐Democratic movement as “the vanguard of the working‐class army in Russia.”778 It was the latter which became the Bund (Vilnius, 1897), six months before the creation of the Social‐Democratic Party of Russia. The next stage is the First Congress of the Russian Social‐Democratic Party, which takes place in Minsk (where the Central Committee of the Bund was located) in 1898. The Jewish Encyclopædia tells us that “out of eight delegates, five were Jewish: the envoys of a Kiev newspaper, The Workers’ Gazette, B. Eidelman, N. Vigdorchik, and those of the Bund: A. Kremer, A. Mutnik, S. Katz [were also present Radchenko, Petruyvitch and Vannovsky] . Within the Central Committee of the party (of three members) which was constituted at this Congress entered A. Kremer and B. Eidelman.”779 Thus was born the SocialDemocratic Labour Party of Russia, in a close relationship with the Bund. (Let us add: even before the creation of Iskra, it was to Lenin that the direction of the newspaper of the Bund had been proposed.780) The fact that the Bund was created in Vilnius is not surprising: Vilnius was “the Lithuanian Jerusalem”, a city inhabited by a whole cultivated Jewish elite, and through which transited, in provenance of the West, all the illegal literature heading to Saint Petersburg and Moscow.781 But the Bund, despite its internationalist ideology, “became a factor of national unity of Jewish life,” even though “its leaders were guarding against nationalism as if it were the plague” (like the Russian Social‐Democrats who succeeded in watching out for it until the end). While subsidies flowed from abroad, consented by the wealthy Jewish milieus, the Bund advocated the
777I. Martov, Povorotnyi punkt v istorii evreiskogo rabotchego dvijeniia (A turning point in the history of the workers’ movement Soblazn Sotsializma (The temptation of socialism), pp. 249, 259 264, JE, t. 5, p. 94. ‒ 778G. V. Plekhanov o sotsialistitcheskom dvijenii sredi evreiev (G. V. Plekhanov on the socialist movement among the Jews), Soblazn Sotsializma (The temptation of socialism), p. 266. 779SJE, t. 7, p. 396. 780V. I. Lenin, Sotchincniia (Works in 45 vols., 4th ed.), Gospolitizdat, 1941 1967, vol. 5, pp. ‒ 463 464, 518. ‒ 781Schub, JW‐2, p. 137.
principle that there is not a single Jewish people, and rejected the idea of a “universal Jewish nation,”782 claiming on the contrary, that there are exist two antagonistic classes within the Jewish people (the Bund feared that nationalistic dispositions might “obscure the class consciousness of the proletariat”). However, there was hardly any Jewish proletariat in the strict sense of the term: the Jews seldom entered factories, as F. Kohn explains, “they considered it disgraceful not to be their own master”, albeit very modestly—as an artisan or even an apprentice, when one can nurture the hope of opening one’s own workshop. “To be hired in a factory was to lose all illusions as to the possibility of becoming one day one’s own master, and that is why working in a factory was a humiliation, a disgrace.”783 (Another obstacle was the reluctance of employers to hire workers whose day of rest was Saturday and not Sunday.) As a result, the Bund declared “Jewish proletariat” both the artisans, and small traders, and clerks (was not every employed worker a proletarian, according to Marx?), and even commercial intermediaries. To all these individuals the revolutionary spirit could be inculcated, and they had be joined to the struggle against the autocracy. The Bund even declared that the Jews “are the best proletariat in the world.”784 (The Bund never renounced the idea of “strengthening its work among Christian workers.”) Not suspected of sympathy for socialism, G. B. Sliosberg writes in this regard that the enormous propaganda deployed by the Bund and some of its interventions “have done harm, and in particular an immediate damage to Jewish trade and their start‐up industries.” The Bund was turning against the employing instructors the very young apprentices, kids of 14 15 years old; its ‒ members broke the tiles of “more or less opulent Jewish houses.” In addition, “on Yom‐Kippur, young people from the Bund went into the great synagogue [in Vilnius], interrupted the prayer and started an incredible party, with beer flowing abundantly…”785 But, in spite of its class fanaticism, the Bund was increasingly based on a universal current equally characteristic of bourgeois liberalism: “It was increasingly understood in the cultivated world that the national idea plays an essential role in the awakening of self‐consciousness in every man, which obliged the theoreticians of the proletarian circles themselves to raise more broadly the national question”; thus, in the Bund, “assimilationist tendencies were gradually supplanted by national tendencies.”786—This, Jabotinsky 782Aronson, V borbe za… (In the fight for…), BJWR‐1, p. 222. 783Revolioutsionnoie dvijeniie sredi evreiev (The revolutionary movement among the Jews) Sb. 1, M.; Vsesoiouznoie Obschestvo Politkatorjan i Ssylno‐poselentsev (Collection 1, M., Association for the Soviet Union of Prisoners and Political Exiles), 1930, p. 25. 784S. Dimanstein, Revolioutsionnoie dvijeniie sredi evreiev (The Revolutionary Movement Among the Jews), Sb. 1905: Istoriia rcvolioutsionnogo dvijeniia v otdelnykh otcherkakh (Collection 1905: History of the Revolutionary Movement, some separate studies), directed by N. Pokrovsky, T. 3, Book 1, M‐L., 1927, pp. 127, 138, 156. 785G. B. Sliosberg, Dela minouvehikh dnei: Zapiski ruskogo evreia (Things of the Past: Notes of a Russian Jew), 3 vols., Paris, 1933 1934, vol. 3, pp. 136 137. ‒ ‒ 786JE, t. 3, p. 337.
confirms: “As it grows, the Bund replaces a national ideology with cosmopolitanism.”787 Abram Amsterdam, “one of the first important leaders of the Bund”, who died prematurely, “tried to reconcile the Marxist doctrine with the ideas of nationalism.”788—In 1901, at a congress of the Bund, one of the future leaders of the year Seventeen, Mark Lieber (M. I. Goldman), who was then a young man of 20, declared: “so far we have been cosmopolitan believers. We must become national. Do not be afraid of the word. National does not mean nationalist.” (May we understand it, even if it is ninety years late!) And, although this congress had endorsed a resolution against “the exaltation of the national sentiment which leads to chauvinism”, he also pronounced himself for the national autonomy of the Jews “regardless of the territory inhabited by them.”789 This slogan of national autonomy, the Bund developed it for a few years, both in its propaganda and its campaign of political banquets of 1904… although nobody knew exactly what could mean autonomy without territory. Thus, every Jewish person was given the right to use only his own language in his dealings with the local administration and the organs of the State… but how? (For should not this right also be granted to the nationals of other nations?) It should also be noted that, in spite of its socialist tendencies, the Bund, “in its social‐democratic programme”, pronounced itself “against the demand for the restoration of Poland… and against constituent assemblies for the marches of Russia.”790 Nationalism, yes—but for oneself alone? Thus, the Bund admitted only Jews in its midst. And once this orientation was taken, and although it was radically anticlerical, it did not accept the Jews who had denied their religion. The parallel Russian Social‐Democratic organisations, the Bund, call them “Christian”—and, moreover, how could they be represented differently? But what a cruel offence for Lenin791 to be so catalogued among the “Christians”! The Bund thus embodies the attempt to defend Jewish interests, in particular against Russian interests. Here too, Sliosberg acknowledges: “The Bund’s action has resulted in a sense of dignity and awareness of the rights of Jewish workers.”792 Subsequently, the Bund’s relations with the Russian Social‐Democratic Party were not easy. As with the Polish Socialist Party, which at the time of the birth of the Bund had an “extremely suspicious” attitude towards it and declared that “the isolationism of the Bund places it in an adversarial position in relation
787V. Jabotinski, Vvdeniie (Preface) to Kh. N. Bialik, Pesni i poemy (Songs and poems), Saint Petersburg, ed. Zaltsman, 1914, p. 36. 788JE, t. 2, p. 354. 789Aronson, V borbe za… (In the fight for…), BJWR‐1*, pp. 220 222. ‒ 790JE, t. 5, p. 99. 791Lenin, 4th ed., Vol. 6, p. 298. 792Sliosberg, t. 2, p. 258.
to us.”793 Given its increasingly nationalistic tendencies, the Bund could only have conflicting relations with the other branches of Russian Social‐Democracy. Lenin thus describes the discussion he and Martov had with Plekhanov in Geneva in September 1900: “G. V.794 shows a phenomenal intolerance by declaring that [i.e. the Bund] is in no way a social‐democratic organisation, but that it is simply an exploiting organisation that takes advantage of the Russians; he says that our aim is to drive this Bund out of the Party, that the Jews are all without exception chauvinists and nationalists, that the Russian party must be Russian and not turn itself in “bound hand and foot” to the tribe of Gad795… G. V. has stuck to his positions without wanting to reconsider them, saying that we simply lack knowledge of the Jewish world and experience in dealing with it.”796 (From what ear Martov, the first initiator of the Bund, must have heard this diatribe?!) In 1898 the Bund, despite its greater seniority, agreed to join the Russian Social‐Democratic Party, but as a whole, with full autonomy over Jewish affairs. It therefore agreed to be a member of the Russian party, but on condition that it did not interfere in its affairs. Such was the agreement between them. However, at the beginning of 1902, the Bund considered that autonomy, so easily obtained at the 1st Congress of the Social Democratic Party, was no longer enough for it and that it now wanted to join the party on a federal basis, benefiting of full independence, even in programme matters. Regarding this it published a pamphlet against the Iskra.797 The central argument, Lenin explains, was that the Jewish proletariat “is a part of the Jewish people, which occupies a special place among the nations.”798 At this stage, Lenin sees red and feels obliged to clash with the Bund himself. He no longer calls only “to maintain pressure [against autocracy] by avoiding a fragmentation of the party into several independent formations,”799 but he embarks on a passionate argument to prove (following, admittedly, Kautsky) that Jews are by no means a nation: they have neither common language nor territory (a flatly materialistic judgement: the Jews are one of the most authentic nations, the most united found on earth. United, it is in spirit. In his superficial and vulgar internationalism, Lenin could not understand the depth or historical roots of the Jewish question.) “The idea of a separate Jewish people is politically reactionary,”800 it justifies Jewish particularism. (And all the more “reactionary” were Zionists to him!) Lenin saw a solution for the Jews
793JE*, t. 5, p. 95. 794G. V.: Georgiy Valentinovich Plekhanov (1856 1918). Social‐democrat, Marxist, leading ‒ member of The Will of the People. Emigrated in 1880. Leader of the Menshevik party. 795Gad. One of the twelve sons of Jacob. One of the twelve tribes of Israel. 796Lenin, 4th ed., Vol. 4, p. 311. 797JE, t. 5, pp. 96 97. ‒ 798Lenin, 4th ed., t.7, p.77. 799Ibidem, t. 6, p. 300. 800Ibidem, t. 7, pp. 83 84. ‒
only in their total assimilation—which amounts to saying, in fact, to cease outright being Jewish. In the summer of 1903, at the 2nd Congress of the Social‐Democratic Party of Russia in Brussels, out of 43 delegates, there were only five of the Bund (however, “many Jews participated”). And Martov, “supported by twelve Jews” (among them Trotsky, Deutsch, Martynov, Liadov, to name but a few), spoke on behalf of the party against the “federal” principle demanded by the Bund. The members of the Bund then left the Congress (which permitted Lenin’s proposed statutes in paragraph 1 to prevail), and then also left the party.801 (After the split of the Social Democratic Party into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, “the leaders of the Mensheviks were A. Axelrod, A. Deutsch, L. Martov, M. Lieber, L. Trotsky,”802 as well as F. Dan, R. Abramovich—Plekhanov remaining on the sidelines.) On the “Street of the Jews,” as it was then called, the Bund quickly became a powerful and active organisation. “Until the eve of the events of 1905, the Bund was the most powerful social‐democratic organisation in Russia, with a well‐established apparatus, good discipline, united members, flexibility and great experience in conspiring.” Nowhere else is there a discipline like in the Bund. The “bastion” of the Bund was the North‐West region.803 However, formidable competition arose with the “Independent Jewish Workers’ Party” which was created in 1901 under the influence and the exhortations of Zubatov804: it persuaded the Jewish workers and all who would listen that it was not the social democratic ideology they needed but struggle against the bourgeoisie defending their economic interests to them—the government was interested in their success, they could act legally, their authority would a benevolent referee. The head of this movement was the daughter of a miller, the intrepid Maria Vilbouchevitch. “The supporters of Zubatov… enjoyed great success in Minsk with the (Jewish) workers”; they were passionately opposed to the members of the Bund and obtained much by organising economic strikes. They also acted, not without success, in Odessa (Khuna Shayevich). But just as, throughout the country, the frightened government (and Plehve805) foiled Zubatov’s project , likewise with the “independents”: Shayevich was arrested in 1903, sentenced to a fairly short sentence—but then came the news of the Kishinev pogrom, and the “independents” had their hands tied.806
801JE, t. 5, p. 97; SJE, I. 7, p. 397. 802SJE, t. 7, p. 397. 803Dimanstein, “1905”, vol. 3, Book I, pp. 127, 138, 156. 804Sergei Vasilyevich Zubatov (1864 1917): Chief of the Moscow Police and Special Police ‒ Department (1902 1905). ‒ 805Viatcheslav Konstantinovich Plehve (1846 1904): cunning Minister of the Interior, killed ‒ by the terrorist S. R. Sozonov. 806N. A. Buchbinder, Nezavissimaia evreiskaia rabolchaia partiia (The Independent Jewish Workers’ Party). Krasnaia letopis: lstoritcheskii journal (Red Chronicle: Historical Review), 1922, no. 2 3, pp. 208 241. ‒ ‒
Meanwhile, “the Bund was receiving help from foreign groups” from Switzerland first and then from Paris, London, the United States where “action groups… had reached sizeable proportions.” Organised “clubs, Rotarian action groups, associations of aid to the work of the Bund in Russia. This aid was mainly financial.”807 From 1901, the Bund renounced “economic terror” (lashing out on employers, monitoring factories), because it “obscured the social‐democratic consciousness of the workers”, and they pretended equally of condemning political terror.”808 This did not prevent Guirsh Lekkert, a cobbler who was a member of the Bund, from shooting at the governor of Vilnius—and to be hanged for it. The young Mendel Deutsch, still a minor, also fired shots whose significance marked “the apogee of the movement of the Jewish masses.”809 And already the Bund was wondering if it should not go back to terror. In 1902, the Berdichev Conference endorsed a resolution on “organised revenge”. But a debate broke out in the Bund, and the following year the Congress formally annulled this decision of the Conference.810 According to Lenin, the Bund, in 1903, went through “terrorist temptations, which it then got over.”811 Terror, which had already manifested itself more than once in Russia, enjoyed a general indulgence, an indulgence which was in the air of the time, and which, with the increasingly widespread custom of holding, “just in case,” a firearm (and it was easy to obtain one via smuggling) could not fail to arouse, in the minds of the youth of the Pale of Settlement, the idea of forming their own combat regiments. But the Bund had active and dangerous competitors. Is it a historical coincidence, or the time had simply come for the Jewish national consciousness to be reborn, in any case, it is in 1897, the year of the creation of the Bund, just a month prior, the First Universal Congress of Zionism took place. And it was in the early 1900s that young Jews pioneered a new path, “a public service path… at the crossroads between Iskra and Bne Moshe” (“the sons of Moses”), some turning right, the others heading left.”812 “In the programmes of all our groupings which appeared between 1904 and 1906, the national theme held its proper place.”813 We have seen that the Socialist Bund had not cut it off, and it now only had to condemn Zionism all the more firmly in order to excite national sentiment to the detriment of class consciousness.
807JE, t. 5, p. 101; SJE, t. 1, pp. 559 560. ‒ 808JE, t.5, p.96. 809Dimanstein, “1905”, T. 3, Book I, pp. 149 150. ‒ 810JE*, t. 5, p. 97. 811Lenin, 4th ed. 6, p. 288. 812I. Ben‐Tsvi. 813S. M. Ginzburg, O roussko‐evreiskoi intelligentsii (From the Russo‐Jewish Intelligence), Sb. Evreiski mir; Ejegodnik na 1939 g. (Rcc. The Jewish World, Annual for the year 1939), Paris, Association of the Russo‐Jewish Intelligence, p. 39.
It is true that “the numbers of the Zionist circles among the youth gave way to the number of young people adhering to the revolutionary socialist parties.”814 (Although there were counter‐examples: thus the publisher of the Jewish Socialist La Pravda of Geneva, G. Gurevitch, had re‐converted to devote himself entirely to the issue of the Jews’ settlement in Palestine.) The ditch dug between Zionism and the Bund was gradually filled by such and such a new party, then another, then a third—Poalei‐Tsion, Zeirei‐Tsion, the “ZionistSocialists”, the serpovtsy (seimovtsy)—, each combining in its own way Zionism and socialism. It is understandable that between parties so close to one other a fierce struggle developed, and this did not facilitate the task of the Bund. Nor did the emigration of the Jews from Russia into Israel, which gained momentum in those years: why emigrate? What sense does this have when the Jewish proletariat must fight for socialism side by side with the working class of all countries…, which would automatically solve the Jewish question everywhere? The Jews have often been criticised in the course of history for the fact that many of them were usurers, bankers, merchants. Yes, the Jews formed a significant detachment, creator of the world of capital—and mainly in its financial forms. This, the great political economist Werner Sombart described it with a vigorous and convincing pen. In the first years of the Revolution this circumstance was, on the contrary, attributed to the Jews, as an inevitable formation on the road to socialism. And in one of his indictments, in 1919, Krylenko found it necessary to emphasise that “the Jewish people, since the Middle Ages, has taken out of their ranks the holders of a new influence, that of capital… they precipitated… the dissolution of economic forms of another age.”815 Yes, of course, the capitalist system in the economic and commercial field, the democratic system in the political field are largely indebted to the constructive contribution of the Jews, and these systems in turn are the most favourable to the development of Jewish life and culture. But—and this is an unfathomable historical enigma—these systems were not the only ones that the Jews favoured. As V. S. Mandel reminds us, if we refer to the Bible, we discover that “the very idea of a monarchy was invented by no other people but the Hebrews, and they transmitted it to the Christian world. The monarch is not chosen by the people, he is the chosen by God. Hence the rite which the Christian peoples have inherited from the coronation and anointing of the kings.”816 (One might rectify by recalling that the Pharaohs long ago were also anointed, and also bearers of the divine will.) For his part, the former Russian revolutionary A. Valt‐Lessine remembers: “The Jews did not accord great importance to the 814Sliosberg, t. 3, p. 133. 815N. V. Krylenko, Za piat lct. 1918 1922: Obvinitelnyie retchi po naibolee kroupnym ‒ protsessam, zaslouchannym v Moskovskom i Verkhovnom Revolioutsionnykh Tribounalakh (Over five years, 1918 1922: Submissions made in the highest trials before the Supreme ‒ Court and the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal), 1923, p. 353. 816Mandel, Rossia i evrei (Russia and the Jews), op. Cit., p. 177.
revolutionary movement. They put all their hopes in the petitions addressed to Saint Petersburg, or even in the bribes paid to the officials of the ministries— but not at all in the revolution.”817 This kind of approach to the influential spheres received, on the part of the impatient Jewish youth, the sobriquet, known since the Middle Ages and now infamous, of chtadlan. Someone like G. B. Sliosberg, who worked for many years in the Senate and the Ministry of the Interior, and who patiently had to solve Jewish problems of a private nature, thought that this avenue was the safest, with the richest future for the Jews, and he was ulcerated to note the impatience of these young people. Yes, it was perfectly unreasonable, on the part of the Jews, to join the revolutionary movement, which had ruined the course of normal life in Russia and, consequently, that of the Jews of Russia. Yet, in the destruction of the monarchy and in the destruction of the bourgeois order—as, some time before, in the reinforcement of it—the Jews found themselves in the vanguard. Such is the innate mobility of the Jewish character, its extreme sensitivity to social trends and the advancement of the future. It will not be the first time in the history of mankind that the most natural impulses of men will suddenly lead to monstrosities most contrary to their nature.
817A. Lessine, Epizody iz moei jizni (Episodes of My Life), JW‐2, p. 388.
Chapter 7. The Birth of Zionism
How did the Jewish conscience evolve in Russia during the second half of the nineteenth century? Towards 1910, Vladimir Jabotinsky describes this evolution in his somewhat passionate manner: at first, the mass of Jews opposed the Enlightenment, “the fanatic prejudice of an overvalued specificity.” But time did its work, and “as much Jews, historically, fled humanist culture, as much they aspire to it now… and this thirst for knowledge is so widespread that it perhaps makes us, Jews of Russia, the first nation in the world.” However, “running towards the goal, we passed it. Our goal was to form a Jew who, by staying Jewish, could live a life that would be that of the universal man”, and “now we have totally forgotten that we must remain Jewish”, “we stopped attaching a price to our Jewish essence, and it began to weigh on us.” We must “extirpate this mentality from self‐contempt and revive the mentality of selfrespect… We complain that we are despised, but we are not far from despising ourselves.”818 This description reflects the general trend towards assimilation, but not all aspects of the picture. As we have already seen (chapter 4), in the late sixties of the nineteenth century, the publicist and man of letters Smolenskin had spoken out vigorously against the tendency to assimilate Jewish intellectuals, as he had observed it in Odessa or as it had spread in Germany. And he at once declared war on both “bigots and false devotees who want to drive out all knowledge of the house of Israel.” No! One must not be ashamed of their origins, one must cherish their national language and dignity; however, national culture can only be preserved through language, the ancient Hebrew. This is all the more important because “Judaism deprived of territory” is a particular phenomenon, “a spiritual nation”.819 The Jews are indeed a nation, not a religious congregation. Smolenskin advanced the doctrine of “progressive Jewish nationalism.”820 Throughout the 70s, Smolenskin’s voice remained practically unheard of. At the end of this period, however, the liberation of the Slavs from the Balkans contributed to the national awakening of the Jews of Russia themselves. But the
818V. Jabotinsky, O natsionalnom vospitanii (From the Education of National Sentiment), Sb. Felietony (Collection of Serials). Saint Petersburg. Typography “Herold”, 1913, pp. 5 7. ‒ 819JE*, t. 14, pp. 403 404. ‒ 820I.L. Klauzner, Literatura na ivril v Rossii (Literature in Modern Hebrew in Russia). BJWR, p. 506.
pogroms of 1881 1882 caused the ideals of ‒ Haskala to collapse; “The conviction that civilisation was going to put an end to the persecutions of another age against the Jews and that these, thanks to the Enlightenment, would be able to approach the European peoples, this conviction was considerably shaken.”821 (The experience of the pogroms in the south of Ukraine is thus extrapolated to all the Jews of Europe?) Among the Jews of Russia “there appeared the type of the ‘repentant intellectual’, of those who aspired to return to traditional Judaism.”822 It was then that Lev Pinsker, a well‐known doctor and publicist, already sixty years of age, gave the Jews of Russia and Germany a vigorous appeal to self‐emancipation.823 Pinsker wrote that faith in emancipation had collapsed, that it was now necessary to stifle every ounce of hope in brotherhood among peoples. Today, “the Jews do not constitute a living nation; they are strangers everywhere; they endure oppression and contempt on the part of the peoples who surround them.” The Jewish people is “the spectre of a dead wandering among the living”. “One must be blind not to see that the Jews are the ‘chosen people’ of universal hatred. The Jews cannot “assimilate to any nation and consequently cannot be tolerated by any nation.” “By wanting to mingle with other peoples, they have frivolously sacrificed their own nationality,” but “nowhere have they obtained that the others recognise them as native‐born inhabitants equal to them.” The destiny of the Jewish people cannot depend on the benevolence of other peoples. The practical conclusion thus lies in the creation of “a people on its own territory”. What is needed, therefore, is to find an appropriate territory, “no matter where, in what part of the world,”824 and that the Jews come to populate it. Moreover, the creation in 1860 of the Alliance [Israelite Universal] was nothing but the first sign of Jewish refusal of a single option—assimilation. There already existed among the Jews of Russia a movement of Palestinophilia, the aspiration to return to Palestine. (Conforming, in essence, to traditional religious salutation: “Next year in Jerusalem.”) This movement gained momentum after 1881 1882. “Stretching out its efforts to colonise ‒ Palestine… so that within a century the Jews can finally leave the inhospitable land of Europe”… The slogans that the Enlightenment had previously broadcasted, inciting to fight “traditionalism, Hasidism and religious prejudices, gave way to a call for reconciliation and the union of all layers of Jewish society for the realisation of the ideals” of Palestine, “for the return to the Judaism of
821JE, 1.12, p. 259. 822Ibidem, t. 13, p. 639. 823Title of his famous work. 824Ibidem, t. 12, pp. 526 527; ‒ Hessen*, t. 2, pp. 233 234; ‒ G. Svet, Rousskiie evrei v sionizme i v stroilelstve Palestiny i Izrailia (The Jews of Russia in Zionism and the Edification of Palestine and Israel). BJWR-1 *, pp. 244 245. ‒
our fathers.” “In many cities of Russia, circles were formed, called circles of the ‘Lovers of Zion’—Khovevei‐Tsion.825826 And it was thus that an idea joined another to rectify it. Going to settle elsewhere, yes, but not anywhere: in Palestine. But what had happened in Palestine? “The first crusade resulted in the virtual disappearance of the few Hebrews who remained in Palestine.” Nevertheless, “a tiny Jewish religious community had succeeded in surviving and the collapse of the Crusader State, and the conquest of the country by the Mamelukes, and the invasion by the Mongol hordes.” Over the following centuries, the Jewish population was somewhat replenished by a modest migratory flow of “believers from different countries”. At the end of the eighteenth century a certain number of Hasidim emigrated from Russia. “In the middle of the nineteenth century, there were twelve thousand Jews in Palestine,” whereas at the end of the eleventh century there were twenty‐five thousand. “These Jewish towns in the land of Israel constituted what was called the Yishuv. All their inhabitants (men) were only studying Judaism, and nothing else. They lived on Haluka—subsidies sent by Jewish communities in Europe. These funds were distributed by the rabbis, hence the absolute authority of the rabbis. The leaders of the Yishuv “rejected any attempt to create in the country even an embryo of productive work of Jewish origin.” They were studying exclusively the Talmud, nothing else, and on a fairly elementary level. “The great Jewish historian G. Gretz, who visited Palestine in 1872,” found that “only a minority studied for real, the others preferred to stroll the streets, remained idle, engaged in gossip and slander.” He believed that “this system favours obscurantism, poverty and degeneration of the Jewish population of Palestine”—and for this he himself “had to undergo Herem827.”828 In 1882, in Kharkov, Palestinophile students founded the Biluim circle. They proposed to “create in Palestine a model agricultural colony”, to set “the tone to the general colonisation of Palestine by the Jews”; they undertook to found circles in several cities of Russia. (Later they created a first settlement in Palestine, but were confronted to the hostility and opposition of the traditional Yishuv: the rabbis demanded that, according to ancient custom, the cultivation of the earth be suspended one year out of seven.829) Pinsker supported the advocates of the return to Palestine: in 1887 he summoned the first Congress of Palestinophiles in Katovice, then in Druskeniki, and the second in 1887. Propagandists began to cover the Pale of
825JE*, t. 12, pp. 259 260. ‒ 826A pioneering Zionist movement founded before Herzl. 827Herem (Hebrew word): the status of one who is cut off from the community due to impurity or consecration. The individual in state of Herem is an outlaw. A kind of excommunication. 828M. Wartburg, Plata za sionism (The Wage of Zionism), in “22”: Obschestvennopoliticianski i liieratournyi journal evreiskoi intelligenlsii iz SSSR V Izraile (“22”: politicosocial and literary review of the Jewish intelligentsia emigrated from USSR to Israel), Tel Aviv, 1987, No. 56, pp. 112 114; ‒ Svet, SJE-1, pp. 235 243. ‒ 829JE, t. 4, pp. 577 579; ‒ Warthurg, in “22”, 1987, no. 56, p. 115.
Settlement, speaking in synagogues and public meetings. (Deutsch testifies that after 1882 P. Axelrod himself contributed to palestinophilia…830) Of course, Smolenskin is one of the passionate apostles of the return to Palestine: bubbling and lively, he connects with Anglo‐Jewish political actors, but he comes up against the opposition of the Alliance, who does not want to promote the colonisation of Palestine, but rather to direct the migratory wave towards America. He then describes the tactics of the Alliance as “betrayal of the cause of the people.” His premature death cut his efforts short.831 We note, however, that this movement towards Palestine was rather weakly received by the Jews of Russia; it was even thwarted. “The idea of a political revival of the Jewish people brought a small handful of intellectuals behind it at the time, and it soon came up against fierce adversaries.”832 The conservative circles, the rabbinate and the Tzadikim833 saw in this current towards Palestine an attack on the divine will, “an attack on faith in the Messiah who alone must bring the Jews back to Palestine. As for the progressive assimilationists, they saw in this current a reactionary desire to isolate the Jews from the rest of enlightened humanity.”834 The Jews of Europe did not support the movement either. Meanwhile, on site, the success of the return was revealed to be “too mitigated”: “many colonists discovered their incompetence in the work of the land”; “the ideal of rebirth of the ancient country was crumbling into petty acts of pure benevolence”; “The colonies survived only because of the subsidies sent by Baron Rothschild.” And in the early 1990s, “colonisation went through… a serious crisis due to an anarchic system of land purchase” and a decision by Turkey (the owner of Palestine) to ban the Jews of Russia from disembarking in Palestinian ports.835 It was at this time that the publicist, thinker and organiser Asher Ginzberg became known, under the eloquent pseudonym of Ahad Haam (“One of His People”). He strongly criticised practical palestinophilia as it had been constituted; what he advocated was, “before striving for a renaissance on a territory”, to worry about “a ‘rebirth of hearts’, an intellectual and moral improvement of the people”: “to install at the centre of Jewish life, a living and spiritual aspiration, a desire for national cohesion, revival and free development in a national spirit, but on the basis of all men.”836 This will later be called “spiritual Zionism” (but not “religious”, and this is important). That same year, 1889, in order to unite among them those who were dear to the idea of a rebirth of national feeling, Ahad Haam founded a league—or, as it
830L. Deulsch, King evreiev v rousskom revolioutsionnom dvijenii (The role of the Jews in The Russian revolutionary movement), t. 1, 2nd ed., ML., 1925, pp. 5, 161. 831JE, t. 14, pp. 406 407. ‒ 832Hessen, t. 2, p. 234. 833Tzadikim (Hebrew word): the righteous. 834JE, t. 12, p. 261. 835Ibidem, pp. 261 262. ‒ 836JE*, t. 3, pp. 480 482.