Читать книгу History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume 3 of 3. From the Accession of Nicholas II until the Present Day - Dubnow Simon - Страница 6

In the domain of those liberal professions to which the Jewish intellectuals, being barred from entering the civil service, were particularly attracted, the law went to almost any length in its endeavor to keep them closed to the Jews. The legal career had been blocked to them ever since the passage of the law of 1889, which made the admission of a properly qualified Jew to the bar dependent upon the granting of a special permission by the Minister of Justice. In the course of a whole decade, the Minister found it possible to grant this permission only to one Jew, who, it may be added, had sat on the bench for twenty-five years – there were two or three such "relics," dating back to the liberal era of Alexander II. In consequence of this provision, the proportion of Jews at the bar, which prior to the enactment of the restriction had reached from fourteen to twenty-two per cent, was reduced to nine per cent. In 1897, a committee appointed by the Government was considering the proposal to place the disability on the statute books and to establish a ten per cent norm for Jewish lawyers. The reasons advanced by the committee for the proposed restriction were of the distinctly mediæval variety:

The conduct of a lawyer is determined by the impulses of his will, of his conscience, – in other words, that sphere of his inner life which finds its manifestation in religion. Now the admission of Jews constitutes a menace, resulting from views peculiar to the Jewish race, which are contrary to Christian morality.

Subsequently, the champions of "Christian morality" on the staff of the Ministry of Justice bethought themselves that it might even be better and nobler to stop the admission of Jews to the bar altogether, and the proposal regarding the percentage norm was tabled. Hundreds upon hundreds of young Jews who had completed their legal education at the universities, or who had acted as assistants to sworn attorneys, saw once more their hopes for the legitimate pursuit of their profession vanish into the air.

Jewish physicians were restricted to private practice and robbed of their right to occupy a Government or public position. Even the autonomous Zemstvo institutions adopted more and more the practice of refusing to appoint Jews, and very frequently the printed advertisements of the Zemstvos offering medical positions contained the stipulation kromye yevreyev ("except the Jews").

The scholastic education of the Jewish children was throttled in the same pitiless manner as theretofore. The disgraceful school norm which had been introduced in 188714 performed with ever-increasing relentlessness its task of dooming to spiritual death the Jewish youths who were knocking at the doors of the gymnazia and universities. In the beginning of 1898, the post of Minister of Public Instruction, which had been occupied by Dyelanov, was entrusted to Professor Bogolepov of Moscow. While Dyelanov had been occasionally inclined to soften the rigor of the school norm – it was commonly rumored that this good-natured dignitary could not bear to see a woman cry, and the tearful entreaties of the mothers of the rejected scholars made him sanction the admission of a certain number of Jewish children over and above the established percentage norm – his successor Bogolepov, an academic teacher who had become a gendarme of education, was impervious to any sentiment of pity. In the course of the three years of his administration, he not only refused to admit the slightest departure from the established norm, but attempted to curtail it still further. Thus, orders were issued to calculate the percentage norm of the Jewish applicants for admission to the universities not in its relation to the total number of the annual admissions, but separately for each faculty (1898-1899). This provision was designed to limit the number of Jewish students who flocked to the medical and legal faculties, since, in view of the fact that the Jews were entirely barred from appointments in the general educational institutions, the other faculties did not offer them even a sporting chance of earning a livelihood. The ruthlessness displayed by the Ministry of Public Instruction towards the Jewish youth was officially justified on the ground that certain elements among them were affiliated with the revolutionary movement which, just at that time, had assumed particular intensity in the Russian student body. This sentiment was openly voiced in a circular of the Ministry, issued on May 26, 1901, which makes the following statement: "The disorders which took place at the end of the nineties in the institutions of higher learning testified to the fact that the instigators of these disorders were, to a large extent, persons of non-Russian extraction."

Bogolepov himself, the reactionary Minister of enlightenment, fell a victim of this agitation among the student body. He died from the bullet of a Terrorist who happened to be of unadulterated Russian extraction. His successor, General Vannovski (1901-1902), though endeavoring to assuage the university disorders by a policy of "kindly solicitude," maintained the former uncompromising attitude as far as the Jews were concerned. In view of the fact that, in spite of all restrictions, the ratio of Jewish students at all universities actually exceeded the norm prescribed by law, the new Minister decreed that the percentage of Jewish admissions be temporarily curtailed in the following proportion: Two per cent for the capitals (instead of the former three per cent), three per cent for the universities outside of the Pale of Settlement (instead of five per cent), and seven per cent for the Pale of Settlement (instead of ten per cent).

Even the restrictions placed upon the admission of the Jews to the gymnazia were intensified. In 1901, Jewish children who had graduated from a pro-gymnazium15 were forbidden to continue their education in the advanced classes of a gymnazium unless there was a free Jewish vacancy within the percentage norm – a truly miraculous contingency. The same policy was extended to the commercial schools established with funds which were provided by the merchant class and the bulk of which came from Jews. In the commercial schools maintained by the commercial associations Jewish children were admitted only in proportion to the contributions of the Jewish merchants towards the upkeep of the particular school. In private commercial schools, however, percentages of all kinds, varying from ten to fifty per cent, were fixed in the case of Jewish pupils. This provision had the effect that Jewish parents were vitally interested in securing the entrance of as many Christian children as possible in order to increase thereby the number of Jewish vacancies. Occasionally, a Jewish father, in the hope of creating a vacancy for his son, would induce a Christian to send his boy to a commercial school – though the latter, as a rule, offered little attraction for the Christian population – by undertaking to defray all expenses connected with his education. Yet many Jewish children, though enduring all these humiliations, found themselves outside the doors of the intermediate Russian schools.

It is worthy of note that in this attempt at the spiritual extermination of the Jewish children by barring them from intermediate educational institutions the Russian law followed strictly the ancient rule of the Pharaohs: "If it be a son, then ye shall kill him; but if it be a daughter, then she shall live." The Government schools for girls were opened to the Jewish population without any restriction, and the influx of Jewesses to these gymnazia was only checked unofficially by the anti-Semitic authorities of this or that institution, thereby turning the tide of applicants in the direction of private girls' schools. But as far as the higher schools were concerned, Jewish girls were subjected to the same restrictions as the boys. The Higher Courses for Women and the Pedagogic Courses in St. Petersburg restricted the admission of Jewesses to five per cent. The constitution of the Medical Institute for Women, founded in 1895, provided at first for the entire exclusion of Jewesses. But in 1897, the doors of this institution were opened to the hated tribe – just enough to admit them to the extent of three per cent.

It was scarcely to be expected that the Jewish youths who had been locked out of the Russian school should entertain particularly friendly sentiments towards a régime which wasted their lives, humiliated their dignity, and sullied their souls. The Jewish lad, driven from the doors of the gymnazia, became an embittered "extern," who was forced to study at home and from year to year present himself for examination before the school authorities. An immense host of young men and women who found their way blocked to the higher educational institutions in Russia went abroad, flocking to foreign universities and higher professional schools, where they learned to estimate at its full value a régime which in their own country denied them the advantages granted to them outside of it. A large number of these college youths returned home permeated with revolutionary ideas – living witnesses to the sagacity of a Government which saw its reason for existence in the suppression of all revolutionary strivings.