Читать книгу Within the Pale - Michael Davitt - Страница 3

Table of Contents

It is deemed necessary, for the twofold aim of this book,—to arouse public feeling against a murder-making legend, and to put forward a plea for the objects of the Zionist movement,—to tell the story of the Russian Jew, apropos of recent massacres. This task could only be partially done in my despatches from Kishineff to Mr. William R. Hearst’s American papers. Moreover, all the despatches were not published, for reasons which govern the exigencies of journals that are concerned much more with a record of daily events in the United States than with history.

While in Russia I tried to find both sides of the anti-Semitic Question, so as to give expression to all views which could throw light upon crimes that had shocked the public mind in America and in Europe no more than they had pained and scandalised all right-thinking Russians.

To several of the minor representatives of the Tsar’s Government I owe an acknowledgment for uniform courtesies, and for valuable assistance in my investigations, and I endeavour, in the chapter on “Russia’s Attitude,” to let the voice of such exponents of official Russian ideas and purposes be heard alongside of counter Jewish accusations.

The unwarranted attempts that have been made in some quarters to use the Kishineff crimes as means of creating an unfriendly feeling between the two greatest powers in the world to-day—the United States Republic and the Empire of Russia—are reprehensible. There are very unworthy motives behind this mischievous endeavour that are not calculated to serve the cause of the Russian Jew. The writer of these pages can have no sympathy with nor lend encouragement of any kind to these sinister efforts.

Russia cannot, for her own sake, allow the present state of things to continue within the Pale of Settlement. Reform or revolution must deal with an absolutely impossible condition of social and economic life.

I follow Russian, and not Jewish, guidance in the brief sketch I give of the history of the Russian Jew and of his long and persistent persecution. The clear and unbiassed opinions, and statement of historic facts, so courageously and clearly expressed in Prince Demidoff San Donato’s book, have been the chief source of information from which the materials for that sketch have been derived.

The Jew, as he is ruled and oppressed by Russian officials, is a far greater danger to Russian autocracy than anti-Semitism is to the Israelites of the Pale. The danger was candidly avowed by all representative Russians from whom I solicited light and information. The average Russian, however, errs most seriously in believing that measures of repression, like those of 1882 and 1891, can ever cure the Empire of its “Semitic malady,” as one high official harshly expressed it. Had far more drastic and more barbarous methods of coercion than those of General Ignatieff possessed the power to cure a similar “malady,” or kill the same race, no Jew would be alive on earth to-day to trouble the domestic cares of the Tsar’s Government. There can be no stronger argument against the policy of continued repression found in the literature or history of liberty than the existence and the marvellous influence to-day of this, the most persecuted of all peoples among the civilised races.

Contempt for human rights, even if they be Jewish rights, is an unwise attitude for an autocratic government. It can only lead to more outrage, through the example and encouragement it offers to the lowest aims of anti-Semitism; to more poverty, through the steady increase within the existing Pale of men and women of the most intellectual of races, who grow up conscious of the fact that they are made poor by the working of special laws, because they are Hebrews. Such contempt and neglect are the best recruiting forces for disloyalty and Socialism among 4,000,000 subjects, having powerful racial friends and political allies in countries where Russia’s strongest enemies are to be found; and are far more dangerous to Russia’s internal peace and progress than any measure of Jewish emancipation could possibly be.

This book is neither inspired by feeling, political or otherwise, against Russia, nor by any pro-Jewish purpose outside the questions immediately touched upon by the writer. Where anti-Semitism stands, in fair political combat, in opposition to the foes of nationality, or against the engineers of a sordid war in South Africa, or as the assailant of the economic evils of unscrupulous capitalism anywhere, I am resolutely in line with its spirit and programme. Where, however, it only speaks and acts in a cowardly racial warfare, which descends to the use of an atrocious fabrication responsible for odious and unspeakable crimes like those that are to its credit in the massacres of Kishineff, it becomes a thing deserving of no more toleration from right-minded men than do the germs of some malady laden with the poison of a malignant disease.

The inquiries made by me in Kishineff convince me that the peculiar atrocity of most of the crimes perpetrated against the Jews of the city at Easter were directly attributable to the horrible influence of the ritual-murder propaganda upon untutored minds possessed of an ignorant and fanatical conception of religion.

Should these pages succeed, even to a little extent, in influencing public feeling in America and Europe, in favour of the suggestions they contain for the redress of the indefensible wrongs of a long-suffering people, the writer will be amply rewarded for his small share in the performance of so worthy and necessary a task.

“The public moral sense of all nations,” wrote Cardinal Manning, on the same topic, a dozen years ago, “is created and sustained by participation in a universal common law; when this is anywhere broken, or wounded, it is not only sympathy, but civilisation, that has the privilege of respectful remonstrance.”

M. D.

St. Justins, Dalkey, Ireland,

4th July, 1903.