Читать книгу Within the Pale - Michael Davitt - Страница 6

Table of Contents

THE time when Jews first settled in Russia is a subject of mere historical conjecture. Some accounts assert that colonies of the race were founded in the country bordering on the Black Sea several centuries before the Christian era. All the probabilities favour this view. Both before and after their dispersion by the Romans, a people so intelligent and resourceful as the Hebrews would learn of the fruitful regions watered by the four great rivers which flow into the southern sea-boundaries of the vast territory now under the sway of the Tsar. They would have a choice of land and sea routes for the voyages of emigration, trade, or adventure.

The distance from Jerusalem to the mouth of the Volga, through Asia Minor and the Caucasus, is not much more than from Astrakhan to St. Petersburg, while the journey by sea from Joppa to where the city of Odessa stands to-day for Russia’s richest seaport, is much less than that from Athens to Marseilles. The Caucasus, Taurida (Crimea), Cherson, and Bessarabia, known in the days of King Solomon by other names, would be within the zone of trading intercourse with the Kingdom of Israel, while these rich and interesting parts of Southern Russia would naturally attract the footsteps of the scattered race after Titus had destroyed their nation and dispersed its people, as well as during the existence of the Byzantine Empire.

Whether the race known as the Khazars, who governed the territory stretching north from Astrakhan over the eastern watershed of the Volga as far as Kazan, were civilised by Semitic colonists, as alleged by some writers, is now only an interesting speculation. One fact offered in support of this theory is that the Israelites were driven out of this country by its rulers in the eleventh century, at a time when Jews in Christian Europe began to be objects of race persecution.

The period of the Crusades may be taken as that in which the systematic oppression of the Jews began. The source of this persecution was the religious influence upon uneducated minds of the gospel of the Crucifixion, coupled with legends about ritual murders, and fables recording the sacrifice of the blood of Christian children and maidens during the sacred rites of Paschal time.

It is on record that, in the year 1298, a fanatic in a city of Franconia circulated a story that the Sacred Host in a church had been polluted by a Jew, and that the Almighty had chosen an avenger of this crime in the person of the narrator of the act of sacrilege. The populace rose en masse and burned all the Jews in the city. The massacre extended to the country, and, before the murderous fury unchained by this fanatic and his falsehood could be stilled, over 100,000 victims were slaughtered in Germany, Bavaria, and Austria.

It was following these and similar ferocities that the first great movement of the Semitic race into Poland occurred. They were encouraged to move into this country by the toleration extended to smaller colonies of their race who had settled in Polish dominions in earlier times. All accounts agree in crediting to this ancient Kingdom a far more enlightened rule of the proscribed Israelites than to any other Christian nation during the Middle Ages. Casimir the Great protected them in both their religious and civil liberties, in return for which freedom they helped to organise and develop the commerce and crafts of the country. They flourished and multiplied under such rule, and became the trading link between producer and consumer, in the economic life of Poland, as well as tillers of the soil and expert artisans.

It is an error to assume that the Jews have not thriven anywhere in agricultural industry. Wherever they were sure of protection against spoliation, they took to land labour as readily as to other pursuits, and succeeded. This was so in Poland during the two centuries in which they shared in the general rights guaranteed by the state. Accounts of Jewish agricultural colonies in various parts of Russia, in later days, also support the same testimony. In fact there was no better foundation for this charge in times anterior to our own than the circumstance that a people who were not permitted to own land anywhere, or even to cultivate it in some countries, were, in consequence, subjected to the imputation of having a racial prejudice against this means of obtaining a livelihood.

The halcyon period of Jewish freedom in Poland came to an end in the middle of the seventeenth century. That proud and ancient nation was itself the victim of invasion and oppression, and its Semitic population lost over 200,000 men, women, and children in the ferocious campaigns waged by the conquering Cossack Hetman, and his Tartar and Russian allies, against Poles and Jews alike.

The Jews of Poland survived this calamity, and grew numerous again, as persecuted civilised races somehow do, in their own, or in some other, land. They, however, lent assistance to the designs of the ambitious nobles when the landed aristocracy invaded the recognised prerogatives of the kingly power, and took to themselves all the responsibilities and advantages of government. They became their agents and instruments in the sordid work of harassing the peasant cultivators, who found themselves ground down more remorselessly by class rule than under a semi-republican monarchy. Popular feeling was thus turned against the Jews, and they began to experience, in Poland, as elsewhere, that social and economic antipathy which their greater money-making capacity has always nourished in the commercial minds of the less successful Christians.

As a friend of Polish freedom remarked to the writer in Warsaw in the spring of 1903, “the nobles cultivated their pride, rack-rented their tenants, and lost their independence.” And, with this fall of the one Christian nation in Europe, which had fairly ruled and humanely treated the hunted Hebrew up to the eighteenth century, the era of systematic persecution began for the Polish Jew when a cruel fate compelled him to become a Russian subject.

The early oppression of the Jews in Russia was entirely due to religious feeling. Their exceptional treatment in recent years arises from political and economic more than from sectarian causes. M. Varadinoff, in his history of Russian administration, says: “The history of all the cases since 1649, involving Jewish religious matters, bears on it the stamp of mistrust to the followers of the law of Moses, because the Jews, by their false doctrines, convert to their faith not only Christians, but persons belonging to other religious persuasions; in consequence of this the civil rights of the Jews were more or less restricted, and their settlement in Russia was prohibited. They were also on several occasions entirely expelled across the Russian frontiers. The code of Alexis Mikailovitch provides punishment of death for the perversion of a Christian to the Hebrew faith. In 1676 Jews were prohibited from coming to Moscow from Smolensk, and in 1727 an order was promulgated to the effect that ‘All Jews found to be residing in the Ukraine and in Russian towns shall be immediately expelled beyond the frontier, and not be allowed under any circumstances to enter Russia.’”

Prince Demidoff San Donato, in quoting this expert in his excellent book, says that a proviso to this ukase stipulated that before leaving Russia all the Jews were to be made to exchange their gold and silver for copper money!

It was found practically impossible, however, to carry out decrees of complete expulsion, while, on the other hand, it had to be recognised that the interest of the state and the development of trade required the trained experience of Hebrew craftsmen, merchants, and bankers. They were tolerated for the utilitarian ends of commercial necessity, while being subject to all the possible penalties of an outlawed community.

Nearing the end of the eighteenth century the trend of Russian conquest westwards annexed the Polish regions known as White Russia, and the Lithuanian country, in which Jews had hitherto found shelter when driven out from Russia proper. Catherine II. governed the Empire at this period, and her somewhat liberal views gave her Hebrew subjects a brief respite from persistent injustice. It was necessary to take account of the recognised status of the Jews in what had been a portion of the Kingdom of Poland, and a ukase was promulgated in 1786, decreeing that “Everyone, irrespective of creed, shall enjoy under the laws all the advantages and privileges of his rank and condition.” This enlightened law only extended to the territories acquired from Poland, and even within these the tolerant intention of the ukase was frustrated by the bias of Russian officials. The right to enrol themselves in burgher guilds was curtailed, while double taxes were levied upon the very people whom the law of 1786 had, in words, freed from exceptional burdens.

Other special penalties followed, to be again mitigated as when, in 1804, a ukase declared that “a spirit of moderation and a sincere wish for the amelioration of the condition of the Jews,” should be shown as being in the best interest of the population among whom the Hebrews were allowed to live. This temporary return to reason and justice was also due to the desire to give Russian workers and peasants the advantages of superior Jewish workmanship in arts, and the example of trading competency. Jewish children were to be admitted to Russian schools. Manufacturing industry and the occupation of land were to be thrown open to Jews hitherto denied access to these employments, except in specified places.

These, however, were but Russian good intentions. They lacked the value of application.