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PRINCE DEMIDOFF SAN DONATO was a member of the Pahlen Commission, and in his admirable work “La Question Juive en Russie” (published at Bruxelles, 1884,) he gives, in his own proposed solution of the problem of the Russian Jew, the broad and liberal measures which forced themselves upon the Commission as an essential basis for a settlement of the question on just and rational lines. He recommended the three following proposals:

“(1) For the re-establishment of more healthy relations between the Jews and the other inhabitants and counteracting Jewish industrial and other exploitation in the western region [the Pale of Settlement], it is necessary to grant the Jews complete civil equality and freedom of choice of residence. This would lead to a greater dissemination of the Jewish population, which is now crowded together in particular districts; to the alleviation of the poverty and hopeless condition of the Jewish masses, and would relieve the part of the country they now occupy from excessive industrial and other competition.

“(2) In order to destroy Jewish exclusiveness and to facilitate the fusion of the Jews with the rest of the population it is necessary to incorporate the Jews with the local rural and urban communities, and to subject them completely in fiscal, administrative, and other respects to the rules and regulations established for these communities. Those Jews who would wish to settle in the interior provinces should be allowed to enjoy the right of joining peasant and burgher communities in the places of their domicile in the ordinary way.

“(3) It is at the same time necessary that serious attention should be directed towards the organisation of elementary schools for the juvenile Jewish population, inasmuch as the school must always be one of the principal instruments for the moral training and Russification of the Jewish masses.”

These were the common-sense recommendations of an enlightened mind for the cure of a growing social and political malady in Russian life. They would have effected that cure, had there been a statesmanship in the Government of the Empire capable of rising above anti-Semitic prejudice in the rendering of a great service to the country. In fact, there are but three Russian remedies for this growing danger to Russia, and two of them are impossible; the third being the rational one outlined by Prince Demidoff San Donato. Extermination cannot be thought of. Emigration is out of the question, where poverty is almost the normal condition of two or three millions of people who have inherited the evils associated with social wretchedness, religious intolerance, and race persecution. No other country will consent to receive them. The third remedy is, therefore, that alone which the nature and extent of the evil demand, and which, if wisely and courageously adopted, would make Russia the stronger through the only effective remedy applicable to a growing, deadly danger.

The facts of the economic and social conditions within the Pale of Settlement are so objective that the warning they give of a coming catastrophe cannot be ignored. It would be like leaving an epidemic of smallpox to cure itself by neglect. This condition of things is fully explained and expressed by the term, unnatural. It is analogous to a situation which would result from a Federal law compelling every European-born artisan and labourer within the whole United States to reside inside of Pennsylvania, and to be forbidden to seek employment outside the cities and towns of that state. The murderous competition for employment, the deadly rivalry for existence, the bad blood between opposing races, the poverty and social wretchedness which such a condition of things would create—apart from the operation of coercive laws—can readily be imagined by the American reader. But this is no overdrawn picture of the economic anarchy prevailing within the Russian Pale of Jewish Settlement.

The present estimated population of the Tsar’s dominions in Europe and Asia is 145,000,000. The territory of legal domicile for the Russian Jew is embraced in the fifteen “governments,” or provinces, of Kovno, Vitebsk, Vilna, Mohilev, Minsk, Grodno, Volhynia, Chernigov, Poltava, Kiev, Podolia, Bessarabia, Cherson, Ekaterinoslav, and Taurida—extending south from near the Gulf of Riga, on the Baltic, to the Crimea and the Sea of Azov, and forming the western provinces of the Empire; having Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Roumania as frontier barriers. Poland is not included in the Pale. The Jews have more freedom of movement there, and are not subject to some of the coercive restrictions imposed within the above provinces.

The Pale itself is again narrowed by the law which forbids a Jew to reside within thirty-three miles of the western frontier. It has a total area about equal to that of France.

The population of the fifteen provinces of the Pale, including Poland, will be about 26,000,000. There are some 4,000,000 Jews comprised in this population, but these, excepting 1,000,000 in Poland, are compelled under the “May Laws” to reside within the “cities, towns, and townlets” of the Pale. The united population of these urban centres will probably not exceed a total of 5,000,000; so that the Jews number three out of every five of the inhabitants of the urban centres within the fifteen provinces.

The percentage of Jews to non-Jews in the towns and townships of the province of Mohilev, is estimated at 94; for those of Volhynia, 71 per cent.; Minsk, 69; Kovno, 68; Podolia, 62; Vitebsk, 61; Grodno, 60; Vilna, 56; Kiev, 49; Poltava, 43; Bessarabia, 38; Chernigov, 29; Cherson, 28; The Taurida, 19; and Ekaterinoslav, 15 per cent.

In the provinces of Russia in which Jews are not permitted to reside the town inhabitants average 59 persons to every 1000 of the rural population. In the population of the Pale the urban inhabitants average 222 for every 1000 of the rural residents and workers. Within the industrial centres of the Jewish Pale to which they are confined there are about 2730 Jews to every square mile of residential area.

These facts and figures show how impossible it is, under such economic conditions, for any healthy or hopeful prospect of industrial life to exist. The towns are crowded with artisans and traders, and as these are out of all proportion to the producers and consumers of an agricultural country they necessarily become more destitute and wretched as their numbers increase. They are too poor to emigrate. They are prohibited from migrating. They cannot seek work on land. They are not permitted to engage in several occupations. Municipal and Government posts are practically closed to them. They have to compete with Russian workers for such means of existence as can be found; and in face of these facts they are reproached for their poverty and made subject to special taxation.

It is also a charge against these people that they are exploiters of labour and not producers. The taunt comes from the apologists for the Ignatieff laws. The charge is not true. In proportion to population, there are relatively more artisans among Jews in Russia than among non-Jews. According to statistics obtained by the Pahlen Commission, the artisans and labourers averaged 15 per cent. of the total Jewish population of the Pale. In England the proportion of labourers and artisans is over 20 per cent.; about 12 per cent. in Belgium; 10 per cent. in France, and 9 in Prussia.

In Kishineff, where the Jews number 50,000 of the city population, the Hebrew artisans, and wage-earners generally, would number fully 10,000 before the recent anti-Semitic outrages.

Nor can the injustice of the “May Laws” be defended or explained by the equally unfounded assertion that the Jew will not work the land. He refuses to do so in Russia only where he is prohibited. Whenever he has obtained access to the land, on fair terms, he has readily embraced the chance, and invariably improved his condition. This has been proved by the records of the Jewish agricultural colonies in the provinces of Vilna, Minsk, Grodno, Kovno, Volhynia, Cherson, and in Ekaterinoslav. There are colonies of more than 50,000 land-workers among the Jews of the southwestern provinces who have more than held their own in every branch of agricultural industry with their Russian or Moldavian neighbours. This taunt is, consequently, no explanation of the Ignatieff laws.

The evils—both to Russia and to the Jews of the Pale—arising out of the economic conditions which these laws must stereotype, would have been swept away or modified in the ten years following the killing and despoiling of the Jews in 1882, had the proposals of the Pahlen Commission been acted upon. The recommendations of provincial governors were preferred instead. Biassed officialism prevailed over the courageously wise counsels of Count Pahlen, Prince Demidoff San Donato, Count Strogonoff, and their colleagues, with the result that M. Pobédonostsev became the virtual administrator of the Ignatieff laws, and the murders, crimes, and expulsions of 1891 followed, in decadal sequence, the outrages of 1882; not, by any means, as a desired or necessary measure of the policy adopted by the famed Procurator of the Holy Synod. M. Pobédonostsev would be as averse to the killing of Jews as General Ignatieff. Both are far above suspicion in this respect. The instigator of the “May Laws” probably believed, as a soldier and diplomat, that such measures were needed the better to subdue a suspected revolutionary tendency among a non-Russian race, and thought they might be enforced according to his plans, without any serious explosion of anti-Semitic feeling. What followed, however, ought to have been a warning to the keeper of the Tsar’s conscience on combined religious and national concerns. The Procurator’s plans would be as religious in their ultimate object as Ignatieff’s policy was the reverse; but both sought the accomplishment of a tyrannical purpose by means which led to such suffering, injustice, and bloodshed as will ever be associated with their records and names.

The Russian Jew was a domestic menace to the mind of Ignatieff; to M. Pobédonostsev he was tainted with the unforgivable sins of heterodoxy, and a religious persecutor is always relentless in proportion to his fanatical sincerity. No one can justly question the honesty of the Procurator’s zeal for Church and State in Russia, and this is why the infidel Israelites have found in him the most implacable of their powerful foes.

The measures resorted to in 1891, at the instance of the influence exerted by the Procurator of the Holy Synod, had for their end the carrying into effect of the provisions of the “May Laws.” Thousands of Jews were still scattered throughout the provinces beyond the Pale; tolerated in centres of trade and enterprise for utilitarian reasons. Most of these were artisans who had by residence, and membership of trade guilds, acquired the privilege of living and working in various provinces of the Empire. Large numbers of these had been specially encouraged in previous years to settle in cities and towns where their proficiency in crafts was necessary to the development of local industries or manufacture. Suddenly in 1891 an Imperial decree was issued, and all these sober, industrious, skilled, and, in many instances, respected citizens were ordered to quit their homes, property, or employment, within a given time, and take themselves within the Pale of Settlement or outside of the Russian Empire.

The orders issued by the Chief of Police of Moscow to his subordinates, contained the following instructions:

“You must personally verify in all the shops and factories kept by Jews the number of the assistant artisans; also, what category the Jews belong to, and the time of their arrival in Moscow for residence; and then take their signature to a notice of voluntary [!] departure from the Capital; warning them that the computation of their terms of stay will begin on the 14th of July next. Also, take a registry of names, in alphabetical order, of Jewish artisans and, second, of Jews living in Moscow under the right of Circular No. 30 issued by the Minister of the Interior in 1880, specifying in separate columns the time of arrival in Moscow, number of assistant artisans, number in family, and the expiration of the term of departure. In reference to Jews residing according to Circular of 1880, specify their occupations, also the names of commercial houses where they were employed, and present them to me within two weeks.”

The penalty for refusing to sign the paper suggested by General Yourkoffsky, was immediate expulsion. The “voluntary” alternative gained only a little time for preparation. It offered, however, some chances to wealthy Jews to come to an arrangement with lower police officials, whereby the general order of expulsion might be evaded, for a consideration.

The attack by Government and people upon the Jews in 1891 was a deliberate proceeding. Prince Dolgorouki was an able and a fair-minded Governor-General of Moscow. Neither Russian nor Jewish complaint had been lodged against him during his tenure of office. His duties had been performed with care and competency, and his administration of the ancient capital and province left no room for official faultfinding at St. Petersburg.

Coincidently with a notification to all Governors of Provinces in the Emperor’s name, that all permits to allow Jews to reside outside of the Pale should be withdrawn on a certain date, an order for the removal of the Governor-General of Moscow was also made, and the Tsar’s brother, the Grand Duke Sergius, was nominated to supersede General Dolgorouki. General Kostanda was to act as Deputy Governor; pending the arrival of Duke Sergius, and to this officer, along with the equally zealous anti-Semite, Yourkoffsky, Chief of the Moscow Police, was left the congenial task of “clearing-out” the Jews. Never was an odious work more brutally performed. The quarter in which the poorest Jews resided was surrounded in the night time by the police and fire-brigade forces, and the unhappy creatures were routed from their dwellings as if they were so many noxious animals. Some who had been warned a few hours beforehand fled to the Cemetaires of the city for protection, while it has been placed on record that several fathers of families took their daughters to houses of ill-fame for the night, presumably to find protection where they would be least suspected of seeking refuge.

All this being done in the name of the Tsar, the populace were encouraged to co-operate in executing what they were led to believe to be the Emperor’s wish. Massacres, raping, and looting became once more the direct results of barbarous decrees. Some 3000 Jews were driven from Moscow after many had been killed. Hundreds of business men were ruined, being compelled to close their establishments, and to dispose of valuable stock at prices which could not realise enough to discharge their obligations. Those who were able to purchase transport to America emigrated, but the mass of the expelled victims wended their way toward the Pale, there to add still more to the congestion of life and labour which had already rendered the vast Ghetto of the Empire the home of poverty, suffering, and despair.

The example set in Moscow was followed in Kiev and other cities, and encouraged police and mobs elsewhere to emulate the inhuman work of hunting the hated race from villages and towns. Throughout the year 1891 outrages were perpetrated in various provinces, despite some apparently earnest efforts on the part of the Government to stop the more violent outbreaks which had been provoked by its own orders. Several villages where Jews resided were burned down. Fully 70,000 Jews emigrated during the year; this fact confirming, in part only, a saying attributed to a conspicuous personality in the Tsar’s confidence, that the Russian Jewish question would be ultimately solved by the action of the “May Laws” as these would force one-third of the Jews to emigrate; one-third more would become converted to the Orthodox Church; while the other third would perish of hunger!

Whatever may be the desire of the more violent anti-Semitic Russians to see such an unparalleled programme realised in results, there can be no doubt as to the efficiency of the anti-Jewish code of Russian laws to work out such a solution, if it were a task legally possible of accomplishment.

Allusion has already been briefly made to the tangle of contradictory laws which the ukases, decrees, promulgations, and provisions relating to the Russian Jew have created. Many of these measures appear to have been adopted under the pressure of unreflecting prejudice or apprehension. Some bear the impress of wise and humane intentions, born, however, in the minds of Ministers or Monarchs too weak to carry out the enlightened impulse which gave them birth. But the vast proportion of these repressive and oppressive laws are frankly tyrannical in inspiration and purpose, and the spirit that could suggest measures which are a deliberate violation of the fundamental principles and rights of civilised existence would be a feeling worthy to animate the task of carrying the above programme into execution.