History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume 1 of 3. From the Beginning until the Death of Alexander I (1825)

A decided bent in favor of such measures is manifested in the ukase of 1795, which prescribes that the Jews living in villages be registered in the towns, and that "endeavors be made to transfer them to the District towns, so that these people may not wander about, but may rather engage in commerce and promote manufactures and handicrafts, thereby furthering their own interests as well as the interests of society." The effect of this ukase was to sanction by law the long-established arbitrary practice of the local authorities, who frequently expelled the Jews from the villages, and sent them to the towns under the pretext that Jews could be enrolled only among the townsfolk. The expelled families, deprived of all means of livelihood, were of course completely ruined, as the mere bidding of the authorities did not suffice to enable them "to engage in commerce and promote manufactures and handicrafts" in the towns in which even the resident merchants and artisans failed to make a living. The system of official tutelage had the effect of fettering instead of developing the economic activity of the Jews.

Experiments were now made to extend this tutelage to the communal self-government of the Jews. In 1795 the edict was repeated whereby the Government and District Kahals, in view of the right, conferred upon the Jews, of participating in the general city administration, in the magistracies and town councils, were to be deprived of their social and judicial functions, and not to be allowed "to concern themselves with any affairs except the ceremonies of religion and divine service."240 As a matter of fact, the active participation of the Jews in the municipalities, owing to the hostile attitude of the Christian burghers, was extremely feeble. Yet, in the interest of the exchequer, the Kahals were preserved for fiscal purposes, and, on account of their financial usefulness, they continued to function as the organs of Jewish communal autonomy, however curtailed and disorganized the latter had now become.

In this wise the restrictive legislation against the Jews appears firmly established towards the end of the reign of Catherine II. A "Muscovite" wall had been raised between the west and east of Russia, and even within the circumscribed area of Jewish settlement the tendency was discernible to mark off a still smaller area and, by forcing the Jews out of the villages, to compress the Jewish masses in the towns and cities. It fell to the lot of the successors of Catherine to consolidate this tendency into law.

In conclusion, the historian cannot pass over in silence the solitary "reform" of this period. In the legislative enactments of the last decade of Catherine's reign the formerly current contemptuous appellation "Zhyd" gave way to the name "Hebrew" (Yevrey).241 The Russian Government found it impossible to go beyond this verbal reform.

2. Jewish Legislative Schemes during the Reign of Paul I.

The brief reign of Paul I. (1796-1801) added nothing of moment to the Russian legislation concerning the Jews. The law imposing a double tax was confirmed, and also the other restrictions were left in force. The area of Jewish settlement was increased by the newly-acquired Government of Courland, on the outskirts of the Empire. In this Duchy, which was annexed in 1795, there were several thousand Jewish inhabitants, who had been "tolerated" as foreigners, after the German pattern, and had only partly succeeded in forming a communal organization. The question now arose as to the best way of collecting the taxes from the itinerant chapmen who formed the bulk of the Jewish population, and were enrolled neither among the rural nor the urban estates, and were not even affiliated with Jewish communities. The Russian Government solved this question in 1799, by placing the Jews of Courland in the same position as their coreligionists in the other western Governments, and by granting them the right of enrolling themselves among the mercantile or burgher estates, as well as establishing their own Kahals. In this case fiscal considerations were responsible for the organization of the Jewish masses in the dominion of the German barons.

Having confined the Jewish population within the western pale, the Government could not very well hamper its freedom of transit within that pale, at least as far as moving from city to city was concerned. This elementary right of free transit was resorted to by many Jews of impoverished White Russia, who began to emigrate into the Little Russian provinces, particularly into the Government of Novgorod-Seversk, later the Government of Poltava, which were more prosperous, and less crowded with Jews. The Government became aware of this internal transmigration, and could not abstain from taking it under its fatherly protection. Merchants were allowed to move unhampered from White Russia into Little Russia. Burghers, however, were permitted to emigrate only on the conditions applying to all persons of the taxable estates – they had to obtain certificates of dismissal (December, 1796).

Poor as was the reign of Paul in the field of concrete legislation concerning the Jews, it was rich in preliminary endeavors leading up to it. For his reign abounds in all kinds of projects looking to the regulation of the status of the Jews on the basis of official "investigations." In the outgoing years of the eighteenth century (1797-1800) the Government offices were feverishly busy in this direction. The Government was endeavoring to familiarize itself with the state of the former Polish provinces and particularly with the condition of the Jewish population. The first step in this pursuit after knowledge consisted in sending out a circular inquiry to the nobles and the higher officials of the region under consideration. The stimulus to this inquiry came in 1797, from a report submitted on account of the famine which had been raging in the Government of Minsk. Governor Karnyeyev of Minsk received orders from St. Petersburg to gather the opinions of the local Marshals, or leaders of the nobility, and on that basis supply "an elucidation of the causes of the impoverished condition of the peasants," with plans looking to their amelioration.

The shrewd device of questioning the landed aristocrats as to the causes of the impoverishment of their peasant serfs bore worthy fruit. Needless to say, the Polish magnates who assembled in Minsk at the invitation of the Government did not even for a moment think of reproaching themselves and their own estate of slaveholders for the misery of the people enthralled by them. Instead they preferred to put the blame partly on external circumstances ("the changes and mutinies in the province," bad crops, poor means of communication, etc.), and partly on the Jews, "whom the owners [of the villages] retain as arendars and tavern-keepers, contrary to the orders of the authorities restricting their domicile to the cities." The Jewish tavern-keepers in the country, so the nobles allege, "lure the peasants into drunkenness," by selling them spirits on trust, and thereby "render them unfit to manage their affairs." In order to save the peasants, the Government should insist "that the right of distilling be open exclusively to the landowners, and be withheld from the Jews as well as other arendars and tavern-keepers," and that in the rural public houses "permission to sell hot wine [whiskey] be given only to the squires." To put it in other words, the peasants will thrive and be "fit to manage their affairs," if, instead of Jewish alcohol, they will imbibe the aristocratic alcohol of the landed proprietors.

One need not be a statesman to discover the underlying motive of this "opinion" of the nobles, who were concerned only about retaining the ancient alcohol monopoly which they had enjoyed under the Polish régime ("the right of propination"). This, however, did not prevent the Governor of Minsk from presenting the report of the nobility to the Tzar, who on July 28, 1797, put down the following "resolution":242 "Measures are to be taken, in accordance with the proposals of the marshals of the nobility, to restrict the rights of the Jews who ruin the peasants." At the same time the Senate called the Governor's attention to Catherine's ukase ordering the transfer of the Jews to the District towns, "so that these people may not wander to and fro to the detriment of society." This was tantamount to giving the authorities carte blanche in expelling the Jews from the villages.

In 1798 came the turn of the nobility of the Southwest, of Volhynia and Podolia, to state their wishes for the benefit of the fatherland. The marshals of Podolia, who met at Kamenetz, elaborated a much more comprehensive scheme of reform than their compeers in Minsk. After expressing their gratitude to the Tzar "for his Imperial benevolence in leaving us the franchise of liquor-dealing," the nobles plead that "neither the right of distilling nor that of selling liquor be let to Jews or even to Christians," and that the nobles themselves be granted the "liberty" of employing people in their "public houses at their own discretion." After securing the monopoly of intoxicating the people through their own bartenders, the nobles propose to transform the bulk of the Jews into export agents, to find foreign markets for the agrarian, i. e. manorial, products, "whence commercial profits will accrue both to the tillers of the soil (?!) and to the nobles." As for the other Jews, part of them were to be retained by the landowners in their public houses, and the rest were "to be forced to engage in agriculture and handicrafts."

This brilliant prospect of becoming the tools of the nobles for the disposal of rural products and the sale of manorial alcohol had evidently little fascination for the Jews themselves. Alarmed by these aristocratic designs, they held a consultation, and even called a conference of delegates. The conference met in Ostrog (Volhynia) in the summer of 1798, and decided to collect a fund and send a deputation to St. Petersburg, to lay before the Tzar the needs and wishes of the Jews of the Southwest, whom the Government had entirely forgotten to ask how they themselves would like to have their affairs arranged. Unfortunately the Governor-General of the Southwest, Count Gudovich, "got wind" of these preparations. Far-sighted statesman that he was, he immediately suspected "that this collection [of money for the deputation] might merely serve as a cover for some wicked Jewish design." He accordingly confiscated the funds already secured, forbade all further collections, and hastened to report his achievement to St. Petersburg. To his astonishment, the overzealous Governor-General received the chilling reply, that the Tzar found nothing criminal in the desire of the Jews to send a deputation to him. At the same time he was instructed to return the confiscated money and not to interfere with the sending of the deputation (September, 1798). Whether the deputation actually proceeded to the capital, and what it achieved, is unknown. But the occurrence in itself bears witness to the fact that even in that unenlightened epoch and in the secluded Hasidic environment of Volhynia and Podolia, the Jews were not altogether insensible of the political and social upheavals which were taking place in Russia.

The last to respond to the Governmental inquiry was the nobility of Lithuania. The marshals of the nineteen Lithuanian districts, who met in 1800, submitted their "opinion," which had been adopted with only three dissenting votes, to Friesel, the Governor of Vilna. The three opposing marshals suggested leaving the Jews in the condition which had prevailed under the Polish régime. All the others drafted a plan of Jewish "reform," which was even more radical than that of the nobles of Minsk and Podolia. The Jews were to be barred not only from distilling and keeping taverns of their own, but also from the sale of spirits in the manorial public houses. The Jewish rural population, which would thus be deprived of all means of subsistence, was to be transferred partly to the cities, partly "to be scattered over the crown and manorial settlements, where they might be allowed to grow corn and to mortgage and farm estates." The economic reform was to be supplemented by one affecting the inner life of the Jews. It was necessary "to abolish the Jewish costume and introduce among the Jews the form of dress customary among the other inhabitants." Altogether the separateness of the Jews was to be broken down, for "they constitute a people by themselves, and as such have their own administration … in the form of synagogues and Kahals, which not only arrogate to themselves spiritual authority, but also meddle in all civil affairs and in matters appertaining to the police." These measures would bring about the amalgamation of the Jews with the surrounding population.

The "reformatory" ardor of the Lithuanian nobles, who thought it necessary to bracket the problem of Kahal autonomy with the sale of alcohol, was the effect of outside interference. Friesel, the Governor of Vilna, who was a cultivated German, and as such was acquainted with the state of the Jewish problem in Germany, found it necessary to address himself to the Lithuanian marshals twice, their first statement having been found "unsatisfactory." Only a second revision of the views of the nobles, which included the plan of inner reforms, satisfied Friesel. In April, 1800, Friesel forwarded these recommendations to the Senate, accompanying them by his own comprehensive memorandum, which to a large extent was obviously based on Chatzki's and Butrymovich's projects submitted some ten years previously to the "Jewish Commission" of the Quadrennial Diet.

Friesel urges the necessity of a "general reform," and professes to take Western Europe as a model, but all he adopted thence was the most objectionable tactics of "enlightened absolutism." In his opinion "the education of the Jewish people must begin with their religion." It is necessary "to wipe out all Jewish sects with their superstitions and to forbid strictly the introduction of any innovations whereby impostors might seduce the masses and plunge them into ever greater ignorance," a veiled allusion to the Hasidim and in particular to their Tzaddiks, whose strife with the anti-Hasidic rabbis was engaging the attention of the Russian Government at the time. He further recommends that the Jews be forced to send their children to the Government schools, to conduct all their business in Polish, to wear the customary non-Jewish form of dress, and not to marry before the age of twenty. Finally the Jews are to be classified in three categories, merchants, artisans, and tillers of the soil, these three estates to form part of the general class stratification of the Empire. In this way the fiscal services of the Kahals could be dispensed with, and the Kahals themselves would pass out of existence automatically.

The suggestions of the leaders of the nobility as well as the proposals of the governors were turned over in the spring of 1800 to the Senate, whose function was to examine and utilize them for a new legal enactment or "statute." Here they happened to fall into the hands of one of the Senators, Gabriel Dyerzhavin, the celebrated Russian poet, who by the whim of fate was soon to blossom forth into a "specialist" in rebus Judaicis.

3. Dyerzhavin's "Opinion" on the Jewish Problem

Dyerzhavin was born in one of the remote eastern provinces of Russia, and spent the greater part of his life in the Government offices of St. Petersburg. He had never come in contact with the Jewish population, until, in 1799, he was dispatched to the little town of Shklov in White Russia, to look into the case of the owner of the town, a retired general by the name of Zorich. The latter had been one of the favorites of Catherine, and lived the fast and extravagant life of a Russian country squire in the town which was his private property. His typically Russian devil-may-care conduct was not calculated to spare the large Jewish population of the town. Zorich evidently fancied that the Jews living on his land were just as much his serfs as were the peasants, and he handled them in the way serfs were dealt with in those days. He expelled several of them from the town, and seized their houses. Others he beat with his own hands, and still others he forced to supply him with drink free of charge. The Jews appealed to the Government against this attempt to turn them into serfs, and it was in response to their appeal that Emperor Paul dispatched Senator Dyerzhavin, with instructions to curb the violence of the boisterous squire. Dyerzhavin, who was imbued with the spirit of serfdom, could not but take a mild view of the high-handed methods of Zorich, and came to the conclusion that the Jews were partly to blame for the disorders that had taken place. The death of Zorich in 1800 put a stop to the case, but theoretically the Senate decided that, according to Russian law, the Jews, by virtue of their being members of the merchant and burgher class, could not be regarded as serfs even in the towns and settlements owned by squires.

A year later Dyerzhavin was again dispatched to White Russia, this time invested with very large powers. The province was in the throes of a terrible famine, brought about not only by bad crops but also by the outrageous conduct of the landed proprietors. These gentlemen, instead of supplying their peasants with foodstuffs, preferred to send large quantities of grain either abroad, for sale, or into their distilleries, for the production of whiskey, which, instead of feeding the peasants, poisoned them. In dispatching Dyerzhavin to White Russia, Emperor Paul gave him full power to put a stop to these abuses and to inflict severe penalties on the squires, who, "moved by unexampled greed, leave their peasants without assistance." They were to be dispossessed, and their estates placed under state control (June 16, 1800). In a supplementary instruction added by the Procurator-General of the Senate, Obolanin, the following clause was added: "And whereas, according to information received, the exhaustion of the White Russian peasants is to a rather considerable extent caused by the Zhyds, it is his Majesty's wish that your Excellency may give particular attention to their part in it and submit an opinion how to avert the general damage inflicted by them." This unmistakably anti-Semitic postscript, to which Dyerzhavin was in all likelihood a party, to which at all events he gave his approval, was designed to mitigate the blow aimed at the squires and turn it against the Jews. The conspiracy of these two bureaucrats, who believed in serfdom and sided with the squires, put an altogether different complexion on Dyerzhavin's mission.

The pacification of White Russia was speedily accomplished. Dyerzhavin placed the estate of one Polish magnate under state control, and personally closed up a Jewish distillery in the town of Lozno, the residence of the famous Hasidic Tzaddik, Rabbi Zalman Shneorsohn. He proceeded with such energy that one Jewish woman complained of having received blows at his hands. After having "installed order," Dyerzhavin set out to do what he considered to be his main task – prepare an elaborate memorandum concerning the Jews, under the characteristic title, "Opinion of Senator Dyerzhavin Concerning the Averting of the Want of Foodstuffs in White Russia by Curbing the Avaricious Pursuits of the Jews, also Concerning Their Re-education, and Other Matters."

The very title betrays the underlying motive of the writer, to make the Jews the scapegoat for the economic ruin of the province, in which the squires had always been the masters of the situation. But Dyerzhavin did not confine himself to the evaluation of the economic activity of the Jews. He was no less anxious to depict their inner life, their beliefs, their training and education, their communal institutions, their "moral situation." For all these purposes he drew upon a multitude of sources. While writing his memorandum in Vitebsk, in the fall of 1800, he gathered information about the Jews from the local anti-Jewish merchants and burghers, and from the "scientific" instructors at the Jesuit College in the same city, in the court-houses, and – from "the very Cossacks themselves."

It must be added that Dyerzhavin also had in his possession two projects from the pen of "enlightened Jews." The author of one of them, Nota Shklover by name, a wealthy merchant, who had served as purveyor to Potemkin's army, and, living at that time in St. Petersburg, knew the drift of opinion in Government circles, proposed to attract the Jews to manufacturing, which should be introduced, in connection with agriculture and cattle-breeding, into colonies set apart for this purpose "in the neighborhood of the Black Sea ports." The originator of the second project, a physician from Kreslavka, in the Government of Vitebsk, by the name of Frank, – evidently a German Jew of the Mendelssohnian type – suggested that the Government through Dyerzhavin focus its attention on the reform of the Jewish religion, which "in its original purity rested on unadulterated Deism and the postulates of pure morality," but in the course of time was distorted by "the absurdities of the Talmud." Frank accordingly proposes to follow the example set by Mendelssohn in Germany, to throw open the Russian public schools to the Jews, and to teach their children Russian, German, and Hebrew, implying of course that the Jew thus educated will not fail to prove himself of unquestionable benefit to the country.

Aside from these projects, Dyerzhavin had before him specimens of several Prussian Juden-Reglements, as well as the recommendations of the marshals and governors of Western Russia referred to above, and similar documents.243 This material sufficed for the Russian official, who had caught no more than a fleeting glimpse of the Jews while passing through White Russia, to elaborate a most comprehensive "Opinion" demanding a complete transformation of Jewish life.

The somber picture which Dyerzhavin draws of the life of the Jews suffices to show how superficial was his acquaintance with the conditions he describes. The naïveté with which he judges and completely distorts many aspects of Jewish life is astounding. The economic pursuits of the Jews, such as trading, leasing of land, innkeeping, brokerage, are nothing but "subtle devices to squeeze out the wealth of their neighbors, under the guise of offering them benefits and favors." The Jewish school is "a hotbed of superstitions." Moral sentiments are entirely absent among Jews: "they have no conception of lovingkindness, disinterestedness, and other virtues." All they do is "to collect riches in order to erect a new temple of Solomon or [to satisfy] their fleshly desires."

This curious bit of characterization forms the preamble to a vast scheme, consisting of no less than eighty-eight clauses, looking to the "transformation of the Jews." The Jews are to be placed under "Supreme [i. e. Imperial] protection and tutelage" and to be supervised by a special Christian official, a "Protector," who, with the assistance of committees to be appointed by the gubernatorial administrations, shall carry out this work of "transformation," shall take a census of all the Jews, and provide them with family names. Thereupon the Jews shall be divided into four categories: merchants, urban burghers, rural burghers, and agricultural settlers, and every Jew shall be forced to register in one of these categories. All this mass of Jews is to be evenly distributed over the various parts of White Russia, and the surplus transferred to the other Governments.

This reform having been accomplished, the Kahals shall be dispensed with. To provide for the management of the spiritual affairs of the Jews, "synagogues," with rabbis and "schoolmen," are to be organized in the various Governments. A supreme ecclesiastic tribunal is to be established at St. Petersburg, under the name "Sendarin,"244 which shall be presided over by a chief rabbi, or "patriarch," after the pattern of the Mohammedan mufti of the Tatars.

Suggestions of various repressive and compulsory measures supplement these positive proposals. The Jews are to be forbidden to keep Christian domestics; they are to be deprived of their right of participating in the city magistracies; they are to be compelled to give up their distinct form of dress and to execute all deeds and business documents in Russian, Polish, or German. The children shall be allowed to go to the Jewish religious schools only up to the age of twelve, and shall afterwards be transferred to the secular schools of the state. Finally the author proposes that the Government establish a printing-office of its own, to publish Jewish religious books "with philosophic annotations." In this way, Dyerzhavin contends, will "the stubborn and cunning tribe of Hebrews be properly set to rights," and Emperor Paul, by carrying out this reform, will earn great fame for having fulfilled the commandment of the Gospels, "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you."