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

At the same time the Holy Synod was sending out circulars instructing the Greek Orthodox clergy to inform the Russian people that Napoleon was an enemy of the Church and a friend of the Jews.

That he might the more effectively put the Church of Christ to shame – so the Holy Synod proclaimed – Napoleon assembled the Judean Synagogues in France … and established the Great Synhedrion of the Jews, that same ungodly assembly which had once dared pass the sentence of crucifixion upon our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and he now planneth to unite the Jews, whom the wrath of the Almighty hath scattered over the face of the whole earth, so as to incite them to overthrow the Christian Church and proclaim the pseudo-Messiah in the person of Napoleon.

By these devices the Government, finding itself at its wits' end in the face of a great war, shrewdly attempted to frighten at once the Jewish people by the specter of an anti-Jewish Napoleon and the Orthodox Russians by Napoleon's leaning towards Judaism. The former were made to believe that the Synhedrion was directed against the Jewish religion, and the latter were told that it was established by the Jewish "pseudo-Messiah" for the overthrow of Christianity.

In this precarious situation the Government once more decided to ascertain, by means of a circular inquiry, the views of the representatives of the Jewish communities on the best ways of carrying the "reform" into effect. The ukase of February 19, issued by the Tzar on this occasion, is couched in surprisingly mild terms:

Prompted by the desire to give our subjects of the Jewish nationality another proof of our solicitude about their welfare, we have deemed it right to allow all the Jewish communes in the Governments … of Vilna, Grodno, Kiev, Minsk, Podolia, Volhynia, Vitebsk, and Moghilev, to elect deputies and to suggest, through them, to the gubernatorial administrators the means which they themselves consider best fitted for the most successful execution of the measures laid down in the Statute of 1804.

The deputies were summoned this time, not to St. Petersburg, but to the provincial capitals in order to present their opinions to the governors.

The expression of opinion on the part of the Jewish deputies, or, as they were officially styled, "the attorneys of the Jewish communes," did not limit itself to the fatal thirty-fourth clause, which all the deputies wished to see repealed or at least postponed for an indefinite period. Serious objections were raised also to the other provisions of the "Jewish Constitution." The deputies advocated the abolition of double taxation for all classes of the Jewish population; they asked for a larger range of authority for the rabbinical tribunals and for a mitigation of the provisions forbidding the use of Hebrew in legal documents, promissory notes, and commercial ledgers. Some of them pleaded for a postponement of the law concerning Hebrew as being inconvenient to business, while others suggested permitting the use of Hebrew for promissory notes up to the sum of one hundred rubels.248

The deputies also called attention to the difficulty, on the part of the rabbis and Jewish members of the magistracies, of acquiring the Russian language within so short a period. They were ready to assent to the change of dress for the magistrates and those living temporarily outside the Pale. But they pointed out at the same time that the prescribed German dress was not becoming to Jews, who on account of religious scruples refused to shave their beards, and that in the case of magistrates and visitors to the Russian interior they would prefer to adopt the Russian form of dress. As for the laws relating to education, the deputies observed that it would be useless for Jewish children to go to the common Russian schools as long as they did not understand the Russian language, and that it would for this reason seem more practicable first to have them acquire the Russian language in the Jewish schools, where they are taught the Hebrew language and the "dogmas of the faith."

By the time the opinions of the deputies were conveyed by the governors to St. Petersburg, the political sentiment there had undergone a change. In July, 1807, the Peace of Tilsit had been concluded. An entente cordiale had been established between Napoleon and Alexander I., and Russia no more stood in awe of Bonaparte's "intrigues." There was no more reason to fear a secret understanding between the Russian Jews and the Parisian Synhedrion, which had shortly before been prorogued, and the bureaucratic compassion for the unfortunate Jews vanished into air. The last term set for the expulsion from the villages, January 1, 1808, was drawing near, and two months before this date, on October 19, 1807, the Tzar addressed an ukase, marked by extraordinary severity, to the Governor-General of the Western region:

The circumstances connected with the war – the ukase states in part – were of a nature to complicate and suspend the transplantation of the Jews… These complications can now, after the cessation of the war, be averted in the future by means of a gradual and most convenient arrangement of the work of transplantation… For these reasons we deem it right to lay down an arrangement by means of which the transplantation of the Jews, beginning with the date referred to above, may be carried into effect, without the slightest delay and mitigation.

The "arrangement" alluded to consisted in spreading the expulsion from the villages over three years: one-third of the Jews were to be expelled in 1808, another third in 1809, and the last third in 1810. Committees were appointed to assist the governors in carrying out the expulsion decree. These committees were instructed to make it incumbent upon the Kahals to render financial assistance to the expelled, to those who were being pitilessly ruined by the Government.

The horrors of the expulsion began.

Those who did not go willingly were made to leave by force. Many were ejected ruthlessly, under the escort of peasants and soldiers. They were driven like cattle into the townlets and cities, and left there on the public squares in the open air. The way in which the expulsion from the villages was carried out in the Government of Vitebsk was particularly ferocious.249

Scores of exiled Jews petitioned the authorities to have them transferred to New Russia, to the agricultural colonies, in which several hundred Jewish families had found some kind of shelter. But the supply of arable land and the funds set aside for the transfer were found to be exhausted; the appeals therefore remained unheeded. The distress of the Jewish masses reached such colossal proportions that the governors themselves, in their reports to the central Government, declared that it was impossible to carry out the expulsion decree without subjecting the Jews to complete ruin. Accordingly a new ukase was issued in the last days of December, 1808, to the effect that the Jews be left in their former domiciles, pending special Imperial orders.

In the beginning of January, 1809, a new Committee (chronologically the third) was appointed in St. Petersburg for the purpose of examining all the phases of the problem of diverting the Jews from the rural liquor traffic to other branches of labor. This time the committee consisted of Senator Alexeyev,250 who had made a tour of inspection through the western provinces, Privy-Councilor Popov, Assistant Minister of the Interior Kozodavlev, and others. In his instructions to Popov, who was chairman of the Committee, the Tzar admits that the impossibility of removing the Jews from the villages results from the fact that "the Jews themselves, on account of their destitute condition, have no means which would enable them, after leaving their present abodes, to settle and found a home in their new surroundings, while the Government is equally unable to undertake to place them all in new domiciles." It has therefore been found necessary "to seek ways and means whereby the Jews, having been removed from their exclusive pursuit of selling wine in the villages, hamlets, inns, and public houses, may be enabled to earn a livelihood by labor." At the same time the Committee was directed to take into consideration the "opinions" submitted previously by the Jewish deputies. After indulging in cruel vivisectionist experiments on human beings, the Government finally realized that mere paper orders were powerless to remodel an economic order, which centuries of development had created, and that violent expulsions and restrictions might result in ruining people, but not in effecting their "amelioration."

The Committee was at work for three years. The results of its labors were embodied in a remarkable report submitted in March, 1812, to Alexander I. Since Speranski's declaration of 1803, reproduced above,251 this official document was the first to utter a word of truth on the Jewish problem.

It is proposed – the report declares – to remove the Jews from the rural liquor traffic, because the latter is considered harmful to the population. But it is obvious that the root of the drinking evil is not to be found with the saloon-keepers, but in the right of distilling, or "propination," which constitutes the prerogative of the squires and their main source of income. Let us suppose the sixty thousand Jewish saloon-keepers to be turned out from the villages. The result will be that sixty thousand Russian peasants will take their place, tens of thousands of efficient farm-hands will be lost to the soil, while the Jews cannot be expected to be transformed into capable agriculturists at a moment's notice, the less so as the Government has no resources to effect this sudden transformation of saloon-keepers into corn-growers. It is not true that the village Jew enriches himself at the expense of the peasant. On the contrary, he is generally poor, and ekes out a scanty existence from the sale of liquor and by supplying the peasants with the goods they need. Moreover, by buying the corn on the spot, the Jew saves the peasant from wasting his time in traveling to the city. Altogether in rural economic life the Jew plays the rôle of a go-between, who can be spared neither by the squire nor by the peasant. To transfer all village Jews to the cities and convert them into manufacturers, merchants, and artisans, is a matter of impossibility, for even the Jewish population already settled in the cities is scarcely able to make a living, and to create factories and mills artificially would be throwing money into the water, especially as the exchequer has no free millions at its disposal to enable it to grant subsidies to manufacturers. The recent experiments of the Government have had no effect. On the contrary, the Jewish people "has not only remained in the same state of poverty, but has even been reduced to greater destitution, as a result of having been forced out of a pursuit which had provided it with a livelihood for several centuries." Hence, "the Committee, realizing this situation of a whole people, and being afraid that the continuation of compulsory measures, in the present political circumstances, may only exasperate this people, already restricted to the utmost, deems it necessary … to put a resolute stop to the now prevailing methods of interference by allowing the Jews to remain in their former abodes and by setting free the pursuits suspended by Clause 34."

The Government submitted. In yielding it was moved not so much by the clear and incontrovertible arguments of the Committee, which amounted to a deadly criticism of the current system of state patronage, as by the "political circumstances" alluded to in the concluding sentences of the report. Napoleon's army was marching towards the Russian frontier. The war which was to embroil the whole of Russia and subsequently the whole of Europe had broken out. At such a moment, when the French army was flooding the whole of Western Russia, it seemed far more dangerous to create groups of persecuted and embittered outcasts than it had been in 1807, when the French invasion was merely a matter of apprehension. In these circumstances the question whether the Jews should be left in the villages and hamlets found a favorable solution of itself, without any special ukase. Stirred to the core, Russia, in the moment of national danger, had to rely for her salvation upon the strenuous exertions of all her inhabitants, Jews included.

4. The Patriotic Attitude of Russian Jewry during the War of 1812

The part played by the Jews in the War of 1812 was not so insignificant as historians are generally disposed to assume, being misled by the fact that the Jews of Russia were not yet drafted into the army. It must be borne in mind that the great war was enacted in western Russia, more particularly in northwestern Russia, on territory inhabited by a compact Jewish population scattered all over the cities, townlets, and villages. The sympathy of this population with one or the other of the belligerents frequently decided the success or failure of the detachment situated in that locality. It is a well-known fact that the Poles of the western region were mostly on the side of Napoleon, from whom they expected the restoration of the Polish kingdom.

As for the Russian Jews, their attitude towards the belligerent parties was of a more complicated character. The recent persecutions of the rural Jews were apt, on the one hand, to set their hearts against the Russian Government, and, had these persecutions continued, the French would have been hailed by the oppressed Jews as their saviors. But the expulsions from the villages had been stopped three years before the war, and the Jews anticipated the complete repeal of the cruel law, which had been so severely condemned in the official report of the Committee laid before the Tzar in the beginning of 1812. Moreover, the deputies of the Kahals, who had been summoned twice to share in the work of the Government (in 1803 and 1807), had an opportunity to convince themselves that Alexander I.'s Government was on the whole favorably disposed towards the Jews, and its mistakes were merely the outcome of the wrong system of state patronage, of the desire of the Government to make the Jews happy, according to its own lights, by employing compulsory and "correctional" measures.

On the other hand, Napoleon's halo had been considerably dimmed even in the eyes of the Jews of Western Europe, now that the results of his "Jewish Parliaments" had come to light. The Jews of Russia, who were all Orthodox, regarded Napoleon's reform schemes as fraught with danger, and looked upon the substitution of Kahal autonomy by a consistorial organization as subversive of Judaism. The Hasidic party, again, which was the most conservative, felt indebted to Alexander I., who, in a clause of the Statute of 1804, bearing on Jewish sects, had bestowed upon the Hasidim the right of segregating themselves in separate synagogues within the communities. The leader of the White Russian Hasidim, Rabbi Shneor Zalman, who at first had suffered from the suspiciousness of the Russian Government, but was afterwards declared to be politically "dependable," voiced the sentiments of the influential Jewish circles towards the two belligerent sovereigns in the following prediction:

Should Bonaparte win, the wealth of the Jews will be increased, and their [civic] position will be raised. At the same time their hearts will be estranged from our Heavenly Father. Should however our Tzar Alexander win, the Jewish hearts will draw nearer to our Heavenly Father, though the poverty of Israel may become greater and his position lower.

This was tantamount to saying that civic rightlessness was preferable to civic equality, inasmuch as the former bade fair to guarantee the inviolability of the religious life, while the latter threatened to bring about its disintegration.

All these circumstances, coupled with the unconscious resentment of the masses against the invading enemy, brought about the result that the Jews of the Northwest everywhere gave tokens of their devotion to the interests of Russia, and frequently rendered substantial services to the Russian army in its commissary and reconnoitring branches. The well-known Russian partisan252 Davidov relates that

the frame of mind of the Polish inhabitants of Grodno was very unfavorable to us. The Jews living in Poland were, on the other hand, all so devoted to us that they refused to serve the enemy as scouts, and often gave us most valuable information concerning him.

As Polish officials could not be relied upon, it became necessary to intrust the whole police department of Grodno to the Jewish Kahal. The Governor of Vilna testified that "the Jewish people had shown particular devotion to the Russian Government during the presence of the enemy."

The Poles were irritated by this pro-Russian attitude of the Jews. There were rumors afloat that the Poles had made ready to massacre all Jews and Russians in the Governments of Vilna and Minsk and in the province of Bialystok. There were numerous instances of self-sacrifice. It happened more than once that Jews who had sheltered Russian couriers with dispatches in their houses, or had escorted them to the Russian headquarters, or who had furnished information to the Russian commanders as to the position of the enemy's army, were caught by the French, and shot or hanged. Alexander I. was aware of these deeds. While on a visit to Kalish, he granted an audience to the members of the Kahal, and engaged in a lengthy conversation with them. Among the Jews of the district appeals written in the Jewish vernacular were circulated, in which the Jews were called upon to offer up prayers for the success of Alexander I., who would release the Jewish people from bondage. Altogether the wave of patriotism which swept over Russia engulfed the Jewish masses to a considerable extent.

The headquarters of the Russian army, which was now marching towards the West, harbored, during the years 1812-1813, two Jewish deputies, Sundel Sonnenberg of Grodno and Leyser (Eliezer) Dillon of Neswizh. On the one hand they maintained connections with the leading Government officials, and conveyed to them the wishes of the Jewish communities. On the other hand they kept up relations with the Kahals, which they informed regularly of the intentions of the Government. Presumably these two public-spirited men played a twofold rôle at headquarters: that of large purveyors, who received orders directly from the Russian commissariat, and forwarded them to their local agents, and that of representatives of the Kahals, whose needs they communicated to the Tzar and the highest dignitaries of the crown. In those uneasy times the Government found it to its advantage to keep at its headquarters representatives of the Jewish population, who might sway the minds of their coreligionists, in accordance with the character of the political instructions issued by it. In June, 1814, during his stay abroad in Bruchsal (Germany), Alexander requested these deputies to assure "the Jewish Kahals of his most gracious favor," and promised to issue shortly "an ordinance concerning their wishes and requests for the immediate amelioration of their present condition." It seems that Alexander I., who was still under the spell of the accounts of Jewish patriotism, was inclined at that moment to improve their lot. But the general reaction which, after the Vienna Congress of 1815, fell like a blight upon Europe and Russia proved fatal also to the Russian Jews.

5. Economic and Agricultural Experiments

The political upheavals of the transition period (1789-1815) were bound to react violently on the economic status of Russo-Polish Jewry. The vast Jewish population of Western Russia was at that time divided into two parts: the larger part resided in the towns and townlets, the smaller lived in the villages. The efforts made by the Russian Government during that period, to squeeze the whole Jewish population into the urban estates and to single out from its midst a new class of agriculturists, failed to produce the desired effect. Instead it succeeded in disturbing the former equilibrium between the urban and the rural occupations of the Jews.

The urban Jew was either a business man or an artisan or a saloon-keeper. In many cities the Jewish mercantile element was numerically superior to the Christian. The increased Jewish activity in the export trade is particularly noticeable. Jewish merchants traveled annually in large numbers to the fairs abroad, particularly to that of Leipsic, to buy merchandise, principally dry goods, at the same time exporting the products of Poland and Russia, such as furs, skins, etc. The gradual absorption of Polish territory by Russia opened up a new, immense market, that of the central Russian provinces, for the goods imported from abroad. It was natural that the Jews began to flock to those provinces. But their way was at once blocked by the local Russian merchants, who began to clamor against Jewish competition, and forced the Government to recognize the monopoly of native "interests," to the detriment of the consumer.253

True, the monopolists did not succeed altogether in shutting the Russian interior to foreign cheap goods and finery, which the Jewish merchants still continued to import, under the clause in the Statute of 1804 which granted Jews the right of visiting the interior Governments on special gubernatorial passports. Yet an untrammeled development of Jewish commerce was rendered impossible by this artificial barrier between Western and Eastern Russia.

The second urban profession, handicrafts, was considered of lower rank than commerce. It was pursued by the poorest class of the population. Artisan labor commanded very low prices. Purely Jewish trade-unions were rare, and when a Jewish artisan summoned enough courage to leave his native townlet and seek employment in a large city, he was sure to encounter the animosity of the organized Christian guilds. We have seen that before the second partition of Poland such an "encounter" assumed the shape of a pogrom in the Polish capital.254

By the side of the store and the workshop stood the public house or saloon, which was generally connected with an inn or a hostelry. The sale of liquor in the cities depended primarily on the peasants arriving from the villages on festival and market days. On the whole the liquor traffic occupied a subordinate place in the cities. Its mainstay was in the villages.

All serious observers of the economic status of the Jews at that time bear witness to the fact that in the majority of cities Jewish labor formed the corner-stone of a civilized economic life, that without the Jew it was impossible to buy, or to sell, or to have any kind of article made. The Jew, who was satisfied with small wages and profits, was thereby able to lower both the cost of production and the price of merchandise. He was content with a pittance, his physical needs being extraordinarily limited. Thanks to the mediation of the ubiquitous Jewish business man, the peasant was able to dispose of his products on the spot, even those which because of their small value would not be worth carrying to the city. In spite of all his indefatigable, feverish labors, the Jew was on the average as poor as the peasant, except that he was free from the vice of drunkenness, one of the sources of the peasant's economic misery. The poverty of the Jew was the artificial result of the fact that the cities and townlets were overcrowded with petty tradesmen and artisans, and this congestion was further aggravated by the systematic removal of the Jews from their age-long rural occupations and the consequent influx of village Jews into the towns.

It is necessary to point out that when the official records harp on the "liquor traffic" in the villages as the sole occupation of Jews, they fail to appreciate the many-sidedness of the rural pursuits of the Jews, which were connected with the liquor traffic, to be sure, but were by no means identical with it. While leasing from the squire or the crown the right of distilling, the Jew farmed at the same time other items of rural economy, such as the dairies, the mills, and the fishing ponds. He was furthermore engaged in buying grain from the peasants and selling them at the same time such indispensable articles as salt, utensils, agricultural tools, etc., imported by him from the town. He often combined in his person the occupations of liquor-dealer, shopkeeper, and produce merchant. The road leading from the village to the city was dotted with Jewish inns or public houses, which, before the age of railroads, served as halting-places for travelers. This whole economic structure, which had been built up gradually in the course of centuries, the Russian Government made its business to demolish. As early as the reign of Catherine II. the governors frequently drove the Jewish villagers into the cities, acting under the "organic law" which makes it incumbent upon Jews to "register among the merchants or burghers." The ambiguous ukase of 1795, to the effect, that "endeavors be made to transplant the Jews into the District towns, so that these people may not wander about to the detriment of society," gave the zealous bureaucrats a free hand. When the Law of 1804 ordered the expulsion of all Jews from the villages at the end of three years, many squires, without waiting for the time limit to expire, refused their Jewish tenants the right of residence and trade in their villages. The Jews began to rush into the cities, where even the long-settled residents could not manage to make a living.