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

In the autumn of 1815 all the large Kahals received orders from the governors to choose an electoral college, two electors for each Government. In August, 1818, the twenty-two electors chosen from eleven Governments assembled in Vilna to elect from their own midst three deputies and an equal number of substitutes. The choice fell, apart from the former deputies Sonnenberg and Dillon, on Michael Eisenstadt, Benish Lapkovski, and Marcus Veitelson, all from the Government of Vitebsk, and Samuel Epstein from the Government of Vilna. To provide for the expenses of the deputies, who were to live in St. Petersburg, the Vilna conference issued an appeal to all Jewish communities calling upon them to make an "embroidery collection," i. e. to cut off and convert into cash the embroidered collars which well-to-do Jews attached to their "Kittels" (shrouds worn beneath the prayer shawls on the Day of Atonement), though the alternative of donating their value in money was allowed. The Jews, who had been ruined during the war, were evidently not in a position to tax themselves directly.

Soon afterwards followed the establishment of a special department, which was placed at the service of "the Deputation of the Jewish People," the name by which this college of deputies, presided over by the energetic Sonnenberg, was frequently designated. The "college," either as a whole or through its individual members, labored for seven years (1818-1825), but its activity was too limited to justify the expectations of Russian Jewry. The hope of the deputies, that they would be consulted about the general problems bearing on the proposed amelioration of Jewish conditions, failed to materialize. On the contrary, the Government had in the meantime abandoned all thought of legislative reforms, and a little later even began to contrive ways and means of carrying into effect the restrictive clauses of the Statute of 1804, which had been suspended in its operation by the War of 1812.

The deputies, who resided in St. Petersburg and did a great deal of lobbying, frequently managed in their intercourse with the officials to ferret out these "designs" of the authorities and to communicate their findings secretly to the Kahal leaders in the provinces. At the same time they endeavored of their own accord to avert the danger by personal negotiations with the leading officials. While reporting on the one hand to the Kahals, the deputies on the other hand transmitted to Golitzin, the Minister of Ecclesiastic Affairs, the petitions of the Kahals and their complaints against the local administration. The deputies were thus reduced, by the force of circumstances, to mere go-betweens in Jewish matters. In exercising this function, some of them, Sonnenberg in particular, were indefatigable. They tried the patience of the high officials with their petitions and representations, and on one occasion Sonnenberg was even deprived of his post of deputy for "impertinent conduct towards the authorities." The bureaucracy of St. Petersburg began to resent these endless solicitations and this constant meddling with their plans.

Gradually the deputies themselves lost heart, having realized their impotence in grappling with the rising wave of reaction. Some of them left St. Petersburg altogether. The downfall of Golitzin's Ministry of Ecclesiastic Affairs, which had been undermined by the ultra-reactionary Arakcheyev party,272 involved, as a natural consequence, the downfall of the curious Jewish representation affiliated with it. Golitzin's successor as Minister of Public Instruction, the obscurantist Shishkov, made representations to the Tzar concerning the necessity of abolishing the institution of Jewish deputies, "numerous instances having demonstrated that their stay here is not only unnecessary and useless but even very harmful, inasmuch as, under the pretext of working for the public interest, they collect money from the Jews for no purpose, and prematurely advertise the decisions and even the intentions of the Government." In 1825 the "Deputation of the Jewish People" was abolished. Thus ended an organization beautifully conceived, but mutilated in execution, one that might well have served as a substitute for Jewish communal representation, and might have softened the régime of caprice and blighting patronage which ate deeper and deeper into the vitals of Russian politics.

2. Christianizing Endeavors

It was quite in harmony with the spirit of the new era that the solicitude of the Russian Government for the Jews should have manifested itself in an attempt at saving their souls. Christian pietism was the fashion of the day, and Alexander I. and Golitzin, the Minister of Ecclesiastic Affairs, both of whom were mystically inclined, conceived the idea of becoming the instruments of Divine Providence in converting the Jews to Christianity. Golitzin, who was the president of the Russian Bible Society, and was anxious to make it a faithful copy of its English model, the Missionary Bible Society of London, approached the missionary problem in his own way. On March 25, 1817, the Tzar published an ukase calling for the formation of a "Society of Israelitish Christians," for the purpose of assisting Jews already converted or preparing for conversion.

We have learned – the ukase reads – of the difficult situation of those Jews who, having by Divine Grace perceived the light of Christian truth, have embraced the same, or are making ready to join the flock of the good Shepherd and the Savior of souls. These Jews, whom the Christian religion has severed from their brethren in the flesh, lose every means of contact with them, and not only have forfeited every claim to their assistance, but are also exposed to all kinds of persecutions and oppressions on their part. Nor do they readily find shelter among Christians, their new brethren in the faith, to whom they are as yet unknown… For this reason we, taking to heart the fate of the Jews converted to Christianity, and prompted by reverent obedience to the Voice of Bliss which calleth unto the scattered sheep of Israel to join the faith of Christ, have deemed it right to adopt measures for their welfare.

The "welfare" held out to the converts was of a rather substantial nature. Each of their groups was to be allotted free crown lands in the southern and northern provinces, with the right of founding all kinds of settlements, townlets, and cities. They were to be granted full civil equality, extensive communal self-government, and special alleviations in the payment of taxes. These groups, or colonies, of Jews, after being converted to the Greek Orthodox, Catholic, or Lutheran faith, were to form part of the "Society of Israelitish Christians," which was to be managed by a special committee to be appointed in St. Petersburg under the patronage of the Emperor. The solemn phraseology of the Imperial ukase shows unequivocally that the Government was not satisfied with the modest task of rendering assistance to occasional neophytes. It was ready to embark upon a vast undertaking, that of encouraging baptism among the Jewish population, and organizing the converted masses into separate, privileged communes, to serve as a bait for the Jews still languishing in their old beliefs. The imagination of the Russian legislators pictured to them the fascinating spectacle of huge masses of Jews marching "to join the faith of Christ," drawn to it not only by heavenly, but also by earthly, "bliss."

The missionary mood of the heads of the Russian Government was speedily utilized by Lewis Way, a representative of the London Bible Society. Way was thoroughly imbued with the apocalyptic belief in the approaching redemption of Israel under the ægis of Christianity. This however did not prevent him from looking upon present-day unconverted Israel with sentiments of profound respect, as the banner-bearer of a great Divine mission in the history of mankind, and he was deeply aroused over the civil disabilities to which they were subjected in the various countries of Europe. When the monarchs who had concluded the Holy Alliance assembled, in the autumn of 1818, with their ministers and diplomats at the Congress in Aix-la-Chapelle, Way grasped the occasion to submit to Alexander I. a "Memorandum Concerning the Condition of the Jews,"273 in which he appealed to the Russian Tzar to emancipate the Jews of his dominions and persuade the Prussian and Austrian rulers to do likewise.

In the course of my protracted travels through the lands of Poland, for the purpose of gathering information about the Jews, I came – says Way – to the conclusion that Providence has not in vain placed so many thousands of Jews under the protection of three Christian sovereigns. Rather has this taken place in fulfilment of the promises given to the Patriarchs.

If the Jews are to join the flock of Christ, they ought to be treated like children, and regarded as equal members of human society. Captive Israel must be set free materially, before it can be liberated spiritually. Way therefore implores the Russian Tzar to set the example, "which will produce its effect upon the whole world."

The Tzar received Way's memorandum, and turned it over to Nesselrode, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, with instructions to submit it to the Congress for consideration. At a meeting of Ministers-Plenipotentiary, representing Russia, Austria, Prussia, England, and France, held on November 21, 1818, Way's memorandum, together with his elaborate, printed project for a pan-European "reform of the civil and political legislation" affecting the Jews, came up for discussion. The diplomats, who were least of all concerned about the Jewish question, and had no desire to make this "domestic affair" of each Government an object of international negotiations, agreed upon the following resolution:

Without entering into the merits of the view entertained by the author of the project, the conference recognizes the justice of his general tendency, and takes cognizance of the fact that the plenipotentiaries of Austria and Prussia [Metternich and Hardenberg] have declared themselves ready to furnish all possible information concerning the Jewish situation in those two monarchies in order to clarify a problem which must claim the attention equally of the statesman and the humanitarian.

By means of this hollow, liberal-sounding phrase, which did not involve the slightest obligation, the diplomats managed to rid themselves of this vexatious problem, even the perfunctory attention given to it at the Congress having been prompted by no other motive than consideration for the Russian Emperor. For the rest, every one of the three allied Governments which had distributed Poland among themselves went on to handle "its" Jews according to the requirements of its domestic policy, which was frankly reactionary, and was not even disguised by the fictitious label of humanitarianism.

The same domestic policy continued in Russia. The Tzar, who abroad had listened benevolently to Way's appeal for the civil emancipation of the Jews, irrespective of the future salvation of their souls, decided, when at home again, to leave everything untouched, looking for a partial solution of the Jewish problem to the fantastic endeavors of the Society of Israelitish Christians. Undeterred by the fact that the solemn appeal issued by the Tzar in 1817 had, during the three years since its promulgation, failed to attract a single group of converts, for the simple reason that such groups were not in existence, there being only rare isolated instances of baptism, prompted in most cases by questionable motives, the Government set aside, in 1820, a large tract of land in the Government of Yekaterinoslav for a future settlement of "Israelitish Christians." It even appointed a special official, with the title Curator, to take charge of it.

But year after year passed by and the empty land was waiting in vain for settlers, while the idle Curator was just as vainly on the lookout for someone to take care of. At last, in 1823, an obscure group of "Israelitish Christians" appeared on the scene. It consisted of thirty-seven families from Odessa, who expressed their willingness to accept the free lands with all the manifold rights and privileges attached to them. Subsequent inquiries from the office of the Governor-General of New Russia revealed the fact, however, that the claimants to the public pie, though confessing the Greek Orthodox faith, did not possess certificates of baptism, and could not even produce passports, with the result that the application of the adventurers was denied.

At last, realizing the impracticability of the whole missionary scheme, Count Golitzin advised Alexander I., in 1824, to dissolve the mythical Society of Israelitish Christians with its Board of Trustees, which by that time carried a whole staff of Government officials on its budget. The Tzar refused to liquidate by official action an undertaking which had been heralded so solemnly, and the society without a membership, administered by trustees without a trust, continued to figure on the lists of Government institutions until 1833, when Nicholas I. issued a curt ukase putting a sudden end to this bureaucratic phantom. The new ruler had in the meantime discovered entirely different and by no means fantastic contrivances for driving the Jews into the fold of the Orthodox Church. These contrivances were the military barracks and the institution of Cantonists.

3. "Judaizing" Sects in Russia

While the Russian authorities were dreaming of a wholesale conversion of Jews to Christianity, their attention was diverted by the ominous spectacle of huge numbers of Christians embracing a doctrine closely akin to Judaism. The Russian officials disclosed the existence of a sect of "Sabbatarians" and "Judaizers" in the Governments of Voronyezh, Saratov, and Tula, all of them without Jewish residents, who might otherwise have been suspected of a missionary propaganda among the Greek Orthodox. The new "Judaizing" heresy first engaged the attention of the central Government in 1817, when a group of peasants in the region of Voronyezh addressed a petition to the Tzar in which they naively complained of "the oppressions which they had had to undergo at the hands of the local authorities, both ecclesiastic and civil, on account of their confessing the law of Moses." Acting under Imperial instructions, Golitzin gave orders "to examine most rigorously" the origin of the "sect," for the purpose of preventing its further spread and bringing back the renegades into the fold of Orthodoxy.

The Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Voronyezh reported, in substance, as follows:

The sect came into existence about 1796274 "through natural Jews." It afterwards spread to several settlements in the districts of Bobrov and Pavlovsk. The essence of the sect, without being directly an Old Testament form of Jewish worship, consists of a few [Jewish] ceremonies, such as Sabbath observance and circumcision, the arbitrary manner of contracting and dissolving marriages, the way of burying the dead, and prayer assemblies. The number of avowed sectarians amounts to one thousand five hundred souls of both sexes, but the secret ones are in all likelihood more numerous.

To exterminate the sect, the Archbishop of Voronyezh proposes various measures, to be carried out partly by the ecclesiastic authorities and partly by the police, among them the deportation of the soldier Anton Rogov, the propagandist of the heresy.

Similar reports from the ecclesiastic authorities of Tula, Orlov, Saratov, and other Great Russian Church districts were soon received by the Synod. The "Judaizing heresy" spread rapidly to the villages and cities, appealing alike to peasants and merchants. Whenever taken to task, the sectarians declared that they longed to return to the Old Testament and "maintain the faith of their fathers, the Judeans."

The central authorities were alarmed, and resorted to extraordinary measures to check the spread of the schism. The Committee of Ministers approved the following draconian project submitted by Count Kochubay in 1823:

The chiefs and teachers of the Judaizing sects are to be impressed into military service, and those unfit to serve deported to Siberia. All Jews are to be expelled from the districts in which the sect of Sabbatarians or "Judeans" has made its appearance. Intercourse between the Orthodox inhabitants and the sectarians is to be thwarted in every possible manner. Every outward display of the sect, such as the holding of prayer-meetings and the observance of ceremonies which bear no resemblance to those of Christians, is to be forbidden. Finally, to make the sectarians an object of contempt, instructions are to be given to designate the Sabbatarians as a Jewish275 sect and to publish far and wide that they are in reality Zhyds, inasmuch as their present designation as Sabbatarians, or adherents of the Mosaic law, does not give the people a proper idea concerning this sect, and does not excite in them that feeling of disgust which must be produced by the realization that what is actually aimed at is to turn them into Zhyds.

All these police regulations, in addition to a scheme of disciplinary ecclesiastic measures, proposed by the Synod for the purpose "of uprooting the Judean sect," were sanctioned by Alexander I. (February and September, 1825). The tragic consequences of these reprisals came to light only during the following reign. Entire settlements were laid waste, thousands of sectarians were banished to Siberia and the Caucasus. Many of them, unable to endure the persecution, returned to the Orthodox faith, but in many cases they did so outwardly, continuing in secret to cling to their sectarian tenets.

4. Recrudescence of Anti-Jewish Legislation

As far as the Jews are concerned, the immediate result of these measures was insignificant. The number of Jews involved in the decree of expulsion from the affected Great Russian Governments was infinitesimal, since, owing to the restriction of the Jewish right of residence, the only Jews occasionally to be found there were a few traveling salesmen or distillers. Yet, indirectly, the Judaizing movement had a harmful effect upon the position of Russian Jewry. The Government circles of St. Petersburg, which were religiously attuned, were irritated by the fact that so many from the Orthodox fold went over to the camp of the very people among whom the Government had been hunting vainly for proselytes, and while the colonies so hospitably prepared for the Israelitish Christians were clamoring for inhabitants, many Great Russian villages had to be stripped of their inhabitants, who were deported to Siberia, on account of their Jewish leanings. In the mind of Golitzin, the Minister of Ecclesiastic Affairs, the opinion gained ground that "the Jews are enjoined by their tenets to convert everybody to their religion." These circumstances produced in Russian official circles a frame of mind conducive to repressive measures, and helped to provide a moral justification for them. Accordingly, the last years of Alexander I.'s reign were marked by a recrudescence of religious oppression, which at times assumed the dimensions of wholesale persecutions.

Sentiments of this kind were responsible for the medieval prohibition against keeping Christian domestics. The prohibition was suggested by Golitzin, a man otherwise far removed from anti-Semitic prejudices, and was officially justified in the Senatorial ukase of April 22, 1820, by the alleged proselytism of the Jews. As instances of the latter the Senate quotes the Judaizing movement in the Government of Voronyezh, the communication of the Governor of Kherson concerning certain Christian domestics in Jewish homes, who had adopted Jewish customs and ceremonies, and so forth.

The same motives, strengthened by the tendency of removing the Jews from the villages, long since pursued by the Government, suggested harsher restrictions in letting to Jews manorial estates with the peasant "souls" attached to them. Ukases issued in 1819 and in subsequent years enjoin the local administration to prosecute all so-called "krestentzya" contracts, transactions whereby the squire leased the harvest of a given year to a Jew, entitling him to employ the peasants for gathering the grain and hay and for other agricultural labors. Such transactions were looked upon as a criminal encroachment of the Jews upon the right of owning slaves, which was the prerogative of the nobles. Orders were accordingly given, that all such farm leases be taken away from the Jews, in spite of the complete ruin of the Jewish lessees, who were left to settle their accounts with the squires.

At the same time the Government set out again to realize its devout consummation – the expulsion of the Jews from the villages and hamlets already provided for by the Statute of 1804, though suspended for a time when the cruelty of the measure spelling ruin to tens of thousands of Jewish families had become apparent. The arguments by means of which the Jewish Committee had endeavored in 1812 to convince, and finally did convince, the Government of the impracticability of such a migration of nations, were blotted out from memory. The local and central authorities were again on the war path against the Jews. To renew the campaign against the rural Jews, the methods which had been tried with success in the time of Dyerzhavin were again resorted to. When, in 1821, hapless White Russia was again stricken by a famine, which affected the Jews to a considerable extent, the local nobility was once more on the alert, placing the whole responsibility for the ruin of the peasantry on the Jewish tenants and saloon-keepers. The landlords proposed that the Government expel all the Jews from the province or at least forbid them to sell spirits in the rural settlements, since the Jews "lead the peasants into ruin." The local authorities, in reply to an inquiry of Senator Baranov, who had been dispatched from St. Petersburg to White Russia, expressed a similar opinion.

The question was first brought up before the Committee which was charged with the task of giving relief to the Governments of White Russia, and included several ministers, among them the all-powerful Arakcheyev. The Relief Committee approved the restrictive project of the nobility, and so, a little later, did the Committee of Ministers. The result was a stern ukase of the Tzar, addressed, on April 11, 1823, to the governors of White Russia, to the following effect:

(1) To forbid the Jews in all the settlements of the Governments of Moghilev and Vitebsk to hold land leases, to keep public houses, saloons, hostelries, posts, and even to live in them [in the villages], whereby all farming contracts of this kind are to become null and void by January 1, 1824. (2) To transplant all the Jews in these two Governments from the settlements into the cities and towns by January 1, 1825.

In signing this ukase, which spelled sorrow and misery for thousands of families, Alexander I. gave verbal instructions to the Committee of Ministers, to point out to the White Russian Governor-General Khovanski "ways and means of obtaining employment and designating sources of livelihood for the local Jews in their new places of abode." But no "ways and means" of any kind could mitigate the misery of people doomed to expulsion from their old nests and reduced to beggary and vagrancy.

Immediately on the receipt of the ukase the local authorities embarked upon their task with relentless cruelty. By January, 1824, over twenty thousand Jews of both sexes had been driven from the villages of both Governments. Hordes of hapless refugees, with their wives and children, began to flock into the overcrowded towns and townlets. There they could be seen, stripped almost to their shirts, wandering aimlessly in the streets. They lived in frightful congestion, as many as ten of them being squeezed into a single room. They were huddled together in the synagogues, while many of them, unable to find shelter, remained on the streets with their families facing the winter cold. Sickness and increased mortality began to spread among them, particularly in the city of Nevel. Even the anti-Jewish Governor-General Khovanski, who was making a tour of inspection through the stricken district, was stirred by the spectacle, and advised the Committee of Ministers to stop the disastrous expulsions. But the blow had been dealt. By the beginning of 1825 the majority of rural Jews had been expatriated, and turned out into the wide world.

The question naturally arises, whether this human holocaust was required in the interest of the country. The Government itself gave the answer twelve years later – when it was too late.