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The situation in Russia is so little
known abroad, because of the Chinese wall erected by our
language, that even such a momentous and far-reaching event
as the starting of a veritable crusade against the Jews can
be made a subject of controversy. Taking advantage of the
prevailing darkness, the friends of the Russian Government
have tried to make light of the severity and the extent
of those persecutions. Some of them have had the impudence
to deny that there has been any persecution. A little more
zeal and they would swear that there are no Jews in Russia
and that they have ben "invented" by the enemies of Russia
to annoy the Government.
I do not feel tempted in the least to
enter into a discussion with any of the gallant champions of
Russian Czardom. From the very outset the American press has
estimated these utterances at their true value, and as time
goes on every mail from the Continent brings numerous facts
bearing upon the real state of things in Russia. In writing
this my object is to explain to impartial readers this most
puzzling of all Russian questions.
One can easily account for barbarity,
however shocking, in dealing with political prisoners and
exiles. Despotic Governments, when frightened, can go to any
length of cruelty. But here we have a whole race, millions
of souls, who, after all, have never offended the
Government, who have obeyed the laws and paid taxes, bribes,
and all their dues. Why, then, are they so persecuted? Are
they really so bad as the Russian Government represent them?
Is the motive religious fanaticism, or blind racial hatred?
Is the Government really responsible for these persecutions,
or has it been forced to them by the anti-Jewish feeling of
the nation? All these questions are interesting enough to be
treated on their own merits in a thoroughly objective and
scientific spirit, which an opponent of the Russian
Government can adopt easily enough. When the actual offenses
are so numerous and aggravating, one is not tempted to
invent offenses.
The Russian Government is certainly not
responsible--the present Government at least--for the
existence in the south and southwest of Russia of very
abnormal relations between the Jews and the Russian
population, which create in those parts the so-called Jewish
question. This question bears relation to the whole of our
history, and is one of the burning national, even
international, problems with which every country has or has
had to deal. In Russia it is only more difficult and
complicated because of the greater mass of Jewish population
and to the general backwardness of the country.
There are 4,000,000 of Jews in Russia
proper, not counting the 1,000,000 of Polish Jews, of this
number, three-quarters of a million are scattered all over
the empire, but the remaining three and a quarter million
are huddled together in the southwestern corner of European
Russia, in a vast ghetto called the Pale of
Settlement. They form there a race within a race, living
apart from the rest, and there is a marked hostility toward
them on the part of the masses of Russian people. This
hostility has undoubtedly a religious basis, or at least
originated in religion. Bu tit seems to me an error to
represent, as most people do, the anti-Jewish movement in
Russia as a manifestation of religious intolerance. Among
the uneducated masses religious hostility toward the Jews
undoubtedly exists in a latent state, and is stirred up
purposely by Jew haters. But the classes which are at the
head of the Russian anti-Jewish movement outlived long ago
the period of religious fanaticism. With them the hostility
toward the Jews is purely racial. Wit the masses the racial
antipathy is also a much stronger ingredient in the
anti-Jewish feelings than religion. Thus we may fairly
describe the anti-Jewish movement as racial.
I hardly need say that the Jews, as a
race, are not a bit worse than other people. Whenever I hear
the idle wholesale characterization of Jews as a race of
usurers, tricksters, and the like, I always remember my
friend, Rabbi David Phillipson of Cincinnati, author of "The
Jews in English Fiction," who observed that the process by
which the Gentiles form their notions of Jews is invariably
thus: The vices, crimes and shortcomings of individual Jews,
no matter how restricted as to number, are fastened upon the
whole race, while the manifestations of all opposite
qualities, no matter how striking or frequent, are viewed as
individual exceptions, and therefore are not taken into
account. I beg to add that it seems to me that the same
process is applied to by all races in their mutual
estimates. There is no love lost between different races and
tribes anywhere, each considering itself the only good and
lovable one. In countries where various nationalities are
mingled and have many opportunities of hurting each other by
their racial differences, their antagonism becomes so
intense and so out of all proportion to the real differences
between them as to become positively amazing to an outsider.
Among the Balkan slaves or the motley population of
southeastern Austria one may study this queer manifestation
of narrow-mindedness.
The Russian Jews have lived for centuries
a life of complete isolation from the bulk of the
population, remaining a nation within a nation. It is only
within the last thirty or forty years that they began to
read Russian books, go to Russian schools, and take interest
in art, the sciences, and politics. Nevertheless, they have
already produced a number of men whose names are the pride
of Russia. In music, in which this gifted race stands so
high, we have quite a number of eminent artists of whom I
will mention those who are better known abroad, the two
brothers Rubinstein, Anton and Nicolas; Vladimir de Pachman,
and that wonderful boy pianist, the rising star of Russian
music and the heir elect of all its glory, the little Max
Hamburg, now amazing and delighting English audiences.
Antokolsky, the greatest sculptor of the age, the man about
whom Turguenoff used to say that if he ever met genius it
was he, is also a born Jew. The Jewish race has produced no
Russian Heine or Berne; but the present literary generation,
which is the first, or at the utmost the second generation
of Russian Jews that has been educated at art, has already
given to Russia a number of useful literary workers, some of
them prominent in their profession, like Vengueroff and
Weinberg; some standing foremost among their contemporaries,
like Minsky and Feug, the best among our living poets.
Another to me far more striking fact,
which speaks volumes for the high moral qualities of the
Jewish races, is the participation of the Russian Jews in
the struggle for Russian freedom. For more than fifteen
years in the gloomy empire of the Car a fierce struggle has
been raging, in which only the ardent enthusiasm and
absolute self-denial of the few enable them to cope with the
enormous forces arrayed against them. There are thousands of
educated Jews who have cast their lot with our patriotic
movement. This fact has greatly hurt the feelings of our
anti-Semitic ruler, and an edict was issued in 1885 making,
contrary to all principles of justice, political offenders
of the Jewish race punishable with far greater severity than
Christians. But I never heard that this edict had produced
any impression upon the Jews, and there are as many of them
as before willing to give up their all for the freedom and
better future of the country which is a stepmother to them.
This is a fact that does not agree with the general
conception of the Jewish character. Yet it was the outcome
of the short experience of 1860-1880, during which a
generation of Jews that passed through our schools grew in a
friendly surrounding, mixing freely with Russians, feeling
themselves men and citizens, and not a race of outcasts.
Some of the best and most influential members of our party
were born Jews. And when I remember their kindliness of
heart, their pure ideality, coupled so often with a mind so
subtle, flexible, and comprehensive. I cannot help thinking
that Spinoza was not altogether a miraculous apparition, but
a representative of the best type of the race. I venture
also to surmise that in better circumstances the Jewish
people would probably produce more Spinozas than Shylocks.
But this is a personal opinion of mine, which the reader can
accept or reject as he chooses.
The common, uneducated Jew is neither
better nor worse than men in his position and circumstances
generally are. A Jewish usurer is exactly the same sort of
person as a Christian usurer. A common Jewish merchant is as
tricky as a common Russian merchant. A Jewish artisan is
like the Russian artisan in all respects, except that his
face bears strong marks of his Semitic origin; that his nose
is hanging down, while that of his Russian confrere is
merrily turned up; that he is generally dark, instead of
being fair; that his gesticulation is queer, and that he
speaks Russian with a peculiar accent.
The hostility toward the Jews has its
origin in the surprising tenacity of their race, which
preserved its purity through all its historical vicissitudes
and is quite the same nowadays as it was a thousand years
ago. The exceptional business capacity of the Jews,
developed in the course of centuries by their exclusion from
all other pursuits, has created everywhere a natural channel
for the manifestation of that racial hostility. A Jewish
middleman, whatever his special calling--trade, usury,
banking--fulfills his functions as well as a middleman of
another race. If anything, rather better. Being on the
average cleverer, he can offer his services at a lower rate
than his rivals. That is indeed the only reason why he beats
them; but he beats them invariably and that is the cause of
his historical troubles. Everywhere the Jews almost
monopolize the most lucrative calling in the community--that
of middlemen. They come to constitute a class apart as well
as a race apart, and racial hostility comes to embitter the
struggle between the classes. the racial struggle is
substituted for the economical struggle, and the worsted and
invidious rivals of the Jews, who only wait for this
opportunity, are accepted by the mob for its leaders.
In the Pale of Settlement the Jews,
although forming but one-seventh of the population, have
concentrated n their hands one-half of the wholesale trade
of the region and have almost monopolized the retail trade.
Russians, Armenians, Greeks, all have been beaten by them,
and as a matter of course they do not feel very grateful for
it. The lower middle class, the Greeks in particular, have
played a very conspicuous part in the anti-Jewish riots. The
Russian peasants are very peaceable and unoffending
creatures, too much so, indeed, for the interests of
independence and good government. If left to
themselves they would rarely if ever give vent to their
latent ill feelings against the Jews in open rioting, but
the middle class are there to give them a lift. In the two
most notorious riots, those of 1871 and 1881, in Odessa,
both of which began in the vicinity of the Greek Church, the
Greek merchants incited and headed the mob. The Russian
merchants are the chief allies of the Government in Jew
baiting nowadays. Since 1881 the anti-Jewish movement in
Russia has entered upon a new phase, because the Government
itself takes the lead in that war against one class of its
own subjects.
Anti-Semitism is not a Russian invention.
It originated in Germany, where it was elaborated by a
certain class of scholars and philosophers into a social
theory. Its real author is undoubtedly Prince Bismarck. It
was he that inaugurated the reign of brutal force such as
Europe has not known at any other time, even in the time of
the first Napoleon. Force means right; the dominant race,
simply because the strongest has a right to get rid of a
weaker race if the latter happens to annoy it in some way.
The wholesale evictions of Poles from Posen is a direct
parallel of the wholesale eviction of Jews in Russia. The
persecution of the Finnish nationality, started by the
present Government in Russia, is just as unprovoked,
foolish, and harmful to the general interests of the State
as the persecution of the Jews. the one prepares us to see
without much surprise the other. It is the same deliberate
appeal to the selfishness of the dominant race with a view
of transforming it into a sort of dominant caste whose
interests are identified with the interests of the State,
while those of others are trampled down. Such a policy is
immorality erected into a system. In the long run it is sure
to bring ruin and dissolution to the State. It is the last
trump of a tottering despotism.
The Russian Government does not want the
fusion of the two races. Education, to which access was at
one time given to Jews, worked in Russia remarkably well for
the removal of racial prejudices on both sides. It gave the
best promises for the future, because of the great zeal of
the Jews for education. There was a rush to colleges and
universities on the part of Jewish youths. In some southern
colleges the Jews numbered 50, 60, sometimes 80 per cent, of
the pupils. In the universities of Odessa and Kharkoff they
formed, on the average, 15 to 20 per cent of the students,
and they were strongly represented in all other high
schools.
Now the Government has deliberately
rejected this natural means of reconciling the two races.
From some schools, formerly open to them, the Jews are
excluded completely. In others they are admitted as a
necessary evil, but only up to a certain low percentage,
three, five, and in some instances then per cent, of the
total number of Christian pupils. If Christians lag behind,
the Jews have to pay the penalty. In the town of Biely a
Jewish apothecary wanted to send his boy to the local
college. But the director informed him that there was for a
Jewish boy only four-fifths of a vacancy, which meant that
the last Christian ten was not complete, being two boys
short. The father petitioned the Minister of Public
Education, Count Delianoff, asking that the four-fifths of
the boy might carry to school the other one-fifth of the
boy, instead of letting the unauthorized one-fifth keep the
entire boy outside. But Count Delianoff was strict;
admittance was refused, and the father was compelled to send
to the college two Christian boys at his own expense to make
room for his son. But few parents can afford such outlay,
and there are many towns within the Pale where Jews
constitute from 60 to 80 per cent of the population. Thus
the new law means compulsory ignorance. I need not speak of
the discouraging restrictions depriving the Jews who have
received their degrees from practicing in the professions
for which they have been qualified; These are tolerably well
known in America.
The Government does not want the Jews to
be Russianized. On the contrary, it wants every Jewish boy
to feel keenly and never be able to forget that he is an
outcast. There is a special edict prohibiting the Jewish
boys from giving lessons to Christian children. In Minsk a
Jewish boy of 14 was expelled from the college because he
was found guilty of teaching a peasant boy merely for love
of the child.
Nor does the Government want the Jews to
become Christians. In former times the conversion of a Jew
to Christianity cancelled all his disabilities, but by a new
edict of 1890 the rights granted to converts have been
restricted to a qualified freedom of settlement, complete
citizenship being granted only to the grandchildren, the
second generation of Christians. The war against the Jews is
not a war of conquest, but a war of extermination.
S. STEPNIAK.
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