Volume I Part 22 (1/2)
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 partic.i.p.ating in the city magistracies; they are to be compelled to give up their distinct form of dress and to execute all deeds and business doc.u.ments 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.”
Such is Dyerzhavin's project, a curious mixture of the savage fancies of an old-fas.h.i.+oned Muscovite about an unfamiliar historic culture on the one hand, and notions of reform conceived in the contemporary Prussian barrack spirit and various ”philosophic” tendencies on the other hand, a medley of hereditary Jew-hatred, vague appreciation of the historic tragedy of Judaism, and the desire to ”render the Jews useful to the state.”[245] And over it all hovers the spirit of official patronage and red-tape regulations, the curious notion that a people with an ancient culture can, at the mere bidding of an outside agency, change its position like figures on a chess-board, that strange faith in the saving power of _mechanical_ reforms which prevailed, though in less nave manifestations, also in Western Europe.
Dyerzhavin's ”Opinion” was laid before the Senate in December, 1800, and together with the previously submitted recommendations of the West-Russian marshals and governors was to supply the material for an organic legal enactment concerning the Jews.
But the execution of this plan was not destined to take place during the reign of Paul. In March, 1801, the Tzar met his tragic fate, and the cause of ”Jewish reform” entered into a new phase, a phase characterized by the struggle between the liberal tendencies prevalent at the beginning of Alexander I.'s reign and the retrograde views held by the champions of Old Poland and Old Russia.
FOOTNOTES:
[234] [In 1766 Catherine convened a Commission, consisting of representatives of the various estates, for the purpose of elaborating a new Russian code of laws. As a guide for this Commission Catherine wrote her famous ”Instructions” (in Russian _Nakaz_), outlining the principles of government, largely in the spirit of Montesquieu.]
[235] [This law laid the foundation for the division of the Russian Empire into ”Governments,” in Russian _gubernia_ (the English term is a reproduction of the French _gouvernement_). The chief of a Government is called Governor, in Russian, _Gubernator_. There are also a few Governors-General, in Russian, _Gheneral-Gubernator_, placed over several Governments, mostly on the borders of the Empire.]
[236] [According to this new law, the city population is divided into merchants, burghers, and artisans. The burghers--in Russian (also in Polish, see above, p. 44, n. 2), _myeshchanye_--are placed below the merchants. The former are those possessing less than 500 rubels ($250); they have to pay the head-tax and are subject to corporal punishment.
The merchants are those who have a larger capital, and are privileged in the two directions indicated. The artisans are organized in their trade-unions. Each estate is registered and administered separately.]
[237] [See p. 320, n. 2.]
[238] It consisted of the Governments of Chernigov and Novgorod-Seversk (subsequently Poltava) and a part of the Government of Kiev.
[239] [The present Government of Kovno was const.i.tuted as late as 1872.
Its territory was up till then included in the Government of Vilna.]
[240] This was in direct violation of the pledge given by the Russian Government at the occupation of the Polish provinces. As recently as in January of the same year (1795) the Lithuanian Governor-General Repnin had replied to the application of the Lithuanian Jews, who pleaded for the maintenance of the Kahal tribunal, that the Jews ”may retain the same rights they had been enjoying prior to the last [Polish] mutiny [of 1794].”
[241] [_Zhyd_, originally the Slavic form of the Latin _Judaeus_, has a.s.sumed in Russian a derogatory connotation. It is interesting to note that in Polish the same word has no unpleasant meaning, although in polite speech other terms are used.]
[242] [See p. 253, n. 1; for ”propination” see p. 67, n. 2.]
[243] Dyerzhavin's statement, that he had ”borrowed his princ.i.p.al ideas from Prussian inst.i.tutions,” refers in all likelihood to the well-known Prussian _Juden-Reglement fur Sud- und-Neuostpreussen_ of 1797, which was at that time operative in the whole of Prussian Poland. There are numerous points of contact between Dyerzhavin's project and the Prussian enactment. The latter may be found in the work of Ronne and Simon, _Verhaltnisse der Juden in den sammtlichen Landestheilen des preussischen Staates_, ed. 1843, pp. 281-302.
[244] This is the way Dyerzhavin spells the word Synhedrion, or Sanhedrin, which he evidently had picked up casually.
[245] The following sentence in Dyerzhavin's ”Opinion” is typical of this mixture of medieval notions with the new system of ”enlightened patronage”: ”Inasmuch as Supreme Providence, in order to attain its unknown ends, leaves this people, despite its dangerous characteristics, on the face of the earth, and refrains from destroying it, the Governments under whose scepter it takes refuge must also suffer it to live; a.s.sisting the decree of destiny, they are in duty bound to extend their patronage even to the Jews, but in such wise that they [the Jews]
may prove useful both to themselves and to the people in whose midst they are settled.”
CHAPTER X
THE ”ENLIGHTENED ABSOLUTISM” OF ALEXANDER I.
1. ”THE COMMITTEE FOR THE AMELIORATION OF THE JEWS.”
The liberal breeze which began to stir in the first years of Alexander I.'s reign sent a refres.h.i.+ng current of air through the stuffy atmosphere of the St. Petersburg chancelleries, in which Russian bureaucrats, undisturbed by their utter ignorance of Judaism, were devising ways and means of turning Jewish life upside down. It took some time, however, before the Jewish question was taken up again. In 1801 and 1802 the Government was busy rearranging the whole machinery of the administration. With the formation of the Ministries and of the Council of State the Senate lost its former executive power, and, as a result, the material relating to the Jewish question which had been in its possession had to be transferred to a new official agency.
Such an agency was called into being in November, 1802. By order of the Tzar a special ”Committee for the Amelioration of the Jews” was organized, and the following were appointed its members: Kochubay, Minister of the Interior, Dyerzhavin, the ”specialist” on Judaism, at that time Minister of Justice, Count Zubov, and two high officials of Polish birth, Adam Chartoriski, a.s.sistant-Minister for Foreign Affairs, an intimate friend of Alexander I., and Severin Pototzki, a member of the Senate. The Committee was charged with the investigation of all the problems touched upon in Dyerzhavin's ”Opinion,” concerning the curbing of the avaricious pursuits of the Jews in White Russia, with a view to ”extending the amelioration of the Jews also to the other Governments acquired from Poland.”