Volume II Part 5 (1/2)
5. THE ECONOMIC PLIGHT OF RUSSIAN JEWRY AND AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENTS
The attempt at thinning the Jewish population by emigration having failed, the congested Jewish ma.s.ses continued to gasp for air in their Pale of Settlement. The slightest effort to penetrate beyond the Pale into the interior was treated as a criminal offence. In December, 1847, the Council of State engaged in a protracted and earnest discussion about the geographical point up to which the Jewish coachmen of Polotzk should be allowed, to drive the inmates of the local school of cadets on their annual trips to the Russian capital. The discussion arose out of the fact that the road leading from Polotzk to St. Petersburg is crossed by the line separating the Pale from the prohibited interior. A proposal had been made to permit the coachmen to drive their pa.s.sengers as far as Pskov. But when the report was submitted to the Tzar, he appended the following resolution: ”Agreeable; though not to Pskov, but to Ostrov”--the town nearest to the Pale. Of this trivial kind were Russia's methods in curtailing Jewish rights three months before the great upheaval which in adjoining Germany and Austria dealt the death-blow to absolutism and inaugurated the era of the ”Second Emanc.i.p.ation.”
As for the economic life of the Jews, it had been completely undermined by the system of ruthless tutelage, which the Government had employed for a quarter of a century in the hope of ”reconstructing” it. All these drumhead methods, such as the hurling of ma.s.ses of living beings from villages into towns and from the border-zone into the interior, the prohibition of certain occupations and the artificial promotion of others, could not but result in economic ruin, instead of leading to economic reform.
Nor was the governmental system of encouraging agriculture among Jews attended by greater success. In consequence of the expulsion of tens of thousands of Jews from the villages of White Busier in 1823, some two thousand refugees had drifted into the agricultural colonies of New Russia, but all they did was to replace the human wastage from increased mortality, which, owing to the change of climate and the unaccustomed conditions of rural life, had decimated the original settlers. During the reign of Nicholas, efforts were again made to promote agricultural colonization by offering the prospective immigrants subsidies and alleviations in taxation. Even more valuable was the privilege relieving the colonists from military service for a term of twenty-five to fifty years from the time of settlement. Yet only a few tried to escape conscription by taking refuge in the colonies. For the military regime gradually penetrated into these colonies as well. The Jewish colonist was subject to the grim tutelage of Russian ”curators” and ”superintendents,” retired army men, who watched his every step and punished the slightest carelessness by conscription or expulsion.
In 1836 the Government conceived the idea of enlarging the area of Jewish agricultural colonization. By an imperial rescript certain lands in Siberia, situated in the government of Tobolsk and in the territory of Omsk, were set aside for this purpose. Within a short time 1317 Jews declared their readiness to settle on the new lands; many had actually started on their way in batches. But in January, 1837, the Tzar quite unexpectedly changed his mind. After reading the report of the Council of Ministers on the first results of the immigration, he put down the resolution: ”The transplantation of Jews to Siberia is to be stopped.” A few months later orders were issued to intercept those Jews who were on their way to Siberia and transfer them to the Jewish colonies in the government of Kherson. The unfortunate emigrants were seized on the way and conveyed, like criminals, under a military escort into places in which they were not in the least interested. Legislative whims of this kind, coupled with an uncouth system of tutelage, were quite sufficient to crush in many Jews the desire of turning to the soil.
Nevertheless, the colonization made slow progress, gradually spreading from the government of Kherson to the neighboring governments of Yekaterinoslav and Bessarabia. Stray Jewish agricultural settlements also appeared in Lithuania and White Russia. But a comparative handful of some ten thousand ”Jewish peasants” could not affect the general economic make-up of millions of Jews. In spite of all shocks, the economic structure of Russian Jewry remained essentially the same. As before, the central place in this structure was occupied by the liquor traffic, though modified in a certain measure by the introduction of a more extensive system of public leases. Above the rank and file of tavern keepers, both rural and urban, there had arisen a cla.s.s of wealthy tax-farmers, who kept a monopoly on the sale of liquor or the collection of excise in various governments of the Pale. They functioned as the financial agents of the exchequer, while the Jewish employees in their mills, store-houses, and offices acted as their sub-agents, forming a cla.s.s of ”officials” of their own. The place next in importance to the liquor traffic was occupied by retail and wholesale commerce. The crafts and the spiritual professions came last. Pauperism was the inevitable companion of this economic organization, and ”people without definite occupations” were counted by the hundreds of thousands.
6. THE RITUAL MURDER TRIAL OF VELIZH
The ”ordinary” persecutions under which the Jews in Russia were groaning were accompanied by afflictions of an extraordinary kind. The severest among these were the ritual murder trials which became of frequent occurrence, tending to deepen the medieval gloom of that period. True, ritual murder cases had occurred during the reign of Alexander I., but it was only under Nicholas that they a.s.sumed a malign and dangerous form. In the year 1816, shortly before Pa.s.sover, a dead body was found in the vicinity of Grodno and identified as that of the four year old daughter of a Grodno resident, Mary Adamovich. Rumors were spread among the superst.i.tious Christian populace to the effect that the girl had been killed for ritual purposes, and the police, swayed by these rumors, set about to find the culprit among the Jews. Suspicion fell on a member of the Grodno Kahal, Shalom Lapin, whose house adjoined that of the Adamovich family. The only ”evidence” against him were a hammer and a pike found in his house. A sergeant, named Savitzki, a converted Jew, appeared as a material witness before the Commission of Inquiry, and delivered himself of a statement full of ignorant trash, which was intended to show that ”Christian blood is exactly what is needed according to the Jewish religion”--here the witness referred to the Bible story of the Exodus and to two mythical authorities, ”the philosopher Rossie and the prophet Azariah.” He further deposed that ”every rabbi is obliged to satisfy the whole Kahal under his jurisdiction by smearing with same (with Christian blood) the lintels of every house on the first day of the feast of Pa.s.sover.” Prompted by greed and by the desire to distinguish himself, the sergeant declared himself ready to substantiate his testimony from Jewish literature, ”if the chief Government will grant him the necessary a.s.sistance.”
The results of this ”secret investigation” were laid before the governor of Grodno and reported by him to St. Petersburg. In reply, Alexander I.
issued a rescript in February, 1817, ordering that the ”secret investigation be cut short and the murderer be found out” intimating thereby that search be made for the criminal and not for the tenets of the Jewish religion. However, all efforts to discover the culprit failed, and the case was dismissed.
This favorable issue was in no small measure due to the endeavors of the ”Deputies of the Jewish People,” [1] in particular to Sonnenberg, the deputy from Grodno. These deputies, who were present in St. Petersburg at that time, addressed themselves to Golitzin, the Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs, protesting against the ritual murder libel. The trial at Grodno and the ritual murder accusations which simultaneously cropped up in the Kingdom of Poland made the Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs realize that there was in the Western region a dangerous tendency of making the Jews the scapegoats for every mysterious murder case and of fabricating lawsuits of the medieval variety by bringing popular superst.i.tion into play. Golitzin, a Christian pietist, who was nevertheless profoundly averse to narrow ecclesiastic fanaticism, decided to strike at the root of this superst.i.tious legend which was disgracing Poland in her period of decay and was about to fall as a dark stain upon Russia. He succeeded in impressing this conviction upon his like-minded sovereign Alexander I. In the same month in which the ukase concerning ”the Society of Israelitish Christians” was published [2]
Golitzin sent out the following circular to the governors, dated March 6, 1817:
[Footnote 1: See Vol. I, p. 394.]
[Footnote 2: Compare Vol. I, p. 396.]
In view of the fact that in several of the provinces acquired from Poland, cases still occur in which the Jews are falsely accused of murdering Christian children for the alleged purpose of obtaining blood, his Imperial Majesty, taking into consideration that similar accusations have on previous numerous occasions been refuted by impartial investigations and royal charters, has been graciously pleased to convey to those at the head of the governments his Sovereign will: that henceforward the Jews shall not be charged with murdering Christian children, without any evidence and purely as a result of the superst.i.tious belief that they are in need of Christian blood.
One might have thought that this emphatic rescript would suffice to put a stop to the efforts of ignorant adventurers to resuscitate the b.l.o.o.d.y myth. And, for several years, indeed, the sinister agitation kept quiet.
But towards the end of Alexander's reign it came to life again, and gave rise to the monstrous Velizh case.
In the year 1823, on the first day of the Christian Pa.s.sover, a boy of three years, Theodore Yemelyanov, the son of a Russian soldier, disappeared in the city of Velizh, in the government of Vitebsk. Ten days later the child's body was found in a swamp beyond the town, stabbed all over and covered with wounds. The medical examination and the preliminary investigation were influenced by the popular belief that the child had been tortured to death by the Jews. This belief was fostered by two Christian fortune-tellers, a prost.i.tute beggar-woman, called Mary Terentyeva, and a half-witted old maid, by the name of Yeremyeyeva, who by way of divination made the parents of the child believe that its death was due to the Jews. At the judicial inquiry, Terentyeva implicated two of the most prominent Jews of Velizh, the merchant Shmerka [1] Berlin, and Yevzik [2] Zetlin, a member of the local town council.
[Footnote 1: A popular form of the name Shemariah.]
[Footnote 2: The Russian form of _Yozel_, a variant of the name Joseph.]
Protracted investigations failed to substantiate the fabrications of Terentyeva, and in the autumn of 1884 the Supreme Court of the government of Vitebsk rendered the following verdict:
To leave the accidental death of the soldier boy to the will of G.o.d; to declare all the Jews, against whom the charge of murder has been brought on mere surmises, free from all suspicion; to turn over the soldier woman Terentyeva, for her profligate conduct, to a priest for repentance.
However, in view of the exceptional gravity of the crime, the Court recommended to the gubernatorial administration to continue its investigations.
Despite the verdict of the court, the dark forces among the local population, prompted by hatred of the Jews, bent all their efforts on putting the investigation on the wrong track. The low, mercenary Terentyeva became their ready tool. When in September, 1825, Alexander I. was pa.s.sing through Velizh, she submitted a pet.i.tion to him, complaining about the failure of the authorities to discover the murderer of little Theodore, whom she unblus.h.i.+ngly designated as her own child and declared to have been tortured to death by the Jews. The Tzar, entirely oblivious of his ukase of 1817,[1] instructed the White-Russian governor-general, Khovanski, to start a new rigorous inquiry.
[Footnote 1: See above, p. 74.]
The imperial order gave the governor-general, who was a Jew-hater and a believer in the hideous libel, unrestricted scope for his anti-Semitic instincts. He entrusted the conduct of the new investigation to a subaltern, by the name of Strakhov, a man of the same ilk, conferring upon him the widest possible powers. On his arrival in Velizh, Strakhov first of all arrested Terentyeva, and subjected her to a series of cross-examinations during which he endeavored to put her on what he considered the desirable track. Stimulated by the prosecutor, the prost.i.tute managed to concoct a regular criminal romance. She deposed that she herself had partic.i.p.ated in the crime, having lured little Theodore into the homes of Zetlin and Berlin. In Berlin's house, and later on in the synagogue, a crowd of Jews of both s.e.xes had subjected the child to the most horrible tortures. The boy had been stabbed and butchered and rolled about in a barrel. The blood squeezed out of him had been distributed on the spot among those present, who thereupon proceeded to soak pieces of linen in it and to pour it out in bottles.[1] All these tortures had been perpetrated in her own presence, and with the active partic.i.p.ation both of herself and the Christian servant-girls of the two families.
[Footnote 1: According to her testimony, the Jews are in the habit of using Christian blood to smear the eyes of their new-born babies, since ”the Jews are always born blind,” also to mix it with the flour in preparing the unleavened bread for Pa.s.sover.]