Volume II Part 23 (2/2)

The _Imperial Messenger_ is comforting the public by the announcement that it would in due time and at due length report all cases of excesses perpetrated upon the Jews. One might think that these are every-day occurrences forming part of the natural course of events which demand nothing else than timely communication to the public. Is there indeed no means to put a stop to this crying scandal?

Events soon made it clear that there was no desire to put a stop to this ”scandal,” as the Moscow paper politely termed the exploits of the Russian robber bands. The local authorities of Balta were forewarned in time of the approaching pogroms. Beginning with the middle of March the people in Balta and the surrounding country were discussing them openly.

When the Jews of that town made their apprehensions known to the local police commissioner, they received from him an evasive reply. In view of the fact that the Jewish population of Balta was three times as large as the Christian, it would not have been difficult for the Jews to organize some sort of self-defence. But they knew that such an organization was strictly forbidden by the Government, and, realizing the consequences, they had to confine themselves to a secret agreement entered into by a few families to stand up for one another in the hour of distress. On the second day of the Russian Easter, corresponding to the seventh day of the Jewish festival, on March 29, the pogrom began, surpa.s.sing by the savagery of the mob and the criminal conduct of the authorities all the baccha.n.a.lia of 1881. A contemporary observer, basing his statements on the results of a special investigation, gives the following account of the events at Balta:

At the beginning of the pogrom, the Jews got together and forced a band of rioters to draw back and seek shelter in the building of the fire department. But when the police and soldiers appeared on the scene, the rioters decided to leave their place of refuge. Instead of driving off the disorderly band, the police and soldiers began to beat the Jews with their rifle b.u.t.ts and swords. This served as a signal to start the pogrom. At that moment, somebody sounded an alarm bell, and, in response, the mob began to flock together.

Fearing the numerical superiority of the Jews in that part of the town, the crowd pa.s.sed across the bridge to the so-called Turkish side, where there were fewer Jews. The crowd was accompanied by the military commander, the police commissioner, the burgomaster, and a part of the local battalion, which fact, however, did not prevent the mob, while pa.s.sing the Cathedral street, from demolis.h.i.+ng a Jewish store and breaking the windows in the house of another Jew, a member of the town-council. After the mob had crossed over to the Turkish side, the authorities drew up military cordons on all the three bridges leading from that side to the rest of the town, with the order not to allow any Jews to pa.s.s. Needless to say, the order was carried out. At the same time the Christians of the remaining sections of the town and of the village of Alexandrovka were allowed to pa.s.s unhindered. Thanks to these arrangements, the Turkish side was sacked in the course of three to four hours, so that by one o'clock in the morning the rioters found nothing left to do. During the night, the police and military authorities arrested twenty-four rioters and a much larger number of Jews. The latter were arrested because they ventured to stay near their homes. The following morning, the Christians were released and allowed to swell the ranks of the pillaging mob, while the Jews were kept in jail until the following day and freed only when the governor arrived.

On the following day, March 30, at four o'clock in the morning, a large number of peasants, amounting to about five thousand and armed with clubs, began to arrive in town, having been summoned by the Ispravnik [1] from the adjacent villages. The arrival of the peasants was welcomed by the Jews, who thought that they had been called to come to their aid. But they soon found out their mistake, for the peasants declared that they had come to beat and plunder the Jews. Simultaneously with the arrival of the peasants, large numbers from among the local mob began to a.s.semble around the Cathedral, and at eight o'clock in the morning signals were given to renew the pogrom. At first this was prevented. The officers of the local battalion, who patrolled the city, ordered the soldiers to surround the mob and hold it off for about an hour, during which time the Greek-Orthodox bishop [2] Radzionovski admonished the rioters and tried to make them understand that such doings were contrary to the laws of the Church and the State. But when the police commissioner, the military chief, and Ispravnik arrived before the Cathedral, the military cordon was withdrawn, and the crowd, now let loose, threw itself upon a near-by liquor store, and, after demolis.h.i.+ng it and filling itself with alcohol, resumed its work of destruction, with the co-operation of the peasants who had been summoned by the Ispraynik and the a.s.sistance of the soldiers and policemen. It was on this occasion that those wild, savage scenes of murder, rapine, and plunder took place, the account of which as published in the newspapers is but the pale shadow of the real facts.... The pogrom of Balta was called forth not by the mere inactivity but by the direct activity of the local authorities.

[Footnote 1: The head of the district (or county) police. The police in the larger towns of the county is subject to the police commissioner of the town, who is referred to earlier in the text.]

[Footnote 2: In Russian, _Protoyerey_, a term borrowed from the Greek. It corresponds roughly to the t.i.tle of bishop.]

What these ”savage scenes” were we do not learn from the newspapers, which were forbidden by the censor to report them, but we know them partly from unpublished sources and partly from the later court proceedings. Aside from the demolition of twelve hundred and fifty houses and business places and the destruction and pillage of property and merchandise--according to a statement of the local rabbi, ”all well-to-do Jews were turned into beggars, and more than fifteen thousand people were sent out into the wide world ”--a large number of people were killed and maimed, and many women were violated. Forty Jews were slain or dangerously wounded; one hundred and seventy received slight wounds; many Jews, and particularly Jewesses, became insane from fright.

There were more than twenty cases of rape. The seventeen year old daughter of a poor polisher, Eda Maliss by name, was attacked by a horde of b.e.s.t.i.a.l lads before the eyes of her brother. When the mother of the unfortunate girl ran into the street and called to her aid a policeman who was standing near-by, the latter followed the woman into the house, and then, instead of helping her, dishonored her on the spot. The fiendish hordes invaded the home of Baruch Shlakhovski, and began their b.l.o.o.d.y work by slaying the master of the house, whereupon his wife and daughter fled and hid themselves in a near-by orchard. Here a Russian neighbor lured them into his house under the pretext of defending their honor against the rioters, but, once in his house, he disgraced the daughter in the presence of her mother. In many cases the soldiers of the local garrison a.s.saulted and beat the Jews who showed themselves on the streets while the ”military operations” of the mob were going on. In accordance with the customary pogrom ritual, the human fiends were left undisturbed for two days, and only on the third day were troops summoned from a near-by city to put a stop to the atrocities.

On the same day the governor of Podolia arrived to make an investigation. It was soon learned that the local authorities, the police commissioner, the Ispravnik, the military commander, the burgomaster, and the president of the n.o.bility [1] had either directly or indirectly abetted the pogrom. Many rioters, who had been arrested by the police, were soon released, because they threatened otherwise to point out to the higher authorities the ringleaders from among the local officials and the representatives of Russian society. The Jews, again, were constantly terrorized by these scoundrels and cowed by the fear of ma.s.sacres and complete annihilation, in case they dared to expose their hangmen before the courts.

[Footnote 1: The n.o.bility of each government forms an organization of its own. It is headed by a president for the entire government who has under his jurisdiction a president for each district (or county). Such a county president is referred to in the text.]

The pogrom of Balta found but a feeble echo in the immediate neighborhood--in a few localities of the governments of Podolia and Kherson. It seemed as if the energy of destruction and savagery had spent itself in the exploits at Balta. On the whole, the pogrom campaign conducted in the spring of 1882 covered but an insignificant territory when compared with the pogrom enterprise of 1881, though surpa.s.sing it considerably in point of quality. The horrors of Balta were a substantial earnest of the Kis.h.i.+nev atrocities of 1903 and the October pogroms of 1905.

4. THE CONFERENCE OF JEWISH NOTABLES AT ST. PETERSBURG

The horrors of Balta cast their shadow upon the conference of Jewish delegates which met in St. Petersburg on April 8-11, 1882. The conference, which had been called by Baron Horace Gunzburg, with the permission of Ignatyev, was made up of some twenty-five delegates from the provinces--among them Dr. Mandelstamm of Kiev, Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Specter of Kovno--and fifteen notables from the capital, including Baron Gunzburg himself, the railroad magnate Polakov, and Professor Bakst. The question of Jewish emigration was the central issue of the conference, although, in connection with it, the general situation of Russian Jewry came up for discussion. There was a mixed element of tragedy and timidity in the deliberations of this miniature congress, at which neither the voice of the ma.s.ses nor that of the _intelligentzia_ were given a full hearing. On the one hand, the conference listened to heartrending speeches, picturing the intolerable position of the Jews; and one of the delegates, Shmerling from Moghilev, who had just delivered such a speech, was so overcome that he fainted and died in a few hours. On the other hand, the most influential delegates, particularly those from the capital, were looking about timorously, fearing lest the Government suspect them of a lack of patriotism. Others again looked upon emigration as an illicit form of protest, as ”sedition,” and they clung to this conviction, even when the conference had been told in the name of the Minister of the Interior that it was expected to consider the question of ”thinning out the Jewish population in the Pale of Settlement, in view of the fact that the Jews will not be admitted into the interior governments of Russia.”

At the second meeting of the conference, the rabbi of St. Petersburg, Dr. Drabkin, reported to the delegates about his last conversation with Ignatyev. In reply to the rabbi who had stated that the Jews were waiting for an imperial word ordering the suppression of the pogroms, and were antic.i.p.ating the removal of their legal disabilities, the Minister had characterized these a.s.sertions as ”commonplaces,” and had added in an irritated tone: ”The Jews themselves are responsible for the pogroms. By joining the Nihilists they thereby deprive the Government of the possibility of sheltering them against violence.” The sophistry of the Minister was refuted on the spot by his own confession that the Balta pogrom was due to ”a false rumor charging the Jews with having undermined the local Greek-Orthodox church,” in other words, that the cause of the Balta pogrom was not to be traced to any tendencies within Jewry but rather to the agitation of evil-minded Jew-baiters.

At the same session, the discussion of the emigration question was side-tracked by a new design of the slippery Minister. The financier Samuel Polakov, who was close to Ignatyev, declared in a spirit of base flunkeyism that the labors of the conference would prove fruitless unless they were carried on in accordance with ”Government instructions.” On this occasion he informed the conference that in a talk which he had with the Minister the latter had branded the endeavors to stimulate emigration as ”an incitement to sedition,” on the ground that ”emigration does not exist for Russian citizens.” Asked by the Minister for suggestions as to the best means of relieving the congestion of the Jews in the Pale, Polakov had replied: ”By settling them all over Russia.” To this the Minister had retorted that he could not allow the settlement of Jews except in Central Asia and in the newly conquered oasis of Akhal-Tekke, [1] In obedience to these ministerial utterances, the obsequious financier sharply opposed the plan of a Jewish emigration to foreign lands, and seriously recommended to the conference to consider the proposal made by Ignatyev. The Minister's suggestion was bitterly attacked by Dr. Mandelstamm, who saw in it a new attempt to make sport of the Jews, Even Professor Bakst, who objected to emigration on principle, declared that the proposed scheme of settling the Jews amounted in reality to ”a deportation to far-off places” and was tantamount to an official ”cla.s.sification of the Jews as criminals.”

[Footnote 1: In the Trans-Caspian region. It had been occupied by Russian troops shortly before--in 1880.]

From the project of deportation, which failed to meet with the sympathy of the conference, the delegates proceeded to discuss the burning question of pogroms. It was proposed to send a deputation to the Tzar, appealing to him to put a stop to the legislative restrictions, which were bound to inspire the Russian population with the belief that the Jews were outside the pale of the law.

In the question of foreign emigration the majority of the conference voted against the establishment of emigration committees, on the ground that the latter might give the impression as if the Jews were desirous of leaving Russia.

After a debate lasting four days the following resolutions were adopted:

_First_, to reject completely the thought of organizing emigration, as being subversive of the dignity of the Russian body politic and of the historic rights of the Jews to their present fatherland.

_Second_, to point to the necessity of abolis.h.i.+ng the present discriminating legislation concerning the Jews, this abolition being the only means to regulate the relations.h.i.+p of the Jewish population to the original inhabitants.

_Third_, to bring to the knowledge of the Government the pa.s.sive att.i.tude of the authorities which had clearly manifested itself during the time of the disorders.

_Fourth_, to pet.i.tion the Government to find means for compensating the Jewish population, which had suffered from the pogroms as a result of inadequate police protection.

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