Part 9 (1/2)
For a long time I have therefore refused to say an unkind, not to mention an offensive word. As far back as in 1898 I refused so absolutely to make myself the advocate of the Ruthenians against them that the Ruthenian leaders became my bitter enemies, who never tired of attacking me, and I was mute as a fish when Bjornstjerne Bjornson, not long before his death, upon application of the Ruthenians, attacked the Poles, fortunately for them with such unreasonable exaggerations that the attacks did no harm. (Bjornson maintained that the Pole as such was the devil himself as the Middle Ages had imagined him.) I knew better than Bjornson what might be said against electioneering and pressure on electors in Galicia, but I remained silent because I considered it unworthy to attack a people which was in such a difficult position and which was able to defend many minor injustices committed by it as self-defense. I considered it especially impossible for me to attack the Poles to whom I was bound by honor and toward whom I bore the warmest, most sincere sympathy.
It is therefore with no light heart that I write these lines.
Denial of the rights of man to Jewish subjects belongs to the nature of Russia. Now and then Europe has been startled when an uncommon ma.s.sacre of innocent Jews has taken place, as in Kis.h.i.+neff, but all have known and know that Russia stows her Jewish population together in the Polish outskirts of the realm, stows them together so tightly that they can neither live nor die, denies them the liberty of moving, the liberty of studying, even the right of school--and university--education beyond a certain (too small) percentage. Only such Jews who hold a university degree are allowed to live in the capitals of the Empire. No young Jewish woman is allowed to take up her abode near the universities in Petrograd or Moscow, unless she has been enrolled as a prost.i.tute, and it has happened that the police have made their appearance and accused her of forgery, complaining that she did not carry on her profession, but was reading scientific books instead. If a man is, for instance, a doctor of medicine, he may take up his abode in Moscow; in case he is married his wife may live there with him. But if the couple has a two-year-old child, the mother is not allowed to take it with her into the railway carriage and let it live with her in the capital. For the child has no right to live there. If this right is wanted a detailed pet.i.tion must be sent in to the Governor General, in whose power it is to grant or refuse it.
In a few of the cases where plunder and murder of a Jewish population in Russia have taken place, the outrages have partly been excused, or at any rate explained, through the almost incomprehensible ignorance of the peasants. Russia's most famous political economist, who at the same time is a great estate owner, has told me himself that when the elections to the First Duma took place he was informed that each of the peasants on his estate had voted for himself. He asked them, surprised, what they meant, and explained to them that in this way none of them could be elected; but they answered with the question, ”Does not each Deputy get so many rubles a day? Yes. And do you think that we should let so much money go to another if we, perhaps, might get it ourselves?”
The same prominent estate owner told me that one day he asked some of his peasants if they really had partaken in a Pogrom which had taken place in the neighboring parish--he could not believe it, as they looked so good-natured. To his astonishment they answered yes, and when he asked them about the reason they replied: ”You know it very well.” They then explained that they had killed these Jews because the Jews had killed their Saviour. He: ”But that was so long ago and it was not they who did it and it did not happen in this country.” To which they, again astonished, exclaimed: ”Was it long ago? We thought it was last week.”
It appeared that they had understood from the priest's explanation that the crucifixion had taken place then and there.
Under such conditions one is not surprised by any outrage. But to see the hatred of the Jews spread in Russian Poland, where people understand how to read and write, that must surely fill one with wonder. The great number of Jews in the old Polish Kingdom originated in the days of Casimir the Great (1309-1370), who out of love for his concubine, Esther, opened his country to the Jews and made conditions favorable for them. Since then the number has increased, as the Czars locked up all their Jewish subjects there. So they have been living separated and with a special dress like the Jews of Denmark at the time of Holberg. They have, however, felt and suffered as Polish patriots. As early as 1794 a regiment of Jewish volunteers fought under Kosciusko; their Colonel fell in 1809. In 1830 the shallow Polish national Government refused the Jews' pet.i.tion to be allowed to enter the army. As they then ventured to apply for admission to the Polish public schools Nicholas I. punished them, allowing 36,000 families to be carried away to the steppes of South Russia, where the regulation for the enlistment of children overtook them. All their small boys from the age of 6 years were sent to Archangel in Cossack custody to be trained as sailors. They died in mult.i.tudes on the way.
The evils which befell all the inhabitants of Poland regardless of their creed for some time suppressed the hatred of the Jews which is always lurking in the ma.s.ses. The great men of Poland checked its development.
Adam Mickiewicz, Poland's greatest author, went so far that in his chief work, Poland's national epic, ”Pan Tadeusz” (1834) he makes a Jewish innkeeper one of the most sympathetic leading characters. He is introduced in the fourth canto as a genius in music, the great master of the national instrument, the cymbal; and Mickiewicz makes the culmination of his poem the moment when Jankiel before Dombrowski himself plays the Dombrowski marche, symbolical of the whole history of Poland from 1791-1812, the year in which the poem takes place, the Napoleon year.
In the year 1860 the equalization of the Jews with the Catholics was a reality in Warsaw, and when, in February, 1861, at two large public places in Warsaw, the Russians had shot on the kneeling ma.s.ses singing the national anthem, (”Zdymem pozarow,”) the Jews felt impelled to show their national feeling through an unmistakable manifestation.
In ma.s.ses they accompanied their rabbis into the Catholic churches just as the Christians in crowds entered the synagogues to sing the same hymn.
This last feature, the processions of the two creeds into each other's churches singing the same song, made such an impression on Henrik Ibsen, the great Scandinavian poet, that again and again he returned in his conversations to this as one of the greatest and most beautiful experiences he had ever had.
And now under the whirlstorm of madness which nationalism has driven across Europe, all this is lost; nay, from a religious reconciliation it has been turned into flaming hatred between the races.
II.
In 1912 the election of a Deputy to the Duma was to take place in Warsaw. The population of the town consists of between seven and eight hundred thousand. As among them there are 300,000 Jews, the majority of the electors, it was in the power of that majority to elect a Jewish Deputy. Because of their Polish national feeling, however, they gave up this right, as they wanted Warsaw, as the capital of the Kingdom of Poland, to be represented by a man who not only in spirit, but also by race, was a Pole. Of the Polish committee they only demanded that the party concerned be no enemy to the Jews. It proved, however, that the committee in its arrogance would not deal with them at all and proposed Kucharschewski, a p.r.o.nounced anti-Semitic candidate and a man who publicly declared that he desired the election to the Duma only to work for the extermination of the Jews of Poland. By the way, it is strange to notice how the word ”exterminate,” which thirty years ago in the days of Bismarck and Eduard von Hartmann as _Ausrotten_ was subject to the curse and condemnation of the Poles, has now come to honor, and how easily it pa.s.ses their lips.
As the Jews, of course, could not vote on such a man, they urgently asked the committee to propose another candidate not inimical to them.
This reasonable request was refused with coa.r.s.eness and Kucharschewski's candidacy maintained. Because of that the Jews were obliged to look about for another candidate of Polish family who was fit for the position and was not hostile to them. In spite of numerous applications, they did not succeed in finding such a man; at the last moment, when all attempts had failed, Jagello, the Social Democrat, declared himself willing to accept the candidacy of the Jews.
The only thing in his favor was the fact that he was of pure Polish blood. As their leading men all belong to the higher middle cla.s.s, they did not share his views. But the state of affairs forced them to support him. Lord Beaconsfield used to maintain that the natural disposition of the Jewish race was conservative, but foolish politics, instead of encouraging the conservative instincts of the race, forced it to cast its lot with the most extreme elements of the opposition. It has proved true here.
Jagello was elected.
The leading men in Russian Poland, who, as a matter of fact, through the whole new century, had fought against the Jews, although secretly, for fear they should forfeit the sympathy of the intellectual aristocracy of Europe, used this electoral victory of the Jews, which had been forced upon them, to throw off the mask and openly act as their pa.s.sionate enemies. The so-called co-operative movement developed during the last twelve years, and in itself nothing but a fight against the Jewish commerce, under a different name, now changed into a systematic and cruelly effected boycotting of the Jewish population. In private as in public life, the openly p.r.o.nounced pa.s.sword was: not to buy from Jews, not to a.s.sociate with Jews.
At the head of this movement marched the intelligence of Poland, among others some of its most famous authors, avowed free thinkers as Nemojewski, nay, as Alexander Swientochowski. Literary life presents many changes, metamorphoses, which in thoroughness are not very much inferior to those of Ovid. A good deal is necessary to make one who for one-half century has witnessed the want of character among writers feel even the slightest surprise. But I should willingly have sworn that I should never have lived to see Alexander Swientochowski a nationalist, he the most uncompromising adversary of nationalism, who endured a good deal for his conviction, to see the poet of ”Chawa Rubin” an anti-Semitic chief. Not only does all that Alexander Swientochowski wrote rise against him, but also the words, the powerful words, which issued from his mouth in his palmy days.
The whole Polish press placed itself at the disposal of this movement.
Young Polish louts were posted outside the Jewish shops and ill-treated the Christian women and children who wanted to buy there. By means of the well-known Dumowski a new paper, Dwa Groszi, was started, which simply urged pogroms. It soon came to b.l.o.o.d.y struggles. Polish undergraduates killed an old Jew in the Sliska Street in Warsaw. In the little town of Welun peasants poured naphtha on the house of a Jew and put fire to it, burning a large family. Similar acts occurred in several other places, until the Russian Government stopped this pogrom movement in order to prevent the Polish nationalism from getting stronger.
The Polish priests in the villages incited the people from the pulpit to boycotting of and war against the Jews. After the sentence in the Beilis action the Polish newspapers were almost alone in publis.h.i.+ng on circulars the information that Beilis had been acquitted, but that the existence of religious murder had been satisfactorily proved. Nay, the free thinker, Nemojewski, wrote a book, in which he maintained the monstrous lie that Jewish religious murders are facts, and traveled all over the country with an agitatorial lecture to the same purpose.
Under these circ.u.mstances, the Jews in Russian Poland turned to the few men whose names were so esteemed or whose characters were so unimpeachable that their words could not be unheeded.
Ladislas Mickiewicz, the excellent son of the great Mickiewicz, who had pa.s.sed his whole life in Paris, first as a publisher and translator of the works of his father, and then as a Polish patriotic author, convened, together with some other prominent men, a great meeting at Warsaw to restore the inner peace. In vain he begged and besought his countrymen, who had enemies enough otherwise, not to act as enemies of the Jews, who had always been their friends. No Polish newspaper gave any report of his speech.
All this took place before the war. The provisional result was the economic destruction of the Russian-Polish Jews. But now during the war the glow of the b.l.o.o.d.y hatred of the Jews has blazed out in far stronger flames and the Russian Government has as yet done nothing to subdue or quench the fire.