Kitabı oku: «History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume 3 of 3. From the Accession of Nicholas II until the Present Day», sayfa 11

3. The Third, or Black, Duma

Such was the atmosphere which surrounded the elections to the third Imperial Duma in the fall of 1907. The reactionary electoral law of June 3 barred from the Russian Parliament the most progressive and democratic elements of the Empire. Moreover, by splitting the electoral assemblies into class and national curias, the Government succeeded in preventing the election of any considerable number of Jewish deputies. The elections took place under severe pressure from the authorities. Many "dangerous" nominees of the Left were arbitrarily put under arrest on framed-up political charges and, pending the conclusion of the investigation, were temporarily barred from running for office. In some places, the Black Hundred openly threatened the Jews with pogroms, if they dared to nominate their own candidates. As a result, only two Jewish deputies managed to get into the Duma – Friedman from the government of Kovno, and Nisselovich from Courland.

The third Duma, nicknamed the Black, assembled in November, 1907. It had an overwhelming majority of reactionaries and anti-Semites. This majority of the Right was made up of the coalition of the conservative Center, represented by the "Octobrist" party,⁵⁶ with the extreme Right wing, the Russian "Nationalists," and Black Hundred. Whenever the Jewish question came up for discussion, the reactionary bloc was always able to drown the voices of the weak opposition, the "Cadet" party (Constitutional Democrats), the Trudoviki ("the Labor Party"), and the handful of Socialists.

The attitude of this reactionary Duma toward the Jewish question was revealed at its early sessions when the bill concerning the inviolability of the person was the subject of discussion. The opposition demanded the establishment of the full freedom of movement as the most fundamental condition of the inviolability of the person, but the majority of the Right managed to insert in the bill the following stipulation: "No one shall be limited in the right of choosing his place of residence and in moving from place to place, except in the cases set forth in the law, and excepting the Jews who arrive in localities situated outside the Pale of Settlement" (1908). In this wise the Russian legislators cleverly succeeded in harmonizing the principle of the inviolability of the person with the life-long imprisonment of millions of people in the huge prison house known as the Pale of Settlement.

Their solicitude for the maintenance of this vast ghetto was so intense that the reactionary Government of Stolypin was often the butt of criticism because it did not always show sufficient regard for this holy institution. The fact of the matter was that in May, 1907, Stolypin had issued a circular ordering the governors to stop the expulsion from the interior governments of those Jews who had settled there before August, 1906, and possessed "a family and a domestic establishment" in those provinces, provided they were "harmless to the public order and do not arouse the dissatisfaction of the Christian population." As a result of this circular, several hundred, possibly several thousand, Jewish families were saved from expulsion. In consequence, the Right brought in an interpellation calling upon the Government to explain on what ground it had dared to issue this "charter of privileges" to the Jews. The interpellation, of course, proved effective, and the Government did its utmost to nullify the exemptive provisions of the circular. The anti-Semitic Duma betrayed the same spirit on another occasion by rejecting in the same year (1908) the bill, introduced by the Opposition, conferring the right of visiting the health resorts or watering-places upon all sufferers, without distinction of nationality.

Yet these legal discriminations were not the worst feature of the third Duma. Even more excruciating was the way in which the Right wing of the Russian Parliament permitted itself to make sport of Judaism and things Jewish. It almost seemed as if the devotees of autocracy, the members of the extreme Right, had come to the Russian Parliament for the express purpose of showering abuse not only on the Russian constitution but also on parliamentary government in general. The hirelings of Nicholas II. danced like a horde of savages over the dead body of the emancipation movement, singing hymns in praise of slavery and despotism. Creatures of the street, the reactionary deputies drenched the tribune of the Imperial Duma with mud and filth, and, when dealing with the Jews, they resorted to methods similar to those which were in vogue among their accomplices upon the streets of the devastated cities. The term Zhyd and the adjective Zhydovski, in addition to other scurrilous epithets, became the most favored terms of their vocabulary. They inserted formulas and amendments in various bills submitted to the Duma which were deliberately intended to insult the Jews. They called upon the Ministry of War to bring in a bill excluding the Jews from the army, in view of the fact that the Jewish soldiers had proved an element "which corrupts the army in the time of peace and is extremely unreliable in the time of war" (1908). They supported a law barring the Jews from the military Academy of Medicine, on the ground that the Jewish surgeons had carried on a revolutionary propaganda in the army during the Russo-Japanese War (1910). The Octobrists demanded the exclusion of the Jews from the office of Justice of the Peace, for the reason that their admission was subversive of the principles of a "Christian State" (1909). The remark made on that occasion by Karaulov, a deputy of the Opposition, "Where there is no equality, where there are pariah nationalities, there is no room for a constitutional order," was met from the benches of the Right with the retort: "Thank God for it; we don't want it." A similar cynical outburst of laughter greeted the warning of Rodichev: "Without the abolition of the Jewish disabilities, there is no access to the Temple of Freedom."

The two Jewish Duma deputies did their utmost to get a hearing, but the Black Hundred generally interrupted their speeches by wild and offensive exclamations. In 1910, the Jewish deputy Nisselovich succeeded in obtaining the signatures of one hundred and sixty-six deputies for a legal draft, abrogating the Pale of Settlement. It was laid before the Duma, but resulted merely in fruitless debates. It was referred to a committee which quietly strangled the bill.

4. New Jewish Disabilities

Spurred on by the reactionary Duma, the Government went to even greater lengths in its policy of Jewish discrimination. Premier Stolypin, who was getting constantly nearer to the Right, was entirely oblivious of the promise, made by him in 1905, to remove immediately all restrictions which are "the source of irritation and are manifestly obsolete." On the contrary, the Ministry presided over by him was systematically engaged in inventing new grievous disabilities. The Jewish deputy Friedman was fully justified in declaring, in a speech delivered in February, 1910, that even "during the most terrible time which the Jews had to live through under Plehve no such cruelties and barbarities were practised as at the present moment." Wholesale expulsions of Jews from the cities situated outside the Pale of Settlement and from the villages within the Pale assumed the character of an epidemic. In the spring of 1910 the Government decided on sacrificing to the Moloch of Jew-hatred a whole hecatomb by expelling twelve hundred Jewish families from Kiev – a measure which aroused a cry of indignation beyond the confines of Russia. The acts of the Government were marked by a refinement of cruelty, for even little children, invalids, and aged people were pitilessly evicted. Particular enmity was shown in the ejection of Jews who had committed the "crime" of visiting summer resorts outside the city lines. The Senate handed down a decision to the effect that the Jewish soldiers who had participated in the defence of the besieged fortress of Port Arthur during the Japanese War were not entitled to the right of residence which had been granted by a former decree⁵⁷ to the Jewish soldiers who had taken part in the war.

The spiritual murder of Jewish school children was the function of the black Minister of Enlightenment, with the significant name of Schwartz. The school norm, which, before the revolution, had been applied merely as a Government order, without legislative sanction, was formulated by him into a law and ratified by the Tzar in September, 1908. Henceforth, all institutions of higher learning in the Empire were open to the Jews only in a proportion not exceeding three per cent. of the total number of students for the capitals, five per cent. for the educational establishments outside the Pale, and ten per cent. for the Pale of Settlement. In view of the fact that during the emancipation movement the influx of Jews to the higher schools had been very great, so that their number was now vastly in excess of the established norm, it would have become necessary for the higher schools to bar completely all new candidates until the number of Jewish students had been reduced to the prescribed percentage limits. For a while the Minister recoiled from taking this cruel step, and permitted for the next few years the admission of Jewish students within the limits of the percentage norm, calculating the latter in relation to the number of the newly admitted Christian students during a given year, without regard to the Jewish students admitted previously. Subsequently, however, many educational institutions closed their doors completely to the Jews, referring, by way of explanation, to the "completion of the norm" by the former pupils. Once more, bands of the "martyrs of learning" could be seen wending their ways toward the universities in foreign lands.

A year later, in 1909, the percentage restrictions governing the secondary schools were also placed on the statute books. The proportion of Jewish admissions was fixed between five and fifteen per cent. —i. e., slightly in excess of the old norm – and was extended in its application to private educational institutions with the prerogatives of government schools. This law spelled ruin to many gymnazia and schools of commerce which, though directed by Christians, were almost entirely dependent on Jewish support, eighty per cent. of their school population consisting of Jews. As for the gymnazia maintained by Jews, with very few exceptions, they never were able to obtain from the Ministry the status of government institutions.

The educational Hamans, however, went a step further, and in March, 1911, secured an ukase of the Tzar extending the percentage norm to the "externs":⁵⁸ henceforward Jews were to be admitted to the examination for the "certificate of maturity"⁵⁹ or for the completion of a part of the curriculum only in a certain proportion to the number of Christian externs. In point of fact, however, there were no Christian externs, since only the Jews who had failed to find admission to the schools were forced to present themselves for examination as externs. In consequence, the enormous number of Jewish children who had been barred from the schools by the percentage norm were deprived of their right to receive a testimonial from a secondary school. This law was passed during a brief interruption in the sessions of the Duma and was never submitted to it. The deputies of the Opposition brought in an interpellation concerning this action, but the "Black Parliament" laid the matter on the table, and the law which lacked all legal basis went into operation.

Swayed more and more by the tendencies of a reactionary Russian nationalism, Stolypin's Government set out to uproot the national-cultural institutions of the "alien" races in Russia. The Poles, the Finns, and other nationalities became the victims of this policy. The lash of oppression was also applied to Jewish cultural life. In 1910, Stolypin issued a circular impressing Russian officialdom with the idea that the cultural and educational societies of the "aliens" contributed towards arousing in them "a narrow national-political self-consciousness" and towards "the strengthening of national separatism," and that for this reason all the societies of the Ukrainians and Jews which were established for the purpose of fostering a separate national culture should be prohibited.

5. The Spiritual Revival of Russian Jewry

This new blow was aimed right at the heart of Judaism. For after the revolution, when the political struggle had subsided, the Jewish intelligenzia directed its entire energy into the channel of national-cultural endeavors. Profiting by the law of 1906, granting the freedom of assemblies and meetings, they founded everywhere cultural, educational, and economic (co-operative and credit) societies. In 1908, the Jewish Literary Society was established in St. Petersburg, which soon counted over a hundred branches in the provinces. The same year saw the formation of the Jewish Historico-Ethnographic Society which began to publish a quarterly review under the name Yevreyskaya Starina ("Jewish Antiquity").⁶⁰ The oldest educational organization among the Jews, the Society for the Diffusion of Enlightenment, enlarged its activity and was endeavoring to create a new type of national Jewish school.

A multitude of other cultural societies and circles sprang into life with the sanction of the authorities throughout the length and breadth of the Pale. Everywhere lectures and conferences were held and heated debates were carried on, centering around national-cultural problems. Particularly passionate were the discussions about the position of Hebrew and Yiddish in public life, in school and in literature, leading to the alignment of two parties, the Hebraists and the Yiddishists. The lectures, conferences and debates themselves were generally carried on in one of these languages, mostly in the Yiddish vernacular.

In spite of their crudities, these partisan conflicts were a clear indication of the advance of national self-consciousness and of the desire for the upbuilding of a genuine Jewish life upon the concrete foundations of a cultural autonomy. Of course, anti-Semitic Tzardom could not be expected to sympathize with this inner regeneration of Jewry, and, as in the time of Plehve, it directed its blow at the Jewish-national organizations. Here and there the blow was effective. In 1911, the Jewish Literary Society, with its one hundred and twenty branches, which had displayed an energetic activity in the establishment of libraries and the arrangement of public lectures, went out of existence. In general, however, the attacks directed against the Jewish spirit proved much more difficult of realization than the attacks upon Jewish property. The cultural activities continued in their course, defying all external restrictions and persecutions.

The literary revival, which had started in the nineties, and was but temporarily interrupted by the stormy events of the revolutionary period, also came into its own again. The rejuvenation of both the national and the popular language, finding its expression in a widely ramified Jewish literature, proceeded along paralleled lines. The periodical press in Hebrew, represented by the two dailies, ha-Tzefirah in Warsaw, and ha-Zeman in Vilna, and the monthly ha-Shiloah in Odessa, found its counterpart in a popular press in Yiddish, reaching hundreds of thousands of readers, such as the dailies Fraind ("The Friend," published since 1903 in St. Petersburg), Haint ("To-day"), Moment, and others, in Warsaw. In addition there was the Jewish press in Russian: the weeklies Voskhod, Razsvyet, Yevreyski Mir in St. Petersburg, and a few other publications.

In the domain of higher literary productivity, new forces were being constantly added to the old ones. Besides the great national bard Bialik there appeared a number of gifted poets: Shneor, the singer of "storm and stress," of doubts and negations, the romantically inclined Jacob Kohan, Fichman, Reisin, David Einhorn, and many other youthful, as yet scarcely unfolded talents. J. L. Perez found a rival in Shalom Asch, the portrayer of patriarchal Jewish life in the provincial towns of Poland (Die Städtel, "The Provincial Town," 1904), and the author of charming sketches from Jewish life, as well as a playwright of note whose productions have met with tumultuous applause both on the Jewish and the non-Jewish stage (Moshiah's Zeiten, "Messianic Times," Gott von Nekomo, "God of Revenge," Shabbetai Zewi, Yihus, "Blue Blood"). His numerous co-workers in Yiddish letters have devoted themselves with youthful enthusiasm to the cultivation of this branch of Jewish literature.

In Hebrew fiction a number of talented writers and a group of novelists, who publish their works mostly in the ha-Shiloah, came to the fore. The successor of Ahad Ha'am in the editorship of this periodical, Dr. Joseph Klausner, occupies a prominent place in Jewish literature as publicist, critic, and partly as historian. If we add to these talents the not inconsiderable number of writers who are domiciled in Galicia, Palestine, Germany, and America, and draw their inspiration from the vast Russian-Jewish reservoir, the growth of Jewish literature during the last decade stands forth in bold relief.

This progress of inner Jewish life in Russia is truly remarkable. In spite of the catastrophes which have descended upon Russian Jewry during the first decade of the twentieth century, the productivity of the Jewish national spirit has gone on unchecked, and the national-Jewish culture has struck out in all directions. The assimilationist positions, which have been generally abandoned, are only held by a few loyal devotees of a past age. It is true that the process of elemental assimilation, which penetrates from the surrounding atmosphere into Judaism through the medium of language, school and literature continues to affect Jewish life with the same force as of old. But there can be no doubt that it is effectively counterbalanced by the centripetal factor of a national culture which is becoming more and more powerful. Large as is the number of religious apostates who have deserted Judaism under the effect of external pressure, and of moral renegades who have abandoned the national ethical ideals of Judaism in favor of a new-fangled decadent æstheticism, it is negligible when compared with the compact mass of Russian Jewry and with the army of intellectuals whose national self-consciousness has been deepened by suffering. As in all previous critical moments in the history of the Jews, the spirit of the nation, defying its new tormentors, has grown stronger in the worn-out body. The Hamans of Russia who have attempted to crush the Eternal People have failed as signally as their predecessors in Persia, Syria and Byzantium.

RUSSIAN JEWRY SINCE 1911

Being loath to cross the threshold of the present, we shall stop at the year 1911, terminating the first decade of the Thirty Years' War waged by Russian Tzardom against Jewry since 1881. The more recent phases of this war are still fresh in our memory. To put the new campaign of Jew-hatred in its proper light, it will suffice to point out its most conspicuous landmarks which stand out by their extraordinarily sinister features. In 1911, the organizations of the Black Hundred, with the help of their accomplices in the Duma and in the Government circles, manufactured the monstrous "Beilis case." The murder of a Russian boy in Kiev, of a family belonging to a band of thieves, and the discovery of the body in the neighborhood of a brickkiln owned by a Jew provided the anti-Semites with an opportunity to bring forward the old charge of ritual murder. In the beginning the Government was somewhat uncertain as to the attitude it should adopt towards the mysterious Kiev murder. But a political occurrence which took place at the time put an end to its vacillation. In September, 1911, Premier Stolypin was assassinated in a Kiev theatre in the presence of the Tzar and the dignitaries of State. The assassin, by the name of Bogrov, proved to be the son of a lawyer who was of Jewish extraction, though he had long before turned his back upon his people – a semi-anarchist, who at one time had been active as police agent for some mysterious revolutionary purposes. The Jewish extraction of the father of the assassin was enough to produce a paroxysm of fury in the camp of the anti-Semitic reactionaries who had lost in the person of Stolypin an exalted patron. In Kiev preparations were openly made for a Jewish massacre, but the Government was afraid that the proposed wholesale execution of Jews would mar the festive solemnity of the Tzar's visit to Kiev. The authorities made it known that the Tzar was not in favor of riots, and a bloody street pogrom was averted.

In its place, however, a bloodless pogrom, extending over two years, was arranged in the form of the Beilis case. Minister of Justice Shcheglovitov, a former Liberal, who had become a fanatical partisan of the Black Hundred, made up his mind to impart to the trial a glaring ritual coloring. The original Judicial inquiry having failed to uncover any traces of Jewish complicity, the Minister of Justice ordered a new special inquiry and constantly changed the personnel of the investigating and prosecuting officials, until he finally secured a bill of indictment in which the whole case was represented as a ritual crime, committed by the Jew Beilis with the participation of "undiscovered persons."

For two years, the Beilis case provided the pabulum for a wild anti-Semitic campaign which was carried on among the so-called better classes, on the streets, in the press, and in the Imperial Duma. The court trial which took place in Kiev in October, 1913, was expected to crown with success the criminal design harbored by the Minister of Justice and the Black Hundred, but the expectations of the Government were disappointed. In spite of a carefully selected court personnel, which consisted of anti-Semitic judges representing the Crown, and of sworn jurymen, ignorant peasants and burghers who believed in the ritual murder legend, Beilis was acquitted, and the authorities found it impossible to fasten the guilt upon the Jews.

Exasperated by the failure, the Government wreaked its vengeance upon the liberal-minded intellectuals and newspaper men, who, by their agitation against the hideous libel, had wrested the prey from the hands of the Black Hundred. Scores of legal actions were instituted not only against newspaper editors and contributors but also against the St. Petersburg Bar Association, which had adopted a resolution protesting against the method pursued by Shcheglovitov in the Beilis trial. The sensational case against the metropolitan lawyers was tried in June, 1914, one month before the declaration of the World War, and terminated in a verdict of guilty for twenty-five lawyers, on the charge of "having agitated against the Government."

The triennium preceding the World War witnessed the rise of a new danger for Judaism, this time coming from Poland. The extraordinary intensity of the national and religious sentiment of the Poles, accentuated by the political oppression which for more than a hundred years had been inflicted upon them, particularly by the hands of Russian despotism, has, during the last decade, been directed against the Jewish people. The economic progress made by the Jews in the two industrial centers of Russian Poland, in Warsaw and Lodz, gave rise to the boycott agitation. Polish anti-Semites proclaimed the slogan "Do not buy from Jews!", aiming the cry specifically against the "Litvaks," that is, the hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews who, in the course of the last few decades, had been chiefly instrumental in the economic advancement of those two centers. The cloak beneath which this agitation was carried on was purely that of Polish nationalism: the Russian Jews were alleged, on the one hand, "to Russify Poland," and, accused, on the other hand, of an opposite tendency, of asserting themselves as the members of a separate Jewish nationality, with a press and a social organization of their own, which refuses to be merged in the Polish people.

The anti-Semitic movement in Poland, which began shortly after the revolution of 1905, assumed extraordinary dimensions in 1910-1911, when the boycott became a fierce economic pogrom, reaching its culmination in 1912, during the election campaign to the fourth Imperial Duma. The Jewish electors of Warsaw formed a majority, and were, therefore, in a position to send a Jewish deputy to the Duma. Yet out of consideration for the national susceptibilities of the Poles who insisted on sending as a representative of the Polish capital one of their "own," a Christian, the Jews were willing to accept a Polish candidate, provided the latter was not an anti-Semite. When, however, the Polish election committee, disregarding the feelings of the Jews, nominated the anti-Semitic candidate Kukhazhevski, the Jews gave their votes to the Polish Socialistic nominee Yaghello, who carried the election. This attitude of the Jews aroused a storm of indignation among the higher classes of Polish society. An anti-Jewish campaign, marked by extraordinary bitterness, was set in motion, and in the press and on the streets the Jews were nicknamed "Beilises," an echo of the ritual murder legend which had given rise to such horrors in ancient Catholic Poland. The economic boycott was carried on with incredible fury, and in a number of towns and villages the cowardly enemies of the Jews, being afraid of attacking them openly, set fire to Jewish houses, with the result that in many cases entire families were consumed in the flames.

The furor Polonicus assumed more and more dangerous forms, so that at the beginning of the World War, in 1914, almost the entire Polish nation, from the "progressive anti-Semites" down to the clericals, were up in arms against the Jews. From this armed camp came the defiant war cry: "On the banks of the Vistula there is no room for two nationalities," thus sentencing to death the two millions of Polish Jewry who consider themselves a part of the Jewish, and not of the Polish nation. Out of this soil of national hatred crawled forth the snake of the terrible "military libel," which during the first year of the war drenched Polish Jewry in rivers of blood. Over the bleeding body of the Jewish people Polish and Russian anti-Semitism joined hands. Horrors upon horrors were perpetrated before which the ancient annals of Jewish martyrdom fade into insignificance.

Nearly twenty centuries have passed since the ancient Judæo-Hellenic Diaspora sent forth a handful of men who established a Jewish colony upon the northern Scythian, now Russian, shores of the Black Sea. More than a thousand years ago the Jews of Byzantium from one direction, and those of the Arabian Caliphate from another, went forth to colonize the land of the Scythians. The Jew stood at the cradle of ancient Kiovian Russia, which received Christianity from the hands of the Byzantines. The Jew witnessed the birth of Catholic Poland, and, during the stormy days of the Crusades, fled from the West of Europe to this haven of refuge which was not yet entirely in the hands of the Catholic Church. He has seen Poland in its bloom and decay; he has witnessed the rise of Muscovite Russia, tying the fate of one-half of his nation to the new Russian Empire. Here the power that dominates history opened up before the Jewish people a black abyss of mediævalism in the midst of the blazing light of modern civilization, and finally threw it into the flames of the gigantic struggle of nations. What may the World War be expected to bring to the World-Nation? Full of agitation, the Jew is looking into the future, and the question of his ancient prophet is trembling on his lips: "Ah Lord God! wilt Thou make a full end of the remnant of Israel?"⁶¹… Let the entire past of the Jewish people serve as an answer to this question – a people which, in the maelstrom of human history, has succeeded in conquering the two cosmic forces: Time and Space.