Chapter VIII: The Russian Jews

In regard to the Jews, thousands of them would return to Russia from the States were they permitted, like other foreign citizens, to live outside the pale. In America, crowded together in the ghettoes of the great cities, competition is infinitely more keen than in Russia, where they constitute practically the only portion of the population engaged in commerce. The beginning of a Russian middle class has made itself evident the past twenty years, and in time this class no doubt will make an effort to compete with the Jews.

Where the author received his preliminary education. The village of Komrat is about sixty miles from Kishinev, Bessarabia.]

If usury, incendiarism and criminal bankruptcy could be made capital offenses, and if the sluggish nobility of Russia would rid itself of its anti-commercial tendencies, and its apathy for everything that has the scent of business, and if the Russian budget could be arranged so as to make available another $50,000,000 annually for the purpose of educating all the peasant children, the friction now existing between Gentiles and Hebrews would remedy itself. In the last four years Russia has appropriated more money for educational purposes than in the hundred years before, and since this is the case, I would like to correct another false impression--namely, that the government is fighting against the education of the peasants. Those circulating such falsehoods in this country dare not confront a man who knows Russia.

There are schools, both for boys and girls, all over Russia, north, south, east and west, where the children of peasants and those just a notch above them, Jews included, can receive their education together with the children of the highest nobility in the land. It was in one of such schools that I received my preliminary education.

Among her bankers, manufacturers, large land-owners, generals, bishops and archbishops, Russia can show many men whose fathers knelt with uncovered heads before the great Alexander, listening to the proclamation which made them free men. Russia’s able and most courteous minister of railroads, Mr. Ruchloff, who, like Prince Khilkoff, is making history for his country, is the son of a peasant; so is Bishop Anatoly, a member of the Douma, and a most distinguished member of the conservative party, and Tshelisheff, the great prohibition advocate. Russia’s task, in the major portion of her European domain, is, of course, easier than ours with the negroes, as her people belong to the white race, but how does our record with our former slaves compare with hers? Again, let us not forget that her people were in bondage six hundred years.

History states that in the time of Vladimir, the Jewish emissaries came to Russia and asked him to compel his people, who at that time were heathens, to embrace the Jewish religion. He listened respectfully, but when they came to relating the rite of circumcision, he spat upon them and drove them from the country. They persistently returned, and in less than no time gained control of the commerce of all Russia. This is true even to-day, for nowhere can the Jews find a more prolific field for the accumulation of wealth than in Russia. It is the knowledge of this fact which draws them there, and, as has been said, thousands of them from everywhere would flock back to Russia, were their indiscriminate entrance permitted.

A large land-owner of South Russia, with his family. His wife is Armenian. Mr. Mimi is typical of the more active titled land-owners.]

When Vladimir came to Kiev, at the close of the tenth century, the people complained bitterly to him that the Jews were craftily monopolizing all commerce. He called a meeting of the ruling princes of the various Russian provinces, and in this convention it was decided to drive the Jews out of Russia, and, should any of them return secretly, to kill them.

In the days of Sviatoslav (1016), while fighting the dreaded Khozars, the Jews were accused of acting as spies for these Mongols. In 1495 Alexander Jakloutshik, the Lithuanian Grand Duke, prohibited the Jews from accepting any obligatory papers, or any other written acts, and when this did not help matters he ordered the Jews driven out of the country. In the sixteenth century, the writer, Michel Litvin, stated: “To our country have come the Jews, whom we find in all great cities of Podolia and Volynia. These are the worst people that have ever come to us. They are fatalists, sly, dangerous in every way, adulterating our goods, counterfeiting our money, forging signatures and seals, and having no other art except cheating and blackmailing.” Ivan the Terrible refused them the right to live in Russia. “They have poisoned our soul and body,” said he. Even the pious Alexis Michalovitch drove them out of Moscow, accusing them of being very dishonest.

In the bitter struggle between the Poles and the Little Russians the Jews were said to have plotted against the Poles until the Little Russians defeated them, and Kridanos, a chief of the famous Cossack Bogdan Chmelnitsky, wrote the Polish Count Osproshsky advising him to drive the Jews out of the country, as they were responsible for his defeat. During the reign of Peter the Great, Catherine the First, and Elizabeth, edicts were issued banishing the Jews from Russia. During Elizabeth’s reign a law was passed permitting those Jews to remain in Russia who embraced the Greek Catholic faith or any other recognized Christian religion. This senseless law made it possible for converted Jews to live anywhere in the empire, and is in existence to-day. During the time of Catherine the Great the Jews were finally permitted to settle in certain parts of Little Russia and Crimea.

The conquest of Poland added several millions of Hebrews to Russia’s population. After the division of Poland, Catherine allowed the Jews to remain there, but did not permit them to visit the central provinces of Russia. In 1773, Count Kachrosky, Governor of Mogilev, wrote: “The Jews, although a sober people, are very lazy when it comes to any kind of physical work and are sly, dishonest and superstitious. They succeed best where the government is weak and the laws lax; they live entirely by fraud and on the honest toil of peasants; they borrow where they can, and then declare themselves bankrupt; by flattery and giving away free drinks, they corrupt people in all stations of life, and they mock our courts; they are continually working in conjunction with our worst class of robbers, many of whom they started in their lawless careers.”

At the end of the eighteenth century, we find Jews in all the large towns of Great Russia. At first the right of residence had been granted to business men of the first guild. (In Russia, the class to which business men belong is determined by the amount and character of business done annually, and to enter the first guild a business man must, regardless of his race or nationality, pay $7,500 a year into the national treasury.) Later, permission was given to college and university graduates to live outside the pale, and finally this right was extended to artisans, doctors, lawyers, druggists, midwives and prostitutes. (In order to better control venereal diseases, Russia tolerates prostitution.)

During the reign of Alexander II, the era of freedom and emancipation in Russia, the Jews were permitted to have a share in public and national life. They were granted the right to enjoy unrestricted tuition in all schools throughout the empire, to enter the service of the state, to take part in local self-government, to acquire real estate in all places where they resided, and to participate in industrial undertakings of every kind. Everything pointed to the fact that the Russian Government had the fixed intention gradually to place the Jews on a footing of equality with those of its other inhabitants.

Then came the assassination of Alexander II. The conservative, progressive element of Gentiles and Jews suffered alike because of this crime, which must be laid to the doors of the senseless hot heads who called themselves Nihilists, and among whom there appeared more than one nationality.

Seldom, if ever, seen unveiled]

The pale of settlement to which Jews are confined consist of fifteen provinces of west, central and southern Russia, and ten provinces of Polish Russia. The writer has seen practically every section of European and Asiatic Russia, and while the pale constitutes only one-twenty-third part of the Russian Empire, including the uninhabitable deserts of Central Asia, and the dry steppes of the Crimea, Caucasus and South Siberia, it does seem that the pale is the only section of Russia where a white man would really care to live, outside the two or three north Russian provinces, which include Moscow, Novgorod and St. Petersburg. Here only a few privileged Hebrews are supposed to have residential privileges, but a great many of all classes are encountered. In principle, however, it seems an outrage that a white man should be refused residence in any part of the earth where he wishes to live.

That the Jews are permitted to send only seven per cent. of their children to colleges and universities is of course a great hardship, and, in my opinion, a great injustice. If the government fears, as I have often been told, that by contact with the Jewish students the Russian children are weaned from the Church and initiated into all forms of Nihilism, which means political ruin for them and exile, why does not the government force the Jews to build their own schools? The majority of them are not the poor, downtrodden outcasts pictured in this country by crafty revolutionists, but by far the most prosperous people of the land, and many of them would make desirable citizens in any country. Those Russians who see the urgent necessity of protecting the peasants from the exploitations of the more commercially qualified Jew should advocate such stringent laws as we made in the States to protect the Indian, and then there need be no fear for the welfare of the peasants.

At right is a cabman or “izvostshik” on his “droshka”]

It is realized that to permit the Jews to own land everywhere in Russia now would mean the reversion of many peasants to serfdom, due largely to the peasant’s insobriety. The same condition is said to exist in Hungary, where the Jews were treated as liberally as in America, with the result that the political supremacy and the land slipped into the hands of the Jews. This compelled many natives to emigrate, for what chance has the shiftless Hun against the hardworking, sober and shrewd Hebrew? Students of political economy say that in New York Gentiles are being gradually driven out of business and forced to go West by the erstwhile Russian Jews.

It is true that Russians as well as Americans when condemning the Jews often do not recognize the fact that among them, as in every race or creed, are grades and classes of individuals. It is true that a great number who swarm to the ghettoes of our big cities are by their presence and questionable business methods a thorn in the side of the nation. Their own co-religionists of the better class--those thoroughly Americanized Hebrews who are among our best citizens--suffer greatly because of this element. There is nothing against the Jew racially, and to hear an American speak of excluding him from this or that club or society indicates a mind not free from ignorant prejudice.

Great responsibility rests with the better Hebrews, for upon them devolves the task of freeing a large percentage of their brethren from those traits which arouse the animosity of the Aryans.

In Russia as elsewhere the better class of the Hebrews will continue to suffer from the wrongdoings of the worse, until they have taken radical steps to instill into the minds of their weaker brethren a proper standard of business morality. Instead of shielding Jewish culprits and putting forward efforts to protect them from the laws they have outraged, they should always refuse the wrong-doers any moral or financial support, decline to tolerate guilt, and see to it that justice was administered to every criminal. Surely, every right-minded Gentile would aid in this work of correction. That the advanced Jews fully recognize their responsibility in this regard I have been assured by the eminent Hebrew, Rabbi Simon, of Washington.

With such men as Schmakoff, Purishkevitch and other prominent members of the Union of Russian People, there prevails the mistaken idea that to give the Jew equal rights would mean eternal slavery for the peasant. This should not be the case if proper laws are enforced for his protection, and especially if pressure is brought to bear upon the authorities executing the law which regulates the rate of interest for lending money, and if in some way the crookedness of the police and gendarmerie could be bridled, there would be less of Jewish dishonesty. Every member of the Union knows that practically all the money of the country is in the hands of the Hebrews, and though they control its commerce almost entirely, not every peasant is in the clutches of the Hebrew money-lenders.

Just prior to the war, before any one thought of the great conflict, the Tzar returned through Kishinev and Odessa from Constanza, Roumania, where he had met the king of the country and where the finishing touches were put to a previously arranged entente. The simplicity and cordiality of the reception of the Tzar staggered me, and the behavior of the Jews was above reproach. The Hebrews, forming a large majority of the population, lined the streets on both sides, and any one of them desiring to harm the Emperor could easily have done so. I remarked to a friend of mine at Kishinev, known to be an unreasonable Jew-hater, that apparently the Tzar seemed highly pleased with the assistance the Semitics gave the local authorities, and he answered, “If the Jews had always been loyal and had fought their battles by themselves, and had not tried to induce your nation to poke its nose into our internal affairs, they might have gotten what they so greatly coveted long ago.” I resented the insinuation, but felt that there might possibly have been more truth than poetry in the remark.

Everywhere in Russia it is evident that the conduct of the Jews in the past few years has been such as to merit serious consideration by the government of their demands for equal rights. It is to be regretted that their cause received a considerable setback on account of the Beiliss case, which the Jewish press all over the world tried and passed judgment upon before giving the jury at Kiev a chance to render its decision. Doubtless the Jews will soon attain the right they are contending for, if they can subdue the zeal of their co-religionists in other countries, that incites senseless attacks upon the Emperor and the Church.

Of the kishlack (town) of Karaul, capital of the district of Karaul, Bokhara, and his staff]

Aide-de-camp to His Excellency the Kushbegi, Vice Emir of Bokhara, who drove with me through Old Bokhara City and its vicinity in this very vehicle, imported to Bokhara from Moscow]