The brutal persecutions of the Jews under Plehve have involved unspeakable misery; but a beneficial effect also, not to be underestimated. The entire public sentiment of Russian society has become friendly to the Jews. In numerous conversations with inhabitants of the Russian capitals, including people from all strata of society, only once have I heard a word expressing ill-feeling towards the Jews. The speaker in this instance was a colonel of Cossacks, on his way to the front, who assured me in all sincerity that the English are a "vile Jew-nation"! With this exception, all protested against regarding the Russians as enemies of the Jews. The Jews are victims of the murderous Russian politics, like the Poles, the Ruthenians, and the Liberals. This appeared to be the generally accepted idea. The natural consequence of this idea is that the Jews have the sympathy of all parties opposed to the government. While the officials are bringing deliberately false accusations against the Jews, unofficial Russia sides with the latter. The situation is similar to that which existed in the[Pg 155] West before the emancipation of the Jews, when Liberal political doctrine was directly inculcating philo-Semitism; the only difference being that among the people of Russia no anti-Semitic feeling whatever exists. Therefore, during any crisis of assimilation consequent upon emancipation, there would be little fear of an anti-Semitic reaction such as that experienced in the West.

There is one class which is pleased by the perpetual hunting-down of the Jews by the Novoye Vremya and its offshoots in anti-Semitism. This is the class of small tradesmen, notorious for their dishonesty, who are thankful that they are protected from Jewish competition. For the rest, all Russia wishes the repeal of the laws enacted in restriction of the Jews.

The government, of course, endeavors to persuade foreigners that to permit the Jews to settle beyond the pale would mean the Judaization, and the consequent ruin, of all Russia. This assertion is made in spite of their knowledge that the contrary is true. A memorial in regard to the Jews, written in 1884 by Ivan Blioch, and published by the ministry of the interior—The Jewish Question in Russia—shows by statistics that the greatest percentage of pauper peasants is found in the Jewless governments of Moscow, Tula, Orel, and Kursk; that the prosperity of the peasantry in the governments within the pale is incomparably higher than in the territory from which the Jews are excluded. The[Pg 156] arrears of revenue in districts in which there are no Jews are three times as great as in the pale. As a result, the land purchased by peasants by means of the peasants\' banks is much greater in extent in the latter than in the former districts. The usurers who advance money to the peasants at from three hundred to two thousand per cent. are without exception Christians. The assertion that the Jews tempt the people to drunkenness stands morally upon about the same level as the statement that the Jews are never found engaged in agriculture. The latter statement is true, but only because the Jews are not allowed to live in the open country. The government has now monopolized the retail sale of spirits, thus driving out of the business thousands of Jewish tavern-keepers. This measure, however severe, is viewed with satisfaction by intelligent Jews as tending to improve the morals of the Jewish masses.

All these are only idle excuses in justification of the policy of extermination of the Jews, which policy has in reality a quite different cause. Three conditions have already been cited, any one of which is alone sufficient to place the unhappy Jews of the great prison state in an especially bad situation, and also to expose the régime in all its depravity—a depravity almost incomprehensible to western Europeans.

The first is the great influence which the rich Russian usurers possess with the authorities. If[Pg 157] Shylock is angry with the merchant prince of Venice because the latter lends money without interest, in Russia the r?les of the contestants are reversed. The Jew also exacts usury where he can—no one in seriousness pretends to be surprised at this, in view of the deliberate demoralization of the pale—but in comparison with his Russian colleague he keeps within modest limits, being indeed compelled to do so by his circumstances. He necessarily prefers to keep the debtor solvent rather than to drive him out of house and home, which he, the Jew, moreover, cannot buy in. The Russian usurer, on the other hand, is accustomed to show no mercy, because he calmly seizes the land of his victim, and either leases it or sells it at a profit or adds it to his own property. For a great part of the Russian usurers belong to the guild of village usurers. These people influence the under authorities with bribes, while the great speculators, the millionaire usurers of Moscow and St. Petersburg, who likewise would have to fear the milder methods of their Jewish competitors, are powerful enough to influence senators and ministers according to their wishes. The Russian usurer, therefore, is the first complainant and enemy of the Jews.

The second and more powerful cause is the spirit of Pobydonostzev, the fanatic of uniformity. Combining in himself the qualities of jurist, theologian, and scholastic, he is too barren in mental powers to master the conception of a state which should take[Pg 158] into account any diversity of creed or race. Above all, however, any toleration would undermine the three pillars upon which alone his conception of the Russian empire can rest—autocracy, orthodoxy, and Russianism. For the preservation of this Asiatic, uniform, absolutist régime, or, better, of the omnipotence of hierarchy, it is above all necessary to keep the people in absolute subjection. This, again, is possible only when every chance of learning anything else than their own condition is closed to them. A prisoner who endangered the spirit of blind obedience by a tendency to dispute orders could not be tolerated in a prison. As little can the great Russian prison state endure men who might lead the prisoner to think whether he must be absolutely a prisoner. Of such thoughts, however, the Jews, who are subject to special taxation, are suspected above all others. Their criminality is certainly of the smallest; they are the most punctilious of tax-payers, and, moreover, the best-conducted citizens in the world. But they are—Heaven knows why—perhaps because of their Talmudic-dialectic occupation, perhaps also because as pariahs they have little cause to be enthusiastic over the ruling order—they are inexorably subtle critics of all existing things, and so could easily upset the simple minds of the Russian lower classes. That is the chief reason why they are surrounded by a cordon of plagues. The paternal precaution of the Russian government is of course not much[Pg 159] wiser than the conviction so many mothers entertain of the unshaken faith of their children in the story that the stork brought the baby. Quite without Jewish criticism the Russian peasant, under the never-resting lash of hunger, begins to think and to grumble; and although his unruly sentiments express themselves chiefly in the specifically Russian form of the organization of religious sects, nevertheless each new sectarian shows a new desertion from Pobyedonostzev\'s ideal of a Russian subject. Upon the organization of sects, however, the Jews have of course no direct influence whatever.

The third cause of the persecution of the Jews is to be found in the Satanic brain of Plehve, who wishes to furnish to the humane Czar, and perhaps still more to the Czaritza, who has western European ways of thinking, an indication that without the Jews there would be no opposition whatever in Russia. For this purpose he not only has the Jews entered more strictly on the police-registers, if they are guilty of any political offence, such as being present in a forbidden assemblage, but he also directly provokes them, in order to drive them into the ranks of the revolutionaries and thereby to compromise the latter. In Hungary and Bohemia ritual murder cases were incited in order to give the Jews a lesson to remember, and to make them national—i. e., more Magyar or Czechic—in feeling, since they stubbornly persisted in remaining[Pg 160] German. In Russia, however, they are driven into the camp of the revolutionaries, in order to extirpate the former and to cast suspicion upon the latter. Nevertheless, some governors, who in other respects readily comply with the directions given from above, yet dare to step in in behalf of the Jews, contrary to the measures appointed by higher authorities, as for example, Prince Urussoff, governor of Bessarabia, who is to be thanked that in spite of all the efforts of Krushevan, the creature of Plehve, no outbreaks of the mob against the Jews took place in Kishinef recently.

As personal but nevertheless effectual causes of the persecution of the Jews, the anti-Semitism of the dowager Empress and of the Grand-Duke Sergius, governor-general of Moscow, must be mentioned. Respectively brother and wife of Alexander III., they conservatively hold to his opinions. This unfortunate and narrow-minded man had been persuaded by conscience-smitten persons that Jewish army-............