- Anti-Semitic feelings still runs high: to this the late
most unjustifiable demonstrations against Sarah Bernhardt in Galicia and
Odessa bear witness. That is especially strong in the eastern part of
Europe, where the Israelites are most numerous and most firmly sealed,
is another indubitable fact. It also may be safely asserted that never,
even in the quietest times, is this feeling wholly extinct. Were it otherwise,
the popular outbreaks could not be so violent, so frequent, nor-to use
a homely but expressive word-so "catching," nor so uniform in
character, as they have been within not very many years in Romania, Galicia,
eastern Prussia and, very lately in the south of Russia. When the effects
are identical, the causes must be at least similar, and where the former
recur with persistent iteration, the latter may be supposed to be permanent
and deeply rooted. Now, looking back along the line of ages we find that
no historical event recurs more surely, though at irregular intervals,
than popular outbreaks against the Jews.
-
- Wherein lies the cause of this singularly tenacious phenomenon?
Historians are quick and ready with their answer: "In religious
intolerance, with its attendant spirits of fanaticism and persecution,
and in the antagonism of race." Such an explanation may pass muster
for the ages of mediæval darkness-but sweeping assertions seldom
exhaust a subject, and this can be proved to be no exception to the rule.
When the same phenomenon is reproduced periodically in our own time, under
our eyes, and we are still told that "its only cause lies in religious
intolerance and the spirit of persecution-more shame to our enlightened
nineteenth century," and when this is made the burden of a general
hue and cry from the so- called progressive and liberal press of most countries,
we become slightly skeptical, and desirous of looking into the matter
for ourselves and more closely. We hope better things of our own time;
we are familiar with it, being a part of it, and we know that its ruling
spirit is not that of religious intolerance.
-
- We also know, from the teachings of the modern philosophical
school of history, that the popular mind and feeling, however abrupt and
unreasonable their outward manifestations may be, are strictly logical
in their development, and that the masses, when they appear to be swayed
by nothing but caprice, or a sudden gust of passion, or at best by a blind
and defective instinct, are in reality ruled by irresistible hidden currents
of historical life, not the less powerful because they act at great depths
below the surface.
-
- To dive into those depths, to reach those currents, to
ascertain their direction and force, is the task of the inquirer. Sometimes
chance steps in, and by the discovery of some unexpected clew lightens
the task. It so happens that such a clew, in this particular case, has
been offered by a rather peculiar combination of circumstances in Russia
several years ago, and as the interest in the subject has been strongly
and somewhat painfully revived by the widespread tumultuous occurrences
of the last twelvemonth or so, it is surely worthy of a few moments' serious
attention, under the guidance of these revelations, which, though they
concern specially the condition, power, and acts of the Russian Jews,
will be found to possess more than strictly local importance. A convenient
introduction is afforded us by the general rising against the Jews which
took place last spring throughout the south-west of Russia, and of winch
scarcely more than a bare mention was transmitted at the time to this
country.
-
-
- I
-
- The disturbances began at Ielizavetgrad, in the middle
of the Easter week. How did they begin? On what provocation? The immediate
occasion was too trifling to have been more than a pretense, a signal
for something long impending. The first three holidays had passed over
quietly, when, on the afternoon of Easter Wednesday, a quarrel took place
at a much-frequented public-house on account of a broken drinking-glass,
for which the offender refused to pay. The tavern- keeper, who was a Jew,
from angry remonstrances passed to blows. A voice from the crowd around
the bar was heard to shout: "They assault our people!" The uproar
quickly spread along the street, and, in a few minutes, there was a mob
of not less than a thousand men, which carried the news and the excitement
from end to end of the city. The work of destruction began immediately,
and raged all through the night and through the following day and evening,
as late as midnight, when it stopped-not so much from fear of the troops
who had been telegraphed for and only then had arrived, as because scarcely
anything was left to destroy. To realize the extent of the ravages done,
it must be kept in mind that Ielizavetgrad, situated on the highway between
Poltava and Odessa, is a great commercial thoroughfare and a very wealthy
city, with a population of forty-five thousand, of which fully one-third
are Jews.
-
- The authorities were wholly unprepared. The ordinary
police force was far too small to be of any use, and of the military only
four squadrons, of cavalry were on hand-a force particularly ill-suited
for action in narrow, crowded streets-not quite five hundred men in all
against a mob of many thousands, half of them women and children. It was
a good-natured mob, too, which did not provoke violence by resistance,
but dispersed at the first collision; but the broken groups would join
again some streets further off, and carry their devastations to other
quarters where the field was still clear. As for the citizens of the better
classes, they, of course, took no part in the proceedings,-but they did
nothing to oppose them. Numbers followed the different mobs out of curiosity,
as mere lookers-on. A certain secret sympathy with the rioters could even
be detected, which the latter were not slow in perceiving, and acknowledged
by sundry marks of friendly attention. Thus, on the "bazaar,"
or market-place, the ground being very wet and muddy, they spread it
with carpets and woolen materials dragged out of the shops, at the same
time politely inviting the spectators "to approach, as they need
not lie afraid of soiling their nice shoes."
-
- The citizens would probably not have preserved this passive
attitude had the rioters shown themselves at all cruelly inclined, and
threatened the persons of the Jews instead of venting their rage only
on their property. But, as it was, the worst instincts of a mob were
not called into play, in great part owing to the prudence of the Jews
themselves, who mostly kept out of sight. Had they "shown fight"
at all, matters might have taken a more tragical turn, for the rioters
gave signs of manifest irritation in the rare instances when revolvers
were fired, very harmlessly, from windows. Crowds of women and children,
and townspeople of the poorer sort, followed in their wake, picking up
and carrying away all they could of the valuable property which covered
the ground, or lay piled in mud-bespattered heaps, and literally could
be had, not for the asking, but for the taking. A noteworthy feature,
and one that shows how entirely the actors were mastered by one feeling,
that of animosity toward the Jews, is that the rioters-mostly workmen,
handicraftsmen, and peasants from the environs-did not take anything for
themselves; they merely destroyed. Some shop-keepers and householders
tried to ransom their goods with sums of money. One gave a thousand rubles,
another two thousand; many gave a hundred and fifty or two hundred. The
rioters took the money, but only to fling the coin away and tear the paper
to shreds, and then went on with their work. The only temptation which
they could not resist was whiskey (vodka). In the cellars of wholesale
spirit-warehouses, every barrel was staved in or the faucets were taken
out, till the whiskey stood several feet deep and the barrels actually
swam. Three men were saved from drowning only by the timely assistance
of the soldiers. Many lay senseless about the streets, and were picked
up in that condition hours afterward. [1]
-
- Yet, on the whole, the mob behaved-for a mob-with remarkable
coolness and discrimination. Not a single Russian house or shop was touched,
even by mistake, although protected only by crosses in white chalk on
the doors and shutters, and occasionally by some saints' images (ikonas)
and Easter loaves placed in the windows-a device which was found so efficient
that the Jews did not fail to adopt it in other towns, where many saved
their houses by it. Jews living in Christian houses were not molested;
neither were Hebrew physicians and lawyers, they being considered useful
members of society. Exceptions were made in favor of well-recommended
individuals. Thus, at the door of one house belonging to a Jew, the mob
is confronted by the porter: "Boys" says he, "leave him
alone! He is a good man, and often gives you work. I have been ten years
in his service." "All right!" say the rioters, and pass
on.
-
- When the outrages were stopped at last, and the excitement
had worn itself out, the city presented the strangest, wildest aspect.
The streets were as white as after a fall of snow; for one of the mob's
chief amusements had been to rip up every feather-bed and pillow they
came across, and fling out the contents. The wooden houses were shattered,
the furniture broken to pieces and left in heaps, mingled with kitchen
utensils and household goods of every kind. Here might be seen the hulk
of a grand piano, with lid and legs wrenched off and strings hanging out;
further on, fine mahogany reduced almost to chips, with velvet rags still
clinging to them, and close to that the débris of painted furniture
of the commonest description. Not a pane of glass, not a window frame,
not a door was left whole. Inside the houses the same ravages had been
committed everywhere, with methodical regularity; every object, even the
smallest, was broken or spoiled for use; the very stoves were demolished;
nothing escaped destruction.
-
- The pawnbrokers' offices were the first to suffer; then
came the public-houses, the wholesale wine and spirit shops, then the
other shops, and lastly whatever the mob set eyes on that belonged to
Jews. The marketplace or bazaar was one motley chaos of dry-goods, broken
crockery, ready-made clothes, iron-ware, leather goods, spilt flour and
grain. Of course, a vast amount of property was secured and carried off
by marauders of the poorer classes, especially women and children, who
followed the rioters for the purpose; but when a bill was posted all over
the city, explaining that such conduct would be considered as robbery
or secretion of stolen goods, and requiring all such unlawful prizes to
be delivered at the different police stations within three days, whole
wagon-loads began to arrive, not only from different parts of the city,
but even from the surrounding villages.
-
- These simpletons actually did not know that they were
committing a blamable act and incurring a severe responsibility. When
questioned or rebuked, they answered with the greatest candor: "Why,
we did not steal these things; they were lying around, so we picked them
up. We meant no harm." Of course there were exceptions, and in several
instances, especially in other cities, great quantities, of valuable
goods, as jewelry, watches, silks, and the like, where found in the possession
of people whose social position put the plea of ignorance out of the question.
Nay, well dressed women-ladies they could not be called-had been seen
to drive to the scene of destruction and to fill their carriages with
plunder. Many a private grudge, too, may have been indulged under cover
of the confusion, as in the case of a certain, tradesman in Kiev, who
rushed into the house of a wealthy Hebrew merchant at the head of a band
of rioters, gave the signal of destruction by shattering with his own
hands the piano and largest mirror, and under whose bed many valuables
belonging to the same merchant were afterward found.
-
- In Kiev and Odessa the riots broke out a few weeks earlier,
in May and June, and took, a rather more malignant character; more personal
outrages were committed; the troops and police were resisted, so that
several people were killed and about two hundred wounded; passers-by,
who were accidentally met by infuriated bands, were in imminent danger,
and escaped it only by crossing themselves ostentatiously, after two men
had already been struck down by mistake; two or three times the mob viciously
had recourse to fire, poured kerosene on pieces of dry-goods, or set fire
to barrels of oil, petroleum, tar, and pitch, and only the greatest vigilance
prevented a general conflagration.
-
- While all this was going on in the large cities, the
small towns naturally followed suit. Great agitation prevailed in the
villages also, but with comparatively trifling results,-on the one hand,
because numbers of the peasantry had joined the rioters in the great
centers; on the other because, immediately after the occurrences in Ielizavetgrad,
Government officials had been dispatched all over the country, to talk
to the people, exhort them to keep quiet, and explain to them to what
consequences they would expose themselves unless they did. This was a
most necessary measure, for the country people had somehow got possessed
of an idea that a rising against the Jews would be connived at. There
were even vague rumors abroad that it was desired, nay that a certain
mysterious "paper" had come from head-quarters, formally authorizing
it, which paper was withheld from the public only because the local officials
had been bribed by the Jews to conceal it.
-
- Where and how such nonsense could have originated and
been circulated has never been found out. The fact, at all events, points
to some hidden machinations, some underhand leadership, and there can
be little doubt that the Nihilists-or socialists-were concerned in the
movement, and secretly fomented it. Proclamations were found in the streets
of Poltáva, and along the most frequented post-roads, exhorting
the people to massacre the Jews and the property-holding classes. In another
place a woman, disguised as a policeman, was caught distributing small
printed sheets of the same description. Odessa being a university city,
the working of the socialistic propaganda was especially apparent there,
and, strange to say, of the students arrested for openly inciting the
mob to the plundering and destruction of Jewish property, and to riotous
proceedings generally, one was himself an Israelite. Yet, in the great
amount of lawlessness committed in those wild weeks, these are isolated
cases which do not warrant the assumption generally set up in official
circles, that the Jewish riots of last spring were entirely the work of
"the party." It was not to be supposed that the revolutionary
agents should miss so good a chance of working on inflammable material-offered
them, so to speak, ready for use. But their efforts must be looked upon
as one of many sparks falling on a train of gunpowder.
-
- The above is a very condensed, but faithful and not incomplete,
account. Anecdotes might be multiplied, but as it is, no characteristic
feature has been omitted. And now, after attentively perusing it, who
will venture to affirm that religious animosity or the spirit of intolerance
had anything whatever to do with the deplorable outrages committed on
one-third of the population by the other two-thirds? On the contrary,
do we not see that every motive except that one was at work more or less
openly? Popular revenge, political propaganda, common greed, commercial
rivalry,-as in the case of the small Russian tradesmen, who would not
be sorry to get rid of Hebrew competition, nor averse to getting the same
exorbitant interest themselves,-in short, most human passions are in play
except religious intolerance. If more is needed to complete the evidence,
here are a few miscellaneous scraps to the point.
-
- "When I reached the corn-bazaar," writes a
special correspondent of the "Golos," from Kiev, "the Jewish
shops were already demolished and plundered; the mob was just attacking
the public- houses. Having broken in doors and windows, they rolled the
barrels out on the street and broke them to pieces. Whiskey flowed in
streams. The rioters waded-they bathed-in whiskey. The marauding women
carried it away by pail-fuls. Through the uproar I could clearly distinguish
the shouts coming from all sides. 'The Jews have lorded it over us long
enough!' 'It is our turn now!' 'They have got everything into their own
hands!' 'Life is too dear!' 'They grind us to death!' etc. Some well-intentional
persons went about amongst groups of idlers, who were evidently anxious
to begin operations., and were forming into a sufficiently numerous mob,
and tried to dissuade them, 'How can you be so foolish?' they would say,
'Don't you know that you will be punished?' The reply in almost every
case amounted to this. 'No matter; we will take our punishment-it will
be once. The Jews torture us all our lives.'"
-
- It is a fact so well known in Russia as to need no repetition
or argument, that it is in part the merciless and systematic "exploitation,"
or, as the people so graphically describe it, the sucking out of the country's
blood by the Jews which has brought the peasantry of the West to the depths
of destitution. As a consequence, never, in the whole course of our history,
has the rage for emigration been so much of an epidemic as it is growing
to be since the Government has opened the wide fields of eastern Siberia
and the Amoor country to settlers, offering them assistance, encouragement
and advantages. The Little-Russian peasant, like every tiller of the
soil, is deeply attached to the land that nourishes him and his family.
Such a land, too!-one of the healthiest, wealthiest, most fertile regions
in the world. Yet this fruitful land-the very "land of milk and honey"-they
will abandon in gangs, half- villages at a time, their wives and children
and some few wretched household goods piled on their wooden wagons, drawn
by small, emaciated horses, sometimes a cow tied in the rear, but more
frequently of late despoiled even of this last friend and chief support
of the little ones, and start on their dreary tramp across half of one
continent and the whole of another,-to them an incalculable number of
miles,-for a distant, absolutely strange, nay, unimaginable goal, which
half of them never reach,-all this with a recklessness which can come
of nothing but despair. [2]
-
- Russia has millions of Mohammedan subjects. I do not
mean our new subjects of Central Asia, but the Tatars along the Volga
and in the Crimea, and the inhabitants of the highlands of the Caucasus.
They are received, in the public schools and colleges, where they are
taught the principles of their religious law by doctors (mollahs) of
their own. They furnish good soldiers and distinguished officers to our
army. They ply various crafts in the midst of our native population, especially
those of peddlers, of cab-drivers, and hotel- waiters. They are thrifty
and peaceable. Who ever heard of hostile outbreaks against them? A little
good-humored raillery is all they ever have to encounter at the hands,
of our people, who will call them "Pig-ear" in fun, or sometimes
in derision, when angry or quarreling, in allusion to their horror of
pork. "Shaved-pate" is also a current appellation, which they
are so far from taking in bad part that a Tatar peddler, if so hailed
by some housewife from the other side of the street, will immediately
walk over, and, of course, drive the best bargain he can. But the people
would no more think of attacking the Tatar quarter in St. Petersburg,
or demolishing and plundering a Tatar village on the Volga, than of so
dealing with a Russian bazaar or homestead. Where, then, is the difference?
Why this imperturbable good understanding with fellow-subjects of one
race and religion, and this ineradicable animosity against those of another?
-
-
- II
-
- If we were told that a certain great state, embracing
under its rule populations belonging to several distinct races, had in
the number several millions of subjects who, outwardly peaceable and harmless,
nay, timid to cowardice and submissive to servility, were yet unceasingly
and systematically undermining the well-being of the country they inhabit;
who, while enjoying the fullest religious toleration and liberty of public
worship, scrupulously perform every year a public religious ceremony which
offers a loop-hole of release from the obligation of keeping any oath
or promise made to the Government or to individuals belonging to the state
religion; who, while sheltered by the laws equally with all their fellow-subjects,
and, like them, entitled to sit in local courts of justice, are bound,
under the direst penalties of excommunication, to decide cases brought
before them only according to instructions received from a secret tribunal
of their own; who are authorized and taught by their law to consider the
persons and property of their fellow-subjects, if belonging to a different
race and religion from theirs, as their natural patrimony, lawful for
them to secure by any means; lastly, who contrive to feed whole districts
in part on the refuse of the meat slaughtered for themselves,-if such
a state of things were described to us as existing actually, in a great
country, under a strong and well-established government, would not such
a statement awaken in us a feeling of incredulity amounting to total disbelief?
-
- Surely no government can for a single moment tolerate
so monstrous an anomaly! Certainly not-i.e., not with its eyes open. But
there are many ways of blinding the most wakeful eyes. Argus had a hundred
of them, yet Hermes could charm them all. That the above is no wild fiction,
but a statement of facts, an account of the condition in which the entire
west and south-west of Russia has been for centuries, and is now, is the
startling discovery which we owe to the remarkable collection of authentic
documents, edited in 1869 by Jacob Brafmann, under official patronage,
and with means of a semi-official source. But before examining and quoting
the work, something must be said of the man, whose marked individuality
invites attention.
-
- There have of old been Jews of two descriptions, so different
as to be like two distinct races. There were the Jews who saw God and
proclaimed His law, and those who worshiped the golden calf and yearned
for the flesh-pots of Egypt; there were the Jews who followed Jesus, and
those who crucified Him; there were the thinkers and the sticklers; the
men of the spirit and the men of the letter; Spinoza and his persecutors.
To borrow, for a moment, Renan's noble and striking language, "in
the course of its long history Israel has always had an admirable minority
which protested against the errors of the majority of the nation. A vast
dualism is the very essence of this singular people's life. It has been
divided, so to speak, into two opposing families, of which the one represented
the narrow, malevolent, hair-splitting, materialistic side of the genius
of Israel, the other its liberal, benevolent, idealistic side. The contrast
has always been striking." [3]
-
- Jacob Brafmann is distinctively a Jew, but distinctively
belongs to the "admirable minority." Of humble parentage, and
in no way favored by fortune, he was raised out of his sordid surroundings
and the narrow groove of his early training by nothing but the predominance
of "the liberal, benevolent, idealistic" element in his nature.
His boyhood was the same unenviable round of useless, unintelligent school
learning, mischievous idleness, and precocious familiarity with sharp
practice of every kind, which makes the Hebrew youth of the poorer class
so unattractive a specimen. "Education" for the Hebrew boy of
small means begins, indeed, at the age of five or six, but consists entirely
in learning to read and memorizing the "Prayer-book"; then chapters
from the Pentateuch, with scraps of Talmudistic commentary, and it may
be, at the last stage, fragments from the Talmud itself. Then, at seventeen
or eighteen, comes marriage with all its cares and burdens,-and Hebrew
wedlock is proverbially prolific,-but too often without its solace and
companionship, for the matter is usually arranged by the respective families,
without reference to the young people's wishes or sympathies.
-
- Poor Brafmann fared but ill at this pass; the mate assigned
him was exceptionally uncongenial to him. Doggedly he worked for his family,
plying alternately sundry small trades and various crafts-that of cab-driver,
of photographer, etc., with the versatility peculiar to his race, and
to which they are partly driven by the necessities of an overcrowded,
overstocked market in those centers of dense and abjectly poor Jewish
population. But, unlike his brethren, he did not sink and harden in degradation.
-
- Through all those years of loveless, thankless toil,
he never ceased to think, to observe, to learn-nay, to study, in the real
and higher sense of the word, robbing many of his nights of their necessary
rest, and bitterly upbraided by his young wife on account, not of his
health, which suffered under the excessive strain, but of the candle
which "he wasted." He became a Hebrew scholar, he learned Russian
and German-the literary German, not the mongrel jargon which Jews all
talk in those parts-at the age of thirty-four; he even taught himself
to read and understand French and Latin. He read the New Testament, and
studied deeply in Christian theology. At length, and from sincere conviction,
he became an open convert to Christianity, and received baptism. Life
among his own people had now become impossible, but the education which
he had given himself with almost superhuman persistence and intuition
had fitted him for better things, and when he was appointed teacher of
the Hebrew language at the seminary [4] of Minsk, in 1860, he found himself
in an honorable and, comparatively speaking, comfortable position.
-
- Even before that, Brafmann had attracted the Emperor's
attention by addressing to him a memoir concerning the anomalous position
and conditions of life of his Hebrew subjects. The consequence was that,
together with his appointment, he received an imperial order to study
and propose ways and means for removing the tremendous obstacles which
Jewish converts encounter when they declare their intention of becoming
Christians. To aid him in his researches, access was opened to the greatest
variety of sources bearing on the question,-on the one hand by the support
of the bishop, on the other by that-less official, but perhaps even more
effective-of many a Hebrew well- wisher. "It was thus," says
Brafmann, in his preface, "that a rich collection of materials accumulated
in my portfolio, valuable not only for my special object, but as illustrating
the condition of the Hebrew population generally.
-
- *** The most prominent feature of my collection is a
package of more than one thousand authentic, documents, never published
until this time-ordinances, resolutions, and acts of divers Jewish Kahals
[administrative councils] and Beth-dins [courts of justice], which are
of great importance as representing that practical side of modern Jewish
life which can never be discerned by outsiders-by those who have not,
so to speak, been reared within the synagogue walls.
-
- *** "These documents," it is said, further
on, "afford convincing evidence that the Kahal and Beth-din rule
the private and social life of the Jewish population in a great measure
independent of the Talmud, and that their own private ordinances, supported
by the penalty of the kherem [excommunication] are of far greater moment
to the modern Jew than the Talmud.
-
- *** They show as clearly as possible in what way and
by what means the Jews, notwithstanding their limited rights, have always
succeeded in driving alien elements from the towns and boroughs where
they have settled, to get into their hands the capital and immovable property
in those places, and to get rid of all competition in commerce and trades,
as has been the case in the western provinces of Russia, in Poland, Galicia,
Romania; by what miracle it could come to pass that whole departments
of France were found to be mortgaged to the Jews in 1806, as Napoleon
tells Champagny in his letter of November 9th of that year, although they
formed only an insignificant minority in the empire, in all sixty thousand.
Finally, what is most important to us, these documents contain the plain
answer to the question why the labor and money expended by our Government,
in the course of the present century, on the reformation of the Jews have
brought no result." Of these thousand documents, ranging from 1794
to 1833, Brafmann published in his book, "The Kahal," a selection
of two hundred and eighty-five, mostly dated from Minsk, in the government
of the same name. Their authenticity is proved
-
- by their very ancient look;
- by the uniform notarial handwriting;
- by the signatures of many persons which can be identified
from other existing sources;
- by the water-mark in the paper on which they are written.
- Before we examine their contents and the conditions of
life which they illustrate, it may be well to define the exact meaning
of some words which incessantly recur in them, and, first of all, that
of the term kahal itself.
-
- The Kahal, abbreviated from kheder~ha~kahal, is the town-council
or administrative council of a Jewish community. Officially it purports
to discharge only a few modest duties, distributing the taxes among their
people, for the punctual payment of which they assume the responsibility
before the Government, taking care of the sick, superintending the synagogue
and all that pertains to Hebrew worship, ceremonial, and religious observances.
On these grounds the institution is not only tolerated, but sanctioned
and actively supported by the Government. In reality, it wields supreme,
absolute, and unquestioned power over every phase of Hebrew life, both
private and social, and manages to use the local Christian authorities
as its unwitting tools, not only against its Gentile fellow-subjects,
but against any of its own people who might feel inclined to demur at
the heavy yoke imposed on them. To show that this is so, and what are
the means employed, is the object of Brafmann's book, and will be that
of our next chapter.
-
- The Beth-din is the Talmudic court of justice, which
exists in every Jewish community without exception, under the high protection
of the Kahal, and under whose jurisdiction are placed all transgressions
and litigations arising between private Jews, or between such and the
Kahal. It answers to all the needs of Jewish mercantile life, and takes
the place of the ancient Sanhedrin. It is a sacred institution, and its
attributes are, even now, very extensive. It pretends to be simply a court
of amicable arbitration, and is tolerated, but not officially recognized,
by the Government.
-
- The Kherem, or great excommunication, is the last resort
and most terrible weapon which the Kahal and Beth-din always keep in reserve
to quell incipient rebellion or punish actual disobedience. Brafmann
gives the entire form, which, besides being very monotonous, is too long
for reproduction here. There is something appalling in the virulence and
malignancy of the curses launched upon the offender's head, and it is
not astonishing that even liberal-minded Jews should often have faltered
and been daunted before its tremendous vehemence. A general malediction
is first pronounced in the name of God and all the celestial powers; then
a special one for every month of the year, in this form: "If he is
born in the month of Nisan, which is ruled by the Archangel Uriel, may
he be accursed of that archangel and his angels," and so forth through
the remaining eleven months; also the days of the week and the four seasons;
then comes the final imprecation, to which great poetic force cannot be
denied:
-
- "May the Lord's calamity hasten to overtake him;
God, the Creator! Break him! Bend him! May fiends encounter him! Be he
accursed wherever he stands! May his spirit depart suddenly, may an unclean
death seize him, and may he not end the month! May the Lord visit him
with consumption, brain-fever, inflammation, insanity, ulcers, and jaundice!
May he pierce his breast with his own sword, and may his arrows be broken!
May he be as chaff which the wind drives before it, and may the Angel
of God pursue him! *** May his path be beset with dangers, covered with
darkness! *** May he encounter direst despair, and may he fall into the
net spread for his feet by God! May he be driven out of the realm of light
into the realm of darkness, and cast out of the world! Misfortunes and
sorrows shall fright him. He shall behold with his eyes the blows that
shall fall on him. He shall be sated with the wrath of the Almighty. He
shall be clothed with curses as with a garment. And God shall give no
forgiveness to this man, but pour curses shall enter into him that are
written in the Law. *** "
-
- And as though this were not yet explicit enough, the
denunciation is further completed in the circular addressed to "the
wise men and elders of the nation," to notify them that a son of
Israel has been cast into the outer darkness. After the introductory greeting
and the enumeration of the offenses of the accused person, the kahal continues:
-
- "Therefore, we have laid the kherem on him. Do you
so likewise, daily. Proclaim publicly that his bread is the bread of a
Gentile; that his wine is the wine of idolatry; that his vegetables are
impure, and his books even as the books of magicians. *** Ye shall not
eat with him, nor drink with him; ye shall not perform the rite of circumcision
on his son, and ye shall not teach his children the law, nor bury his
dead, nor receive him into any corporations; the cup that he has drunk
from ye shall wash, and in every respect ye shall treat him as a Gentile."
-
- And now, after these necessary explanations, we can at
last turn to that part of our subject to which the foregoing pages have
been in reality only an introduction.
-
-
- III
-
- "Die Juden bilden einen Staat im Staate."
- (The Jews form a State within the State.)
-
- These words of Schiller, Brafmann takes as his motto.
Referring to them in the course of his book, he remarks that as a state
without a territory is not admissible, so these words are usually taken
by unsuspecting outsiders for a poetic figure rather than a historical
truth. They little imagine that the fiction is turned into a momentous
reality by a short item in the Talmud, which lays down as a fundamental
axiom that "the property of Gentiles is even as a waste, free unto
all" [5] (i.e., all Jews). Now, as the Kahal has the supreme direction
of the affairs of every community, it follows that the Kahal of each district
considers itself the only rightful owner and legal disposer of the territory
within its jurisdiction, no matter who may hold it or any part of it in
actual possession, Jew or Gentile, and that not arbitrarily, but on the
ground of the khezkat- ishoub, a right well defined in the Talmudic code
called Khoshen- Hamishpat, and the works of its learned expounders. One
of the highest authorities among the latter, Rabbi Joseph Kouloun, in
his highly respected work, "Questions and Answers," compares
the property of Gentiles (section 132) to "a lake free to all,"
in which, however, no one may spread his nets but a Jew duly authorized
by the Kahal. We continue in Brafmann's own words:
-
- "Considering, then, the Gentile population of its
district as 'its lake' to fish in, the Kahal proceeds to sell portions
of this strange property to individuals on principles as strange. To one
uninitiated in Kahal mysteries, such a sale must be unintelligible. Let
us take an instance. The Kahal, in accordance with its own rights, sells
to the Jew N. a house, which, according to the state laws of the country,
is the inalienable property of the Gentile M., without the latter's knowledge
or consent. Of what use, it will be asked, is such a transaction to the
purchaser? The deed of sale delivered to him by the Kahal cannot invest
him with the position which every owner assumes toward his property. M.
will not give up his house on account of its having been sold by the Kahal,
and the latter has not the power to make him give it up. What, then, has
the purchaser N. acquired for the money paid by him to the Kahal? Simply
this: he has acquired khazaka-i.e., right of ownership over the house
of the Gentile M., in force whereof he is given the exclusive right, guaranteed
from interference or competition from other Jews, to get possession of
the said house, as expressly said in the deed of sale, 'by any means whatever.'
Until he has finally succeeded in transferring it to his official possession,
he alone is entitled to rent that house from its present owner, to trade
in it, to lend money to the owner and other Gentiles who may dwell in
it-to make profits out of them in any way his ingenuity may suggest. This
is what is meant by khazaka. Sometimes the Kahal sells to a Jew even the
person of some particular Gentile, without any immovable property attached.
This is how the law defines this extraordinary right, which is called
meropiè: 'If a man [meaning a Jew] holds in his power a Gentile,
it is in some places forbidden to other Jews to enter into relations
with that person to the prejudice of the first; but in other places it
is free to every Jew to have business relations with that person, for
it is said that the property of a Gentile is hefker [free to all], and
whoever first gets possession of it, to him it shall belong.'" [6]
-
- It will be noticed what stress is laid on money-lending
as a means to effect the desired transfer of property. Indeed, it is the
mainspring of the operation, and a case of failure is very rare. The proposed
victim is tempted into borrowing, and enticed on and on by proffered
facilities so long as it is supposed he still has a chance of rescue.
When he has become entangled in the meshes of renewed bills and compound
interest wholly beyond the range of his resources, the blow descends,
and the fortunate purchaser enters into open possession of his secretly
long-cherished property. Perhaps he sells it then to a Christian, so that
it may revert back to the Kahal as hefker, and the process begin over
again, to the advantage of some new "fisher." And the beauty
of the thing is, there is no risk attached to it. It is all done snugly
within the law. If people will borrow, they have to pay, and there are
courts of justice in the land to see that they do. No matter what artifices
have been used to inveigle them, what amount of fine psychology has been
put in play to find out their weak sides and attack them-the law has nothing
to do with that. In the rural districts, the process is still easier and
the result still sadder. Jews do not live in villages; there is nothing
for them to do there. They prefer more populous and, above all, wealthier
centers, where the artificial demands of city life give scope to the display
and bartering of tempting wares of all kinds.
-
- Of these wares, there is one which the overworked, underfed,
ever careworn peasant cannot resist-vodka. It is warmth in the inhuman
winter cold; mirth in his rare hours of rest; strength-fictitious, it
is true, yet upholding him for the time-when he sinks under the day's
task; medicine in sickness; above all, it is forgetfulness. And if poets,
with everything to make life a dream of beauty, have cried out in weariness
of heart, "The best of life is but intoxication," surely the
poor plodder may be excused for feeling the same in the only sense accessible
to his limited experience. And truly, in moderation, whiskey is a necessity
to our peasant, imposed by the climate and the conditions of his life.
But how easy the slip into excess! And where the line? Well do the Jews
know all this, and so the public-houses in the villages are all kept by
Jews-a plenteous and never-failing source of replenishment to the exchequer
of the kahal. In every village are one or two public-houses, or more,
according to its size and the number of its inhabitants; for there must
not be more fishers than the lake can support, nor must it be fished out
all at once. How complete the success let any village of our western provinces
witness, with its wretched, weather-beaten cabins, hingeless doors and
shutters, crooked and thatchless roofs, and rotting door-steps; its tottering,
yawning barns, scantily propped by poles; empty stables, solitary plows
and wagons under ruinous sheds; finally, the long trains of Amoor emigrants
mentioned in our first chapter. And if figures are wanted, let this suffice:
in 1869, seventy-three per cent of all the immovable property of the
western provinces had passed into the hands of the Jews.
-
- If we turn to the documents themselves, our amazement
increases, for there, indeed, the assertion which we were half inclined
to doubt assumes a body and becomes a living reality. Here are three,-Nos.
22, 23, and 26, dated Minsk, 1796,-which relate to a dispute between
the Kahal and a certain Eliazar, "about the possession of a house
and lot of ground belonging to the un-circumcised hatter, Zvansky."
Eliazar claims it on the ground that it was sold to his dead father,
but there is a flaw in the title. In disputes of this kind the Kahal generally
wins the day. So this case ends by the Beth-din adjudging the property
to the Kahal, "who may sell it to whomever it pleases." No,
77- dated 1799-records the sale to the "wealthy and illustrious Jochiel-Michael"
of a stone building, containing two shops, with their cellars and upper
stories, belonging to the Russian Baikoff; while No. 205-dated 1802- gives
half of the same property to another person in payment of an old debt,
"seeing that Jochiel- Michael has not yet paid in full the sum due
for those shops." The house of the uncircumcised blacksmith, Zeleza,
and that of the German carpenter, Johann, are disposed of in Nos. 115
and 195, and we may be sure these buildings did not in the end escape
their destination, even though hatter, shopkeeper, blacksmith, and carpenter
continued for a while to follow their several pursuits, each within his
own premises, in the security of ignorance. Nor does the Kahal limit its
operations to private property.
-
- It is rather startling to find it disposing (No. 105)
of "a convent, formerly possessed by Carmelite monks, but now occupied
by Franciscans," with all its buildings and outbuildings, in wood
or stone, the distillery belonging to it, as well as the convent meadows
and vegetable gardens, with the usual remark that "the purchase
money has been paid to a farthing"; of a hospital, with the piece
of ground thereto pertaining, held in actual possession by a certain
Catholic charitable brotherhood (No. 261); and, finally, appointing arbiters
to decide a litigation between itself, the Kahal, and a private individual,
concerning the right of possession to several shops, stone buildings,
owned by the Bishop of Minsk (No. 177). We pass over a long array of documents
of exactly the same nature, only observing that in the statute of the
Kahal and Beth-din of the city of Vilna, composed on the approved and
general model, the obligation to see that Jews do not interfere with each
other's khazakas and meropiès is especially mentioned as one of
their functions and attributions. Moreover, the interesting "angling"
process can be followed step by step in Gustav Freytag's powerful novel,
Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit), in which we see the wealthy usurer
Hirsch Ehrenthal systematically going to work on the property of the easy-
going and imprudent Baron Roth-sattel, until the wished-for consummation
is happily achieved.
-
- It is well known how punctilious orthodox Jews are about
their food, and how particular about having their meat butchered and cooked
according to certain very strict regulations laid down in the Talmud;
also how great and enduring is their repugnance to share the food of
Gentiles, even though they will occasionally welcome a Christian guest
to their own table. But what is less generally known is that this peculiarity
of theirs, respected everywhere as a feature of their religious observances,
very greatly affects, both directly and indirectly, the well-being of
the populations among whom they are settled. So little is this suspected
that no sort of objection is raised against their building slaughter-houses,
and getting the entire butcher's trade into their own hands; indeed, the
fact is mentioned with perfect innocence in the Russian Code of Laws:
[7] "In most of the towns of the western provinces there are no butchers
but Jews, and only that meat is sold to Christians which is not found
kòsher."
-
- It is supposed that the whole difference between kòsher
and trèf (lawful and forbidden, clean and unclean meat) lies in
the observance of or departure from certain ridiculously trivial and minute
Talmudic ordinances concerning the knife to be used for slaughtering,
its shape, sharpness, smoothness, the exact spot on the animal's throat
across which it is to be drawn, and the like. If this were all, there
would be no harm in handing over to the Christians meat pronounced unfit
for the use of their fastidious Jewish brethren. But this is not all.
When the animal has been successfully dispatched, according to all the
refinements of Talmudic law, [8] its internal parts- brain, heart, lungs,
liver, bowels, etc.-are submitted to the closest examination from a hygienic
point of view, and if a taint or symptom of disease is discovered in any
of them, the whole carcass is pronounced trèf, and put into the
market for sale to the Christian population. "We cannot wonder,"
remarks Brafmann, "at the profound loathing with which Jews regard
the food of Christians, knowing as they do that much of the meat which
is sold them is actually no better than carrion." Nor does their
conscience sting them in the feast for so unjustifiable a proceeding,
since they have for it the authority of the Mosaic law, which expressly
says (Deuteronomy xiv. 21): "Ye shall not eat of anything that dieth
of itself: thou shalt give it unto the stranger that is in thy gates,
that he may eat it; or thou mayest sell it unto an alien; for thou art
a holy people unto the Lord thy God."
-
- Indirectly, the condition of the entire country (that
part of it where the Jews are allowed to dwell) is influenced by this
separatism, because it furnishes the Kahal with its principal and most
unfailing revenue,-universally known under the curious name of "box-duty,"-and
thus always keeps it provided with large sums of ready money, which it
uses at its own discretion to further the interests of the community,
or avert any obnoxious interference on the part of the Christian authorities-principally
by means of bribes to police officials and employees. The regulations
about this tax and its collection form quite a complicated organization,
too important in its effects to be dismissed with only a passing notice.
It necessitates a considerable staff of officials, who hold their functions
on oath and under dread of the kherem. First there are the professional
slaughterers, trained in the business of killing according to Talmudic
rules, and appointed by the Kahal. All cattle or fowls, without exception,
that are to be consumed in the town- either for the market or for private
use-must be slain by them, on pain of being considered "even as carrion";
the owner of a chicken may not kill it to make soup for his sick wife,
but must take it to the sworn slaughterer. A certain duty has to be paid
to the agents of the Kahal, always present on the premises, on every head
of cattle,- ox, calf, sheep, or goat,-and on every fowl, varying according
to their kind. It is to be paid, not in paper or copper coin, but in
silver, and the slaughterer is forbidden "to unsheathe his knife
before it has been so paid." This is only part of the box-duty.
-
- By far the greater part of it is levied on the retail
sale of kòsher meat. This part falls on the purchasers, who pay
three groats in silver (about one cent) on every pound they buy. Meat
brought in from the surrounding country pays the same duty-i.e., the owner
can neither use it nor sell it unless he pays his three groats per pound
to the collectors of the Kahal. Even fat is not exempt from the duty,
and anyone who purchases either from a private person (i.e., not from
a butcher in the meat-market) must be shown the receipt of the collectors,
or he may find himself devouring "carrion," "food unclean
as pork," and come under the canonical kherem in consequence. There
is in the market a special room, in which the collectors sit all day long
to receive the money, while two superintendents continually "walk
the floor" of the market, to see that every purchaser, after having
received his piece of meat from the butcher, takes it straightway into
the collectors' office, to be reweighed and to pay the duty.
-
- It is amusing to note the precautions that are taken
to secure the money from fraud or foul play of any kind. "The collectors,
to avoid abuses," it is stated in the regulation (Document No. 88),
"are forbidden, under penalty of the most terrible kherem to put
it in their pockets, but must slip it into a locked box, with a slit in
the top." (Hence the name "box-duty.") Every evening they
are to count the money, enter it into the book, then transfer it, at least
twice a week, into a strongbox, deposited under the care of one of the
rich men of the city, who, however, is not entrusted with the key -or rather
keys, for the box has two locks. One of the keys remains with the collectors,
while the other is in the charge of a third person, appointed every month
by election. The contents of the strong- box are verified once a month,
by persons specially appointed. When the Kahal makes a demand for money
from the box-sums, "it must be signed by five members at least"
(there are nineteen in all), and the money is taken out and delivered
by both collectors jointly, not otherwise. Butchers, in consideration
of their having paid box-duty for the slaughtering of' the animals, are
allowed to sell kòsher meat two groats per pound higher than trèf,
so that the Jewish purchaser really pays a double duty on his meat.
-
- A number of documents show that a great part of this
box-money is regularly expended in bribes, either on given occasions,
for an object, or in a generally propitiating manner, as gratuitous gifts
on the two great holidays of the year-New Year's Day and Easter. These
latter offerings being a very ordinary occurrence, in accordance with
an old custom of the country, are registered quite openly as "holiday
presents to the authorities" (No. 4); or, "to be taken from
the box-money a hundred zlotys [a little over ten dollars] to buy coffee
and sugar for presents to the authorities at Easter" (No. 114); or,
"ordained by the 'chiefs of the city' to go the usual round at Easter,
the necessary sums to be taken from the box- money" (No. 73); or,
"bought four loaves of sugar, best quality, eighty-two pounds in
all," for New Year's presents (No. 244). Actual bribes, given for
a purpose, being of not so harmless a nature, are neither given nor expressed
so openly. The documents which record the expense are worded covertly,
as: "A hundred rubles to be employed in the purchase of rye and other
grain for a certain purpose, and fifty rubles to be given to the secretary
of the governor in acknowledgment of a certain service" (No. 33).
-
- The agents employed in such cases are instructed to do
their best to secure proofs of the transaction, so that the Kahal may
always hereafter have it in its power to exercise control over the official
who has yielded to temptation, by threatening to divulge his offense.
When affairs in the issue of which the Jewish community is interested
-or a corporation, or even private individuals-are being transacted in
one of the local courts, clever and trusty agents are directed to watch
the case, and, if necessary, to give it a gentle push in the right direction
by trying various blandishments on the members of the court,-such, for
instance, as providing a luncheon, with choice wines, for the judges (No.
37). Now all this materially, if indirectly, affects the condition of
the country at large, for every unlawful favor shown to the Jews is sure
to react in a prejudicial manner on the Christian population. And were
it not for the right to levy box-money on kòsher meat, the Kahal
would not have always ready to its hand extensive means to dispose of
in this way. Therefore it has taken care to secure to itself this never-failing
source of revenue, by enlisting the Government on its side.
-
- It was easy for it to do this by assuming the responsibility
for the payment of the taxes by the Jewish communities, and by undertaking
to supply the required number of recruits or the corresponding "exemption-money"
(under the old military system), and by representing the box-duty as the
easiest and surest means to this end, as a supplementary reserve income,
from which the taxes should be paid for the poor or insolvent members
of the community. The consequence is that this duty, together with all
the regulations about kòsher meat, without which it could not be
levied, are under the sanction and protection of the Russian law, and
actively supported by the local authorities, whose aid and assistance
the Kahal may claim at any moment. The following are the express terms
of the law:
-
- "Subject to the box-duty are:
-
- The slaughtering of cattle (per head of cattle);
- of fowls (per each fowl);
- the sale of kosher meat (per pound);
- another item of the box-money is the fines imposed for
the non- observance of the regulations on this subject." [9]
- "The police, both urban and rural, and all other
local authorities, are bound to render their aid and assistance, when
such is required in legal form, to see that the box-duty be paid by the
Jews without opposition or fraud." [10]
-
- How far the official object of the institution is achieved
may be seen from the fact that, in 1867, there was a balance against the
Jews in the government of Vilno of 293,868 rubles, 3612 kopecks arrear
on taxes, and 341,097 rubles, 15 kopecks against those of Minsk. (A ruble
is one hundred kopecks, and worth about seventy-five cents United States
money.)
-
- This exposition of the attitude which the Russian Jews
[11] have invariably held and still hold toward their Gentile fellow-subjects
would be incomplete without a brief statement of the line of conduct
which they follow with regard to the jurisdiction of the Gentile courts
of justice, and to their own obligations as represented by oaths and promises
made to Gentiles.
-
- The first of these points is settled most unequivocally
by the following extract from the "Khoshen-Hamishpat" (chapter
26, paragraph 1):
-
- "Jews are forbidden to go to law before a Gentile
court of justice, or Gentile institution of any sort. This prohibition
does not lose its force even in cases where the Gentile laws coincide
with the Hebrew laws, nor even should both sides wish to submit their
case to a Gentile court. He who violates this prohibition is a villain.
Such an act is considered equal to blasphemy and rebellion against the
entire Mosaic law."
-
- The offender of course incurs the kherem in its entire
rigor, and cannot be freed from it until he releases his antagonist from
the power of the Gentiles. How consistently this principle is carried
out is shown by two very remarkable documents, Nos. 165 and 166. Two
Jewish members are to be elected to sit in one of the mixed minor local
courts, called "oral courts," because cases of a very trivial
nature are examined and decided by them orally, according to "custom"
more than written law. Thirty electors have been chosen by a general assembly,
and the names of the candidates have been proclaimed. Thereupon, and before
the official election by ballot takes place, the candidates are summoned
before the Beth-din, and there made to engage, under oath, "that,
through all the time of their exercising the function of judges in the
oral court, they will be guided by the directions and instructions of
the Beth-din and Kahal; also that they will unconditionally obey all their
commands with respect to the cases which will be submitted to the court."
After this a committee of four persons-two members of the Kahal and two
of the Beth-din-is appointed to make out a code of rules for the guidance
of the two judges.
-
- "And all the resolutions signed by the committee
shall be by said judges carried out punctually during a whole year. All
this has been done with the common consent, in accordance with the laws
and ordinances. At each sitting of the committee one of said two judges
must of necessity be present, in order to consult together concerning
the cases to be decided in said court."
-
- It naturally follows from these premises that all oaths
whatever taken by Jews, or testimony given by them under oath before Gentile
courts or magistrates, may or may not be valid. Further opportunities
for evading obligations to Christians are offered by the annual religious
solemnity called kol-nidreh, the opening act of the great festival of
Yom-Kippur, the day of national purification, of absolution and reconciliation
with heaven, when all private chapels as well as the synagogues of the
various corporations are closed, by special order and under pain of the
kherem, so that Israel may pray to the Lord of their fathers jointly in
the great synagogue, as one united family. It is the tenth day after the
Hebrew New Year's day, its great holiness marked by a severe fast-total
abstinence from food during twenty-four hours for all adults, and even
children over twelve years old; like the solemnity of New Year's day it
closes with the significant patriotic signal, the blowing of the sacred
horns, which is answered by the entire congregation with the traditional
ejaculation: "Next year in Jerusalem!" The fast and common prayer
begin the night before, two hours before sunset, and are ushered in by
the ceremony of kol-nidreh, which we will describe in Brafmann's own words:
-
- "When the men and the women, in holiday attire,
have taken their separate stations in the synagogue, which is lighted
by the wax tapers held by each person, and the leader of the choir (cantor)
has taken his place, then the most notable members of the assistance open
the ark, reverently take out the thora, while the choir thrice repeat
the celebrated kol-nidreh to an ancient traditional chant; the congregation
repeat it aloud with them. Judging from the pomp and reverence with which
the Jews prepare for this act, an outsider would naturally conclude that
it is the very center-piece of the whole yearly cycle of spiritual exercises.
But, if he knew the language, he would find that the words pronounced
with such awe-inspiring ceremonial, such religious concentration and profound
reverence, are not words of prayer at all, but an act by which the entire
nation renounces all promises, oaths, and obligations given by each of
its members in the preceding, and all such as will be given in the coming,
year. With this public renunciation of a nation's plighted word, the whole
moral base of social life does indeed fall to pieces. It is a fact so
utterly revolting, that the greatest authorities of the Talmudic world
itself have risen in protest against it. But not even they could prevail
against the force of custom, and the kol- nidreh renunciation maintains
its place among the most honored Hebrew rites."
-
- This chapter cannot be more aptly concluded than by another
extract from Brafmann's remarks, so pithy and forcible in their simple
earnestness:
-
- "To students of law we venture to think that these
documents will offer not a little interest; but we especially recommend
them to the study of those who are curious to find out the real causes
of the universal murmur of reprobation which has always been heard against
the Jews from the surrounding world, and of the persecutions to which
they have been subjected through eighteen centuries-i.e., ever since
the kahal has ruled this unhappy people."
-
-
- IV
-
- Was Brafmann right in making these revelations-or, at
least, in giving them the publicity of the press? Should not a certain
merciful feeling have restrained him from thus exposing the short-comings
of those who still were his brethren in blood and race? Should he not
have been content to cut himself adrift from the vessel which held them?
Scarcely. You cannot let your neighbor's house be broken into because
you have friends in the gang, even though you have withdrawn yourself
from them when you discovered their evil ways. Yet, Brafmann is emphatically
and enthusiastically a Jew. He is deeply, passionately devoted to his
people, and he possibly-who knows?- might have hesitated and temporized
with his duty to his new brethren from tenderness to the old, had it not
been his entire conviction that the Jews suffer quite as much under the
system whose secret workings he divulges as the Christians themselves.
For each power, each right, of the Kahal and Beth-din is a stick with
two ends, of which the one descends on the Christian population and the
other impartially belabors the Jewish community,-of course falling heaviest
on the poorer mass, [12]-with equal violence and equally fatal results.
-
- If the Gentile trader or artificer can never be sure
that his house has not been sold over his head to a Hebrew fellow-citizen,
on the other hand, the Jew who has bought a piece of ground or a house,
from the Russian Government or a Christian owner, is made to pay an additional
sum for the same property to the Kahal. Thus No. 87 records the sale "to
Rabbi Khaim, son of Rabbi Isaac, Levite," of the right of ownership
to a stone building, constructed by him on the market-place of Minsk,
and only from the day that this second deed of sale is delivered to him
is it said that the building belongs to him and his heirs forever, "from
the center of the earth to the summit of the heavens." Further, as
a rule, a Jew from one district is not permitted to trade or settle in
another, and if he is, by special favor of the Kahal, he is made to pay
handsomely for the privilege. For it is said in the law: [13]
-
- "At the present time, when we live under the rule
of alien nations and too great an accumulation of Hebrew population may
lead to collision with them, every Jew who comes to a city and wishes
to settle in it, is a foe to those who already dwell there. Therefore
the local kahal is given the right to close the door before the new- comers,
to attain which object it is lawful for it to employ any means whatsoever,
even to the power of the goïm [the local administration]."
-
- "Even to the power of the goïm." That
means the local Christian police, which is to the kahal what the secular
arm was to the Inquisition. It is literally at its beck and call, owing
to the sanction awarded by our laws to the box-duty. This same active
sanction also enables it to exercise a most irksome supervision and an
intolerable coercion over the private life of every Jewish family. A few
instances will best illustrate the practical working of this simple and
ingenious machinery.
-
- However miserable a Jewish family, there are two occasions-a
wedding and the circumcision of a son-on which a certain amount of festive
expenditure is inevitable. Guests are invited, a meal is served, and
musicians are hired. In none of these points, however, is the giver of
the feast allowed to follow his own discretion or inclination, but must
submit to a code of regulations, which would be amusing from their absurdity
were they not so galling to all feeling of independence and human dignity.
Here are a few items: "No one shall dare to serve at circumcision
feasts refreshments consisting only of cakes and whiskey." There
must be a meal of butcher's meat; if the feast-giver be a poor man, he
must have meat for at least ten persons, and only in case of absolute
destitution can an exemption be obtained from the Kahal. Visitors who
come to offer congratulations on the birth of a son or daughter are forbidden,
as well as the parents themselves, to taste refreshments in the shape
of cakes, preserved fruits, or sweets of any kind, on pain of the canonical
kherem. At weddings it is forbidden to serve a large cake with filling
made of preserved fruit. "Before and after a wedding each of the
families is allowed to give only one feast." "There must not
be more than three musicians at a wedding, and they are not allowed to
eat more than three times." To a circumcision may be invited "only
relatives to the third degree, the two next-door neighbors on each side
of the house and three from across the street, *** the teacher of the
host's children," and a few more persons strictly determined. The
invitations are to be sent through the messengers of the Beth-din-not
otherwise. The feast-giver is entitled to a certain quantity of meat duty-free,
which, however, the collectors deliver only on being presented with the
list of guests, sanctioned by the Kahal and signed by the city-notary.
-
- Now, if the kahal had not contrived to secure the active
cooperation of the state laws in levying the box-duty, it would not have
the means of reminding every Jew, even on such occasions as household
festivals, of its dread and resistless power. As things stand, its vengeance
can fall on the rebel at any moment. To punish disobedience to its slightest
regulations or even a temporary ordinance, it has only to summon the police
and denounce the culprit as having infringed the laws concerning kòsher
and box-duty. Who is to rescue the unhappy man from the hands of the authorities,
who demand from him the legal fine for that offense? That he never committed
it is no safeguard to him, for false accusation, even supported by perjury
and recourse to the goïm, are among the authorized means to break
rebellion. Two documents-Nos. 148 and 149-contain the exposition of the
measures to be taken "in order to preserve the Talmudic court [Beth-din]
from the disrespect which, in punishment for our sins, has of late made
itself felt,-to prevent our foes from sitting as judges over us, which
Heaven forbid!-and to bend audacious apostates and rebels, so that every
Jew may be submissive to the Talmudic law and court." The measures
contained in No. 149 are much the most terrible, to be used only against
hardened rebels, and when the case has been put in the hands of the "secret
prosecutor"-a functionary who is elected every month by ballot from
among the officers of the Beth-din, and who swears the most solemn oath
to spare no person in carrying out the instructions of the Talmudic court,
and never to reveal that he ever has been invested with the function of
"secret prosecutor." [14] Here are the nine paragraphs (some
of them condensed) into which this remarkable document is divided:
-
- The rebel is deprived of the offices which he may have
held in the Kahal or corporations.
- He is excluded from the community and any corporation
to which he may belong.
- He is excluded from general assemblies and corporation
meetings.
- He is excluded from all functions or honors in the synagogue.
***
- He is not to be invited to any festival, public or private.
He who invites him falls under the kherem.
- No one is to rent from him his house or his shop, nor
to let his own to him. ***
- If he is an artisan, it is forbidden to give him work,
on pain of the heaviest kherem.
- If a betrothal contract has been entered into with him,
the other party is freed from it, without incurring the fine usually imposed
in such cases, and reimbursement of expenses.
- It is lawful to proclaim in the synagogue that the rebel
has eaten trèf food or infringed a fast, etc., to confirm the accusation
by false testimony, and to have him punished as if he had done this thing.
- This document is approved and signed by fourteen members
of the Kahal and Beth-din, and by the chief rabbi of the city of Minsk.
-
- Nor are the Christian courts of justice less efficient
tools than the local police in the hands of the Jewish rulers. One of
the most common proceedings to punish disobedience or disrespect is to
sue the offender in a Christian court for debt, real or imaginary. Thus,
when litigation is to be decided by the Beth-din, it is customary, in
order to secure the submission of the parties to the suit, to make them
both sign blank bills before the case is tried. Then, should the losing
party be dissatisfied with the decision and refer the case to the Christian
court, which is his right under the state laws, the Beth-din fills the
blank at its pleasure, and directs the nominal holder to present this
perfectly legal document for payment through the local authorities. "This,"
says Brafmann, "accounts for the great number of litigations always
on hand in Christian courts. They are generally nothing more than legal
fictions used by the Beth-din or Kahal to compel the obedience of refractory
members of their communities." If offenders return to the path of
duty within a certain time, the claim is withdrawn. Sometimes the Russian
courts receive genuine complaints, but they are usually powerless for
redress, and bitterly are the plaintiffs made to rue their audacity.
-
- In 1866, a Hebrew widow complained to the mayor and town-council
of Vilna that she had been charged fifteen hundred rubles for the burial
of her husband, and compelled not only to pay this sum but to sign a
declaration that she had done so voluntarily for charitable purposes,
the corporation of undertakers having been directed to refuse burial to
the body until she had submitted, which she had done at the expiration
of five days. It is further seen, from the progress of the case, that
the Kahal fined her five hundred rubles more, and compelled the police
to recover this sum from her by representing it as an arrear on her share
of the contribution for ransoming poor and insolvent Jews from military
service. The impudence of the pretense was patent, yet the local authorities
could do nothing, for the Kahal, in all that regards the collection and
payment of taxes for the Jewish population, is a state institution.
-
- The meaning of the little phrase, so frequently repeated,
that it is lawful to the Kahal to compel obedience "by any means
whatsoever, even through the power of the goïm," will now be
sufficiently clear not to need further illustration, though such might
be produced to any extent from Brafmann's book, to which indeed full justice
could be done only by translating it.
-
- Brafmann is, we repeat, a Jewish patriot in the fullest
and widest sense. He admires his race; he takes pride in belonging to
it, and loves his people with a passionate pity and tenderness which make
his voice break and his eyes fill when he speaks of their sufferings and
moral degradation under the oppressive system which holds them in iron
bands. His dreams are of their regeneration, of their future power and
greatness-not as a political nation, but as a highly gifted race, living
on equal terms among other races, all artificial barriers being removed,
and the field opened without let or hindrance of any kind to the free
development of the many noble faculties of mind and soul so characteristic
of what Renan calls "the admirable minority of Israel." If,
therefore, he incurred by his revelations the utmost wrath of the rulers
whom he exposed, and of the ignorantly fanatical mass, to such a degree
that his life at one time was not considered safe even in St. Petersburg,
where he dwelt after his book appeared; on the other hand, he is comforted
and secretly supported by the sympathy of many of the more enlightened
Jews who, like him, sigh for release from a bondage worse than foreign
captivity. But for such support he could not have obtained possession
of the precious pile of papers which were abstracted for him, not without
danger, by a friend from the Jewish archive of Minsk.
-
- The above exposition of a state of things which might
be pronounced wildly unreal but for the irrefragable documentary evidence
adduced, though far from exhausting the material collected by Brafmann,
[15] will, it is to be hoped, have clearly established one fact: that,
whatever historical causes may underlie the oft-recurring popular outbreaks
against the Jews, race animosity, and religious intolerance have never
been alone at work, and, in our days, are no longer so at all. The only
case of systematic persecution of them from fanatical motives is that
of the Spanish Inquisition, though the motives were far from unmixed,
even there. At all events, if the fathers of St. Dominic and their secular
supporters did not object to enriching themselves with the spoils of the
wealthy Jews they burned, we must do them the justice to acknowledge that
they burned the poor ones quite as piously and scrupulously. In all other
instances "Jewish riots" begin spontaneously; something-sometimes
a mere trifle- happens to infuriate the mob, and they begin to kill and
plunder.
-
- The massacres spread, rage for a few days, then stop,
and everything goes the old round again-for a while. Ignorant fanaticism
is only an accessory-true, a terrible one-which comes into play with the
greater violence the further the occurrence is removed from us, in the
"dark ages." But a significant feature is that the notorious
usurers are always the first to suffer, and the bills and securities
which hold whole provinces in bondage are the first property sought after
and destroyed. This was the case even in the more than usually severe
outbreak at the beginning of Richard I.'s reign, which ended in the horrible
catastrophe of York, and the monkish chronicler who records it in terms
of unseemly exultation, amid much revolting fanatical twaddle drops a
word which strangely reminds us of the burden of popular complaint which
recurred all through the riots of last spring.
-
- He calls the Jews "blood-suckers." [16] Another
curious coincidence is that then, in England, as nine hundred years later
in Russia, "the rumor was spread that the King had issued orders
to massacre the Jews." [17] The facility with which the ignorant
masses lend their ears to such absurdities betrays, at all events, a latent
though monstrously distorted consciousness of having received at the
hands of the race such wrongs and injuries as claim redress from their
natural protector, the governing power.
-
- The difference between then and now, apart from the comparatively
mild form of the recent paroxysms consequent on the general softening
of men's natures, is chiefly this: then, religious feeling was actively
mixed up with economical grievances and hideous reprisals, while now it
is totally absent. And never could this mediæval specter be dragged
forth to the light of our sober, unfanatical age, to account for phenomena
of which the real causes must be obvious to every unbiased observer, were
it not that by far the greater part of the so-called "liberal press"
in Europe is in the hands of Hebrew editors and Hebrew writers-many of
them men of great culture and talent, of great and well-merited authority
in the world of letters and science, but whom it suits, from mistaken
national zeal, to shed a false light on certain events and sides of modern
life, to blind the eyes of superficial and docile readers with the dust
of those cheap and plausible phrases of which the shallow orators of 1789-93
have left us so ample a store, and which can be as easily shuffled to
prove anything or nothing as the cards whose combinations furnished forth
the effective and patriotic speeches of Pieborgne, the lawyer- minister
in Laboulaye's "Prince Caniche."
-
- It is time to drop the sentimental liberal slang, through
whose loose, wide meshes the biggest humbug can slip unchallenged, When
a question of vital import is presented to us, the thing to do is to
drive it into a corner and grapple with it, not muffle it up in commonplaces
long ago worn threadbare. The Jewish question, in Eastern Europe and Western
Russia, is such a question: let us then, for once, look it square in the
face. The Jews are disliked, nay, hated in those parts, not because they
believe and pray differently, but because they are a parasitical race
who, producing nothing, fasten on the produce of land and labor, and live
on it, choking the breath of life out of commerce and industry as sure
as the creeper throttles the tree that upholds it.
-
- They are despised, not because they are of different
blood, because they dress differently, eat peculiar food; not even because,
herding together in unutterable filth and squalor, they are a loathsome
and really dangerous element-a standing institution for the propagation
of all kinds of horrible diseases and contagions; but because their ways
are crooked, their manner abject,-because they will not stand up for themselves
and manfully resent an insult or oppose vexation, but will take any amount
of it if they can thereby turn a penny, will smirk and cringe, and go
off with a deadly grudge at heart, which they will vent cruelly, ruthlessly,
but in an underhand manner, and not always on the offender, but on any
or all belonging to the offender's race. It is an essentially oriental
feature, this making light of servile forms, so the feeling of pride be
secretly treasured and revenge taken at some time and in some way-a feature
which our Jews could not have retained so unimpaired had they not always
been forcibly kept aloof, by their own rulers, from the ennobling influence
of that compound of Grecian refinement and Teutonic manliness which we
call modern culture, and which instills more than it teaches that the
forms of servitude are as degrading as the fact.
-
- The readiness with which they appeal to foreign sympathy
and interference, and which in any set of people holding the position
of citizens would be looked upon and punished as state treason of the
worst kind, is but another phase of their oriental nature-the inability
to grasp the first principles of state-life, or perhaps rather their determination
not to acknowledge themselves as belonging to any Gentile state. They
are not "persecuted." Only, from time to time, the popular patience-that
dike built up of ignorance, apathy, and habitual endurance-breaks; then
there is an outpouring of angry waters. True, some things have become
impossible. No invading conqueror, for instance, would dream nowadays
of farming to the Jews the churches of a conquered people, as did the
Poles when they held Galicia in the sixteenth century and later, thus
authorizing them to tax the people arbitrarily for having divine service
performed in their own temples. No government would now lend itself to
such iniquity. Still we have just seen that, even without such open support,
enough can be achieved to exasperate the most long- suffering people and
goad them into momentary frenzy.
-
- The question naturally arises: What is to be done? It
is a momentous one, and might partly be answered by showing what ought
not to be done-i.e., by a review of the legislative measures, hostile
or propitiating, which have been tried in different countries and at
various times, and have utterly failed, as well as of the causes why they
failed. Brafmann's "Kahal" and his other book, "Hebrew
Corporations, Local and Universal," contain valuable material toward
working out the problem; but it is not at the end of an already long
paper that this feature of the subject can be considered-a paper, too,
of which the special object is only to vindicate the age in which we live
from the odious imputation of "intolerance and religious persecution,"
unthinkingly and indiscriminately brought against it. Yet the impression
conveyed would be incomplete, nay, the entire tenor and drift of the paper
might be misconstrued, without at least a hint at the solution which is
desired and openly advocated by all enlightened Russians as represented
by our liberal press. Briefly stated, it reads as follows:
-
- The legal emancipation of the Jews, begun years ago by
granting them the right of buying and holding land, of entering the universities,
and various smaller concessions, must be completed. They must share both
the rights and the duties of their Christian and Mohammedan fellow-subjects,
without restraints or privileges. As the first step toward such a consummation,
the Kahal must necessarily be abolished, or at all events shorn of its
power-a thing very easily achieved by simply depriving it of the right
of levying box-duty on the slaughtering and sale of kòsher meat,
and forbidding the sale of trèf to Christians. This would at once
release the Jewish population from an intolerable pressure by delivering
them from an irksome duty, and by depriving the town-councils of the means
of enforcing their arbitrary separatistical ordinances by recourse to
"the power of the goïm." The taxes would then be collected
from the Jews directly by Government officials, in the same manner as
they are from all other subjects; they would be brought under the census,
which they have always been able to elude until now,-and all this would
place them in a direct and normal relation to the rulers of the land,
without in the least interfering with the full exercise of their religious
worship and national customs. Left to themselves and freed from all restraint
with regard to their place of residence, the process of assimilation would
soon begin, and the number of Jews who discard the Talmud and keep to
the simple Mosaic law in its wider and more liberal application would
annually increase. But if the Government, at this critical moment, recoils
from this radical change, and contents itself with half-measures, denying
its Hebrew subjects their full share of civil rights and at the same time
upholding the artificial separatism so baleful in its effects, the same
state of things will be still further perpetuated,-consequently, the causes
being unchanged, the effects will be identical, and the same deplorable
scenes will be enacted from time to time,-scenes which every other European
country has witnessed, and would see now, had not a wiser legislation
made their recurrence impossible.
-
-
- [1] The account reads something like the famous episode
of the Gordon riots in "Barnaby Rudge," minus the horrible accessory
of the fire.
- [2] There is another current of emigration from the Government
on the Volga; and that, of course, has nothing to do with the Jews.
- [3] "Les Évangiles et la Seconde Generation
Chretienne," page 12.
- [4] The word "seminary" is always applied to
ecclesiastical schools or colleges, placed under the jurisdiction of the
local ecclesiastical authorities, and, as supreme resort, of the Holy
Synod.
- [5] Talmud, Treatise "Baba-Batra" page 55.
- [6] "Khoshen-Hamishpat" section 156, paragraph
17, and Treatise "Baba-Batra," chapter 8.
- [7] Vol. V. Note to section 280, paragraph 42.
- [8] The Talmudic law devotes eighty-six chapters, divided
into six hundred and forty-two paragraphs, to the regulations concerning
slaughtering, kòsher and trèf.
- [9] Statute on Taxes; supplement to section 281, paragraph
8.
- [10] Ibid, paragraph 57.
- [11] To these may safely be added the Jews of the eastern
provinces of Prussia and Austria, Galicia, Bukovina, etc., and also Roumania,
for in all these countries the state of things is exactly similar.
- [12] So on one occasion, when the superintendents of
the box-duty demanded an addition to their salary, the Kahal, instead
of granting it from its own exchequer, imposed an additional duty on the
sale of meat, and when the collectors in their turn applied the very next
day for the same favor, the duty was still further increased-by one groat
per pound-to satisfy them. (Nos. 173 and 176.)
- [13] "Khoshen-Hamishpat" section 156, paragraph
7.
- [14] This strongly reminds us of the mediaeval vehm-gericht.
- [15] Thus, no mention has been made of the so-called
"candle- money," nor of the extraordinary contributions, mostly
in the shape of a percentage on capital, personal property and wares,
levied by the kahal arbitrarily on special occasions, to avert some danger
threatening the entire community. Such an occasion occurred in 1802,
when the poet Derjàvin, a staunch Russian patriot, was in the ministry,
and strove to carry through a law forbidding the Jews to keep taverns
and public-houses in the villages. There was a great panic among them;
the Kahals raised one million rubles for bribes and presents at head-quarters,
ordered public prayers and days of fasting. Derjàvin was offered
one, even two hundred thousand rubles, to withdraw the project. He told
the Emperor (Alexander I.), and did not take the money; but others did,
and the Jews won the day. Russian writers have celebrated the event as
a triumph of humane and liberal policy, and it has been rather the fashion
to abuse Derjàvin as a narrow-minded retrògrade.
- [16] Charles Knight's "History of England,"
chapter 21.
- [17] Hume's "History of England," chapter 10.
- Original scans of this article can be found at the Cornell
University Library.
|