At the
end of the 19th century there was an estimated 5,500,000 Jews living
in Russia. Under a law introduced by Alexander
III, all Russian Jews were forced to live in what became known
as the Pale of Jewish Settlement. Exceptions were made for rich business
people, students and for certain professions. The Pale comprised the
ten Polish and fifteen neighbouring Russian provinces, stretching
from Riga to Odessa, from Silesia to Vilna and Kiev.
After
the assassination of Alexander II
in 1881 there was a wave of pogroms in
Russia against the Jewish community. This led to a large increase
in Jews leaving Russia. Of these, more
than 90 per cent settled in the United States.
A significant
number of Jews played leading roles in the October
Revolution. This included Leon Trotsky,
Gregory Zinoviev, Lev
Kamenev, Dimitri Bogrov, Karl
Radek,
Yakov Sverdlov, Maxim
Litvinov, Adolf
Joffe,
and Moisei Uritsky.
On 10th
July, 1918, the Soviet government passed a law that abolished all
discrimination between Jews and non-Jews. This resulted in a considerable
amount of Jewish migration within the Soviet Union.
(1)
Mary Antin, The Promised Land (1912)
The Gentiles used to wonder at us because we cared so much about
religious things about food and Sabbath and teaching the children
Hebrew. They were angry with us for our obstinacy, as they called
it, and mocked us and ridiculed the most sacred things. There were
wise Gentiles who understood. These were educated people, like Fedora
Pavlovna, who made friends with their Jewish neighbors. They were
always respectful and openly admired some of our ways. But most of
the Gentiles were ignorant. There was one thing, however, the Gentiles
always understood, and that was money. They would take any kind of
bribe, at any time. They expected it. Peace cost so much a year, in
Polotzk. If you did not keep on good terms with your Gentile neighbors,
they had a hundred ways of molesting you. If you chased their pigs
when they came rooting up your garden, or objected to their children
maltreating your children, they might complain against you to the
police, stuffing their case with false accusations and false witnesses.
If you had not made friends with the police, the case might go to
court; and there you lost before the trial was called unless the judge
had reason to befriend you.
The Tsar was always sending us commands - you shall not do this and
you shall not do that - till there was very little left that we might
do, except pay tribute and die. One positive command he gave us: You
shall love and honor your emperor. In every congregation a prayer
must be said for the Tsar's health, or the chief of police would close
the synagogue. On a royal birthday every house must fly a flag, or
the owner would be dragged to a police station and be fined twenty-five
rubles. A decrepit old woman, who lived all alone in a tumble-down
shanty, supported by the charity of the neighborhood, crossed her
paralyzed hands one day when flags were ordered up, and waited for
her doom, because she had no flag. The vigilant policeman kicked the
door open with his great boot, took the last pillow from the bed,
sold it, and hoisted a flag above the rotten roof.
The Tsar always got his dues, no matter if it ruined a family. There
was a poor locksmith who owed the Tsar three hundred rubles, because
his brother had escaped from Russia before serving his time in the
army. There was no such fine for Gentiles, only for Jews; and the
whole family was liable. Now the locksmith never could have so much
money, and he had no valuables to pawn. The police came and attached
his household goods, everything he had, including his bride's trousseau;
and the sale of the goods brought thirty-five rubles. After a year's
time the police came again, looking for the balance of the Tsar's
dues. They put their seal on everything they found.
There was one public school for boys, and one for girls, but Jewish
children were admitted in limited numbers - only ten to a hundred;
and even the lucky ones had their troubles. First, you had to have
a tutor at home, who prepared you and talked all the time about the
examination you would have to pass, till you were scared. You heard
on all sides that the brightest Jewish children were turned down if
the examining officers did not like the turn of their noses. You went
up to be examined with the other Jewish children, your heart heavy
about that matter of your nose. There was a special examination for
the Jewish candidates, of course: a nine-year-old Jewish child had
to answer questions that a thirteen-year-old Gentile was hardly expected
to answer. But that did not matter so much; you had been prepared
for the thirteen-year-old test. You found the questions quite easy.
You wrote your answers triumphantly - and you received a low rating,
and there was no appeal.
I used to stand in the doorway of my father's store munching an apple
that did not taste good any more, and watch the pupils going home
from school in twos and threes; the girls in neat brown dresses and
black aprons and little stiff hats, the boys in trim uniforms with
many buttons. They had ever so many books in the satchels on their
backs. They would take them out at home, and read and write, and learn
all sorts of interesting things. They looked to me like beings from
another world than mine. But those whom I envied had their troubles,
as I often heard. Their school life was one struggle against injustice
from instructors, spiteful treatment from fellow students, and insults
from everybody. They were rejected at the universities, where they
were admitted in the ratio of three Jews to a hundred Gentiles, under
the same debarring entrance conditions as at the high school: especially
rigorous examinations, dishonest marking, or arbitrary rulings without
disguise. No, the Tsar did not want us in the schools.
(2)
Leopold Trepper was brought up in Novy-Targ,
a small town in Galicia that at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire.
The Jewish
community in Novy-Targ, which was about three thousand strong when
I was a child, had been in existence since the founding of the town
in the Middle Ages. The district was inhabited by very poor peasants,
who had to struggle to extract a meager subsistence from unproductive
land. In the villages the people only ate bread once a week. The daily
fare was potato pancakes and cabbage.
On Sunday,
the peasants came to Novy-Targ by the hundreds to attend mass; they
carried their shoes on their shoulders and did not put them on until
they were just about to enter the church. The Jews who tilled the
land were no better off- for them, too, a pair of shoes had to last
a lifetime.
The number
of people who left for the United states and Canada increased with
every year. Hoping to find the new Eden, they prepared joyously for
the long voyage. I can still see them, the collars of their shirts
wide open over what passed for suits. They carried little wooden suitcases,
and they looked proud in their magnificent bowler hats.
(3)
Bernard Pares, a British academic, was
a regular visitor to Russia during the reign
of Nicholas II.
At this time the favourite object of persecution was the
Jewry of Russia, which was in 1914 nearly one half of the whole Jewish
population of the world. And here Nicholas was as bad as Alexander.
It was not just a question of what rights the Jews did not possess,
but whether they had the right to exist at all. But for special exemptions,
the Jewish population was confined to the so-called Jewish Pale of
Settlement, where they lived under Polish rule before the partitions
of Poland.
(4)
In her book Promised Land, Mary Antin
described what it was like to be Jewish in Russia during the 1880s.
I remember a time when I thought a pogrom had broken out in our
street, and I wonder that I did not die of fear. It was some Christian
holiday, and we had been warned by the police to keep indoors. Gates
were locked; shutters were barred. Fearful and yet curious, we looked
through the cracks in the shutters. We saw a procession of peasants
and townspeople, led by priests, carrying crosses and banners and
images. We lived in fear till the end of the day, knowing that the
least disturbance might start a riot, and a riot led to a pogrom.
(5)
Joseph Stalin, article in
Brdzola newspaper (December, 1901)
Groaning
are the oppressed nationalities and religions in Russia, among them
the Poles and Finns. Groaning are the unceasingly persecuted and humiliated
Jews, deprived even those miserable rights that other Russian subjects
enjoy the right to live where they choose, the right to go to school,
etc. Groaning are the Georgians, the Armenians and other nations who
can neither have their own schools nor be employed by the state and
are compelled to submit to the shameful and oppressive policies of
Russification.
(6)
Felix
Yusupov was in Petrograd during the October
Revolution.
The day after I arrived, the Provisional Government collapsed
and the Bolshevik party, with Lenin and Trotsky at its head, assumed
power. All government posts were instantly occupied by Jewish commissaries,
more or less camouflaged under Russian names. Indescribable confusion
reigned in the capital; bands of soldiers and sailors broke into people's
houses, pillaging and murdering. The town was in the hands of a frenzied,
bloodthirsty populace, eager for destruction.
(7)
Decree passed by the Soviet Government (10th July, 1918)
The RSFSR
recognizing the equality of all citizens, irrespective of race or
nationality, declare it contrary to the fundamental laws of the Republic
to institute or tolerate privileges or to repress national minorities,
or in any way to limit their rights.
(8)
Julius Streicher, Der Stuermer
(May, 1939)
There must be a punitive expedition against the Jews in Russia, a
punitive expedition which will expect: death sentence and execution.
Then the world will see the end of the Jews is also the end of Bolshevism.
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