Within The Pale

THE time when Jews first settled in Russia is a subject of mere historical conjecture. Some accounts assert that colonies of the race were founded in the country bordering on the Black Sea several centuries before the Christian era. All the probabilities favour this view. Both before and after their dispersion by the Romans, a people so intelligent and resourceful as the Hebrews would learn of the fruitful regions watered by the four great rivers which flow into the southern sea-boundaries of the vast territory now under the sway of the Tsar. They would have a choice of land and sea routes for the voyages of emigration, trade, or adventure.

The distance from Jerusalem to the mouth of the Volga, through Asia Minor and the Caucasus, is not much more than from Astrakhan to St. Petersburg, while the journey by sea from Joppa to where the city of Odessa stands to-day for Russia’s richest seaport, is much less than that from Athens to Marseilles. The Caucasus, Taurida (Crimea), Cherson, and Bessarabia, known in the days of King Solomon by other names, would be within the zone of trading intercourse with the Kingdom of Israel, while these rich and interesting parts of Southern Russia would naturally attract the footsteps of the scattered race after Titus had destroyed their nation and dispersed its people, as well as during the existence of the Byzantine Empire.

Whether the race known as the Khazars, who governed the territory stretching north from Astrakhan over the eastern watershed of the Volga as far as Kazan, were civilised by Semitic colonists, as alleged by some writers, is now only an interesting speculation. One fact offered in support of this theory is that the Israelites were driven out of this country by its rulers in the eleventh century, at a time when Jews in Christian Europe began to be objects of race persecution.

The period of the Crusades may be taken as that in which the systematic oppression of the Jews began. The source of this persecution was the religious influence upon uneducated minds of the gospel of the Crucifixion, coupled with legends about ritual murders, and fables recording the sacrifice of the blood of Christian children and maidens during the sacred rites of Paschal time.

It is on record that, in the year 1298, a fanatic in a city of Franconia circulated a story that the Sacred Host in a church had been polluted by a Jew, and that the Almighty had chosen an avenger of this crime in the person of the narrator of the act of sacrilege. The populace rose en masse and burned all the Jews in the city. The massacre extended to the country, and, before the murderous fury unchained by this fanatic and his falsehood could be stilled, over 100,000 victims were slaughtered in Germany, Bavaria, and Austria.

It was following these and similar ferocities that the first great movement of the Semitic race into Poland occurred. They were encouraged to move into this country by the toleration extended to smaller colonies of their race who had settled in Polish dominions in earlier times. All accounts agree in crediting to this ancient Kingdom a far more enlightened rule of the proscribed Israelites than to any other Christian nation during the Middle Ages. Casimir the Great protected them in both their religious and civil liberties, in return for which freedom they helped to organise and develop the commerce and crafts of the country. They flourished and multiplied under such rule, and became the trading link between producer and consumer, in the economic life of Poland, as well as tillers of the soil and expert artisans.

It is an error to assume that the Jews have not thriven anywhere in agricultural industry. Wherever they were sure of protection against spoliation, they took to land labour as readily as to other pursuits, and succeeded. This was so in Poland during the two centuries in which they shared in the general rights guaranteed by the state. Accounts of Jewish agricultural colonies in various parts of Russia, in later days, also support the same testimony. In fact there was no better foundation for this charge in times anterior to our own than the circumstance that a people who were not permitted to own land anywhere, or even to cultivate it in some countries, were, in consequence, subjected to the imputation of having a racial prejudice against this means of obtaining a livelihood.

The halcyon period of Jewish freedom in Poland came to an end in the middle of the seventeenth century. That proud and ancient nation was itself the victim of invasion and oppression, and its Semitic population lost over 200,000 men, women, and children in the ferocious campaigns waged by the conquering Cossack Hetman, and his Tartar and Russian allies, against Poles and Jews alike.

The Jews of Poland survived this calamity, and grew numerous again, as persecuted civilised races somehow do, in their own, or in some other, land. They, however, lent assistance to the designs of the ambitious nobles when the landed aristocracy invaded the recognised prerogatives of the kingly power, and took to themselves all the responsibilities and advantages of government. They became their agents and instruments in the sordid work of harassing the peasant cultivators, who found themselves ground down more remorselessly by class rule than under a semi-republican monarchy. Popular feeling was thus turned against the Jews, and they began to experience, in Poland, as elsewhere, that social and economic antipathy which their greater money-making capacity has always nourished in the commercial minds of the less successful Christians.

As a friend of Polish freedom remarked to the writer in Warsaw in the spring of 1903, “the nobles cultivated their pride, rack-rented their tenants, and lost their independence.” And, with this fall of the one Christian nation in Europe, which had fairly ruled and humanely treated the hunted Hebrew up to the eighteenth century, the era of systematic persecution began for the Polish Jew when a cruel fate compelled him to become a Russian subject.

The early oppression of the Jews in Russia was entirely due to religious feeling. Their exceptional treatment in recent years arises from political and economic more than from sectarian causes. M. Varadinoff, in his history of Russian administration, says: “The history of all the cases since 1649, involving Jewish religious matters, bears on it the stamp of mistrust to the followers of the law of Moses, because the Jews, by their false doctrines, convert to their faith not only Christians, but persons belonging to other religious persuasions; in consequence of this the civil rights of the Jews were more or less restricted, and their settlement in Russia was prohibited. They were also on several occasions entirely expelled across the Russian frontiers. The code of Alexis Mikailovitch provides punishment of death for the perversion of a Christian to the Hebrew faith. In 1676 Jews were prohibited from coming to Moscow from Smolensk, and in 1727 an order was promulgated to the effect that ‘All Jews found to be residing in the Ukraine and in Russian towns shall be immediately expelled beyond the frontier, and not be allowed under any circumstances to enter Russia.’”

Prince Demidoff San Donato, in quoting this expert in his excellent book, says that a proviso to this ukase stipulated that before leaving Russia all the Jews were to be made to exchange their gold and silver for copper money!

It was found practically impossible, however, to carry out decrees of complete expulsion, while, on the other hand, it had to be recognised that the interest of the state and the development of trade required the trained experience of Hebrew craftsmen, merchants, and bankers. They were tolerated for the utilitarian ends of commercial necessity, while being subject to all the possible penalties of an outlawed community.

Nearing the end of the eighteenth century the trend of Russian conquest westwards annexed the Polish regions known as White Russia, and the Lithuanian country, in which Jews had hitherto found shelter when driven out from Russia proper. Catherine II. governed the Empire at this period, and her somewhat liberal views gave her Hebrew subjects a brief respite from persistent injustice. It was necessary to take account of the recognised status of the Jews in what had been a portion of the Kingdom of Poland, and a ukase was promulgated in 1786, decreeing that “Everyone, irrespective of creed, shall enjoy under the laws all the advantages and privileges of his rank and condition.” This enlightened law only extended to the territories acquired from Poland, and even within these the tolerant intention of the ukase was frustrated by the bias of Russian officials. The right to enrol themselves in burgher guilds was curtailed, while double taxes were levied upon the very people whom the law of 1786 had, in words, freed from exceptional burdens.

Other special penalties followed, to be again mitigated as when, in 1804, a ukase declared that “a spirit of moderation and a sincere wish for the amelioration of the condition of the Jews,” should be shown as being in the best interest of the population among whom the Hebrews were allowed to live. This temporary return to reason and justice was also due to the desire to give Russian workers and peasants the advantages of superior Jewish workmanship in arts, and the example of trading competency. Jewish children were to be admitted to Russian schools. Manufacturing industry and the occupation of land were to be thrown open to Jews hitherto denied access to these employments, except in specified places.

These, however, were but Russian good intentions. They lacked the value of application.

GRADUALLY the provinces along the western frontier, stretching south from Riga to the territories bordering on the Black Sea, became marked off as a Pale of Settlement. Within these regions all the Jews of the Empire were to be domiciled; saving merchants, bankers, scientists, and eminent Hebrews whose wealth or accomplishments would outweigh in the selfish plans of domestic government the anti-Semitic feeling which appealed to the despotic expediency of exceptional laws. Inside this economic Siberia, the poorer Jews would have their chances of employment greatly diminished, while the struggle for existence must become by degrees a contest between a growing population and a narrower area of industrial opportunity.

Unnatural social and economic conditions necessarily engender correlative abuses and evils. Poverty, illegal pursuits, the smuggling and sale of liquor, evasion of coercive laws, bribery and corruption, protested against the causes which begot them, until finally an Imperial Commission had to be appointed to inquire into and report upon the measures necessary to remedy this state of things. This Commission issued its report in 1812. The report is so tersely summarised in Prince Demidoff’s book, and the matters dealt with are so intimately connected with the inherited injustices of the Russian Jew, that I cannot forbear adding the following extract to this brief historic sketch of anti-Semitic legislation and its results:

“Firstly, the Commission was of opinion that the impossibility of carrying out the provisions of paragraph 34 of the Law of 1804 ‘did not arise from the obstinacy of the Jews and remissness of the authorities, but from the natural and political condition of those provinces to which residence of the Jews is restricted.’ The report then states that while the Jews retained their political independence and lived in their own country, they were an agricultural people. Subsequently, when they were dispersed over the whole world and everywhere subjected to the bitterest persecution, unrecognised as regular citizens of the countries in which they were domiciled, agriculture became to them an inaccessible pursuit. They were thus necessarily obliged to have recourse to trade as the sole means of occupation according with their new condition of life.

“In Poland the Jews were so numerous that the pursuit of trade alone was insufficient for their subsistence. On the one hand, the Polish landlords, owing to constant wars and internal strife, were not able to manage their own estates in a proper manner. They were, therefore, obliged to seek special means for increasing the revenue of their properties, for instance, by distilling brandy, lease of farms, etc. The correlation of these two causes led to the utilisation of the Jews by the landed proprietors in their domestic concerns. The Jews became indispensable to the landed proprietors, and as they did not possess the right to acquire land and engage in agriculture, they were obliged, while residing in villages, to confine themselves to a retail sale of spirits as a main pursuit.

“When White Russia was annexed to Russia, the Russian Government recognised all the previously existing rights of the Jews. The ukase of the Senate of 1786 confirmed their right of residence in provincial districts, and their faculty of holding estates on lease. The immediate object of this law was the suppression of drunkenness among the rural population. The distillation of brandy, however, is a privilege of all landed proprietors, and forms a necessary adjunct to the process of agriculture. With the departure [expulsion from villages] of the Jews the retail sale of spirits would be carried on by tapsters of the native rural class, so that drunkenness would not diminish, but only a decrease would take place in the number of agriculturists. A peasant had previously been in the habit of selling his corn on the spot to a Jew, but now he was obliged to proceed to the nearest town, at a loss in time and labour, to sell his produce to a Jew, and the money realised he would still spend on brandy, bought from the same Jew. The same result would ensue in the purchase by the peasant of articles required by him, such as iron, salt, etc.

“The Commission also found it unadvisable to allow the Jews to reside in villages under the prohibition of their not engaging in the retail sale of brandy; this opinion being founded on the following consideration: The Jews who inhabit the villages belong to the poorest class, and if not allowed to sell spirits they would be deprived of all means of subsistence. The poverty of the peasantry of White Russia is not caused by the Jews, and this is proved by the fact that there are also many Jews in the southwestern provinces, yet the peasantry there are in a more prosperous condition than those populating White Russia. So long as the landlords of this latter region continue to adhere to their present system of working their estates, which encourages drunkenness, the evil will spread, be the village tapster who he may, either Jew or peasant. This is confirmed by the example of the provinces of Petersburg, Livonia, and Esthonia, where there are no Jews and yet drunkenness is very prevalent.

“Should the Government adopt the proper measures for making the sale of brandy less lucrative, the Jews would be obliged to turn to other pursuits, perhaps to those of husbandry, especially if they are accorded the right of purchasing land. If the Jews be interdicted to sell brandy such sale would be carried on by the peasants, who, in order to increase their landlord’s revenue, will be obliged to do the same as the Jews. It should also be borne in mind that the Jews, with all their aptitude and experience in matters relating to the sale of spirits, never enriched themselves by this calling, but only earned enough for their subsistence. It would also be impossible to convert all Jews into traders and artisans; firstly, because they would not find sufficient occupation in the towns and hamlets, where there is no demand for a great supply of services of this kind; and secondly, because great injury would be inflicted on those Jews who are unable to find alternative sources of livelihood. As a matter of fact the retail sale of spirits in the western provinces is only carried on by those Jews who are unable to find any other means of existence. The Jews adhere to their present occupations because, owing to the want of means, the Government is unable to effect any radical change in their condition. Lastly, the Commission arrived at the conclusion that it was necessary to rescind entirely paragraph 34 of the Law of 1804.”

This paragraph of the law thus cited ordered the removal of all Jews from villages and hamlets into the towns.

The recommendation of the Commission was not acted upon. On the contrary, the law of 1804 was continued. Though not vigorously enforced it remained as a potential agency for rendering residence of employment outside the Pale a source of insecurity to the Jews, and a means by which police, business rivals, and others could at any time put the ukase of expulsion in operation against them. Trading communities were most active in appealing for the application of this law. Petitions calling for expulsion from cities and towns in which Jews were rival workers and dealers are constantly recurring features of the tyranny, official and commercial, to which they were subjected during the next half-century.

General Levashoff, Governor of Kiev, reporting to the Government in 1833 upon a petition asking for the banishment of all the Jews from that important city, laid bare the motives and condemned the selfish purpose of the petitioners, in honestly saying:

“It is desirable on the ground of public utility to allow the Jews to remain in Kiev, where, by the simplicity and moderation of their mode of life, they are able to sell commodities at a cheap rate. It may positively be asserted that their expulsion would not only lead to an enhancement of prices of many products and articles, but that it will not be possible to obtain these at all. Under these circumstances the interests of the mass of the inhabitants must be preferred to the personal advantages which the Christian trading class would derive by the ejection of the Jews.”[1]

Opposed in cities and towns in this manner, after being turned out of country districts in obedience to a similar spirit, the authors of these coercion laws began to find it a serious administrative problem what to do with subjects for whose systematic oppression they were alone responsible. Agricultural colonies were planned in Cherson (Southwestern Russia) and even in Siberia, to which Jews were induced to go in order to escape from the intolerable hardships of incessant wrong. Failure followed these benevolent designs of the Government; not from the reluctance or incapacity of the migrating Jews to work the land, but owing to the corruption and incompetence of officials who were charged with the superintendence of these colonies. Money advanced for the building of dwellings and purchase of stock was disbursed in the erection of unsuitable houses, in most unsanitary places, and in other wasteful and ignorant directions. Great hardships were thus entailed upon the unfortunate victims of this crass official stupidity; a cruelty of deliberate neglect adding, in the instances of the migrations to Siberia, its penalties of suffering and death to the bitter disappointments and the blasting of hopes caused by the callous miscarriage of the well-meant enterprise of the Government by its blundering officials.

One unexpected good result followed both to Russia and to large numbers of Jews by the failure of these contemplated agricultural settlements in the Governments of Cherson and Ekaterinoslav; where, at a later time, similar colonies grew and flourished. Odessa, to-day the richest and busiest maritime city of the Empire, owes its prosperity and progress largely to Jewish enterprise. Both the forced and voluntary migration from the north to the south of the Pale brought this resourceful race near where they were to find an outlet in a young and rising commercial centre for qualities essential to its rapid development which Russians do not themselves possess in any marked degree,—commercial genius. The city and its varied opportunities attracted both those who succeeded and those who had obtained no fair chance of thriving as agriculturists, and to-day over two hundred thousand of the Jewish population of Odessa embrace the wealthiest and most enterprising bankers, merchants, brokers, contractors, and business men of the Empire.

From the codification of the ukases and laws relating to Jews in 1835, down to the Ignatieff or “May Laws” of 1882, the treatment of the Jews, as regulated by these measures, is consistent with their experience as already briefly described. In some of these laws, Jews would appear from the text to be on a footing of theoretic equality with other citizens, while again special provisions are made to limit the application of these general rights to residence within the selected sphere of domicile, and to be further curtailed within this area, in the light and meaning of the law of 1804. There is a bewildering mass and maze of contradictory purpose in this code of special laws which no summary can hope intelligently to disentangle. It is obvious, however, that the vigour of direct persecution is meant to be modified to the extent of promoting the utilities of the State by Jewish abilities, while reserving all the powers necessary to dispense with the objectionable artisan, trader, or mechanic when his services or example are no longer needed in hamlet or village. This is one of the most objectionable features of indefensible laws. It wears a character of state meanness which can well compare in odious rivalry with the methods and morals of Jewish usury. The spirit of fair play is totally absent from regulations which give the state, by virtue of permissive coercion, the benefits of subjects’ services which are ultimately repaid in penalties and expulsion.

In 1843 the Pale of Settlement was further contracted by a law forbidding Jews to reside within a distance of fifty versts (about thirty-three miles) of the Austrian or German frontiers. The necessity for this regulation was said to be the smuggling operations of the Jews. They probably excelled in this as in other illegal practices, to which they were driven on being denied the chances of living by more reputable means. The injustice of punishing thousands of families who had resided in these frontier districts for generations, for the wrongdoing of a few people, would not be calculated to lessen the feeling of settled disloyalty which persistent oppression must inevitably create in the minds of an intellectual race. And, these accumulating measures of an insensate injustice are now responsible for the existence of four millions of disaffected subjects adjacent to the frontiers of Russia’s two most formidable rival powers, Germany and Austro-Hungary. The Pale of Settlement has thus become, by the lex talionis of a poetic justice, the most vulnerable part of the Russian Empire. It is not alone the seed-bed and centre of Socialism, born of persecution, it is a military weakness well measured and noted in the army bureaus of Berlin and Vienna.

Under the Emperor Alexander II., the emancipator of the serfs, the Jews obtained a respite from many of the most oppressive and vexatious of the penal ukases. Schools hitherto closed to Hebrew children were thrown open to their admission. Restrictions upon attendance at fairs in the interior were removed, while in many other respects the original plan and purpose of the Pale were forgotten, and the dawn of happier days began to rise above the troubled and darkened horizon of the Russian Jew. The freedom of the peasants gave rise to the hope that the same liberal-minded Tsar would break the bonds of his Semitic subjects, when there fell upon all this promise of brighter times the bolt of Nihilist vengeance, in the assassination of the best of Russia’s rulers. The abominable deed, which shocked the world by its terrible character and results, shattered the hopes of Hebrew emancipation, and led to the savage onslaught which was made upon the objects of peasant fury in 1881 and 1882, in many parts of the Empire.

Beyond doubt there were some Jews concerned in Nihilist plots. The man who attempted to kill General Loris Melikoff was of Jewish blood. The women Lewinsohn and Helfman, who were sent to Siberia for complicity in murder conspiracies, were Jewesses, while several prominent Nihilists were believed to be half Hebrew in parentage. But the history of human oppression always explains, even where it may not justify, deeds of savage political vengeance. No race can be denied the ordinary franchises of personal freedom—the right to live secure from the insult and intrusion of a tyrannical law, and the unfair infliction of exceptional burdens—without rousing into dangerous activity passions which appeal to the wild impulse of revenge. The assassination of Alexander II. had nothing to do with the coercion of the Jews. He was not their enemy; he was their friend. But the revolutionary spirit which germinates under despotic rule is generally blind in selecting the objects of its unreasoning fury; just as many Governments are deaf to the pleadings of an enlightened justice in the rule of a country until the shock of some desperate deed compels them to think of that which, if listened to in time, would protect both subjects and monarchs from the fear and consequences of criminal acts. If some Jews were guilty accomplices in the murder of a humane Emperor, so were Russians. And it would have been no greater wrong to punish guiltless peasants for the acts of the Nihilists than to wreak vengeance upon equally innocent Jews.

In Warsaw, Kiev, Rostov, and elsewhere Jews were killed, their houses wrecked, and their shops looted. Outrages occurred throughout the whole Pale of Settlement, and thousands of terrified people fled across the frontiers into Germany, Bohemia, and Roumania. These outbreaks occurred near the end of 1881 and early in the following year and, like the recent massacres in Bessarabia, aroused a widespread expression of sympathy in Europe and America for the hapless objects of Russian popular fury. Manifestations of international feeling greatly impressed the Tsar’s Government, and earnest efforts appeared to have been made to curb the lawless conduct of the mobs. This action, however, instead of being a promise of better things, turned out to be but a prelude to sterner measures than ever against the victims of exceptional laws.

On the 3d of May, 1882, General Ignatieff obtained the Emperor’s sanction and signature to what have since been known as the “May Laws”; the purpose of these being to add more rigorous provisions, as a supplement to the law of 1804. This latter law ordered all the Jews of the Empire to retire within the Pale of Settlement, excepting those who possessed special permits, passports, or privileges to live outside. The May Laws ordered Jews living inside the Pale to remove from the villages into the towns within that area. In a word, General Ignatieff created a Pale within a Pale, and contracted the territory of life and livelihood for upwards of four millions of people within the boundaries of the cities and towns inside the already limited domain of legal domicile. These measures read as follows:

“The Committee of Ministers, having heard the report of the Minister of the Interior on the execution of the temporary orders concerning the Jews, resolved:

“1. As a temporary measure, and until a general revision has been made in a proper manner of the laws concerning the Jews, to forbid the Jews henceforth to settle outside the towns and townlets, the only exceptions admitted being in those Jewish colonies that have existed before and whose inhabitants are agriculturists.

“2. To suspend temporarily the completion of instruments of purchase of real property mortgages in the name of Jews; as also the registration of Jews as lessees of landed estates, situated outside the precincts of towns and townlets, and the issue of powers of attorney to enable them to manage and dispose of such property.

“3. To forbid Jews to carry on business on Sundays and on Christian holidays, and that the same laws in force, about the closing on such days of places of business belonging to Christians, shall, in the same way, apply to places of business owned by Jews.

“4. That the measures laid down in paragraphs 1, 2, and 3, apply only to the Governments within the Pale of Jewish Settlement. His Majesty the Emperor was graciously pleased to give his assent to the above resolutions of the Committee of Ministers, on the 3d of May, 1882.”

These Laws did not apply to the Jews of Poland.

These “temporary measures” remain to-day the potential law of Russia regarding Jews. They were not immediately enforced. Russia is never in a hurry in matters of this kind. She waits and notes the material results of such enactments at home, and the moral effects upon opinion abroad. In the case of the May Laws, there was a universal chorus of condemnation in Western Europe. It was felt everywhere that any attempt to put such savage measures into operation must either lead to the flight of hundreds of thousands of wretched Jews over the borders, or to their death within the crowded towns of the Pale, from starvation induced by an overwhelming congestion of labour without means of employment. The laws were, therefore, left inoperative, but in terrorem; General Ignatieff being conveniently superseded, while a Commission presided over by Count Pahlen was appointed by the Emperor to prepare a report upon the whole Jewish question.

PRINCE DEMIDOFF SAN DONATO was a member of the Pahlen Commission, and in his admirable work “La Question Juive en Russie” (published at Bruxelles, 1884,) he gives, in his own proposed solution of the problem of the Russian Jew, the broad and liberal measures which forced themselves upon the Commission as an essential basis for a settlement of the question on just and rational lines. He recommended the three following proposals:

“(1) For the re-establishment of more healthy relations between the Jews and the other inhabitants and counteracting Jewish industrial and other exploitation in the western region [the Pale of Settlement], it is necessary to grant the Jews complete civil equality and freedom of choice of residence. This would lead to a greater dissemination of the Jewish population, which is now crowded together in particular districts; to the alleviation of the poverty and hopeless condition of the Jewish masses, and would relieve the part of the country they now occupy from excessive industrial and other competition.

“(2) In order to destroy Jewish exclusiveness and to facilitate the fusion of the Jews with the rest of the population it is necessary to incorporate the Jews with the local rural and urban communities, and to subject them completely in fiscal, administrative, and other respects to the rules and regulations established for these communities. Those Jews who would wish to settle in the interior provinces should be allowed to enjoy the right of joining peasant and burgher communities in the places of their domicile in the ordinary way.

“(3) It is at the same time necessary that serious attention should be directed towards the organisation of elementary schools for the juvenile Jewish population, inasmuch as the school must always be one of the principal instruments for the moral training and Russification of the Jewish masses.”

These were the common-sense recommendations of an enlightened mind for the cure of a growing social and political malady in Russian life. They would have effected that cure, had there been a statesmanship in the Government of the Empire capable of rising above anti-Semitic prejudice in the rendering of a great service to the country. In fact, there are but three Russian remedies for this growing danger to Russia, and two of them are impossible; the third being the rational one outlined by Prince Demidoff San Donato. Extermination cannot be thought of. Emigration is out of the question, where poverty is almost the normal condition of two or three millions of people who have inherited the evils associated with social wretchedness, religious intolerance, and race persecution. No other country will consent to receive them. The third remedy is, therefore, that alone which the nature and extent of the evil demand, and which, if wisely and courageously adopted, would make Russia the stronger through the only effective remedy applicable to a growing, deadly danger.

The facts of the economic and social conditions within the Pale of Settlement are so objective that the warning they give of a coming catastrophe cannot be ignored. It would be like leaving an epidemic of smallpox to cure itself by neglect. This condition of things is fully explained and expressed by the term, unnatural. It is analogous to a situation which would result from a Federal law compelling every European-born artisan and labourer within the whole United States to reside inside of Pennsylvania, and to be forbidden to seek employment outside the cities and towns of that state. The murderous competition for employment, the deadly rivalry for existence, the bad blood between opposing races, the poverty and social wretchedness which such a condition of things would create—apart from the operation of coercive laws—can readily be imagined by the American reader. But this is no overdrawn picture of the economic anarchy prevailing within the Russian Pale of Jewish Settlement.

The present estimated population of the Tsar’s dominions in Europe and Asia is 145,000,000. The territory of legal domicile for the Russian Jew is embraced in the fifteen “governments,” or provinces, of Kovno, Vitebsk, Vilna, Mohilev, Minsk, Grodno, Volhynia, Chernigov, Poltava, Kiev, Podolia, Bessarabia, Cherson, Ekaterinoslav, and Taurida—extending south from near the Gulf of Riga, on the Baltic, to the Crimea and the Sea of Azov, and forming the western provinces of the Empire; having Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Roumania as frontier barriers. Poland is not included in the Pale. The Jews have more freedom of movement there, and are not subject to some of the coercive restrictions imposed within the above provinces.

The Pale itself is again narrowed by the law which forbids a Jew to reside within thirty-three miles of the western frontier. It has a total area about equal to that of France.

The population of the fifteen provinces of the Pale, including Poland, will be about 26,000,000. There are some 4,000,000 Jews comprised in this population, but these, excepting 1,000,000 in Poland, are compelled under the “May Laws” to reside within the “cities, towns, and townlets” of the Pale. The united population of these urban centres will probably not exceed a total of 5,000,000; so that the Jews number three out of every five of the inhabitants of the urban centres within the fifteen provinces.

The percentage of Jews to non-Jews in the towns and townships of the province of Mohilev, is estimated at 94; for those of Volhynia, 71 per cent.; Minsk, 69; Kovno, 68; Podolia, 62; Vitebsk, 61; Grodno, 60; Vilna, 56; Kiev, 49; Poltava, 43; Bessarabia, 38; Chernigov, 29; Cherson, 28; The Taurida, 19; and Ekaterinoslav, 15 per cent.

In the provinces of Russia in which Jews are not permitted to reside the town inhabitants average 59 persons to every 1000 of the rural population. In the population of the Pale the urban inhabitants average 222 for every 1000 of the rural residents and workers. Within the industrial centres of the Jewish Pale to which they are confined there are about 2730 Jews to every square mile of residential area.

These facts and figures show how impossible it is, under such economic conditions, for any healthy or hopeful prospect of industrial life to exist. The towns are crowded with artisans and traders, and as these are out of all proportion to the producers and consumers of an agricultural country they necessarily become more destitute and wretched as their numbers increase. They are too poor to emigrate. They are prohibited from migrating. They cannot seek work on land. They are not permitted to engage in several occupations. Municipal and Government posts are practically closed to them. They have to compete with Russian workers for such means of existence as can be found; and in face of these facts they are reproached for their poverty and made subject to special taxation.

It is also a charge against these people that they are exploiters of labour and not producers. The taunt comes from the apologists for the Ignatieff laws. The charge is not true. In proportion to population, there are relatively more artisans among Jews in Russia than among non-Jews. According to statistics obtained by the Pahlen Commission, the artisans and labourers averaged 15 per cent. of the total Jewish population of the Pale. In England the proportion of labourers and artisans is over 20 per cent.; about 12 per cent. in Belgium; 10 per cent. in France, and 9 in Prussia.

In Kishineff, where the Jews number 50,000 of the city population, the Hebrew artisans, and wage-earners generally, would number fully 10,000 before the recent anti-Semitic outrages.

Nor can the injustice of the “May Laws” be defended or explained by the equally unfounded assertion that the Jew will not work the land. He refuses to do so in Russia only where he is prohibited. Whenever he has obtained access to the land, on fair terms, he has readily embraced the chance, and invariably improved his condition. This has been proved by the records of the Jewish agricultural colonies in the provinces of Vilna, Minsk, Grodno, Kovno, Volhynia, Cherson, and in Ekaterinoslav. There are colonies of more than 50,000 land-workers among the Jews of the southwestern provinces who have more than held their own in every branch of agricultural industry with their Russian or Moldavian neighbours. This taunt is, consequently, no explanation of the Ignatieff laws.

The evils—both to Russia and to the Jews of the Pale—arising out of the economic conditions which these laws must stereotype, would have been swept away or modified in the ten years following the killing and despoiling of the Jews in 1882, had the proposals of the Pahlen Commission been acted upon. The recommendations of provincial governors were preferred instead. Biassed officialism prevailed over the courageously wise counsels of Count Pahlen, Prince Demidoff San Donato, Count Strogonoff, and their colleagues, with the result that M. Pobédonostsev became the virtual administrator of the Ignatieff laws, and the murders, crimes, and expulsions of 1891 followed, in decadal sequence, the outrages of 1882; not, by any means, as a desired or necessary measure of the policy adopted by the famed Procurator of the Holy Synod. M. Pobédonostsev would be as averse to the killing of Jews as General Ignatieff. Both are far above suspicion in this respect. The instigator of the “May Laws” probably believed, as a soldier and diplomat, that such measures were needed the better to subdue a suspected revolutionary tendency among a non-Russian race, and thought they might be enforced according to his plans, without any serious explosion of anti-Semitic feeling. What followed, however, ought to have been a warning to the keeper of the Tsar’s conscience on combined religious and national concerns. The Procurator’s plans would be as religious in their ultimate object as Ignatieff’s policy was the reverse; but both sought the accomplishment of a tyrannical purpose by means which led to such suffering, injustice, and bloodshed as will ever be associated with their records and names.

The Russian Jew was a domestic menace to the mind of Ignatieff; to M. Pobédonostsev he was tainted with the unforgivable sins of heterodoxy, and a religious persecutor is always relentless in proportion to his fanatical sincerity. No one can justly question the honesty of the Procurator’s zeal for Church and State in Russia, and this is why the infidel Israelites have found in him the most implacable of their powerful foes.

The measures resorted to in 1891, at the instance of the influence exerted by the Procurator of the Holy Synod, had for their end the carrying into effect of the provisions of the “May Laws.” Thousands of Jews were still scattered throughout the provinces beyond the Pale; tolerated in centres of trade and enterprise for utilitarian reasons. Most of these were artisans who had by residence, and membership of trade guilds, acquired the privilege of living and working in various provinces of the Empire. Large numbers of these had been specially encouraged in previous years to settle in cities and towns where their proficiency in crafts was necessary to the development of local industries or manufacture. Suddenly in 1891 an Imperial decree was issued, and all these sober, industrious, skilled, and, in many instances, respected citizens were ordered to quit their homes, property, or employment, within a given time, and take themselves within the Pale of Settlement or outside of the Russian Empire.

The orders issued by the Chief of Police of Moscow to his subordinates, contained the following instructions:

“You must personally verify in all the shops and factories kept by Jews the number of the assistant artisans; also, what category the Jews belong to, and the time of their arrival in Moscow for residence; and then take their signature to a notice of voluntary [!] departure from the Capital; warning them that the computation of their terms of stay will begin on the 14th of July next. Also, take a registry of names, in alphabetical order, of Jewish artisans and, second, of Jews living in Moscow under the right of Circular No. 30 issued by the Minister of the Interior in 1880, specifying in separate columns the time of arrival in Moscow, number of assistant artisans, number in family, and the expiration of the term of departure. In reference to Jews residing according to Circular of 1880, specify their occupations, also the names of commercial houses where they were employed, and present them to me within two weeks.”

The penalty for refusing to sign the paper suggested by General Yourkoffsky, was immediate expulsion. The “voluntary” alternative gained only a little time for preparation. It offered, however, some chances to wealthy Jews to come to an arrangement with lower police officials, whereby the general order of expulsion might be evaded, for a consideration.

The attack by Government and people upon the Jews in 1891 was a deliberate proceeding. Prince Dolgorouki was an able and a fair-minded Governor-General of Moscow. Neither Russian nor Jewish complaint had been lodged against him during his tenure of office. His duties had been performed with care and competency, and his administration of the ancient capital and province left no room for official faultfinding at St. Petersburg.

Coincidently with a notification to all Governors of Provinces in the Emperor’s name, that all permits to allow Jews to reside outside of the Pale should be withdrawn on a certain date, an order for the removal of the Governor-General of Moscow was also made, and the Tsar’s brother, the Grand Duke Sergius, was nominated to supersede General Dolgorouki. General Kostanda was to act as Deputy Governor; pending the arrival of Duke Sergius, and to this officer, along with the equally zealous anti-Semite, Yourkoffsky, Chief of the Moscow Police, was left the congenial task of “clearing-out” the Jews. Never was an odious work more brutally performed. The quarter in which the poorest Jews resided was surrounded in the night time by the police and fire-brigade forces, and the unhappy creatures were routed from their dwellings as if they were so many noxious animals. Some who had been warned a few hours beforehand fled to the Cemetaires of the city for protection, while it has been placed on record that several fathers of families took their daughters to houses of ill-fame for the night, presumably to find protection where they would be least suspected of seeking refuge.

All this being done in the name of the Tsar, the populace were encouraged to co-operate in executing what they were led to believe to be the Emperor’s wish. Massacres, raping, and looting became once more the direct results of barbarous decrees. Some 3000 Jews were driven from Moscow after many had been killed. Hundreds of business men were ruined, being compelled to close their establishments, and to dispose of valuable stock at prices which could not realise enough to discharge their obligations. Those who were able to purchase transport to America emigrated, but the mass of the expelled victims wended their way toward the Pale, there to add still more to the congestion of life and labour which had already rendered the vast Ghetto of the Empire the home of poverty, suffering, and despair.

The example set in Moscow was followed in Kiev and other cities, and encouraged police and mobs elsewhere to emulate the inhuman work of hunting the hated race from villages and towns. Throughout the year 1891 outrages were perpetrated in various provinces, despite some apparently earnest efforts on the part of the Government to stop the more violent outbreaks which had been provoked by its own orders. Several villages where Jews resided were burned down. Fully 70,000 Jews emigrated during the year; this fact confirming, in part only, a saying attributed to a conspicuous personality in the Tsar’s confidence, that the Russian Jewish question would be ultimately solved by the action of the “May Laws” as these would force one-third of the Jews to emigrate; one-third more would become converted to the Orthodox Church; while the other third would perish of hunger!

Whatever may be the desire of the more violent anti-Semitic Russians to see such an unparalleled programme realised in results, there can be no doubt as to the efficiency of the anti-Jewish code of Russian laws to work out such a solution, if it were a task legally possible of accomplishment.

Allusion has already been briefly made to the tangle of contradictory laws which the ukases, decrees, promulgations, and provisions relating to the Russian Jew have created. Many of these measures appear to have been adopted under the pressure of unreflecting prejudice or apprehension. Some bear the impress of wise and humane intentions, born, however, in the minds of Ministers or Monarchs too weak to carry out the enlightened impulse which gave them birth. But the vast proportion of these repressive and oppressive laws are frankly tyrannical in inspiration and purpose, and the spirit that could suggest measures which are a deliberate violation of the fundamental principles and rights of civilised existence would be a feeling worthy to animate the task of carrying the above programme into execution.

M. DE PLEHVE and the Tsar can accomplish one good and blessed work, if so minded, without altering a single anti-Semitic Russian law. The Emperor can destroy, in Russia, the atrocious legend about the annual killing of Christian children by Jews as an alleged part of the Blood Atonement in Hebrew Paschal rites. In this humane and Christian task he is entitled to the co-operation of the Emperor of Austria, the King of Roumania, and the heads of other Balkan States, where this story of ritual murder is constantly circulated, and not infrequently as a part of political propaganda. There ought to be a truly Christian crusade waged against this infamous product of ancient, insensate, sectarian hate. It was the inspiration of the most horrible of the Kishineff murders; the driving of nails through the eyes of a woman, the cutting out of the tongue of a two-year-old child, and of nameless sexual mutilations. Thousands of innocent people have been done to death in the centuries through which these crimes have been the bloody fruit of a monstrous invention, born of a spirit of superstitious savagery, which no age has yet made any honest civilised endeavour to exorcise out of ignorant and fanatical Christian minds.

The Jews of Kishineff believe with all right-minded people everywhere that no one deplores these shocking crimes more than the Emperor. His humanity is beyond question in popular belief, and, should a suitable opportunity be given, or be forthcoming, while the recollection of this great stain on his country’s reputation remains in the public memory, he may be counted upon, it is to be hoped, to place on record his honest condemnation of such abominable deeds.

Let His Majesty the Tsar add this task to other noble duties with which his name is associated. A special ukase, reciting his own disbelief in the ritual-murder legend, and forbidding under severe penalties its circulation anywhere, and, by any means, in Russia; ordering that this ukase shall be read, in the Emperor’s name, in every church in the Empire, a fortnight before Easter each year for the next five years; let this be done, and the good work is virtually accomplished for Christianity, for civilisation, and for Russia, too.

A similar obligation lies upon the governments of Austria and of the Balkan States. Roumania is at present the worst of sinners in this matter. This legend is in constant circulation through the anti-Semitic press there, being used, in fact, as an argument in political campaigns for driving the Jews out of the country.

A few months ago, a Roumanian paper, the Vocea Tutovei of Berlad, openly incited the populace to kill the Jews. In a series of articles, subsequently reprinted in pamphlet form, popular ignorance and passion were appealed to by stories of alleged Hebrew murders of Christian children. One extract from this organ of Roumanian opinion will illustrate at once the savage sentiments of the writer and the culpable conduct of a government which could permit such appeals to assassination to be openly made in a civilised land:

Roumania is the western boundary of Bessarabia. Before the Berlin Treaty of 1878, a portion of this now Russian province belonged to Roumania. Moldavians live on each side of the frontier. The pamphlets circulated by the anti-Semites of Berlad, containing the above and other murderous appeals to fanaticism, would inevitably find their way into the Moldavian community of Kishineff, where Pavolachi Kroushevan, himself a Moldavian, was carrying on a similar bloodthirsty propaganda in the Bessarabetz against the Jews of Bessarabia. The Governments which continue to permit this kind of press savagery are themselves morally responsible for the crimes which find their instigation in such writings. Nor can diplomatic denunciation, after the occurrence of deeds of infamy such as those of Kishineff, atone in any way to the outraged sense of civilised human feeling for what Leo Tolstoy rightly terms the “permitted assassinations” of innocent people. For the law or Government which encourages by indifference the circulation of these atrocious, fabricated tales of the slaughtering of Christian children by Hebrews, is either the indifferent guardian of citizens’ lives or the cowardly accomplice of a fanatical ruffianism which it is unable or unwilling to grapple with and put down.

There is another and a higher authority that can deal with the propagation of this crime-stained legend, especially in Catholic countries like Austria and Poland. This is the authority of the Holy See.

A few years ago a parish priest of Vienna revived the old story of the alleged murder of the boy Simon of Trent, for ritual purposes, by Jews in the fifteenth century. He republished particulars of what purported to be the crime so named, but unfairly suppressed the facts associated with the accusation, which would explain the whole charge away. The Jews who had confessed to the murder of the boy did so under the application of torture; a pretty common method of extorting desired “information” of trumped-up charges by the various authorities in the Middle Ages. The confession thus wrung from the accused by the application of the rack led to their execution, but it is on record that Pope Sixtus IV. denounced their conviction and death as a murder.

The reverend anti-Semite tried his hand again, in the same line, in conjunction with a renegade Jew, and came to grief. One Paul Meyer “revealed” how a Christian boy, to his (Meyer’s) own knowledge, was kidnapped and slaughtered for the purposes of Paschal rites by the hated Hebrews. The sensational story was published in an anti-Semitic Vienna newspaper. This was a deliberate challenge to inquiry and refutation. The challenge was accepted by the Jews of the city, in a prosecution of the Vaterland, when Meyer confessed in open court that the whole story was an invention of his own, palmed off on both the priest and the public.

An ex-professor of Hebrew in the University of Prague, an enthusiastic student of Eastern cabalistic writings, has contributed very materially to the revival in Poland, Bohemia, and Austria of these miserable inventions. He has written a work in Latin on the subject, and he gives the impression of an honest fanatic who is in the grip of a mysterious investigation. He also falls back upon a converted Jew as a guide, and is led to believe in the authenticity of certain cabalistic writings shown to him by this man, Brimamo. He quotes from one of these books, the “Ha-likkutim,” a passage which the credulous padre is convinced proves the employment of the blood of Christian maidens in these unhallowed Hebrew ceremonies. This quotation is found, on critical examination, to refer to a passage in the Bible dealing with the supernatural world, in which the colour of the blood of a virgin is taken as emblematical of the Day of Judgment. There is nothing whatever beyond this in Brimamo’s work to justify the inference that Christian maidens’ blood is sometimes used in Jewish sacrifices.

In the same book Canon Röhling draws upon other cabalistic documents for suggestions and innuendoes tending to uphold his case, but in every instance in which he quotes passages to support his propositions, they are found, on close inspection, to convey no such meaning as he attempts to attach to them. There is not, in fact, a solitary authenticated instance of this sanguinary sacrifice given in his two works, “My Replies to the Rabbis,” and “The Controversy and the Human Sacrifices of Rabbinism,” both published in 1883. Still, these writings have been widely read, and have done much harm in misleading minds that look for truth and Christian guidance from clerical authors.

Can nothing effective be done to kill this legend? I quote in an appendix, some pronouncements from Bulls issued by Popes Innocent IV., Gregory X., Martin V., Nicholas V., and Paul III., all reprobating this blood accusation as being a groundless and monstrous invention, and a general pretext for the plundering of Jews. These enlightened words of denunciation were addressed to the rulers, prelates, and people of the Middle Ages, some of them so far back as six hundred years ago. Can this example not be followed now when the reputable press of all civilised countries would willingly co-operate in a just crusade against this hoary-headed, crime-stained infamy?

It has been urged that as anti-Semitism in France, Austria, and Germany is a political movement, a denunciation of the use of the murder-legend calumny would probably be misconstrued. This is a highly sensitive but very inconsistent position. Surely, when Socialism—which is a far greater and nobler political movement in each of these countries—can be vigorously condemned, on assumed moral and Catholic grounds; an agitation relying upon literature and legends, convicted of forgery and lies, and condemned again and again by the Holy See itself; and which has the killing or torture of fellow beings as its ultima ratio, should claim some measure of earnest repudiation and moral censure at the hands of Catholic Powers, temporal and spiritual.

His Holiness Pope Pius, the Emperor of Austria, and the Tsar could easily draw the fangs of this murder legend. To no other minds in Christendom could the consequences of this horrible calumny of long and infamous vitality be more odious or hateful. It is a reproach and disgrace to Christianity that certain notorious clerical organs in France and Austria persistently circulate these incitations to fanatical outrage, and a stain upon the political life of Austria, Roumania, and Russia, whose governments tolerate this poisonous propaganda. It is a pestiferous evil that could be readily stamped out if the wish and will to rid Europe of its baleful influence could overcome the opportunist counsels of a spiritless entourage, which prevent the three best and greatest potentates in Europe from realising all the evils, religious, moral, and political, that spring from this perennial source of shameless sectarian rancour, bloodshed, and crime.

THE absolute truth about the plan and purpose of the massacres at Kishineff in April may be difficult to determine amidst the conflicting accounts of Russian officials, and of Jewish witnesses of what actually occurred. The wronged and the wrongers seldom or ever agree as to disputed facts. But there can be no doubt upon any mind conversant with the state of Russian feeling, and the trend of Russia’s domestic policy, as to the intolerable position of the Hebrew subjects of the Tsar. No facts are concealed in this connection. They are as objective and undisguised as the Russian policeman, and as patent to every inquirer from Odessa to Warsaw as the rivers Dniester and Vistula. I brought away with me after a journey through the Jewish Pale, the conviction that there is no horizon of hope for the Russian Jew in any prospective era of future emancipation. He is and will remain an alien until the politically impossible comes to be a reality—until the Empire of the Tsar elects to adopt a government of constitutional liberty.

He is under no personal or political restraint, it is true, in the matter of emigration. The Jews are free to leave Russia to-morrow. Such freedom of action, however, is like the tempting waters which only aggravated the thirst of Tantalus by the mockery of a nearness made impossible to reach. The poverty of the vast mass of these unfortunate people renders the thought of finding refuge in America or the Argentine a hopeless dream. And, as an educated Russian official said, in discussing this question with the writer, “What can we do with them? They are the racial antithesis of our nation. A fusion with us is impossible, owing to religious and other disturbing causes. They will always be a potential source of sectarian and economic disorder in our country. We cannot admit them to equal rights of citizenship for these reasons and, let me add, because their intellectual superiority would enable them in a few years’ time to gain possession of most of the posts of our civil administration. They are a growing danger of a most serious nature to our Empire in two of its most vulnerable points,—their discontent is a menace to us along the Austrian and German frontiers, while they are the active propagandists of the Socialism of Western Europe within our borders. The only solution of the problem of the Russian Jew is his departure from Russia.”

This is the conclusion to which one is irresistibly driven by a full survey of the cruelly anomalous position occupied by the Jew in relation to all the dominant factors of Russian life and government. He is under the obligations of citizenship, military and otherwise, without its privileges or full protection. Special taxes are imposed upon him. He is confined by law within a kind of economic concentration camp. The legal difficulties put in the way of the full exercise of his industrial capacities are both the source of his poverty and of his oppression. He cannot own land, within the Pale, or work it; but he must live. Therefore, he is compelled to exploit those who will hate him all the more on account of a resourcefulness which conquers some of the obstacles purposely placed in the way of his livelihood. His faith is assailed by almost every form of human temptation, including the terrorism of such periodical crimes as those perpetrated a few weeks ago. And the very fidelity which enables him to resist both the powers of proselytism and of persecution, only adds one more prejudiced ground to the many which appeal against him to the religious side of an autocratic regime which decrees that an invulnerable heterodoxy is one of the worst of crimes in Russia.

The Jew has no friend outside his own race in Russia, while not infrequently those of his own household are the worst paymasters of his talent and industry. The peasant dislikes him for his race, his religion, and his exploiting propensities. The artisan and labourer in urban centres of the crowded Pale look upon him as an economic black-leg, because he is compelled to work at anything for the wages of bare subsistence, in order to live. He is, by the cruel decree of his fate, and not by choice, the cause of low wages. This is one reason why a great number of the sanguinary rioters at Kishineff were Russian and Moldavian workingmen.

The shop-keeper and petty dealer see in their Hebrew rival a competitor who outclasses them in all the dexterous tricks of trade, and who can succeed where the business capacity of the Slavonic gentile is wanting in perseverance and resource. Here hatred is born of a sordid jealousy.

As rich merchant and banker he is tolerated. The wealthy Russian Jew is, at present, a Russian necessity. Odessa, one of the richest cities of the Empire, is “run” by the superior abilities of the proscribed race. Its commercial prosperity would collapse to-morrow if they were expelled; just as the business and progress of Kishineff have been all but paralysed by the outbreak against them at Easter.

Anti-Semitic prejudices grow as we proceed from the rivalries of economic pursuits to the classes and interests associated with the administration of the Empire. The policeman knows the Jew is made an alien by law, and that the necessity he is under to evade the legal disabilities to which he is subject renders him a profitable source of blackmail. Where his poverty repels the exercise of this corruption, the guardian of the peace looks upon the Jew with all the mixed antipathy—racial, religious, and economic—of the superstitious, uniformed Mujik.

In the lower and middle grades of the civil service the Jew is feared as well as disliked. He is known to be far more intellectual, more industrious, and more capable than the average Russian, and there is a dread lest employment in the innumerable posts of a vast administration should, at some future period, be thrown open to a race so versatile, so sober, and so ambitious to succeed. In every Royal School or Gymnasium to which a Jewish youth is admitted—the number must never exceed 10 per cent. of the whole attendance, in some schools not 5 per cent.—the son of Abraham is certain to eclipse his rivals, and to walk off with whatever honours are to be won.

I have already indicated the feeling, candidly expressed, of the higher branches of the public service on the subject of the Jew as a possible rival in that department of the state. An equality of opportunity would mean a monopoly of posts by sheer force of mental and general equipment.

The Russian officer is not averse to the Jew as a soldier, but he must never be—a Russian officer.

Finally, the Government of Russia looks upon the Jew as the most dangerous of disturbing factors in the rapid development of the industrial life of the Empire, and as a political enemy within the ambit of its most vulnerable western frontier. He is believed to be the active propagandist of Socialism, and he is known to have powerful political and financial allies among the pressmen and financiers of France, England, and Germany—allies who can strike at Russia’s financial credit, external policies, and moral prestige, in retaliation for the legal outlawry of their race within the dominions of the Tsar.

Against these governmental, religious, industrial, social, and national forces of a huge empire combined, what chance has a proscribed race, alienised by law, of obtaining redress? It is a hopeless struggle, look at it how we may. The duties and obligations of civilised rule may be put before the Russian Government, and the pleas of an enlightened jurisprudence advanced in behalf of the Russian Jew, but with what result? Russia makes answer, “These people are not of us, any more than the Chinese of San Francisco, or the ten millions of emancipated Negroes, are free citizens of the United States Republic. They are a danger to the Empire from within, more so than the existence of the Boer Republics of South Africa ever was a menace to the prestige of the British Empire, the removal of which, nevertheless, required a great and costly war. We claim the right to resort to our own measures, as other Powers have done, as France is doing to-day, to safeguard the peace of the realm, and to minimise the risks involved in having an unfriendly element, composed of five or six millions of an unpopular race, located where a German or an Austrian attack might some day be made upon our Western frontier. We cannot expect, or induce, other countries to open the gates of emigration to these undesirables, but we will not permit any Power or people to coerce us to admit this race to the common rights of Russian citizenship or nationality.”

This may be despotic, irrational, and all the rest, but it is the answer which every external attempt to nationalise the Semitic alien will obtain from the Russian Empire. The voices of Maxime Gorky, and of Tolstoy, and of a few other noble spirits to the contrary are but moral foils which exhibit by contrast the omnipotent strength of the resisting and resistless ruling influences behind the Tsar; military, religious, social, and industrial; which stand remorseless and irremovable between the Russian Jew and justice and equality.

Russia’s point of view must be understood if she is to be rightly judged in this matter, and if the friends of a persecuted people are to be persuaded to concentrate their sympathetic energies upon some feasible remedy for an intolerable wrong. Socialism has, as yet, about as much of a hold and of a hope in Russia, as Protestantism has in Spain, or Catholicity in Turkey. The soil is not congenial; but the propaganda is a most serious danger which the Russian powers that be fear more as a potential future element of industrial and political agitation than as a present trouble to the forces of law and order. Socialism is like the Jew, an unwelcome intruder, and both are inseparably associated in the ruling and official mind of the Empire.

Russia’s industrial development, like the extension of her power and prestige, must be along lines selected by herself. She wants no external tutelage, and will have no outside meddling in her domestic affairs. Nor, is she taking this stand out of any unwillingness to see labour rightly rewarded, or from any desire that a favoured class or protected interest shall sweat or treat unjustly the growing industrial population of her manufacturing centres. Any such imputation would be untrue and unfair. There is scarcely a practicable reform in the social and industrial programme of Trades-Unionism which some department of Russian administration is not trying its best, at the present time, to put into operation, in some tentative way, for the benefit of the mill, and foundry, and general workshop hands of Russia’s manufacturing activities;—old-age pensions, profit-sharing, sanitation of mills and mines, healthy housing of workers, even to the copying of the Arbeiterstadt of Mülhausen, in the Cité ouvrière of Dago-Kertell. But there shall be no Trades-Unionist combination in Russia except what emanates from and is sanctioned by a paternal government.

In many respects and ways Russian autocracy is ahead of constitutional countries in enlightened efforts to solve the complex labour problem of our day. The manifold evils of overcrowded urban centres are recognised and guarded against in the encouragement of rural manufacturing villages. Plans for enabling artisans to acquire the ownership of their homes are the work of Commissions and Societies subsidised by the Government for this special task. There are apprenticeship schools for the children of mechanics, “public workshops” for the unemployed in times of distress, and other progressive schemes having the social and moral betterment of the worker in view. These and kindred reforms are engaging the serious and earnest attention of the Tsar’s ministerial advisers.

In one other most important respect the Russian Government is setting an example in beneficent industrial enterprise which more progressive countries might follow with marked advantage to their labouring classes. This is the national encouragement offered to the “Koustari,” or rural, industries. These play an essential part in the national economy of the Russian people. They help to keep families together, and to minimise migratory labour. These cottage industries give remunerative employment during slack seasons and winter months to several million people, and yield an addition to the general wage fund of the country averaging five hundred million roubles a year. All these industries have direct economic relation to the greatest of all Russian industries, that of agriculture. They, therefore, play a doubly profitable part in the social welfare of the people, in helping to maintain a due economic balance between rural and urban labour, and in upholding the primary importance of land industries to the physical and moral health of the nation.

Russia, unlike England, recognises the national danger of physical degeneracy through overcrowded manufacturing cities. Knowing how the prospect of better wages in these centres attracts the workers of the soil to the employment of mills and foundries, she sets herself the task of encouraging the growth of such counter-industries as will tend to minimise the extent of this movement. Not alone does she want to remove mills from the unhealthy environment of crowded towns by placing them amidst rural surroundings, she also wisely tries to add to the necessarily scant money earnings of farmers’ families the profits of the Koustari occupations, the better to preserve the home influence and the healthy atmosphere of village industrial life for the general benefit of the people’s physique and to the great moral advantage of the Russian masses.

All this is necessary to be understood in order to comprehend the antipathy, economic and political, which the Russian Jew excites in the official and the general Russian mind.

And, above all, this one additional fact must, in like manner, be grasped in any useful discussion of the problem of the Russian Jew.

The enormous development of the industrial resources and energies of Russia is too frequently ignored in an unfriendly foreign press, which finds space and speculation only for the external policy and generally exaggerated plans of the Tsar’s Government. What Russia is accused of coveting in Manchuria, or of devising in Persia, and not what she is strenuously and rapidly achieving in the sphere of her vast domestic activities, exercises the critical attention of West-European and American journalism. And yet, the wide and sure and extraordinary progress that is being made in the economic development of a great empire, as self-contained in its measureless natural resources as the United States, and with an assured domestic market for most of her manufactured products in a population of fully 140,000,000—growing at a rate of upwards of 2,000,000 annually out of a natural increase—ought to be a subject of infinitely greater concern to the public thought of commercial rivals like Great Britain and the United States—as it undoubtedly is to the keener sense of German competition—than what Russian policy may or may not mean in its diplomatic trend in the Far East.

Russia is at the beginning of an enormous manufacturing career. Her surplus urban population will be drawn upon for the needs of her mills and factories. An artisan class, in a comparatively new sphere of industrial energy, is rapidly growing, made up of young men who must inevitably gather new ideas of social life among the influences of associated labour; a class to be recruited from an uneducated peasantry, susceptible to new impressions of capital and labour, of wages and economic rights, of citizenship and political teachings, and of the contending human rivalries of class interests for wealth and influence and power in the rule of the state.

In a word, the government of a country in which freedom of the press is limited, and the right of public meeting denied; where no Parliament, or Congress, exists for the ventilation of theories, the discussion of reforms, or the chances of legislative redress, finds itself confronted with the problem of a huge working class, soon to number millions, and to be emancipated from peasant ignorance; a class, too, which must contribute its quota of strength to Russia’s enormous army. And this autocratic guardian of an Empire’s destinies says: “The enemy of my household is the Jew. I have treated him badly, and he naturally resents it. He retaliates by preaching Socialism in my industrial centres. He is in alliance with the avowed enemies of the Empire in Western Europe. For all these reasons, out he must go! Let him be off to any country whose Constitution may admit him to equal citizenship with people who are ruled by other systems and laws than ours. In Russia the Jew is both a domestic and an Imperial danger, and it is our duty to rid ourselves of its cause.”

NO truer general statement of the case of the Russian Jew, or nobler appeal to enlightened humanity in his behalf, has been made in our time than by Cardinal Manning, in a letter addressed to a London meeting in December, 1890. Every word of this superbly Christian epistle is as true and as applicable to-day as it was thirteen years ago, and I quote the concluding sentences of it here as being both a powerful argument in behalf of an oppressed people, and as a testimony to the liberty-loving spirit of a Cardinal of the Catholic Church:

“Six millions of men in Russia are so hemmed in and hedged about by penal laws as to residence, and food, and education, and property, and trade, and military service, and domiciliary visits, and police inspection as to justify the words, that ‘no Jew can earn a livelihood,’ and that ‘they are watched as criminals.’ The narratives before us may be highly coloured, they may be overcharged; but, all deductions made, they show both a violent and a refined injustice, which is perpetually as ‘iron entering the soul.’

“And, further, when the cry of such a multitude of suffering is wafted through the commonwealth of Europe, it is surely a part of the comity of nations that we should, with all due respect, make known what we have heard, in the confidence that, if things be so, the first to seek out and to treat such evils would be the supreme authority of the Realm from whence those wailing voices came.

“We show no disrespect in believing that what reaches our ears may not have reached the ears of those who are most highly exalted. Knowledge travels more readily on lower levels, and often does not ascend to the highest regions; the highest are, as a rule, the last to know the excesses and malpractices of their local authorities. We, therefore, with all due reverence, petition the Imperial Ruler of all the Russias to take account of all the Governors of the Jewish Pale; and even this we should not venture to do, if the sufferings alleged were not of such a kind and of such an extent as to violate the great and primary laws of human society. On this broad and solid base of natural law the jurisprudence of European civilisation rests. The public moral sense of all nations is created and sustained by participation in this universal common law; when this is anywhere broken, or wounded, it is not only sympathy but civilisation that has the privilege of respectful remonstrance.

“I am well aware of the counter allegations, not only of the anti-Semitic press, but of guarded and responsible adversaries; nevertheless, it is certain that races are as they are treated. How can citizens who are denied the rights of naturalisation be patriotic? How can men, who are only allowed to breathe the air, but not to own the soil under their feet, to eat only a food that is doubly taxed, to be slain in war, but never to command—how shall such a homeless, an exiled race live the life of the people among whom they are despised, or love the land which disowns them?

“It would seem to me that if such were the sufferings of any nation, even in Central Africa, we should be not only justified, but called on, to intervene. How much more, then, in behalf of a race who, in their past and their present and their future, demand of us an exceptional reverence; a race with a sacred history of nearly four thousand years; a present without parallel;, dispersed in all lands, with an imperishable personal identity, isolated and changeless, greatly afflicted, without home or fatherland; visibly reserved for a future of signal mercy.

“Into this I will not enter further than to say that any man who does not believe in their future must be a careless reader, not only of the old Jewish Scriptures, but even of our own. It is not our duty to add to their afflictions, nor to look on unmoved, and to keep the garments when others stone them.

“If we know the mind of our Master who prayed for them in His last hour, we owe to them both the justice of the Old Law and the charity of the New.”

I have come from a journey through the Jewish Pale, a convinced believer in the remedy of Zionism. I failed to see any other that can offer an equal hope of success. It is a necessity of the actual situation, and faces the growing perils of the position of the Russian Jew with a courageous plan of repatriation. Hope for partial or ultimate emancipation in Russia there is none. Other countries cannot be expected to relieve Russia of the unhappy victims of oppression and poverty. Where, then, are they to go?

Russia has a direct responsibility in their impoverishment and discontent, and this fact demands at her hands every help which the Zionist plan requires in its execution, financial co-operation with the wealthy Jews of Christendom in providing the cost of emigration, the purchase of suitable land in Palestine, and in obtaining the necessary rights of settlement and guarantee of protection from the Turkish Government. This latter provision is generally believed to be an affair of money, to be arranged with the Sultan; but, in any case, the moral help of other great Powers would not be refused in such a chivalrous, humane enterprise when once the influential Jews of Europe and America made it, as they easily could do, an appeal for assistance to the sense of justice and of reparation of the nations of Christendom.

It is some eighteen years since I rode from Mount Carmel to Nazareth, thence to Tiberias, and back through the beautiful plain of Jezreel, down to Nablus in Samaria on the way to Jerusalem. Jericho, the wilds of Judea, the country to the west, across the pastoral lands of Sharon, were also visited. I found the German Templer colonies at Haifa, Nablus, and Sarona wearing all the appearance of comfortable clusters of garden and farming homesteads. The Jews of Bessarabia are as sober and as industrious and, at least, as intelligent as these German emigrants. They have progressed in South Russia when permitted to cultivate the land. Why should they not be able to grow grain in Galilee, fruit and olives in Samaria, meat in the mountains of Judea, and wine and other products congenial to the soil and climate in the vale of Sharon, and elsewhere, in a land which once flowed rich with milk and honey?

Christendom is prejudiced against this race because its sons are generally non-producers of wealth, and mere exploiters of the fruits and necessities of direct industry. This is largely, but by no means wholly, true, while the taunt bears with it the spirit of Pharisaical virtue unconscious of self-accusation. Twenty per cent. of the Jews of Bessarabia are artisans and labourers working for wages. But, if the race generally are exploiters and extortioners, who made them so? Are not historical conditions and centuries of deliberate oppression in every Christian land (Ireland honourably excepted) answerable for the Hebrew predilection to profit-seeking by other than the methods of immediate production? And are the Gentiles of the lofty moral school of critics so much above the doctrine and practice of the commercial greed of buying in the cheapest, and selling in the dearest, market? “Expedients of every kind and shade,” writes Herbert Spencer (“Philosophical Essays,” vol. ii., on “Commercial Morality”), “from innocent deception to anything you please, excepting open robbery, prevail even in the higher grades of the commercial world. Innumerable frauds, untruth, both in words and in principles of business, and carefully devised subterfuges are generally in vogue, while many of these have become established as commercial usages.”

It is on record somewhere that no Jew has ever become a millionaire in Scotland or in the United States. His powers of dextrous money-mongering are blunted in some pronounced Christian lands by methods as expert and morals as accommodating as his own. But, whatever ground there may be for the somewhat general feeling prevailing against the Hebrew race for its financial unscrupulousness ought to make for and not against the Zionist movement, which seeks to find a place of refuge and of safety for those whose present sufferings and unhappy prospects appeal to the best side of our common humanity.

Cardinal Manning’s noble words, quoted in support of this humble advocacy of the cause of an oppressed people, will surely find a direct response in every kindly heart and head which may reflect upon the story and the sufferings of the Russian Jew.

KISHINEFF is the capital of Bessarabia, the seat of its government, and the chief centre of its trading industry. It has a present population of 130,000, of a mixed ethnological community. The Russians number about 8000; the Moldavians, 50,000; the Jews, 50,000, with Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks, Macedonians, and Germans accounting for the balance.

In the time of the Romans, Bessarabia formed part of the Imperial colony known as Dacia, and the Moldavian peasantry, who form the greater part of its present population, are said to be descendants of Roman “undesirables” who were forcibly exiled to the Balkan regions. From thence they emigrated, in time, to the rich lands lying west of the Dniester. The succession of conquering and colonising peoples who fought for the possession of this most fruitful region is historically bewildering. Cymri and Scythians, Greeks and Getæ, Romans and Goths, Huns and Avars, Bulgars and Slavonians; until, in the seventh century, the Bessi arrived, and gave the country its name of “Bessarabia.” Then came, in due course, Ugrians, Kumans, Polovtzians, and Mongolians. In the Middle Ages the Republic of Genoa founded colonies along the Dniester, which in turn gave way to an invasion of Turks. During the eighteenth century Russian power asserted itself in the land, and portions of the southern provinces which belonged to Turkey were, in our own time, ceded to the great Empire, thus completing Russian possession of the most fought-for country embraced within the wide dominions of the Tsars.

Thirty years ago Kishineff was on a level with an average Turkish town. According to its present Mayor, M. Karl Schmidt, the city owes its rapid rise and prosperity, and its present flourishing trade, solely to the Jews. They built up its commerce, organised its banks, developed its general business, and made it the handsome, thriving city it is to-day.

The country around the city is a great wine-growing region, and the Moldavian peasants are the chief producers of this most marketable commodity. They are not an intelligent race, and are even more superstitious, if possible, than the average Russian Mujik. They do not migrate from their villages in search of labour, like Russian workers in the central provinces. Their spare time is spent in eating sunflower seeds, and in drinking vodka during the winter months.

The economic relations between these Moldavian wine-growers and the Jews of Kishineff are most intimate. They have no business capacity whatever, and they dispose of their produce to the Jew brokers and dealers, who make, at least, a ten per cent. profit on such transactions.

These intimate trading connections have not led, as recently alleged, to any marked ill-feeling against the intermediaries; though it is only natural to assume that the profits of the skilled exploiter are not always a source of satisfaction to the mind of the peasant producer. What I was assured of, in this connection, from all sources of information sought by me in Kishineff, was that the origin of the outbreak at Easter was not, in any sense, traceable to these dealings between the Jew merchants and brokers of the city and the surrounding Moldavian farmers.

The genesis of the recent massacres is to be found in the special legislation which gives the Jew the mockery of civil rights within a pale of legal domicile. There are, at least, a hundred laws, ordinances, and special regulations having for object the coercing of him in all his religious, social, and industrial rights; even within this Pale of Settlement.[2] He is crowded into urban centres and denied, under penalties, access to where conditions of work and location might relieve him of his poverty and wretched home. Fines are levied upon him for infringements of these coercive regulations, and this fact induces him to circumvent such restrictive measures, while it appeals also to the police to help him to do so—for a consideration.

The first serious trouble experienced by the Jews of Bessarabia began about eight years ago. A sous-prefect of police, named Von Oglio, appointed in the Beltzy district by the present Vice-Governor, Ostrogoff, harassed the Jews by exactions and blackmail until they “struck” against being further bled in this manner. He retaliated as follows:

On the Hebrew festival of Yom Kippur, one of the most solemn ceremonies of the year, Von Oglio entered the local synagogue, seized the Torah, or sacred writing, flung it on the floor, ordered a policeman to pick it up, to seal it, and then had it conveyed to—the local prison! He next expelled the small congregation, and placed his seal upon the lock of the place of worship.

He then applied the “May Laws” in all their rigour, and forced all who had not special permits to leave the town, even men who had lived there in peace for thirty years; taking proceedings against them under circumstances which led to the death or injury of their cattle and the ruin of their crops. This conduct on the part of the local head of the police excited a corresponding feeling of hostility among the local peasants. They saw the guardians of the law ill-treating those whom they were supposed to protect, and they followed the example thus set them.

Suits for reparation and damages were brought by some of the wealthier victims of this police tyranny, but no redress was obtained. Von Oglio was removed, without degradation or punishment, to another district, and no further steps were taken by the authorities.

The chief instigator of the recent massacres now appeared on the scene. Up to 1894 the only paper in the province of Bessarabia was the Bessarabsky Viestnik, a journal of a moribund existence. In this year one Pavolachi Kroushevan, of Moldavian origin, acquired the dying sheet, and amalgamated it with a new daily paper, the Bessarabetz. The Vice-Governor, Ostrogoff, was press censor, in virtue of his higher post, and he extended his patronage to Kishinev’s only daily organ in the most marked manner.

Kroushevan commenced at once a vicious anti-Semitic campaign. He singled out for special attack municipal offices in which Jews were employed as clerks and in other capacities, and demanded that the hated Hebrews should be driven out to make room for Christians. This was done. Popular feeling was worked up in this manner to such a heat that the paper became the dominating force in the public life of the city. It was the only paper read in Kishineff. Its circulation reached 20,000, and its articles against the Jews were directly addressed to the police, soldiers, workingmen, Seminarists (Kishineff possesses half-a-dozen Royal and Ecclesiastical Colleges, Gymnasiums, and High Schools), and to all the lower employés of the Governor’s, Post Office, Telegraph, and other public departments.

From fiery denunciation the Editor progressed to deliberate incitations to violence. Articles headed “Death to the Jews!”—“Crusade against the Hated Race!”—“Down with the Disseminators of Socialism!” followed each other, while Kroushevan organised a society under the patronage of his paper, in which the most rabid of his pupils in the anti-Semitic war were enrolled.

All this was ostentatiously tolerated by the present Vice-Governor, Ostrogoff.

Kroushevan got into financial difficulties a few months ago, and removed to St. Petersburg, leaving the paper in charge of the deputy-editor, but continuing himself as directing head of the staff. Its ferocious anti-Jewish spirit and propaganda were in no way abated by this arrangement.

This brings us down, in the matter of time, to a few weeks before the recent massacres.

There next happened two events that gave the Bessarabetz a match with which to explode the mine of popular fury it had been building in the popular mind for four years. One was a murder of a boy at a village south of Kishineff, called Doubossar; and the other the suicide of a girl within the city itself. These were at once seized upon by the Kroushevan organ as “proofs” that they were instances of Semitic ritual murder! They were deliberately declared to be cases of the sacrifice of Christian blood in the performance of Hebrew rites at Passover! Steps were taken at once to put the true facts before the people, in public inquests and declarations; but the match had already ignited the end of the Bessarabetz fuse, and those who were resolved to strike terror into the “Socialist Jews” of Bessarabia and Southwestern Russia paid no heed to the documents and evidence which told the truth about the Doubossar boy’s death and the girl who took poison and who passed away in the Jewish Hospital in Kishineff. The plot was ripe for execution, and the Paschal time, associated by the atrocious legend with the kidnapping and killing of Christian children, was fixed upon for action.

TO arrive at definite conclusions as to the immediate and the contributory causes of the sanguinary outrages perpetrated upon the Jews of Kishineff on the 19th and 20th of April, was a tedious and painful process, beset with innumerable difficulties. To try to find the truth amidst a mass of conflicting testimony, where murder and rape and rapine are charged against one side, and where the actual perpetrators of these deeds are supposed to be all in prison awaiting some form of trial, would be a formidable task even where the law and popular feeling were on the side of justice. But in a city where the injured class are placed almost beyond the protection of the law of the land, and where public passion is alike the author of outrage and the apologist of partisan officials, it is necessarily much more difficult for the searcher after unbiassed evidence to secure the object of his quest.

Disregarding entirely the accounts which have been published in the Russian and foreign press, I adopted the following means of reaching something approximating to the real facts as to the outrages; their instigators, cause, and extent, and the measure of representative Russian feeling in relation thereto:

On arriving at Odessa I interviewed Count Schouvaloff, the retiring Civil Governor of South Russia, and I reproduce from memory (not having taken notes of the conversation) what he was courteous enough to say. I also obtained expressions of opinion from Russian and other merchants in Odessa upon anti-Jewish feeling in South Russia; and these views, frankly biassed as they were, will speak for a very large class of Russian and of resident foreign Christian opinion about the Jews and their racial and commercial character, as developed in this country.

Immediately upon reaching Kishineff, I called upon the responsible leaders of the Jews to whom I carried letters of introduction from London, Paris, and New York. They are prominent citizens, and are largely of the medical profession. I obtained from them and others, including the three Rabbis of the city, a very copious statement of all that occurred there on the 19th and 20th of last month.

Resolved to compare this ex parte testimony with such Russian evidence as might be least tainted with anti-Semitic prejudice in this now somewhat demoralised place, I solicited and secured interviews with two Christian doctors of Russian blood; also with one of the highest civil functionaries in the district, who is a noble of great wealth, of unique local influence, whose name I am not permitted to use, but for whose bona fides I can absolutely vouch; and, in addition, I was privileged to hold fully an hour’s conversation on the subject of the riots and outrages with M. Karl Schmidt, who has been Mayor of the city for the last twenty-five years without interruption; the strongest possible evidence to his popularity with all classes of his fellow-citizens, and to his worth and capacity as a Russian municipal ruler.

I then met by appointment in the Jewish Hospital all the medical men, Jews, who had professionally attended to the persons brought there during and after the riots, who could speak as to the number of killed and wounded, and the extent of the injuries inflicted upon the unfortunate victims of the mob’s fury. The statements made to me by these doctors I repeated to the two Russian doctors I have already referred to, and I have noted down their comments upon the accounts given me by their Hebrew medical confrères.

My next step was to visit the scenes of outrage in the city, and in the Skulanska Rogatka district, where the most atrocious of the crimes were committed, and to obtain from the living witnesses of the outrages an account of what they saw and experienced, some of them from women and girls who went through the saturnalia of ruffianism as victims of outrage and of rape.

From these tales of revolting deeds I proceeded to the Jewish Cemetery, where I saw and counted the forty-four newly made graves of the massacred men, women, and children, whose freshly turned mounds stand there to-day with their simple Hebrew wooden marks of identity, as an appeal to the God alike of Christian and of Jew against deeds done in the pretended name of religion which might even shame devils to perpetrate.

I have taken pictures of these graves, of the shed in which the young girl of thirteen was assaulted, and killed with four men, of groups of little girls and women who passed through the two nights of horror in the quarter where the Moldavian fiends committed the worst deeds, and of houses in which numerous murders were committed.

Knowing how unlikely it would be for me, or for any man, to obtain from modest maidens and respectable married women any account, or even admission, of their having been violated, I sought the Rabbis of the city, and got from them and from some of the victims whom I met there particulars of the outrages to which they and others were subjected. These will, as far as the subject can permit it, be dealt with in subsequent letters.

Let me to this extent forestall what I shall have to say about the violation of women. All the worst of these crimes were the work of Moldavians, and not of Russians. This, I am convinced, is absolutely true. Many of these Moldavians are descended from the colony of convicts and criminals founded by Pagan Rome in the country now known as Roumania; and the several centuries’ experience by the race of Turkish rule, before being inflicted as subjects upon more civilised governments, has not morally improved the original taint in the blood of their present-day representatives.

Two letters,[4] one signed by Count Tolstoy and the other from Maxime Gorky, addressed to the committee in charge of the labour of relief in Kishineff, express the hateful feeling of indignation and of abhorrence with which the cultured Russian mind looks upon these revolting deeds of mediæval savagery in our day.

Kishineff, May 21st.

The first survey of the situation here satisfies me there is no likelihood of any further serious outbreak for the present. The military precautions seem fully adequate to the task of dealing with any emergency.

The Jews, however, are still terror-stricken, and in fear of renewed violence. Wealthy families have fled the city, but the vast mass of the Hebrew community, numbering fully fifty thousand souls, are too poor to purchase the means of seeking protection in flight.

All the Russians I have met, from Odessa to this city, condemn the abominable acts of the anti-Semitic mobs as strongly as other people.

The true origin of the massacres will need patient and careful inquiry, but it can in a general way be put down to combined racial, economic, and other factors, inflamed by violent incitations of the local anti-Jewish press.

The latest list of the killed and wounded, and accounts of looting and destruction, gives these figures: Killed, 44; badly wounded, 83; injured, 500. Houses wrecked, 700; shops and small stores looted and damaged, 600; 2000 families are said to be ruined in their business and employment, and 10,000 people require relief.

The wealthy Jews of the City and Pale have subscribed about forty-five thousand dollars, while donations from Germany, France, England, and the United States amount, so far, to some thirty thousand dollars more.

All the vengeance of the mobs seems to have been directed against the very poorest of the Jews. Shops were only looted, but artisans were killed.

Much greater help than that already received will be required to prevent starvation.

Kishineff, May 25th.

During a brief halt in the South Russian capital, Odessa, I availed myself of an opportunity of visiting the retiring Civil Governor, Lieutenant General Count P. P. Schouvaloff, elder son of Count Paul Schouvaloff, formerly Russian Ambassador at Berlin, and subsequently the most popular Viceroy of Poland who reigned in Warsaw since the stormy days of 1863. The Count received me with courtesy and affability at his private palace, on the Nicolai Boulevard. His Excellency had, he informed me, been abroad during the last two months, and had only just returned to take adieux of the local officials and citizens of Odessa before assuming the functions of his new post in the Ministry of the Interior. Had he been in Odessa during the terrible events in Kishineff he would, ex-officio, have been in possession of intimate knowledge of the tragic occurrences, upon which he should have had no hesitation, he was good enough to say, to have given me the frank expression of his views. As it was, the Count regretted he could say very little indeed. Like the rest of his countrymen who had a jealous regard for the good repute of Russia abroad, his Excellency sincerely deplored the frightful popular émeute in the Bessarabian capital. But there were one or two things to be borne in mind by a foreign observer and commentator, he was anxious to point out. He need not, perhaps, he remarked, dwell upon the unsophisticated condition of the Russian peasant or artisan; his simplicity, ignorance, and the practically unlimited credence he gave to sinister and plausibly mischievous counsellors. Against these qualities in the simple Russian, there was to be set, he insisted, the vastly superior intelligence of the Jew, of all grades and conditions. It was, unfortunately, an indisputable fact, in his opinion, that the Jews, more especially where they were numerically equal to their orthodox neighbours—and in South Russian centres they formed the predominant elements—exploited the Christians in a hundred unscrupulous ways, to their own aggrandisement. The Jew not only knew the law better than his Christian neighbour, but he was an adept in circumventing it. Consequently the exploited Russian failed to obtain legal redress, and occasionally the ignorant people, instigated by the worst class of criminals, whose only object was plunder, took the law—according to their own primitive conception of it—into their own hands, with such frightful results as were lately seen in Bessarabia.

In his Excellency’s opinion the limitations placed upon the Jews in this country should be made somewhat more stringent, in the protective interests of the Jews themselves. That was to say, he remarked, they should be deprived of much of the immunity under which they now exploited the uneducated Christians. On the other hand, improvement might be effected by a more careful choice being made in the appointment of Governors in Jewish centres. Younger and more active men are required, who will keep themselves fully and exactly au courant with every latent movement among the people under their jurisdiction. They should be just, intelligent, and alert Governors, his Excellency said, upon whom it would be practically impossible to spring any sudden outbreak, and they should be prepared to apply instantly repressive measures at all time.

Count Schouvaloff would not enter into any discussion of the Jewish question in Russia, but he might be permitted to observe that it was, in his opinion, one for Jews themselves, in the main, to solve. Generally speaking, he had little hope in any change for the better in the inimical feeling between Jew and Christian in Russia, so long as there existed no standard of commercial rectitude among Jews. There was no question of religious intolerance, although, unfortunately, it was no difficult thing for agents provocateurs, whose object, as already said, was plunder, to arouse the fanaticism of simple people on occasions like Easter festivals.

Such is the view, briefly expressed, of a Russian Governor whom I believe to be, from the evidence of my own countrymen in Odessa, as well as from common repute, a singularly honest and high-minded member of the gubernatorial class in this country.

Count Schouvaloff, on parting, cordially expressed his great admiration for “the most progressive and enlightened nation in the world,” and fervently trusted the United States and Russia, as the two great Pacific powers, would ever remain the firmest of good friends and neighbours.

Interviews with three prominent Russian merchants—all men of good social standing and repute—failed almost entirely to elicit any more friendly expression towards the Jews. They denounced as inhuman the iniquities of the ignorant, savage mob at Kishineff, but could not shut their eyes to “the trade trickeries and treacheries,” to use their own words, which, at the hands of grossly ignorant, lower-class Russians, brought such terribly retributive punishment upon the Jews. None of these gentlemen could, or would, admit that religious hatred or Paschal rancour were the incentive motives of the terrible outbreaks against the Hebrews. There were exceptions, of course, they were careful to remark, but, generally speaking, the Russian Jew was very largely the author of his own persecution.

It is alike disappointing and depressing to find with what remarkable unanimity this unfavourable view is taken by an otherwise fair-minded class of Russians, in the South Russian capital. Considering that nearly the whole of the trade and commerce of the city and port of Odessa is in the hands of Jews, it is only natural that the Christian merchant’s opinion of his Hebrew rival and neighbour should be strongly tinctured by competitive prejudice and jealousy. Much allowance must, therefore, be made for that; but, on the other hand, ’tis no less remarkable that among, for example, the resident foreign Consular corps and other independent and impartial observers in the same city, it is almost equally difficult to elicit a favourable opinion of the Jews, although the majority of these authorities were solicitous to qualify their opinions by pointing out to me that it is not against the Jews themselves, but against Jewish methods and their shady commercial morale generally, that public feeling and sentiment run so strongly.

There is a comparatively large English colony in Odessa, and the shipping is almost entirely in the hands of British ship-brokers, and, as the exporters are all Jews, these agents have intimate knowledge of the latter. Here, again, one hears the same condemnatory opinions of the Jew’s want of commercial morality. This is not, I regret very much to say, a pleasing picture of the Jewish element in this great Russian centre, but my duty and resolve is to give a faithfully accurate record of the opinion and views I am seeking from authentic sources and representative people of all classes. Among educated and enlightened Russians one finds anti-Semites who are not one whit less rancorous than the ignorant and benighted Mujik. But the former would never dream of murdering his Jewish neighbour.

The only other comment that suggests itself in connection with this matter, especially in reference to Count Schouvaloff’s implied suggestion that the Kishineff massacres are mainly due to Jewish exploitation of artisans and peasants, and to their customary commercial trickery, is this: The rioters of April last were not peasants, nor were the victims of their licensed brutality usurers or profit-mongers. The murderers and looters were chiefly labourers and artisans, led by Seminarists; and the victims were, almost in all instances, Hebrew workingmen and their families. The sinister influence of the local anti-Jewish press is also a factor in the origin of the riots which his Excellency overlooked, and which others in Odessa did not refer to when expressing their views upon the Kishineff reign of terror at Eastertide.

Kishineff, May 27, 10 P. M.

An attempt to renew disorder near the market place this afternoon was promptly dealt with and suppressed by the military. A large crowd gathered about five o’clock, near the scene of the first outbreak on Easter Sunday, when, as on that occasion, some boys were made use of to test the disposition of the police and military by throwing stones at some Jewish residences. In this instance there was no hesitation on the part of the authorities. The military rode round the crowd at once, and hemmed them in, when forty of the leaders and instigators were immediately arrested and taken to the prison.

Hundreds of families fled from the city last night, owing to threats that the deeds of Easter would be repeated to-day. The trains to Odessa were packed with fugitives, while all the hotels in Kishineff were crowded by Jews whose wives and daughters could not leave the city, and dare not remain in their homes.

The more I make myself acquainted with the measures which seem to be imperatively ordered by the central Government, the more I am convinced that the authorities here will not hesitate for a moment to employ the sternest methods to preserve order. Fifty ball cartridges have been served out to each soldier. At every dangerous point in the Jewish quarters soldiers are posted with fixed bayonets, while cavalry patrols are constantly moving from one quarter to another, day and night, in vigilant surveillance of the situation.

I visited the Jewish districts in the city and suburbs twice to-day, and found everything quiet.

The city is still paying dearly, in the virtual suspension of all work, for the riots in April. Business is completely disorganised through the injuries done to shops and warehouses, and the flight of Jewish dealers and employers.

I desire to appeal most urgently for assistance for the future of the girls and married women who were savagely violated during the riots at Easter. These girls have now no hope of marriage where the facts of their dishonour are publicly known. Under the rigorous moral law of Moses married women who are outraged must be divorced from their husbands. There are several such cases among the victims of the mob’s brutality, and their misfortunes, along with those of the young girls referred to, make a peculiarly pathetic appeal to the sympathy of those who may be blessed with the means by which the future of these unhappy creatures might be made less miserable and hopeless.

There are also from fifty to one hundred orphans, children of murdered fathers and mothers, who are to be provided for. Some of the money subscribed from abroad ought to be specially ear-marked for alleviating these three classes of exceptional suffering and wrong.

Berlin, June 3d.

Finding it impossible, on account of the Russian censorship of all telegraphic messages relating to the Kishineff outrages, to forward this despatch from that city, I do so from this point.

I have completed an investigation as to the origin, authors, and extent of the recent massacres and looting, while I have also traversed almost the whole of the Jewish Pale of Settlement, from Odessa to Warsaw, inquiring into the present state of anti-Semitic feeling arising out of the outbreak at Easter.

The origin of the sanguinary riots at Kishineff, on the 19th and 20th of April, was not, as reported in the Russian official press,[5] an assault by a Jew proprietor of a merry-go-round upon a Christian woman, whereby a mob of peasants were incited to attack the Jews. There is no truth in this account.

The real origin of the outbreak was this:

The only daily paper in Kishineff is the Bessarabetz. It is a violently anti-Semitic organ. Its chief editor is Pavolachi Kroushevan, of Moldavian origin. He has systematically inflamed the popular feeling against the Jews, as the foes of Russia, as the propagandists of Socialism, and as the enemies of the Christian religion. These attacks have been continuous for the last six years. Merchants and employers giving work to Jews were held up to public odium, and the expulsion or extermination of the race was openly urged. The Bessarabetz has a circulation of 20,000, chiefly among the police, municipal employés, and workmen generally.

Two events occurring shortly before Easter were seized upon by Kroushevan to incite the mob to murderous violence. One was the murder of a boy belonging to the village of Doubossar, situated between Kishineff and Odessa, by his relatives for gain. The other was the suicide of a girl and her death at the Jewish Hospital of Kishineff. The Bessarabetz declared them to be both ritual murders by the Jews, and summoned the Russian Christians to punish the authors of the alleged crimes.

The chief Rabbi of Kishineff, fearing from past experiences the results of these ferocious appeals, hastened to the Greek bishop, and implored him to calm the popular mind by giving an episcopal assurance that no such ritual was practised, and no such crimes committed, by the Jews. The bishop’s reply was that he feared there was some Semitic sect which really did indulge in the use of Christian blood in the Paschal ceremonies, and he refused to intervene.

Ten days before the riots broke out a body of representative Jews visited the Governor and warned him that Kroushevan’s incitations would lead to murder, unless restrained. General Von Raaben assured the deputation that all necessary precautions would be taken, but no attempt was made by him to stop the appeals of the Bessarabetz to the popular anti-Semitic hatred.

Chief of Police Tchemzenkov was also requested to act in the interest of peace, and curb the diatribes of the Bessarabetz. He replied that it would “serve the Jews right if they were driven from the city for encouraging the propaganda of Socialism.”

Having by the blood accusation articles, and through the circulation of a Roumanian anti-Semitic pamphlet purporting to give instances of numerous murders of Christian children by Jews, roused the Kishineff populace to a state of savage fury, Kroushevan’s local accomplices planned an attack for the Easter holidays. Kishineff Jews declare that Kroushevan came to the city, in disguise, from St. Petersburg, on the eve of the outbreak, to plan the riots. This statement I could not get verified. A meeting was held and a plan of attack decided on. A few days previously a band of strangers arrived at Kishineff, comprising thirty Albanians and some Macedonians, believed to be brigands brought especially for an attack on the Jews.

The chief instigators of the riots were Kroushevan and the staff of the Bessarabetz; a doctor who is of Greek origin; a Moldavian doctor; a Moldavian engineer; a notary; two sons of a prominent merchant; two students, sons of prominent citizens; two Odessa students; two minor officers, and several well-known citizens.

The actual leaders of the riots were students and Seminarists from the Royal School and the city religious colleges.

All the statements made to me agree that the Seminarists directed the movements of the mob on both days, disguised as labourers and strangers. The rioters comprised thirty bands, averaging fifty each, with a Seminarist on a bicycle directing the attack. Some of the bands were composed of the lower employés of the various departments of the municipality—the telegraph, post office, and other municipal offices, but artisans and labourers, and Moldavians from the suburbs, formed the greater body of the rioters, with the Albanian strangers above mentioned.

These bands, with sticks and stones, but no firearms, attacked the Jewish quarters at thirty different points simultaneously, thus proving a deliberate plan of operation.

All the evidence that I have gathered during eight days of searching inquiry in Kishineff convinces me that the riots were not a casual or accidental uprising of a mob against the Jews, but formed a carefully planned attack by the local anti-Semitic leaders, with the passive connivance of the Chief of Police and the active encouragement of some of his officers. Von Raaben’s deplorable weakness in not employing his military force to quell the riots during the first day is responsible for the horrors of that and the massacres and the violations of women and girls of the second day.

The majority of the rioters were of Moldavian origin. These Moldavians are as numerous as the Jews in Kishineff and constitute the most ignorant and brutal element of the populace.

The rioting began with the looting of the Jewish shops and the demolition of houses. The mob, finding the military not employed against them and the police witnessing the attacks sympathetically—many of the police taking part and participating in the looting—passed from murder and massacre to the violation of Jewish women and girls.

I have two detailed statements, carefully prepared by eye-witnesses of the scenes. One is a copy of the indictment of the authors of the massacres, which has been lodged with the Procureur; the other is a specially prepared statement by two Christian ladies, one Russian and one Russo-French, who investigated a certain class of outrages for my information. Here are a few instances of the worst crimes:

The Feldstein family is one of the most respectable in Kishineff. The mob attacked their saloon on the corner of Armenia Street at noon on the first day, Sunday, April 9. The police barracks are some forty paces away. The soldiers and police patrolled the street during the five hours occupied by the mob in demolishing the saloon and destroying fifteen thousand roubles’ worth of wines. A safe containing a large sum of money was also broken open and robbed. While that section of the mob was thus employed, the leader of the gang found in the kitchen of the family residence the meat for the family’s dinner. He put it on a stick, mounted to the roof of the saloon, which is of one story, and, addressing the mob, the police, and the military in the street, declared, “Here are the remains of a Christian child found in the house of the wealthy Jew, Feldstein.”

The members of the household were saved by a Russian employé of Feldstein and a humane gendarme, from the fury of the mob. On completing the destruction of the place, the leader drank to the health of Editor Kroushevan from the roof of the looted premises.

At No. 13 Asia Street in the Bender Rogatka quarter some of the worst outrages were perpetrated. Twelve families, all Jewish artisans, lived in the yard. A mob of Moldavians, some Russian workingmen, and a few Albanians attacked the occupants of the yard. The majority of the Jewish men escaped, while the women and girls, numbering sixteen, concealed themselves in a loft under the roof of a one-story house. Four Jewish men tried to defend the place, and were murdered. Their wives and daughters, with a dozen women and children, had taken refuge in a loft under the roof of No. 13. It was from some of these I obtained the facts here recorded.

One Mottel Greenspoon, a glazier, was stunned by a blow from a bludgeon, and the Albanians mutilated him while still alive. They then choked a child, two years old, and cut out its tongue, while alive.

The other three men were killed and then had feathers put on their faces. As an act of desecration of the dead, two drunken women, one Moldavian and one Bulgarian, trampled on the body of Greenspoon as it lay mutilated in the yard. The mob then found its way to the loft where the women were concealed, and remained several hours. All the women and girls were violated.

All this time the police and soldiers were patrolling the open space in front of the house where these fiendish crimes were committed. I saw blood spattered on the walls of the rooms and yard, and picked up a child’s schoolbook on which some murderer had wiped his hands.

At the household Foudyn, No. 33 Gostinna Street, four men and one woman were killed. Sixteen families lived in this yard, all those of artisans. The mob came the first day and demolished the windows and doors. It returned the next day for massacre. Sixteen women and eight children were concealed in the loft. The first killed was a boy of sixteen, who begged piteously for life, saying he had done no wrong, was a scholar of the state school, and wanted to live. His father, at the other end of the yard, heard the boy’s cries, but could not save his life. They killed him while the father lay stunned, unable to make an effort to save the boy’s life. It was Mr. Baranovitch, the father of the boy, a most intelligent and respectable man, who told me the story of his son’s murder. As at the house in Asia Street, the women and girls who had concealed themselves in the loft were discovered and violated by the mob. One married woman escaped through the roof, leaped to the ground, ran to the nearest police station, and implored help, but she was driven out by the officer, who said the Jews were only receiving what they deserved. Another married woman named Feya Katzap was bludgeoned to death in the yard of this house.

The scene of the most diabolical crimes and violations committed by the mob was the Skulanska Rogatka suburb, eighty per cent. of the population of which are Moldavians, the Jews forming the remainder. This is the residence of the poorer class of the workers of both races. The mob broke into the yard on the evening of the second day, Monday, April 20. Twenty-five persons, mostly women and children, hid themselves in a carpenter’s shed owned by one Grillspoon. The houses in the yard were demolished, and the mob was going away when the cry of a child in the shed indicated the place of concealment of the women. The shed was instantly attacked by Moldavians, led by a father and son, who were neighbours of the Jews. Grillspoon, the owner of the shed, was killed, together with four other artisans, who were defending the place, and one woman, the wife of the owner, was murdered after violation. The mob also found a pretty girl, named Feya Wouller, aged thirteen, and her fate is so awful that I can only state that after having been violated by more than a dozen of these Moldavians they fought for her body like famished wolves after life was extinct. When found the next morning by her relatives the body was seen to be literally torn in two.

The sister of Feya Wouller, whose brother died trying to defend the women and children, assured me that the Moldavian leader and his son, who led the mob in his district, are walking about free at this moment. Three brothers, well-known in the city, are implicated in several of the murders. A car-driver and his two sons took part in four murders and general looting, but none of these men are now in prison. The Jews killed by the car-driver and his son are Eydel Drochman, one Galantor, one Kantor, and the boy Baranovitch.

During the worst stages of the riot the chief police officer, Tchemzenkov, drove through the city smoking cigarettes. At one period of the disturbance, on the morning of the second day, the Jews of the New Bazaar organised a body of about 150 to defend themselves, but Police Officer Dobroselsky, on finding them able to drive the mob away, arrested several of the defenders and broke up the body.

Among the prominent looters of the Jews’ shops was the soldier servant of a military surgeon; and a son of a murdered woman, Keyla Konza, declares that among those who violated and killed his mother were four common soldiers.

Joseph Newman testifies that his father was killed in the presence of Policeman Stepanovitch.

A Christian Russian says that he heard the students from Odessa shout to the mob, “Kill the Jews!”

A prominent employé in the municipal office in the city was declared to be an active director of the mob, showing where the Jews lived, and shouting, “Kill the Jews!”

Several police officers did their duty and saved many lives in the Jewish districts. Among these was Officer Sloutschevsky, of Bender Rogatka, who, with twelve men, drove the mob away. They went from this to the Asia Street district, where another police officer was patrolling, and he allowed them to commit the murders described. Some artillery officers, who were off duty, manfully saved several Jewish women.

On the morning of the first day’s outbreak large crosses were chalked on the houses of the Christians living in streets inhabited by the Jews, and none of these dwellings or shops were injured. Ikons (images) were shown in the windows of other houses, and thus indicated places not to be attacked. During the progress of the first day’s outrages the Bishop of Kishineff, while on his way to dinner with a rich noble, passed in his carriage through the mob, giving his blessing to the crowd. Upon hearing of this incident, I refused to believe it possible, and resolved to interview the nobleman, who is Michael Nicolavitch Kroupensky. He received me courteously, and said:

“Bishops in Russia always give blessings to people when passing through the streets. This was purely an accidental coincidence. The Bishop is a humane man.”

So that the fact remains that the Bishop did pass through the mob on his way to dinner, and uttered no word to persuade the mob to stop its murder and pillage.

The Jews are convinced from every evidence that the outbreak was a plan of the local anti-Semitic leaders to punish and terrorise the Jews for their supposed propaganda of Socialism in conjunction with the leaders of the Socialists of Western Europe. The fanaticism and superstition of the Moldavian and Russian mob were then excited by the fabricated stories of Jewish ritualistic murders of Christian children, to cover the organised political plot against the local Socialist movement. I was informed by Nobleman Kroupensky that on the day following the riots thirty young Jews were arrested, and that five of them were found to be in possession of pamphlets appealing to the workingmen of Russia to demand a constitutional government like that of England. Some officials of the municipal department, some police officers, and others connived at the attack in order to crush the alleged Jewish Socialist propaganda. The artisans and labourers had been appealed to by the Bessarabetz to drive out the Jew workers, who labour for low wages, and thus do much injury to Christian families. No evidence was adduced for me to implicate the Government at St. Petersburg in a responsibility for the outbreak which had covered Russia’s name with shame, but Minister de Plehve must have known that some kind of manifestation was contemplated. Thinking, probably, the affair would not culminate in massacres, but might assume the character of an anti-Socialist demonstration, he took no steps to meet the emergency which actually arose until too late. The present Vice-Governor of Bessarabia, Councillor of State Ostrogoff, is a notorious anti-Semite. This fact, coupled with threats of the police and the murderers at large that the next attack will be a St. Bartholomew for the Jews of Kishineff, explains the flight of nearly all the Jewish leaders and wealthy members of the race from the city, leaving only the poor members of the Hebrew community apprehending a renewed attack.

The military measures to preserve order were adequate when I left Kishineff on Friday morning, but if these are relaxed in any way, no protection remains for the terrorised men, women, and children against further violence, The journal edited by Kroushevan is still circulating in the city, and, while more restrained in its language than before the massacres, it is keeping alive the racial animosity against the defenceless Jews. I would urge the following measures to afford some immediate protection for the Jews of Bessarabia and the Pale:

First, that the Government at St. Petersburg issue a ukase declaring there is no truth in the horrible fiction of Jewish ritual murders of Christian children; second, that the bishops and clergymen of all cities, towns, and villages be compelled to read the same from their pulpits, thereby stopping the circulation of these atrocious legends within the borders of Russia; third, that a conference of the leading Jews of Western Europe be held without delay, to consider the best means to solve the problem of the Russian Jew, and how best to help the Jews of the Pale to protect themselves under the existing Russian laws.

Unless some action of this nature is taken soon, more outrages will follow. I found the feeling in the larger cities, where the Jews are strong, very excited and apprehensive. In one city the Jews have purchased 9000 revolvers to protect themselves. There is a constant panic in Kiev, from which most of the wealthy Jews have fled to Cracow, while Jewish refugees from Kishineff were refused shelter on their arrival at Kiev by the terrified Jews of that city.

In Warsaw I found more confidence than elsewhere, as, in this large city, with its quarter of a million of Jews, the Polish Socialists, who are a strong organisation, have promised to aid the Jews if any attack should be made on them by the anti-Semites. The Governor, General Tchetverikoff, is a capable officer, free from anti-Semite prejudices, and he has made it plain, in the measures already taken, and in some straight talk, that he will deal promptly and sternly with any attempt to repeat the Kishineff ruffianism in the city under his control.

Throughout the whole Pale the police and peasants are told by the anti-Semites that the Tsar has issued an order to kill all the Jews or drive them from Russia.

London, June 6th.

The situation at Kishineff at the present time is this: The military measures in force are fully adequate for an instant repression of any attempted renewal of outrages. Owing, however, to the notorious anti-Semitic leanings and record of the Vice-Governor, Ostrogoff, the Jews who have fled the city, and the poorer class who suffered most and who cannot leave for lack of means, dread another outbreak.

They likewise note the indulgent punishments inflicted upon the directors of the riots, while several men known to have committed murder and to have been implicated in the tortures of women were actually liberated from prison after a few days’ detention, on the ground of alleged lack of sufficient evidence of their guilt. The feeling in Kishineff is general that the rank and file of the rioting bands were retained in custody, while the instigators and ringleaders were permitted to go free.

I do not credit the statement going the round of the press which alleges that Governor Von Raaben telegraphed to St. Petersburg for permission to use the military in Kishineff in dealing with the mob, and that he waited vainly for an authoritative reply. No such permission was needed from either Minister de Plehve or the head of any other department. The criminal code armed the local Governor with the fullest power and discretion for the employment of soldiers within his government or province as a supplementary force to the police to preserve order. There were 8000 military and 350 police at Von Raaben’s command during the first day’s riot, and he was as much in absolute control of those forces in the task of dealing with the outbreak against the Jews as the Governor of New York State would be of the State militia in a similar emergency.

As to the question of remedy: What can be done to safeguard the men, women, and children within the Jewish Pale, from Odessa to the Baltic, from periodic outrage; and free the name of a great empire from the reproach of such organised Christian barbarism as that of Kishineff? This question cannot be dismissed on the plea that American and European opinion is concerned only with the humane task of relief. The best possible measure of relief that could be offered to the victims of anti-Semitic oppression in Russia, at this crisis, would assume the character and form of a friendly mediating influence exercised with the Tsar in behalf of the Jews of his Empire.

I have discussed this idea with a high Russian official during my tour, and I briefly summarise our conversation.

In reply to my question as to what could be done by the friends of Russia in the United States to procure some better protection for the Russian Jew, this official, who is thoroughly conversant with both American and British politics, said:

“It is no use appealing to Russia through the medium of indignation meetings. This is not how to exercise a friendly influence such as is desired. We resent attempts to meddle in our domestic affairs through the agency of political demonstration. It is an unwarranted interference by other countries in our internal concerns. How, may I ask, would your Government and press consider our action if we organised great gatherings and delivered violent speeches in protest against, say, the burning alive of American citizens, not alone without trial, but independent even of the form of legal indictment? You must look at the position of our Government in relation to the hateful crimes of Kishineff from many points of view. Our system of administration differs radically from yours, while the civil position of the Jews here has no parallel in civil and political conditions in America except, perhaps, in your treatment of the Negro and the Chinaman. Whatever faults our system may possess in your eyes, we consider it as being adapted to the domestic requirements of Russia, and to the social temperament of our people. We are not in any sense a cruel or a persecuting nation, nor do we hate the Jews on any religious ground. But we never will admit a people so foreign in every respect to the Russians in racial traits and character, in faith and in general reputation, to an equality of citizenship. You might as well ask the American people to permit Chinamen to become Mayors of San Francisco or members of Congress. There is something more to be said in relation to Kishineff; not in any sense by way of palliating the horrible outrages which I condemn as strongly as you do, but in the way of, say, such an explanation as a Governor of Alabama or Carolina would try to account to civilised opinion for some act of a mob of Christian citizens in burning a fellow-citizen at the stake. The Jew in Russia is the disciple and propagandist of Socialism. He has introduced this menace to our Government and system from abroad. He is believed by the tens of thousands of our people who are employed in our departments to be their racial enemy, and the foreign plotter inside our gates against the Tsar, who is the head of the system which gives them their means of livelihood and some prospect of future positions for their sons.

“These are the class of Russians who hate the Jews most, and the hatred is begotten of the same human selfishness which stirs up strife between rival classes in other countries.

“It is necessary to know all this in order to understand the fact that many persons above the rank of artisans and labourers took part in the shameful outrages at Kishineff.

“Allow me now to reply direct to your question:

“I can only make a suggestion, which is this: Let some prominent statesman or highly respected citizen of the United States visit St. Petersburg and seek an interview with the Emperor. This would be welcomed as an act of friendship, and could not be considered as an intrusion even by our Government officials. The Tsar would be sure to receive such a visitor as the spokesman of friendly American feeling.

“No kinder-hearted man lives to-day than the Emperor. No one in your country deplores the outrages of April more than he does. Moreover, like all Russians, he holds the great American nation in high esteem, and cherishes the friendly relations which have so long subsisted between the two countries. If, then, some one of your leading men, commanding wide respect, would undertake such a mission, he would accomplish a thousand times more to guarantee the Jews against further outrage than 10,000 public meetings organised by the Jews of your cities or on the suggestion of Russia’s kind friends on the London press.”

I most urgently beg your advocacy, and that of the American press generally, of this proposal. It would be a mission worthy of a statesman, and its certain fruits would be the Tsar’s protection for the Jews from Odessa to Warsaw against further organised outrage during his lifetime.

The public man in the States eminently qualified for this humane mission is ex-President Cleveland. Such an ambassador on a friendly visit to St. Petersburg would attract the world’s attention, and success would be sure to crown his undertaking.

I attended several meetings of the Central Relief Committee while in Kishineff. The last one was on the eve of my departure, last Friday. The committee meets daily to examine applications and distribute assistance in money, food, and clothing. Kishineff is divided, for relief purposes, into twenty-two districts. Each has its local committee, who report to the Central Executive Committee of Fifteen, whose chairman, Dr. J. S. Mutznik, is a leading physician and one of Kishineff’s wealthy residents. Assisting him are several equally representative Jews, like Dr. Kohan-Bernstein, Rabbi Ettlinger, S. M. Grossman, E. Galperin, S. Perelmutter, I. Kipperwasser, E. Reidel, M. Kligman, Z. Rosenfeld, Israel Pappervasses, and several other well-known citizens.

A Ladies’ Committee gives valuable co-operation, attending to and reporting upon the women, girls, and orphans requiring aid. These ladies showed me over the food, clothing, and general assistance departments of the Central Committee Headquarters. I found everything well organised and efficiently executed. The Rabbis and leading members of the Ladies’ Committee have founded an asylum for the orphans of massacred parents.

I visited this temporary asylum and photographed the orphans and their guardians. Up to the date of my departure the Central Relief Committee had expended a total of 130,000 roubles; one-fourth of which was used in the purchase and distribution of food for the people whose homes had been destroyed, and for others made workless by the riots. Small sums of money had been advanced to the owners of shops and little stores to enable them to renew business; 1000 roubles were given in several instances.

This action of the Committee was severely criticised by the friends and representatives of the Jews who were killed. These complained that the money contributed from abroad ought to be apportioned according to relative loss, and that the subscribers would not estimate the injury done to a tailor’s or shoemaker’s store at three or four times the value of a murdered father, mother, or brother.

In this connection, I pointed out to Dr. Mutznik that, as those whose stores were looted could, under Russian law, claim adequate compensation from the city or the government, it would be more equitable to devote the major portion of the funds received to the present and future assistance of those who have suffered the greater wrong and injury in the loss of parents, of employment, and in other ways. To this view he agreed, though he was very doubtful if the claims for compensation already lodged in behalf of the store-owners will be fairly dealt with, or even considered, by the authorities.

Under the law as it stands, three independent witnesses must depose, not alone to the injury done to a particular store or business, but to the person or persons accused of being guilty of the looting or destruction. And no blood or marriage relative of the person seeking redress is permitted to testify! Under such conditions, and in view of the fact that most of the male Jews fled and hid themselves when the outbreak occurred, many of the claims for compensation will fall to the ground for want of sufficient evidence as to the names and complicity of the actual perpetrators of the destruction.

Dr. Mutznik believes that the relief work must be continued during the coming winter, to the larger number of artisans and labour applicants. Most of the Jewish merchants and employers have fled to Odessa, Cracow, and other cities. They will not return until they are assured of safety, and in their absence those whom they employed will, in all probability, remain without work.

My appeal through the press in behalf of the violated women and girls, and for the orphans, was warmly endorsed by the Ladies’ Committee and the Rabbis. Mesdames Mutznik and Hornstein, leading members of this committee, with true matronly feeling, pleaded the exceptionally hard cases of the young girls and of the violated married women. The case of the orphans speaks for itself, and needs no advocacy apart from the cruel facts which plead so forcibly for their utter helplessness.

When visiting these little ones in their temporary shelter, and while learning from the girls and women, whom the Rabbi assembled in his house to meet me, the stories of the irreparable wrongs done them, and their fears of the future now before them, I could not help indulging in the hope that some wealthy Jewish merchant or banker in New York, London, or Paris might have the heart and head to bring himself a life’s happiness in the humane task of aiding these orphans and terribly wronged girls and women which all the wealth of all the Jews in any one of these cities could not purchase in palaces, banks, or pleasures.

A Warsaw paper having published an account of the appeal in behalf of the Kishineff sufferers, my hotel soon became a centre of attention and of supplication. Hundreds of poor creatures of both sexes came to beg to be enabled to emigrate. They had heard that the American was proposing to devote some of the money subscribed in New York and elsewhere to the task of taking a few thousand families away from the city of blood to the United States or to the Argentine. No matter what was the proposed destination, they were willing to go, if it were only to some country where Christians did not kill Jews. One petition, signed in behalf of 122 families, was presented to me to be forwarded to the American in the hope of having an early consideration of their claims.

No explanation by my most capable dragoman would disabuse the minds of these poor people of the forlorn belief that escape from a dreaded recurrence of the horrors of April might lie in such a petition.

Among my most persistent callers were two matronly-looking ladies, who also begged to be sent to America. On the first occasion they did not disclose the nature of their calling, or the extent of their losses. I pressed them on these points when they came again. One of them replied, “Our business has fallen off entirely since the riots.”

And what was the business, inquired my dragoman.

“We are midwives,” was the answer. The petition had, of course, to be refused.

London, June 6th.

A few facts concerning Kishineff will be essential to the right comprehension of the causes which led to the perpetration of the black deeds of April, and to a proper understanding of a story of deliberately plotted political crime.

The last census, that of 1897, gave to Kishineff a population of 108,296 souls. Of these over 50,000 were males. The present estimated population may be put down at or about 130,000. These are divided racially as follows: Jews, 50,000; Moldavians (Christians), 50,000; Russians, 8000, with the residue comprising Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks, Macedonians, Albanians, and Germans. These figures and estimates are given me by Dr. Kohan-Bernstein, a leading physician of the city, and are confirmed by one of the Rabbis, who holds some kind of a government position in connection with the special taxes levied on the Jews.

The Jews are thus numerically in excess of the Russians and of all other Christian sects combined, excepting the Moldavians, who are equally strong in numbers, and even more bitter in their anti-Semitic feeling than those of Russian blood.

Fully fifty per cent. of the Jews of Kishineff are artisans and labourers, and in the great majority of cases they are wretchedly poor. The stern needs of daily life, the want of bread and the shelter of a home, compel them to work for any pay that may be offered to them.

The Jewish artisan is far and away more intelligent and skilled than his Moldavian or Russian neighbour of like occupation. He is more expert in technical details, and more ambitious to do better and to perform more work for his employer. Poor as he may be he reads more newspapers, and is an all-round formidable rival to workers who dislike him for his race, and who dread him as an increasing and competing factor in the industrial world of Kishineff.

These facts will account to some extent for the part which Christian workers took in the organised riots of April.

One fact more in this connection has an important bearing upon another feature of the outbreak—the pillaging of shops and saloons. Kishineff is the capital of Bessarabia, and is its largest trading and commercial centre. There are rival Christian and Jewish interests at work in catering for the needs of so large a place, and these interests collide in competitive activity in almost every branch of business life.

There are shops, warehouses, and saloons where Christian and Jewish rivalry conflicts, and in such a combat the Gentile is nowhere, in trade competition, with the fertile and adroit Jew. Hence, there is as strong a commercial antipathy toward the unpopular Hebrew in fairly educated Russian and Moldavian circles as is found on other grounds among the anti-Semitic artisans and labourers.

These circumstances account for the complacency—to put it no stronger—with which merchants and leaders of the Christian community looked on at the pillaging of shops and the destruction of saloons which belonged to their Jewish rivals. And they also explain why saloons and stores of Jewish ownership were alone the objects of the mob’s attention; for the riot was not an affair of blind, popular fury, bent upon indiscriminate lawlessness. Nothing of the kind. It was deliberately organised and intelligently directed from start to finish by leaders who knew what they were about, and how to discriminate between Russian and Moldavian property and Semitic belongings, in the matter of looting, and between Jewish and Christian women in another and more infernal business.

Kishineff, in its central and chief business parts, is a handsome town. Its leading boulevard, Alexandra Street, would do credit to any American city. It is more than twice the width of Broadway, New York; is planted on both sides with acacia trees, and can boast of imposing public buildings, substantial shops, banks, and jewellers’ stores.

The municipal headquarters, built, like most of the prominent structures of the city, with a whitish stone, is situated near the middle of the leading thoroughfare and wears a stately and striking appearance. The streets are all wide and run as in American cities, at right angles to each other in uniform arrangement. They are nearly all planted; a feature which adds greatly to the beauty of the city, in combining the light green foliage of the acacia trees with the bright, clean look of the houses and public buildings.

The Royal Gardens and People’s Park are in the centre of the city. Military bands play each evening in the former, and attract large crowds of well-dressed citizens, officers of the garrison, youth, and particularly ladies.

The city, in its chief business and fashionable districts, has the look of a comfortable, fairly wealthy, up-to-date bourgeois centre, and a well-governed municipal community; a most unlikely place, in the eyes of a visitor, to offer itself as a theatre for one of the most abominable tragedies in modern times.

Kishineff owes its success and prosperity almost exclusively to the Jews. Thirty years ago it was little more than a rough Bessarabian village. To-day it ranks, in South Russia, next to Odessa—where there are over 200,000 of the same race—in population, commercial standing, and wealth, and all this is freely admitted by educated Russians.

Jews in Russia are compelled by law to reside inside a Pale of Settlement, or territory comprising some fifteen governments, or provinces, of western and southern Russia, extending south from the coast of the southern Baltic to the Crimea, and westward from Charkov and Smolensk to the borders of Roumania, Galicia, and Prussian Poland. The area thus embraced in the Jewish Pale is about equal to that of France, and the number of people of this section of Russia is upward of 27,000,000.

Under the ukase of 1882, which compelled Jews to leave the villages and live within the towns, these centres became crowded inside of what thus became virtual economic concentration camps.

Within these limits of legal domicile the density of Hebrew population is at the rate of some 2800 per square mile. In the non-Jewish towns of Russia the average is about 60 of urban to 1000 of rural population. Within the fifteen provinces included in the Jewish Pale, the average is close upon 230 of urban to every 1000 of country population.

The effects of this crowding of Jews into the towns of the Pale are as obvious as they are inevitable. There is a dense population, restricted by necessity and disposition to certain pursuits and occupations, in places where the economic conditions do not provide opportunities for the healthy exercise of one-fourth of the industry or abilities which could under normal conditions find opportunities for profitable employment.

There are towns in which Jewish tradesmen and artisans are 50 per cent. of the total population. They are literally penned in within these places.

This is the economic side of the problem of the Russian Jew. The political side is even more serious to the Russian administration, and here we are approaching the consideration of what was the real underlying cause of the outbreak of a month ago.

All the Jews of the Pale are not poor. Quite the contrary. Despite the restricted area allowed them, large numbers of them are wealthy through successful trading. Another and larger section exploit inferior Russian intelligence and capacity, and earn money in legally forbidden ways by making it fairly profitable for the obliging Christian to act as a shield or deputy for the legally boycotted Jew.

Saloons are owned in this way by Jews, and are worked for them by Christians.

The Jew must not own land. But he can organise a company, place a Russian in nominal headship of the concern, and in this manner make a profit out of Russian agriculture.

In many other ways the keen intelligence, the inherited racial capacity for financial undertakings, the greater natural ability and better education of the business Jew, and also of the higher artisan Hebrew section, enable them, even in the face of all the obstacles put in their way, to give their sons and daughters an education which is gradually evolving out of an oppressed and degraded race a people of progressive thought and of political aspirations, who are deemed to be a most dangerous menace to the government and administration of an autocratically ruled country.

The educated Jew in Russia is more than an accidental ally of what may be termed Russian liberal tendencies. He occupies within this huge empire a semi-penalised political and racial status.

None of the higher state schools must admit more than 5 per cent. of Jew pupils, even where, as in Kishineff, the Jews are five times more numerous than the Russians proper.

The Jew cannot buy land.

He is debarred from administrative positions, except in lower grades of employment, and while he is compelled to serve in the army, he cannot claim the usual rewards or aspire to the ordinary ambition of men who make no greater sacrifice than he in the common military service of the empire.

All these facts, disabilities, and oppressive and depressing conditions, acting upon the thoughts and ideals of a brainy people, are producing a powerful anti-Russian political force along the southwestern portion of the Tsar’s most vulnerable frontier—that bordering upon the Austrian and Germanic empires. In other words, the Jewish Pale is becoming the nursery of revolutionary Socialist ideas and the active centre of an anti-autocratic propaganda.

The riots and terrorism of April, with their attendant horrors, were deliberately planned, not by robbers or murderers, not on account of religious bigotry, but for the reasons I have just given—namely, the feeling of hostility in the minds of administrative employés to a race believed to be plotting against the Empire, combined with the jealousy of local artisans and proletarians of the cheaper, better, and pushing Hebrew workingmen, compelled by absolute necessity to earn a living within a legally circumscribed sphere of industrial activity.

Hence, on the direct incitation of the local anti-Semite Bessarabetz newspaper, edited by a Russian, who is really a Moldavian, and which is the only paper published here and read by administrative employés, Seminarists, and other enemies of Jews, it was resolved, in an organised riot, to strike terror into the Jewish community of Kishineff, with the double object of punishing what is believed to be a hostile element conspiring against the Government, and of forcing the Jews to leave the city.

Dalkey, June 9th, 1903.

The hideous realities of the actual outrages committed during the two days’ inferno of murder and outrage surpass in the naked horror of their details almost anything which the imagination could invent. I hate to return to further reference to these deeds. It has become a horrible and repugnant subject, but I convince myself that some good will come of it in tending to keep alive the sympathy of the American people in the future of the victims who escaped with life, but also with broken hearts and the outlook of a dismal future.

Meyer Weissman had a very small store in one of the poorest Jewish quarters of the city. He had lost an eye, by an accident, when young. The mob attacked and demolished his little grocery on Easter Sunday. He offered them all the money in his possession to spare his life. It was a sum of sixty roubles. The leader took the money, and then said: “Now, we want your eye; you will never again look upon a Christian child.” He implored them to kill him instead of making him blind for life. They gouged out his eye with a sharpened stick, and left him. Amidst sobs and suffering he told me his story in the Jewish Hospital.

Near the bed of poor blind Meyer Weissman was that of Joseph Shainovitch, whose head had been battered with bludgeons, and the victim left for dead. He told me that it was this same gang who killed his mother-in-law, by driving nails through her eyes into the brain. This story I refused to believe, thinking it might be born of some horrible nightmare following the poor fellow’s terrible experience. But from no less than six different sources, one of them being a Christian doctor, I learned that the facts were as stated by Joseph. Among the other witnesses were the men who dug the unfortunate woman’s grave.

In the female ward of the same hospital there were still upwards of a dozen girls and married women, when I visited the place, whose injuries were too serious to allow of their discharge. I heard their stories: at least those which could in part be related to a man.

One of the girls, aged about seventeen, was a perfect type of Jewish beauty, with a face which a painter would envy as a model for a Rachel. Her head was covered with bandages. She had been alone for three hours in the hands of a dozen men, who had killed her father and mother, and they left her for dead. A young Jew, evidently her lover, sat at her bedside while the tale of her sufferings and losses was being told.

In the next bed was a married woman, a mother of four children. She had not fully recovered consciousness, and all the events of the night of her agony were as yet not completely known to her. She, too, had been beaten and left for dead, after having been assaulted by many men.

At the Rabbi’s house, as already related, I met several more victims of the mob’s nameless infamies. One was a girl of sixteen, named Simme Zeytchik, very pretty, and childish-looking for her years. She said that all her assailants were Russians, mainly Seminarists, and told the Rabbi that fifteen of these young ruffians had outraged her.

She was one of twenty women who had sought refuge in the loft of the house No. 11 Nicolaievskai Street, and who were discovered by the mob, as were several other groups of women and girls in similar hiding-places.

I have before me a record of thirteen girls and women of ages ranging from seventeen to forty-eight, who were assaulted by from two to twenty men, and in many cases left for dead.

Six young girls who are known to have undergone similar violence were ashamed to come to the Rabbi’s house to tell their tale of wrong and ruin.

The foregoing list does not exhaust the number of women who were subjected to the greatest wrong that can be done to their sex.

All house-breaking and robbery were suspended in the night-time during the outbreak, and the younger men of the thirty or forty gangs of rioters went in search of the hidden girls and married women. Those who can do so naturally hide the narrative of their wrong, and suffer in silence. The actual number of the mob’s victims in the most ruffianly of their crimes will therefore never be fully known.

Apart from the desperate and hopeless efforts of the forty murdered men to save wives and daughters, and the solitary attempt at organised resistance described in a previous letter, the 10,000 or 12,000 Jewish men of Kishineff offered little or no resistance to the 1500 or 2000 Moldavian and Russian assailants of their women, homes, and property. Ninety per cent. of them hid themselves, or fled to safer parts in and out of the city for refuge.

A thousand determined men, even in spite of the action of the Chief of Police in virtually protecting the mob, could have saved many lives and averted most of the outrages on the women and girls. One plucky little Jew, Leon Koulberg by name, a member of the Kishineff Fire Brigade, with only a few helpers, faced a band of fifty-six Moldavians and drove them from his district.

Many Russians of both sexes nobly exerted themselves to protect the women from the mob. But from no quarter in the city, and from no source, did I learn of any attempt being made by Russian or Moldavian clergymen (with one solitary exception) to perform a similar Christian duty.

Instances of incredible baseness on the part of the Moldavians were given me by various witnesses.

Mordka Mynduik was escaping from a gang of ruffians in the Skulanska Rogatka suburb. He was invited into a Moldavian neighbour’s house, and murdered by those who had offered him hospitality and protection.

Israel Ullman fell a victim to a similar act of Moldavian perfidy.

Three men and a woman with a child were fleeing from pursuers, and were directed to take a certain course over a field towards the railway station. They ran into an ambush, and two of the men were killed, the woman and child, however, escaping.

Another woman and her child sought the house of a converted Jew for safety, after her home had been demolished. The “Christian” Jew holds a position under the City Government. He knew the frightened woman well, and had been on terms of the closest intimacy with her family before climbing into office as the reward of his “conversion.” He shut the door in the face of the terrified wife of his former friend.

What impressed one most painfully in Kishineff, after the narratives of outrage, was the seeming indifference of the mass of the Russian and Moldavian people over the whole infernal business. They had to recognise the great injury done to the city by the riots and their results. That was too patent to be ignored. But, with the exception of a comparatively small number of Christians, already alluded to, there appeared to be neither regret nor remorse among the citizens generally over the deeds which had riveted the world’s attention upon them as a community capable of perpetrating acts so base and inhuman. This callous bearing I attribute mainly to the tactics of the anti-Semitic press, combined with the amazing silence maintained by the Greek Church prelates and clergy in relation to these crimes.

The Bessarabetz and Znamya, the only papers circulating in Kishineff, audaciously blamed the Jews for what had occurred, and carefully abstained from reproducing the comments of foreign journals upon the rioting at Eastertide. By this means the people were prevented realising the extent and character of the external indignation aroused by the reports of the events of April, and they were left by these means, or by their own indifference, a community apparently unconcerned about the massacres and infamies which had found victims only among Jews.

As far as I could learn, there had not been a solitary word spoken or act done by any of the prominent ecclesiastical authorities of Kishineff which could be construed, even charitably, into a condemnation of the killing of harmless men and the ravishing of innocent girls beneath the shadows of the many Christian churches which adorn the capital of Bessarabia. The sufferers were only Jews.

Each evening during my stay in this soulless city large crowds gathered in the Royal Gardens to enjoy the music of the fine Dragoon Band which performed Polish polkas, and the Hungarian “Chardash” and Russian marches in faultless fashion. Throngs of gaily dressed ladies, under the escort of the young officers of the garrison, were always in evidence, along with students from the colleges and Seminarists supplied by the religious high schools of the city. It was fashionable Kishineff’s rendezvous for evening enjoyment, recreation, and social gossip, and the tables of the cafés rang with laughter when the groups of visitors were not drinking in the music of some operatic selection or of an inviting waltz from the band.

Not a single Jew had been seen in this place of popular resort since April 19th.

One evening my dragoman called my attention to a group of young Seminarists sitting at a table near to ours. They were boisterous in their merriment, and appeared to be enjoying the recital of some unusually piquant incident or adventure, amidst the smoke of their cigarettes and the relish of their coffee.

“That gang,” observed my dragoman, “judging from what I have heard some of them say, must have been among those who violated the girls and women in the loft of No. 11 Nicolaievskai Street, where Simme Zeytchik was outraged by a number of young students.”

It was only that morning we had seen this girl of sixteen at the Rabbi’s house, and heard her story.

The Mayor of Kishineff, M. Karl Schmidt, received me most courteously when I called upon him in the fine municipal buildings on the Alexandra boulevard. He has been burgomaster of the city for a quarter of a century, almost in unbroken succession. A man of some sixty summers, of tall and commanding appearance and of cultured manner, he impresses you at once with the feeling that you are in the presence of a strong, capable, and upright personality.

He willingly accorded me an interview, but answered my questions in a manner suggesting a reserve which was more official than personal:

“What was the origin of the outbreak, Mr. Mayor?”

“The writings in the anti-Semitic press, and their effect upon the minds of ignorant people who dislike the Jews both for their race and religion. The alleged murder by Jews of the Christian boy at Doubossar and of a girl here in Kishineff, who committed suicide, inflamed the populace. When the real facts were published, the truth was believed to be an invention to cover up a Jewish crime, and the frequenters of cafés and the workingmen, who are hostile to the Jews, remained convinced that Christian blood had been actually obtained in this way for ritual purposes.”

“Do you find the Jews of the city a turbulent or provocative people?”

“No. They resemble most other people, in having good and bad numbered among them. There has been nothing whatever in their behaviour, as far as my many years’ experience of Kishineff goes, to explain or in any way to palliate the attacks made upon them. The great mass of them are very poor, but they are most patient and never disorderly.”

“Have they any secret or revolutionary society here?”

“Nothing, in my belief, worth serious attention. Some of the younger Jews call themselves Socialists, but there are not many, and I do not think they need cause the authorities any serious anxiety.”

“Is there any similar organisation, under any name, among the Russian or Moldavian workingmen?”

“There is some kind of a society which scatters pamphlets about and things of that kind from time to time. Its members were among the rioters and against the Jews.”

“Do you take the reports of the riots in the matters of the killed, wounded, and looting as having been exaggerated?”

“No. I am sorry to say there were more people killed than the forty-three reported deaths. A few bodies have been found since the last report was issued. The number of persons wounded is difficult to find out. Many poor Jews who want to obtain a share of the relief funds declare they were injured, but they carry no traces of wounds or hurts, when examined. The accounts of the destruction of dwellings and stores have not been overstated. Enormous damage has been done, and both the city and the actual sufferers will feel the great loss for years to come. I understand you have been visiting the scenes of the disorders, and you can judge for yourself as to the extent of the damage and mischief done.”

“Do you anticipate any recurrence of the trouble on the Emperor’s day?” (Date of the Tsar’s Coronation, May 27th.)

“I have seen the Vice-Governor on the matter, owing to the rumours you mention, and I am satisfied he will act promptly and severely if any attempt of the kind should be made. He will post soldiers at all points of danger near where the Jews reside, and these will be under officers who will have orders to fire on any persons who may try to renew the riots.”

“Is it true, as reported, that the police were, to some extent, participators in the Easter outrages?”

“That is not an easy nor yet a pleasant question to answer. I have no control of any kind over the police force of the city, and I was not a witness of the disgraceful events in April. Some loot was, I believe, found in the possession of a few policemen, and this fact has given rise to the charge to which you refer. But it is most unfair to impute to all the force of the city and to its officers conduct so disgraceful, owing to the very few who were mixed up with the disturbers and their looting.”

“What forces, military and police, were in the city in April?”

“Probably about seven or eight thousand troops and three hundred police and officers.”

“Surely, there were in these forces means enough to have dealt promptly and effectively with the bands of rioters?”

The Mayor showed evidence of painful hesitation before replying to this question, but ultimately said:

“Oh, there was a most lamentable and unfortunate misunderstanding!” Whereupon he politely handed me another cigarette, to indicate that it would be no use to pursue that subject any further.

“Can you suggest any remedy to prevent these anti-Semitic outbursts, Mr. Mayor?”

“I fear not. The Government measures promulgated, from time to time, with regard to the Jews, are deemed necessary for the preservation of order. I cannot discuss the worth or wisdom of these measures, but I can understand why the Jews should think them unjust.”

“One question more, sir: Do you think that the Zionist movement offers any feasible or effective solution of the question?”

“As the Mayor of Kishineff, I would consider the loss of the Jewish community as a commercial calamity for the city. But, I confess, if I were a Jew, I would be a Zionist.”

THE official explanation from the Russian Government was made by M. de Plehve, Russian Minister of the Interior, to Mr. Arnold White. The following is the full text of the document, which was sent to Mr. White in the English language, and published in The Times, June 13, 1903:

“Russia’s agricultural and labour population is ill at ease, living common life with Jewish inhabitants of wide-developed commercial instinct. Hence constant antagonism, material racial religious character coming to verge of frenzy at least possible occasion. Strained relations between Russians and Jews of Bessarabia were made the worst by fact of finding outlying village murdered Christian boy, murder attributed by population to ritual Jewish habits. Official denials ritual murder not given credit by peasants, attributing other murders of Christians in towns Kiev and Kishineff likewise to Jews. On Easter Day, on market place of Kishineff, workers holiday-making saw a Jew proprietor of carousing machine strike a Christian women, who fell to the ground, letting go her infant baby. This incident was nearest cause of outburst. Workers began breaking windows, pulling down Jewish stores as sign of protest. Police, which always gives much to be desired in provincial towns, failed to make efficacious intervention, the many thousand mass of onlookers and holiday-makers approving riot, hindering policemen’s actions. After demonstrators came plunderers’ outbreak, lasting from five in the afternoon to ten evening, and leaving nine Jewish bodies on place. Night brought disturbance to end what goes far to prove momentous character of outbreak letting loose popular passions with strength natural forces. On Monday morning Jews wishing intimidate and inflict punishment on Christian workers, began on market place, assembling in groups armed sticks and weapons; Jews being more numerous had best of it in two first encounters, and a Christian was seen to fall, receiving bullet wound. This called forth popular passion in all its abject force and abomination. Russian peasants driven to frenzy, excited by race religious hatred, under influence of alcohol, being worse than South Americans lynching negroes. Unfortunately Governor of Bessarabia did not make appearance in person. Easter Sunday and Monday gave over command to military men what he had no right of doing, as he, in consequence, had put the police aside, and on the other hand, left the military forces without actual guidance. Troops can take towns by assault, but cannot carry out police duties without special instructions. In the end, the town being divided in districts, with a special military command in each, the disturbances ceased on Monday evening. By this time the Minister of the Interior had ordered by wire to proclaim martial law, and—an unprecedented fact—had sent the Director of Police Department to investigate as to the responsibilities of local officials. In consequence the Governor, the chief of the town police, and some other officials were dismissed outright. Many hundreds of rioters are in prison with hard work in the Siberian mines awaiting them after trial. The Minister of the Interior has issued a circular to the Governors all over Russia authorising them to make immediate use of firearms in case of anti-Jewish disturbances.

“The Russian Government is the first to disapprove of such horrid acts of violence, but it cannot, in compliance with the requests of the Radical and revolutionary Press, give the Jews new rights of citizenship, as this is sure to drive the Russian population to new excesses against the Jews, who are hated by peasants with such extraordinary force.”

A further statement was made by M. de Plehve to Mr. White[6] in reply to a communication calling his Excellency’s attention to the statement “from our Russian correspondents” in The Times of June 6th, that General Von Raaben, the Governor of Kishineff, telegraphed three times to the Minister of the Interior during the riots for permission to use force before he received any reply:

IT will be observed that M. de Plehve ignores altogether the part played by the Bessarabetz in the period which led up to the massacres. He makes mention of the fact that he sent the chief Director of Police to investigate the origin of the assassinations and the conduct of the officials. But he omits all mention of the petition presented to the Director-General Lopoukhine, in behalf of the relations of victims, in which the responsibility of this paper was clearly demonstrated in no less than thirty-five marked copies, handed to the Director-General, containing in citations to murder the Jews, and to drive them from Russia.

M. de Plehve next asserts that the “nearest cause of the outburst” was the striking of a Christian woman on Easter Day in the market place “by a Jew proprietor of a carousing machine.” Here again the Minister has been badly informed by his subordinates.

I sought for and found the proprietor of this identical carousing machine (a merry-go-round). He was not a Jew, but a Christian, German by nationality, and Reinhold Mergert by name. He told me he saw no Christian or other woman struck by any Jew on the occasion, while no such act was committed by himself or anyone in his employment.

Had any such injury been done to a Christian woman by a Jew, would the carousing machine have been spared by the mobs which wrecked seven hundred Jewish homes, and five or six hundred Jewish shops the same day? Or would the Jew be alive to tell the story?

I saw this very machine in full swing, with its loads of laughing children, on several days during my stay in the city.

“Workers then began breaking windows, pulling down Jewish stores, as sign of protest,” continues M. de Plehve, in his official explanation.

My information, gathered on the spot from eye-witnesses—Russian and Jewish—tells a far different story. It is this:

A few nights before the outbreak, members of the society organised by the Bessarabetz, a large number of Moldavian and Russian artisans, and several Seminarists and students, assembled in the “Moscow” hall. Speeches were made in which it was declared that the Tsar had given permission to kill Jews for a period of three days, beginning on the coming Sunday!

The conveners of this meeting were the leaders of the mobs of Sunday, April 19th, and Monday, the 20th.

That there had been plan, premeditation, and organisation for all this, there is not a shadow of doubt. It was no sudden uprising, as M. de Plehve had been informed, but a carefully prepared and officered arrangement to strike terror into the “Jewish Socialists” of Kishineff, and, through them, into the alleged propagandists of revolutionary doctrines throughout the cities and towns of the Pale, from Odessa to Warsaw.

One more fact establishing the case of preparation:

A fortnight before the riots the band of thirty Albanians referred to in Letter IV arrived in Kishineff. They were strangers and evil-looking. They all took part in the riots, and the mutilations of a child and of two of the four Jews murdered at 13 Asia Street, Bender Rogatka district, were the work of these imported brigands. They were not imprisoned after the riot. They were expelled the city.

The various bands of rioters referred to above proceeded with absolute impunity, in presence of the police, to destroy Jewish homes and smash and loot Jewish shops, until darkness set in, on the Sunday night. In places where Christian citizens lived among Hebrews, a cross marked in black was found on the front of the house, or an ikon was displayed in a window. Not one of the dwellings thus indicated as non-Jewish was injured. I counted over a hundred such houses marked and protected in this manner during my stay in the city. At the junction of Podolian Street and Armenian Street, looking out upon an open space, with a police station forty paces away, and a military barracks some two or three hundred yards distant, the Feldstein premises were in possession of the looters for fully five hours, owing to the trouble they found in breaking open Mr. Feldstein’s safe, where they found fifteen thousand roubles. All this time police and soldiers were in the street, actually looking on at the “sport.” The looters were grateful for this official neutrality, and brought up out of the Feldstein cellars bottles of champagne which they shared freely with the officers of the peace and a few of the soldiers, one leader of the gang, mounting the roof of the saloon, and asking the crowd of spectators to drink with him “the health of Kroushevan, the Editor of the Bessarabetz, and terror of the Jews.”

Before this festive toast had been proposed the incident of the meat took place, which had such a fiendish influence upon the subsequent proceedings of these patronised ruffians.[7]

The attack on the Feldstein saloon and home occurred near the dinner hour, and some meat was being prepared for the family meal. The family fled, or rather was rescued by a humane gendarme, a neighbour, when the mob assailed the premises. The rioters found the meat alluded to in the kitchen, whereupon the leader of the band fixed it upon the end of his stick, mounted the house-top (a building of one story), and, holding up the meat to the gaze of the people and police below, shouted, “Behold the remains of a Christian child which we found in the home of the rich Jew, Feldstein!”

By eleven o’clock that night ten Jews had been murdered, and hundreds of homes and shops broken into and looted.

Over twenty thousand roubles’ worth of costly wines was destroyed in the Feldstein premises. After eleven at night dozens of vehicles were seen carting away goods and property from places visited by the mobs, and articles of furniture, which had been flung into the streets. The vehicles were owned and led, in every instance, by virtuous anti-Semites.

During all these hours General Von Raaben, the Governor, remained indoors. No orders of any kind were issued by him, or by the Vice-Governor, either to the police or military. The mobs were left in possession of the city, with not alone the indirect encouragement by the non-action of the authorities, in face of assassinations and looting, but with the knowledge that the head of the police of the city, Tchemzenkov, or “Baroda,” as he was popularly called, had been seen driving round the streets during the day, smoking, as if thoroughly enjoying the whole infernal saturnalia of sanguinary ruffianism.

Seeing that there was no protection offered them by the authorities, some Jews organised themselves during the night of Sunday, and on the “sport” being renewed at eight on Monday morning, they gathered, to the number of 150, at the New Bazaar, and easily drove away one or two of the gangs, one shot only having been fired, which inflicted a slight wound upon a rioter. Instantly the police and military were on the scene; the Jews were dispersed, and their leaders arrested and lodged in the prison.

The deeds of Sunday were more than surpassed, in character and in number, on the second day. Over thirty more men, women, and children were butchered; some of the unfortunate victims being mutilated in a manner more barbarous than anything recorded against the customs of African savages. Then, at the hour of seven on Monday evening, the city was declared in a state of siege, and the military cleared the centre of the town of the murderous bands in a few moments. But only to drive them to the Bender Rogatka, Skulanska Rogatka, and other districts and suburbs, where they sought out the women and girls who were concealed in lofts and in other hiding-places the previous day.

It is not possible to describe the outrages perpetrated during this night. Women and girls who went through it all told me their stories in the house of the Rabbi and elsewhere, and it was impossible to doubt the statements which, in depicting the infamies resorted to by “Christian” men, recorded their own sufferings and dishonour.

One statement must, however, be put on record. A number of women and girls, some twenty in all, were discovered concealed in a loft at No. 11 Nicolaievskai Street. For four hours the moral pupils of the Bessarabetz, and of the religious and other colleges of Kishineff, held their victims in this dark place; several of these being girls under seventeen. A married woman, who succeeded, after being violated by six ruffians, in breaking away from her captors, ran to the nearest police station, and implored an officer to rescue the women, including her daughter, Simme, aged sixteen. She was driven from the station and told that “the Jews are only getting what they deserve.” The woman’s name is Chane Zeytchik, and the gallant officer in question is one Maretzky.

There were many exceptions, however, among the police; the dictates of decent humanity asserting themselves where the connivance of their chief had outraged their sense of moral manhood. Among these was officer Sloutschevsky, of one of the Bender Rogatka streets, who with twelve men drove a mob of seventy out of his district. Several artillery officers off duty also helped to save families and women. These instances of Samaritan kindness were gratefully mentioned to me by both men and women who had witnessed such acts. Among the comparatively few Christians who were conspicuous in this humane service were the citizens Dorianov, Demtchenks, Dr. Doroschevsky, Dr. Wolsky, the pope Laschkov, and M. Georgior. Many Russian women also saved the girls of their Jewish neighbours by giving them shelter in their homes.

The mobs were composed mainly of Moldavian and Russian workingmen; the former being five-sevenths of the whole. The Albanian contingent has already been referred to. A few Macedonian refugees, and some Bulgarians, were also among the gangs. All the accounts given to me agreed in one particular—that the worst crimes were the work of the Moldavians. In the murders inside the carpenter’s shed in the Skulanska Rogatka suburb, all the assassins were Moldavians resident in the very district. The sister-in-law of little Feya Wouller[8] told me that the Moldavian father and son who led the mob in this work, and in the murder of her husband, who tried to save his little sister, were walking about free during my stay in Kishineff, having been released from prison after a few days’ detention.

A brace of other assassins, a car-driver and his son, who were concerned in no less than four murders, were pointed out to me in the streets!

One feature of the massacres is most significant, and is not mentioned by M. de Plehve in his official account, namely: All the Jews who were killed, with one exception, were workingmen, regular or casual; carpenters, masons, smiths, clerks, and a few very poor jobbing dealers. The exception was one Galantor, a cattle dealer, who was known to have fifteen thousand roubles in his possession. He was assassinated and robbed by the driver and his son alluded to above.

The women and girls who suffered were the wives and daughters of Jewish artisans. Those females who were killed were also, like the male victims, of the same class. A few young ladies of richer families suffered too, but their names, for obvious reasons, were not made known to their families. No rich Jews were killed or wounded.

The leaders of the gangs, in almost every instance, were Seminarists, disguised as workingmen. There were two students from Odessa, sons of wealthy Kishineff families, prominent among the captains of the mobs; but to the seminaries of the city belonged the shame and dishonour of having contributed mostly all the directors, guides, and active instigators of the two-days’ carnival of crime, lust, and looting. Employés of the post office and telegraph departments were along among the rioters, but chiefly for loot.

Among the organisers of the plot, but not in the actual execution of it, were a notary of the city, an engineer, a well-known wealthy citizen, two minor officers, two sons of a rich merchant, and members of the staff of the Bessarabetz.

None of these had been arrested when I left Kishineff, on the 30th of May last.

The question of official responsibility has been raised, and a circular alleged to have been issued by M. de Plehve has been published which would tend to connect the Minister of the Interior with an intimate knowledge of the intended outbreak. No one in Kishineff with whom I came in contact knew of any such circular. Charges of complicity were freely made against the Government by many leading Jews, but no proofs of any kind were adduced. These charges were entirely based upon the culpable inaction of Governor Von Raaben, and the all but active participation of the head of the City Police in the riots, along with the well-known anti-Semitic record and feeling of the Vice-Governor, Ostrogoff.

Official responsibility might be deduced from these facts, but I failed to discover any evidence, outside these circumstances, which could even indirectly bring home to the Government the charge of guilty connivance in the Bessarabetz plot.

The Governor was, beyond all doubt, the person most to blame for the crimes which were allowed to disgrace the capital of his province and a civilised city during two whole days. And he was forewarned in time of what was coming.

Ten days before Easter he was waited upon by leading Jewish citizens and his attention called to the incendiary appeals of the Bessarabetz, in connection with the murder of the boy at Doubossar. General Von Raaben assured them that they need not dread any disturbance, as he would not hesitate to employ all the military force at his disposal in order to preserve law and order. He fulfilled this promise on Easter Sunday and Monday by refusing to leave his house during the forty-eight hours in which the slaughter of forty-five victims of the anti-Semitic crusade was carried out.

It has been alleged that the Governor, on realising the gravity of the first day’s events, wired to St. Petersburg for authority to declare a state of siege. This I believe to be untrue. M. de Plehve’s explicit statements, as given in his second communication to Mr. Arnold White, dispose of this allegation. In face of the clear language of the Criminal Code it would be an absurd and unnecessary proceeding on the part of the Governor.

Clause 340 of this Code, and Clauses 1 and 8 of the supplement to Section 316, of Vol. II., give, I am informed, the fullest powers to the administration of any province or city to take all necessary measures for quelling riots or disturbances which threaten to become a menace to life or property. There could, therefore, be no excuse or ambiguity in the language of the law necessitating such a message, as that alleged, to the central Government. What happened, in all probability, was this: Someone in lower authority, seeing the criminal neglect of the Governor in presence of such a situation as was developed on Monday morning, may have telegraphed to M. de Plehve an account of what was taking place. This would necessarily have to be verified, in reply to messages from the Minister, and in this way, as he relates in his despatch to Mr. Arnold White, he ordered martial law to be proclaimed on Monday evening; unfortunately after most of the murders and other outrages had been committed.

In an official sense only M. de Plehve is answerable for the conduct of his subordinates, as all Ministers are, under similar circumstances, even in constitutionally governed countries; but without evidence, which has not yet been forthcoming from any quarter, I refuse to credit accusations of direct cognisance of, or complicity in, the plot which owed its origin to the indications of a powerful local paper; its plan and purpose to local anti-Semites; and in the execution of which several minor officials of the local administration, some police officers, employés of public departments, students, Seminarists, and Moldavian and Russian artisans were notoriously engaged. In character it was a savage anti-Semitic outbreak, and in purpose a terrorising demonstration against the Jews as advocates of Socialism and suspected enemies of the Tsar’s Government.

M. de Plehve’s borrowed version of the origin and objects of the outbreak is the concoction of incriminated local officials, and members of the Bessarabetz staff. It is therefore, and on that account, prejudiced and untrue.

(I) Petition addressed by the Jews of Kishineff to the Director-General of the Police Department sent from St. Petersburg by M. de Plehve to investigate the causes of the massacres.

To His Excellency the Director of the Police Department:

We, the numerous Jewish inhabitants of the town of Kishineff, having suffered from an inhuman and sanguinary outburst which resulted in unprecedented plundering on the part of an unrestrained mob on the 6th and 7th (19th and 20th) of April, perceive in the arrival of your Excellency into our town an unmistakable sign that the Supreme Government takes an interest in the causes responsible for the sad event, and in the conditions which made the occurrences assume such terrible proportions. In this case we, the Jewish population of the town of Kishineff, are convinced that your Excellency will not refuse to listen to our complaints as sufferers.

It is impossible, in our opinion, to attribute the causes of the present outbreak to the economical exploitation of the Christians by the Jewish inhabitants. Hitherto there has been no friction between Jews and Christians, in Bessarabia in general and in Kishineff in particular. This state of affairs is explained partly by the peaceful character of the local population, partly by the favourable economic condition of the province. The result has been that for the last twenty years there has been no collision whatever between the two groups of the population in the province of Bessarabia; and whilst in the South and Southwest of Russia several outbreaks against the Jews have occurred, peace and order reigned at Kishineff.

When in the eighties the whole South was ablaze with attacks against the Jews, not a single spark found its way into Bessarabia. During all those years the province suffered on several occasions from failure of crops, and yet the Christians never thought of attributing the cause of economical troubles to their Jewish neighbours. The present year, following upon a very good one for Bessarabia, could offer no reason whatever for hostile feelings between Jews and Christians on economical ground.

We are therefore of opinion that the economical question must be entirely excluded from a consideration of the recent massacres. Not only does the rich and fertile province of Bessarabia secure an easy existence for every kind of work, but it is also quite free from the vagabond element of the rabble in seaports, from whom the rioters are usually recruited. The recent outbreaks, unequalled even in the history of attacks on the Jews, are so entirely out of harmony with the usual social life and habits of the province, that we must necessarily look for the reasons not in the relations existing between Jews and Christians, but in special events which have taken place during the last few years, and in certain occurrences immediately preceding the outbreak. Among such events we count, in the first instance, the influence of the local press, the only representative of which is the Bessarabetz. This paper has been established for over five years. Before its existence there was no local organ in the province (with the exception of the short-lived Bessarabsky Viestnik). Thus the Bessarabetz was bound to begin its activity upon virgin soil, and its influence was, for this very reason, considerable from the commencement. In the second year of its existence the paper began a systematic campaign of Jew-baiting, which took a much more monstrous form than that in any other paper. The Bessarabetz evidently made a special feature of Jew-baiting. We could quote articles which plainly incite the mob to exterminate the Jews. The local population, with only one paper, the Bessarabetz, at its disposal, the Censor having refused to authorise another organ, were told day by day that “the Jews are enemies,” and that “the Jews must be destroyed.”

The local Censor, in the person of the administrative power, evidently found such a tendency useful from some other point of view, otherwise his attitude remains quite incomprehensible. It naturally followed that the average reader, and especially the half-educated mass, had in the end to adopt the views of the press which told them that the extermination of the Jews was not only desirable but also possible. This is one phase of the state of affairs,—the preparatory stage, consisting in the endeavour to influence the local population towards one end and in one particular direction. The absence of any other local organs, the attitude of the Censor, and the daily activity of several individuals under the leadership of the editor of the Bessarabetz, helped forward the movement. There is hardly a number of the paper which did not contain an attack on the Jews. Phrases like “death to the Jews,” “all the Jews must be killed,” were suggested regularly as the means of solving the Jewish question. Being the only local organ the Bessarabetz is read in all the taverns and teashops, and it is evident to what an extent this paper could foster the hatred of the Christians towards the Jews and how all-pervading its influence upon the passions of human nature must have been.

In order to convince his readers of the necessity of solving the Jewish question, especially in the spirit advocated by the paper, the editor of the Bessarabetz availed himself of the circumstances, inexplicable at the beginning, attending the murder of a lad living in Doubossar. As insinuatingly as possible he attributed the disappearance of the lad to ritual murder by the Jews, and to the alleged requirement of Christian blood. The official denial of the accusation by the competent judicial authorities was purposely worded in such a way as to be only half convincing.

All these circumstances, together with the general attitude of the Bessarabetz, could not but create such a state of mind in the mob that one stone thrown into a Jewish window was sufficient to call forth a regular attack. We are unable to trace the source whence came the circulars read in the taverns and according to which: “the Tsar had ordered the extermination of the Jews during the three days of Easter.”

We must, however, remark that under the conditions existing, it was impossible for the mob not to consider these circulars as the logical sequel to the campaign of the Bessarabetz extending over a course of years.

If we now turn to the lesson which the population of Kishineff could take from the action of the local administrative authorities towards the Jews, we see that the mass could not but come to the conclusion that what was unlawful with regard to any other section of the inhabitants, was legal and permissible where Jews were concerned. These acts include the expulsion of Jews from various localities, subsequently recognised as unjust by the Senate; and the actions of individuals, as, for instance, the Pristav Von Oglio.

The Jewish population, becoming aware long before the festivals of the attitude of the crowd and of the dangers that threatened them, addressed themselves through their representatives to the Governor of the province, and asked him to take the necessary measures to protect them and their property. The Governor gave them a reply of a very assuring nature, relying upon which the Jews considered it needless to think of self-defence.

Under these circumstances the Easter festival approached with danger feared by all the population. It was talked of publicly and openly; it was no secret even to the authorities. Strangely enough, however, not only did the local government take no preparatory measures against a possible outbreak, but even when the attack began it neglected to take the steps within its power which would have prevented the massacres from assuming unheard-of proportions, and of which it is impossible to speak without feelings of horror and pity. Before the very eyes of the police almost incredible havoc was worked upon human victims, and cruelties committed unequalled in the history of Russia during the past few decades. The military power remained inactive and, for reasons altogether incomprehensible, the local government did not avail itself of the rights and privileges accorded to it in such cases by the § 340 of the Criminal Code and by § 1 and § 8 of the additions to § 316. Remaining unmoved itself, it kept inactive the military forces and thus encouraged the mob. The latter, perceiving the passive attitude of the authorities, soon ceased breaking the windows and took to sacking houses and shops, and finally to murder and violation.

In their complaints addressed by the sufferers to the public prosecutor, they pointed to cases where the police encouraged the rioters by the words: “Kill the Jews!” (Byei Zhidoff!). Jews who had armed themselves in self-defence were soon disarmed by the police. The result of such an unheard-of state of affairs has been the loss of 45 lives, with 86 dangerously wounded and 500 slightly wounded, and the violation of women and children—in a word, all the horrors of a massacre.

It is not astonishing that when some of the rioters were arrested they expressed surprise, asking: “Why they were being arrested, since it had been permitted to kill the Jews?” There was an instance in which the mob was engaged over eight hours plundering one house, situated in a populous street, without being stopped, although the sufferers applied for help to all the authorities. Only towards five o’clock in the afternoon of the 7th (20th) of April, when the military were called upon to check the riot, did the rabble cease its terrible work.

The horrors and crimes committed have brought about a state of things which, offering no guarantee as far as life and property are concerned, prevents the inhabitants from resuming their peaceful occupations. The people, deprived of their homes and property, are trembling for their lives. The losses cannot be exactly estimated, but they amount to several millions of roubles, and the fire that has broken out in Kishineff is spreading all over the province. The Jewish population therefore trusts that your Excellency will restore order and tranquillity and protect the Jewish inhabitants from the dangers threatening their lives and property. The arrival of your Excellency into our town has already inspired us with the hope that definite and energetic measures will be taken.

 

(II) List of the killed and those that died from wounds in the Hospital.

1. Seltzer, Michel Josiphov.

2. Makhlin, Moses Chaskelev, 45 years, Asia Street, No. 13, killed by a bootmaker; his daughter was also killed; murderers armed with hammers.

3. Berladsky, Hosea Abramovitz, Asia Street, No. 13, had hidden himself in the attic, and was thrown into the street.

4. Kainarsky, Kopel Davidovitz, 60 years old. His grandsons know the murderer. The sons are in the hospital. Kainarsky was killed in the slaughter-house; he lived in the Mountzeskaya road. His money was taken from him and his abdomen was opened and filled with feathers.

5. Tounik, Jacob Elchunov, killed in his own house.

6. Kogan, Abraham Routor, killed in the slaughter-house; was a dealer in fowls.

7. Menduk, Mottel Davidovitz, shop-keeper in the Mountzeskaya Street, killed in the slaughter-house in the stables; wife and children in Berlin (?) in very poor circumstances.

8. Ullman, Israel Yacoblewitz, wine-shop proprietor near the botanical gardens; wife and children in Berlin.

9. Shalistal, Israel Leiservitz.

10. Baranovitz, Benja Shimenov, lived in Gostinaya Street, No. 33. With him in the same house 8 men were killed.

11. Fanarnei, Eiss Davidovitz (?); lived near the slaughter-house. The daughter Fliga is in the hospital, and is ignorant of the father’s death.

12. Salapter, Ben-zion Leibov, lived in Gostinaya Street, No. 33; killed; the roof was torn off by the mob who killed Galantor, cattle dealer, and robbed him of 1500 roubles, and others with clubs.

13. Goldiss, Chaim Leibov.

14. Chaskelevitz, David Nisselev, smith; killed together with his grandmother. His sister, 12 years old (violated), has since died in the hospital.

15. Wouller, Leinha; married, no children; killed defending his sister Feya, aged 13, who was violated and killed; wife now at home.

16. Liss, Hirsch Yankelev, killed in the courtyard; lived at the corner of Gostinaya Street, No. 2; dealer in bread, etc. Son was in the hospital, student of the commercial school.

17. Krupnik, Idel; lived in Krovskaya Street, No. 52.

18. Krupnik, Isaac, son of the former.

19. Drachmann, David Moisuv; baker, worked in the bakery of Silberstein.

20. Greenspoon, Mordecai; killed with a knife. The murderers mutilated the body.

21. Byeletzky, Isaac David Mendelev.

22. Kantor, Joseph Abramovitz; joiner, lived in Gostinaya Street, No. 33, 28 years old, married.

23. Bolgar, Hirsch Chaimov; commission agent at the railway station; killed in the courtyard; married, 8 children.

24. Nissenson, Chaim Nissinov, formerly a bookkeeper. Died in the hospital the following day, in consequence of blows received on the head with clubs; he was in a terrible state.

25. Urrmann, Samuel Baruch, died in the hospital.

26. Weinstein, Abraham; bootmaker, 47 years old; died in the hospital.

27. Kiegel, Moshe Samuel; lived in Ismailovsk Street, shopkeeper, 27 years old; married, no children.

28. Brachmann, Aaron Isaacov; his wife is now in the hospital.

29. Rosenfeld, Isaac Yankelev.

30. Greenberg, Joseph Hirsch Danilov. Lived in Nicolaievskai Street, No. 33.

31. Charidon, David Abrahamov, brought in a box (to hospital or cemetery?) with parts of his body cut off; single.

32. Kodja (?), Beila Leiserovna.

33. Katzap, Rose Falikovna; lived in Gostinaya Street, No. 33; killed in the yard; lived with her son.

34. Papagei (?), Chaja Sarah Abramovna.

35. Berger, Itlia, 52 years old; had come on a visit to Kishineff.

36. Spivak, Pinya Isaacov.

37. Fishmann, Simeon; 6 months old; smothered whilst the mother defended herself.

38. Michel Shaev Lashkoff.

39. Wolowitz, Kalmann, 60 years old; died in the hospital.

40. Kiegelmann, Chaya Leah, 38 years old, died in the hospital; daughter employed in the free reading room in the professional school.

[This list is not complete. It was probably prepared soon after the massacres. A few dead bodies have been found since the first lists were compiled.—M. D.]

 

(III) Extracts from a report upon the outrages by two Christian ladies.

Seltzer. Gostinaya Street, No. 75. His daughter rushed to the police station, asking for help. The police replied: “We shall do nothing.” The father escaped, but was caught by the crowd and killed; the policeman who took him to the hospital trampled him under his feet.

The Jews assembled on Monday, and armed themselves in self-defence, but the police officer, Dobroselsky, ordered them to disarm.

Makhlin. Asiatskaya Street, No. 13. Whilst the crowd was at its murderous work in this place, the Jews addressed themselves to the military, asking for help. The reply was: “We have no orders.” About 300 Jews assembled near the barracks, when suddenly a drunken sergeant (feldwebel) rushed in, calling out to the Jews: “Dogs, I shall kill all of you.” The Jews rushed away, frightened, and fell into the hands of the mob.

Makhlin, Berladsky, Greenspoon, and Nissenson were killed.

The daughter of Berladsky was thrown down from the attic.

The daughter of Makhlin had the skin of her finger torn off, together with the rings.

Greenspoon. (The following is told by his wife.) She had hidden herself, together with two little children and a neighbour, in a shed. When her husband was being beaten in the yard she rushed out to defend him, but one ruffian struck the child in the face and pushed her back into the shed. She found the dead body of her husband only on the following morning, in a neighbouring yard. In the same house there were wine vaults, and the crowd drank, shouted, and danced upon the corpses.

Myntsheskaya Road. Forty families lived here.

Munduk.

Meier Weismann.

Kogan, Abraham, was running towards the town to save himself, when he was caught by the crowd and struck upon the head. His wife, who was with him, was caught by fifteen men, who violated her, in the open road, one after the other. A daughter, 22 years old, and two sons, 16 and 18 years old, were wounded, and when they sought refuge in the house of a retired Colonel, who was cashier in the gut-works, he refused to shelter them. A converted Jew showed equal cruelty with regard to the victims.

Israel Ullmann. When the crowd left him, thinking he was dead, his little son came, crying: “Father, father!” Ullmann lifted up his head, and some of the Christian onlookers shouted: “Ullmann is still alive.” The murderers returned and finished him.

Fanorissi Siss and his wife. The wife had nails driven through her eyes.

Chariton.

Kainarsky.

Baronowitz, Gostinaya Street, No. 33. Whilst the crowd was breaking the windows, the Assistant Police Officer passed, but took no notice of what was happening. The officer Goresonsky passed afterwards and showed the same indifference. The son of Baronowitz hid himself in the closet; the crowd tore off the roof and killed him. When the father saw that the son was being killed, he wept and begged the murderers to take everything, but to spare his son. The murderers replied: “Be quiet, Jew; we shall soon do the same to you.” Whilst he was endeavouring to save the other children he was dragged back into the yard.

Baronowitz fell on his knees before the officer Solovkin, kissed his hands, and told him that his son had been killed. “Well,” said the officer, “don’t worry; it is all over now in your house, they will harm you no more.”

Drachmann. Gostinaya Street, No. 33.

Skyljanskaya Rogatka. When the Jews went to the police station to ask for help, the inspector replied: “Serves you right, why do you use our blood?”

A little girl of ten years, having begged the officer Osovsky to protect her from the murderers, the officer replied: “Go away, you Jewish brat.”

Kiegelmann, killed; wife died in the hospital. A son and a daughter, 18 years old, defended themselves, when six ruffians seized the girl by the hair, dragged her out into the yard, and attempted to violate her. She fought desperately, defending her honour, her clothes were torn off her body, but at last the ruffians left her. The mother rushed to the daughter’s assistance, but was severely injured.

Weinstein. The wife was ill (she has died since) in bed. The crowd, led by some Government officials, came into the house and beat the husband until he fell down bleeding and motionless. The little children defended the bedridden mother. One little girl, 10 years old, having thrown her arms round her mother, had her arm cut off; another daughter and her intended had their teeth broken, and their lips cut off. The murderers were two peasants whom they knew well, and who used to be on very good terms with the family. They left the house shouting: “Where are Itzko and Israel [two sons], we shall kill them.”

Volowitz. Killed; one daughter dangerously wounded; she begged the murderers to kill her together with her father. A younger daughter rushed into the streets, imploring the military for help, but the officer took no notice of her.

Alexandrovskaya Street, No. 37. Golder hid himself in the cellar, having with him a child 2 years old. There he passed the night. The child, in consequence of the cold, died the next day.

Fishmon, Solomon. The crowd was led by several men, evidently belonging to the better class of society. The wife of F. tried to escape, holding in her arms a child 10 months old, when somebody struck her in the back so violently that she fell, and in her fall smothered the infant with her own body.

Not far away from the scene of the murder, the Superintendent of the Police, the Pristav Solovkin, and the patrol were looking on quietly and unmoved.

A Christian boy of about 15 jumped upon a tram, asking: “Are there no Jews here?” There was only one Jewish woman whose husband had just been killed, and who, tremblingly, managed to hide herself behind her neighbour, a Christian woman. At last the reply was given: “No Jews here.” Then a gentleman, well dressed, having a hat on, and with rings on his fingers, asked the boy: “Well, how goes it?” “Very well,” replied the youth. “By the evening we shall have killed all the Jews.” The gentleman encouragingly patted the boy on the cheek.

The Superintendent of the Police visited the crowd on the first day of Easter, addressed a few words to them, and went away. The crowds shouted: “Hurray, bravo!” and at once began breaking the windows.

Elie Mutshnik and 150 Jews came on the first day of the riots to the Vice-Governor to ask for help. The latter ordered the soldiers to disperse them.

Whilst the crowd of rioters was attacking a family in which there were little children, a lady, passing by, said to her husband, a Government official, that she was sorry for the children. “Never mind,” said her husband, “let them get their reward.” An eyewitness says that the military and the police refused to help the victims, and coolly looked on whilst houses were sacked, and men and women killed.

In Asiatskaya passage (Perenlok) all the houses were destroyed, and many women violated.

Among the rioters were women, girls, students of the seminary, government officials,[9] and some belonging to the better classes.

THERE is another anti-Semite organ edited by Pavolachi Kroushevan. It is named the Znamya, or Standard. Though published in St. Petersburg, it has a large sale in Bessarabia.

Both the Bessarabetz and the Znamya have studiously refrained from alluding to the indignation excited in Western Europe and in the United States over the consequences of their savage appeals to fanatical mobs. No other papers being read in Kishineff by the anti-Jewish section of the populace, these people remain unaffected by this outburst of public reprobation in other countries. They are under the impression that the attack on the hated Hebrews was a good work done for the Tsar, the church, and themselves.

The credulity of the average Russian, in all anti-Hebrew matters, is boundless. A Christian lady in Odessa told me that her servant, a very intelligent-looking young girl, informed her a few evenings after the horrible events at Kishineff, that the Jews of Odessa were planning the murder of all the Christian children in the city. When the girl was asked what information she had of this intended wholesale slaughter, she replied: “I was told so! The Jews will put poisoned chocolate on Christian doorsteps some night, and then, when the children come out for school or play the following morning, they will see the chocolate, eat it, and die. All the Jews in Odessa should be burned out!”

 

The popes, or Russian priests, are not in any special sense anti-Semitic. Anyhow, they wield little, if any, influence of that or any other kind upon even the simple and superstitious peasantry. The Russian pope is, in fact, a man who has neither social nor political importance of any kind. He is not invited to the houses of the nobility, nor is he looked up to or relied upon by the people. He is a badly educated Mujik, as a rule, and commands neither the confidence of his own class nor the esteem of the ruling order. When he marries, his family ties and domestic interests are believed to be his chief considerations, while the worldly benefits of his clerical position, comparatively small though these may be, are believed to be his primary concern in life. Whatever little distinction belongs to his garb and calling arises entirely from the fact that he is, in reality, a clerical soldier of the Tsar; earning his living as an officer of a religious army, whose head and commander-in-chief is the great Emperor of all the Russians. He is, in another sense, the Tsar’s moral policeman among the Russian people.

 

The ordinary Russian policeman corresponds in many respects to the average member of the Royal Irish Constabulary. He is a man of the peasantry, of fine physique, and of unbounded self-importance. He lacks, however, the education and superior intelligence of his Irish rural prototype, while his reputation is on a lower moral plane. He is badly officered, as a rule, and this accounts largely for the suspicion which attaches to the performance of his duties in districts where the numerous vexatious restrictions in operation against the “Semitic malady” are so many temptations to the guardian of the law “to wink the other eye” at evasions of legal obstructions made profitable not to see. His pay is small, and this, too, is an explanation of his official dereliction in these matters.

Strenuous efforts have been, and are still being, made to induce a more educated class of Russians to officer the police force of the Empire, but with slow and uncertain results, so far. The nobility look upon the army as the only honourable service open to them, apart from diplomatic and administrative posts. Trade and commerce are, of course, infra dig., and the police is even more so, from the point of view of all sections of the aristocracy, poor and rich, fortunate and the reverse. There is not, strictly speaking, a Russian middle class, but there will soon be an intellectually developed class of men from a corresponding social grade turned out of Russia’s fine colleges and gymnasiums, from whose ranks an educated body of officials will be recruited for this and kindred public employments. Well officered, and better paid than they now are, the Russian police would soon rank in efficiency, as well as in appearance, with the best peace-preserving forces of any country.

 

A Russian city mob has little or no fear of the police force. Nor do the ordinary military, as a rule, inspire rioters with any sense of serious apprehensions. The explanation is probably due to the immediate kinship of class and feeling between the rough elements of an urban community and the conscript force of which they are a potential part, and (in anti-Semitic outbreaks) to the fact that policeman, soldier, and artisan share a common sentiment of antipathy towards the Jew. It is emphatically otherwise with Cossacks. The mob exhibits no hesitation when confronted with this arm of the military power. It disperses in double-quick time. I was told by one of the foreign Consuls in Odessa that on one occasion, some fifteen years ago, there was a sudden outbreak of mob violence which neither military nor police could, or would, quell. They attacked the houses of some foreign residents, and the Consul was called upon for protection. He went at once to the Governor, and suggested the employment of a dozen Cossacks to clear that part of the city of the disturbers. A troop of these splendid horsemen was turned loose without delay, and the riots were at an end within an hour. Nothing can stop their sweeping charge through a city’s streets. They ride over or through obstacles, human or otherwise, knout in hand, and spare no one who has not already cleared out of their path. As the Consul remarked to me when discussing the action, and inaction, of the military at Kishineff, “A dozen Don Cossacks would have settled the whole business with the rioters on Easter Sunday in half an hour.”

 

During an attack upon a Jew’s shop in Kishineff, an artillery officer, who was lodging in a Christian house opposite, saw a soldier enter the premises, and join in the looting of the unfortunate Hebrew’s goods. The officer, indignant at the disgraceful act of the soldier, rushed across the street, and seizing the military culprit, tore off his number, with the view of reporting him to the Colonel of his regiment. The mob turned upon the officer, who was compelled to seek shelter in his quarters. The windows were smashed with stones, and he was called upon to return the badge containing the soldier’s number. This he refused to do, and telephoned to the nearest military barracks for assistance. He was ultimately rescued from the mob’s threatening display.

 

It was difficult to obtain any reliable account of the actual number of persons who were arrested, tried, and punished for the murders and looting on the 19th and 20th of April. M. Polak, the Procurator from Odessa, came to Kishineff to put the law in motion against the rioters. About seven hundred out of the fifteen hundred or two thousand persons implicated were lodged in prison. M. Polak had to rely upon the local authorities to execute the orders of the Government through him. After his return to Odessa no less than five hundred of the prisoners were liberated, following an inquiry before the Juges d’Instruction which was remarkable for the hurried manner in which it was conducted.

Punishment averaging a few months’ imprisonment was meted out to about 150, by the judges of the peace, before whom the cases were sent by the Juges d’Instruction. Some fifty were held on more serious charges, but the results of their trials are not yet made known. They will presumably be tried before the Criminal Court of Assize.

None of the known local instigators of the outbreak were arrested up to the date of my departure from Kishineff.

Some of the rioters protested, on arrest, that they were led to believe that the local authorities had lent their sanction to the massacre and looting, in order to punish the Jews for being the enemies of the Tsar’s Government and the supporters of Socialism.

The Juge d’Instruction, M. Davidovitch, who had to deal with the accused in the first instance, was at one time a contributor to the Bessarabetz—the active agent of the outbreak. I was informed that he had written an article for the paper shortly after the massacres, showing how the Jews were themselves the sole cause of the attack made upon them at Easter.

Two especially revolting outrages, the particulars of which have been published, one, the killing of a woman who was enceinte, and the putting of feathers in her body after disembowelling her; and the murder of a child two months old, were not included in the list of murders which I obtained, and I am not satisfied that these two crimes were actually committed as alleged. The Jewish doctors in the Hebrew Hospital could not confirm the report or particulars of these two cases. In the instance of the infant, they told me that the mother, in defending herself, and subsequently in her flight from the mob, had let the child fall, and that its death really happened in that way.

The foundation for the other and more inhuman story was, I think, this: A Jew named Kainarsky, a dealer in sheep and cattle gut, was attacked, robbed, and murdered in a slaughter-house. The mob cut open his bowels and put feathers inside; prompted, doubtless, to this act of barbarity by the nature of the poor fellow’s calling and business. It was an outrage base and inhuman enough, in all conscience, but not quite so fiendish in character as that of the account which represented a woman with child as the object of this peculiar atrocity.

The man thus murdered is included in the list of victims given to me in Kishineff, while no woman is mentioned as having undergone such mutilation, a circumstance which, it is sincerely to be hoped, disposes of the story as untrue.

 

“Byei Zhidoff!” the terrible cry which was the signal of slaughter at Easter, means “Kill the Jews!” Zhidoff is a term of Russian contempt for the Jew.

 

The “Narodovostvo,” or People’s Freedom Party, which is supposed to be a growing movement in Russia, has no branch or supporters in Kishineff, at least I failed to obtain information of its existence. It represents an aspiration rather than an original force. A student who joined the rioters on the first day’s outbreak, with the object of diverting the mob, if possible, from resorting to extreme violence against the Jews, began by raising a cry for constitutional freedom. The crowd did not understand him, whereupon he shouted “Down with the Government at St. Petersburg!” He was instantly knocked down, and would have been killed had the police not interfered on seeing a Russian in danger. He was taken off to prison.

Ten days after the Kishineff massacres there was an attempted Socialist demonstration at Odessa. It was in some way supposed to be a May Day Labour affair, but assumed the form of an Anarchist turnout, of which the police appeared to have had timely intimation. A band of some forty men, workers and prolétaires, attempted to march toward the centre of the city, with a red flag at their head. After proceeding along a small street, and raising a few feeble cries, they were pounced upon by the police and taken to prison. It was found, on examination, that nineteen of the forty were Jews. They were all liberated after a few days’ detention.

 

One ground of objection to the Zionist movement for the repatriation of the Jews is that the Hebrews, who are not a military people, would be shut off from European help while being at the mercy of Turkish rule and of Arab hostility in Palestine. The implied loss of European protection may be an imaginary risk. The record of the Turks in the matter of modern anti-Semitism compares more than favourably with that of the tender feelings of European Christianity. The Arab is of the same racial family as the descendants of Father Abraham, and even were the offspring of Ishmael more numerous in Palestine than they are estimated to be, they might be trusted to show no more savage propensities towards their Israelitish kindred than Russian Seminarists or Roumanian Christians have done in recent years.

Two or three millions of Jews in Palestine would, however, develop a national sentiment and idea that would soon nourish a spirit of patriotism capable of defending them from possible Arab aggression. The Jews of the world would be their foreign friends and allies, while the civilised nations inhabited by the scattered Hebrews could not in reason neglect to take a sympathetic interest in the protection and welfare of one of the oldest peoples in the world, restored again to the Promised Land of Israel.

Russia’s diplomatic common sense should see in the Zionist movement a noble racial effort, worthy of assistance on its merits, but especially calling for Russian help and encouragement. The creators of the Pale of Settlement, and those responsible for the poverty and suffering which are alone due to this cause, owe some reparation to the people who have been thus treated. No ten million pounds which Russia could spend on her army and navy would render her empire a better or more lasting service than what would follow to her domestic peace if a sum of that amount, or more if necessary, were devoted to the carrying out of the great work of the Zionist leaders. If Russia will only trust and obey her better instincts in adopting a humane policy of this kind, coupled with a stern moral warfare against the propagation of the blood-accusation legend inside the Empire, she will cure the “Semitic malady,” which will otherwise grow to be an increasing and more dangerous evil within her borders.

 

The Russian Jew as an emigrant to the United States is a subject which will demand serious consideration after public interest in the Kishineff horrors subsides. All who can find means to go will leave Bessarabia, unless the Tsar is inclined, or induced, to speak words which will be an Imperial guarantee against further violence. No such words have yet been uttered. This is much to be regretted by all who believe in the humanity of the Emperor’s personal disposition. It tends to create the possibly erroneous and unjust suspicion that the terror created by the massacres in April is to be used by the Tsar’s advisers “pour encourager les autres,” to lessen the extent of the “Semitic malady” by emigrating from Russia. But, in any case, large numbers of Jews will endeavour to quit the Pale, and their relatives and friends who fled in 1891, and who have prospered in America, may be counted upon to lend assistance to the new aspirants for United States citizenship and protection.

It is the proletarian Jew and the members of the small huckstering class who are the chief undesirables in Russia now. They are three-fourths of the Semitic population of the Pale, and their numbers are increasing.

I saw thousands of these in the cities and towns, from Odessa to Warsaw. They are not a drunken nor an abnormally immoral class. Russian officials have testified to their general good conduct, on the whole; when due allowance is made for the precarious nature of their employments and the poverty of their lives. I observed how uniform were the healthy looks of their children, even amidst some of the most wretched surroundings. This is a good testimony to personal character and civic qualities. In England the children of the lowest classes are neglected and underfed by parents who expend in gin and beer what would provide more nourishment for their offspring. There is no corresponding bad trait in the average proletarian Jew of the Pale.

There are, as a matter of course, traits of low cunning, of shady subterfuge, and of other obnoxious qualities found among a people who have been hunted and ground down for generations. It would amount to a miracle of racial morality if such results did not follow from the treatment and experiences of the Russian Jew. They are also sufferers from the indifferent sanitary system of towns like Kishineff, where there is an abundance of water badly utilised in municipal management for the health and cleanliness of the poorer quarters and suburbs of the city.

 

Their poverty and persecution, along with the habits peculiar to the lowest grade of Hebrew humanity in Eastern Europe, render them singularly objectionable in appearance; carrying with them, as they do, all the traces of social degradation which cling to a pariah people as a physical certificate of the wrongs and hardships they have had to endure.

No country, be it ever so free, hospitable, or humane, could in reason be expected to open its ports to such a class of emigrant in order to relieve the Russian Government and nation of these wronged and unfortunate undesirables. They must first be improved in the land of their birth by more liberty and better treatment, or be sent for change—for better conditions of industrial life and hopes—to Palestine, where land labour could be provided for them. Transplantation would be an effective remedy, if carried out under careful supervision. The root qualities of the Jew—his intelligence, his faith, his intense ambition to possess money—would, under a more favourable environment, reclaim him from the induced vices which have naturally grown out of the congenial surroundings of poverty, suffering, and injustice. The human being who can succeed in living at all the semblance of a civilised existence, under the depressing conditions obtaining for the Jew within the towns of the Pale, could not fail in winning a better livelihood where rural industries and petit culture, such as the soil and situation of Palestine will encourage, would be open to his intelligence, ambition, and energies. Such a Jew has no hope in Russia. He could not possibly meet a worse fate in Palestine. No other country can be expected to give him the privilege of its citizenship. Therefore, if he is not to be improved off the face of the earth by a corroding poverty, or by periodical outbreaks like that of Kishineff, he should be taken by the Zionist movement to where there are both the promise and inspiration of a new life.

The Polish proletarian Jew has more virility than the Hebrew of the same class within the Pale. He is no more prepossessing in appearance, while it is not wronging him to say that he is less desirable, in some other respects, as a citizen of another country. The Jews are sufficiently numerous in Poland to enlist the co-operation of Socialist revolutionary forces there, and thereby to obtain, by some means, a right to live. They are not so powerless as those within the Pale, and Russia may soon find it a wise and necessary policy to allow them to have a freer access than they now enjoy to the resources of the country, in order to lessen their growing numbers in the ancient capital of the Kingdom of Poland. There are over a quarter of a million of them in Warsaw. They would be a dangerous element there if driven to extremities, or in the event of any complications arising between the Russian Empire and Germany. In any case, the Polish Jew will work out his own destiny. He has lived in Poland for over seven hundred years, and this long experience of varied forms of fortune and of oppression gives him a tenure and a hope which may yet win him back some of the rights and privileges he once enjoyed before he lost the tolerant protection of the Polish people in becoming the agent and tool of the Polish landed aristocracy.

 

Since the foregoing parts of this book were prepared for the press, it has been announced from Russia that Vice-Governor Ostrogoff has been transferred from Kishineff to Stavropol, in the Caucasus. This action marks the severe condemnation of this official’s conduct by the Russian Government.

The head of the gendarmerie at Kishineff has been retired from service.

It has also been reported from apparently reliable sources that several persons who were at first accused of participation in the massacres, and liberated after a short detention in prison, have been re-arrested, and will be tried in September. It is further stated that there are to be 53 indictments for manslaughter in addition to 34 prisoners already held for trial, while 400 other cases are under investigation.

It has likewise been published in the press that former Governor Von Raaben had asked for, and had been denied, an interview with the Emperor.

According to reports circulated from Vienna on the 10th of July, the special visit paid to Kishineff by the Minister of Justice was responsible for the action of the authorities in re-arresting suspected culprits, and for the intention to prosecute several of the prominent instigators of the riots at Easter who had been arrested or accused for their connection with the massacres up to the date of the author’s departure from Kishineff.

From a similar Vienna source, it has been reported that one of these prominent anti-Semites of Kishineff had committed suicide, as a result of an inquiry instituted into his conduct during the disturbances.

The actual murderers of the Christian boy, Ribalenko of Doubossar, who was declared by the Bessarabetz newspaper to have been killed by the Jews for sacrificial purposes, have been discovered and arrested. He was killed by one Tischtchevko, the caretaker of the orchard in which the body was found. The murderer confesses that the uncle of the boy took part in committing the crime. Both the murderers are Russians and Christians.

The latest published report of the Kishineff Relief Committee gives the following account of the moneys received and how expended by that body:

“To the end of June 735,476 roubles have been received as follows:

RECEIPTS

	Roubles
America,	192,443
England,	16,001
Germany,	35,675
Italy,	5,000
Holland,	1,000
Austria,	10,415
Roumania,	3,023
France,	9,248
Russia,	462,671
Total,	735,476

EXPENDITURES

	Roubles
Provisions,	14,700
To sufferers (directly),	273,622
To sufferers (indirectly),	30,000
To 35 families of those murdered or who died of wounds,	87,500
To two families of invalids,	4,600
To the Ladies’ Committee, for preparing linen and clothes and for a crèche,	4,000
To settling 50 families in Palestine,	50,000
Total,	464,422
Balance in hand,	271,054
Roubles,	735,476

“The number of families who suffered from the riots is given at about 2750. Applications for relief were received from 2538 families, to the amount of 2,332,890 roubles. The number of persons murdered, or who died of wounds, is put down at 47; severely wounded, 92; slightly wounded, 345. Some of the latter were treated by private doctors. The killed left behind 35 widows and 123 orphans. The number of persons rendered unfit for work has not yet been ascertained, but is so far given as 50. The Committee is of opinion that in order to satisfy all the losses for which only now claims are being made 200,000 roubles will still be required.”

Washington, June 15.—Through their representative association, B’nai B’rith, the Jews of America to-day laid their case before President Roosevelt and Secretary Hay, and they are content to abide by whatever the Executive decides is best for them.

A statement of the proceedings given out at the White House concerning the conference consisted of a memorandum submitted by the B’nai B’rith on the recent Kishineff massacre, a tentative draft of a petition to the Tsar, which it is desired this Government should unofficially or semi-officially assist in delivering to the Tsar, and procuring a reply thereto, and copies of the replies of Secretary Hay and President Roosevelt to their callers.

The memorandum says that the facts concerning the Kishineff massacre as officially reported by the Russian Government have appalled and horrified not only the Jews in Russia and elsewhere, but the whole American people, who want something done, and whose hostility to Russia, if nothing is done, will become intensified and fixed.

In his reply to the memorandum Secretary of State John Hay said:

“No person of ordinary humanity can have heard without deep emotion the story of the cruel outrages inflicted upon the Jews of Kishineff. These lamentable events have caused the profoundest impression throughout the world, but most especially in this country, where there are so many of your coreligionists who form such a desirable element of our population in industry, thrift, public spirit, and commercial morality.

“Nobody can ever make the Americans think ill of the Jews as a class or as a race—we know them too well. In the painful crisis through which we are now passing the Jews of the United States have given evidence of the highest qualities—generosity, love of justice, and power of self-restraining.

“The Government of the United States must exhibit the same qualities. I know you do not doubt the sentiments of the President. No one hates more energetically than he does such acts of cruelty and injustice as those we deplore. But he must carefully consider all the circumstances and then decide whether any official action can be taken in addition to the impressive and most effective expressions of public opinion in this country during the last month. You will have observed that no civilised government in the world has yet taken official action—this consideration alone would bid us to proceed with care.

“The Emperor of Russia is entitled to our respect, not merely as the ruler of a great and friendly nation, but as a man whose personal character is even more elevated than his exalted station. We should not be justified in assuming that this enlightened sovereign, who has given so many proofs of his devotion to peace and religious tolerance, has not done and is not doing all that lies in his power to put a stop to these atrocities, to punish the guilty, whether they belong to the ignorant populace or to high official circles, and to prevent the occurrence of the outrages which have so shocked humanity. In fact, all we know of the state of things in Russia tends to justify the hope that even out of the present terrible situation some good results may come; that He who watches over Israel does not slumber, and that the wrath of man, now as so often in the past, shall be made to praise Him.”

The call on the President at the White House followed, and there President Roosevelt, after the memorandum was laid before him, said:

“Mr. Chairman: I need not dwell upon a fact so patent as the widespread indignation with which the American people heard of the dreadful outrages upon the Jews in Kishineff. I have never in my experience in this country known of a more immediate or a deeper expression of the sympathy for the victims and of horror over the appalling calamity that has occurred.

“It is natural that while the whole civilised world should express such a feeling, it should yet be most intense and widespread in the United States; for of all the great powers I think I may say that the United States is that country in which, from the beginning of its national career, most has been done in the way of acknowledging the debt due to the Jewish race, and of endeavouring to do justice to those American citizens who are of Jewish ancestry and faith.

“One of the most touching poems of our own great poet, Longfellow, is that on the Jewish cemetery in Newport, and anyone who goes through any of the old cemeteries of the cities which preserve the records of colonial times will see the name of many an American of Jewish race who, in war or in peace, did his full share in the founding of this nation. From that day to this, from the day when the Jews of Charleston, of Philadelphia, of New York, supported the patriot cause and helped in every way, not only by money, but by arms, Washington and his colleagues, who were founding this Republic—from that day to the present we have had no struggle, military or civil, in which there have not been citizens of Jewish faith who played an eminent part for the honour and credit of the nation.

“I remember once General Howard mentioning to me the fact that two of his brigade commanders upon whom he had placed special reliance were Jews. Among the meetings of the Grand Army which I have attended one stands out with peculiar vividness—a meeting held under the auspices of the men of the Grand Army of Jewish creed in the temple in Forty-fourth Street—Temple Emanu-El—to welcome the returned veterans of the Spanish-American war of Jewish faith.

“When in Santiago, when I was myself in the army, one of the best colonels among the regular regiments who did so well on that day, and who fought beside me, was a Jew. One of the commanders of the ships which, in the blockade of the Cuban coast, did so well, was a Jew.

“In my own regiment I promoted five men from the ranks for valour and good conduct in battle. It happened by pure accident, for I know nothing of the faith of any one of them, that these included two Protestants, two Catholics, and one Jew; and while that was a pure accident, it was not without its value as an illustration of the ethnic and religious make-up of our nation and of the fact that if a man is a good American, that is all we ask, without thinking of his creed or his birthplace.

“In the same way, when I was Police Commissioner in New York, I had experience after experience of the excellent service done—an excellent work needing nerve and hardihood, excellent work of what I may call the Maccabee type in the Police Department under me, by police officers of Jewish extraction.

“Let me give you one little incident with a direct bearing upon this question of persecution for race or religious reasons. You may possibly recall, I am sure certain of my New York friends will recall, that during the time I was Police Commissioner a man came from abroad—I am sorry to say, a clergyman—to start an anti-Jewish agitation in New York, and announced his intention of holding meetings to assail the Jews. The matter was brought to my attention.

“Of course, I had no power to prevent those meetings. After a good deal of thought I detailed a Jewish sergeant and forty Jewish policemen to protect the agitator while he held his meetings; so he made his speeches denouncing the Jews protected exclusively by Jews, which I always thought was probably the most effective answer that could possibly be made to him, and probably the best object lesson that we could give of the spirit in which we Americans manage such matters.

“Now let me give you another little example dealing with a Russian Jew, an experience I had while handling the Police Department, and that could have occurred, I think, nowhere else than in the United States.

“There was a certain man I appointed under the following conditions: I was attracted to him by being told on a visit to the Bowery branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association that they had a young fellow there, a Jew, who had performed a feat of great note in saving people from a burning building, and that they thought he was just the type for a policeman. I had him called up and told him to take the examination, and see if he could get through. He did, and he passed.

“He has only been an excellent policeman, but he at once, out of his salary, proceeded to educate his younger brothers and sisters, and he got either two or three of his old kinsfolk over from Russia, through the money he had saved, and provided homes for them.

“I have given you examples of men who have served under me in my administration of the Police Department in New York and my regiment. In addition thereto, some of my nearest social friends, some of those with whom I have been closest in political life, have been men of Jewish faith and extraction. Therefore, inevitably, I have felt a degree of personal sympathy and personal horror over this dreadful tragedy, as great as can exist in the minds of any of you gentlemen yourselves.

“Exactly as I should claim the same sympathy from any one of you for any tragedy happening to any Christian people, so I should hold myself unworthy of my present position if I failed to feel just as deep sympathy and just as deep sorrow and just as deep horror over an outrage like this done to the Jewish people in any part of the earth.

“I am confident that much good has already been done by the manifestations throughout the country, without any regard to creed whatsoever, of horror and sympathy over what has occurred. It is gratifying to know—what we would, of course, assume—that the Government of Russia shows the feelings of horror and indignation with which the American people look upon the outrages at Kishineff, and is moving vigorously not only to prevent their continuance, but to punish the perpetrators.

“That government takes the same view of those outrages that our own government takes of the riots and lynchings which sometimes occur in our country, but do not characterise either our government or our people.

“I have been visited by the Russian Ambassador on his own initiative, and in addition to what has been said to Secretary Hay, the Russian Ambassador has notified me personally, without any inquiry upon my part, that the Governor of Kishineff has been removed; that between three hundred and four hundred of the participants in the outrages have been arrested, and he voluntarily stated that those men would be punished to the utmost that the law would permit.

“I will consider most carefully the suggestions that you have submitted to me and whether the now-existing conditions are such that any further official expression would be of advantage to the unfortunate survivors, with whom we sympathise so deeply. Nothing that has occurred recently has had my more constant thought, and nothing will have my more constant thought, than this subject. In any proper way by which beneficial action may be taken it will be taken, to show the sincerity of the historic American position of treating each man on his merits as a man, without the least reference to his creed, his race, or his birthplace.”

The following is the translation of a letter from Count Leo Tolstoy to a Jew who had asked his opinion concerning the outrages in Kishineff:

“I have received your letter. I had already received several similar letters. All the writers request me, as you do, to express my opinion on the events at Kishineff. It seems to me that these appeals are based on a misunderstanding. My correspondents supposed that my words carried weight, and I am therefore begged to express my opinion on an event so important and so complicated in its origins as the crime committed at Kishineff. The misunderstanding consists in demanding from me the work of a publicist, whereas I occupy myself exclusively with a single definite question, having nothing in common with contemporary events—viz., the question of religion and its application to life. To request from me the public expression of my opinion on contemporary events is as illogical as it would be to demand such expression from any other specialist who makes use of contemporary events to illustrate his views. I cannot, like a publicist, even if I thought it would be useful, express my opinions on everything that occurs, no matter how important it may be. If I did so I should have to speak hurriedly and without reflection, repeating what has been said by others, and then my opinions would cease to have the importance for the sake of which their expression is sought.

“As regards my views on the Jews and on the horrible doings at Kishineff, they ought, it would seem, to be clear to all who would interest themselves in my conception of life. I cannot regard the Jews other than as brothers whom I love, not because they are Jews, but because, like ourselves and everybody else, they are sons of the one God the Father. Such love needs no effort on my part, for I have met and known many excellent people among the Jews. My attitude towards the Kishineff outrage is likewise defined by my religion and my conception of life. When I read the first accounts in the newspapers, even before I knew of the horrible details which afterwards came to light, I realised the full horror of what had occurred and was filled with a profound pity for the innocent victims of the barbarity of the mob, mingled with astonishment at the bestial ferocities of these pretended Christians and disgust and loathing towards the so-called educated people who stirred up the mob and sympathised with its doings. But what I felt most deeply was horror at the criminals who were really responsible for all that had occurred, horror at our Government, with their clergy, who keep the people in a state of ignorance and fanaticism, and with their bandit horde of officials. The outrages at Kishineff are but the direct result of the propaganda of falsehood and violence which our Government conducts with such energy. The attitude of our Government towards these events is only one more proof of the brutal egoism which does not flinch from any measures, however cruel, when it is a question of suppressing a movement which is deemed dangerous, and of their complete indifference (similar to the indifference of the Turkish Government towards the Armenian atrocities) towards the most terrible outrages which do not affect Government interests.

“This is all I can say with regard to the events at Kishineff, but it has all been said long ago by me. If you ask me what, in my opinion, the Jews ought to do, my answer in that case, as in others, is the logical outcome of that Christian teaching which I strive to understand and to follow. For the Jews, as for all men, one thing, and one thing only, is necessary for salvation; to follow as closely as may be the universal rule, ‘Do unto others as you would that others should do unto you.’ They should fight the Government not by violence—that weapon should be left to the Government—but by virtuous living to the exclusion not only of all violence towards their neighbours, but of all participation in violence, even when called upon by the Government instruments of violence for their own advantage. This is all I can say with regard to the horrible events at Kishineff; all this is very old and is well known.”

Maxime Gorky, the Russian novelist, wrote the following letter to the Kishineff Relief Committee:

“Russia has been disgraced more and more frequently of recent years by dark deeds, but the most disgraceful of all is the horrible Jewish massacre at Kishineff, which has awakened our horror, shame, and indignation. People who regard themselves as Christians, who claim to believe in God’s mercy and sympathy, these people, on the day consecrated to the resurrection of their God from the dead, occupy the time in murdering children and aged people, ravishing women, and martyring the men of the race that gave them Christ.

“Who bears the blame of this base crime, which will remain on us like a bloody blot for ages? We shall be unable to wash this blot from the sad history of our dark country. It would be unjust and too simple to condemn the mob. The latter was merely the hand which was guided by a corrupt conscience, driving it to murder and robbery. For it is well known that the mob at Kishineff was led by men of cultured society. But cultivated society in Russia is really much worse than the people, who are goaded by their sad life and blinded and enthralled by the artificial darkness created around them.

“The cultivated classes are a crowd of cowardly slaves, without feeling of personal dignity, ready to accept every lie to save their ease and comfort; a weak and lawless element almost without conscience and without shame, in spite of its elegant exterior. Cultivated society is not less guilty of the disgraceful and horrible deeds committed at Kishineff than the actual murderers and ravishers. Its members’ guilt consists in the fact that not merely did they not protect the victims, but that they rejoiced over the murders; it consists chiefly in committing themselves for long years to be corrupted by man-haters and persons who have long enjoyed the disgusting glory of being the lackeys of power and the glorifiers of lies, like the editor of Bessarabetz of Kishineff and other publicists. These are the real authors of the disgraceful and awful crime of Kishineff. To all the shameful names hitherto given to these repulsive men must be added another, and the well-deserved one, of ‘instigators of pillage and murder.’ These hypocrites, with the name of God on their lips, who preach in Russian society hatred of the Jews, Armenians, and Finns, to-day heap base and cowardly calumnies upon the corpses of those killed through their influence, and they shamelessly continue their hateful work of poisoning the mind and feeling of the weak-willed Russian society.

“Shame upon their wicked heads! May the fire of conscience consume their decayed hearts, covetous only of lackey-like honours and slavishly obsequious to power!

“It is now the duty of Russian society that is not yet wholly ruined by these bandits, to prove that it is not identified with these instigators of pillage and murder. Russian society must clear its conscience of part of the shame and disgrace by helping the orphaned and desolated Jews and assisting these members of the race which has given to the world many really great men and which still continues to produce teachers of truth and beauty in spite of its oppressed condition in the world.

“Come, therefore, all who do not want themselves to be regarded as the lackeys of the lackeys, and who still retain their self-respect; come and help the Jews!”

A Reuter’s telegram from St. Petersburg dated the 13th of June, stated:

“The famous Orthodox priest, Father John of Kronstadt, whose fiery condemnation of the Kishineff massacre was published in a Liberal newspaper of St. Petersburg, has published the following statement in the anti-Semitic journal Znamya, the new St. Petersburg organ of M. Kroushevan, formerly editor of the Bessarabetz:

“To my beloved brethren of Christ in Kishineff: From the newspaper accounts that followed those first published about the Kishineff catastrophe, I have come to the conclusion that the Jews themselves were the cause of those disorders and the wounds inflicted and the murders committed on April 6 and 7 [old style]. I have arrived at the conclusion that it is the Christians who have suffered in the end, and that the Jews have been doubly repaid for their losses and injuries by their own brethren and others. I know this from letters which I have received from my people, who have lived for a long time in Kishineff who are well acquainted with the state of things there, and who are most trustworthy. Therefore I say to Kishineff Christians, forgive the reproach which I cast upon you alone on account of the horrors perpetrated. From letters of eye-witnesses I am convinced that one cannot lay all the blame upon the Christians, who were incited to the disorders by the Jews, and that the latter are mainly responsible for the catastrophe.”

No Russian newspaper of any influence, with the exception of the Novoye Vremya, has attempted to palliate the massacre, or to lay the blame for it on the Jews.

The case of the alleged ritual murder of the child Simon of Trent is the most important example of its kind, and is therefore frequently quoted by anti-Semites. I have given the history of the case in the Oesterreichische Wochenschrift. The Vienna Vaterland of the 17th October, and Pastor Deckert in the Deutsches Volksblatt discuss my articles, but carefully avoid mentioning the Oesterreichische Wochenschrift. In May, 1893, the Vienna Vaterland was obliged to publish several articles from my pen, contradicting the statements made by Pastor Deckert. In an article of May the 30th, 1893, I called attention to a fact which throws a glaring light upon the history of the case: Some days before the murder of the child, during the Easter week of 1475, Bernardinus de Feltre, whilst preaching in Trent against the Jews, expressed himself to the following effect: “And with these cursed Jews you are on a friendly footing? You say, although without the true faith, they are good people? But I tell you that even before the Easter will have come to an end they will have given you a proof of their kindness.” (Cf. Wadding, “Annales Minorum,” XIV. p. 132). Bernardinus thus predicted the murder days before it happened. His prophecy was naturally fulfilled. On Thursday in Passion Week, March the 23d, Simon, the 28-months’-old son of the tanner Andreas, disappeared. Bernardinus accused the Jews, and on Saturday the body of a child was discovered in the house of Samuel. The Jews themselves informed the Bishop Hinderbach, in consequence of which information all of them, including women and children, were imprisoned.

In his article of the 17th of October, Pastor Deckert maintains that: “It is not true that the confessions made by the Jews were obtained by means of torture, and that they had been tortured whilst there were absolutely no indications of their guilt.” Pastor Deckert is right. There were proofs against them, proofs of a very extraordinary nature. As soon as the bishop saw the body of the child he exclaimed: “This is the work of the Jews!” (Acta Sanc., II., March 24, p. 497), and swore to have revenge. He entrusted the prefect of the town, Johann de Salis, with the conduct of the action. The latter put the richest Jews to (an ordeal?) trial, and the wounds having begun to bleed as soon as the Jews approached the body, which is always the case, as experience teaches (experientia compertum est), when a murderer approaches his victim, this fact was a convincing proof of the guilt of the Jews. There was also another “proof” against the Jews. In the prison of Trent a converted Jewish criminal, Johann de Feltre, was detained. By accusing his former coreligionists he could hope for freedom; and he became a witness, ready to say anything and everything against the Jews. Pastor Deckert maintains that “it is not true that the confessions of the Jews were obtained in consequence of tortures only.”

I have refuted his statement with his own words. On p. 21 of his article he himself states: “only torture could make them confess; without tortures they would have confessed nothing.” The Jews were submitted for several days to the most inhuman tortures, and only then confessed. This is proved by the contents of the letters of the Bishop addressed to the Pope: “The accused Jews have been tortured for several days (per pluries dies torti et interrogati), but have confessed nothing”; and in another place the Bishop writes: “Although much has been done against the Jews, a fortnight has passed without any result.”

Had the prisoners confessed at the first, second, or third application, the official would not have employed so many variations of torture. All the alleged confessions had therefore been obtained by means of terror and tortures of the most cruel character.

The sufferings of the martyrs are related in the letters of the Bishop addressed to the Pope:

“On the 30th day of March (Vienna Acts, fol. 51) Samuel was ‘examined’ for the first time; he was, however, sent back to prison to ‘recover’ (animum repetendi), which term means in judicial language that he had fainted. On the following day (March 31st) he was undressed, and with his feet and hands tied, hoisted up on a rope and kept suspended in the air, his limbs being thus turned out of their joints. As, however, he still persisted in maintaining his innocence, he received ‘una cavaletta’ (a leap), in other words, he was quickly lowered and pulled up again; then the cord on which he was suspended was ‘touched,’ i. e., beaten, and he was made to ‘leap’ several times. The victim having swooned, the torture ceased. It was continued, with several variations of exquisite cruelty, on the 3d of April.

On the 4th day (April the 7th) the procedure was resumed; and as the victim exclaimed: “If I were to confess my guilt, I would only be telling a lie,” a wooden peg was attached to his leg, whilst he remained suspended in the air, thus considerably augmenting the pain. Then a pan filled with fire and brimstone was held to his nose.

He still maintained his innocence, until at last, mad with pain and suffering, he confessed that he and Tobias had strangled the boy. This admission, clearly contradicting the blood accusation, was all that could be obtained from him. Samuel was kept imprisoned for two months (up to June the 7th) whilst the other Jews were being “examined.” Evidently Samuel must have retracted his confession of the 8th of April, as the following excerpt from the Acts will show:

Invited to speak the truth and informed that all his companions had confessed their guilt, he replied that if they had done so they had told a lie. The prefect of the town having been informed that the drinking of holy water made criminals confess their guilt, Samuel was made to drink a spoonful of consecrated water.

He persisted, however, in maintaining his innocence. Then two hot boiled eggs were put under his shoulder-blades. Asked to speak the truth, he promised to do so, but in presence of the prefect and the captain of the town only. Left alone with these two gentlemen, he asked them to promise him, “that he would only (!) be burnt and not have to die any other death.” That is the manner in which he was made to confess his guilt. In spite of his mad self-accusations he was asked again to tell “the truth better still” (Interrogates, quod melius dicat veritatem, minante eidam Samueli, quod si non dicat veritatem, ponetur ad cordam. Qui Samuel respondit, quod vult dicere veritatem, quia ex quo confessus est mortem pueri, vult confiteri aliqua), and was threatened with new tortures. On the 21st of June he was burnt alive. All the other victims were treated in the same manner, even those who had accepted baptism.

Israel, son of Mohar of Brandenburg, was arrested on the 27th of March, tortured from the 12th to the 21st of April, and having expressed the wish to be baptised was freed. On the 26th of October, however, he was again arrested, tortured several times, and killed on the wheel on the 19th of January. This sentence was due to the fact of his having given evidence before the Papal Legate, the Bishop of Ventimiglia at Roveredo, relating to the “examination” of the accused. In No. 128 of the Vienna Vaterland (May the 10th, 1893) I proved that the Duke and the Council of Venice sent two eminent “jurisconsults” from Padua to Trent to investigate the manner in which the accused were examined. The learned doctors were maltreated by the mob. An “Apostolic note” issued by Pope Sixtus IV., on the 10th of October, 1475, prohibits, under punishment of excommunication, the claim that the child Simon of Trent was a martyr. It is not proved, says the “note” that the child Simon had been murdered by the Jews (nihil adhuc certum compertumve nostro judicio aut approbatum de quodam puero Simone Tridentino per Judæos, ut dicitur, interfecto). The Pope appointed the Legate, Bishop of Ventimiglia, Giovanni dei Giudici, to investigate the case. The investigation took place at Roveredo, in 1476, and the innocence of the Jews was proved. An Zelinus, a citizen of Trent, proved that a certain Swiss, Zanesus, living in Trent, and an enemy of the Jews, was the actual murderer of the child. That the Papal Legate had clearly established the innocence of the Jews is manifest by the acts of the case, dated: October the 20th and 29th, and November 2d, 1475, and April 3d, 1476.

It was natural, therefore, that with regard to this case Pope Paul III., in a Bull of May the 12th, 1540, declared the blood accusations to be nothing but the result of hatred and envy, and of covetousness due to a desire to seize and appropriate the possessions of the Jews. The Bull further prohibits, under the severest punishment of the Church, the revival of such accusations in the future.

The false and terrible accusation that the Jews require blood of Christians for their religious rites and ceremonies has been systematically disseminated, for the last few months, all over Austria. The immediate cause of the movement was the Polna case of the murder of Agnes Hruza. A Jew has been accused of the crime, but although his guilt has not yet been proved, the circumstance has been used by a prejudiced party, hostile to the Jews, and ritual murder suggested. At the trial the public prosecutor, representing the government, public morality, and the law, placed himself under the influence of that accusation by the use of the words, “the well-known motives of the crime.” The president of the court found no words of protest against the blood legend, which was made use of, in presence of an excited crowd, for party purposes. Although there was no ground and no corroboration for the accusation, the belief gained popularity, thanks to the attitude of these organs of justice. That the unrestrained spread of such a terrible accusation must bring about disastrous consequences, is self-evident. No law and no power are strong enough to protect those who require the blood of innocent human victims for their religious rites. The whole extent of the danger was perceived centuries ago, and Popes and temporal (non-religious) rulers, especially kings of Poland, strongly prohibited the raising and spread of the false accusation. This was done by the Popes: Innocent IV. (in the “Bulls” of May the 28th, 1247; July the 5th, 1247; and September the 22d, 1258); Gregory X. (October the 7th, 1272); Martin V. (February the 20th, 1422); Michael V. (November the 5th, 1447); Paul III. (May the 12th, 1540); who, availing themselves of their fullest authority, most emphatically, and under pain of the severest punishment of the Church, forbade the Christians to raise blood accusations against the Jews. The example of the Popes was followed by the kings of Poland: Jan Albrecht in his edict of 1496; Zygmunt I., 1514; Zygmunt II., August, 1548; Stephen Batory, 1576 and 1580; Zygmunt III., 1592; Wladystan IV., 1663; Jan Kazimir, 1694; Michael I., 1696; August II., 1763; August III., 1763, and Stanislaus August, 1765; commanded eternal silence (æternum silentium) in regard to the calumny of the blood accusation, under the penalty of “pœna talionis.” In Bohemia, where the case of Huelsner occurred, the Kings Ottokar II. (March 29th, 1254; and August 23d, 1268); Wenzel II. (1300); and Ladislav IV. (May the 15th, 1454), issued similar decrees. In other countries special laws, relating to the blood accusation, have been enacted. The condition of the present Austrian legislation makes the promulgation of special laws unnecessary. Unfortunately, however, the law is powerless against the extravagant excesses of the press; and thus daily, in various languages, the legend of the ritual murder is spread among all classes of society.

In the face of the above facts, we beg to submit the following questions:

(a) Is your Excellency aware of the existing evil?

(b) What measures does your Excellency propose to take, with a view to put an end to it?

Dr. Byk, Dr. Rappoport, Piepes-Poratynski, Dr. Rosenstock, Dr. Trachtenberg, Dr. Kolischer, Yaworski, Bilinski, Dziednszycki, Gorski, David Abrahamovicz, Dielemba, Struszkiewicz, Gizowski, Moysa, Wladimir Gniewosz, Bogdanowicz, Pientak, Milewski, Dr. Walewski, Ratowski, Lewicki, Roszkowski, Henzel, Popowski, Weigel, Kareis, Auspitz, Straucher, Tittinger, Sokolowski.

We have received a pitiable complaint from the Jews of Germany. They say that some nobles, lay and ecclesiastical, and other powerful and notable men within your cities and dioceses, designing to seize and usurp their goods unjustly, devise against them impious counsels and invent diverse pretexts. Without considering that testimonies to the Christian Faith have proceeded from their records and that the Sacred Scripture among other precepts of the Law says: “Thou shalt not kill,” and forbids them at their Passover ceremonies to touch any dead flesh, they falsely accuse the Jews of using in these same ceremonies the body of a murdered child, thinking that the said practice is required by their Law, whereas it is clearly contrary to their Law. And they cast upon the Jews, with malicious intent, any corpse that by chance is discovered at any place. Attacking them with these and other inventions, and without formal accusation, confession or conviction, and in despite of the privileges conceded to the Jews by the clemency of the Holy See, they despoil them of their goods (contrary to the law of God and to justice), and they visit them with hunger, imprisonment, and so many calamities and afflictions, punishing them with diverse punishments (even condemning many of them to shameful death) that the Jews, living under the rule of the said princes, notables, and powerful men in worse plight than were their fathers under Pharaoh in Egypt, are compelled to leave places where they and their ancestors have dwelt from time immemorial. Hence, in fear of extermination, they have thought it necessary to have recourse to the protection of the Holy See. Now, therefore, being unwilling that the Jews should be unjustly harassed (for God in his mercy awaits their conversion, seeing that, on the testimony of the Prophet, it is believed that the remnant of them is destined to be saved), we order that you show yourselves favourable and well disposed to them, and whenever you find any violent attempt made against them, with respect to the matters mentioned above, by the prelates, nobles, and powerful men aforesaid, you shall see that the matter is treated according to law, and shall not in future permit the Jews to be improperly molested on these or similar charges by any persons whatever. Those who molest them you shall summarily restrain by your ecclesiastical censure.

Divine justice has not cast down the Jewish people without preserving the remnant of them for salvation. Therefore, it is an act of zeal that deserves no commendation, or of cruelty that is worthy of detestation, when Christians, either through greed for wealth or thirst for blood (disregarding the merciful nature of the Christian Church, which allows the Jews to live in its midst and to practise their own rites), plunder, torture, and slay them without trial. Now, the Jews living within your province have lately brought before the Holy See a pitiable complaint. They say that certain prelates and nobles of the province, desirous of having a pretext for cruelty towards them, have accused them of the death of a girl who is said to have been found secretly murdered near Valréas, that they have inhumanly committed some of them to the flames without legal trial or confession, while they have despoiled others of all their possessions and driven them away, and that—against the wont of the Mother who, herself free, brings forth children that they may be children of freedom—they have compelled their children to be baptised against their will. Now, since we are unwilling to tolerate such things—as, indeed, we could not do without transgressing the will of God—we hereby command you to deal according to law with such attacks on the Jews, of the nature that has been described above, as are made by bishops, nobles, and rulers. You shall not permit the Jews to be unjustly ill-treated on these or similar grounds, and you shall restrain the evil-doers by the summary use of ecclesiastical censures.

Moreover, in order to counteract the wickedness and greed of evil men, we decree that no one shall harm, or trespass on, the cemeteries of the Jews, or shall dig up dead bodies to obtain money, or shall charge them with using human blood in their ceremonies. Though they are ordered in the Old Testament to use no blood at all—not to mention human blood—yet many Jews have been killed at Fulda and in many other places on suspicion of having used human blood. By the authority of these presents we strictly forbid such actions in the future. If any man, having become acquainted with the purport of this decree, contravenes it—we pray that such a thing may not happen—let him be exposed to the danger of losing his office or rank, or let him be punished by excommunication, unless he makes suitable amends for his presumption; but we wish this protection of ours to be given only to those who use no devices for the subversion of the Christian faith.

Since Jews cannot bear testimony against Christians, we decree that the testimony of Christians against Jews shall be of no avail unless there is a Jew bearing testimony among them. For it sometimes happens that Christians lose their children, and Jews are charged by their enemies with taking them away and killing them and using their hearts and blood for religious purposes; the fathers of the children, or other Christians, in hatred of the Jews, hide the children away, so that they may cause trouble to the Jews and gain money from them for relieving them from their trouble, and in order that they may most falsely assert that the Jews have secretly stolen and murdered the children and that they use the blood for religious purposes, whereas their law strictly forbids them to use blood for ceremonial purposes, or to taste it, or to eat the flesh of animals with cloven hoofs, as has been many times demonstrated at our court by Jews converted to the Christian faith. On charges of this kind Jews have often been seized and imprisoned unjustly. We decree that in such cases the testimony of Christians against Jews shall not be admitted; that Jews imprisoned on this empty charge shall be liberated; that they be not imprisoned in future on this empty charge unless (which we cannot believe) they are found in the act.

(Signed by the Pope, four cardinals, and two bishops).

It sometimes happens that many Christians, in order that they may extort money from the said Jews and deprive them of their goods and substance and cause them to be killed, invent pretexts and assert (at times of plague and other calamities) that the Jews have poisoned the wells and mixed human blood with their unleavened bread: they say that it is in consequence of these crimes, which they unjustly ascribe to the Jews, that the calamities are caused. Hence the population is moved against the Jews and massacres them and persecutes and afflicts them in many ways.

Some persons have ventured to make the untruthful assertion that the Jews are unable to celebrate certain of their festivals without using the liver or heart of a Christian.

We have heard with displeasure, through the complaints of the Jews in your parts, that various ... towns, nobles, and powerful men among you, being jealous of the Jews and hostile to them, and blinded by hatred and envy, or, as is more probable, by greed, and wishing to have a pretext for depriving them of their goods, falsely charge them with slaying your children and drinking their blood, and committing many other horrible crimes specially directed against our faith. Thus they attempt to arouse the feelings of simple Christians against the Jews, and it often results that the Jews are not only robbed of their property, but are even murdered.

THE END

 

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