Russian Jews

“ But in Russia the Jewish question is most acute, first of all because nowhere else are there so many Jews in a compact mass, and in the second place because of the marked inadequacy of Russian administrative methods as they are brought to bear on the complex necessities of the case. These are the two elements which make the Jewish problem in Russia so acute and perplexing. On the one hand you have the cruel and intolerable oppression of the Jews. You have the perpetual humiliation and irritation of the Jews in the small towns, who have no room for expansion, who live poor and miserable lives ”

“ In Russia modern culture spreads a little way over the face of mediaevalism, as the waters of a river at its mouth spread over the surface of the ocean, modifying its colour without affecting its depths. Consequently the Jew is still persecuted for his heresy, as well as for his usury, exclusiveness, and foreign extraction.
Russian officials and English apologists of Russian anti-Semitism will not admit that the persecution of the Russian Jews is religious, though acknowledging that religion, too, plays its part. ”

“ The Russian Jewry, as a whole, is warmly and sincerely devoted to the interests of Russia, its motherland, and has struggled and is still struggling for the regeneration of the Russian state, and is heartily interested, together with all the other peoples inhabiting Russia, in the speediest overthrowing of Bolshevism and the reconstruction of orderly life in Russia. The Russian Jews have lost over one hundred thousand of their brothers and sons in killed and wounded in the war with Germany. ”

“ A popular account of the Polish and Russian Jews whose Pale of Settlement is the battleground of Teuton and Slav. It elucidates the problem of Russian Jewry which, at the termination of the world struggle, will claim alike the attention of statesman and humanitarian. It interprets the complex psychology of the Russian Jew who is becoming an important factor in the life of America. ”

“ There are the Polish refugees who for a hundred years have pleaded the cause of Polish freedom in every capital of Europe. And, above all, there are the Russian Jews who in every country have constituted themselves the passionate apostles of an anti-Russian propaganda.
The Jewish problem is a difficult problem in every country. It is becoming a difficult problem even in the United States. But it is especially acute in Russia. Russia has a larger Jewish population than all the other countries of the world together. Russian Poland alone has a Jewish population of five millions. ”

“ But the interesting thing in Russia is that the very intensity of Jewish suffering in Russia stimulates the efforts of the Jews, and of those who understand who the Jews are and what they are, to find a real solution. ”

“ I wrote, "will have no effect whatever upon Russians, it will have a great effect upon the Jews of Russia. It will proclaim aloud, in the hearing of these millions, that England and its great Lord Mayor, with all the wealth of London at their back, have undertaken the cause of the Russian Jews. And these poor people will believe it, and thousands and tens of thousands will sell all they have and come over to experience the first fruits of the generosity which promises them a new land of Canaan—in the City of London. ”

“ To the Russian Jews groaning in servitude the Czar’s Empire is a foreign land; his religion a foreign religion. In leaving Russia they leave a hotbed of idolatry as fierce, as cruel, as Godless as the idolatry of Egypt, Babylon, Syria, or Rome. To them the Russian god who can sanction such persecution is a veritable Moloch. He can claim no kinship with Jehovah. They owe it to themselves to escape from the house of bondage, and to their God to continue bearing witness to His unity. They, therefore, like their remote ancestors, seek freedom of worship by expatriation. ”

“ On the one hand there is a constant fight to secure elementary rights of existence in Russia on a level with the other inhabitants of the great plain, and at the same time there is an effort, which is now largely crowned with success, to bring about a new Jewish national revival, and the inner life of the Jews in Russia is extremely interesting because of this conflict of aims and ambitions, and because in the long run this movement is illumined by a spiritual light. ”

“ The sick among our Russian brethren, those who partook in dangerous quantities of the unwholesome delicacies, believed that they would solve all difficulties by 'Russification,' that is, by abandoning the old Jewish culture and adopting Russian mannerisms and customs—by ceasing to lead Jewish lives and by leading the lives of Russians. A great number of Jewish literary men of those times believed that if the Russian Jews would become 'Russified,' and would adopt modern civilization, they would receive full and equal rights, on the same terms as the other nationalities. ”

“ These principles were ratified by 350 rabbis, and published just at the time of the anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia.
"Judaism teaches respect for the life, the health, the forces and the property of one's neighbour."
I am a Russian. When, alone with myself, I calmly scrutinise my merits and demerits,—it seems to me that I am intensely Russian. And I am deeply convinced that there is much that we Russians can and ought to learn from the Jews. ”

“ His action, which has made him a popular hero throughout the Russian Empire, has done more to improve the position of the Jews than any event in the whole course of their history in Russia. It has made the nation realise that a Jew can be a worthy son of Russia. ”

“ Russian Jews who, in the course of the last few decades, had been chiefly instrumental in the economic advancement of those two centers. The cloak beneath which this agitation was carried on was purely that of Polish nationalism: the Russian Jews were alleged, on the one hand, "to Russify Poland," and, accused, on the other hand, of an opposite tendency, of asserting themselves as the members of a separate Jewish nationality, with a press and a social organization of their own, which refuses to be merged in the Polish people. ”

“ Petersburg and the provinces against the Kontrabandisti, a libellous play written by an apostate Jew, Levin, will become more and more general. Then the heroic effort and the unexampled progress of the Russian Jews will be more fully appreciated, and a patriotic nation will gratefully acknowledge its indebtedness to that smallest but most energetic and self-sacrificing portion of its heterogeneous population, the Jews, who have done so much, not only for Jewish Russians, but for Christian Russians as well, to hasten the time when "many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased." ”

“ One eighth of our immigrants are Russian Jews. Peculiar and pathetic is the lot of the Jew in Russia. A law of 1769, modified in 1804 and in 1835, requires that all Jews, except certain specified classes, shall reside within the Jewish pale. The pale is a district beginning immediately south of the Baltic provinces, stretching throughout the west and extending over the south as far east as the Don Army Territory. It has an area of about 362,000 square miles, or less than 20 per cent, of European Russia, and only a little over 4 per cent, of the entire Russian empire. ”

“ The facts concerning the persecution of the Russian Jews have constantly been belied by the Russian authorities, in conformity with the historic methods of Russian diplomacy, but have for some years past been placed beyond question through the efforts of our own government. ”

“ The Jewish question was the first of many I was called upon to consider after crossing the Russian frontier, for my first service within the empire was the Confirmation of a Jew. He was of the educated class, and particularly attractive; and as he bowed low over my hand and kissed it with a singular grace of manner the western part of Europe seemed already far away. It was at Warsaw, where, as at Cracow—the ancient capital of Poland—the Jews form a larger and more influential part of the population than in any other European city. ”

“ The prospect of future benefits, the attainment of which was conditioned by the weakening of the time-honored foundations of a stalwart Jewish [346] cultural life, expressing itself in language, school, and communal self-government, had no fascination for Russian Jews, who had not yet been touched by the influences of Western Europe. But what the Russian Jews did feel, and feel with sickening pain, was the imminence of a terrible economic catastrophe, the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews from the villages. ”

“ The awe inspired by the statesmanlike genius of the French Emperor made the Russian Government suspect that the convocation of a universal Jewish Synhedrion in Paris was merely a Napoleonic device to dispose the Jewish masses of Prussia, Austria, and Russia in his favor. In these circumstances it seemed likely that the resentment aroused in the Russian Jews by their imminent expulsion from the villages would provide a favorable soil for the wily agitation of Napoleon, and would create a hotbed of anti-Russian sentiment in the very regions soon to become the theater of war. ”

“ The Jewish people has grown to be a living part of Russia's economic organism, and the blows which are directed against the Jews affect in an equal, if not a greater, degree the mass of the aboriginal Russian population. ”

“ Jew-hatred in Russia is a thoroughly genuine survival. In Western349 Europe it is largely an artificial revival. The Russian Jews have never been emancipated from servitude, because the Russian Christians, with few exceptions, have never been emancipated from ignorance and bigotry. In other words, the modern term anti-Semitism, with all its quasi-scientific connotation, can hardly be applied to the Russian variety of the epidemic. ”

“ We have lately had very bitter experiences in Russia, We are both too many and too few; too many in the southwestern provinces, in which the Jews are allowed to reside, and too few in all the other provinces, where they are forbidden. If the Russian Government, and the Russian people as well, realized that an equal distribution of the Jewish population would benefit the entire country, we might have been spared all our sufferings. ”

“ The calamitous condition of general suffering into which the Russian Jews were plunged by the proscriptive policy of their government, appears to have passed its acute stage. While the expulsion of the Jews from the interior of the Empire and their settlement, permanent or temporary, in the "Pale" of the Western Russian provinces, including Poland, was in the height of its progress a few years ago, the number of those who were eventually forced to emigrate was very large, aggregating, it is estimated, nearly two hundred thousand in a single year. ”

“ The Jews with us are loyal and patriotic citizens and though proud—as they have a right to be—of their race, they are proud also of their nationality. So it will be in Russia when she gives them freedom. None will be more patriotic than they, amongst all the mixed races which make up the empire. ”

“ Here again the czar defeated his own end by segregating the three or four million of his Jewish subjects in certain districts, technically called the Pale, the greatest ghetto the world has ever known. It was a Judea in itself. The Jews there seldom came in contact with outside civilization. The languages they used were Hebrew as the literary tongue, Yiddish among themselves, and the local Slavonic dialect with their non-Jewish neighbors. Russian was strange, not only to the great majority of Jews, but to the Russians themselves. ”

“ The figures are not yet complete, but the Central Statistical Commission of the Minister of the Interior annually publishes figures of the rate of increase of the Russian population which de- monstrate the overwhelming importance of the Jewish Question to the ruler and people of Russia. In most of the text-books published on the subject of the Jewish population in the world the number of Jews in Russia is greatly underrated. ”

“ The Jews were no longer the best hated race in Russia; that distinction had been wrested35 from them by the “Nemetz.” Everywhere a new tolerance and a new respect for the Jews was apparent, especially when news came of their heroic deeds at the front. Their enthusiasm for the war and devotion to the Tzar rivalled that of the Russians themselves. A quarter of a million of men—the largest Jewish army ever assembled since the fall of Jerusalem—were with the Tzar’s forces. ”

“ The American Minister was therefore instructed to exert his influence with the Russian Government in the direction of mitigating the severity of the anti-Jewish measures. He was to point out to the Russian authorities that the maltreatment of the Jews in Russia was not purely an internal affair of the Russian Government, inasmuch as it affected the interests of the United States. Within ten years 200,000 Russian Jews had come over to America, and continued persecutions in Russia were bound to result in a large and sudden immigration which was not unattended with danger. ”

“ The majority of the Jews themselves are not less well-behaved in Russia than they are here; they lived under restrictions which do not exist here; yet in Russia their genius has enabled them to attain a degree of power which has completely baffled the Russian mind. Whether you go to Rumania, Russia, Austria or Germany, or anywhere else that the Jewish Question has come to the forefront as a vital issue, you will discover that the principal cause is the outworking of the Jewish genius to achieve the power of control. ”