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 ofthe 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 toother 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, theVocea Tutoveiof Berlad, openly incited the populace to kill the Jews. In a series of articles, subsequently reprinted in pamphletform, 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:
“The recent ritual murders committed by Jews in Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, Germany, and Russia must still be fresh in everyone’s mind. And how many children have disappeared in our own country! How many mutilated bodies have been found, while the criminals have remained undiscovered! Who are these criminals—these bloodthirsty murderers of our prattling babes? They are the fanatical Jews that infest our land. These monsters are the slayers of our Christian children. They are the criminals—the Jews who have invaded our country like locusts.“The time for peaceful and legal restrictions is passing away. Let all good Roumanians raise their heavy sticks and kill these parasites of their country.”
“The recent ritual murders committed by Jews in Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, Germany, and Russia must still be fresh in everyone’s mind. And how many children have disappeared in our own country! How many mutilated bodies have been found, while the criminals have remained undiscovered! Who are these criminals—these bloodthirsty murderers of our prattling babes? They are the fanatical Jews that infest our land. These monsters are the slayers of our Christian children. They are the criminals—the Jews who have invaded our country like locusts.
“The time for peaceful and legal restrictions is passing away. Let all good Roumanians raise their heavy sticks and kill these parasites of their country.”
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 theBessarabetzagainst 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 suchas 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 theJews of the city, in a prosecution of theVaterland, 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 credulouspadreis 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 inthe 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 thesecountries—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 itsultima 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 readilystamped out if the wish and will to rid Europe of its baleful influence could overcome the opportunist counsels of a spiritlessentourage, 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 theJewish 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 otherdisturbing 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 orfull 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 thecivil 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 theJew 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 theRussian 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 ahope 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 inthe 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 theArbeiterstadtof Mülhausen, in theCité ouvrièreof 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 arethe 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 yieldan 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 themamidst 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 emancipatedfrom 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 arule, 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 bepatriotic? 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 intheir 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 theirimpoverishment 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 manyof 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 forciblyexiled 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 levelwith 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 thecoercing 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. Asous-prefectof 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 theyear, 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 ofthis 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 theBessarabsky 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, theBessarabetz. 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 makeroom 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 theBessarabetza 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 inthe 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 theBessarabetzfuse, 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, wouldbe 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 expressionsof 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 thisex partetestimony 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; alsowith 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 whosebona fidesI 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 medicalconfrères.
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, ofthe 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 absolutelytrue. 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 anyfurther 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; badlywounded, 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 CivilGovernor, 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 popularémeutein 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 lawbetter 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 exactlyau courantwith every latent movementamong 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 foragents 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 aRussian 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 thesame 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 commercialmoralegenerally, 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 Russiansone 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 daughterscould 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 theBessarabetz. 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. TheBessarabetzhas 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 girland her death at the Jewish Hospital of Kishineff. TheBessarabetzdeclared 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 theBessarabetzto the popular anti-Semitic hatred.
Chief of Police Tchemzenkov was also requested to act in the interest of peace, and curb the diatribes of theBessarabetz. He replied that it would “serve the Jews right if they were driven from the city for encouraging the propaganda of Socialism.”