beginning of the year.
Riots directed against the Jews, and winked at if not encouraged by the
authorities, broke out in the towns of Southern Russia. Edicts followed
which excluded the Jews from all direct share in local government, refused
to allow more than a small percentage of Jews to attend the schools and
universities, forbade them to acquire property outside the towns, laid
special taxes upon their backs, and so on. This attitude of the Government
encouraged the populace of the towns to believe that they might attack the
Jews with impunity. The Jews are regarded in modern Russia in much the same
light as they were regarded by our forefathers in the Middle Ages. They are
hated, that is to say, on two counts: as unbelievers and as usurers. The
condition of affairs in a township where the population is half-Jewish,
half-Christian, and where the Christians are financially and commercially
in the hands of the Jews, and the Jews are politically and administratively
in the hands of the Christians, is obviously an extremely dangerous one.
Add to this the presence of a large hooligan section which is found in
almost every Russian town of any size, the open disfavour shown towards
the Jews by the Government, and the secret intrigues and incitement of the
police, and you get a train of circumstances which lead inevitably to those
violent anti-Semitic explosions, known as _pogroms_, which have stained the
pages of modern Russian history. The revolutionary movement has complicated
matters still further; for Jews are naturally to be found in the
revolutionary ranks, and the bureaucracy and its hooligan supporters have
tended to identify the Jewish race with the Revolutionary Party. Nothing
can excuse the treatment of the Jews in Russia during the last thirty-five
years, and the guilt lies almost entirely upon the Government, which,
instead of leading the people and educating them by initiating an
enlightened policy towards the Jews, a policy which might in fact have done
more than anything else to "Russify" the latter, has persistently aided and
abetted the worst elements of the population in their acts of violence.
It has reaped its reward in the rise of one of the most formidable of the
revolutionary parties in modern Russia, the so-called Jewish "Bund." The
Governor of Vilna, in a confidential report written in 1903, declared that
"this political movement is undoubtedly a result of the abnormal position
of the Jews, legal and