conscription was fixed at twenty to twenty-five, while boys between the
age of twelve and eighteen were to be drafted only when the parents
themselves wished to offer them as substitutes for their elder sons who
were of military age. Nevertheless, to the Polish Jews, who had never
known of conscription, military service lasting a quarter of a century,
to be discharged in a strange Russian environment, seemed a terrible
sacrifice. The "Congregational Board" of Warsaw, having learned of the
ukase, sent a deputation to St. Petersburg with a petition to grant the
Jews of the Kingdom equal rights with the Christians, referring to the
law of 1817 which distinctly stated that the Jews were to be released
from personal military service so long as they were denied equal civil
rights. The petition of course proved of no avail; the very term "equal
rights" was still missing in the Russian vocabulary.

Only in point of disabilities were the Jews of Poland gradually placed
on an equal footing with their Russian brethren. In 1845 the Russian law
imposing a tax on the traditional Jewish attire [1] was extended in its
operation to the Polish Jews, descending with the force of a real
calamity upon the hasidic masses of Poland. Fortunately for the Jews of
Poland, the other experiments, in which St. Petersburg was revelling
during that period, left them unscathed. The crises connected with the
problems of Jewish autonomy and the Jewish school, which threatened to
disrupt Russian Jewry in the forties, had been passed by the Jews of
Poland some twenty years earlier. Moreover, the Polish Jews had the
advantage over their Russian brethren in that the abrogated Kahal had
after all been replaced by another communal organization, however
curtailed it was, and that the secular school was not forced upon them
in the same brutal manner in which the Russian Crown schools had been
imposed upon the Jews of the Empire. Taken as a whole, the lot of the
Polish Jews, sad though it was, might yet be pronounced enviable when
compared with the condition of their brethren in the Pale of Settlement,
where the rightlessness of the Jews during that period bordered
frequently on martyrdom.

[Footnote 1: A law to that effect had been passed on February 1, 1843.
It was preparatory to the entire prohibition of Jewish dress. See below,
p. 143 et seq.]

CHAPTER XVI

THE INNER LIFE OF RUSSIAN JEWRY DURING
THE PERIOD OF MILITARY DESPOTISM

1. THE UNCOMPRO