Juifs russes

Our brief analytical catalogue

Charles Péguy

We have published in our earlier editions and in our first five series, 1900–1904, so great a number of cahiers of letters — short stories, novels, dramas, dialogues, poems and tales; — so great a number of cahiers of history and of philosophy; we have published in them so great a number of texts and commentaries, of documents and information, of contributions, of dossiers and of works bearing on the history of the people of Israel; in particular on the contemporary history of this people; in particular on the Dreyfus affair; in particular by Bernard-Lazare on the oppression of the Jews in Eastern Europe; and these cahiers of letters, of history and of philosophy, these texts, commentaries, documents, pieces of information, contributions, dossiers, works were so considerable that we cannot think of giving here even the most succinct enumeration of them; to know what has appeared in the first five series of the cahiers, it suffices to send a money order of five francs to M. André Bourgeois, administrator of the cahiers, 8, rue de la Sorbonne, ground floor, Paris, fifth arrondissement; one will receive in return the brief analytical catalogue, 1900–1904, of our first five series.

This catalogue was established precisely in order to give, as far as it was possible, an image in brief, an abridgment, an idea, abridged but complete, of our earlier editions and of our first five series; everything in it is classified in order; it suffices to read it to find, in their place, the references requested.

This catalogue, in-18 grand-jésus, forms a very thick cahier of XII + 408 very dense pages, marked five francs; this cahier counted as the first cahier of the sixth series and our subscribers received it on its date, October 2, as the first cahier of the sixth series; every person who subscribes to the sixth series receives it, by the very fact of his subscription, at the head of the series; we send it against a money order of five francs to any person who makes the request of us.

Cahiers de la Quinzaine

Charles Péguy

Raoul Allier. — The primary education of the natives in Madagascar. — Today, taking up again this fourth cahier of this sixth series, I notice that in the transcriptions which I had begun to make, precisely in order to relieve the reading of the cahier itself of all concern of transcription, I have omitted several important transcriptions; this omission was inevitable; it would have been necessary, so to speak, to transcribe almost everything; for almost everything lent itself to transcription, almost everything indicated itself, almost everything imposed itself for transcription.

I do not recall whether I transcribed, in chapter II, a condemned piece of antiquity, of May 29, 1904, an important passage, and one which determines very exactly the situation of upright Protestants with regard to an attempt at the monopoly of education; the author has just cited the text of the contract, of the convention concluded between the government of the French Republic and the Society of the Sisters of Saint-Joseph de Cluny, represented by its superior general, residing in Paris; it is known that the government and the various Catholic Institutes had imagined, by these contracts, a condemned piece of antiquity, to make congregational education, confessional, Catholic education, the official, governmental education, to invest a confessional education with an official investiture, to make a monopoly of State education coincide with a monopoly of congregational education, to make an institution of the Church exactly overlap an institution of the State; it was to superpose exactly the two monopolies, to make weigh simultaneously, to make coincide at all their points the two servitudes from which, in modern times, and save for exceptions, we hardly suffer except alternately; and even thus we suffer much from them; such was also the effect of the contract concluded with the Brothers of the Christian Doctrine; “it would have been impossible to give official schools a more clearly confessional stamp.”

But since one must be just toward everyone, and since the State readily believes that equality is obtained by equalizations of servitudes, by equalizations of complicities of servitudes, and by equalizations of redoublings of servitudes, “in order to attenuate a little the character of this convention, the government, — M. André Lebon was then minister of the colonies, — offered the French Protestants, represented by the Society of evangelical missions, to conclude with them a similar agreement. The proposal was set aside by them. The confessional character, conferred upon the schools of the government, appeared to them as too contrary to essential principles. It suppressed that religious neutrality of the State which was, over there, desirable above all. It compromised evident rights. Instead of associating themselves with this regime and consolidating it, they had to desire its end. Yet the French Protestant schools received a global subsidy of ten thousand francs, raised a little later to twenty thousand. It was a slight compensation, but one which did not attribute to them an official existence.”

Here is exactly the limit between a licit intervention and an illicit intervention, between a legitimate intervention and an illegitimate intervention of the State in the sustenance and in the functioning of confessional institutions, whatever they may be; if the State, I mean the State as it is today, comes to enter into the examination of the questions which pertain to the very institution of the State, if the State judges that a confessional institution is useful to the common interest, it subsidizes this confessional institution; but without asking anything of it, nor imposing anything upon it, except technical guarantees of competence; on the contrary if the State judges that a confessional institution is not useful to the common interest, it does not subsidize this confessional institution; in no case must it oppress consciences, by crushing religious consciences beneath enslavements, beneath the servitude of the State, by crushing consciences beneath the double servitude, beneath the double coincident servitude, servitude of the State, servitude of the Church; above all, let the State not be of the Church; let the Church not be of the State; let the confessional schools, having already all that immense authoritarian apparatus of the Church, not be official; and let the official schools, having already all that immense authoritarian apparatus of the State, not be confessional; it is the very formula of our old, deeper reshapings, the formula which holds that true revolutions will not have renewed humanity, suppressing the servitude of the State, suppressing the servitude of the Church; as long as there shall be servitudes, let them at least be isolated, let them at least not be solidary, bound, and not overlap one another; let them not double one another, let them not reinforce one another; and let us have only to bear one at a time, when we are constrained to bear any.

I was in such haste to come upon that admirable history of that good military officer who was peopling the governmental schools that I do indeed believe I forgot, on the preceding page, at the beginning of chapter VI, the art of statistics, an important note:

In the first days of March 1904, a semi-official dispatch from Tananarive was communicated to the press: “The measures taken recently in France concerning the congregations and their schools have led the governor general to modify the regulation of education in Madagascar in conformity with the orientation given by the government of the metropole. A recent decree taken on this subject henceforth suppresses for the religious associations all subsidy.”

One sees how our metropolitan demagogic agitations reverberate in our colonies; just as that attempt at monopoly in Madagascar formed as it were a perfect laboratory example of what awaits us in Paris, in France, so the events of Madagascar form as it were an enlarged prolongation of the events which in France would still give only indications; I take the liberty of drawing attention to the very method which a governor general follows in the most perfectly insular of our great colonies; this general governor general does not ask himself what his colony needs by considering his colony; to know what his colony needs, what the country of which he has the government needs, there would be one means, which would be to consider his colony a little, itself; only that means would be a means within reach of even the most aged intelligences; it would be the direct means, the immediate, living, practical, pragmatic and realistic means; a general governor general has other means; our prefects, our maritime prefects, our military prefects have not in vain passed through our great schools, through our great military administrations, and through our great governments; to the realistic and living method they will always prefer the statist, governmental methods, and, to say everything in a word, the scholastic methods; instead of looking at, instead of considering the very object of their study, the object of their work, and the ground of their administration, they begin by taking care to look everywhere else, by preference; and instead of working reality upon reality itself, they begin by asking of exterior, superior governments not only indications, but commands; to work upon reality, that is given to everyone, that is good for everyone; what is fine, what is superior, and truly worthy of a general, is to govern reality while looking elsewhere than at that reality; the general, if this comparison does not offend him, is like a workman who would take care above all not to look at his work; for fear of seeing his handiwork; such a workman would not succeed much in the arts and in the crafts, because industrial reality has immediate sanctions which governmental fictions do not exercise; and inseparably it is because they have immediate sanctions that all non-governmental realities likewise require immediate methods; and inseparably it is because they do not undergo immediate sanctions that governmental fictions can dispense with immediate methods; the one is bound up with the other; the one entails the other; an industrial workman is constrained to look at his work, immediately, because if he did not look at his very work he would receive from his very work immediate sanctions; a general on the contrary can refrain from looking at his work, because he is covered against the sanctions, against the automatic play of the sanctions, by the enormous apparatus of governmental force; a general governor general does not ask of the colony what the colony needs; but he asks of the central government, of the metropolitan demagogic agitations what is to be done to the colony; it is one more triumph of the indirect, scholastic, exterior, extrinsic, bookish, factitious method, and, as was to be expected, this triumph of the indirect method is also the triumph of the governmental method.

It is also the triumph of centralization; just as that attempt at monopoly made for us a perfect laboratory example to give us an idea of what awaits us, just as the government of that general gives us a good example of indirect method, in the same way, and particularly, the government of that general gives us a fairly good example of what a centralizing government is; it does not suffice to say that a centralizing government is a government which refers everything to the center; there is reason to examine a little more closely what the method and the play of centralization are.

All this hangs together; all the evils from which we suffer hang together; the method of centralization is essentially a method of monopoly; and it is, no less essentially, an indirect method; and finally it is a laboratory method; and particularly the employment of this method in Madagascar functions like a laboratory apparatus.

The method of centralization consists essentially in referring everything to a center; in this sense the centralization exercised in Madagascar furnishes us an eminent example of centralization; for if the method of centralization consists essentially in referring everything to a center, the more the point to which one refers will be remote from the world that one refers, the more the center will be remote from the real and from the periphery, the more the example will be striking, the more the operation of centralization will appear.

Centralization rages everywhere; when one refers to Paris the government of Orsay, of Orléans, of the Charentes, of Lyon, of Marseille, there is evidently an exercise, and there can be an abuse of centralization; leaving the geographical order and entering the other orders of classification, the mental order for example, when one refers to the government of the State all the immense work of art and of philosophy, of science; likewise when one refers to the government of the State all the immense industrial, economic work, there is evidently an exercise, and there can be an abuse of centralization; but all these exercises and all these abuses may not be fully and scandalously apparent; they are not as it were schematized in advance; on the contrary a centralization whose center is at Paris and whose circumference is at Madagascar, by the very length of the radius, by the disproportion between the central point and the circumferential object, appears as a maximal centralization, as a ready-made schema of centralization.

Ready-made schemas, the schemas of nature and of history are always worth more than the schemas that we can imagine; not only are they real, which is the unique virtue, and the others are imaginary, but they are always better made; technically, professionally, they are always of a better manufacture; we could not imagine an example of centralization as well made as this Madagascar example, historical, real, ready-made; let us therefore seize this example.

An immense island; immense interests; immense needs; an immense future; but immense difficulties; rights, exigencies, competitions; subject populations; an immense territory; settler citizens; an immense work to do; such is the circumferential object, and the one which will have to be referred.

A few ministry offices in Paris; a few green files; a few functionaries; a few unintelligences and a few sterilities; a few routines and a few encrustations; a minister, a temporary secretary or under-secretary of State, foreign, come from elsewhere, going elsewhere; always provisional, transient, intermittent, a substitute, placed there by some parliamentary combination; a few rancors and a few hardenings; a few ephemeral maneuvers, a particular budget voted at the hazard of the combinations and of the foreign preoccupations; a few military or civil vices, equally colonial; dominating the whole, the play of influences, of recommendations, of ambitions, of political favors, parliamentary, governmental; a few habits; a few vices; a few exercises, a few abuses of authority of command: there is the center.

That being so, who will command; which of the two will command the other, if there must be command, and as long as there shall be command; which of the two, of that immense circumferential object, or of that minute central point; nature, reason, history would require that, considering only the very proportions, if there must be command, it should be the circumferential object that commands the center; for all that pertains to it, the circumferential object, and only for that; but let us reassure ourselves; it is not nature, reason, history that govern the governments; and the method of centralization does not fail to schematize itself thus:

Given an immense circumferential object, and a minute central point, bound by a thread of an improbable length, and of a still more improbable tenuity, the method of centralization requires that it be from the central point that the commands set out which at the end of this long thread make the immense realities move like puppets.

An enormous reality hung at the end of a long thread and moving as it can at the end of this long thread; this thread attached to a center, to a point, to a minute central point; and the whole government of this mass coming from this point, passing through this thread; such is the schema of the method of centralization which we obtain ready-made and perfect in this reality of Madagascar; an enormous island, a point of that point which Paris is, for Madagascar, and seen from Madagascar; a thread of no thickness thrown over Africa; so that the slightest variations of the center are manifested, reverberate in immense variations of the immense realities, as if their amplitude were multiplied by the very length of the radius, as if their importance were multiplied by the very importance of the mass, by its proportional importance, by the relation, by the enormous relation of the mass to the point; thus the slightest political inclinations, at the center, the slightest parliamentary caprices, at the center, the slightest ministerial favors, at the center, the slightest governmental games, at the center, give automatically, at the periphery, enormous variations, enormous alterations of the mass; a word in a parliamentary discussion, not even a speech, but an interruption, a turn of the ballot, or an unforeseen amendment, all this dictated by causes the most foreign possible to the colony, cause the colony to undergo or not to undergo such a treatment, to receive or not to receive such a command, to undergo or not to undergo a regime; there is therefore, by the method of centralization, and without entering into the very critique of the modern State, first an inversion of the current of command, second an enormous disproportion between the commander and the commanded.

First an inversion of the course of command; I insisted greatly, in the three lessons that I gave last winter at the École des Hautes Études Sociales, upon the primordial importance there was, in every study bearing upon social movements, in considering the direction of the movement, in asking oneself what the direction of the course is, in what direction one would have to draw the arrow of the river, the arrow which on a social map would represent the current; I had said that every study really bearing upon social realities comes down necessarily to making a study bearing first upon social movements; I said next that in every study bearing upon social movements there was a primordial interest in considering in what direction the movement went; on a given itinerary of movement, there can be ascending movements and descending movements, ascensions and descents of social movements, crossings, collisions; given the schema that reality has made for us in Madagascar, nature, reason, history required that the current set out from the periphery, that is to say that it should be the needs and the rights of the colony that made the origin of the movement; there had to be as it were a call exercised by the colony and coming from the colony and going to the center; and the command come from the center had to be only a response to that call; on the contrary the method of centralization requires that the initial movement be the centrifugal movement and that it make a movement of command.

It is the very reversal, it is the reversal end for end of the natural, rational, reasonable, historical movement; nature, reason, history require that it be the periphery that makes the call, that gives the initial jolt, that makes the very first setting in motion; nature, reason, history require that the movement set out from the periphery, from the remote mass, from the interested circumferential part; having set out from there, and from there only, nature, reason, history require that the movement reascend to the center, reach the center, attain the center; and the movement of governmental authority which comes back, which descends, which sets out from the center, which comes back to the interested periphery, must be only a response to the call come from the colony, to the call come from the needs of the colony, needs of rights, needs of interests; the movement of authority, which carries the commands, is only a movement of response.

When therefore the method of centralization requires that the initial movement come from the center, that the very first setting in motion be given at the center and by the center, that the first and the only current that passes through the itinerary of the thread be the descending current of governmental authority, this method does nothing less than a total reversal, a complete inversion in the direction of the current that makes the communication of the colonies and of the metropole; it substitutes for the natural, rational, reasonable, historical direction, exactly, end for end, a factitious direction, the contrary direction.

Let us note that the same phenomenon is produced every time that the method of centralization functions; perhaps one could say that this phenomenon of reversal is not essential to the method of centralization, that it is an abuse of it, or the result of an abuse, and not the result of an exercise; and indeed, if one wished to hold to the rigor of an analysis which would itself reascend to more thorough researches, bearing upon more ancient states of the matter, there would be another schema of centralization, there would be another state, another form of the method of centralization, another mode of centralization, today almost effaced: the primitive schema of centralization would be that of an operation which, for a social movement concerning a part of the periphery, would set out from that part of the periphery, and would come back to that part of the periphery, having, between the two, passed through a center.

If we have some day the time and the means to make a somewhat more advanced study of centralization, we shall not fail to begin by studying this primitive, first form, today almost effaced, of centralization; historically and logically this form indeed precedes the other; it can be schematized thus: given a part of the periphery, with its needs, needs of rights, needs of interests, the first form of centralization requires that every social movement concerning that part of the periphery, instead of moving on the spot and acting there, be constrained to pass through a center, through the center, however remote that center may be; this first historical and logical form of centralization requires that the social movement, born in the interested part of the periphery, go to the center, go to pass through the center, and come back afterward to the interested part of the periphery, to the original part; this form, today almost effaced, of centralization therefore requires finally that the impulse come from the periphery, that the movement make a journey of going and return; such would be, such has been the complete, anterior, first form of centralization; a movement born at the edge, and forced to pass through the center before coming back to the same edge.

This first, complete form has today almost effaced itself, and it has been replaced in practice by a much simpler form, simpler by half, the only one of which we have spoken today, for today we wished only not to let fall the magnificent example of centralization that the government of Madagascar had brought us; in practice the first half of the old centralization wore out first, effaced itself entirely; as the central government grew in force, in authority of command, and as the feeling of liberty fell everywhere, disappeared from everywhere, and particularly cooled at the extremities, the part of the movement which came from those extremities attenuated itself, obliterated itself, too, and the part of the movement on the contrary which came from the center invaded the whole operation; so that today, and in the immense majority of cases, it is strictly true to say that the method of centralization functions thus, that the impulse comes from the center, and that all the social movement, which becomes in the case a movement of authority of governmental command, marches from the center to the periphery, instead of there having to be a movement of call, of exigency, of requisition going in the inverse, contrary, prior direction and to which the descending movement of authority would be only a response; and this redescending movement of authority has on the contrary invaded everything, annulled all that ascending movement of exigency and of liberty.

One is thus led to the following result; I do not wish to return today to what I said of the formidable disproportion which we have observed between that enormous mass of reality, which one refers, and that very little lost point of a center, to which one refers; but, to consider today only the amplitude, the spread of the angle, and the length of the remoteness, who does not see that, given the length of the radius, every variation of angle given at the center or in proximity to the punctuated center stands out at the extremities in more and more formidable oscillations; there was formerly at the head of the twentieth brigade of French infantry, to which, if my memory serves me well, I have the honor of belonging, a general who was named, I believe, Le Loup de Sancy de Rolland, or de Roland; I may well name him, without informing, since he has for several months passed into the second section, reserve, of the General Staff of the army; in other words, he has retired; he has made the retreat, as our elders used to say; and he had even made it for himself a little before being struck by the age limit, because, having been a brigadier for one knows not how many years, and having, for good reasons, the assurance that he would never become a divisionary general, he felt the need, a few months before the fatal limit, to resign with great fracas, if my memories are exact, in order to demonstrate clearly to the nationalist people that the government of republican defense was betraying France; in short this general was not very much loved by his subordinates, nor very much esteemed, I mean as a general, and not as a man;

as a man I do not know him; he was attributed a certain technical and professional incapacity; in short the officers who served under his orders had the custom of summing up his manner in the following manner: When he has, they said, made the tail of his horse turn, he wants the last man of the last section of his last reserve battalion to have instantaneously accomplished the corresponding movement.

This good general was not so stupid after all; and my God, if it is permitted still to pronounce such a name, he did as everyone does today; I mean as everyone governmental does; but who is not, today, of the governmental world; this pivot general furnishes us quite simply the most perfect symbol that we could find of what centralization has become today; he was a center, he too, this man, and the tail of his horse was an object little remote from his center; when he turned by a quarter circle that object situated in proximity, there was no reason why the men situated at the last extremity of his brigade should not have made, instantaneously, an immense quarter circle, proportioned.

We are governed thus; let us not look elsewhere; we hold here a perfect symbol; all our governments are like that brigade general; and we common folk are all like the soldiers of that general; a government pivots, in some instant; therefore it is necessary that all the country, all the immense and rebellious reality of the country traverse, in that same instant, the immense arc of circle, make the immense conversion, operate the immense corresponding change of direction; I repeat it, that is what happens today everywhere; that is all centralization, all statism, and I can say it without offending M. Déroulède, that is all jaurésism; and if we have stopped at this Madagascar example, if we have retained for examination this culminating example, it was in no way to deny or to neglect all the other innumerable cases of centralization; it was on the contrary to study upon an eminent example, eminently simple, eminently well made, eminently characteristic, the mechanism of the operation, it was to have in pure form the schema of the method, for the sole end of finding more easily afterward both that method, and that mechanism, and that schema, in the much less simple, much more complex, and much more clothed examples, which reality presents to us on all sides.

Before coming, if we can, to those much fuller examples, I wish to say one more word, and it will be all for today’s commentary, I wish to say one more word about that schematic example of centralization that we have found in the primary education of the natives in Madagascar.

In the note where we stopped, it is no longer even a general’s command, a gyration of government that stands out at the extremities in an immense corresponding conversion; it is a simple popular movement, a political parliamentary movement, a central demagogic movement that commands, that determines at the extremities an immense change of direction; the governor general, who does not look at the colony of his government, does not even look, outside, at an official, administrative movement; and it is not even on a governmental indication that he aligns himself, in his distant government; he claims to take an alignment, to take his alignment as governor general upon the fluctuations of a moving, corrupt, faltering and completely disordered public opinion.

If an alignment taken upon a few central rigidities gives at the extremities, for the most minimal angular variations, the most unexpected displacements, the most unexpected aberrations, what shall we say of an alignment taken upon the softest movements, upon the most uncertain agitations, upon the incessant displacements of the mobile demagogies; when that general tries to align himself upon the governmental variations themselves, what oscillations does he not risk imprinting, what staggerings does he not risk making the colony of which he has the government accomplish; but when it is upon the variations of the crowd that he wishes to align his general commands.

“The measures taken recently in France concerning the congregations and their schools have led the governor general to modify the regulation of education in Madagascar in conformity with the orientation given by the government of the metropole;” when one knows what the orientation of a government is, and in particular when one has seen the orientation of this government, when one knows how the government of the metropole gives the orientation in Paris, one no longer asks oneself how one can represent to oneself that orientation in Madagascar; it is an alignment which lacks all the same a little of base file, an orientation whose compass lacks a little constancy; a central government which orients itself solely upon the fluctuations of demagogy; and a colonial government which guides itself solely upon the orientations of the central government; that gives a colonial government which guides itself solely, at the second degree, upon the fluctuations, multiplied, of the demagogic movements; this reduplication of displacement will characterize the colonial government; and in it will be achieved the exercise of contemporary tyranny.

One can sum it up thus; one can represent it in the following schema: immense demagogic movements, all confused, all barbarous, all soft and yet redoubtable, by their mass, by their weight and their inconstancy itself, by their incoherence, by their heavy and flowing fluidity, by all that they have of the slimy, of the muddy, of the miry, by a perpetual danger of political and social bogging-down, immense colloidal and gelatinous movements, without a point of support, without a resistance, a piece of stone, the most dangerous of all the demagogic movements, precisely because they are viscous, pasty, without an idea, without a serious organization; and instead of introducing a little fixity into the fluctuations of that moving mass, a central government which puts at the service of the movements of that mass all the enormous rigidity of the modern State, instituted on the contrary by the means of hardness; so that the fluctuations of that heavy soft mass rebound in repercussions of that heavy hard mass; finally, far away over there, a general government which takes the agitations of those demagogic eddies, the jolts of that central government for the fixed point of its orientation; double, redoubled displacements; double, redoubled aberration; first the formless and slimy, colloidal aberrations of those demagogic crowds, lost, stupid, ignorant, corrupt, barbarous, vicious, flattered, grotesque, flattering, corrupting, cruel, wicked, bad, devious, frowning, proud and base, crawling and biting, mistress-servants, and which join all the corruptions of false grandeur to all the corruptions of true miseries; second the rigid subordinated aberrations of a government of State; third the multiplied, enlarged aberrations of a colonial government.

We have here a perfect schema of the contemporary servitudes, a representation of servitude, and of modern tyranny; it is to this that we have at last come; humanity has undergone many tyrannies since the beginning of its history; and, to tell the truth, since it has been known, it has hardly undergone anything but tyrannies; by their number it would not be fit to terrify it, nor even to astonish it much, if this new and, until fuller event, last form of tyranny, contemporary or modern tyranny, particularly the tyranny that today calls itself republican defense, this form of tyranny that we enjoy, did not present certain particularly disquieting characteristics.

Not only does it present certain particularly disquieting characteristics, but of all those characteristics the most disquieting is that it presents, above all, a superposition, a coincidence, a coexistence, a new superaddition of two ancient forms of tyranny which had not yet been much accustomed to go together; among all the forms of tyranny which old humanity has hardly ceased to undergo, two great sorts have been seen, two great, great species which one could name respectively the hard tyrannies and the soft tyrannies; hard tyrannies, that is to say heavy and fixed tyrannies of the authoritarian governments, consistent tyrannies of the sectarian sects, of the autocrats, of the aristocracies, of the chiefs and of the bureaucracies, of the functionaries, of the governmental administrations; soft tyrannies, that is to say heavy and inconsistent tyrannies of the crowds, corruptions of the plebs, decadences of the publics, dominations of the slaves; soft tyrannies and hard tyrannies, humanity has experienced, since the beginning of its history, these two sorts, and all the sorts of tyrannies; and it has naturally experienced many more sorts of tyranny than the republic has introduced forms of liberty.

But never perhaps had one seen so perfectly organized, so regularly accepted the superaddition of an entire hard, global, total, universal tyranny to an entire soft, global, total, universal tyranny; never perhaps had one seen as today a perfect superaddition, a perfect redoubling of tyrannies which seemed incompatible; so perfect a superaddition of an entire hard tyranny to an entire soft tyranny, and the placing of an entire hard tyranny at the service of an entire soft tyranny; it is indeed to the corruption of modern democracy, and to its withering of our days almost totally accomplished into demagogy that we owe this monstrous coupling.

The hard, ancient, simply hard tyrannies had their advantages and their inconveniences; they had naturally more inconveniences than advantages, since they were tyrannies, and since, being tyrannies, they made servitudes; but in the end they presented a few compensatory advantages; by their very fixity, which made their hardness, they could bring some security to the work of long achievement, and consequently to all life, which is only a work of long achievement; Renan, who was not as democratic as he has recently been made out to us, several times represented to himself the long achievement of science pursued under the hard tyranny of a monarchical governmental authority.

The soft, ancient, simply soft tyrannies, the tyrannies of plebs, of rabbles and of crowds had their advantages and their inconveniences; they had naturally more inconveniences than advantages, since they were tyrannies, and since, being tyrannies, they made servitudes; but in the end they presented a few compensatory advantages; by their very mobility, which made their softness, they could leave some opening, some escape-route to the eruptions of liberties, to the evasions, to the invasions, to the interruptions, to the breakings and to the introductions; the revolts and the troubles of life could at a pinch pass through there; and in history, crises of intense labor have often coincided with crises of demagogic upheavals; the Renaissance; the French Revolution; so many others.

But hard tyrannies and soft tyrannies, tyrannies of chiefs and tyrannies of troops, I do not believe that these two tyrannies, which seem irreconcilable, incompatible, have ever coincided as they seem to wish to coincide in the modern world, with a coincidence as regular, as organic, as solid, as statutory, as perfectly accepted; let us consider indeed how our modern governments, claimed democratic, really demagogic, our governments of State, function in reality; they cumulate all the inconveniences of the soft tyrannies and all the inconveniences of the hard tyrannies; they add all the inconveniences of the hard tyrannies to all the inconveniences of the soft tyrannies, being themselves constituted by the superposition of a hard tyranny of State upon the soft tyranny of the crowd.

Soft tumultuations make the slimy crowds swell, seethe and whirl, demagogic movements, one day antisemitic, one day anticatholic, always anti-something, agitate in stirrings of fermentations; the State, the government of the State, supervenes; and instead of opposing some solidity to the fluctuations of that formless mass, far from making a rampart of its ancient solidity for the threatened liberties, it has nothing more pressing to do than to put on the contrary all its solidity, all its rigidity, all its hardness at the service of those tumultuous depths; it redoubles, weighs down, sanctions all the demagogies with all the forces, with all the sanctions of democracy, of legality; thus, the government above all, above all the force of the crowd.

Nothing can resist, nothing can save itself; nothing can escape the oppressions of this regime; this regime cumulates all the inconveniences of the hard tyrannies with all the inconveniences of the soft tyrannies;

and it does not cumulate, it annuls on the contrary the few advantages that they can respectively have; for in such a matter the inconveniences cumulate, and the advantages do not cumulate, and the advantages on the contrary destroy themselves; such a regime destroys, one by another, the few advantages which the soft tyrannies and the hard tyrannies could respectively present; the security of long work and of life, which could be assured upon the fixity of the government, disappears beneath the temporary invasion of the syrupy crowds, an alternating incoherent intermittent tyranny; and the eruptions of liberty, which could pass through the inattentions of the crowd, are broken by the rigidity of the government.

This regime on the contrary cumulates all the inconveniences, all the oppressions of the one and the other tyrannies; the incoherence, the inconsistency of the crowd falls back upon the continuity of work and of life; the coherence of the State, the consistency of the government falls back upon the discontinuity of revolt and of liberty; everything is settled.

I stop this commentary here; we shall begin again as and when we can; at the pace at which I am going, even a sociologist would notice that I am not close to catching up with my texts; above all at the pace at which the texts have been going since the beginning of this sixth series; so much the better then, and let the texts continue to march at a good pace; the cahier that one is going to read does not need me to present it; it is one more cahier brought as a contribution to the history of the people of Israel, and particularly to the contemporary history of this people; in the cahier of M. Henri Dagan, which was the first cahier of the fifth series, the Oppression of the Jews in Eastern Europe — the massacres of Kishinev and the situation of the Jewish proletarians in Russia, the author studied both those particular massacres, and that general situation with all the resources of the historical method, that is to say by employing like a historian all the documents and all the information that one could have at that date in Paris; we complete today this old cahier in the two opposite senses; on the general situation and on the general history of the Jewish proletariat in Russia, in particular on the “Bund” and on Zionism, a native and an interested party, a Russian Jew, come from Russia, today residing in Paris, gives us both the results obtained by the historical method, and the reinforcement, the deepening of those results which only a direct personal experience can bring; on the massacres of Kishinev, and on the particular situation which preceded those massacres, which accompanied them, which resulted from them, a Jew of France, on the contrary, and even of Paris, gone from France over there, our collaborator Georges Delahache, whose cahier Jews, fifth cahier of the third series, has certainly not been forgotten, brings us the direct personal results of a study journey which he made in the country itself; finally a short story by Vladimir Korolenko, house number 13, translated by M. Élie Eberlin, gives the direct and gripping vision of an episode of the massacre.

CHARLES PÉGUY

The primary education of the natives in Madagascar

Raoul Allier

[Editor’s note: this cahier contains no body text by Raoul Allier; his essay The primary education of the natives in Madagascar was published separately, as the fourth cahier of this sixth series. Péguy’s commentary above, under “Cahiers de la Quinzaine,” concerns that essay. Allier’s title is listed here only because it appears in this cahier’s own front-matter and analytical Table.]

Russian Jews

The Jewish parties in Russia

Élie Eberlin

Introduction

Of the eleven million Jews counted in the entire world Russia possesses more than five: five million of whom scarcely a tenth are scattered through the countryside and outside the zone of residence (1) and about four and a half million crowded into the towns and the boroughs of the Territory. (1) Behind the double wall of this territorial and urban ghetto lives, thinks, suffers and stirs the Jewish mass, a whole world, a complete society with the necessary variety of its elements — workers and intellectuals, scholars and financiers, leaders and laborers… At the summit a financial bourgeoisie, as in the West, but without any influence, lower down a middle bourgeoisie, intellectual and commercial, and finally an immense Jewish proletariat.

A misunderstood proletariat, if ever there was one! For the strongest class, the most homogeneous, the truly characteristic mass of the nation — the Jewish proletariat has at all times been ignored. The Jew has never been studied except in his bourgeoisie, says M. Bernard-Lazare with reason, and Jewish historians have never done anything but the history of the

(1) The Territory or the zone of residence comprises twenty-six governments where the Israelites may reside, but in the towns and the boroughs only.

Jewish bourgeoisie and for the use of the Jewish bourgeois of their time. (1)

The trafficking Jew, handler of money, the Jewish commercial bourgeoisie monopolized the historical stage by itself. The antisemites attacked it, the Jewish historians pleaded the extenuating circumstances. But the proletariat, the Jewish mass, one refused to see it, one persisted in misunderstanding it.

It revealed itself in the course of the last twenty-five years. And from the frozen plains of Yakutsk, where the Israelite workers, deported by the Russian government, toil, to the sweaters’ workshops of New York and San Francisco, there resound the sad songs of exile of the Israelite proletarians. New York with its Jewtown, perhaps the most formidable of human agglomerations, London, Paris, Vienna have their Jewish workers’ quarters. Every year the towns of the Russian ghetto pour out upon Europe and America the tumultuous flood of emigrants, who bring everywhere their assimilable intelligence, the dexterity of their arms and the tireless activity of their nervous energy.

In these towns of exiles, in England, in America, as well as in the great Russian ghettos, it is a breath of renewal, a contained quivering that stirs the wretched Jewish masses. Never since the prophets perhaps has the dream of a universal fraternity, of a social justice, never has the imperious need to contribute to

(1) “Their history being an apologetic history of the Jews in relation to the Christians, a history made with a view to demonstrating the progressive efforts of the Jews toward assimilation, — which is not just, — they have had constantly one preoccupation: not to make the history of the Jews as a nation.” — Grande Revue, August 1899. The social conception of Judaism. Bernard-Lazare.

human enfranchisement been more vivid in Israel than at the present hour.

But if this dream and this desire find themselves in accord with the conscience of civilized humanity, if the perpetual movement of the modern democracies carries along in its powerful waves the popular Jewish impulses, it is not the same in Russia. There, the emancipating thrust of the Israelite proletariat encounters a muffled resistance. It reveals itself there, thanks to the epoch and to the circumstances, with a particularly tragic character. In those immense steppes, in the midst of those inert and resigned populations, enslaved by a long moral and social discipline, ardent and indomitable Jewish thought labors. In a country where Christianity is put at the service of oppression, where resignation is the diversion of the masses and the support of the oppressors, the Jews represent the element of progress, of criticism, of positive aspirations. Certainly, there are in Russia many causes of an economic order that nourish the anti-Jewish hatred, and which we shall try to bring out in the course of our study. But today above all — and we cannot insist too much on this — it is the motives of a social and psychological order that predominate.

At the hour when Russia is shaken, when a vague revolutionary shiver runs through the Russian masses, the Jew recognizes there with joy his instincts and his traditions. In the struggle which sets the principle of authority against that of liberty he has not hesitated to bring to the second all his support, in spite of the exasperation of the reaction and the reprisals of Kishinev. One must have been in the great Jewish centers, one must have studied the Jew, withdrawn from foreign influence, product of his milieu, of his

religious education, of his national traditions, to know the “Jewish spirit,” the true Jewish spirit, not that of the idle and the sated, but of the poor man and the worker.

We cannot claim to give here a complete picture of the economic and social life of the Israelites of Russia. We propose only, leaning upon figures and facts, to sketch the great intellectual and social movement which agitates at the present time Russian Judaism, and to follow the formation as well as the evolution of the parties which have been constituted within the Jewish proletariat in this country.

I

The Jewish population of Russia: the bourgeoisie, the working class, the small merchants and the agriculturists.

If one calculates according to the Besser and Ballod method the figure of the male Jewish population of Russia above fourteen years, one obtains 1,115,000 in round numbers. These eleven hundred and fifteen thousand Israelites are distributed thus according to their profession:

Laborers … 85,000 Workers of large industry … 25,000 Agriculturists … 21,000 Artisans … 426,000 Industrialists, financiers … 3,000 Liberal professions (graduates of the University, Jewish religious teachers) … 25,000 Merchants, intermediaries, persons of undetermined profession … 530,000 Total (1) … 1,115,000

(1) We have established the figure of laborers, of workers of large industry, of agriculturists and of artisans by basing ourselves on the statistical data of the Collection of materials on the economic situation of the Jews of Russia (Saint Petersburg, two volumes in quarto). The Collection of materials, published by the care of the Society of Jewish Colonization, is a capital work in which the various manifestations of the social activity of the Russian Jews are studied with a quite particular care. It is to be regretted only that for reasons of a fiscal and administrative order the Collection contains no information on the class of merchants, of intermediaries and of industrialists.

One sees then that in the Jewish population in Russia, the artisan, the worker, the small shopkeeper predominate. The cultivated, graduated Jews are in an infinitesimal minority. The lycées, the Universities — it is known — are closed or nearly so to the Israelites; the bar, the functions of State equally. There remains only a single liberal profession, Medicine.

The class of Jewish proprietors, rentiers, industrialists is also not numerous in Russia. This country counted in 1898 only twenty-five thousand factories and works with a million and a half workers, of whom about twenty-three thousand Jews. In 1903 the number of the latter, according to the Collection of materials on the economic situation of the Russian Jews, rose to 33,933. This relatively low figure of Israelite workers is explained above all by multiple reasons on which we shall insist further on.

A third of the works situated in the “Territory” belongs to the Israelites, but — curious thing — the capital that these works represent forms only 18 per cent of the total value of all these industrial establishments. The richest industries remain in the hands of the Christians. It is easily explained. The Russian Jews, save for a few exceptions, have no capital; they work only thanks to credit and, as the enlargement of their industry is hampered by a multitude of restrictive laws, every extension of business becomes impossible, the Jewish works cannot bear the competition of the Russian industrialists. Without speaking of all sorts of difficulties opposed to the Israelites who wish to found a commercial company among themselves or with Christians (in this last case they are admitted only in an infinitesimal proportion), in a general way

all regular development of industry is rendered impossible for them. A Jewish manufacturer, for example, cannot visit his Christian suppliers living outside the Territory without risking an expulsion and a sending back under escort, in the company of thieves and criminals, to his town of the Territory. One understands that in these conditions, the Jewish financial element of the Territory, while possessing works, is far from forming a capitalist class in the true sense of the word. (1)

If we except then the graduated Jews and the industrialists — not numerous as we have seen — there still remain two very important categories in the Jewish population of Russia: the merchants and the artisans. (2)

Among the merchants one must distinguish the merchants of the first and second guild, whose number is not considerable because of the guild dues, rather high in Russia, and a multitude of small shopkeepers who give one another a murderous competition and whose average gain hardly exceeds two or three and a half rubles (3) per week.

Into this category also fall: the clerks, the peddlers, the commission agents, the beggars… There is there a whole people of paupers, an army of the workless, a Lumpenproletariat such as exists in no nation and which is swelled every day by the Jewish countryman, hounded into the towns, the artisan and the worker of the factory hurled into the ranks of the

(1) Here are a few figures on this subject. At Vilna the well-off Jewish class forms only 7 per cent of the total Israelite population; the average income of a Jewish manufacturer is 2,880 rubles, that of a banker 5,000 rubles per year. (Report of Count Pahlen, governor of Vilna.) (2) See categories 4 and 7 of the table above. (3) One ruble, 2 francs 65.

workless by the progress of mechanization. It is among this proletariat that the most active elements of the “Bund” are recruited, as well as the nucleus of the emigration.

Here is the table of the number of Israelite artisans of the different trades in the sixteen Governments indicated hereafter. This table was drawn up in 1891.

Governments — artisans — assistant artisans — apprentices — Total

Bessarabia … 15,165 — 6,586 — 2,677 — 24,428
Vilna … 19,593 — 8,880 — 10,601 — 39,074
Vitebsk … 12,706 — 3,703 — 3,211 — 19,620
Volhynia … 23,392 — 7,304 — 5,667 — 36,363
Grodno … 27,245 — 7,605 — 10,532 — 45,382
Yekaterinoslav … 5,608 — 1,510 — 901 — 8,019
Kiev … 15,249 — 7,459 — 5,597 — 28,305
Kovno … 26,226 — 3,555 — 4,897 — 34,678
Courland … 5,707 — 1,089 — 1,254 — 8,050
Minsk … 24,368 — 7,752 — 8,471 — 40,591
Mohilev … 14,301 — 4,983 — 2,070 — 21,354
Podolia … 24,705 — 10,735 — 10,537 — 45,977
Poltava … 3,928 — 1,959 — 1,779 — 7,716
Tauride … 3,181 — 1,592 — 1,014 — 5,787
Kherson … 13,853 — 4,952 — 2,757 — 21,562
Tchernigov … 6,385 — 2,050 — 939 — 9,374 Total … 241,662 — 81,714 — 72,904 — 396,280

This table shows us that the majority of the Jewish working class is composed of small artisans, who work either alone, or with one or two workers at most. These workers, after four or five years of apprenticeship, ordinarily marry and become in their turn proprietors of small workshops; the class of Jewish artisans is therefore essentially mobile and changing; its cadres renew themselves ceaselessly.

Moreover the number of small Jewish masters diminishes appreciably and the proletarianization of the working class follows its regular course.

Let us compare indeed this table with another drawn up in 1901–1902 by a Jewish statistical society. It comprises also the ten governments of Russian Poland.

Governments — artisans — assistant artisans — apprentices — Total

Bessarabia … 8,580 — 7,075 — 5,321 — 20,976
Vilna … 18,404 — 3,241 — 4,595 — 26,240
Vitebsk … 10,671 — 7,077 — 5,725 — 23,473
Volhynia … 18,146 — 12,729 — 6,089 — 36,964
Grodno … 23,623 — 11,561 — 10,005 — 45,189
Yekaterinoslav … 4,910 — 2,220 — 909 — 8,039
Kiev … 21,744 — 14,511 — 7,131 — 43,386
Kovno … 14,313 — 3,590 — 5,621 — 23,524
Minsk … 18,129 — 10,451 — 6,707 — 35,287
Mohilev … 12,821 — 7,649 — 5,379 — 25,849
Podolia … 19,753 — 13,392 — 7,656 — 40,801
Poltava … 4,924 — 2,097 — 1,794 — 8,815
Tauride … 3,732 — 2,237 — 1,497 — 7,466
Kherson … 11,036 — 8,530 — 5,216 — 24,782
Tchernigov … 5,196 — 3,666 — 2,201 — 11,063
Warsaw … 16,149 — 3,540 — 3,598 — 23,287
Kalisz … 3,635 — 1,476 — 2,684 — 7,795
Petrokov … 7,800 — 5,680 — 2,869 — 16,349
Kielce … 3,397 — 1,220 — 1,837 — 6,454
Radom … 7,253 — 2,505 — 3,480 — 13,238
Lublin … 8,910 — 4,879 — 2,842 — 16,631
Siedlce … 4,817 — 3,977 — 2,673 — 11,467
Lomja … 5,466 — 2,490 — 2,347 — 10,303
Plock … 2,909 — 1,194 — 1,723 — 5,826
Suvalki … 3,318 — 840 — 1,163 — 5,321 Total … 259,636 — 137,827 — 101,062 — 498,525

If we subtract from this table the artisans, assistant artisans and apprentices of the ten governments of Poland, whose respective numbers are 63,654, 27,801 and 25,216, we shall see that in a period of ten to eleven years the number of small artisans — we mean the masters — in the fifteen governments of the Territory has diminished by 45,680 (241,662 in 1891 and 195,982 in 1901), while that of the workers (assistant artisans and apprentices) has increased only by 31,254 (154,618 in 1891 and 185,872 in 1901).

The average rate of wages, both in the artisans’ workshops and in the factories, can be considered as a famine rate. It does not exceed 3 and a half rubles or 4 rubles per week. The most frequent wages are from 2 and a half rubles to 3 rubles per week; inferior wages from 1 and a half ruble to 2 rubles.

The young girls rarely earn from 6 to 8 rubles per month, generally from 3 to 4 rubles; sometimes even one and a half ruble only.

The factory proletariat is not very numerous in Russia, large industry not yet having taken its flight. In 1902, according to the Collection of materials, one counted in the fifteen governments of the Territory 33,933 Israelite factory workers, of whom 26,587 adults. The relatively restricted number of Jewish workers in the industrial establishments is explained by several causes: first the lack of traditions, of experience and of technical knowledge, necessary in large industry — the rest of the Sabbath, which occasions either diminutions of output, or difficulties of interior organization — the insufficient number of Israelite foremen — finally the very desire of the Jewish workers to make their class demands prevail. For all these reasons, the Christian and even Jewish manufacturers hesitate to take Israelite workers into their service. Nevertheless, in certain manufacturing towns of the Territory (Bialystok, Pinsk), the majority of the workers of factories and manufactories are Jews. In the town of Bialystok, an important industrial center, known for its cloth factories, 72 per cent of the workers are Israelites.

Here is the table of the Jewish workers compared with that of the Christian workers in different factories belonging to the Israelites of this town.

Kind of factories — Number of factories — Workers, Jews — Workers, Christians — Total — per cent Jews Cloth factories … 60 — 774 — 449 — 1,223 — 63 Spinning mills … 4 — 101 — 117 — 218 — 46 Hangings … 4 — 88 — 95 — 183 — 51 Shawl factories … 9 — 276 — 123 — 399 — 69 Blanket factories … 2 — 27 — 25 — 52 — 51 Gloves and stockings … 2 — 12 — » — 12 — 100 Tobacco … 4 — 527 — » — 527 — 100 Hog bristles … 3 — 162 — » — 162 — 100 Brewery … 1 — 10 — » — 10 — 100 Tannery … 1 — 20 — 4 — 24 — 83 Sawmills … 1 — 10 — 1 — 11 — 90 Machine works … 4 — 20 — 1 — 21 — 95 Joineries … 3 — 27 — 10 — 37 — 72 Total … 98 — 2,054 — 825 — 2,879 — 71

The favorite trades of the Israelite artisans in Russia are: the making of clothes, shoemaking, joinery, tannery, bookbinding. At Vilna, for example, where the number of artisans is 19,000, and where two-thirds of all the trades are exercised by Jews, there are only 5 per cent of Christian tailors.

But it must not be believed that the hard trades repel the Israelites. Jewish pavers, chimney-sweeps, blacksmiths, masons, charcoal-burners, potters, carpenters — you will meet them by the thousands in the towns of the “Territory.” A curious statistic, dated 1857, gives us a few figures on the Jewish workers of Russian Poland, whose Israelite population was at that epoch only 563,093 souls. Of this half-million Jews one counted then 129,538 workers, of whom 32,957 tailors, 14,182 shoemakers, 1,973 masons, 37,106 day-laborers, etc.; the number of day-laborers, laborers, coachmen, dockers, etc., Jews, rises at present, according to the Collection of materials on the economic situation of the Russian Jews, to 105,000. It results in sum from all these statistics that of three Russian Israelites there is at least one worker.

A few figures finally on the Jewish agriculturists.

In Palestine, their country of origin, the Jews were an essentially agricultural people. Torn from their native soil by the Roman conquest, exiled into Europe, encountering everywhere only occupied territories, the Jews, like the Greeks or the Phoenicians of old, had to devote themselves to trade and to the manual crafts. For eighteen centuries the labor of the soil remained unknown to them. Nevertheless — a metamorphosis difficult above all others — the shopkeepers, the merchants and the Jewish artisans established by the Russian government in 1807 and 1808 in the steppes of the governments of Kherson and of Yekaterinoslav rapidly became excellent settlers. It results from a thorough study on the Jewish agricultural colonies published in the Collection of materials that the Jewish agriculturists are better equipped than the Russian peasants and that they yield in nothing to the settlers of the other nationalities established in the South of Russia. If one considers all the obstacles (vexatious regulations, administrative severities, natural calamities) which overwhelmed the first settlers, if one takes into account the difficulty for a town-dweller to become a peasant again, one can only be surprised at the rapid progress realized by the Jews in a relatively short lapse of time, and that is the most significant testimony of their aptitude for agriculture.

We borrow from the Collection of materials a few statistical data on the Jewish agriculturists in Russia.

JEWISH AGRICULTURISTS Governments — Number of colonies — Number of settlers — Extent of lands cultivated in deciatines (1) Vilna … 32 — 3,932 — 4,392 Vitebsk … 28 — 1,648 — 1,914 Grodno … 14 — 2,752 — 3,585 Kovno … 15 — 4,954 — 2,649 Minsk … 26 — 7,946 — 6,601 Mohilev … 76 — 4,500 — 5,343 Volhynia … 18 — 6,548 — 5,551 Kiev … 23 — 15,960 — 2,812 Podolia … 15 — 18,822 — 2,191 Tchernigov … 4 — 1,024 — 1,280 Bessarabia … 11 — 2,100 — 3,300 Kherson … 22 — 19,419 — 42,839 Yekaterinoslav … 17 — 7,849 — 17,650 Total … 301 — 97,454 — 100,107

(1) About one hectare.

In all these governments, in Bessarabia above all, the Jews are employed also in the tobacco plantations; a great number of them occupy themselves with market-gardening and with horticulture. About 10,000 Jews work in the tobacco plantations and 5,000 are horticulturists and market-gardeners. In 1902 more than 12,000 Israelites had hired themselves out as day-laborers for the work of the fields.

Outside the Jewish agriculturists in the “Territory” there are a certain number of Israelite settlers in Siberia; in addition nearly twenty thousand Jews in the Caucasus, natives of the country, and speaking Georgian, devote themselves also to agriculture and to viticulture.

II

The historical, psychological and moral causes of the revolutionary movement among the Russian Jews.

This numerous working population is confined — like all the Russian Israelites — in the twenty-six governments of the “Territory.”

In the towns of this immense ghetto their conditions of existence are frightful. Crowded into unhealthy dwellings, ravaged by a poverty beside which the poverty that one finds in Paris, in Berlin or in London seems comfort, reduced to wages of 40 and 50 centimes per day, multiplying themselves ceaselessly because of their very destitution — like all famished peoples — these unfortunates die slowly. From day to day, wrote M. Bernard-Lazare in 1895, their situation grows worse, they crush together in those cities like cattle too tightly pressed in too narrow stables and no hope of deliverance shines for them; they have the choice only among three alternatives: to convert, to emigrate, or to die. That is what was foreseen by their implacable enemy, Pobiedonostsev, the procurator of the Holy Synod.

Besides this systematic driving back into the towns of the “Territory,” other measures have been taken against the Jews. Certain employments and certain professions are forbidden them; the Jewish nurses are driven from the hospitals, even Israelite patients are not admitted there; the Jewish employees in the railway and navigation companies are dismissed; the number of those who have the right to enter the Universities and the Lycées is limited; they are prevented from being lawyers, attorneys, notaries, doctors and engineers of the State, scribes in the offices of the administration, even notaries’ clerks; they are overwhelmed with special taxes on their rents, on their inheritances, on the meats they slaughter and on the candles they light on Friday evening.

Beside these official taxes decreed by the Russian government, they undergo the exploitation of the Muscovite administration and police, the most corrupt, the most venal and the most abject of Europe.

It is above all the class of the workers that is the victim of the police vexations and of the public boycott. The State works, those of State suppliers, the Christian works, in general, are closed to them. The antisemitic municipal councils oblige the contractors of public works not to employ Jewish workers.

In short, governmental and public antisemitism applies itself systematically to degrade the Jews, the Jewish proletariat above all, to the level of pariahs.

And in spite of that, it is the Jewish proletarian organization that appears the most dangerous to the Russian authority. The Jewish factory workers form only 2 per cent of the Christian industrial proletariat; the proportion of Jewish artisans is also very minimal. And yet there are three times more organized Israelite workers than Russian workers. While the Russian social-democratic party has only a single workers’ organ in Russia, nine clandestine journals appear regularly in the towns of the “Territory,” at Vilna, Warsaw and elsewhere. The proclamations of the Russian social-democratic party are printed in 4,000 to 5,000 copies and those of the “Bund” in 40,000 to 80,000.

A question then poses itself naturally: How from this people penned within the narrow limits of an artificial zone, deprived for centuries of the essential rights of man, vowed to contempt and to persecution, could there emerge and organize itself in a few years a conscious proletariat, admirably armed for the struggle, and which forms the vanguard of the Russian Revolution?

To answer this question, one must first of all know the history of the Jews in Russia. This history is only an uninterrupted succession of pitiless expulsions, of vexations without truce and of mass killings.

We are going to sketch in its great features the martyrology of the Russian Jews, which, by itself, could already justify that state of malaise and of particular mistrust which reigns in this fraction of the proletariat of the Muscovite Empire.

The Jews are not at all intruders in the Empire of the tsars. They count among its most ancient inhabitants. As early as the third century before Jesus Christ, the Greek chroniclers already mention the presence of the Jews, grouped in flourishing communities, in the Hellenic colonies in Crimea. That does not prevent the Muscovites, masters of Crimea for only a hundred and fifty years, from believing themselves “autochthonous” and from considering the Jews as foreigners, while subjecting them to all the charges and taxes, and to military service.

The Jews of the north and of the east of Russia, of Lithuanian and Polish origin, became Russian “subjects” only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But they had not waited so long to know the gentleness of the Muscovite tsars. Thus in the fifteenth century, Ivan the Terrible seizes the town of Polotsk (in Lithuania); he offers the Israelite inhabitants the choice between conversion and death; and as the latter do not wish to abjure the faith of their fathers, the Muscovite soldiers drown them all, women, children, old men, to the number of a few thousand.

One of the successors of this Ivan, of terrible memory, sends his troops to second the hetman of the Cossacks Khmelnitsky, who, after having won a few victories over the Poles, massacred 300,000 Jews. In a single town, Uman, near Kiev, the Muscovites and the Cossacks immolated 10,000 victims. The Russian Jews did not recover from this disaster and consider it as the most tragic event of their life of exile.

The survivors were expelled. Moreover the Jews had already been driven out of Russia long before, in the twelfth century, and had then taken refuge in Poland.

The grand-duchy of Muscovy scarcely tolerated the Jews. The second of the Romanovs, Alexis (1645–76), decreed the penalty of death against whoever should convert a Christian to Judaism; he forbade, also under penalty of death, the Jews to have Christians in their service. [This last law was confirmed in 1835 by Nicholas the First; but the penalty of death was replaced by imprisonment (Leroy-Beaulieu, Empire of the Tsars, III, page 630).]

Under Catherine the First Little Russia, theater of the massacres of Khmelnitsky, was annexed to Muscovy. Then, in 1727, the High Privy Council of the empress promulgated an ordinance signed by Catherine and prescribing to expel “the scabby Jews,” men and women, dwelling in the Ukraine (Little Russia) and in the Russian towns in general, not to permit them, under any pretext, to return there, and to take the necessary measures so that in the future the country should be guarded with vigilance and perseverance against any “Jewish intrusion.” The attitude of the other Russian sovereigns and sovereignesses never varied with regard to the Jews and hardly differed from that of Catherine the First.

The empress Anna confirmed this ordinance of Catherine the First in 1731 and had it executed in 1740. Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, had her physician Sanchez, whom she had had for eighteen years in her service, driven from Russia in 1749, because she learned by chance that he was a Jew. Seven years earlier, in 1742, she had expelled from the Russian States all the Israelites and piously appealed to heaven to justify this barbarous measure. “Nothing but irreparable evils,” says her ukase, “can result for our faithful subjects from the presence in the country of people thus hardened in hatred of our Christ the Savior.”

Then came the reign of Catherine II. By her philosophical education she was inclined to tolerance, but the old Muscovite spirit, whose susceptibilities she spared, forbade her to go too far in this way. Moreover the friend of Diderot and of Voltaire drew very little inspiration from their philosophy in her policy. She began then by walking in the footsteps of her predecessors. In her first manifesto, while inviting foreigners to come and settle in Russia, she took care to exclude expressly the Jews. But at the end of her reign, the annexation of Poland, which contained hundreds of thousands of Jews, forced the Russian government to occupy itself with them. It was not possible to drive back into the neighboring States so great a number of men; moreover commerce, industry and the fisc above all would have fared ill from this mass expulsion. The Israelites were therefore left, but they were overwhelmed with taxes and the senatorial decrees of 1786, 1791 and 1794 confined them in the conquered provinces with prohibition to leave them. These provinces constituted from then on the famous “Jewish Territory.”

Thus, from the first days of their entry into the Russian Empire, the Jews were submitted to that regime of exception which still weighs upon them. By confining the Jews, says M. Leroy-Beaulieu, there where they had found them, the Tsars seem to have wished to preserve holy Russia from the Israelite leprosy. Considering the Jew as a plague, he was enclosed in the eastern provinces as in a lazaretto. So that the most elementary of liberties, that of coming and going, which even the Russian jurists, like M. de Martens, declare intangible, does not exist for the Jew. He is not master to live where he wishes; the right to reside or to travel in all the parts of the Empire, a right guaranteed by law to all the other subjects of the Tsar, the law denies it to the five million Israelites and to the… liberated convicts.

It is this iniquitous and cruel restriction of domicile that is the principal source of the Jewish sufferings in Russia.

On ascending the throne, Alexander the First had permitted the Jews to lease and to buy under certain conditions lands within the limits of the “Territory,” which was rigorously forbidden them before. He also authorized them to settle in the domains of the crown on condition of being agriculturists there.

But at the same time this emperor forbade the Jews to settle less than fifty versts (fifty-five kilometers) from the frontier; the “Jewish Territory” was thus considerably narrowed.

Nicholas the First, going further in this way, cut off from it the important towns of Kiev, Nikolaiev, Sebastopol and certain streets of the town of Vilna. Yet, by way of special favor, he had permitted the Jews to travel for the needs of their commerce within the limits of the “Territory.” But the Jews who inhabited the countryside were pitilessly driven into the towns. Nicholas the First also inaugurated among the Israelites the disastrous system of the “cantonists.” The soldiers levied among the Jews, children of twelve years, were torn from their mother, baptized by force in the military “canton-schools” and sent into the regiments.

Under Alexander II, son of Nicholas, the Israelites for the first time could breathe. None of the restrictive laws was abolished nor repealed, but they were applied with less rigor; the sojourn of the Jews outside their territorial ghetto was tolerated; they could attend the Universities and, once their studies finished, live everywhere.

It is under the reign of Alexander II in 1871 that the first great anti-Jewish riot took place. General Kotzebue, governor of Odessa and German by birth, vexed at the sympathy that the Jews of his town showed to France during the war of 1870–71, found no better vengeance than to loose a few thousand Russians and Greeks upon the Jews of Odessa. The pillage lasted three days and served as precedent and as model for the riots of 1881 and for the massacre of Kishinev. It is also under Alexander II that the accusations of ritual murder multiplied against the Israelites. At Saratov, notably, more than a hundred Jews were thrown into prison and several of them died before the end of the trial. In spite of that, the minimal tolerances granted to the Jews by Alexander II make them consider his reign as their golden age.

Under Alexander III and Nicholas II, indeed, one can say that the life of the Jews has become intolerable. These two tsars have still further narrowed the “Territory” by forbidding the Israelites entry to the villages, to the strongholds, and by decreeing that they could no longer inhabit the frontier zone. (1)

To these restrictive measures came to be added still the regime of the “pogroms” or anti-Jewish riots, inaugurated in 1881, scarcely a few months after the tragic death of Alexander II. Russia, distraught and irritated, instinctively sought a scapegoat upon which to load its sins and upon which to make its angers fall again. A few young Israelites of both sexes had taken part in the conspiracies against the “tsar

(1) A ukase of recent date grants the right of sojourn outside the “Territory” to the families of the soldiers having made the present campaign, to the Israelite commercial councillors, etc.; but it hardly brings any notable modifications to the right of sojourn of the Jews in the interior of Russia.

liberator.” The press pointed out the Jew, “this scurvy one, this scabby one,” to the wrath of the populations. The people discharged upon him at once its patriotic vengeances and its private rancors. The men in power were happy in those hours of anguish to find a diversion from the political anxieties and from the terrorist conspiracies; from then on the “pogroms” became the great diversion of the popular discontent against the authorities and the regime in general.

The instigators pursued a double aim: it was first to kill in the Jewish people all spirit of revolt and of resistance to the conditions of vile and base existence that have been made for it. It was next to demoralize the Russian people itself, to make of it the warder of the Jewish people, in order to render liberty impossible for the one and for the other. (1)

But if the Russian Machiavellis can flatter themselves on having succeeded in demoralizing the Russian people — the massacres of Kishinev prove it sufficiently — it was impossible for them to stifle the social demands of the Jewish populations.

However the persecutions, the sufferings undergone by the Jews in Russia could not by themselves alone explain the rapid progress of the Jewish revolutionary movement in Russia. Among the oppressed peoples of the empire of the Tsars — less oppressed than the Jews no doubt — there are nations — yesterday still mistresses of their destinies — to whom the Russian yoke must seem heavier and a change of regime more necessary than to those

(1) M. Roubanovitch, Pages libres. The massacres of Kishinev, 1903.

eternally persecuted ones that the Jews are. And nevertheless it is the Jewish revolutionary party that is, by the avowal of Russian revolutionaries themselves, the most advanced and the best organized of the Empire.

Why then does the Jewish revolutionary party seem to dominate and to lead all the others?

One must seek the reason for it, it seems to us, in the Jewish nature and character, in the Jewish spirit in general. Judaism, says M. Leroy-Beaulieu (Israel among the Nations, page 337), has always been a law, a religion of the head, a cult of reason, little favorable to mystical transports and to divine languors.

“Having no hope of future compensations (the Jews admitted only very belatedly, under the influence of Parsism, the immortality of the soul), the Jew could not resign himself to the misfortunes of life. And while the peoples who believed in the beyond, who lulled themselves with sweet and consoling chimeras, who possessed the dogma of rewards and of punishments, of paradise and of hell, accepted while bowing their heads poverty and sickness, the Jew answered the scourges which struck him neither by the fatalism of the Mussulman, nor by the resignation of the Christian: he answered by revolt. Thus those frenzied idealists who conceived the pure idea of the one God were, by a striking and explicable contrast, the most intractable of sensualists.” (Bernard-Lazare, Antisemitism)

This conception that the Israelites formed of life and of death furnishes the first element to their revolutionary spirit. Their conception of the divinity gave them the second element. It led them to conceive the equality of men, and consequently the idea of

justice, social justice. Charity does not exist for ancient Israel; alms are only a restitution. It is of justice only that there is question in the psalms and in the books of the prophets. The reign of peace, the establishment of justice and the diffusion of well-being among men, such has been the social ideal of the prophets; an individualism imbued with idealism, such is the profound sense of the inflamed imprecations of the prophets. Now an individualist imbued with idealism is and will always be a rebel!

Notwithstanding their long slavery, in spite of the years of martyrdom which were their lot, in spite of the centuries of humiliations which lowered their character, depressed their brain, narrowed their intelligence, transformed their tastes and their aptitudes, the Jews did not abjure their dream, their dream of human equality and of social justice.

And perhaps more than the persecutions, more than the political and economic oppression, it is this old atavistic sentiment, this rooted hatred of injustice that works the wretched Jewish masses, from which come the best combatants of the struggle engaged in Russia for a better future. (1)

(1) Outside these psychological or historical motives one could not fail to recognize the causes of an economic and social order (the industrial concentration, the progress of the Russian workers’ movement); we have moreover taken account of them in the chapters which follow. But if we insist on the first, it is that they alone can explain the powerful and rapid flight of the Jewish workers’ movement.

III

The Jewish workers’ movement before the creation of the “Bund”

Industry, large industry above all, existed in Russia, thirty years ago, only in the embryonic state. The small artisans who predominated then, as now, in the Jewish working class of the “Territory” worked only on order; production was limited to the needs of such or such a determined locality. And although the exploitation of the worker was great and the inequality between him and the small master strongly marked, the acute antagonism between the master class and the working class, an antagonism which generally appears at an advanced epoch of economic development, was still latent. The Jewish population seemed to be homogeneous, and the social relations stamped with a patriarchal character.

The abolition of serfdom came to change them from top to bottom. Industry takes a considerable flight, commerce develops, thanks to the construction of the railways. In a space of thirty years the population of the towns increases rapidly until it is tenfold in certain industrial centers. A new category of workers appears — the workers of works and of factories. The development of commerce and of industry does not remain without influence on small industry. The capitalization of the crafts begins: work on order gives place to work for the shop. The shops seize the market. Most of the artisans fall under the dependence of the capitalists, great or small, who furnish them the raw material and sometimes even the instruments of work. There follows a malaise that comes from becoming a master. Competition becomes more and more bitter. One works from 14 to 16 and even 18 hours per day for a wage of 2 to 3 rubles per week. Slowly but surely the differentiation between the classes of the Jewish population is effected and the class antagonisms, until then effaced, become more and more accentuated. The rapid proletarianization of the Jewish petty bourgeoisie caused by the new restrictive laws and above all by the “Ignatiev laws,” which weigh heavily upon the Jewish population, contribute also in large measure to prepare the ground for a great workers’ movement.

It is in Lithuania, at Vilna, an intellectual and commercial center of real importance, that the Jewish workers’ movement took birth. The first workers’ circles there date from the years 1885–1886.

It was young “intellectuals,” students above all, who began the propaganda among the Israelite workers. It must be remarked that the cultivated Jewish youth held itself during the reign of Alexander II apart from its people. Profiting from the regime of relative tolerance inaugurated by this tsar toward the Jews, it rushed into the Russian schools, sought to assimilate the Slavic language and literature; it took part in all the literary, aesthetic, and above all political movements of the epoch. The aureole with which were surrounded, in the advanced milieus, the names of Karl Marx, the founder of scientific socialism, and of Ferdinand Lassalle, the founder of the German workers’ party — both of them Jews; — the possibility of collaborating in the advent of a free regime in these milieus more or less exempt from the anti-Jewish prejudices still very lively even among the Muscovite liberals; then the temperament, the revolutionary inclination which, whatever one may say, is inherent in the Jewish character — all these reasons had determined a great part of the Jewish youth to take place in the ranks of the Russian revolutionaries. They had brought there a spirit of consistency and of tenacity which, in forcing the admiration of their comrades, drew upon them the angers of the government.

After the death of Alexander II the awakening of the authoritarian reaction was frightful in Russia. The Jews were the first victims of it. The populace of the towns was unleashed against them; a series of riots began, in which the Jews were sacked, pillaged and sometimes massacred; the press, the official press above all, the authorities loudly approved these riots, even glorified them as an act of protestation of the orthodox people faithful to the Tsar and to the Holy Faith against those Jewish fomenters of troubles and eternal disturbers. Some “revolutionaries” even, in their manifestos, encouraged the rioters and wished to see in the “pogrom” the prelude of the Russian Revolution. You must beat the Jew, they said, but do not forget that he is not the only exploiter. The police and the “tchinovniks” (the functionaries) must be treated in the same fashion.

Thus abandoned by its comrades of yesterday, no longer able to work for the good of the Russian people, the Jewish youth turned toward the Jewish proletariat.

“Has not the Jewish revolutionary youth,” writes around this epoch a Jewish socialist, “too greatly neglected the Jewish proletariat? Has it not abandoned to its fate the immense mass which suffers, and to which yet, for historical reasons, it is only the Jewish revolutionary youth that can bring the spirit of struggle and of organization? Has it not, the Jewish intellectual youth, the special duty of organizing the Jewish proletariat, in order to join it to the general revolutionary current, and thus to activate the Russian movement itself?…

“The ‘pogroms,’” he continues, “have awakened in us latent sentiments, they have rendered the youth more sensible to the sufferings of the Jewish people and the latter more susceptible of adopting our revolutionary ideas… Well then! if we do not wish to remain indifferent witnesses in the struggle on which our fate depends; if we do not wish to buy our happiness at the price of sacrifices made by others, we must take an active part in the revolutionary struggle. In this struggle we shall show, for the first time perhaps since our lamentable sojourn in Europe, a sort of self-activity to conquer a better fate. Until now, we waited timidly for the improvement coming from outside and we have not understood that to have a right to a better future one must know how to conquer it…”

The ideas set forth in the article we have just cited animated the young Jewish people who began to make propaganda among the workers. It must however be remarked that these pioneers did not think of creating a great independent Jewish workers’ movement; they attributed to this movement in itself only a secondary importance and their eyes were always turned toward the Russian worker, from whom they awaited the salvation of the Jewish worker. Attached to the “Territory,” says a report of the “Bund,” not being able to consecrate their forces to the service of the Russian revolutionary cause, the Jewish intellectuals begin an active propaganda among the Israelite proletariat.

This propaganda had at the beginning a theoretical character; the workers were taught history, the natural sciences, geography, political economy; a workers’ elite was thus created; at the same time circles of mutual aid and professional funds were founded in several towns of the Territory. These funds rendered great services in the strikes, of which the first took place in 1888 and which became more and more frequent. These strikes, all spontaneous and, in spite of the absence of all preliminary organization, crowned with success, determined a change of tactic among the Jewish socialists. To the necessarily restricted propaganda of small coteries succeeds a vast agitation. The movement takes extension. It gains Minsk, Smorgon and Warsaw. In Poland, where the Jewish working mass was less advanced than in Lithuania and the cultivated class much more assimilated, the Jewish workers’ movement developed much more slowly.

But it becomes at Vilna, in Lithuania, and in White Russia, more and more considerable. A series of strikes begins, having for aim the limitation to ten hours of the working day. A law promulgated still under the reign of Catherine II and limiting to ten hours the working day serves as a point of support for the demands of the strikers. This law remained on paper becomes a legal weapon in the hands of the workers against the masters and the police who support them.

Toward this epoch appears also the brochure entitled: On agitation in the working mass. Destined to combat the errings of Jewish revolutionaries partisans of “small study circles” of socialism, and adversaries of a broad agitation, this brochure specifies at the same time the role and the duties of the propagandists and of the agitators.

The author, one of the founders of the movement, after having retraced the march of capitalist evolution, passes to the economic and political struggle of the classes. The future political tendencies of the “Bund” already take shape in this brochure.

Political power is the principal aim of the proletariat, we read. But the proletariat will not know how to be led to the struggle for political power except when it shall have seen the impossibility of improving its economic situation under such or such a political regime… The economic and political struggles are therefore narrowly bound up with one another.

The author advocates a continuous and persevering agitation in the working mass by the intellectual agitators. A narrow communion must always exist between workers and propagandists. Theory and practice, the study circles and the broad agitation, far from contradicting one another, must complete one another.

The author refutes the widespread opinion according to which the industrial centers alone can offer a favorable ground for propaganda. He demonstrates not only the possibility, but the very necessity of agitation among the artisans, seeing above all that the inevitable evolution of small industry toward large industry could bring crises for which the Jewish working class must be prepared.

The author then approaches the Jewish question in Russia. The Jewish national emancipation, he says, must come from the working class. The more the Jewish working class shall be a revolutionary force, the more the rights granted by the Russian Constitution to the Jewish population will be extended. He therefore advocates the formation of a Jewish workers’ party. This idea was taken up again in 1894 and 1895 by a few other theoreticians.

The Jewish working class can no longer, they wrote, wait as before for its salvation from the Russian or Polish workers; certainly without them it will not do any great thing. But it must organize itself, it must be able to sustain its demands and to make felt the weight of its will!…

The enfranchisement of the Jewish workers must be the work of the Jewish workers themselves. There are rights to be conquered for the Jewish proletariat, the right of free sojourn, the right to instruction; these rights which are for us essential demands could have for the Russian proletariat only a value of principle. It is therefore a Jewish workers’ party that must conquer its specifically Jewish rights.

The constitution of such a party, specially Jewish, could not be in contradiction with the internationalist principles of socialism, for there does not exist among the Jews a national party, revolutionary and not socialist; the proletarian consciousness will therefore not be obscured.

The ideas set forth by the author of the brochure were very sympathetically welcomed in the working milieus. It was however necessary to wait still two years before an organized workers’ party was constituted.

In the course of these two years the movement gained several towns, among others Bialystok, which is a great workers’ center. A monster strike of 25,000 workers (among whom 3,000 Jews) takes place in this town in 1895, a strike whose success raised the courage of the workers. At Vilna, at Minsk, at Warsaw, professional funds, “combat funds” are founded; the strikes multiply everywhere and the sorters of silk for brushes organize a sort of “Trade-Union” purely economic, it is true, but affiliated to the socialist organization of Vilna.

The socialist group of Vilna distinguishes itself in general by its activity. It publishes thousands of propaganda brochures in the Jewish language, in jargon. (1) In two years, in 1894–1895, there appeared 5 brochures, that is 10,000 copies. These brochures are still printed abroad. The necessity of a clandestine printing-house in Russia makes itself well felt, but the intellectuals conceive doubts on the possibility of the enterprise. To put an end to their hesitation, the workers of Vilna themselves manufacture a press, compose and print the first number of the journal the Voice of the Worker, printed in 5,000 copies.

The Jewish workers toward this epoch begin to enter into relations with the proletarian organizations of Russia and of abroad.

(1) The jargon is a German patois, mixed with Hebrew, Russian, Polish words, which is the language of the Russian, Romanian and Galician Jews.

They send an address and aid in money to the workers of Petersburg on strike (in 1894); in 1896, the delegates of several workers’ associations lay a wreath on the tombs of the dead of the Commune of Paris. The First of May is celebrated in all the workers’ towns. Meetings are held everywhere. In the speeches of the orators, the liberty of meeting, of strike, of coalition, of the press is already demanded.

At the international socialist Congress of London, the Jewish proletariat of Russia is represented by four delegates (from Warsaw, Vilna, Minsk and Smorgon), sent by three thousand organized workers of these towns.

The Russian government is more and more stirred by these rapid progresses of the Jewish workers’ movement. A series of arrests and of searches begins. Fifteen persons are arrested at Bialystok, of whom two are condemned to five years of deportation to Eastern Siberia, two to three years of the same penalty, and the others to prison and to the surveillance of the police. A joiner, named Segal, was condemned to three years of deportation for not having wished to name the author of a socialist article, of which he was found to be the bearer.

In spite of these pitiless persecutions, the movement spreads more and more. It gains Vitebsk, Grodno, Dvinsk, Lodz, great manufacturing and industrial towns. The strikes multiply. Socialist journals, the Juedischer Arbeiter and the Arbeiterstimme, begin to appear regularly in thousands of copies. The group of Vilna, which until now centralized the efforts of the other towns, can no longer suffice for the task. The creation of a regular party, of a general organization imposes itself.

IV

The “Bund” and its activity; its relations with the Russian Social-Democratic party

In the month of September 1897 took place the first Jewish socialist workers’ congress, and it is from this congress that dates the “General Jewish workers’ Union of Russia and of Poland,” or the “Bund.” (1) It results from the works of the congress that two reasons motivated the creation of a Jewish workers’ party: the necessities of an active struggle against the restrictive laws which weigh upon the Jewish proletariat in Russia, and the needs of socialist propaganda in the Jewish language. The Russian socialist party, said the promoters of the “Bund” to themselves, combats for the general interests of the proletariat in Russia. It has neither the time nor the means to occupy itself with the special interests, nor with the political education of the workers of the various peoples inhabiting the Empire. That must be the work of the national parties. It is therefore upon a Jewish workers’ party that must fall the task of organizing the Jewish proletariat.

A few months after the congress, in 1898, the “Russian social-democratic workers’ Party” having been constituted,

(1) Bund means Union. It is above all under this name that the “General Jewish workers’ Union” is known in Russia, and it is thus that we shall call it in the course of these chapters.

the “Bund” enters it, by way of an autonomous organization. The party grants the “Bund” full powers in all the questions relative to the Jewish proletariat. For its part, the “Bund” adheres to the program of the party, set forth in its “Manifesto.”

Here are the essential points of it:

“The Russian working class is deprived of all the rights of which the foreign workers freely enjoy; it cannot take part in the government of the country; it has neither the liberty of strike, nor the liberty of coalition; all the legal weapons with which the European and American proletariat tends to improve its lot and to prepare the advent of a socialist state are taken from it. Political liberty is therefore as indispensable to the workers as pure air to respiration.

“But this political liberty, it is the Russian proletariat, and it alone, that will know how to conquer it. It will be its first step toward the integral enfranchisement, toward that society where there would no longer be the exploitation of man by man…

“The social-democratic party considers that the enfranchisement of the workers will be the work of the workers themselves…

“It recognizes to each nationality or ethnic group the right to the recognition by the other nationalities and groups of its own individuality.”

This right to the recognition of “national” individuality determined, five years after, the rupture between the “Bund” and the Russian Social-democratic Party. But let us not anticipate, and before treating of the relations between

the “Bund” and the Russian social-democratic party, we are going to study its organization, such as it has been settled in its great lines by the first congress and modified by the four following congresses which were held in 1898, 1900, 1901 and 1903.

The funds of the “Bund” are fed above all by the strike funds (combat funds). The number of the workers, members of these funds, paying regularly their dues, was in 1900 200 at Bialystok (20 per cent of the total number of organized Israelite workers of the town), 180 at Gomel (40 per cent), 350 at Vilna (25 per cent), etc.

These strike funds, as their name indicates, pursue an economic aim. But they subsidize at the same time the workers’ libraries and the agitators. In each town these funds are submitted to the control of the local committee of the “Bund.” These committees, which exist in all the chief towns of the governments and in all the workers’ centers, distribute the money to the strikers, launch the proclamations and the appeals, propagate the socialist writings and brochures, even publish, in certain towns, journals. The local committees are placed under the surveillance of a central committee. It is it that publishes the Workers’ Voice, (Arbeiterstimme) official organ of the “Bund,” takes charge of the importation of the prohibited books or brochures, of their transport and of their delivery to the local committees. It serves as intermediary between these and the “foreign committee” which is the representative of the “Bund” abroad. The “foreign committee” publishes the Jewish Worker, (Juedischer Arbeiter) official organ of the “Bund” abroad; it distributes the aid among the

members of the party arrested or deported, and controls the activity of the bundist organizations abroad.

The supreme organ of the party is the congress. Since the constitution of the party five congresses have taken place. The delegates of the local committees and of the two professional workers’ associations (the “Union of the sorters of silk for brushes” and the “Union of the tawers”) took part in them.

The accounts of these congresses, the reports of the delegates, the discussions raised within the congress and in the journals of the party give a complete picture of the economic and political activity of the “Bund” and of the phases of its evolution.

The economic activity of the “Bund” during the period that occupies us (1897–1903) manifested itself above all by the organization of strikes, of strike funds, by the creation of study circles, and by the publication of socialist brochures and manifestos.

There were, from the year 1897 to 1900, about 312 strikes; the number of strikers rose to 27,890. 140 strikes (14,032 workers) were made by the workers of works and of factories, 169 (16,428 workers) by the small artisans, 3 by the assemblers and the dismantlers of rafts; the average number of workers for each strike was 160 for the works and 100 for the artisans’ workshops. The result of these strikes was known only in 262 cases. 239 strikes (91.2 per cent) succeeded and 23 (8.8 per cent) failed. The success of most of the strikes is explained by the solidarity of the workers, by the energetic aid of the “Bund” and by the disunion of the masters. The augmentation of wages and the diminution of the working day, such were the principal demands

of the workers in most of the strikes (66 per cent for the factories and 88 per cent for the artisans’ workshops).

From 1901 to 1903 there were 172 strikes, with 10,331 strikers. The results are known only for 95 strikes of which 80 ended with the victory of the workers, 12 with a failure, and 3 with a partial success.

Let us point out still a few other demands: the suppression of piecework, the dismissal of foremen, the organization of medical aid, the diminution or the suppression of fines and of night work, the demand for reinstatement of the dismissed workers, etc.

It must be noted that when it is a question of the reinstatement of the dismissed comrades, the bundist workers give proof of an admirable solidarity. Thus the reports cite us cases of strikes which lasted 7 or 8 weeks because the master did not wish to take back a worker, and which ended almost always with the victory of the strikers.

Here are a few statistical pieces of information on these strikes. The average duration of a strike in the works was 18 days (862 days for 49 strikes), and in the artisans’ workshops 21 and a half days (817 days for 38 strikes). Of 89 strikes whose durations are known, one lasted 18 weeks; one, — 15 weeks; two, 9 weeks, — from 6 to 8 weeks (13.5 per cent); twenty-two, — from 3 to 5 weeks (24.7 per cent); thirty, — from 1 to 2 weeks (33.7 per cent); and twenty, — less than one week (22.5 per cent).

It must be remarked that thanks to these strikes the Israelite workers have succeeded in different towns in notably improving their conditions of existence. The wages in some places (not numerous moreover) have increased from 15 to 40 per cent, in others from 15 to 25 per cent. The working day, which was 17 and 16 hours, has been reduced to 14, 12, and even 10 hours. Nevertheless it must be observed that in the last years the “Bund” tends more and more to abandon the ground of the economic struggle and to become a revolutionary political party.

This evolution is explained by several reasons. In Russia the right of strike does not exist. Any participation in a strike constitutes a political crime, may be imprisonment or deportation to Eastern Siberia, without judgment, by simple administrative decision. And — characteristic detail — a Jew is punished more severely, in matters of political offenses, than a Christian. For the same infraction, the first is deported to Siberia, while the second is interned in a government of European Russia.

This, certainly, is not fit to inspire the Israelites with very tender sentiments for the Russian government. But there is more. In this vast ghetto, where the five million Russian Jews are penned, the workers’ question presents itself under an aspect entirely other than everywhere else. It is less a question of regulation than a question of supply and demand. There are too many arms and not enough work. The small masters, against whom the “Bund” struggles, are themselves also proletarians. In a few years, all the possible concessions have been obtained from them thanks to the solidarity of the workers. The work of the worker has hardly improved. For if he works less and if he is paid a little better, he is unemployed more, in consequence of the slow but fatal disappearance of small industry, and of the general crisis in which Russia has been struggling for twenty-five years and which the governmental persecutions and the race hatreds only aggravate. As for large industry, it has not yet taken its flight, and it cannot take it because absolutism, here as everywhere, sets itself across progress. It hampers the free development of the industry of the Jewish “Territory” by its protective tariffs granted to the orthodox manufacturers, by the vexations and restrictions of every sort lavished upon the Israelite industrialists, and by its savage persecution of the Jewish workers’ organizations.

Moreover the “Bund” is not a purely workers’ organization; the leaders and a good number of the militants are “intellectual proletarians.” They have everything to expect from a change of regime and they contribute much to pushing the working mass to the political struggle. And the Jewish worker, always ready to grow enthusiastic for an ideal of justice, revolutionary by instinct, and embittered against a secular persecutor, willingly pays with his person for the ideal of human enfranchisement. The number of Israelite workers arrested and deported is very considerable. The adversaries of the “Bund” even reproach it with sacrificing its adherents too much and demonstrate that the number of the victims is greater in the “Bund” than in the Russian or Polish socialist party. Moreover here are the figures, which are eloquent by themselves. The number of bundists arrested, detained, and deported rose to about a thousand during the years from 1897 to 1900 and to 2,180 in the years 1901, 1902 and 1903. 2,180 persons arrested out of 30,000 members of the “Bund,” what a frightful proportion! The number of the Israelites condemned to deportation is also much higher than that of all the other nationalities, the Russians not excepted. From the month of March 1903 to the month of November 1904, 384 political convicts passed through the Alexandrovskaya prison, of whom 53.9 per cent Jews, 26.4 per cent Russians, 10.4 per cent Poles, 5.9 per cent Georgians, 1.5 per cent Estonians, Letts and Lithuanians, 1.9 per cent Armenians, some Kirghiz, some Moldavians, White-Russians (Byelorussians) and Little-Russians (Malorussians); among the women, there were about 64.3 per cent Jewesses, 30.9 per cent Russians and 1.8 per cent Moldavians.

How to explain this extraordinary severity with regard to the bundists? It holds, it seems to us, to this fact that the Jewish workers were the first to enter into open struggle with tsarism. Sons of a people intellectually free, as M. Georges Delahache says very well, they have understood the importance and the efficacy of the open-air protestations and manifestations. (1)

(1) The language of one of the “Appeals” of the Committee of the “Bund” is very explicit on this point: “In the countries of Western Europe,” we read, “the people have the tribunes of Parliament, of the public meetings, the book, the journal where it can speak freely of its needs. Here we have nothing of all that. The public word is for us one thing: to carry our demands into the street. And in vain does the odious government propagate absurd rumors that, at this price of a peaceful demonstration, on the First of May, the workers are going to try to pillage, to burn, to organize raids. The government slanders us, for it understands the danger that a successful demonstration makes it run. A peaceful demonstration advances us more than whole months of clandestine propaganda. A demonstration opens the eyes even of the most apathetic. The government reveals itself there in all its horrible nakedness and provokes the hatred and the contempt of all honest men. That is why the government treats the demonstrators with an unheard-of cruelty, why it has people massacred who do not provoke, why it recoils before no means to prevent the demonstrations in the street.”

It is the Jewish workers who were the first to carry their demands into the street. It is in the Jewish towns, for the first time, that the cry “Down with Autocracy” resounded and that the red flag was carried about. And while in the Russian towns, except the capitals or the great workers’ centers, there are never demonstrations, in every Israelite borough where there exists a Jewish workers’ organization, not a year passes that there is not one or several to register. One demonstrates in the synagogues. One demonstrates in the theaters, one organizes protest meetings. (1) Now the government dreads above all these street demonstrations, these open defiances which shake the torpor of the populations, which excite the crowds and create a milieu sympathetic to the revolutionaries. That is why it acts severely against the demonstrators. In its exasperation it has gone even so far as to inflict corporal punishments upon the demonstrators of Vilna. In 1902, the governor von Wahl found himself on the evening of the First of May at the town theater when from the gallery a packet of small bills was thrown into the hall. One of these bills fell into the governor’s box. It was conceived thus: “The social-democratic Committee of Vilna congratulates you on the occasion of the international feast of the First of May. Down with autocracy! Long live political liberty!” Von Wahl did not

(1) Thus according to the report of the “Bund” there were thirty demonstrations in the course of the years 1901 and 1902, with a number of 7,520 demonstrators; in addition ten demonstrations took place on the occasion of the First of May, with 1,000 demonstrators at Warsaw, 700 at Minsk, etc. 260 meetings and rallies were held; more than 36,000 persons attended them. The average figure of those attending for each meeting varied from 100 to 150, but there were rallies of 1,000 and of 1,500 persons.

hear it thus. Immediately, on his orders, the police invaded the gallery and arrested eighteen persons. They were dragged to the police station and there, in the presence of the governor, of the prefect of police and of a physician, a certain number of strokes of the rod were administered to each of the demonstrators, which von Wahl counted aloud. And when the execution was finished, the governor himself handed (a stroke of wit of a Russian functionary) to each victim a bill with this inscription: “Congratulations on the occasion of the first of May.”

Can one conceive the moral torture of these conscious men, of these socialists full of the sentiment of their personal dignity? A great consternation fell not only upon the bundists, but upon the whole Jewish nation; never did the contempt of legality, (1) never did the triumph of the brutal soldiery manifest itself with so much insolence and cynicism.

An appeal of the “Bund” eloquently translated the general indignation:

”…Why then do all these gendarmes, spies, governors and Cossacks fall upon us with all their might? Why are so many prisons built to enclose us in them? Why are the cold deserts of Siberia peopled with us? What do we do then, that we should be combated by cruel means? We are social-democrats — the vanguard of the militant proletariat — we ask only one thing: the truth in all the spheres of social and individual life. We wish to suppress the exploitation of man by man, we wish the reign of justice, of liberty and of fraternity. We do not

(1) It must be remarked that the Jews, in their quality of town-dwellers, have at all times been withdrawn from the penalty of the rod, “reserved” for the rural class.

wish that the earth be watered with blood, with sweat and with tears and plunged into an ocean of misery and of famine. We do not wish despots fleecing the peoples. Our ideal is the radiant ideal of socialist society…

“The band of thieves, of assassins and of debauchees which holds power had tried all the means to combat the Revolution: prison, deportation, mass massacres in the streets and in the police stations, hypocritical assassinations accompanied by the comedy of ‘self-hanging,’ assassinations pure and simple by the bullets of the soldiers, and finally ‘legal’ depravation. But all these means have failed. And now the band has imagined a new infernal procedure, by which it counts on reducing the people to silence, by striking its imagination with the frightful image of supreme shame. But it forgets that one cannot saturate the atmosphere with violence except up to a certain limit. Beyond this limit, revolt raises all the layers of society; a desperate courage takes the place of servile submission, the dead come out of the tombs and before each one this fatal dilemma stands up: to cast off the chains of slavery, or to die.

The Appeal sees in the exasperation of the government the convulsions of its agony:

“Yes, the day of deliverance is already shining. And the tyrants tremble, and the spirits of darkness stir, dismayed. For they feel that their time is finished and that the reign of violence touches its term…

It ends with an appeal to vengeance:

”…We struggle by peaceful means. We do not wish to shed human blood. But… patience has limits. It will not be our fault if the popular vengeance and hatred translate themselves one day by an act of violence… It is upon Wahl and upon his acolytes that the responsibility for it will fall…”

This appeal was heard. Two days after, a Jewish worker, Hirsch Lekert, fired several revolver shots at the governor. The latter was slightly wounded. The “Bund” hailed in enthusiastic terms the act of the avenger of justice, who “had avenged the honor of the Jewish working class and human dignity outraged and flouted by a satrap of the tsar.”

Lekert, brought before a court martial, was condemned to hanging. He died simply and bravely. His memory, says an Appeal of the “Bund,” will remain eternally engraved in the hearts of the Jewish proletarians and of all those who have not yet unlearned to hate injustice.

The attempt of Lekert raised courage. The government had to abandon the “politics of the rod” and revoke von Wahl. As for the “Bund,” it has taken up again with more vigor and success its anti-governmental propaganda.

The Russian socialist party realized from the beginning the powerful support that the “Bund” brought it in its struggle against tsarism. And the official organ of this party, the Iskra, did not stint the Jewish workers’ organization its compliments and its encouragements. But in the course of the last two years a change supervened. Contestations on the attributions of the “Bund” within the party were raised in the Iskra. A very acerbic polemic ensued and at the second Congress of the Russian socialist party the “Bund” separated itself from this party.

This schism, it must be said, was rendered inevitable by the intransigence of the party and by the attacks of the Iskra.

As we have already said, the Russian Socialist party recognized in its “Manifesto” to each nationality “the right to the recognition and to the affirmation of its own individuality.” This vague and ill-defined right contributed not a little to keeping apart from the Russian party the socialist organizations and parties of Poland, of Lithuania and of Armenia. The “Bund” alone adhered to it. But as the Jewish workers’ movement extended itself, as the organization grew complicated and as the awakening of the Jewish national sentiment in Russia, provoked by Zionism, gained the working masses, the situation had to change. The “Bund” wished to come out of the tutelage of the party, while remaining bound to it by a sort of federal union. But the Party obstinately refused this. The Congress did not even wish to consider the “Bund” as the sole representative of the Jewish proletariat, and refused to recognize for the Israelites, as for the other nationalities inhabiting Russia, the right to an autonomy of languages and of national institutions, an autonomy which was advocated and adopted for the various races inhabiting Austria-Hungary by the Congress of Brünn in 1897. (1)

There remained then to the “Bund” no other resource than to

(1) Here are the decisions of this Congress on the question of the nationalities: 1° Austria must be transformed into a democratic confederation of nationalities. 2° The historical provinces (that is to say territorial) must be replaced by autonomous national groupings (national abgegrenzte selbstverwaltungskoerper), administered by national chambers elected by universal suffrage. 3° The autonomous districts of each nationality must be constituted into a national federation (National einheitlicher Verband), managing with the most complete autonomy all the affairs touching this nationality. 4° The rights of the national minorities will be guaranteed by special laws prepared by the central Parliament.

detach itself from the party, and to work in complete independence. But this schism has no doubt weakened the party. One can only regret it for the leaders of the Russian Social-democracy, who have sacrificed to a narrow and forced unitarism — heritage of Russian absolutism — the superior interests of the socialist cause.

As for the “Bund,” it continues, having recovered its liberty, to struggle against tsarism; but its national tendencies become more and more accentuated, and in this respect, the bundist party seconds the efforts and contributes to the action of another powerful party, the Zionist party.

V

Zionism

While, outside the “Bund,” there exists neither in Europe, nor in America, a militant Israelite workers’ party, there are in all the countries of the Jewish dispersion Zionist parties and federations.

Zionism, as is known, aspires to the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine. This political movement, whose initiator and chief was doctor Herzl, recently deceased, makes its way toward its aim by several roads. The diplomatic negotiations begun with the Sultan and the great powers, the creation of financial institutions (the “Jewish colonial Bank” and the “national Fund”), destined for the purchase of the Palestinian territories, the agitation and the propaganda in favor of the Zionist cause in the Jewish and non-Jewish milieus, such are the different manifestations of the Zionist activity. However the character of the movement varies according to the countries. In Russia, where the bulk of the Jewish people is found, the Zionist movement is more intense, more extended and more profound than in the West.

There are several reasons for that.

Zionism, as M. Max Nordau has said, is a new designation of a very ancient thing. At the origin, after the destruction of the second Temple and the Roman conquest, Zionism manifested itself by revolts and uprisings. This desire, natural to a vanquished people, of recovering its independence, took on after the dispersion, in the countries of exile, a mystical form: Messianism. The expectation of a Messiah, who would lead the Jewish people back into its fatherland, was the only gleam of joy capable of lighting existence in the ghettos of the Middle Ages.

It is only toward the end of the eighteenth century, under the thrust of the egalitarian ideas of the French Revolution, that a change supervened. The Sanhedrin convoked by Napoleon in France, Moses Mendelssohn and his disciples in Germany declare that they recognize no other fatherland for the Jew than that where he is born and to which he is bound by civic relations. Zionism, for Mendelssohn and his adepts, was no longer the return into the land of the ancestors. It was the establishment of Jewish monotheism, it was the triumph of Jewish morality, a morality of fraternity and of justice. Far from gathering into a body of a nation, the Jews had to remain dispersed among the peoples, in order to lead them to universal fraternity, to the ideal cosmopolitanism.

The moment seemed propitious for the realization of the theories of Mendelssohn. “The emancipating Revolution aiding,” says M. Rouffie in his excellent article on Zionism, (Pages libres, number 157), “one could glimpse the day when Judaism would no longer be anything but a religious confession. By professing a religion of progressive ideal, the Jews had prepared themselves early to be the artisans of social progress and of economic progress. What did they need to attain it? Real liberty and absolute legality, that is to say the dissolution of the secular hostility which surrounded them: they did not obtain it.”

Antisemitism, which had slumbered, awakened in all Western Europe. It struck a decisive blow at the dreams of fraternity of the spiritual Zionism of Mendelssohn and gave a renewal of vigor to the traditional Zionism which remained alive in the heart of a part of the Jews of the West, whose aspirations found an echo in the resounding book of Moses Hess, “Rome and Jerusalem,” appeared on the morrow of the day when the German Jews had acquired the equality of rights.

In Russia, the theories of the German Jewish philosopher exercised no action on his coreligionists. The powerful breath of the Revolution did not reach the Jewish boroughs of Poland and of Lithuania. The emancipation of the Israelites, proclaimed in France as early as 1789, was barely beginning in Russia in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. And it was at once arrested.

That is why Zionism in Russia, unlike Western Zionism, keeps all the characteristics of a popular movement. The Jew of the West comes to Zionism by a psychological process, sometimes painful and complicated. Zionism results, for the Jewish elite of the West, says M. Nordau, (1) in part from their spontaneous impulses, from their enthusiasm for the history and the martyrology of the Jewish people, from the ambition they have to save, for an endless future, the antique throne, to add to the high deeds of their forebears the high deeds of their descendants; in part, Zionism is the result of two impulses come from outside: first the sentiment of Jewish nationality, during a half-century, has dominated European thoughts and sentiments, and determined world politics; second antisemitism, which has been, for most of the Zionists, the constraint which obliged them to reflect on their relations with the peoples.

(1) “Zionism,” page 8.

On the contrary the Russian Jew is a Zionist without reflecting much on it, by sentiment, by instinct, through suffering and through desires. One can say that Zionism is the expression of Eastern Judaism, of Eastern Europe.

Already, a quarter of a century ago, the example of the Serbs and of the Bulgars, called to life by the treaty of Berlin, made confusedly germinate in the mind of several Russian Israelites the idea of the establishment of the Jews on the soil of the ancestors. An Israelite agricultural colony, the first, was founded in 1879, in Palestine.

In 1881 anti-Jewish riots were produced in several towns of Russia. It is then that appears the brochure of doctor Pinsker, a Russian Jew: “auto-emancipation,” which preluded political Zionism, as M. Max Nordau says, and already contained its essential principles. For M. Pinsker, the Jews are not only a religious grouping, but constitute a nation. They wish to live in their own country, in Palestine. Their regeneration must be at once economic, intellectual and moral.

Inflamed by the ideas of Pinsker, several groups of Jewish students and workers emigrated to the Holy Land and founded there about twenty agricultural colonies. Several societies were formed in Russia and in all Europe to come to the aid of these settlers. The movement was thus sketched. But it lacked amplitude and scope. For it to extend itself it needed a chief who should not be only a prophet or a pamphleteer; it needed also a book simple, precise, setting forth not ill-defined aspirations, but a system in which the somewhat vague hopes of the persecuted Jews would find themselves realized. The chief was Theodore Herzl, and the book: the Jewish State. This book, hailed by hundreds of thousands of Jews as an act of deliverance, was the point of departure of political Zionism.

The Jewish palestinophiles of Russia, partisans of the small colonization in Palestine, ranged themselves in great number under the Zionist banner. They took a very active part in the different Zionist congresses, held at Basel and at London. It is principally by the money of the Russian Zionists that the funds of the party are fed. And however poor most of the Israelites of Russia may be, whose destitution exceeds that of the most wretched proletarians of the universe, they find means to contribute, by dint of heroic sacrifices, by a minimal contribution in fact, but relatively onerous for them, to the work of the Zionist propaganda. Thus, the majority of the shareholders of the “Zionist colonial Bank” and of the subscribers of the “National Fund” — financial establishments of the Party — is found in Russia.

We read, indeed, in the report of the “Committee of action”:

“Naturally, it is Russia that holds the head of the Zionist movement. The figures that we have before our eyes and which relate only to the current year (1903) show us the augmentation of our movement in this country. At the beginning of this year, there were over there 1,146 societies; there are, at this moment, 1,572. The augmentation is of 426 societies, that is to say of 37 per cent about. This rate of augmentation reaches in certain districts a much higher figure. Thus in the district of Vitebsk, it reaches 61 per cent…

“As living witnesses of the extension of Zionism in Russia, we can see at this congress delegates from Siberia, from Tashkent and the Jewish mountaineers of the Caucasus…

“The numbers of the Schekels (1) come in, of the shares sold and of the gifts received for the National Fund are in relation with the augmentation, in Russia, of the organized and active Zionists. The stamps of the National Fund, which constitute a freely consented tax, are employed on all occasions…

“As regards the interior life of the groups, this is agitated and intense. As proof of the Zionist activity in Russia, we can note that the Russian central seat received in the course of last year 14,256 letters and dispatched 17,937 of them. Beside the oral propaganda, there was distributed a great number of brochures and appeals rising to 180,000;

(1) Annual contribution of about one franc paid by each Zionist.

for the district of Elisabethgrad alone, this number was 83,000.

The Russian Zionists leave the care of the political steps and negotiations to doctor Herzl and to the Western Committees. They occupy themselves above all with the political and national education of the Jewish populations of the Empire.

Most of the Zionists of the West consider Zionism as a philanthropic work, of a very broad philanthropy, it is true, “disdaining the beaten paths of degrading charity in order to use for the profit of the wretched the resources of social economy”; (1) on the contrary, the Russian Zionists see in it their regeneration and their national redemption. Return to Judaism first, and to the country of the ancestors next, such is their device. That is why they have covered the Jewish Territory with a network of schools, of libraries, of reading rooms. Economic action has not been neglected either. Savings funds, cooperatives of production and of consumption have been created in several towns. Hebrew literature has taken, thanks to Zionism, a new and powerful flight. Journals, reviews, appearing in thousands of copies, have been founded. A whole pleiad of poets (Bialik, Tchernichovsky), of writers and of philosophers (Achad-Haam, Brainin, Sokolov) arises.

Hebrew has become more and more a spoken language in the Jewish agglomerations of Russia, thanks to this lively renewal. Within the Zionist party itself, various currents formed. There is the group of the old

(1) M. Rouffie, Zionism, page 10.

Zionists: the rabbis and the orthodox. There is the advanced group: the socialist Zionists.

“The salutary ideas of socialism,” writes one of them, “will find in the Jewish colonization the broadest application. Already, the nationalization of the soil and the cooperative organization of production are inscribed in the Zionist program. That is only a beginning. The Jewish people has been great in its religion, in the faith; the times and the conditions having changed, it is for social justice that it is ready to combat with the same heroism. But this justice is inseparable from the Zionist ideal, that is to say from the existence of an autonomous and free people.”

“The Zionist organization,” he continues, “is the Jewish people itself struggling for its autonomy; it comprises therefore all the classes of the nation. But that cannot prevent the socialists from being part of it, while combating for their ideal. The capital of which the Zionist organization will dispose will be composed of the sums of the philanthropic societies and of the National Fund; the latter is formed by periodic subscriptions of the nation or by a tax on the Jewish communities. They are therefore national capital; from then on, the socialist reforms, doing no harm to any private interest, but regulating only the mode of employment of the popular capital, will be easy to realize. The democratic spirit of the Jewish people will blossom definitively only in its own country; it is thus that the Jews will have powerfully contributed not only to theoretical socialism, but also to practical socialism.”

And he concludes: “In the West France, in the East

autonomous Judea will become the hearths from which socialist light and action will spring upon the entire world.” (1)

Thanks to the initiative of the advanced Zionists, the Zionist workers grouped themselves into associations (Poalé Zion). The “Poalé Zion,” that is to say the workers of Zion, place themselves on the ground of the class struggle; they affirm loudly their socialist demands; but while combating for their economic interests against their Zionist or non-Zionist masters and against the Russian government which supports the latter, they adhere at the same time to the Zionist program. The “Poalé Zion” consider the creation of a democratic and socialist State in Palestine as the final aim of the Jewish proletariat. For the rest, in the countries of exile, in Russia principally, the struggle imposes itself against the regime of oppression and of massacre. (2) And during the killings of Kishinev, the “Poalé Zion” resolutely engaged the combat against the anti-Jewish agitators, against the fomenters of “pogroms” and against the complaisant authorities. In their “Appeals” spread by thousands of copies, they advocated armed resistance to the rioters and to the policemen.

“Enough of bowing,” says a “Manifesto,” “before

(1) Revue Socialiste, page 210, year 1903. — Deka-Duo. Jewish autonomy and philanthropy. (2) The “Poalé Zion” party is a Jewish proletarian party… The “Poalé Zion” party tends to the creation of a political and national center in Palestine; it advocates an active struggle against the existing social order… The “Poalé Zion” party adopts the program of the international socialist party with a view to the abolition of capitalist society and to the establishment of a socialist State… The Party considers the creation of a national and political center in Palestine as an essential condition of the existence and of the normal development of the Jewish people… (Program of the “Poalé Zion”).

each functionary… The times are past when the Jews let themselves be oppressed without opposing the slightest resistance. The hour has come to answer violence with force, by combating our enemies with arms in hand. And when bloodthirsty brutes are loosed upon you, we say to you: Arm yourselves, and go down into the street. Your dignity as men and as Jews requires it…

“We shall no longer let ourselves be slaughtered! We shall no longer permit our honor to be trampled underfoot! We have counted too much on the aid from outside, on the laws, on enlightened men, on the governments. Our best support is ourselves…

“In the long and difficult combat that we shall have to sustain for the triumph of the Zionist ideal, courage, audacity and energy are necessary. Let the resistance to the antisemitic savageries and the defense of our honor be the first manifestation of it…”

These vibrant appeals raised courage everywhere. In all the towns “Committees of defense” formed. And when, scarcely six months after the massacres of Kishinev, the emulators of M. von Plehve wished to stir up an anti-Jewish riot at Homel, they struck against a vigorous resistance. The “Poalé Zion,” united to the bundists, had dispersed the bands of the rioters. There were bloody collisions, wounded and dead on the one side and on the other. But one had not to register any assassinations or rapes. (1) Since then, at Smela, at Rovno, thanks to the workers’

(1) At Homel, as everywhere, the troops protected the rioters. They fired only on the Jews; a few workers were killed.

organizations, violences could be averted. One can even be certain from now on, if however the “Committees of defense” continue to show themselves active, that the era of the massacres in the manner of Kishinev will be closed.

The struggle against the common enemy had brought together the “Poalé Zion” and the partisans of the “Bund.” It must be said that at the beginning the relations between the two parties were somewhat strained.

The bundists accused the Zionists of playing the game of the Russian government, by abstaining from combating it and by preaching indifferentism in matters of politics. For their part, the Zionists reproached the bundists with sacrificing the Israelite workers, either to the aleatory benefits of the Russian Revolution, or to the profit of a Constitution which will not know how to suffice to guarantee the integral liberty of the Jewish people.

However, in the course of these last years, time and circumstances aiding, a relaxation had been produced. On the one side the bundists have drawn nearer to their people, by grouping themselves into a national Israelite organization, by adopting the Jewish language, by recognizing the right of the Jewish people to a national autonomy in Russia.

On the other side the Zionists, the Zionist youth above all, have recognized the necessity, in the very interest of Zionism, of combating tsarism which debases and degrades the Jewish people in Russia and hampers the means of its economic and political development.

So that under the thrust of events a rapprochement tends to operate itself between the two parties, which, in their ensemble, represent contemporary Russian Judaism. The Russian government — is there need to say it — makes no better figure to the Zionist workers than to the socialist workers. It struck with the utmost rigor the Zionist Dachevsky, the author of the attempt against the sinister Kruchevan, organizer of the massacres of Kishinev. It acts severely against the “Poalé Zion” and has lately taken a series of severe measures against the Zionists in general.

In spite of these persecutions, the Zionist movement gains more and more ground in Russia.

Conclusion

We have tried in the preceding chapters to inform the French reader about the various movements which agitate Russian Judaism. Two parties find themselves face to face: the one national, the other proletarian. The one claims the imprescriptible right of each nation to integral liberty, and aspires to independence in the country of the ancestors. The other places itself on the ground of the class struggle, makes itself the artisan of the Revolution, and combats for its national autonomy in Russia itself. One cannot prejudge the future of these two parties. But the conclusion which emerges from the study of the facts is that we are witnessing a true national awakening of the Jews in Russia. It is the renaissance of the Jewish consciousness, the new foliation of the millennial ideal of the prophets. The old people that one believed dead awakens like so many others and wishes to unseal the stone of its tomb. Whether it be in Russia, where its sons mount blithely upon the altar of the Revolution, whether it be in Palestine, where they dream of a better society, it is always its old ideal of justice and of truth that Israel pursues with a tireless tenacity. In the great struggle for human emancipation, the people of the Bible and of the prophets does not abdicate its ancient traditions.

ELIE EBERLIN

A study journey

Georges Delahache

All men are born and remain free and equal in rights… No one may be disturbed for his religious opinions… — Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

… Our two nations, friends and allies … — Aboard the “Pothuau,” 1897.

Before anyone who, not being Russian, claims to venture into the Empire of the Tsars, a wall rises, imposing and forbidding. One persists in teaching children that Russia is a State of Europe: yet it takes fewer visas, seals and countersignatures to found a counting-house at Santiago or to make one’s fortune at the Stock Exchange of Johannesburg, than to spend a night in a hotel at Warsaw. The title of French citizen, which ought, by itself alone, to assure to all those who bear it, in their relations with the foreigner, an equal respect and an equal treatment, is of no effect on the representatives of the Russian administration in France, independently, if I may say so, of its confessional support; and there is truly something strange in having never put forward, in the eyes of the friendly and allied chancellery, the dignity of that title, which suffices unto itself. I know the modesty of my protestation, and its probable inefficacy; but I deem it necessary; just as well a protestation is worth something by itself, by the reason, by the right on which it is founded. One acclaims France, but, when the days of jubilation are past, when the bedizened delegations have vanished with the smoke of the champagne, one stops it at the frontier, like the other nations, perhaps a little more than the others, being more representative of liberty: the French spirit is not an article of importation. Therefore, even French, and even Catholic, the foreigner, suspect by definition, enters Russian territory only if he has been duly labeled and initialed at the departure. But, if he is Protestant, above all if he is a Jew, he must have his soul firmly riveted to his body not to leave all hope at the door of the Consulate General: for it is there — for the Parisian at least — that the prologue of every journey in Russia is played out. “You have your passport?… Your name is?… Ah! you are… an Israelite? — Yes, Monsieur. — Then… — … ?… — Then, you must procure a certificate from the head of the house for which you are leaving, attesting that you are indeed in his service, and whose signature must be legalized by the police commissioner of his quarter. You also need a card of legitimation, like this one… (and the functionary negligently shows you a specimen of this card, in the name of M. Mayer Lehmann or of M. Salomon Lévy…). This card must be delivered to you by the Chamber of Commerce, with legalization of the signature of the head of the house, plus the legalized visa and the seal of the President of the Chamber of Commerce.” You have remarked that “then”? — understood all that it signifies of steps, of negotiations, of vexations, of witnesses to produce, of signatures to solicit, — better still, glimpsed all that it conceals, in an autocratic and religious State, of miseries and of iniquities.

* * *

… From the entry into Romania one understands that Paris is far and that one has left free Europe: it suffices to undergo at the frontier the formalities of the passport under the eye of an already suspicious police, to see the customs officers search from top to bottom the meager valise of a poorly dressed woman traveler — because they have noticed two brochures in Hebrew — search, I say, search, what is rightly called search… without hesitations or modesty, even to the folds of the dirty shirts… It appears from this instant that one is moving away from civilization. I remember having had an impression of Romania a little rapid and limited to a single town: Jassy. It would yet deserve that one should stop there. Flanked on each side by three or four great public edifices of fairly recent construction and which a provident authority has placed far from the center, outside the active town, in order to give the latter the temptation to lengthen itself as far as those extreme points, it remains from that moment standing in spite of that administrative fatality.

Here, most of the merchants are Jews, most of the Romanians are soldiers and functionaries, only a few are beginning to try themselves at business. Unfortunately the troubles which several times overturn and bloody the country have left profound traces in the Jewish population, which alone perpetually has the menace above it. It is known that Europe, by the treaty of Berlin, took the Jews of Romania under its protection, declaring them equal in rights to their fellow-citizens of the other confessions, — but also, that the Romanian government, by an ingenious fiction which recalls the celebrated word of the famished monk of the good Lenten season, persecutes them at its ease, baptized “Foreigners.” Thus those who had the most independent situations have left, those who remain are ruined people, small shopkeepers who have a large shop on the street and possess in reality not a parcel of their merchandise. Life is sad, sad, anxious, commerce is dying, between the Jews who are finished with business and the Romanians who do not yet do any, and the situation is all the more painful in that their anxiety, always on the alert in the midst of the passionate controversies of which they are the object and which moreover impassion in the domain of facts, grows particularly nervous at this moment:

Kishinev is not far in space, — four hours of railway, — nor in time, — three months scarcely, — they still feel the effects of the shock they experienced, and the same impression emerges from all the conversations; here, one can always fear a Kishinev, but a Kishinev worse than the other, a Kishinev “without the fear”: the Russian administration, following the strange and beyond the power of “letting things be done,” — current euphemism, — would it have as surely succeeded in stopping it?… Happy then the Jews of Russia, since they are not at the mercy of spontaneous brutalities recalcitrant to repression, but indeed under the tutelage of a strong administration which always intervenes… first to provoke the movement, then to compress it: such was, indeed, as we shall see, the characteristic and so to speak the originality of the days of Kishinev.

From Jassy to Kishinev, — it is not a hundred years since the two towns were separated by a political frontier, — it is the same country that continues, the immense plateau which spreads beneath the frontier of the sun. After four hours of a nocturnally slow train and of interminable stops, one perceives at last, dominating the sandy streets and the small low houses which slope down to the edge of the track, towers and bell-towers, heavy white and green cupolas, masses of stone bursting in the sun, all the apparatus of a great city, Kishinev. It takes an hour to cross, at a walk, a Moldavian jostles a woman and strikes her with a whip-blow, that is Kishinev. It must indeed be avowed that in France one did not know the name of Kishinev, a year ago (would to God it had not come out of its obscurity!), that with our somewhat stay-at-home habits of mind we could not very well represent to ourselves what the aspect is of a town of 100,000 inhabitants, — in Bessarabia, — and that finally we should not have been able to conceive that the locality unknown not long ago where yesterday so many savage horrors occurred should be what one calls a great town. It is therefore with an emotion in which the piquancy of the present impression mingles with the tragic of the memory that one sets foot on the platform of a great station, that one crosses a very elegant buffet, with tablecloths, services, wines and sodas in the European fashion, that one finds before the station, after a few tufts of greenery which gently brighten the monotony of the sand, a tramway as comfortable — neither less nor more — as those of our small French towns, and, in front of which, while awaiting the departure, an urchin cries his newspapers for sale. — The tramway follows broad streets all straight which other streets equally straight and broad cut at right angles: this barbarous town, — it was Turkish until 1812, and since then it is Russian, — is built as if on principles, in the manner of New York or of Buenos Aires, and its symmetry recalls that of the American blocks. Elegant troikas with ardent horses, high houses with great shop-fronts and small balconies, important shops very European in appearance, banks and pharmacies, “souvenirs” and bookshops, a “Hôtel National,” a “Grand Hôtel,” Konditoreïaïa where one savors ices very well served, a Public Garden peaceful and smiling, illustrated postcards, — are we then so far from home?… in a country of barbarism?… It is true that the streets, brilliant in the rich quarter, end in a thick dust of grey sand, between low houses without a story, roughcast with stone, with wood, with blue, whose roof advances in a peristyle protective from the sun on small wooden columns equally colored: an agglomeration of “negro huts” on a high plateau swept by immense warm gusts which come from very far… Sometimes, a great empty square, — a market, — where, on certain days the stalls fill and grow animated, where, in the evening, poor little booths made of oil or of candle, light, flickering, the rough face of a few wretched market-vendors before their display of a few apples or other fruits; — or else one of those dances, between two bottles of “tchaï,” of “kvass,” or of “pilsner” manufactured at Riga, where the soldiers, the peasants, the Jews play, and it is within two steps of the fashionable promenade, — and this is not, I affirm it, an illusion of a traveler whose mind would be too occupied by the object of his journey, — the unfortunates look with a distrustful air at the foreigner who

passes and carry in their eyes the bewilderment of yesterday’s terrors, — like the murdered man whose convulsed retina keeps, it is said, the image of the murderer; — and, in the vagueness of all those gazes lost at the point of a terrible memory, one believes one reads the same anxious interrogation: “Who are these people? What is going to happen to us again?” It is true that, if the rooms of the Grand Hôtel are modern, it is better not to sleep there, in order to avoid the presentation of one’s passport to the indiscreet authority, that one must take precautions, not get oneself noticed by the police, not speak too loud in the train, examine furtively one’s wagon companions, not have too curious, too surprised, too foreign an air in the country, not compromise the natives who are willing to indicate to you the roads and to inform you about things, but who would rather not show themselves with you in public, — and inform you within four walls…

Within four walls, they speak willingly, and it is not without emotion that one hears them appeal to French loyalty, so that their name shall not be divulged: Siberia for them is at once too near and too far. Not that we learned things more frightful than those one already knows; at least our observations are, of the reports which preceded them, a terrible confirmation.

We heard the account of a M. G… who was attacked while getting off the tramway, and left for dead, — a happy circumstance to which he owed his life. — From his office he saw the rioters and the policemen, pell-mell, make the Jews come out of their shops. He writes a few letters, gives them to his employee for the mail, goes off, jumps into the tramway. He perceives a corpse abandoned on the road, then farther on, some thirty persons who break and sack everything they meet, before impassive soldiers. He wishes at first to get off the tramway, then, frightened, remains. From the tramway a Christian cries to the soldiers: “You are here to protect, and you are knocking people down!” G… feels comforted by this cry of protestation, but now one has passed the group of pillagers, one arrives

at the station, where another group howls, strikes, recognizes him for a Jew, stops him. One cries: “They are going to kill us!…”, to which the courageous voice of the same Christian answers: “We are here without arms…” G… falls under stone-blows vigorously dealt, he is thrown into the station where he plays dead until the next morning. After a week and a half of illness, the first time since the affair that he went out of his house, he meets his Christian defender: it was a Caucasian prince, who offered to be his witness and who, moreover, he says, had already told everything to the delegate from Petersburg.

Here is a small dealer in fancy goods, who had a house of her own and a few savings. She has nothing left. Her house has been pillaged and broken. On Easter Sunday, the first day, — they had come three times to break their windows. In the evening, they threw into the cellar as much merchandise as possible and the personal objects to which they were most attached. Of nine tenants, seven fled, trying to find a refuge elsewhere. She and her husband remain, then in the morning wish to go away. A Christian woman cries to them: “Do not go out! yesterday, it was the pillage! today, it is the assassination.” Groups arrive, utter cries, break wildly. M. and Madame F… see at once that their assailants are well-off people whom rubles will not stop, they pass through the courtyard, go off, and come back two days later. The assailants, before leaving and to assure the consequences of their visit, had opened the water-pipes… They cannot even think of leaving for America: like yesterday, today they have debts: two thousand rubles of merchandise were with them on deposit, they owe fourteen thousand rubles to the bank, and they cannot abandon for nothing a house which has its value for them.

And here is a testimony which was made to us solemnly, like a testimony before justice, by a very important personage of the town, a man of very clear intelligence, who knows the value of words, and who says only what he knows and sees. It is on Sunday at six o’clock in the morning that the first rumors of the beginning riot reached him.

As for several days one had been discussing in town the subject of the foreseen troubles, he understood immediately that the affair would be serious. The evening however brought some appeasement in the street and in people’s minds. But on Monday morning at eight o’clock people came running from various sides to his house, announcing to him that the crowd is beginning again to pillage the shops, and that persons and properties are threatened, that no measure has been taken for their protection. At half past eight, two of the most considered and most influential Israelites of the town go to the governor’s, insisting that he intervene; he answers tranquilly that measures have been provided for. At ten o’clock, all the New Bazaar is ravaged. Evidently, one did not begin at once and without preambles with the rape of women and the violation of properties. It is first urchins of ten years who break the windows, throw stones against the walls; in their wake, impassive, the police agents, without threatening them, accompany them to the limit of their quarter, where sometimes their colleagues of the neighboring district relay them in this strange escort. Nowhere any intervention of the agents to stop these violences. When Jews come to complain, the police insult them or answer that nothing can be done. It is only after these encouraging beginnings that the rioters, in small groups, with shouts of assault, break the shutters, the doors, enter the houses and the shops. There are in this crowd many barefoot people, transient workers, Bulgars and Moldavians of the suburbs, then servants and women, — and also too many very well-dressed people whose presence was not necessary, who make their squad pass, indifferent and rapid, before the Christian houses in order to hurl it without error upon the neighboring Jewish house. Little by little, as the rioters became conscious of the impunity which was assured them, they grew bolder. Certain groups returned toward three o’clock in the afternoon to the places they had insufficiently visited in the morning, in order to take up again or perfect their first attempt at pillage. From several Jews who wished to organize a resistance and were drawing their arms, the police

confiscated them, reassuring them with good words: “If you stir, you will spoil everything, the measures are taken!” And the rioters, surprised all the same to find the way so free and the adversary so little dangerous, excited themselves to the chase of the victims. The number of the killed, of the wounded, the very nature of the wounds, the broken ceilings, the opened taps, the furniture and the merchandise torn to shreds show well both the ignoble brutality of the assailants and the indifference of the police. There where the least resistance was opposed to them, no trace of disorder: most of the houses of the third quarter, almost exclusively inhabited by Jews, are undamaged thanks to a very small number of agents who protected them; the bourgeois owed the salvation of his house and of his family to the intervention of a courageous Christian, such-and-such a shopkeeper to the “bachtleh” habitually granted to a police agent, — when, right alongside, the Pushkin street is absolutely devastated and when in the most opulent quarter, where there was abundance of police, the rioters enter as they wish, where they wish, unscrewing, pillaging, striking in all frankness, staving in the casks, breaking the bottles of a wine-shop without concern for the patrol which passes within two steps. In the street and in the houses the blood flows, the strongboxes are gutted, the agitation spreads like an oil-stain, extending more and more, as far as the quarters neighboring the countryside, where the bandits divide among themselves like a triumphal booty the gold pieces and the precious objects. It was becoming dangerous for everybody: one was willing to have the pillage, but thanks to the facility of the work (1) it was turning ugly. And, to stop the costs, one order suffices. As soon as the riot saw the troops come out of the barracks, serious and resolute, rifles loaded, as soon as the squadrons swept the streets, — on Monday evening at six o’clock, — it melted away almost instantaneously. And yet, in the official report, it was said that the troops were powerless to protect the Jews attacked!

(1) A mother of one of the rioters made a claim in these terms to the physician who was treating her son: “He worked two days, he is owed three rubles.”

On Tuesday morning, there were no longer any violences except in the remote suburbs, and one was beginning to gather the corpses and the wounded, on the sidewalks, in the cellars and the “closets.” (1) But the narration of a victim or the deposition of a witness, however precise and detailed they may be, cannot, by themselves alone, render the exact physiognomy of what those days were. They must be completed by the thousand memories which circulate in the conversation of the people, scraps of truth brought by one and by the other. Atrocious stories. — Here a little girl of twelve years was raped by an old man and found the next day covered with wounds. There, a woman was raped near the corpse of her husband; she has gone mad. This other one, mother of a child of four months, raped by ten brutes, — I employ the plural on purpose, — is pregnant, and, in spite of her husband, persists in demanding a divorce, out of respect for the Jewish law which imposes it in this barbarous case. One speaks currently of these atrocities, which for us until now were only words, empty words, signs of things so distant that one does not even seek to imagine them to oneself, but which one must indeed represent to oneself and as it were relive, with a shudder of horror, when one speaks to those who were witnesses of them, who tell you the precise details, the street where the event occurred, the circumstances of brutality which surrounded it, the name of the friend who was the victim of it, the horror of those situations all the more painful in that one must hide them and that vengeance is impossible. Touching stories also, of heroism or of charity. The keeper of a synagogue refused to open the door and to deliver to the rioters the rolls of the law: he was killed… — An aged man, women, children had thrown themselves to the bottom of a cellar and remained there in a frightened silence in order not to draw upon their retreat the attention of the bands which from time to time passed in the street. All at once

(1) A young man, a student at the professional School of Kharkov, who had come to spend the Easter vacation at his parents’, was found dead in the water-closets of their house.

one of the refugee children recognizes through the air-hole his grandmother who, trembling, was fleeing, seeking a shelter; the child cries to the old woman to enter, to come near them. Distraught, the women wish to strangle the child, but the old man stops them with a word: “A Jewish hand cannot kill. Open…” A few Christians showed themselves very worthy and very courageous; one cites the name of an engineer who stood up to the rioters and saved several Jews; of four young Christian girls and women who offered themselves immediately and energetically to care for the wounded. One speaks much of father Jean who, on the morrow of the massacre, manifested, by a letter in Novosti, a good movement of pity for the innocents, — which he retracted two days later, — of the archbishop of Zhitomir, who, while vituperating socialism, took in charge the defense of the massacred. One mentions here this very significant trait of a cavalry officer: posted with his men at the angle of two streets, he hears at a short distance, as if coming from a courtyard or a cellar, cries and calls: between his human compassion and his military intervention (the tendency was not favorable to intervention, and it can be clumsy to neglect the tendency…) he hesitated an instant: his conscience got the upper hand; he ran toward the house from which the cries came, dispersed a gathering, saved a few unfortunates; on returning to quarters, he was reprimanded by his colonel, the affair became noised abroad as far as Petersburg, and a week later he received his reward from the ministry of war: and those who know the episodes of the bad days insist, — one will understand presently why, — on this fact that it is the minister of war who rewarded. Amusing stories, finally, for even these are not lacking: life is diverse in everything. The governor von Raaben has not, in spite of the responsibility which falls upon him, raised the hatred of the inhabitants; laughter disarms malevolence; and then, alive, powerless, very submissive to the influence of an amiable lady, to the counsels of a gentle husband and to the malices of his sub-governor, a frenzied antisemite,

a sort of intriguing policeman whom one compares, — out of regard for the French that we are, — to our Fouché of the first Empire. One had whispered into the mind of the lady that during Easter an anarchist movement directed against the governor would break out; he had therefore concentrated troops at the palace, that was always so much unavailable against the nascent riot. Frightened, he did not come out of his apartments, did not move away from the telephone, and a placard, which circulated in Kishinev, represented the governor hidden under his bed, the lady setting the parcels and the friend of the governor saying: “Stay under the bed, disorder still reigns!” When the dismissal of the governor was learned, it was the occasion of another caricature: the governor, by night, drags himself out of the town on the cart loaded by the malicious and triumphant sub-governor. It is this same governor, an old man one must say, who, advised by the press of having received money from the Jews of Kishinev to make the massacre cease, had the strange weakness of asking them for a certificate of good conduct on what he had done for them. One also speaks much of the false mayor, grandson of a Greek baker, a great open thief who traffics in everything and a millionaire fifteen times over in rubles, miserly and rapacious, and who has paid a hundred thousand rubles to be a noble: which permits him to profit from the financial advantages that the subscription to the Bank of the nobility gives. One speaks of Kruchevan, the soul of antisemitism, the founder of the Bessarabets at Kishinev, then of the Flag at Saint Petersburg, — Kruchevan, the austere reformer, the philosopher, a skilled climber, who pretends to scientific antisemitism and whose strength is above all to know how to write for the mass. And particularly of Démètre Pisarjevsky, his former collaborator on the Bessarabets, friend of Kruchevan and his enemy, whose existence is a novel, or was one, — for it has just ended like the most banal page, in such a fashion; Démètre Pisarjevsky was an antisemite by need of action and by elegance; young, rich, brilliant, happy, enamored of life, he

was such that everyone knew his amiable adventures, whose diversity amused him without their simultaneity embarrassing him. In the days of Kishinev he did not

dress, if not to direct the assailants, at least to show himself in their midst with his uniform cap, and, among those frenzied ones, to distinguish himself by a particular epilepsy, one took as it were the state of minds and of responsibilities. — They explain to you that the feasts of Easter were particularly favorable to the explosion, not only because the alleged ritual crime of Dubossari was a convenient pretext, but again because of the special effervescence of the orthodox in those holy days: the night is passed at church in the joy of the risen Christ, and ends in feasts, whose fumes manifestly went to the brains of many of those elegant men and elegant women who applauded the rioters, and offered themselves the curiosity of watching victims be made. — One remarks that the pockets of the dead were carefully emptied and that the money which disappeared rises to 350,000 rubles, that the great majority of the rioters arrested are not of the town, but barefoot people from outside, people without avowal, vagabonds whom the wealth of a country always attracts where the cask costs more than the wine, habitués of the traktirs of Nizhni-Novgorod and of Moscow, who always know where there is a coup to be made. Their arms were rather summary: they marched through the streets, the hand folded back hiding under the wrist rounded pieces of lead at the elbows of water which they broke as the attack progressed, and many of the atrocious wounds that were observed on the victims were made with these improvised arms. — And the memories press and accumulate, accusing. One felt the riot forming so well that the Grand-Rabbi of Kishinev made an approach to the orthodox bishop to ask him to calm people’s minds: the latter contented himself with answering that he believed perfectly that the Jews made the unleavened bread with the blood of Christian children. (1)

(1) An impertinent reply at which, be it said in passing, one must not be too astonished. For French Jews, accustomed to other manners, an approach of this kind would assume a sort of correct dignity, due to the equality of the persons, to their confraternity in the ecclesiastical functionariate, to their common desire for peace. It is not the same in a country where God is only the God of the orthodox, where the Jewish priest is nothing. In fact, the Russian Jewish communities, — save in Poland where they have kept the organization that Napoleon the First granted them, — have no one who can speak in the name of their ensemble: there is no general assembly, two rabbis, — a religious rabbi, an old Jew perfectly competent for this purpose, but as to their scrupulous observation in the detail of the traditional ceremonies or of the culinary operations, — and an administrative rabbi, who, having to be a graduate of the Russian Universities, chosen in consequence among the lawyers, doctors or pharmacists of the town, sometimes puts his own affairs before those of his confessionals. And in this division of functions, there is no longer any place for the moral authority of a representative of the community.

A thousand details came back to their minds, of which they understood the importance only after the event, on reflection, a thousand small facts whose juxtaposition is particularly significant from the point of view of the state of minds and of responsibilities. — They explain to you that the feasts of Easter were particularly favorable to the explosion, not only because the alleged ritual crime of Dubossari was a convenient pretext, but again because of the special effervescence of the orthodox in those holy days: the night is passed at church in the joy of the risen Christ.

Eight days before the affair, an important merchant of Odessa, who found himself at Petersburg, had heard spoken very clearly of the pogrom that was being prepared, and made one foresee the coming of it, in the letters that he sent to his family. — On Sunday, the first day of the massacre, an Israelite lady of Kishinev, rich and richly connected at Odessa and at Kiev, meets, anxious and nervous, an important functionary of the immediate entourage of the Governor and asks him: “Then what are they going to do to us tomorrow? — Do not be afraid, he answered, to you nothing will be done.” — Toward the middle of May, as the agitation was being reborn, one of the Russians of Easter, decided to leave for abroad, made an approach at the police office to obtain his passport; he meets there many Christians, who were asking for the authorization to have arms, for themselves, for their domestics, for their stable-boys. Our Jew solicits the same authorization: it had been granted to the others, it is refused him; he questions, insists: “We can tell you nothing… — Tell it to me, come now, between us: is it because I am a Jew? — You put us at the foot of the wall. It is true.” — From the morning, the house and the courtyard of M. F…, dealer in cattle, are invaded; at nine o’clock, all the rest being broken, one attacks the cash-box. He has run to his lawyer, then to the prosecutor, where he receives a reassuring answer: “We shall send troops.” The troops do not come, he runs to the police, where one answers him more frankly: “Go away, Jew, we have no orders from Petersburg.” From nine o’clock to five o’clock the men continue their task tranquilly, at five o’clock the chest is opened and 30,000 rubles fly away. — On the morrow of the massacres, when the prosecutor of Odessa arrived, he wept on seeing the corpses and on hearing the account of the events, but the director of the police, who was sent from Petersburg, remained impassive, — and modified his report in the sense one guesses in order to be agreeable to M. de Plehve, who had told him, while chiding him about its first form, that he could not present it thus to the emperor. Jewish delegates of Kishinev went to pay a visit to the governor

of Odessa, underwent, by way of consolation, a speech which was an apology for antisemitism and which ended, naturally, with considerations on socialism. The same admonition from M. de Plehve to the delegates of Kishinev who came to ask him for assistance at Petersburg and whom he received moreover incorrectly: they were the antisemitic elite, but carried against them the same accusation: “You are socialists!” — Which drew upon him this reply: “We were not in 1881!” — In the press, all that did not overwhelm the Jews was suspect: the Right, of Saint Petersburg, which said that those two days were a shame for the country, received a very severe observation; the Voskhod, a Jewish journal of Petersburg, received two observations, two weeks in a row; at the third it would have been suppressed. The first number of the Bessarabets after the events carried in headline the question: “Who suffered the most?…” — And all the friends and the brothers of the Christians who supported them for so long? In the third number a subscription was opened for the families weary of the fire. And then the Jews wished to make a collection for their own, sacked and bruised, the publicity for it was forbidden them.

From the examination and the bringing-together of these facts there emerges logically an indisputable conclusion: the complicity of the Administration. And I hold to this word Administration, because I believe that it represents the exact truth. From France, — from afar, — the violent ones, easily simplistic, would willingly accuse the tsar. The tsar is not in question. In the month of Easter, at the blessed hour when the faithful exchange the kiss on the mouth to celebrate the Resurrection of the Savior, Nicholas II no doubt did not know that the next day, on a determined point of his empire, his lawful subjects were going to break loose; perhaps even he knew nothing of it still, three or four days after the event. At least no one has been bold enough, neither at Berditchev, at Kishinev as at Odessa, at Kiev, as at Petersburg, where one speaks however of the ministers, of M. de Plehve, — not too loud, — make the slightest allusion to the tsar himself:

immediately the boldest slip away, their voices grow muffled, the gazes flee, the conversation slinks off in formulas of excuses: “The Emperor has no ministers and trusts to their reports, naturally… The Emperor has no clear will, he lets himself be influenced, he is not the master… The Emperor has not a robust health, and the strength fails him to work by himself… The Emperor is not of very firm mind, he does not see things well, does not understand the bearing of them, one cannot hold it against him…” And of all these accumulated excuses one would make an admirable accusation, but, in the form, the political proprieties are respected, the walls which listen to you will retain nothing, — for this time; — the tsar is out of question, Russia is saved, — and the conversation turns on M. de Plehve. — To attribute the responsibility wholly to that collective being which we call the government, would not be either quite just: we like, we, to concentrate in that very simple word the responsibility for our bad humors: it is a political entity and a subject of conversation for free countries, where there mingle a little confusedly the notion of a State at the center of everything, the bourgeois consideration of the “established powers” and the precise idea of a few personalities reunited by the hazard of the parliamentary combinations on a special bench of the legislative palace: it is a word too European, too Western, too French. Here the committee of ministers is not a council of ministers, the ministers are not great heads of service who themselves receive the impulse from one of them more particularly favored with the imperial confidence… And the conversation always falls back on M. de Plehve, M. de Plehve, minister of the Interior, great holder of the forces of police and of gendarmerie, M. de Plehve, a policeman’s soul gone astray in an apparent situation of statesman, is marvelously apt to make the organism that he directs yield its maximum of effect, but he benumbs his own force, and all the others, and one conceives what its power must be in a country where the security of the monarch and the safeguard of the ideas by which he lives seem to be the final cause of all the institutions and the essential duty of all the subjects. The Administration,

it is the Vidrine affair; the Jewish merchants who are authorized to establish themselves outside the territory may bring with them the number of clerks necessary for the good running of their enterprise; the governor contests the merchant Vidrine’s right to summon a Jewish clerk because he had not brought him with him, the general assembly of the Senate gives the governor reason; — and it is the Guen affair: a typographer artisan has the right of sojourn outside the Territory, but as a typographer artisan only, — he becomes the master of a printing-house, is no longer considered except as a merchant, and is sent pitilessly into the zone. The Administration, it is, at Kishinev, the governor of the telegraph refusing the telegram of doctor Mutruik, who wished to inform the minister of what was happening, and it is the police agent answering the distraught dealer in cattle: “Go away, Jew, we have no orders from Petersburg!” A formidable mass of ukases and of decrees which can crush anyone, anywhere, anytime; an innumerable body of authoritarian and suspicious functionaries, who mount an always invisible, but always present guard, beside every human being who lives permanently or circulates temporarily within the limits of the Empire, — following him everywhere, in his private life as in his public life, watching over and controlling even the other administrations, which sometimes have the temptation to rebel, — I recall here the incident of the officer of Kishinev rewarded by the minister of war, — fierce executors of the orders that are given them, and malicious ones, of those that have first of all been given: the Administration, it is the oratorical text of the regulations multiplied by the role of the functionaries, and, since this admirable organism perceives in its field of action a few categories of the weak and of the suspect over whom one can do everything and whom one cannot know how to defend, one must not be astonished that its exuberance manifests itself from time to time by an interested police operation.

If one needs a particularly precise, immediate, direct proof of this narrow bond between the Administration and the crime, in the affair of Kishinev, one must recall

a fact on which one has not sufficiently insisted: it is that there are here only 50,000 Jews out of more than 130,000 inhabitants, that these Jews are almost all workers or small merchants, not suspect of incorrect traffics, that the relations between Jews and non-Jews were good, that in 1881 even the town had remained at peace in spite of the generality of the Jewish massacres in Russia, and that it is only for the last seven or eight years that the peace there is troubled, — since the apparition of the Bessarabets! Now, in a country where the Administration has over the journals, whether they appear in Russia itself, or whether they come from outside, — all the rights, if I dare express myself thus, — the prohibition of entry at the frontier, the prohibition of sale on the public way, censorship, seizure, suspension, suppression, — it is that one has knowingly tolerated, if not aroused, for seven or eight years as a counterweight, it is that one has knowingly tolerated, it is that the Administration wills it! In Russia, a native as witty as veracious told us, in Russia everything comes from above, even the riot…

* * *

Immediately after the event, the Administration, stirred by the proportions that the affair had taken and also by the unexpected repercussion that it had on opinion abroad, ordered the traces of it to be effaced as quickly as possible. The windows, the doors, the walls were repaired, — although there remain today a few visible damages, — and the organization of relief was tolerated. Every day families come to draw upon it at the “Committee of relief,” make their farewells, leave for America.

Many have taken refuge at Odessa. Odessa offered them, indeed, as it were a natural asylum. Odessa is very near Kishinev, — one speaks of leaving Kishinev at ten o’clock in the evening to arrive at Odessa at six o’clock in the morning, — many relations of commerce and of family existed between the Jews of the two cities, and the incidents which trouble the one fatally gain upon the other. Moreover, it is a great town, rich, where existence appears from afar as less difficult and deadly, an important port where many diverse elements meet, where the aboulia of the authority grows supple

while scattering itself: from the top of the granite staircase which dominates the statue of the duke of Richelieu, the view extends over the sea to infinity, and it seems that one breathes, with the air from outside, a little liberty. Out of nearly five hundred thousand inhabitants, there are at Odessa one hundred and twenty thousand Jews: about sixty thousand are indigent. And the number of them grows every day; every year, at Easter, the gratuitous distribution of unleavened bread to the poor increases in considerable proportions. From everywhere, the persecuted Jews take refuge here: it is, in the agitated epochs, the outlet of all central and southern Russia. A few weeks ago, two thousand Jewish artisans were driven out of Kiev: every day a few of them arrive at Odessa, they crowd together here, without knowing how they will live tomorrow. M. Brodovsky has consecrated to the Jewish proletariat of Odessa a very complete and very documented study. He knows all the houses, all the families, their incomes and their charges, and one must accompany him into this labyrinth of the depths of the Moldavanka suburb, where the poorest part of the Odessa Jewry dwells, immense barrack-houses open onto a great courtyard peopled with brats or onto a long alley bordered on each side with cabarets and with cellars; here is one which contains a hundred and fifty rooms, — about a thousand persons; — another, in two corps of buildings, which, under the entrance-vault, on the slate panels of the “dvornik,” (concierge) displays before astonished eyes the names of 51 families for the right wing and 50 for the left wing. In these basements, taking a little light through an air-hole level with the courtyard, lodgings of two rooms, or of one only, — sometimes for two families composed each of five or six persons; and the price of the rent of these hovels varies between two and a half rubles and six rubles per month, (about six francs fifty and sixteen francs) when the husband, worker or small merchant, earns one ruble (two francs sixty-five) per day, the wife, washerwoman at the market, a half-ruble. — Three francs per month, that is 192 francs per year, do not perhaps represent a very high rent; but, in the misery of these people, and when one sees these foul subterranean lodgings, it is, as one says, “well paid.” It must be avowed that

these houses do not all belong to non-Jews, that moreover the police sometimes intervenes to close, empty and destroy the particularly insalubrious premises, but that the proprietors know, by the ordinary way of the bakshish, how to have the interdict lifted. — A few kilometers from Odessa, in the suburbs, the baths of the Liman offer a spectacle perhaps still sadder. At the edge of a bay which opens onto the Black Sea, an establishment of mud baths has risen, luxurious and very frequented by the rheumatic and neurasthenic town-dwellers. But, on the hill, wretched shanties tier up, half sunk into the ground, where there sleep on pallets, pell-mell, old men, women, children, — Jews come from the interior to whom the Community of Odessa sometimes advances the 0 francs 50 per day and per person necessary for their expenses of food and of lodging, and who often, not having the wherewithal to return home, will remain there, indefinitely… Naturally, from the depths of this misery, hopes rise to which Zionism gives body and life. These men have the consciousness of forming here a complete society, with the necessary variety of its elements, workers and scholars, intellectuals and financiers, leaders and laborers. A rich Jewish banker may have his offices comfortably installed in Richelievskaia and live his happy life in his mansion of the Nicolas boulevard… Russian society is closed to him, he will never be proprietor on the shores of the Black Sea of the villa where he passes his summer evenings, he cannot, without a passport regularly stamped, go for twenty-four hours to Benderi or to Kishinev, he is a “prisoner” in the Territory like the others: he thinks, by contrast, of the country where he will at last be “at home”: he is a Zionist. Here is a Jewish doctor who has inhabited Russia for twenty-five years, who has raised all his children in the Russian fashion, of whom two daughters are married to Jewish doctors of old Odessa families, and who feels himself always on the eve of an order of expulsion which he escapes only by prodigies of diplomacy; he knows that, driven from here, he will be, on returning to his fatherland, only a “Jew” still, or even a “Russian Jew”: how would he not dream

of a fatherland of his own, autonomous and independent? He is a Zionist. And these men consecrate to Zionism qualities of intelligence, an energy, an ardor which would be employed, in happier countries, only in the peaceable exercise of some vice-presidency of a charitable committee, or which they would reserve quite simply for the care of their personal affairs, not feeling, between them and their brothers, the bond of the common servitude. And they are the pastors of the people, and the people follows, a crowd of the humble and of the poor scattered in the various categories of the social labor; if, moreover, in other times, the incapacity to possess the soil and to be part of the corporations cast the Jews almost exclusively into the practice of financial affairs, here, the ostracism that they undergo is so to speak less professional than administrative and geographical; within the narrow limits where they are hemmed in, obliged to earn their bread from day to day, they disdain no trade as the Jew of the West sometimes does, to whom liberty gives ambitions: roofers here are almost all Jews, many are Jews among the carters, the orchestra musicians, the truck-drivers… This pride that they feel of being by themselves alone “a world,” the keen sentiment manifest in all their conversations, it sustains and vivifies in them the idea of the transplantation in a body. They do not remark that there is Zionist and Zionist, that the spirit of economic and financial enterprise is perhaps not foreign to the Zionism of the banker, that that of the modest one rests particularly on ethnological or political considerations, and that there differs equally from the one and from the other that of the patcher of boots and the seller of cucumbers, who frets, sadly and without phrases, only to “get out of there.” Those very ones do not think that their present misfortune is made for a great part of the humility of their condition, and that Palestine could not give them back, from one day to the next, the golden age! But they are united in the faith, and the faith does not follow the difficulties. Periodically taken in across the centuries by messianic hopes which were not realized, they have kept, from the past quiverings, a greater facility

to quiver again. Very instructed in their antique origins, history has left in the depths of their souls as it were the soil of a poetry which destined them to receive fruitfully the germs of Zionism. An idea at once mystical and social warms them, a prestigious word unites and exalts them, the portrait of doctor Herzl is everywhere: leaning on the balcony of the hotel where he lodges at Basel in time of congress, the profile of his beard caressing with his hand the humble bearded ones of the Rhine who lose themselves in a poetic perspective, the apostle of Zionism lets the dreamy gentleness of his eyes wander to the distances of the countryside and of the future. It seems that thanks to Zionism, to its organization, to its ramifications in the numerous Jewish localities, they feel themselves less threatened and less alone, and the Hebrew letters of the word “Zion,” inscribed in the symbolic star, on the paper of the Zionist committees and on the door of the mender of carriages where they converse, make upon these unfortunates athirst for a better life, the effect of a new emblem which cold reason has not yet touched and which possesses all its virtue generative of devotion and of hope. But, alas! while awaiting a dawn that does not rise, these unfortunates strike, in order to obtain their passports, against the rapacious hands of the police; those who have not yet the age of military service have 800 francs to pay for the right to emigrate, (1) the journey costs dear, the admission into Palestine is difficult, — and the Jews continue to molder, a prey all ready for cholera and for typhus, in the basements of the Moldavanka.

* * *

Of this common ardor toward a happier future by a return to the geographical and religious past, Berditchev is the hearth. It is of this town that one says over there, jokingly, that for its inhabitants the world reduces itself willingly

(1) Exactly three hundred rubles, of which the payment is exigible from the family of the emigrant [partly obscured: a clause provides that in case of losses of non-Jews the sum is only one hundred rubles, and that one can be in order with one’s immediate relatives].

to a formula of three words: “Europa, — Berditchev, — Palestina.” Berditchev is indeed a great Jewish town, almost absolutely Jewish, “the Jewish Town.” It has 60,000 inhabitants, of whom about 55,000 are Jews. And for whoever has not completely lost the memory of the traditions, it is an impression in which there mingles with the amused curiosity a little emotion, the arrival in Berditchev on a Saturday, at the hour when, through the doors of the synagogues which half open to the first who leave, escapes the rhythmed murmur of the final prayers; the streets are silent like those of our towns on Sunday, the Jewish shops pierced in the basement of the orthodox cathedral are closed, on the sides of the market which spreads out in a trapezoid, empty and gloomy, the heavy iron doors of the shops are hermetically padlocked, and, at the end of the afternoon, “from five to seven,” along a walk planted with meager trees which follows by the middle the principal roadway of the town, all the little Jewesses promenade, a little awkwardly in their Sunday best. In this milieu the letter of introduction of a Zionist of mark is like a rallying word which puts at your disposal men and information: one opens the letter, one runs through it, one sees in it the words: “French Jew, — Zadoc-Kahn… Doctor Marmorek… Doctor Lippe…” and, with a complaisance all the greater in that this very situation is an explanation and an illustration of their theory, they do you the honors of their misery. The town is above all a market of commission, where a few houses well arranged for this kind of business live at their ease. But it is insufficiently industrial for the number of its inhabitants. Some forty tanneries, ten or twelve works of chemical products cannot employ all the working population. Five or six only are Christian houses: everywhere the workers are Jews, above all at the Christian masters’: the Jewish masters fear a little the less disciplined character of their coreligionists. A few enterprises of sewing, of fashions, of haberdashery permit the women to earn eight or ten rubles per month. One even tells me that three-

quarters of the wages go in expenses of toilet; the Saturdays of Berditchev are pernicious!… But the misery is real and profound. Of the 55,000 Jews of Berditchev, 25,000, about, are in a difficult situation, as many in indigence. A small town built for charity would not be unaware of what sugar was, it had never seen any! They crowd together five or six in the subterranean chambers whose rents cost about forty rubles per year.

Evidently this population is not content with its lot, — and the Administration is not content with it. It crushes it under the accusation of socialism, a “cream-tart” doubly convenient for it, because it finds in it the means of compromising equally the Jews and socialism, the Jews as socialists, the socialists as allies of the Jews. Yet there is in this “accusation” only a part of truth. At Berditchev there are too many small shops, and not enough great works, it is too much a town too lost in the interior, too remote from the great currents of instruction and of agitation for one to be able to attribute to the population an adherence to socialist principles such as other manufacturing agglomerations more cultivated and nearer Europe have. If from the Hebrew books there emerges a breath of justice and of humanity, one cannot however say that the poor currier who, on Saturday afternoon, in the chiaroscuro of his basement, chants the litanies of them to his son, is a dangerous disciple of Karl Marx and of Lassalle. But to authorities always on the alert this vague humanitarianism, this desire for the better, this “discontentism” is a sufficient pretext for suspicions, for vexations, and, if need be, for massacres. No more than their socialism, their Judaism is not absolute, neither under its religious form, nor under its political form. From the first point of view, it is piquant to observe that, in this Jewish “Mecca” itself, the influence of the “situations,” experience, ennui or the dissolvent, on the classes of the tradition. One avows that the most unfortunate ones are the most pious, that the well-off bourgeois are willingly negligent: I have even seen some whom the official bonds

attach however to the community, and who astonish by the offhandedness of their indifference. The “small town” is a universal thing, and what would one not do here as elsewhere for a smile of the governor, for a greeting of the President of the Tribunal? From the national-Jewish point of view, the wretched ones who with a curious and timid cry followed our comings and goings did not worry about knowing whether we were Zionists: when one had well convinced them that we were not inspectors of salubrity sent to suppress their shanties, reassured at last, they put to our companions another question, always the same: “Are they then delegates of the I C A?…” (1) Truly Palestine attracts them less, — than emigration. — But, outside all the differences of ideas and of souls, which are no doubt life itself, above the questions of material hatching and of social rivalries, the sentiment affirms itself and vibrates with a great intensity in the proletarian and in the bourgeois, it is that intellectual and moral dignity is the whole of life, — (in their “Zionism” there enters a great part of gratitude for the school assemblies that they owe to the cause of the party), — it is that here they are nothing morally, that they have no rights, that one neither treats nor considers them as men: and for them all the other miseries are nothing beside that one.

* * *

After Berditchev, the “Jewish town,” one must see Kiev, the orthodox town, the Jews are no longer “at home,” if one may say so: although they are still geographically on their territory, Kiev, because of its character of holy town, constitutes an enclave where the Jews are no more free than outside the Territory, that is to say that they can live there only if they are graduates of the universities, merchants of the first guild, or artisans. And as there are many Jews at Kiev, — precisely because the town is only an administrative enclave in the midst of a region

(1) I C A. Abbreviation of Jewish Colonization Association.

generally open to the Jews, — as the Jewish bourgeoisie of Kiev counts many old “Kievans” long since “assimilated,” one can observe here in a particularly striking fashion the difficulties imposed by the Administration on the coexistence of the Jewish element and of the Christian element, the vexations, the insecurity, the perpetual disputes which stir around the questions of police. Ukases of the emperor, decrees of the ministers and of the governors, decisions of the councils of government, judgments of the senate, all the measures which have for object the situation of the Jews are reunited in a special code, a ridiculously compact book which one must have constantly within reach of the hand to convince oneself that in case of conflict the police can always invoke a precedent which gives it reason. Just as well it is a knowledge that one finds again, for this formulary reigns at Paris on the desks of the Embassy and it is there that the attaché goes to seek the exact mention which it is fitting to inscribe on the passport of the “French Israelite citizen” in instance of visa… Such-and-such of them tells us of his thwarted vocation, his career broken, from the beginning: he was born, he says, in better times, at the epoch when the Jews could attend the gymnasium without there being question of percentage. But when he wished to follow the courses of the University, he could enter it only by the door slightly ajar of proportionality, a proportionality all the more odious in that it is arbitrary and variable from year to year at the will of the minister. Received a lawyer, he cannot exercise, because a Jew: the Jew can be only a trainee, and offer himself afterward the honor of a useless title: a “Jewish lawyer” cannot plead, save before criminal justice, which is forbidden to any Russian subject whatsoever, the pleadings in civil matters being reserved to the lawyers alone. The ukase of interdiction is of 1889, and it has been applied until 1899 in all its rigor. One has made only one exception to it: an old “private counsel,” obliged to leave the town where he fulfilled his functions, in order to follow to Petersburg his son who had just finished his artistic studies in the capital, gave his resignation and obtained the authorization to exercise as a lawyer. One cites the

case of an old lawyer of Odessa who, having become blind, profited from the passage of the minister in the town and asked him for his son the authorization to take over his affairs; it was refused him; — and that of a young Kievan who, received a lawyer, also saw himself refuse the authorization to exercise although his father was an old Kievan of an old Russian family, a lawyer himself, and even a former functionary of the chancellery of the governor of Kiev: the prosecutor of the court of appeal spoke of it personally to the minister who would hear nothing, always in order not to make an exception. One asks oneself, when one has conversed with the people of Kiev, why, before certain Western exaggerations of bureaucratic formalism, we speak of red tape and of byzantinism: Russia is nearer! Alas! its fancies are less laughable than odious. — Two affairs are here in everyone’s memory, return in all the conversations. First that of the artisans: 2,000 Jews, who had been living at Kiev for some ten years, were given notice to leave within fifteen days: one had just discovered that their passports, deposited at the town-hall, carried the word workers (rabotchi) instead of artisans (remeslinik); now, as “workers,” they cannot, but, as “artisans,” they can live at Kiev. The difference is not always easy to establish, and the people are to be pitied whose existence depends on the interpretation of words so close by an authority so partial!… Then the affair of the women market-vendors. The women market-vendors not belonging to the category of merchants of the first guild, nor to that of graduates, the markets of Kiev are forbidden to Jewesses in general: — only the wives of artisans who sell the products of their work have the right to sell there. Now, Jewish milk-sellers were one day prosecuted: it could not pass for a product of their work! One judged as one could: those who sold the milk of their own cows were acquitted, those who sold the milk of others’ cows were condemned to the interdiction of sojourn at Kiev and to confiscation. One even recounts that on the morrow of the judgment, the lawyer of these unfortunate women, meeting the vice-governor,

remarked to him that the condemnation was going to bring about the dislocation of the families, the husbands, artisans at Kiev, finding themselves obliged to remain, and their wives to leave since they were not proprietors of the cows! The vice-governor did not contest, smiled, but did not dare to take pity. The governor even had it said to the lawyer that he had been disagreeably surprised to see him plead such a cause. And the Novosti, which had defended the prosecuted women, in an article entitled: “For a milk-pot,” received a blame. The police, here, is marvelously on the alert. During the night, it organizes hunts for Jews, to see whether all those who are there have indeed the right to be there, whether the tolerated Jewish families do not hide at their homes some contraband Jew, and sometimes in the morning one can see the police agents drag their haul to the town-hall. Not long ago a Jew of the environs, who was coming to Kiev for business and counted on spending a day there between two boats, was picked up at the landing-stage, put in prison, then re-expedited. The affair even made some noise: the journal of Kiev, — the Kievlanin, — which is yet rather antisemitic, reported the adventure, grew indignant, alluded to the “bakshish,” saying that this man had no doubt not known how to use it; the editor of the article, a former professor at Kiev, a rich and influential personage, was summoned to the governor’s, but answered to the menace that it would be better not to begin prosecutions against him: failing which he would bring the proofs. In a milieu so constantly troubled by the police vexations, the announcement of the events of Kishinev had to produce a profound trouble. The first news reached only at the end of eight days, by the private way, — letters, telegrams, conversations reported. It was immediately the panic. Many of those who had the means took refuge in hotels, where they took lodging and board: there, at least, they would be sheltered; the hotels are eclectic, and one does not risk massacring Christians there. A few threw themselves to the station, decided to travel, if it were necessary, going and returning, in all directions,

day and night: in the train one will not ask them for a passport. But the crowd, which cannot save itself by costly means, rushed toward the embarkation-point of the Dnieper: five to six thousand persons invaded the departure pontoons without knowing where they wished to go, and without listening to the prefect of police who, caracoling, sought to calm them: “Your assurances do not suffice us! we remember 1881! A Jewish house was pillaged opposite the town-hall itself!” It took some ten days before the appeasement was made. In spite of these trials and these brutalities, this insecurity of every instant, this discouraging malevolence of the Administration, the relations between “Jews” and “Russians” are not habitually bad. In other towns one could no doubt play on words and maintain that the relations could not be bad where there are no relations at all. It would not be here quite exact; and then, if they were truly and continuously bad, does one believe that, the dispositions of the authority being known, the “accidents” would not be more frequent? By the sole fact that the Jews of Kiev, sorted on the administrative sieve, constitute a sort of aristocracy, and are not the Jews of everywhere, perhaps one is better disposed in the other camp to render them justice. One remarks the attitude of the Kievlanin, which is certainly not favorable to the Jews, but, placing itself clearly on the ground of the regulations, often takes their defense against the arbitrary vexations of the police. One recounts the state of soul of a very well-known journalist of Kiev, who had shown himself very violent against the Jews at the time of the massacres of 1881; he has much amended himself since, he has married a rich woman, whose dowry comprised important landed properties, and, although the Jews are only tolerated in these functions, it is in Jewish farmers that he places his confidence, finding in them more capacities and fewer exigencies; lately, having had a difference with one of his farmers, it is an old Jewish lawyer whom he chose as arbiter. The whole point is to know one another, instead of despising one another a priori: who knows whether with time this Kievan and a few of his fellow-

citizens would not take to their own account the witty definition: “The Jew is the Israelite whom one does not know”? And it seems that the Jews, for their part, however pessimistic their state of mind may be, — after twenty years of malevolence and after Kishinev, — would be willingly disposed to the fusion. One recalls to me the painful situation of the Jewish children from the point of view of instruction. The orthodox communal school is forbidden them, they can therefore attend only the Jewish schools (which are moreover under the control of the general direction of public instruction), that is to say, for almost the totality, schools where the teaching, as to the matters of the program and the language employed in the courses, is almost exclusively Jewish; in a few towns only there are a few Jewish schools where the teaching is more general and is done in Russian. Now such is the conciliatory tendency, that many young people who have been able to attend only the Jewish schools apply themselves to learning Russian things, all the same, at home or at private teachers’ whom they pay. Even a few young people of the Jewish bourgeoisie wished to organize courses, sorts of popular Universities which were to be held on Saturday evening and where they would give the Russian teaching to their less favored coreligionists: but an authorization was needed, the direction of teaching refused it. And yet in 1881, a Jew attached to the chancellery of the government of Kiev, who went through the region for this purpose, succeeded only rarely and with difficulty in convincing, — according to the views of the government of that time, — the Jewish groupings to have Russian taught to the children.

* * *

At Homel, at Minsk, at Bialystok, it seems equally that these two categories of the population live face to face with one another without perpetually measuring one another with a wrathful gaze. At Homel, half the population is Jewish, and lives peaceably. The town lengthens its very straight streets bordered with little wooden houses without a story; opposite the market a synagogue of wood and another of stone, on the fronton of which the word SYNAGOGUE stands out in Russian

as well as in Hebrew; a bearded Jew, with glasses and in a frock-coat, slowly finishes passing over the wall a whitewashing brush, and, as the day falls, on the doorsteps, Jews and Jewesses sit down, foregather, chat: it is the hour of the “newsmongers.” (1) At Minsk, a more modern town, smart and gentle to live in, the tranquillity is the same; in the elegant streets where the fashionable pastry-cooks display on their panels at once primitive and pompous inscriptions whose lettering is French, if not the style: “Accepts diverse orders,” where the furnished houses are called “Old-Berlin,” and, opposite, by competition, “New-Moscow,” many shops are Jewish. It is above all around the meat market, strangely picturesque with its wooden portals and its stone vaults painted ox-blood red, that the Jewish shops press, narrow, black, throwing to the nostrils gusts of flour and of brine. In the midst of the flies which buzz, of the quarters of meat which stick to the trestles, of the toothless poor women, of the hideous-to-see beggars, of the hagglings, of the laughs, of the discussions, of the cries, — it teems like a court of miracles, and, in the white burst of the midday sun, dazzles the eyes, throws to the brain a seed of nightmares for the following night. At the door of a “table d’hôte,” the Zionist star solicits us, and we enter. For two days the orders of the Administration are known: suppression of the Zionist emblems, interdiction of the Zionist meetings, of the contributions, of the propaganda. But the star here has not yet been removed. And the welcome is rather cold: these foreigners frighten the servant, who circulates around us with circumspection, calculating her words, her gestures, almost trembling. But as soon as we “jargon” with her, and she feels in us friends, she relaxes: I have rarely seen change, in a fashion as complete and as abrupt, the expression of the human face. The general life is relatively happy at

(1) The examination of the events posterior to our passage in no way invalidates, — on the contrary, — this impression: the police has put too much complaisance into troubling the peace.

Minsk, even for the Jews. There are few indigent ones; if the industries are not very numerous, nor very important, — a few works of clogs, of matches and of footwear in the suburbs, — on the other hand commerce is fairly prosperous, many Jews are small or large merchants. They live on good terms with the Russians, and many, who find themselves well off in their lot, resist Zionism. The wretched ones are assiduous at all the offices of the synagogue, — the others content themselves with appearing there at the three great feasts and, for the rest, let themselves go to indifference, aerger wie goy, — “worse than Christians.” Moreover confident in themselves and very disposed to defend themselves in case of alarm. When the affair of Kishinev was learned at Minsk, the rumor ran that the Jews were going by way of reprisals to throw themselves upon the Christians, — a pogrom in reverse! — and this time it is the Christians who took fright. Jews and Christians no longer went out except armed. Now everything has returned to order.

* * *

At Warsaw, the term of our journey, it seems that the question presents itself under its diverse aspects at once, and thus permits us to make our way toward our conclusions. There are, at Warsaw, out of 800,000 inhabitants, 280,000 Jews. A few families, — financiers and large industrialists, — are powerfully rich, a few are well-off, the greater part vegetate sadly. Many Jewish workers are without work: the proportion of the available ones is too great in relation to that of the employers, and moreover, if they are often ill-received at the Christian masters’, they have not always at the Jewish masters’ more chance: such-and-such Jewish works of Lodz occupy thousands of workers, — almost all Christians: out of snobbery certain of these large industrialists do not wish to have the air of interesting themselves in their coreligionists; moreover the stoppage of the Jewish work, during two hours on Friday, and during the whole day on Saturday, occasions either diminutions of output, or difficulties of interior organization;

finally many masters fear to find in the Jewish worker a less great habit of the manual crafts and a less humble submission to the law of work. Thus the misery is frightful. There are only 5,000 families who can pay to the community the obligatory annual contribution of which the minimum is three rubles: 8 francs! To visit the foul hovels where the wretched Jews of Warsaw live, one is taken by the throat by the acridity of the heavy and rare atmosphere, and one feels, — to the letter, — one’s eyes filled with tears. In the immense houses which form the Franziskanskaia street, a populace in rags swarms. Look, as at the Moldavanka of Odessa, at the black board of the “dvornik”: Odessa is surpassed. Here is a house of 1,420 persons! At the bottom of the courtyard, which is itself occupied in part by a market, on a long corridor below ground level, half subterranean, open small lodgings full of people, of furniture, of utensils pell-mell. In this room, which takes its day through an air-hole, and which has not fifteen square meters, two beds and a cradle. It is five o’clock in the afternoon, a child of seven years sleeps on the great bed, a baby awakes in the cradle, laughing and gesticulating, the mother is beside him, the grandmother, the grandfather too, who turns a spinning-wheel: the father will return from work presently; they eat and sleep six persons in this reduit. — Farther on: two beds end to end, covered with clothes in disorder, opposite another bed without bedding; two wardrobes juxtaposed divide the room by the middle: it is the lodging of two families. The woman who welcomes us is a seller of fruits, but she does nothing at this moment, because she has not, with which to buy, the necessary capital: ten rubles, twenty-six francs fifty. — A narrow passage leads from the corridor to the courtyard: it serves also as lodging. The air and the light come there only by two doors: the one which makes it communicate with the neighboring lodging, the other, by which one enters, — bending oneself in two, — when one comes from the courtyard: three steps descend there, but one must burn matches in broad day in order not to descend too fast! Now, four persons lodge here, the husband, the wife and two

children, and the rent is three rubles, — eight francs per month. — On the beds, in the disorder of the rags, the vermicelli paste spreads out, prepared for the soup; — on a corner of the table, shining, bursting with cleanliness, the candlesticks of Friday evening, — and everywhere, on the wall, in frames of gilded wood, the “chromo” of the tsar smiles at that of the tsarina. In this society where great fortunes and atrocious miseries rub shoulders, all the states of mind and of opinion are represented, with an intelligent vivacity in which one already feels the vicinity of Europe, — and also the tradition of a country long accustomed to live and to discuss its national life. In the quarter of the humble and of the wretched, whose shops touch one another, too tightly pressed one against the other, like a family which presses around the threatened hearth, one follows with ardor the journals edited in Hebrew, the articles of the Zionist editors, one speaks feverishly of the Congress of Basel which is being prepared, of doctor Herzl, of Nordau, of Sokoloff. One follows others also, less avowed, those that hide themselves, of which the police suppresses the printing-house and expedites the editor to Siberia, — when it finds them, — and which are reborn unfailingly fifteen days after, without anyone knowing how. Here socialism is otherwise instructed and conscious than in interior Russia, and perhaps because of that very fact, divides itself among diverse organizations: Polish socialism where Christians and Jews mingle, and which is only a branch of universal socialism; — socialism more specially “Russian Jewish,” the “Bund,” introduced into Poland by Jews of the center, and which wishes to see its socialist aspirations realized in a Jewish nationality, — by which it draws near to Zionism, — but on the soil itself and without Palestine, — by which it draws apart from it, — a party less disciplined, more turbulent, which likes to agitate itself, makes demonstrations, provokes conflicts, with a noble and valiant activity, which some find ill-considered and dangerous: why furnish the administration, without material or moral utility for oneself, the occasion of easy victories?

These socialisms have not stifled the old Polish nationalism. The Jews are here more ancient than the Russians; contemporaries of the Poles, they have shared their historical vicissitudes, and proudly keep the names of those among them who, in the national insurrections, found glory, and death. But, if the Russian domination is only superficial, if, to make it seen that they are the masters, the Russians are obliged to construct at great expense in the center of the town an orthodox cathedral, if there are not 4 per cent of Russians in the population and if never a Pole allies himself to a Russian woman, if, as a consequence, there is sometimes a rapprochement of the Polish Catholic element and of the Polish Jewish element in face of the Russian element, one cannot however say that this common aversion creates a true fusion. The relations always feel the effects of the old subjection of the Jews, with an aggravation due to the theories and to the practices of modern antisemitism. The Jews persist as energetically as possible in their effort of conciliation, they found and maintain asylums, hospices, admirable schools, striving, in the least details of the interior organization, to maintain the “Jewish-Polish” tradition, they have three professional schools, where, on principle, they admit young Christians, — a politeness which in fact the Christians do not willingly render them. — But ill-considered whatever they do, they no longer dare to despise, from the height of their Polish pride, the “Jewish-nationalism” of the Zionists… (1)

* * *

It is not fitting to make of the question of the Russian Jews a single block. Even in servitude there is no equality. The Jews of Minsk are relatively tranquil and happy, if one compares their situation to that of the Jews

(1) There are at Warsaw a fairly great number of converted Jews, either to orthodoxy, or to Lutheranism: one even calls jokingly “the Jewish Church” a Lutheran temple which is the “parish” of many of these converts. The converts escape the administrative servitude, they have the right to circulate everywhere in Russia, outside the Territory, without special formalities: a considerable advantage for all the men whom their affairs oblige to travel. Moreover the tradition of the “Marranos” is not lost: many of these converts are converts only in the eyes of the administration and continue to practice their cult without speaking of their conversion to their original coreligionists: one cites the case of a Jew who died not long ago, at the synagogue, on a day of Kippur, and in the formalities which followed, one perceived that this Jew was administratively a Christian.

of Odessa; the small merchant of Shlobine, lost in the depths of Russia, lives on good terms with his Christian neighbors, while that of Kishinev, yet nearer Europe, civilized, trembles under the perpetual menace of the follies of the Bessarabetz, and who knows whether one would not find a cobbler of Bialystok or a café-concert musician of Odessa who would have led, through the narrow meshes of the vexations and of the persecutions, a calm life of a small French bourgeois?… But, what unites them, is that the one and the other, in the general peace of the country, feel themselves always at the mercy of an incident and on the eve of a catastrophe: the word pogrom belongs to the current language, and when, from town to town, in spite of the ill will of the administrative telephone and telegraph, the news of a Kishinev spreads through all the Territory, they all vibrate equally with a common horror: in spite of the apparent calm of today, — tomorrow, at Vilna as at Odessa, at Lodz as well as at Berditchev, a quarrel can break out, at the market, between a drunken moujik and an irascible Jew, stir up in the twinkling of an eye the crossroads, the quarter, the town, make the governor come out of his palace, the police, the gendarmerie, the troops out of their barracks, the runners of the roads out of their dens, who will each return home only after having reestablished peace in the imperial manner, — ubi solitudinem faciunt…, — by thinning a little the Jewish population by saber-blows, tramplings of horses, arrests and expulsions… The immense disproportion of fortunes, which is a characteristic of the retardatory civilizations, is marked naturally as well in Jewish Russia as in orthodox Russia. The amply millionaire banker of Odessa who has a town house on Nikolaievsky and a country house at Moyenne-Fontaine, the great factory-owner of the suburbs of Warsaw whose two-horse coupé glides softly, on Sunday at five o’clock, under the lime-trees of the Ujazdovska alley, can offer his servitude compensatory joys… He is none the less a Jew, nothing but a Jew, and what unites him to the other Jews less favored by fate, is that he cannot, in spite of all his fortune, possess the least parcel of the soil, move about without the police following him, found a branch where it seems good to him, take the employees he wishes, that his son will perhaps not be admitted to the lycée, or to the University, will certainly be neither magistrate, nor officer, that in a word, in the eyes of the Administration, he and his are and will never be anything but Jews without rights. If one must therefore guard oneself from believing, in the frightened simplification of the distance, that the misery and the persecution reach equally all the members of Russian Judaism, at least the share of the misfortune is, if one may say so, still ample enough to force the universal compassion, and to incite us to seek what are the true causes of the exceptional situation made for the Russian Jews. One must first remark the special form of this misery. Not that there are not other miseries alongside, among the Christians, among the Russians as one says over there: it would be a singular optical illusion, because one is interested more specially in the Jewish misery, not to see the misery of the others. If such-and-such a town, formerly happier, now vegetates in a mediocre life, if the workshops are idle and if the shopkeepers go bankrupt, there is no reason why the Jews, and the Jews alone, should find work in this “rotten borough”: their misery is therefore sometimes only a manifestation of the general misery. It is however aggravated among them by diverse causes. First, being agglomerated on a single portion of Russian territory, and, on this Territory, in the towns only, the six million Jews of the Empire make as it were bear on a single point the weight of their compact mass, constituting for themselves and for the others a disastrous competition for everybody, whether it diminishes the rate of wages, or whether it increases the number of the indigent, — and which can only concentrate more around them the hatred: whereas, if they were spread through all the Empire, by the natural play of the economic laws, the equilibrium would not fail to establish itself and to provoke an improvement in the conditions of existence at once of the Jews and of the Russians of the present Territory. Next these Jews always uncertain and threatened have not had the means, — and have moreover not the right, — to possess the land, while many small folk, even very poor, among the orthodox, have at least the shelter of a cabin of their own and the resource of a corner of a hamlet, however small it be, where they can live. Finally the consciousness that they have of their misery, their general horror for injustice, their very intelligence and their virtues, in a word, are aggravating factors: from all mouths there rises the same bitter complaint: “We live, we, at our hearth, honest and laborious, we are not ignoramuses and brutes, we do not lose our money, our time and our strength at the vodka merchant’s, we believe ourselves as worthy to live as the free and happy Jews of the other countries, we could be, like them, useful citizens, and yet if the moujik who staggers in the street, collapses at the corner of a curbstone, dead drunk, the police sergeant picks him up with respect, while if we need a paper at the chancellery of the governor, one looks at us as dogs.” There are vanities that one reproaches the Jews with: here this pride does not lend itself to a smile. Perhaps they would bear their misery better if one did not at every instant clash with their self-esteem, and the best testimony of the dignity of these men, is the discouragement that they feel at seeing it thus misunderstood. At so many sadnesses, injustices, vexations, one is surprised not to find causes which are reasons. The question has been too often discussed for me to return to it in detail. The Jews assassins of little Christians? one knows that the accusations of ritual murder are as vain from the point of view of truth as efficacious, alas! as pretexts for troubles and for riots. The Jews usurers? but in this country, the priests, the women, nor the peasants, can subscribe bills; moreover usury rages with much more intensity outside the Territory. The Jews merchants of alcohol, the Jews poisoners? One would have to ask oneself first whether, in the present state of Russia, the merchant of alcohol necessarily raises hatreds around him; to observe next that from one day to the next, thousands of Jews, driven from the villages, left there the shops that they exploited, and that it is the State itself which succeeded them: the law of the Monopoly has therefore removed all value from this argument. The Jews remain too attached to their customs and to their traditions, the Jews are foreigners, the Jews do not assimilate themselves? Here I fear that it is one of the arguments most dear to our antisemitism, ours, that strays in theirs. This reproach can have a sense when, of two states of manners coexistent and unequal, it is the less advanced that obstinately refuses to follow the other: is it thus, at present, of the Jewish mass in relation to the Russian mass? Now, even in admitting it, — even in admitting also that the word can have all its force in a country as vast and as composite as Russia, whose diverse elements keep their intensity of life proper as jealously as the Poles and the Kalmuks, the Cossacks and the Finns, — I deem that the Russian Jews, drawn along by the examples of assimilation of their Western coreligionists, were going slowly but willingly toward “absorption.” If many of them continue to live in the narrow respect of religious forms which seem to us, to us, outdated, must one make of it a crime for them, grow indignant against the “mezuzahs” in the country of icons, and blame an attachment to family traditions which, at least, as one says, do harm to no one, when the others follow their prejudices as far as hatred, and their superstitions as far as crime? At the first sight, the Jews of Russia appear as more disposed to assimilation than their neighbors of Galicia for example: the levite-coat, the boots, the high top hat, the locks of hair descending along the temples, — they no longer consider all this “uniform” as de rigueur, and one meets it here only exceptionally. — The military criterion is no less significant. The Jews whose fathers were soldiers under Nicholas the First, — that is to say at an epoch when military service was not obligatory, — are assimilated to the merchants of the first guild, merchants and artisans: they have, under the condition of certain somewhat complicated formalities, the right to live everywhere in Russia: there are a hundred or so of them at Kiev. Today the Jews furnish to the army an annual contingent of 15,000 men: it is true that service is obligatory, — but the Jewish refractories and deserters are from year to year less numerous. — Moreover they insist too much and with too much energy, in all their conversations, on this point that a Jew cannot occupy the least function which touches however remotely the administrations of the State, — for one not to see to the point of evidence that the ill will does not come from them. Is the obstacle to assimilation not rather the doing of those who oblige the Jews, — and the Jews only, — to inscribe their Jewish first name, their names in full, and even, when by chance the name and the first name are equally doubtful, to mention expressly their quality of Jews? — Everywhere, at Kishinev, at Berditchev, at Kiev, at Minsk, we have met enlightened Jews, — shopkeepers, businessmen, doctors, graduates of the schools, — who live in the Russian atmosphere, almost detached from Jewish things, — sometimes [bound?]: thus, the Polish Jews are as “Polish” as their Catholic compatriots, which is yet a manner of proving the assimilation that Russia would readily do without.

In sum more than elsewhere antisemitism in Russia does not rest on a rational base: psychological observation, the consideration of the human passions can serve to explain certain facts: reason and justice have nothing to do there. But the originality of Russian antisemitism is to be, above all, administrative: when one learns in Europe the news of a pogrom, one believes in hatreds without truce and without mercy, while in reality, almost everywhere, Jews and Christians live side by side, indifferent rather than hostile to one another, merged in the tranquil mediocrity of their existences rather than excited perpetually by desires of ruin and of blood. I do not wish to say that there is Russian antisemitism only everywhere; but this Russian antisemitism borrows from the administrative restrictions of which the Jews are the object, a degree of authority and as it were an official character which renders it particularly dangerous and interesting.

There is indeed, to these furies, a profound cause. To the travelers who descend from the train of Europe, at the frontier-station of Oungheni, the door of the waiting-rooms half-opens with mistrust: they pass only one by one under the eye of a functionary in white tunic and cap who holds out his hand to collect the passports. You have not your paper? it lacks a stamp, an initialing? The train waits, ready to take you back toward Europe… At the end of a half-hour, the passports, turned and turned again, stamped and signed, come back from the special office and the same functionary distributes them while calling the roll of the travelers, who form the circle around him. Meanwhile a meticulous customs officer has searched to the bottom of your baggage, leafed through your blotter of correspondence, your Baedeker: nothing suspect, — nothing but two newspapers of any sort, which have been lying in your valise since Paris: purely and simply, without holding form or trial, he tears them up. At last recognized fit for entry, you can follow your itinerary: you descend at the hotel at Odessa, — nothing at first: at the hotel, the green and gold porter, at your friend’s, his concierge, — a sworn personage, — rushes upon your passport, carries it off, sends it to the police, has it taken back the next day, with a new visa correctly dated. Far from your country, avid for news, you ask, while savoring your glass of tea, for the Figaro or the Matin, the Berliner Tageblatt, the Daily Chronicle: stuck on the columns of the journal a black rectangle, absolutely opaque, frightens you: it is nothing, — it is an article that the censorship has “passed to the caviar” in order to render the reading of it impossible and to save Russia from its contagion. You are going at last, this evening, to take the train of return: halt there! Do not embark without a written authorization of exit which the police of the last town where you sojourn delivers, after examination of all the visas of the passport: one will let you pass the frontier only with this exeat: since your entry on the territory of the Empire, you were a prisoner! … And that is why the Jews drive the Russian administration distracted, which is closed: censorships and passports watch: men, ideas, one does not enter: Russia has its Great Wall. Everything that contributes to assuring the continuation of this state of things is in honor in the Empire: priests, functionaries and policemen, hierarchy and resignation. Everything that could compromise it is suspect. Now the Jews, — one must indeed generalize for them, since one generalizes against them, — the Jews could not be an inert and crude stone in a rampart of defense: on the contrary, everything concurs to make of them a bridge between retardatory Russia and liberated Europe. — By their geographical situation in the Territory where the authority pens them, they are in contact with Austria and Germany; even, — isolation in barbarism is easier for the Cossacks of the Urals. On the other hand, escaping the tutelage of the great landed lords, obliged to live in the towns, constrained to trade, they tend to form that class of middle bourgeoisie which is lacking in Russian society, — and which, to the autocratic regimes, is never anything worthwhile. — From the moral point of view, they represent a danger worse still, since they escape the one King and the one Faith, where the Emperor is pope, they are outside the governmental orthodoxy, — and since being Jews, instead of submitting to the injustices of this world with a view to a reparation in a better world, they wish justice in this world itself, here and at once, before death! — Finally when one comes from a country where, by the long work of the democratic institutions, it seems that intelligence itself has equitably divided itself among all the categories of the nation, one is struck and the more surprised to observe, at social equality, differences as strange as the intellectual inertia of the poor Russian, whose eyes wander without gleam and without life, and the ardent curiosity of the Jewish adolescent. We have seen them, during thirty-six hours running, in the steerage of the boat which conducted us from Kiev to Homel, — the wretched moujiks, on one side, exchanging rare interjections and frequent shoves, — on the other the Jews in sad rags, who chatted, discussed, read… The admirable man who was then fighting his last combat in the throes of an implacable malady, Bernard-Lazare, whose heart-rending thought did not leave us for an instant in the course of this journey to which he had encouraged us, and whose name we gathered, pronounced like a word of hope, everywhere we passed, Bernard-Lazare said to us fifteen days before his death: “The Jew is the man who for three centuries has known how to read…” The Russian Jew reads, reflects, his thought goes beyond the walls of his subterranean stall, he knows that there are, elsewhere, happier Jews, — and freer men. Geographical and social, moral and intellectual, many reasons, one sees it, seem to destine the Jew of Russia to play the beneficent role of intermediary between the unequal and discordant civilizations of the day. — Now progress could not be made in the sense of Russian autocratism. Therefore the Jew is dangerous. Therefore the Jew is persecuted. To such great evils one would like to glimpse remedies. — Zionism, with its double power of a specious logic and of a consoling illusion, — to affirm that the Russian Jews come out of Russia will appear everywhere as foreigners and that never, nowhere, will they be at home as long as they shall not have their own territory, that is for the logic, — to wish to gather in the Promised Land and to galvanize a nation dispersed for twenty centuries, that is for the illusion, — Zionism is an admirable surge of hope and of faith which carries away by moments, far from their misery, these souls weary of servitude. But, with or without Zionism, the mass emigration implies a thousand questions, complex and delicate, of money, of outlets, of new acclimatization, of good welcome at the point of arrival and even of authorization at the point of departure: for, although the recent measures are directed, according to the Administration, not against Zionism the emigration agency, but against Zionism the State organization, it seems practically difficult that Russia, without consideration for the economic consequences of this exodus, and without modesty in the eyes of humanity, should let detach itself from her, solely for cause of religion, a portion of population which furnishes a solid contingent of rubles to the treasury and of soldiers to the army. — The application to the Jews of the common law would be the heroic remedy: a reform frightful as a revolution. A young Jewish teacher who was going back up the Dnieper with us, an enthusiastic Zionist, with eyes burning with vivacity and with faith, with a vibrant and warm word, showed us, to right and to left, the banks of the river deserted to infinity, and, with a violence of tone in which there merged the discontent with the present social state and the energetic confidence in the vitality of the race: “Let them give us lands,” he said, “let them open this country to us, and they will see what we shall make of it!” But they will not give it to them, for fear that the Jews should make precisely of Russia what they do not wish Russia to be! And, — I must excuse myself for returning still to those supreme conversations where he persisted heroically in occupying himself with the misfortune of others, — I see again the vague gesture of distant hope with which Bernard-Lazare punctuated his questions: “There will no doubt be a cure, will there not? only in the general cure: the Jews will be free only when the country shall be free…” But, while awaiting better from time and from politics, the duty imposes itself of making known more and more, by the book, by the brochure, by the journal, the state of material and moral misery in which Russian autocracy takes pleasure in crushing six million Russian subjects, subjects of the last class, without security and without rights, a vile herd of humanity to which one refuses all that makes the dignity of human life, — and that, because these men are Jews in an orthodox nation, intellectually [caught?] in a milieu of intellectual enslavement, marvelously apt for modern life in a social state which obstinately misunderstands evolution. And one must, for however little confidence one has in the force of ideas, hope that the day when public opinion, more “queen of the world” now than ever, shall know this situation, one will indeed arrive, by sorting out and by making precise the questions, at obtaining today the annulment of a brutal decree, tomorrow the softening of an outdated regulation, and that it will be permitted to glimpse, at the end of the road, equality in tolerance. It is not fitting that the Israelites of France, however proud they may be of their quality of Frenchmen, should lose interest in the question: I know that we consider ourselves as very different from the filthy Jew with the guttural jargon who mounts his obsequious guard at the door of our temples, and that we feel a somewhat haughty contempt for these specimens of misery and of degradation that Jewish Russia sends as far as us; but one must see this Jew over there, in his normal life and in the Russian milieu, in order to mistrust a bad sentiment which rests on an insufficient experience. We have the duty of thinking of these pariahs, — because, Jews, we have been pariahs like them, that the evils they suffer recall those that our fathers suffered, that we still ourselves experience the tenacity of the prejudices under the weight of which they bend, — and because, Frenchmen, we shall thus work at one of those works of generous emancipation in which France will always be proud to mingle her concourse, under penalty of being no longer France. And it is toward her no doubt, the first emancipator of the Jews, that there rises the emotion of these wretched hearts, when at the bottom of the hovels of Berditchev and of the cellars of Warsaw, the children of the Jews promenade in the wake of the foreigner who passes the gliding of their bare feet and the fever of their curious gazes, — when this throng of reviled beings presses, anxious and timid, but living and thinking in spite of everything, around the enfranchised brothers who come to bring them, from a distance of liberty, a little compassion, of friendship and of hope.

Georges Delahache

House Number 13

Vladimir Korolenko (translated by Élie Eberlin)

After Tolstoy and Gorky, the writer most loved in Russia is Vladimir Korolenko, singer of human pity, the author of “The blind Musician” and of the “Tales of Siberia.”

At the first news of the massacres of Kishinev, Korolenko went immediately to the place of the disaster and he summed up his painful impressions in this account, moving in its simplicity and penetrated with a sentiment of immense pity.

Élie Eberlin

I

I arrived at Kishinev two months after the “pogrom” (1) whose painful echo still resounded through all Russia.

In spite of the measures of the police, one still perceived everywhere, at Kishinev, traces of the riot: even in the great streets one saw sacked houses and broken windows. In the suburbs it was worse and the traces of the “pogrom” were otherwise numerous.

At Saint Petersburg, toward this epoch, the Jew Dachevsky had wounded with a knife-blow M. Kruchevan, (2) and — a thing stranger still — another Jew, a doctor, wished to give him the first aid. M. Kruchevan, frightened, refused his assistance and wrote “that the life of Dachevsky belonged to him”; in agreement with M. Komarov, the director of the Sviet, he demanded the condemnation to death of Dachevsky, because he, Kruchevan, was not an ordinary man, but a man “with the conceptions of a statesman.” And two

(1) It is the name that is given in Russia to the anti-Jewish riots. (2) Anti-Jewish journalist, the instigator of the massacres of Kishinev.

or three days after, when I was already at Kishinev, three unknown young people attacked an Israelite lycéen who was going to school; one of them dealt him a dagger-blow in the groin: the dagger was directed by a hand more skilled than that of Dachevsky, and it is thanks to a book which was in the pocket of his jacket that the blow was deadened, but the young Israelite was nevertheless wounded. This young man, who was peaceably going to his courses, was evidently not an important personage, he had not yet, like M. Kruchevan, the “broad conceptions of a statesman”; it is for that reason no doubt that MM. Komarov and Kruchevan, as well moreover as the journal of the country the Bessarabetz, did not breathe a word of the incident, and no one dared to speak of it, except a few Jews who passed each other the news with a quite comprehensible anxiety. One said, notably, that this dagger-blow was a reply to the attempt of Dachevsky. However absurd that may appear, this opinion is nevertheless not improbable. Moreover everything now is probable. One can expect anything at Kishinev, where it seems that the very air is saturated with hatred and with ferocious rancors. The life of the town is as if arrested. The houses under construction remain unfinished, the fear and the anxiety of the morrow strike the Israelites.

II

Arrived on one of those days at Kishinev, and seeking to explain to myself the mysterious and terrible drama which had just been played out there, I promenaded through the town and the sub-

urbs, through the streets and the markets, questioning the Jews and the Christians on the recent events.

I certainly have not here the pretension of explaining in a more or less complete fashion this heart-rending episode and of recounting to you how this crowd forgot in an instant the principles of the most elementary civilization in order to return to its primitive instincts of ferocious bestiality. “There is nothing hidden that does not become one day manifest.” It is quite possible that all the secret springs of the crime of Kishinev shall be known one day, this affair will be as clear as the mechanism of a clock that one had dismantled. It is however certain that there will always remain one thing that cannot be explained either by the conditions of the place or by those of the time. And it will always be a troubling question to know how an ordinary, average man, not a wicked man after all and of sometimes agreeable company can transform himself all at once into a wild beast without reason or pity. It would take much trouble, time, and a thorough study to reestablish the complete picture of the massacres. They are lacking to me and the time moreover is not yet come. One would like to hope that justice will do this work, but[?] there are numerous reasons to believe that it will not do even that. I desire however to give an idea, if not of the terror (this is impossible), at least of the reflection of the sinister terror which seized me during my short sojourn at Kishinev, two months after the “pogrom.”

For this I shall strive to reestablish with as much coolness as possible an episode of the massacres. It will be the history of house number 13, henceforth sadly celebrated.

III

House number 13 is situated in the fourth arrondissement of Kishinev in a little street which bears the name of Asiatic at the corner of Stavrisky street. Moreover, the inhabitants of Kishinev themselves know ill the names of these narrow and twisted streets and little streets, and the Jewish coachman (there are here many Jewish coachmen and there were also wounded and killed among them) did not understand at first where we wished to go. Then my companion, who had been at Kishinev for three weeks already, and who knew approximately the places where the principal incidents of the massacres had unfolded, said to him: “house number 13… There where they were killing…” — Ah!… Good! answered the coachman, inclining his head. And he gave a whip-blow to his horse, as lean, as puny and as dejected as its owner. I did not see the face of the coachman, but I heard him mutter into his beard. I believed I distinguished the words: “Nissensohn” and “the Glazier.” Nissensohn and the Glazier were there not long ago men. Now they have become symbols, the personification of the recent horrors… We made a fairly long journey, leaving behind us broad and modern streets; we turned into the labyrinth of narrow little streets of the old town, where the stones, the tiles and the lime stifle the meager shrubs which push on the stone itself, and where there seem to hover the phantoms of the time of the boyars and of the Turkish invasions. The

houses are small, surrounded by stone walls, with narrow embrasures.

At last in one of these little streets we found the house so sadly celebrated. Small, covered with tiles like all the houses of Kishinev, it gives onto a little square. Around it are grouped houses still lower and still more wretched. But while those give an impression of life, house number 13 has the air of a corpse with its gaping holes of its windows whose shutters are broken, with its doors stove in and stopped up with planks and diverse debris… One must render justice to the police of Kishinev: for if it opposed only a mediocre resistance to the massacrers, it took energetic measures with regard to the Jews, by forcing them to repair the houses which had been sacked and destroyed. But it has no longer any power over the proprietor of house number 13.

The courtyard still keeps eloquent traces of the débâcle: it is strewn with pillow feathers, with pieces of furniture, with splinters of windowpane, with broken crockery and with shreds of clothes. It suffices to cast a glance over all this to form a picture of that savage destruction: the furniture is broken into tiny pieces, one has walked on the crockery, and the clothes have been put in pieces, a torn sleeve drags on the ground, and farther off a child’s camisole in shreds. The window-frames are torn out, the casements and the doors broken, and the detached lintels are suspended in the black holes of the windows like dislocated arms. At the corner of the courtyard, under the shed, one still sees distinctly a great brown stain, — coagulated

blood, — in the midst of a thousand debris of glasses, of bricks, of lime and of pillow feathers.

IV

“Here, they assassinated Gruenschpun…,” cried a strange voice, drawing near to us. When we entered the courtyard it was deserted. Now, there was beside us a little girl of ten to twelve years. Moreover one could give her this age according to her stature and her figure. But according to the expression of her face she seemed much older, and her eyes had not at all that gaze of a child… This little girl had been present at the drama which had occurred a few days before at this spot. And for her this picture of destruction in this silent courtyard, under the burning rays of the sun, had remained in her mind like a memory of an unspeakable horror. Since the “pogrom” she lay down, awoke, got up, in a word did what she did before: therefore she had calmed herself. But this precocious terror, which had thus disfigured her child’s features, had not completely disappeared from her imagination. It had left on her face as it were a poisoned stigma, and her eyes had kept a strange expression which was not that of a child, like a remnant of the contractions her features must have undergone before so many horrors. The voice of the little girl was muffled, and it was painful to listen to her words; the words came out only with effort: they were broken words, without sequence. It seemed that it was a machine that spoke rather than a human being.

— Here it is… he ran…, she said, breathing with difficulty and holding out her hand in the direction of the shed and of the pool of blood. — Who then? The glazier? asked my companion. — Yes-s… The glazier. He ran there… And he fell here. And they were killing him… With an involuntary sensation of terror and of disgust we drew back before this stain, where the blood was mixed with lime, with mud and with the down of feathers. In the house everything has been sacked with the same care as in the courtyard: the hangings are torn out, the doors stove in, the chimneys destroyed and the walls holed from one part to the other. This meticulous “care” brought to the savage destruction gave birth in the town to a legend. It was recounted that before the “pogrom” one of the half-intellectual “antisemites” of Kishinev had prepared a whole stock of stakes furnished with hooks which special “agents” had distributed to the rioters and taken back afterward. It is difficult to disentangle the part of truth in this rumor, but it is very suggestive in itself. Whatever it may be, one has some trouble in believing that a few days earlier these places, which today are only a heap of ruins, were still full of life and of happiness. House number 13 was composed indeed of seven lodgings, in which lived crowdedly, pressed one against the other, eight Jewish families, in all forty-five persons including the children. The proprietor of the house, Mocha Makline, was a commission agent and also kept a shop in town. All his enterprises, — commission, business stock and house, — brought him only 1,500 rubles

(4,000 francs) per year. The other inhabitants of the house considered him as a fortunate rich man. Moreover he did not inhabit house number 13; it was his daughter, his son-in-law and his grandchildren who occupied one of the lodgings. Navtoula Serebrenik, a small shopkeeper, was one of the principal tenants of it. One can recognize the site of his shop from the debris of wooden chests which formed the counter and which drag on the ground in the midst of the dilapidated walls. Let us note also the shop clerk Berlatzki with his wife and four children. He earned 45 rubles per month. Nissensohn, aged 46 years, was a “bookkeeper,” that is to say that he kept commercial books and established the accounts. It was a somewhat learned profession that he exercised on a fixed-fee basis and that brought him 25 to 30 rubles per month. Gofcha Paskar was a shop clerk and had an emolument of 35 rubles per month. He had a wife, Ita, and two children. Itzik Gervitz was an attendant at the hospital, but remained without a place a little before the “pogrom,” and found himself in a great destitution. Gofcha Tourkenitch had a joinery workshop with three workers and Bassia Barabasch a butcher’s shop. Finally the glazier Gruenschpun set out every morning with his panes and returned in the evening with the gain of his day. All the figures cited are drawn from the depositions of the victims and of their relatives. They prove to us with what rich men house number 13 was peopled. And let us say that these depositions, joined to the demands for damages, may be suspect rather of exaggeration than of diminution of figures…

Thus peaceably and tranquilly the inhabitants of number 13 led their life until the 6th of April of this year. Nissensohn went into the shops and drew up the commercial books, Berlatzki and Gofcha Paskar sold in the shops all sorts of merchandise, Navtoula Serebrenik retailed to his Jewish, Moldavian and Russian neighbors candles, soap, matches, petroleum, cheap calico and bonbons. Itzik Gervitz sought an employment and the glazier Gruenschpun replaced the broken panes… And no one had a presentiment of what was to happen. On the 6th of April, the first day of the greatest Christian feast, the “pogrom” began in the town. The news of the riot spread at once to Kishinev, and one easily guesses the anguish of the inhabitants of house number 13, packed with Jews, when they learned what was happening and knew the attitude of the authorities and of the orthodox society. One said, moreover, that things were happening thus because the governor was awaiting “orders,” the orders were to arrive without fail in the night and then everything was going to return the next morning into calm. In the evening the troubles ceased of themselves and the night passed in anguish, but without a pogrom however.

V

The former inhabitants and the neighbors of house number 13 also recounted to us what happened the next day: Toward ten o’clock in the morning, the police sergeant appeared,

(badge number 148) a personage well known in the quarter, who, caring no doubt about the fate of the Jews, advised them aloud to go back into their lodgings and not to go out into the street. The Jews, of course, followed this advice, and the narrow Jewish lodgings filled with frightened tenants. The doors and the shutters closed, all the Asiatsky little street seemed numbed in a passive expectation. I have reasons to believe that this aspect: closed lodgings, deserted streets and passive expectation of what was to happen, — was that of all the suburbs of Kishinev on the second day of the “pogrom.” Indeed, I had the sad possibility of seeing and of conversing with a victim. It is M. Meyer Selman Weissmann. Before the “pogrom” he was one-eyed. But during the massacres a “Christian” believed he had to put out the other eye for him. When I asked him whether he knew this “Christian” he answered me in a heroic tone that he could not affirm it. But that the son of the glazier boasted of having done that, with a weight, attached to a string… This Selman lives beside the slaughterhouses in the magale (suburb). There, as everywhere in the suburbs, one spoke with anguish of the events, one awaited the “orders” which were to come in the night and put an end to the troubles. The police sergeant of the quarter appeared also in this suburb which had not yet been tried by the massacres and awaited with horror the “pogrom,” and he was at once surrounded by the Jews and the Moldavians. He told them that he was returning to his post without having received a special order and that in the town the “pogrom” was increasing in the presence of the troops and of the police.

The Moldavians drew their conclusions from this official communication. They held council. The general idea which emerged from their conciliabule was that the inhabitants of the quarter of the slaughterhouses had evidently to act in the same fashion as their fellow-citizens at the different points of the town. Weissmann transmitted to us a detail of their conversation: they spoke of two Jewish brothers and decided that one of them could be left in peace. Then the Jews began to hide where they could. One of the neighbors of Meyer Weissmann, a Moldavian, had sheltered him at his home with his family. But the wife of the Moldavian came saying that the crowd was going to do him an ill turn for having hidden a Jew. “Then, Weissmann recounts to me, — we set ourselves to running.” He lost much time in wishing to entrust his little ones to a former well-off coreligionist who had converted to Christianity. His daughters took in the children, but their father threw them three times over the fence of his garden. It was necessary to flee with the children. Meyer Weissmann ran into a tannery. Some time after the Moldavians came there armed with iron-tipped sticks and began to “strike” him. He no longer remembers anything. When he came back to consciousness at the hospital, his first word was for his family and for his daughter: — Ita, where is my Ita? — I am here, answered Ita, who was standing near the bed. But the sick man stirred always and asked again: “Ita, Ita, where are you then?” When she bent again over him and repeated that she was there, Meyer Weissmann, without yet understanding what had happened, continued to wave his arms in the air and complained of not seeing his daughter. He could not see her, since the “Christian boy”

had put out his other eye with a weight, no doubt for the symmetry. Moreover… there are people who think that, “the guilty one,” it is Meyer Weissmann, and that he is already “rewarded for his usury”[?], since he can no longer ever see his beloved daughter. As for the Christian boy who had practiced on the Jew this operation with the help of a weight, he merits of course no blame. He appears rather as a “victim.” (1) Well then it is perhaps true. To enter into life with such an act on one’s conscience…, it would be truly horrible if the “Christian boy” could understand it. And if he were incapable of it, he would also be a victim, a victim more unfortunate still. But… is it indeed to Meyer Weissmann that one owes this victim?

(1) M. Korolenko alludes here to an article of Kruchevan, where the rioters and the assassins were represented as the “victims of the Jews.”

VI

The tragedy in house number 13 began in the same fashion as that which unfolded near the slaughterhouses. The police sergeant, (badge number 148) as well as his colleague, returned in the morning from the town, where probably he believed he would receive clear and precise orders, but those orders were not given him and then, arrived in his quarter, he had to confine himself to giving the following advice: “Eh! Yids, burrow into your houses and keep yourselves quiet.” And a few moments after the rioters debouched from the neighboring streets and squares. This police sergeant, after this so benevolent advice, sat down on a curbstone, since he had evidently nothing else to do, and, according to what is said, he stayed there. This man thus seated on his curbstone must have been a superb “model” if a sculptor had wished to symbolize in him “the greatest of the Christian feasts at Kishinev.” And alongside, a few steps from this philosopher, the tragedy of the destruction of the Israelite hovels unfolded in all its horror. The crowd

arrived at eleven o’clock, flanked by two patrols which unfortunately had no orders either. It was composed of fifty or sixty individuals among whom one remarked also a few good Moldavian neighbors. It is recounted that they invaded first a wine-shop. They said to the publican: “Give us thirty rubles, otherwise we kill you.” He gave the thirty rubles and thus avoided death; of course, he hid in order not to remain in view and thus abuse the indulgence of the savage crowd… The latter, without delaying, had begun its work of devastation, and in a twinkling of an eye the square was covered with windowpanes, with debris of furniture and with down of feathers. But soon everyone felt that it is around the house of Mochka Makline that the principal act of this bloody tragedy was going to be played out. Why? it is difficult to say. Had the rioters a preconceived plan, were they directed, as is said at Kishinev, by a secret organization, or quite simply were they guided by the spirit of crowds, that demon which charges ahead with eyes closed, with the unconsciousness of an element. It is the question that the trial which will take place shortly will elucidate (or perhaps will not elucidate). But, whatever it may be, in house number 13, to the crash of the stones, to the cracking of the walls and to the noise of the broken glasses there were soon joined cries of murder and of death… To the left of the entrance door, in the corner where one still sees the stain of blood, are situated a few little wooden sheds. In one of these sheds took refuge the glazier Gruenschpun, his wife and his two children, Ita Paskar, also with two children, and again a little girl of fourteen years, a servant. Inside the shed did not close, and in sum all these sheds recall cardboard boxes. Their principal advantage was that there was nothing inside that could be sacked or broken. That is why the Jews believed they were there sheltered from an attack. One could not think of defending oneself; there were only eight men in the house; the police sergeant number 148, having received no order, was seated on the curbstone, and the two patrols stationed themselves at the top and at the bottom of the street where house number 13 was. And in the crowd one saw remount little by little all the instincts of bestiality and of savage ferocity which were soon to make burst the thin layer of varnish of civilization that the Christian religion had earned it. The destruction was at its height; the panes broken, the windows shattered, the chimneys destroyed, the furniture and the crockery reduced to pieces. The leaves of the sacred books dragged on the ground, floods of down of feathers covered the courtyard; the down floated in the air and hung from the trees like a jelly of hoarfrost. In the midst of this hell of crash, of cracking, of savage sneers, of laughs and of cries of terror, the thirst for blood awoke in the soul of the rioters. They had sacked too long to be afraid of men. One rushed first toward the shed. There there was only one man, the glazier Gruenschpun. A neighbor, a Moldavian, whom the widow of Gruenschpun designated to us by his name (it was an acquaintance) struck the glazier first with a knife-blow in the throat… The unfortunate wished to flee from the shed, but was caught, dragged under the shed and finished off with cudgel-blows, at the very place where even now one sees a stain of the blood. As we asked her whether she really knew the name of the assassin, whether she was not mistaken and whether it was not a passing assassin, an Albanian of Turkey or an escaped convict, the widow of Gruenschpun answered with conviction: “I carried him in my arms when he was still a child. May the Lord give us a good life, as we were good acquaintances. This ‘good acquaintance’ had dealt the first knife-blow in house number 13. After that the situation became evident. The death-rattle of the glazier, and the Jews, and the crowd itself perhaps had understood what one had to expect. The Israelites stirred “like rats in a trap,” according to the expression of one of the “Christians” of Kishinev, a jovial man and one who finds in such cases matter for jokes… A few Jews dashed into the loft… Under the same shed where Gruenschpun was killed, a black hole in the ceiling leads to the loft. A narrow and inconvenient passage. The first who engaged himself in it was Berlatzki with his daughter; the proprietor of the house, Makline, followed him into it. Makline,

as we have already said, did not inhabit the house. Anxious about the fate of his daughter who dwelt there, he came to look for her. But his daughter had already left with her children. He had now to think of his own salvation. All three penetrated without difficulty into the loft. One must conclude from this that the crowd of rioters was not entirely dominated by the thirst for blood; otherwise they would not have been permitted to pass through this narrow hole, where one could barely pass in the sight of the massacrers; it is there that they hid themselves, and the people who believed it was their pleasure (or their duty) to sack the goods of the Jews, but not to kill them, permitted them. Nevertheless, the assassins rushed also into the loft in the wake of the fugitives. The loft of house number 13, a narrow and obscure premise, is encumbered with beams, with chimney-pipes and with roof-supports. The unfortunate fugitives, after having made a few turns of this loft, understood that it was impossible for them to hide there in the obscurity of the narrow loft and, having heard behind them cries of pursuit, they began, seized with despair, to demolish the roof… One still perceives on the roof of house number 13 two gaping holes and around them broken tiles. Near one of these holes lay at the moment of our visit an iron washstand. It must have been that the people were indeed desperate to make, in a few instants of mortal danger, with nothing but their hands, without tools, these openings, but they succeeded in it, having wished at all costs to climb onto the roof. Above, it was the brightness of the sun, it was the houses, the crowd, the police sergeant number 148, the

patrol… It was all the same the day, the light… and the men. And they made two openings. The first who passed through was Movtcha Makline, for he was “small and light” (according to the sayings of an eyewitness). Berlatzki helped first to lift up his daughter Chaïka. Then, when he engaged himself in the hole, his persecutors were already there, in the loft, and one of them had seized him by the foot. And now between the father and the crowd a fierce struggle is engaged. The daughter pulled her father upward and below a rioter held him by the leg. The struggle was, of course, unequal, and no doubt Berlatzki would not have seen again the light of the sun, if his daughter, after having ceased to pull her father, had not leaned toward the opening and prayed the persecutor to let him go. And he let him go. May at least a part of his fault be pardoned to this man, who let penetrate into his soul, in the midst of those shadows, a ray of human pity, were it only for an instant, for having understood the fear that this Jewish girl felt in seeing her father hunted down by the assassins. He let the Jew go. But what then did he do after that? Perhaps he had left the place of the massacre, ashamed, confused, having heard the voice of God, who, as all the religions say, manifests himself in the love of men and in fraternity, and not in the assassination of defenseless beings… Or, perhaps, he came back from his primitive sentiment, and “was angry with himself,” not for his fits of ferocity, but for his surge of pity for the

massacred Jews, as we had seen by other examples. Whatever it may be, the three victims appeared on the roof. For one time again they saw the light of day, and the square, and the neighboring houses, and the blue sky, and the policeman number 148 on the curbstone, and the patrols, which awaited the orders, and perhaps also the priest who, obeying his Christian conscience, tried alone and unarmed to approach the ferocious crowd of the massacrers. This priest was passing by chance on the square when Jews who were watching from the neighboring houses what was happening in house number 13 prayed him to intervene. I do not unfortunately know the name of the priest. He was, evidently, a brave man who did not believe that there could be in “Holy Russia,” or even elsewhere, a people whose members merited, for collective crimes of whatever sort, to be killed like wild beasts. He did not think either that there could be found in Russia people who had the right to assassinate inoffensive Jews, without fearing the light and the sun. His first movement, his immediate impulse, was to approach the crowd with words of Christian persuasion. But the rioters threatened him, and he withdrew. He was, evidently, a brave man, not a hero of Christian duty. One must suppose at least that he was not ashamed of having intervened and of having yielded to his first impulse. Whether it be at that precise moment or not that this episode took place, the fact is that the three victims appeared on the roof, in the midst of a town, among hundreds of people, defenseless however. Behind them surged the assassins. They set themselves to running on the roof, now

appearing on the side that gives onto the street, now passing to the side of the courtyard. Behind them ran the assassins. The same neighbor who dealt the first knife-blow to Gruenschpun wounded Berlatzky. Another rioter threw at the feet of the Jews the iron washstand that two months after the “pogrom” we still saw on the roof. The iron washstand resounded in striking against the roof. And the crowd laughed probably. At last all three were precipitated from the top of the roof. Chaïka by chance fell into a heap of down, and remained alive. Makline and Berlatzki, already wounded, bruised themselves in falling from the roof, after which the foul rabble of the voluntary executioners finished them off with stick-blows and laughing buried them under a heap of pillow feathers. Then one poured over them a few casks of wine, and the unfortunate victims (one affirms that Makline still breathed for a few hours) suffocated in this puddle of mud, of wine and of down.

VII

Nissensohn was assassinated in the last place. He was hidden with his wife in the cellar when he heard the cries of his coreligionists who were being assassinated; he understood that death and murder had already entered into house number 13 and ran into the street. Nissensohn succeeded in penetrating into the courtyard which is opposite number 13; he was going to be saved, but seeing the rioters on the traces of the house[?]. His cries drew attention upon him. One left the wife and pursued the husband; he was overtaken and killed opposite number 7 of the

Asiatsky little street. It is said that one of the assassins is a Pole and the other a Moldavian. As it had rained before Easter, there were puddles of water at the edges of the street. Nissensohn fell into one of these puddles; then the murderers rinsed him in the mud, like a rag that one washes and that one wrings. After that the crowd, having satisfied its instincts of murder, ceased to kill and confined itself to demolishing the houses. The Jews of the houses came out to seek the body of the unfortunate Nissensohn. He was still living, came back to himself and asked to drink. His hands and his feet were crushed… One drew him out of the mud, one gave him to drink. A rioter having seen that, hailed his comrades. The Jews fled and Nissensohn remained alone. Then the same individual who killed Gruenschpun and wounded Berlatzky dealt him a stake-blow on the head and thus put a term to his sufferings… The crowd continued to work. The square was all encumbered with debris of furniture, with rags and with broken frames, so that one could no longer cross it except with difficulty. A Jewess recounted to me that, being obliged to save herself to the other side of the square, where her children were, she tried in vain twice to cross it, having in her arms a nursling. Finally a Christian neighbor took the child from her, and it is only then that she slipped through these improvised barricades. At five o’clock in the afternoon, one learned that the “orders” awaited by the Jews since the first day of the “pogrom” had at last arrived. And within one of those hours, “order was reestablished” in all the town. There was needed for that neither effusion of blood, nor gunshots. There was needed only a little decision…

But it will take now years to efface the shameful memory of these events, which are a stain of mud and of blood on the conscience of the Christians of Kishinev, and on the conscience not only of those who killed, but of those who incited the others to it by preaching to them hatred and falsehood; of those who find that the guilty ones are the assassinated and not the assassins, and who think that there can be a collective irresponsibility and a collective deprivation of rights…

VIII

I feel how little I inform the reader by this reporter’s chronicle. But I have wished to draw an episode from that entangled and impersonal chaos which has the name of “pogrom,” and to give at least, by this single concrete example, an idea of what the reality must have been. I have profited for this purpose from the impressions of the eyewitnesses who imparted them either to my companion, or to me, and who helped me to reestablish the picture trait by trait. It is true that it is reconstituted according to the testimonies of the Jews. But there is no reason to doubt their veracity. The fact is incontestable: in house number 13 human beings were killed in mass during hours, in the midst of a populous town, as in a forest. The corpses are there… And afterward is it not indifferent to the Jews to know how one killed them? What good is it to invent details?… The morality of the events is clear for all those in whom the human sentiment still lives. But are those

[Editor’s note: leaves 0641–0642 were skipped as duplicate bad captures of pp. 142–143; clean text follows from leaves 0643–0644.]

numerous? This painful question stands up when one has seen what I have seen, I, at Kishinev.

IX

And yet… When I was in the act of finishing these disconnected notes, crushed by this mass of terrible materials, I learned from the journals the suicide of the notary Pisarjewski. The name of this man was on all lips at the moment when I found myself at Kishinev. Young, handsome, rich, frequenting the best society of Kishinev, always in quest of new adventures, Pisarjewski, everyone said it, had taken part in the “pogrom,” by directing the crowd of the rioters. One said also that strong influences were employed to throw a veil over this monstrous affair and to dissimulate the participation of the young Kishinev lion in the “pogrom.” One would like to believe that all was not true in what had been recounted on this subject, but already the part of truth contained in these accounts could serve as an interesting illustration to the terrible epic of Kishinev. These efforts did not succeed. The truth was too evident and the journals announced the prosecutions against Pisarjewski. He continued to lead his ordinary train of life, went into society, debauched, played cards. The night of his suicide he was playing with much luck, was gay, and at daybreak he went into the garden, wrote on a bench: “Here died the notary Pisarjewski,” and then blew out his brains. The commentaries of the journals inform us that he was an alcoholic, that the per-

spective of the trial haunted him, that he had sorrows of love… Is that indeed all? The fact is there, the sad settling of accounts has taken place. I believe I do not debase the memory of the unfortunate man, in supposing that in this account of which he drew up the balance on the bench of the garden, there still lacked a few figures. I think also that at the dawn of his last day he had the consciousness of what he has done, he a cultivated man, to his Christian brothers who were killing the Jews. Moreover all that are only conjectures, and perhaps even conjectures too optimistic. But the truth, the true truth, although not new for me, it has been given me to hear it before my departure, from the mouth of a man of the people, of a coachman of Kishinev, originally from Russia moreover. When we were conversing with him about the “pogrom” and its consequences, he recounted to me that one of his acquaintances, a horticulturist who had to pay his workers, had come lately to borrow money from him at Kishinev. The Jews, still uncertain of the morrow, had cut off credit. The horticulturist was therefore forced to address himself to the Christian usurers instead of the Jewish usurers. “And from then on, I shall tell you, monsieur, the thing is certain, concluded my coachman with conviction, when the Jew flays your skin, our Russian usurer will flay it for you three times.” One perceives it very well at Kishinev… And among the people who had sympathized with the massacrers and excited in the crowd the obscure prejudices, the hatred of races and the savage instincts of murder and of rapine, one could cite certain very well-known usurers who found their profit in it. I have not the intention of advocating the projects destined

to resolve the Jewish question. But if I were one of those Jewish millionaires who seem to occupy themselves with this question, I would not know how to resist the temptation of a social experiment which is this: I would have transplanted, if not all, at least the great majority of the Jews of the place of the “pogrom.” I would have given back to the rich man his fortune and made of the poor man a well-off man, provided they consented to emigrate. And when from beneath the layer of Jewish capital, thus removed, the Christian and even patriotic capital had appeared without alloy or mixture; when M. Kruchevan had no longer had the means of creating somber legends of ritual murders, when the usurers and the monopolizers had promenaded themselves dressed in the European fashion, then one must believe that one would have seen clearly into the affair; then one would understand whether it is possible to resolve such questions by the “pogroms”; by the assassinations of the “bookkeepers” like Nissensohn, of poor glaziers like Gruenschpun, and of Israelite coachmen earning their bread hardly by a labor as painful as that of their Christian colleagues… And, indeed, is the oppression of the usurer then less heavy because he wears a European costume and calls himself a Christian?…

VLADIMIR KOROLENKO

translated by Élie Eberlin

Table of this cahier

Cahiers de la Quinzaine

TABLE OF THIS CAHIER

PAGES

Our brief analytical catalogue … II

Charles Péguy. — Cahiers de la Quinzaine … V

Raoul Allier. — The primary education of the natives in Madagascar … VII

Russian Jews

Élie Eberlin. — The Jewish parties in Russia … 3

Introduction … 5

Of the eleven million Jews counted in the entire world Russia possesses more than five; scarcely a tenth scattered through the countryside; about four and a half million crowded into the towns and the boroughs of the Territory or zone of residence; composition of this mass; a misunderstood proletariat; Bernard-Lazare; the Jew has never been studied except in his bourgeoisie; a worldwide glimpse of the Jewish proletariat; the ghettos of the world; the present renewal; but in Russia; a muffled resistance; a particularly tragic character; the economic causes; the motives of a social and psychological order predominate; the true “Jewish spirit”; to sketch the great intellectual and social movement which agitates at the present hour Russian Judaism, and to follow the formation as well as the evolution of the parties which have been constituted within the Jewish proletariat in this country;

I. — The Jewish population of Russia: the bourgeoisie, the working class, the small merchants and the agriculturists … 9

According to the Besser and Ballod method, figure of the male Jewish population of Russia above fourteen years; 1,115,000; distribution by professions; Collection of materials on the economic situation of the Jews of Russia; the artisan, the worker, the small shopkeeper predominate; the cultivated, graduated Jews in an infinitesimal minority; why; the Jews and the liberal professions; the Jewish proprietors, rentiers, industrialists; industrial workers; a third of the works situated in the Territory in the hands of the Jews; but only 18 per cent of the total value of these industrial establishments; Jewish works cannot bear the competition of the Russian industrialists; impediments of every order; the merchants and the artisans; merchants of the first and second guild, number not considerable; a multitude of small shopkeepers; clerks, peddlers, commission agents, beggars; an army of the workless; swelled every day; progress of mechanization; “Bund” and emigration; table of the number of Israelite artisans of different trades in the sixteen Governments hereafter, drawn up in 1891; majority; proletarianization of the working class; table drawn up in 1901–1902, where are added the ten governments of Russian Poland; comparison of these two tables; small masters diminished; workers increased; but increased much less; famine wages, men and women; relatively restricted number of workers in the industrial establishments; why; exceptions; table of the Jewish workers compared with that of the Christian workers in different factories belonging to the Israelites of Bialystok; the favorite trades of the Israelite artisans in Russia; the hard trades do not repel; a statistic, dated 1857, on the Jewish workers of Russian Poland; a few figures on the Jewish agriculturists; the Jews and agriculture; 1807 and 1808 Jewish settlers of the governments of Kherson and of Yekaterinoslav; better equipped; in spite of all impediments; rapid progress; a few statistical data; in Siberia; in the Caucasus;

II. — The historical, psychological and moral causes of the revolutionary movement among the Russian Jews … 19

Confined in the twenty-six governments of the Territory; in the towns frightful conditions of existence; other interdictions; special taxes; Muscovite administration and police; above all the workers; the organization of this proletariat; compared, for the proportion of the organized workers, with that of the Christian, industrial, working proletariat; comparison of the journals; of the proclamations; how the conscious proletariat could emerge and organize itself; history of the Jews in Russia; martyrology of the Russian Jews; the Jews are not at all intruders in the Empire of the tsars; they count among the most ancient inhabitants; detail of their history; but the persecutions, the sufferings undergone by the Jews in Russia could not by themselves alone explain the rapid progress of the Jewish revolutionary movement in Russia; other oppressed peoples; Jewish nature and character, Jewish spirit in general; M. Leroy-Beaulieu; Bernard-Lazare; conception of life and of death; conception of the divinity; justice alone; rooted hatred of injustice; causes of an economic and social order;

III. — The Jewish workers’ movement before the creation of the “Bund” … 30

Industry, large industry above all, existed in Russia, thirty years ago, only in the embryonic state; the Jewish population seemed to be homogeneous and the social relations stamped with a patriarchal character; abolition of serfdom came to change them from top to bottom; industry, commerce, railways; urban population; workers of works and of factories; capitalization of the crafts; shops; competition; slowly but surely the differentiation between the classes of the Jewish population is effected and the class antagonisms, until then effaced, become more and more accentuated; rapid proletarianization of the Jewish petty bourgeoisie; “Ignatiev laws”; a great workers’ movement; birth in Lithuania, at Vilna; first workers’ circles 1885–1886; young “intellectuals”; propaganda among the Israelite workers; the cultivated Jewish youth, during the reign of Alexander II, held itself apart from its people; relative tolerance; rush toward the schools, toward the studies, toward the literary, aesthetic, above all political movements; among the Russian revolutionaries; why; after the death of Alexander II, frightful awakening of the authoritarian demagogy; excesses of the antisemitic demagogy; governmental encouragements to this demagogy; a few “revolutionary” encouragements; the Jewish youth turns toward the Jewish proletariat; but at the beginning not particularist; awaited from the Russian worker the salvation of the Jewish worker; only a distribution of competence; at the beginning a theoretical character; a workers’ elite; circles of mutual aid and professional funds; strikes, the first in 1888; more and more frequent; all spontaneous, without preliminary organization, crowned with success; a change of tactic; a vast agitation; extension of the movement; in Poland, in Lithuania; in White Russia; the ten-hour day; a law of Catherine II; On agitation in the working mass; economic and political struggle of the classes; future political tendencies of the “Bund”; two struggles narrowly bound up with one another; working mass and intellectual agitators; narrow communion; mutual completion; agitation everywhere, and not only in the industrial centers; artisans also; Jewish question in Russia; Jewish national emancipation must come from the working class; a Jewish workers’ party; idea taken up again in 1894 and 1895 by a few other theoreticians; the enfranchisement of the Jewish workers must be the work of the Jewish workers themselves; specifically Jewish demands; not in contradiction with the internationalist principles of socialism; ideas sympathetically welcomed in the working milieus; two years before an organized workers’ party; several towns; Bialystok; a monster strike; in 1895; Vilna, Minsk, Warsaw; “combat funds”; strikes; a “Trade-Union”; socialist group of Vilna; editions; a clandestine printing-house in Russia; the Voice of the Worker; relations with proletarian organizations of Russia and of abroad; the First of May at the Congress of London; the Russian government prosecutes; but the movement spreads more and more; socialist journals; Vilna insufficient; a regular party is needed;

IV. — The “Bund” and its activity; its relations with the Russian Social-Democratic party … 40

In the month of September 1897, first Jewish socialist workers’ congress; “the General socialist Jewish workers’ Union of Russia and of Poland,” or “Bund”; two reasons: an active struggle against the restrictive laws which weigh upon the Jewish proletariat in Russia; the needs of socialist propaganda in the Jewish language; in 1898 enters the “Russian social-democratic workers’ Party”; by way of an autonomous organization; the party grants the “Bund” full powers in all the questions relative to the Jewish proletariat; for its part the “Bund” adheres to the program of the party; the “Manifesto”; essential points; “national” individuality; a year after; rupture between the “Bund” and the Russian social-democratic Party; organization of the “Bund”; four congresses, 1898, 1900, 1901 and 1903; funds of the “Bund”; strike funds; workers paying regularly their dues; libraries; the control of the local committees; the central committee; activity; the “foreign committee”; the congress; two professional workers’ associations; economic activity of the “Bund”; statistics of the strikes; causes of the strikes; results; nevertheless one must observe in the last years the “Bund” tends more and more to abandon the ground of the economic struggle and to become a revolutionary political party; several reasons; any participation in a strike is in Russia a political crime; and a Jew is punished more than a Christian; less a question of regulation than a question of supply and of demand; unemployment increases; crisis; fatal disappearance of small industry; large industry has not yet taken its flight; cannot take it; masters themselves arrived at the limits of the concessions; they too proletarians; whence common interests of the workers and of the masters; moreover the “Bund” not a purely workers’ organization; the leaders and a good number of militants “intellectual proletarians”; the political struggle not an ideal; enthusiasm; statistics of the persecutions undergone by the “Bund”; how to explain this extraordinary severity; an appeal of the Committee of the “Bund”; demonstrations of the Jews; open; repression; corporal punishments to the demonstrators of Vilna; in 1902, the evening of the First of May, the governor von Wahl; statistics of the demonstrations; an appeal of the “Bund”; vengeance; two days after, a Jewish worker, Hirsch Lekert, fired several revolver shots at the governor; slightly wounded; enthusiasm of the “Bund”; Lekert, in a court martial, condemned to hanging; died simply and bravely; an appeal of the “Bund”; the “politics of the rod” abandoned; von Wahl revoked; the “Bund” growing; the Russian socialist party; compliments and encouragements to the “Bund”; then, in the course of the last two years, contestations on attributions; the Iskra; very acerbic polemic; at the second Congress of the Russian socialist party, rupture; intransigence of the party; attacks of the Iskra; the Russian party and the other national parties in Russia; intervention of Zionism; the “Bund” a sort of federal union; the congress of Brünn, in 1897, for Austria-Hungary; decisions of this congress on the question of the nationalities; unfortunate rupture; repelled a narrow and forced unitarism, — heritage of Russian absolutism; — national tendencies become more and more accentuated;

V. — Zionism … 54

In all the countries of the Jewish dispersion Zionist parties and federations; a Jewish State in Palestine; doctor Herzl; diplomatic negotiations; financial institutions; agitation and propaganda; in Russia more intense, more extended and more profound than in the West; M. Max Nordau; the egalitarian ideas of the French Revolution; Moses Mendelssohn and his disciples in Germany; establishment of Jewish monotheism; Jewish morality for universal fraternity; religion of progressive ideal; but awakening of antisemitism; decisive blow to the spiritual Zionism of Mendelssohn; traditional Zionism; Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem; German Jews; but in Russia a popular movement; in the West, antiquity of race; sentiment of nationality; antisemitism; in Russia instinct; treaty of Berlin, national examples; an agricultural colony in 1879 in Palestine; in 1881 anti-Jewish riots; brochure of doctor Pinsker, auto-emancipation; preluded political Zionism; a nation; in Palestine; regeneration at once economic, physical, intellectual and moral; about twenty agricultural colonies; several auxiliary societies; Theodore Herzl, the Jewish State; point of departure of political Zionism; Zionist congresses; subscriptions of the poor and of the wretched; Russia holds the head of the Zionist movement; activity of the Russian Zionists; leave to the Western Committees the care of the political steps and negotiations; political and national education of the Jewish populations; Zionism of the West and Russian Zionism; a whole culture, a whole Hebraic life; Hebrew; old Zionists; socialist Zionists; in the West France, in the East autonomous Judea will become the hearths from which socialist light and action will spring upon the entire world; the Poalé Zion; class struggle; at the same time Zionists; a “Manifesto”; Committees of defense; an anti-Jewish riot at Homel; a vigorous resistance; elsewhere; first strained relations between bundists and Poalé Zion; in the course of these last years, rapprochement; common persecutions;

Conclusion … 66

A national party and a proletarian party; in sum a true national awakening of the Jews in Russia;

GEORGES DELAHACHE. — A study journey … 69

We shall not make the summary of this courier; if one will be so good as to refer to our brief analytical catalogue, one will see there that we have constantly followed this method; we establish summaries for the cahiers of work and of researches properly so called and we do not establish any for our cahiers of couriers; the couriers indeed are to be read and reread, by following the thread of the narration, and not to be read and then to be consulted in order to find references there; the courier of M. Georges Delahache, however considerable it may be, and however full of information, receives this common treatment.

VLADIMIR KOROLENKO. — House number 13; — translated by Élie Eberlin … 119

Élie Eberlin. — Vladimir Korolenko … 120

VLADIMIR KOROLENKO. — House number 13 … 121

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