Chapter XXI · IN RUSSIA (continued 2)

These experiences and the apprehension of massacres on a larger scale have impelled the Jews to form a great revolutionary association for organised resistance to the organised forces of their enemies. A secret society—already notorious as the Bund—arose in Lithuania, whence it spread to Poland and other parts of the Russian Empire. Its aims are to foster Jewish national feeling and to protect Jewish interests. But the protection which this body could afford the victims of deliberate persecution was necessarily limited. If it rescued them from occasional slaughter, it could not defend them against chronic starvation. Consequently, the exodus, especially from the Province of Mohileff, continued: The emigrants were, for the most part, Jewish young people of both sexes, who, not having any means of existence, left the towns and villages. Some villages even became quite deserted. In the town of Mohileff itself, where there are no factories of any kind or industrial or commercial undertakings except shops which are held by Jews, business was quite suspended.204 Within the next five months no fewer than 75,160 Russian Jews arrived in New York alone.205

How this readiness to quit hearth and home, in order to seek a new life under unknown skies in the furthest corners of the earth, carries us back across the ages to the flight of Israel from Egypt! To the Russian Jews groaning in servitude the Czar’s Empire is a foreign land; his religion a foreign religion. In leaving Russia they leave a hotbed of idolatry as fierce, as cruel, as Godless as the idolatry of Egypt, Babylon, Syria, or Rome. To them the Russian god who can sanction such persecution is a veritable Moloch. He can claim no kinship with Jehovah. They owe it to themselves to escape from the house of bondage, and to their God to continue bearing witness to His unity. They, therefore, like their remote ancestors, seek freedom of worship by expatriation. Treated as aliens in their native country, they renounce it with as little regret as if they had not been born and bred in it. There are, of course, both in Poland and in Russia proper Jews who would gladly conform in everything except religion. Such Jews deplore the estrangement of the Jew from the Gentile, and believe that the lot of the former can be improved only by the removal of the legal restrictions which perpetuate that estrangement. According to them, if the Jews were allowed to mingle freely with the other inhabitants of the Empire, they would in time lose all those characteristics which mark them off as a people apart, and become patriotic subjects of the Czar. But the Russian Government in its persecution of the race makes no invidious distinctions between these “Assimilators” and their sterner brethren. The Jew who ventures to advise assimilation alienates his friends without conciliating his masters. By its indiscriminate severity the Russian autocracy feeds the old spirit of dogged resistance, sullen resentment, and inflexible arrogance.

It also feeds, as might have been expected, the old dream of Redemption and national rehabilitation. The Russian Ghetto at the present day is the citadel of Hebrew orthodoxy and the recruiting ground for the Zionist movement of which we shall speak in the sequel. It is natural that it should be. The Jew in the Empire of the Czars finds little or no scope for development. As we have seen, he is debarred from holding real property, from pursuing liberal professions, from engaging in many trades. He is a stranger in the land of his birth, an outcast among his fellow-countrymen. Chronic contempt and oppression are only relieved by periodical massacre. Forbidden to be a citizen, he cannot be a patriot. He has no life in the present. He, therefore, lives in the future. He is an uncompromising idealist. The same conditions which deprive him of all inducement to national assimilation also encourage his religious and social separatism. The intolerance of his Christian neighbours reacts on his own bigotry. If politically he lives on hopes, religiously he lives on traditions. Amidst all his calamities, the Jew of the Russian Ghetto is sustained by the expectation that the real history of his race is still to come. He believes that the ruins of the Temple will one day prove the foundations of new greatness. While awaiting the fulfilment of the ancient prophecies, he clings to the tribal distinctions, to the ceremonial laws, and to all those rules of omission and performance which tend to perpetuate his self-isolation. In the West the Jews have, as patriotic citizens of various states, succeeded, by generous concessions quite compatible with true loyalty to their traditions, in the effort to reconcile the old Jewish life with modern political conditions. In Russia the Jews are denied the opportunity. But they still love the land. Therein lies the irony and the hope.

Such is the lot of Israel in Russia. It is hardly better on the western side of the Pruth—in that other European country which within three days’ journey of London continues the Middle Ages.