Note (return) — Chapter VI

These restrictive measures were not relaxed when Alexander III was succeeded by his son Nicholas II (1894). If anything, they were more rigorously executed, and the mob was encouraged to multiply its outrages upon the defenceless Jews. The closing years of the nineteenth century wiped out the promises of its opening years. Blood accusations followed by riots became of frequent occurrence. Irkutsk (1896), Shpola, and Kiev (1897), Kantakuzov (Kherson), Vladimir, and Nikolayev (1899) gave the Jews a foretaste of what they had to expect when the Black Hundreds, encouraged by the Government and incited by Kruzhevan and Pronin, would be let loose to enact the scenes that took place in Kishinev and Homel before the Russo-Japanese war, and in hundreds of towns after it. The difficulties in the way of securing an education were increased. Russia did not believe in an "irreducible minimum" where the rights of her Jews were concerned. Under Nicholas II the number of Jewish women admitted to medical schools was put at three per cent of the total number of students; the newly-established School for Engineers in Moscow was closed to Jewish young men altogether; and the students of both sexes in the schools were constantly harassed by the police because of the harsh laws concerning the rights of residence. Some splendidly equipped institutions of learning were allowed to remain almost empty rather than admit Jewish students.2