The Russian Background of the Anglo-American Jewish Immigration

<plain_text><page sequence="1">The Russian Background of the Anglo-American Jewish Immigration* By Leonard Schapiro, LL.B. N the eve of the First World War nearly half of the Jewish population of this country consisted of recent immigrants from Europe, the great majority of them from Russia and Poland, which then, of course, formed part of the Russian Empire. Mr. Lloyd P. Gartner in his recent study of these fugitives from oppression estimates the total number who reached our shores between 1870 and 1914 at 120,000;* those who found refuge in the United States?which was for most emigrants the first choice?were, of course, many times more numerous. These multitudes, the parents and grandparents of many of us among them, have profoundly affected the intellectual and social life of the Anglo-American world, and in particular Anglo-American Jewry. It is therefore natural that we should show some curiosity about the background of unendurable tyranny from which they fled. Yet, is there much that one can add to a story that is already well known? The fate of the Jew in Russia after 1881 was the subject of continuous public protests and demonstrations here and in the United States, of a persistence and of a vigour which to our more craven, or more hardened, generation seem well-nigh incredible. The Russia of Alexander III and Nicholas II was not the Russia of Stalin or Khrushchev: the treatment meted out to the Jews could not then be concealed in a pall of silence or a smokescreen of official lies. It was known in every detail to anyone who took the trouble to find out in the more reliable press and publica? tions and in the reports of debates in Parliament. The Times, for example, some months after the succession of pogroms which began in April, 1881, published a series of articles, subsequently reprinted as a pamphlet,2 in which these grim tragedies were analysed with a wealth of detail which could only have been the result of extensive research on the spot. Again, in 1912 a man whose memory will always be honoured by British Jewry, and most especially in this Society, Lucien Wolf, published a most exhaustive survey of the legal and administrative limitations under which the Russian Jews had been suffering since 1882.3 Professor Dicey wrote a Preface to this work?a work which seems to me so excellent that I cannot see how it could be improved on. In spite of the partial publica? tion of the archives of the government departments since the revolution in Russia, not a great deal of new evidence has come to light. There has been much iUumination of detail?but the general picture of the facts is not, I think, so very different from what it appeared to those who were contemporaries of the events. Perhaps the greatest addition to our knowledge of the Jewish sufferings in Russia in the last three decades of the Empire has been provided by the memoirs of Genrikh Borisovich Sliozberg, published * Paper read before the Jewish Historical Society of England on 18th January, 1961. 1 Lloyd P. Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England, 1870-1914, London, 1960, p. 49. 2 The Persecution of the Jews in Russia, 1881. Reprinted from The Times. Second edition, London, 1882. 8 The Legal Sufferings of the Jews in Russia. A Survey of their present situation and a summary of laws. Edited by Lucien Wolf. With an Introduction by Professor A. V. Dicey, London, 1912. 215 p</page><page sequence="2">216 RUSSIAN BACKGROUND OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN JEWISH IMMIGRATION in Paris in 1933-34.1 This generous and noble-minded Jew and Russian?for he was both?devoted his whole active life as a lawyer to the defence of the Jews from the rigours of the law and the administration and to the struggle for their legal emancipation. From about 1890 onwards he was active in almost every important public committee concerned with Jewish affairs. His record of his activities, written in exile, throws a flood of light on what was not only a vital phase in Jewish history, but, as I hope to show, a moment of critical choice in Russian history. Yet, there seem to me to be two reasons why a reassessment at this time of the fate of the Jew in the last decade of old Russia is justified. We of this generation have had to witness the consequences to the Jewish people of maniacal antisemitism without parallel even in the tragic history of the Jews. It is right that we should stand back and take a look at Russian antisemitism with the Nazi story fresh in our minds. For though the parallel is not, of course, complete, there are many similarities. We find, for example, the same outright denial of legal rights to an entire community, coupled with a flouting of the rule of law and of those liberal principles on which alone civilized society can be based; we find the same exploitation by an autocracy of those primitive nationalist instincts of the population which are always ready to receive as truth the age-old myth of the Jew as an evil force whom it is a duty to exterminate; and, above all, we find the same readiness by the autocracy to use the Jew as a "lightning conductor"?if I may borrow a phrase from the late Joseph Stalin?in order to deflect the storm of popular discontent from the targets on which it might otherwise vent itself. Now we all know today that German antisemitism spelt disaster not only for the Jews, not indeed only for Germany, but for the whole of our civilization. With this grim demonstration provided for us by history we are perhaps in a better position today to understand why it was that men like Sliozberg, as well as the many non-Jewish Russian liberals who espoused the cause of Jewish emancipation, saw themselves as fighting not so much for the benefit of the Russian Jews as for the benefit of all Russia, and indeed of human civilization. And this brings me to my second reason for going back to pre-revolutionary antisemitism. The Russian revolution has not brought to the Jews the emancipation for which many of them hoped. During the last thirty years of the Soviet regime, at any rate, antisemitism in various forms has become evident in Russia. It is not correct, I think, to draw any complete parallel in form or extent with what went on in pre-revolu? tionary Russia. For one thing, we can no longer turn to The Times or to Hansard in order to find out what is happening to the Jews in Russia, but have to engage in some kind of detective work to discover it. But certain parallels, of course there are, and, once again, to recall the main features of the old antisemitism is to arm ourselves for the better understanding of the new. Our story begins in 1881, the year in which Alexander II was assassinated on the first of March. But it is necessary first to glance at the state of the Russian Jews before this fatal date. It is important at the outset to have in mind that since Russia was, until 1905 at any rate, an unrestricted autocracy, all policy, including policy towards the Jews, was deterrnined by the monarch in the last resort. Only two monarchs in the history of Russia were capable of understanding that an orderly state can only be built on the foundation of law and of properly functioning institutions?Catherine II, and Alexander II. It was only these two therefore who to some extent realized that to maintain within 1 G. B. Sliozberg, Dela Minuvshikh dnei. Zapiski Russkago Evreia. Three volumes, Paris, 1933, 1934.</page><page sequence="3">RUSSIAN BACKGROUND OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN JEWISH IMMIGRATION 217 a state a body of free inhabitants who are kept outside the ordinary operation of the laws is not only destructive and oppressive towards those particular individuals, but makes impossible the development of anything other than an arbitrary form of government in the state as a whole. All the other emperors with whom we are concerned, and in particular the last two?Alexander III and Nicholas II?saw themselves quite literally as fathers of their people, ruling patriarchally with primary responsibility to God alone, with an instinctive distrust of law and legal order, of progress, capitalism and all modern ideas generally. It was for this reason, for example, that they resisted all efforts of their more enlightened advisers to emancipate the millions of peasants from the system of tutelage and paternal apartheid in which they remained even after they had been liberated from actual serfdom in 1861. As regards the Jews, the emperors were easily persuaded that their duty lay in protecting the simple, pious Russian peasant from exploitation by these clever, unscrupulous alien infidels. Catherine, however, with her essentially European outlook and her ideas of enlightened absolutism, saw the problem somewhat differently, when the successive partitions of Poland presented her with a new and large Jewish population within the confines of her enlarged Empire. Before the partitions, in 1762, Catherine, in spite of the unanimous advice of her Senate that it would be beneficial for commerce if Jews (who had been banished from Russia in 1744) were readmitted, was reluctant to allow this. "Ces gens-l? attirent tout ? eux"?she later wrote to Diderot, and their readmission could do more harm than good.1 So it was not for love of the Jews, but from a sense of enlightened principle, that Catherine in a number of enactments, between 1772 and 1783, relating to the Jews who had come under Russian rule as the result of the first partition of Poland, virtually accorded the Jews full citizen rights. They could enter the merchant class, they could be elected to town administrations, and they were not to be subjected to any discriminatory taxation. Unlike most other Russian monarchs, when Catherine created an institution she tried to make it work as intended. So in 1785, when the Jews of White Russia complained that they were being kept out of municipal councils, Catherine insisted that the practice should stop, and that Jews should enjoy their rights as subjects "on an equal basis with others."2 I mention these remote events in order to emphasize that what happened in Russia in the nineteenth century was in fact a decline from earlier, more liberal principles. But I fear the rest of the story is less enlightened. Catherine's liberal intentions were genuine enough, but she was defeated by the difficulties of the problem, by that primeval chaos and disorder which seem to characterize Russia throughout the centuries. In 1791 she yielded to complaints by the Moscow and Smolensk merchants about Jewish competition, and enacted that the rights of the Jews hitherto unrestricted?there were nearly a million of them in Russia by then?were to be limited to White Russia and certain other territories. Thus began the Pale of Settlement, which was to have such melancholy consequences for the life of the Jew in Russia. The sixty years which intervened between the death of Catherine in 1796 and the accession of Alexander II in 1855 were dark years of humiliation, restriction and suffering for the Jews of Russia and Poland. Compared with these sixty years, the twenty-six years of Alexander's reign were an age of hope, relaxation and promise for the Jews?as indeed for the whole of the Russian people. It is fashionable now to minimize Alexander IPs liberalism?the late Louis Greenberg's treatment of him, for example, bristles with 1 Quoted in Maurice Tourneux, Diderot et Catherine II, Paris, 1899, pp. 532, 535. 2 Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov (First Collection), Volume XXII, No. 16, 391, pp. 596-8.</page><page sequence="4">218 RUSSIAN BACKGROUND OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN JEWISH IMMIGRATION reactionary or antisemitic comments made by the emperor, which the archives opened up after the revolution have disclosed.1 It was probably true that, ur?ike Catherine, Alexander had little love for enlightened principles, though he shared with Catherine a healthy fear of radicalism and anarchy?such words as "progress" on official documents used to send him into a rage. Yet this man realized that the Augean stables bequeathed to liim by his predecessors had to be cleaned up. No Russian monarch before or since conferred so great a benefit on his country as Alexander II?his reforms extended from the abolition of serfdom to the institution of municipal self government, and he reorganized the army, education and the legal system. Under fire both from the right and from the left?from the more reactionary landlords and from the radical intellectuals?he went steadily ahead at what he regarded as the safe pace for reform?and as autocrat he believed, rightly I think, that it was he who had to set the pace. In the light of what has since happened in Russia the age of Alexander II appears as a Golden Age, and the assassins' bomb of 1st March 1881 an act of tragic folly. If the Jews did not benefit from this Golden Age as much as they hoped, it was for them at least an age in which they could reasonably believe that full emancipation was now no longer a vain dream. And since men are fed on hope, Alexander II remained for the Jews the only tsar for whom they could ever feel something akin to affection, somone who was more a friend than an enemy. From Alexander's point of view the Jews were after all only a minor problem in his vast pro? gramme of reform. He readily conceded a whole host of important if not very funda? mental measures, which removed some of the preposterous restrictions and injustices inherited from previous regimes. But on the question of full emancipation he proved more obdurate. He rejected repeated suggestions which emanated throughout his reign from his ministers and local adniinistrators that the Pale of Settlement should be abolished and that the Jewish population should be allowed to merge at once with the rest of the population. His policy remained firmly anchored along the lines which he laid down in 1856: "to revise all existing legislation regarding the Jews, so as to bring it into harmony with the general policy of merging this people with the native population, so far as the moral status of the Jews will allow it."2 This policy of separating the wheat from the chaff, or of making the Jews earn their passage to citizenship, if humiliating, was a good deal better than the prospect hitherto held out to them of remaining a depressed class for ever. In practice it opened up trade, government service and education to the more able and ambitious, and for the first time made the Jew feel that he, too, had a share in the life of a country which he was learning to call his own. The Russian Jewish intellectual, who has made such a distinctive and important contribution to European culture, was born in the age of Alexander II. All this slow but sure progress towards complete emancipation came to an abrupt end with the death of Alexander II. It is at this point that our story of the sufferings of the Jews, which were to send them overseas in hundreds of thousands, begins. Six weeks after the murder of Alexander came the first of the long series of pogroms in the Jewish Pale of Settlement which were to horrify the civilized world outside Russia, and, be it said in fairness, civilized society inside Russia as well. We have very complete information on these anti-Jewish riots of 1881 and 1882. Not only do we have the con? temporary accounts, which were very detailed, but since the revolution the government 1 Louis Greenberg, The Jews in Russia, Volume I. The Struggle for Emancipation, New Haven, 1944, Chapter VII. 2 Quoted ibidem, p. 91.</page><page sequence="5">RUSSIAN BACKGROUND OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN JEWISH IMMIGRATION 219 records dealing with this period have been published.1 These include the reports passing between the Ministry of Interior and the adrninistrative and police officials on the spot. In addition, in the summer of 1881, when most of the worst pogroms had already taken place, Count Kutaisov was entrusted by the Minister of the Interior, Count Ignatiev, with the duty of investigating the origin and course of the riots and we now have his detailed reports. He seems to have discharged his duty with honesty and integrity, though with a certain reticence when it came to making recommendations for the future. The statistical information on the effects of the rioting is very incomplete?in general, Russian government statistics until the end of the nineteenth century were pretty poor. The best estimate I can make of the total physical damage caused to the Jews is that over five thousand suffered injury and in a minority of cases, death, while damage to Jewish property was well over half a million pounds.2 It is, however, with the reasons for and the consequencs of the pogroms that we are mainly concerned, since they determined the openly antisemitic policy which was henceforth to be pursued by the government almost uninterruptedly until its fall in 1917. Two factors must I think be borne in mind if we are to attempt to understand the subsequent attitude of the government to the Jewish question in Russia. First, the fact that the pogroms took place at a time when there was some reason to fear that the assas? sination of the emperor would be followed by an uprising of the peasants throughout the country?the government, after all, could not be blamed for supposing that the revolu? tionaries had made some preparation towards this end, even though these romantics had in fact done nothing of the kind. Indeed, in some cases the mood of the rioters seemed to take on something of a general revolutionary character: "Let us first finish off the Jews and then we'll go on to deal with the landlords." There is no doubt whatever that the revolutionaries, if not their instigators, were certainly mixed up with the pogroms? printing illegal leaflets, for example, including one of an extraordinarily naive character urging the peasants to beat up the Jew, but to realize while they did so that they were beating him up not because he is a Jew who eats or prays in a different manner, but because he is an exploiter and a capitalist. Count Kutaisov in his reports, however, makes it quite clear that the role of the revolutionaries was only incidental. From the point of view of the government this intermingling of pogroms and revolution had an ambivalent effect, which persists as a dual motive thereafter: on the one hand the pogrom is viewed as dangerous and therefore to be stopped; on the other hand, the fact that popular unrest could be harmlessly deflected to the Jews, who do not matter, offered a certain attraction. And the second factor which must be borne in mind is the effect of foreign opinion. There is no doubt that foreign criticism, though of course much resented, was nevertheless taken into account. But here, too, a dual attitude seems to have developed: on the one hand, that the pogroms should be stopped in order to silence foreign criticism; and on the other, that since all the agitation was the work of that sinister "International Jewry" with its ramifications everywhere in the outside world where capital ruled, a good pogrom or two in Russia would teach the foreign Jews a lesson.3 This dual attitude, which of course, meant that different views could be held 1 Materialy dlia istorii anti-evreiskikh pogromov v RossiL Tom II. Vosmidesiatye gody (15 Aprelia 1881 g.-29 Fevralia 1882 g.), Pod redaktsiei i so vstupiternoy statiei G. Ya. Krasnogo Admoni. Petrograd, Moscow, 1923 (cited hereafter as Materialy). 2 Materialy, pp. 531, et seq. 8 Memorandum of 3rd January, 1906, from Count Lamsdorff to the emperor, reprinted in Lucien Wolf, Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question. With texts of Protocols,Treaty Stipulations and other Public Acts and Official Documents, London, 1919, p. 58.</page><page sequence="6">220 RUSSIAN BACKGROUND OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN JEWISH IMMIGRATION by different people at different times, goes a long way to explaining much of the inconsistency of later anti-Jewish policy. What was it that really caused the 1881 pogroms? Let me deal first with two of the favourite official explanations. First, that anti-Jewish riots were a spontaneous expression of the wrath of the loyal Russian people against the revolutionaries, of whom the over? whelming majority were said to be Jews. This view was not, I think, held for long by Alexander III, who was too intelligent to believe it. It was certainly accepted as incon? trovertible by his son, Nicholas II, whose political intelligence was of an astonishing immaturity;1 and was sedulously propagated by the cynical Plehve, who became Minister of the Interior in 1902, just before the second great wave of pogroms began in Kishenev and in Gomel in 1903. Certainly the antisemitic agitators who set the pogroms in motion in 1881 made use of the argument that "the Jews killed the tsar"? which was, of course, true to the extent that one of the five assassins was a Jewess. But the evidence is overwhelming that the motives of the rioters were two: plunder; and the absolute conviction that it was perfectiy safe to rob and beat Jews with complete impunity. Nor was it remotely true in 1881 that the revolutionaries were predominandy Jewish. Such figures as there are suggest that the Jewish representation in the movement was only proportionate to the Jewish population.2 The populist revolutionary movement of the 'seventies was Russian and even nationalist to the core, even with its anti-semitic element. Those Jews who formed part of it did so as Russians, with the liberation of Russia as their ideal, not as Jews?indeeed many of them became converts to Chris? tianity in order to bring themselves closer to the people. The Jewish revolutionary of the twentieth century is another question, to which I will return. The other official explanation, which was to become the keystone of the arch of future policy, was that the Jews were everywhere guilty of practising economic exploita? tion, and that pogroms were simply an outburst of the poor peasants who had lost patience at this monstrous injustice. Economics apart, it was not a very convincing explanation. For example, in many cases those who carried out the pogroms had arrived or been brought in for the purpose from another district; there were pogroms in districts where no question of exploitation by the Jews could arise?such as Warsaw; and in general the victims were nearly always poor Jews, not the few rich, if only because the rich were in a position to pay the police to protect them. But once accepted as the explanation, the government in the person of Count Ignatiev, the Minister of the Interior, with the full support of Alexander III, proceeded to build his Jewish policy on the theory of exploita? tion. Since the Jews were exploiters, the simple innocent Russian peasants who were so easily duped by these clever and unscrupulous aliens, must be protected from them by legislation. This was the origin of the famous Temporary Laws of 3rd May, 1882? which lasted, as such things tend to do, until 1917, when the Provisional Government repealed them. I will have to refer to them later. The truth or falsehood of the assertion that the Jews were exploiters seems to me to be irrelevant. If there were Jews?and no doubt there were a good many such Jews as well as Russians?who used illegal or dis? honest methods to exploit others, then legislation equally applicable to all who were guilty of such practices was the only civilized solution. In no possible way could it 1 See The Letters of Tsar Nicholas and Empress Marie.... Edited by Edward J. Bing, London? 1937, pp. 190-1. 2 N. I. Sidorov, "Statisticheskie svedenia o propagandistakh 70-kh godov v obrabotke III otdeleniia" in Katorga i ssylka&gt; Vol. 38, 1928, pp. 27-56.</page><page sequence="7">russian background of the anglo-american jewish immigration 221 LIVONIA! Psl"&gt;v TT R E L KURSK PERCENTAGE OF JEWS IN GOVERNMENTS From i% to 5* From 8? to 10* From 10&lt;tol From OitoUi From Ujf Poltava ft-OS* Twirida UBflt Yekaterraotlav* 4.77* Chernigov 4.99% Kallas ??&lt; Flock M3&lt; 10,09 % 10.83* Beenrabia 1L66* Vltelwlc 11.80* MogbUef 11-?* Kiev IMS* tolftJt From IT* up Podolia 14.1ft* Kherson 113S* Wilna 11.90* Volhynta. 1M1* Korno 13.71% 13.89? 15.?* _ 15.77*? Flotrkow 15.83* Byettlitt 15.84* Grodno IMS* Wanaw 18.12* ?5? LongUnd? Bait Sebast fromOrg^rh afrj? ^4 C &gt;S E A Plate 36 Map of Western Russia Showing the Jewish Pale of Settlements. (from tht Jewish Encyclopedia)</page><page sequence="8">222 RUSSIAN BACKGROUND OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN JEWISH IMMIGRATION justify cUscriminatory legislation against several million people, of whom at least ninety per cent, were, according to official statistics, living in penury from hand to mouth.1 Be that as it may, the charge of exploitation by the Jews seems to have had no real foundation in fact. Soon after the pogroms broke out, Count Ignatiev, who had already firmly made up his mind that their cause was "exclusively" economic, and had obtained the emperor's approval for his policy of dealing with the problem on 22nd August, 1881,2 set up a series of provincial commissions to take evidence on the subject, in order to bolster his case. The terms of reference of these commissions were indeed so worded as to show quite clearly what answer the Ministry of the Interior required. Nevertheless, the majority of the commissions, at all events, failed to provide the required answer, and indeed they were closed down in 1886, and their voluminous reports were never published. However, the reports were for some reason unknown to me made available to I. S. Bliokh?a financier and railway magnate who was also an expert economist?who at his own expense produced a five-volume analysis of the economic position of the Jews in comparison with the situation in the areas where no Jews were allowed. Apparently by accident the whole edition of his work perished in a fire at the printers, all but twenty-five copies. The book is therefore exceedingly rare, and I am only familiar with it from a long summary of it published in 1903.3 Certainly, if Bliokh's analysis was correct and is accurately summarized, the general picture is not one of exploitation by the Jews. Indeed, there is abundant evidence that the economic position of the Russian peasant was a good deal better in the Pale than outside it. Moreover, eleven out of the fifteen provincial commissions recommended that Jews should be allowed to acquire land in the Pale and even outside it?in direct contradiction to the strict prohibition against this enacted in the Temporary Laws of 3rd May, 1882.4 No doubt this was one of the reasons why the results of these commissions' labours were suppressed. The advantage of an autocracy is that the autocrat need pay no attention to the views of his advisers. And so Alexander III continued firmly along the course which had been set for him by Count Ignatiev and thereby gave official encouragement to the prejudiced and ill-informed antisemitism which was never far below the surface at various levels of Russian life. Count Kutaisov, to whose reports I have already referred, came to the conclusion that the latent reason for the pogroms was economic, but that the actual outbreaks were spontaneous. The fact that they assumed the serious form which they did he squarely attributed to the firm conviction of the rioters that Jews could be attacked with impunity, a conviction which he asserts was enhanced by the failure in numerous instances of the local police and administrative authorities to take effective steps to stop the rioters at the outset.5 At the other end of the spectrum we find the view of a balanced man like Sliozberg that the riots were planned by Plehve. His argument is based mainly on the coincidence of Plehve's appearance at the Ministry of the Interior and the outbreak of large-scale pogroms?as head of the police department in 1881, and as Minister in 1902.6 1 A. Subbotin, Evreiskiy vopros v ego praviVnom osveshchenii (v sviazi s trudami I. S. Bliokha), St. Petersburg, 1903, pp. 14-15?based on statistics compiled by the fifteen provincial commissions set up by Ignatiev to study the economic position of the Jews in 1881. 2 For text of Ignatiev's report, as approved by the emperor on 22nd August, 1881, see Evreiskaia Entsiklopedia, edited by Dr. L. Katsnel'son and Baron D. G. Gintsburg, St. Petersburg, n.d.3 Vol. I, columns 826-7. 3 By A. Subbotin, op. cit. 4 A. Subbotin, op. at., p. 37. 5 Materialy, e.g. pp. 204, 208, 278-9, 416. 6 Op. cit. (Note 4), Vol. Ill, chapter 37.</page><page sequence="9">RUSSIAN BACKGROUND OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN JEWISH IMMIGRATION 223 It is certainly consistent with the character and opinions of Plehve. Moreover, not only am I sceptical about the possibility of "spontaneous" pogroms in general, but I find the suggestion that the 1881 pogroms were spontaneous completely untenable?someone has to get the crowd started, the evidence of the presence of ringleaders in the crowds is overwhelming, and the similarity of pattern in the outbreaks could not have been coinci? dental. As against this, April 1881 was the last moment that any sane government would have chosen deliberately to start off any kind of riots; there is no evidence in the documents which have been published of any complicity by the Ministry of Interior in the organiza? tion of the pogroms, and indeed the appointment of Kutaisov to conduct an investigation rather suggests that the Ministry did not expect anything discreditable to itself to emerge. So, if Plehve organized the pogroms of 1881 (there is much more evidence of organization in 1903) he must have done so behind the backs of his superiors in the Ministry?which is by no means impossible. If he did not, then we are driven to the conclusion that the riots were instigated locally by the numerous reactionary and antisemitic groups with which Russian society teemed. Their task would have been made easy by two factors. First that the general lack of legal rights of the Jews in the Pale lent considerable veri? similitude to the rumour spread among the crowds that Jews could be attacked with impunity, indeed in some cases that the Tsar himself had issued an injunction to attack them. And secondly, the obvious delay, reluctance, indifference and inefficiency with which in very many cases, and most fatally in the first outbreak in Elisavetgrad in April, the local authorities intervened to stop the riots. When one of the Governors General in a report to the emperor expressed the view that the most depressing aspect of the pogroms was the fact that it forced the Russian authorities into the role of defenders of the Jews against the Russian people, Alexander III minuted in the margin: "That is precisely what is so sad about all these Jewish disorders."1 Is it surprising that so many of the Governors?there were exceptions when the riots were stopped at the outset or prevented from breaking out?showed little zeal in restraining the rioters? As one would expect, the source both of the pogroms and of the new harsh restrictive legislation which flowed from them must be sought in the general problem of antisemitism in Russian society in the last thirty-five years of the Empire, to which I must now turn. The last two emperors were quite simple antisemites?a very important fact, because as I said before in an autocracy what matters is the autocrat. Both Alexander III and Nicholas II regarded Jews not only as morally depraved and detestable in themselves, but as bloodsuckers who preyed on the simple Russian peasant (had they ever seen a Russian village kulak one wonders?) and also as enemies of Christ. "We must not forget," Alexander III wrote on the margin of a report depicting the plight of the Jews, "that it was the Jews who crucified our Lord."2 Neither of these emperors was dis? tinguished for his political penetration, and it is therefore very likely that they were both influenced by the vast literature on the subject of the Jews which always circulated with success in Russia?the sinister kahal, the Passover blood ritual, the menace of inter? national Jewry, often coupled with freemasonry, and all the rest of it, right down to that hotch-potch of imaginative plagiarism, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This litera? ture, which runs into thousands of titles, has a fascination of its own, but I have no time to dwell on it. But lest we tend to dismiss it all as something that could only rouse a 1 Istoricheskii obzor deiateVnosti komiteta ministrov. Vol. IV, edited by Kalomzin, St. Peters? burg, 1902, pp. 183-7. 2 Quoted in Michael T. Florinsky, Russia. A History and an Interpretation, Vol. II, New York, 1953, p. 1119.</page><page sequence="10">224 RUSSIAN BACKGROUND OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN JEWISH IMMIGRATION sympathetic echo in poor barbarous Russia, let me remind you that in 1920, in this country, a highly reputable firm of publishers published a translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion under the title "The Jewish Peril" which sufficiently convinced The Times for it to express its pontifical alarm on 8th May, 1920; that a series of no less than seventeeen articles was published in July of the same year by the Morning Post on every imaginable kind of sinister conspiracy afoot in the world, mostly with a Jewish angle. Indeed one can understand only too well the feelings of Lucien Wolf, who felt constrained to write a serious refutation of all this gibberish, when he says in the Intro? duction to his pamphlet: "I confess to a feeling of shame at having to write this pamphlet at all."1 I share his feelings in resurrecting all this, but if wre are to judge Russian anti semitism in its proper proportions, then we must not forget what could happen in liberal England?to say nothing of democratic and constitutional Weimar Germany. The fact that the emperors were antisemitic would not have mattered very much, had they had the political wisdom to realize that it is fatal for any orderly legal society to maintain discriminatory legislation against an entire community in place of making every individual answerable for the crimes or offences which he commits, and no more. But their antisemitism combined with their political backwardness meant that they accepted the advice of the minority of their ministers and higher officials who urged discrimination against the Jews?such as Count Ignatiev or Plehve?and rejected the more enlightened view which, with reservations, was held by the majority of ministers and higher officials, that the only solution to the Jewish problem was to extend equal citizen rights to the Jews. The majority of the Pahlen Commission, set up by Ignatiev, for example recom? mended in its final report (which was, of course, ignored) that the only way to resolve the Jewish question in Russia was to abolish all restrictive legislation, though it would have to be done gradually.2 The Committee of Ministers as a whole was opposed to Ignatiev's policy in 1882, although, of course, his policy prevailed, since it had the support of the emperor. Count Reutern, the Chairman, put the position very clearly: "Everyone must be protected against every form of illegal attack. Today it is the Jews who are being incited against and plundered, tomorrow it will be the turn of the so-called kulaks, who from a moral standpoint are the same Jews, only they happen to be of the orthodox Christian faith. Then it will be the turn of the merchants and the landowners."3 I could quote many more examples if I had time?and, as we shall see, in 1906 once again it was the emperor who held out against the unanimous liberal recommendation of his Council of Ministers. Lower down the scale officialdom was not always so enlightened. Both in 1881 and in 1903 it was evident that there were officials in the police and civil administration at the local level whose inclination was to treat anti-Jewish riots with indifference and tolerance, if not approval. Whether this sprang from personal inclination or from a desire to please reactionary superiors, it reflects little credit on parts of the Russian administrative machine. One document, which may not be typical?I hope it wasn't?is so vivid that I think it must be quoted here. It is a long report of a meeting held in a provincial town (Pereyaslav) on 6th July, 1881. There had been a severe pogrom in the town, and the meeting, which consisted of representatives of both the Christian and 1 Luden Wolf, The Jewish Bogey and the Forged Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion3 London, 1920, p. 5. 2 See the report of the Commission quoted in Evreiskaia entsiklopedia, Vol. I, columns 832-3. 3 Quoted in Victor Leontovitsch, Geschichte des Liberalismus in Russland, Frankfurt a/M, 1957, p. 183, note.</page><page sequence="11">RUSSIAN BACKGROUND OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN JEWISH IMMIGRATION 225 Jewish populations, was part of a series of conferences to discuss ways and means whereby better relations could be established in the future between the two communities. The Christian delegation included the Marshal of the Nobility, the district police chief, the assistant procurator, the town mayor, a justice of the peace and the municipal doctor. Their proposals included the following: all Jews to retire from all elected public appoint? ments, since no one can remember any one of them ever uttering "even one honest thought or an honest and clear opinion"; Jewish wives and daughters should not imitate the gentry by wearing silks and finery; and Jews should discharge all their Christian maidservants since they all invariably become prostitutes."1 Turning to society other than officialdom, it becomes exceedingly difficult to generalize or indeed to judge, and I can only attempt to give you my impression. There was, of course, in Russia a pretty large lunatic fringe of antisemites?all those avid readers of the kind of literature I have referred to and of the numerous poisonous local newspapers. There were secret and semi-secret groups and societies with a brashly nationalistic anti-revolutionary and antisemitic colouring, who later formed the core of the ill-famed Union of the Russian People or the Black Hundreds, as well as of the extremist right wing in the Duma. When I described this as a "lunatic fringe" I was thinking less of their effectiveness than of their intellectual level. Of course, where the emperor, as was Nicholas II, was prepared to pay serious attention to the views of the Union of the Russian People, and where the police were not prepared to take any action to stop local newspapers from openly inciting to violence, where assassinations were winked at by the police?-and all this happened?you may think that "lunatic fringe" is something of an understatement. And yet, I would be prepared to justify the description. For what gave this kind of activity its importance in Russian life was not its existence, but the attitude towards it of the authorities. In general, what gives antisemitism its importance is not its existence?it is liable to manifest itself anywhere where a sizeable Jewish community exists. What matters is the attitude towards it of the government. In Russia the com? bined facts of the discriminatory treatment of the Jews, the known sympathies at the highest level with absurd extremist views, and the weak public sense of the importance of legal order all combined to transform the lunatic fringe into a powerful force for evil. When one turns, with relief, to educated society, the intelligentsia, an entirely different picture is presented. The great majority, the overwhelming majority of educated Russians?the liberal professions, the Bar, the judges, the academic world, the writers and the clergy were appalled at the government's Jewish policy and did not hesitate to say so. There has survived in the library of the British Museum a unique copy of a book compiled for publication in St. Petersburg in 1891 by S. Rapoport, which is an anthology of statements by public men in all walks of life protesting against the treatment of the Jews. For reasons best known to itself, the book was suppressed by the censorship and all copies save one in the author's possession were destroyed. The surviving copy was presented by the author to the British Museum.2 An anthology several times the size would be necessary to cover similar protests in the twentieth century, if it were to include the storms of protest which were aroused by the Kishinev pogrom and the Beilis trial, for example, or a selection of the speeches made in the Duma on the Jewish question. 1 Materialy, pp. 327-46. 2 Russkie lyudi o evreiakh, St. Petersburg, 1891. (The publication is anonymous, but its authorship is established from a letter by S. Rapoport attached to the British Museum copy.) It includes 50 pages of extracts from sermons and articles by members of the clergy, mostly around 1881-82.</page><page sequence="12">226 RUSSIAN BACKGROUND OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN JEWISH IMMIGRATION Antisemitism never acquired "respectability" in educated Russian society?in spite of, or more accurately because of, the fact that it was sponsored by the emperor and his more notoriously reactionary advisers. Some of the Slavophile intellectuals, perhaps, came pretty near to an antisemitic outlook on occasions?even Dostoevsky, in the famous second chapter of his Diary of a Writer for March, 1877. There were several reasons which made the Slavophiles more ready to sympathize with, if not to accept an anti Jewish policy. One was their strongly nationalist religion. Another was their intense dislike of capitalism which was associated with the Jew?whether it was the village money? lender, or the railway or banking magnate. Above all, the Slavophile, of all Russian intellectuals, had least understanding for the value of legal order and most respect for the paternalism associated with autocratic government. He was therefore least able to comprehend the consequences to a society of discriminatory legislation aimed at one section of it. And lastly let me take a look at the attitude of the political parties which came into existence in the wake of the revolution of 1905, and of the revolutionaries who emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. The parties of the extreme right need not detain us long: they were the spokesmen of the lunatic fringe and were rabidly, violently and unrestrainedly antisemitic. Of the two main liberal or centre parties, the Octobrist, the party farthest to the right of centre, tended to be somewhat equivocal on the issue of Jewish rights. It was certainly never the voice of the lunatic fringe. It stood for liberal principles, which included equality of rights for all citizens. But after 1907, when it became the party in the Duma to which the emperor and his ministry mainly looked for co-operation, some Octobrists sacrified some of their principles to the endeavour to make constitutional government a reality. In the process one of the casualties was often the issue of the Jews. Not so the Kadets, the most radical of the liberals, who maintained their opposition to the Tsar and his ministers to the bitter end in 1917. The Kadets became the most consistent and eloquent advocates of equal rights for Jews on the floor of the Duma, and missed no opportunity of denouncing persecution of Jews or the major scandals of government policy in this respect. It is one of the myths of the twentieth century that Socialists are the most consistent opponents of antisemitism. It was not true of the Russian socialists. Their opposition to capitalism put them in this respect in a position of ambivalence. The peasant party, the socialist revolutionaries, was often torn between dislike of right-wing and government antisemitism and the fact that the peasant's antisemitism appeared to them to be a laudable form of class struggle. The social democrats, with their very large Jewish membership, recognized, of course, that antisemitism was one of the weapons used by the government for its struggle against the revolutionaries. But they subordinated their demand for equal rights for the Jews to their general aim of overthrowing the government, and indeed, as all social democrats must, regarded equality of rights along with all the democratic rights inscribed on their programme as a means to an end, and not as an end in itself. Whatever the reasons, the socialists in the Duma made a comparatively small contribution to the defence of the Jews. Such then is the anatomy of forces of Russian antisemitism after 1881: at the top the emperor and some influential advisers who had his ear; below an indeterminate mass of peasants and sometimes workers who could at any time be roused up against the Jews by agitation; and a lunatic fringe which formed an underground political reserve which could be easily mobilized from the top. It is, I think, sufficient to consider the motives which animated those at the top: the motives of the other two groups, neither of which</page><page sequence="13">RUSSIAN BACKGROUND OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN JEWISH IMMIGRATION 227 would have been of any importance without encouragement from the top, are fairly obvious. These motives at the top were not, I think, ever racial: the idea of preserving the purity of the Russian race from alien contamination, the Nazi idea, is notably absent. Religion certainly was an element: that it was more of an element than racialism is evident from the fact alone that many Jews were able by accepting conversion to Chris? tianity to rise to positions of eminence in state and public life that were completely closed to unbaptised Jews. There was also an element in Russian antisemitism of nineteenth century nationalism. The burden of Dostoevsky's argument, for example, in the chapter of his Diary to which I have referred, is that the fault for the position of the Jews in Russia lay just as much with the Jews as with the Russians?by reason of the Jewish failure to show brotherly love and understanding towards the Russians. There is no suggestion in Dostoevsky's article of the view that after over a hundred years the Jew might have some claim to be regarded as a Russian himself. This view of the Jew as something alien to the Russian tradition and popular way of life was, I think in its essence, an opposition to capitalism, to modernization, in a sense to legal order, and an assertion of the tradition of Russian paternalism. In this sense the sudden break in 1881 in the policy towards the Jews which had been inaugurated under Alexander II?the abandon? ment of the policy of gradual and selective emancipation in favour of a policy of segregation and discrimination?was merely a part of the general break which began in 1881 with the liberal tradition. It was not only in respect of the Jews that Alexander III turned back the clock?one of the first acts of his reign, for example, was to reject a project for a consultative assembly which could have proved the first step on the long road to constitutionalism. Alexander II had approved this project on the very morning of his last day on earth. Before long his successor made serious inroads on other reforms, notably on the system of rural and municipal administration. In fact, his reign was to prove the begirming of the return to the traditional Russian Proizvol or arbitrary adnimis tration, for which Alexander II had at any rate attempted to substitute some degree of legal order. But the only hope of the Jew lay in the law, for the Russian courts as reformed by Alexander II, retained their high standard and their integrity to the end. If once his fate was placed in the discriminatory power of the corrupt administration he could hope for neither justice nor mercy. The so-called Temporary Laws of 3rd May, 1882, prohibited Jews in general terms from settling outside the towns or townlets in the Pale, and from acquiring land by purchase or lease. On top of that, innumerable regulations, the interpretation of which was in practice left to the local police, imposed restrictions of every conceivable kind? there are fifteen pages of small print in Lucien Wolf's book on the subject listing these restrictions over thirty years. Let me give you a bald summary of the restrictions to which the Jew was subjected?leaving it to your imagination to fill in the human misery, the hopelessness and the sense of being hounded and unwanted, which drove hundreds of thousands of Jews into the uncertainty of emigration. Army service: Jews excluded from all positions worth having and from promotion, but required to contribute a greater number of recruits in proportion than the rest of the population. State service: in practice virtually inaccessible to the unbaptised Jew. Town and rural councils: Jews almost totally excluded after 1892, except as Governors' appointees in the smaller towns. Totally excluded from the vote?even in towns where Jews formed more than three quarters of the population. There were innumerable restrictions on the practice by Jews of the liberal professions, and, of course, a severe numerical limitation on admission to universities and high schools?at the end of the century there were more Russian</page><page sequence="14">228 RUSSIAN BACKGROUND OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN JEWISH IMMIGRATION Jewish students at foreign universities than there were in Russian universities. (I should observe in parenthesis that while there were always difficulties about obtaining a passport for leaving the country, the difficulties seldom proved insuperable by one means or another. The practice of imprisoning as well as ill-treating one's population belongs to a later age.) Finally, and worst of all, restrictions on residence. Ninety-five per cent, of all Jews were confined to the fifteen provinces of the Pale, which formed one twenty-third of the area of the Empire. Within the Pale after 1882 they were confined to the towns and "townlets"?it was the local police, needless to say, who usually decided whether, say, a row of houses with a factory was a "townlet," or a rural area, from which the Jew had to be expelled, although he might have lived there for generations. In the more liberal days of Alexander II four classes of Jews had been permitted to reside outside the Pale: discharged soldiers; merchants of the first guild; graduates of universities and other institutes?apothecaries, midwives and so forth; and artisans, and their apprentices. But in those days, consistently with the policy of encouraging the "morally superior" Jews to become emancipated, the exceptions were interpreted liberally?the authorities tolerated the midwife's husband as well, did not scrutinize the "artisan" too closely, allowed the merchant to employ some Jewish clerks and so forth. Now all this was changed. The regulations were not only applied strictly, but interpreted with that macabre ingenuity which characterizes petty officialdom in all despotisms. To this policy the emperor himself gave his encouragement?as we know from his marginal comments on the reports of his governors. A great wave of expulsions began from the cities, first from Moscow and then from the other principal cities, of the "unlicensed" but hitherto prescriptively tolerated Jews. Tens upon tens of thousands were rendered homeless, hounded like animals, deprived of their property and condemned to insecurity, fear and humiliation. The only escape lay in corrupting the authorities?which was happily very easy for those who had the means. Prince Urusov, the Governor of Kishenev after 1903, estimated that his subordinates were exacting about a million roubles annually from the Jews?at twenty or twenty-five millions for the whole country, this makes an annual Jewish tribute of some two million pounds. There is an ironical ending to this story of the expulsions. On 22nd May, 1907, the Prime Minister, Stolypin who, as we shall see, in spite of his reputation, was not illiberal towards the Jews, issued an instruction that Jews domiciled outside the Pale in forbidden areas were to be allowed to remain there if they had originally had the right to live there, but had forfeited it. There was a further proviso?intended to cover the case of revolutionaries?that Jews who were inimical to public order were not to be allowed to remain. This instruction, which was undoubtedly intended to put and end to the expulsions, in fact proved calamitous: for the police interpreted it to mean that any Jew who could not prove that he had forfeited his right of residence could be expelled?a contingency which covered cases of Jews whose residence was perfectly legal. In case of dispute, of course, the police could always apply the "inimical to public order" proviso. This welter of illegality could occasionally be put right by appeal to the Minister or to the Courts?much of Sliozberg's activity was con? cerned just with this type of appeal. But the cases which could be appealed were neces? sarily few?there were five thousand expelled from Kiev alone under this order. Nor in the general condition of lawlessness which prevailed in the country did a successful appeal in one case necessarily have any effect on other similar cases. The reign of arbitrariness by itself would have marked the last two decades of the Empire as the most difficult of all for the Jews to bear. But starting with the notorious Kishinev and Gomel massacres of 1903, an era of open violence against the Jewish</page><page sequence="15">RUSSIAN BACKGROUND OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN JEWISH IMMIGRATION 229 community was inaugurated?pogroms, assassinations and ritual murder accusations became a normal occurrence in Russian life. The facts are too fresh in our memory to need detailed treatment. A tragedy for the Jews, this grim twilight of the Russian autocracy was only one aspect of the failure of Russian society?monarchy, liberals and radicals?to find a way out of the deadlock which defied compromise, and which in the end could only lead to the triumph of extremism when the final collapse came. This time, unlike 1881, there could be no doubt of the complicity of the government in the successive assaults on the Jews. The evidence poured from the floor of the Duma, from public men like Count Witte and Prince Urusov, from the results of inquiries instituted by leaders of the Jewish community, from the liberal press. The contemporary evidence has in part been confirmed in the documents from the archives of the Ministry of the Interior published since the revolution, though the documentation made available is incomplete, and one can only presume that much of it was destroyed. The motive force behind this orgy of violence was the alliance between the fanatics at the top and the fanatics of what I have described as the lunatic fringe?the adherents of the extreme right, the semi-conspiratorial organizations like the Union of the Russian People. Leaving aside the question of the consequences to the Jews and the issues of common humanity, one can only wonder at the temerity or madness of a government which was prepared to tolerate the risk of this open flouting of the law in its midst. The motives which activated the Emperor Nicholas II and those like Plehve who were prepared to encourage him, seem to have been twofold. One was the view that violence against the Jews was an effective method of attacking the revolutionary parties. It was, of course, true that by the twentieth century, the Jewish membership, especially of the social democratic move? ment, was high?particularly high if one bears in mind the emergence of the Bund as a mass Jewish workers' party. I very much doubt how far it was true to identify the revolutionary activity of the Jewish social democrat with a desire of the Jew to avenge himself on a government which persecuted his people. The most characteristic feature of the Jewish revolutionary was his lack of national consciousness as a Jew?he was fighting for internationalism, for the world of the future in which the new Russia would transcend narrow chauvinistic barriers. The nationalist Jew was being absorbed into Zionism or into movements like Poale Zion. But there is no doubt that the identification ofvengeance as the motive of the Jewish revolutionary was firm in the minds ofthe Russian authorities. Even so enlightened, if complex, a man as Witte gave this as the explanation to Theodor Herzl in 1903.1 Besides?and this was certainly true of Nicholas?the revolutionary movement was in some circles believed to be merely a part of a great international Jewish conspiracy, and so it was hoped that by killing Jews in Kishenev the ardour of the sinister conspirators in Paris, London or New York would be damped. The other motive, I believe, was the hope that violence would encourage large-scale emigration?that the Jewish problem could be solved by the disappearance of all Jews somewhere, somehow, was a dream which always appealed to some Russian statesmen. Baron Hirsch's abortive scheme for emigration to the Argentine was warmly supported, and even Plehve expressed himself in favour of Zionism, so long as the Zionists confined their efforts to promoting emigration to Palestine and did not attempt to rouse national feelings among the Russian Jews.2 1 The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, edited and translated with an introduction by Marvin Lowenthal, London, 1958, p. 395. 2 In a letter to Herzl in 1903, quoted in Pamyati Vyacheslava Konstantinovicha Pleve, St. Petersburg, 1904, p. 50.</page><page sequence="16">230 RUSSIAN BACKGROUND OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN JEWISH IMMIGRATION It should be emphasized that this new turn towards violence after 1903 was once again, as was the whole policy after 1881, a united action of the emperor and a few other fanatics at the top, and the lunatic fringe lower down the scale. The whole of liberal and moderate opinion was aghast at the policy?its successful implementation is merely one further instance of the impotence of the liberal forces in twentieth-century Russia. After October 1905, when extensive constitutional promises were wrung from the reluctant Nicholas, the anomaly of the Jewish situation became even more clearly apparent?if Jews were now to be admitted to the vote, how was it logically possible to maintain discriminatory legislation against them? Stolypin, the Prime Minister after 1906, for all his faults, must be credited with a genuine desire and intention, at any rate in the first two years of his office, to transform Russia into a Rechtsstaat. And so, in October 1906 he persuaded the whole Council of Ministers to put forward a unanimous proposal to the emperor, which, with certain limitations, would have conferred equality of civil rights on the Jews. On 10th December, 1906, the proposal was rejected by the emperor: "In spite of the completely convincing reasons," he minuted, "for adopting a positive decision in this matter, an inner voice even more persistently assures me that I should not take this decision. ... I have a responsibility before God for all the power entrusted to me and am ready at all times to render Him an account."1 We know a little more now about this inner voice. It would seem that the Union of the Russian People had got wind of this proposal and had immediately organized the dispatch of two hundred and five telegrams of protest to the emperor from all branches of the Union.2 This was the last chance for the Jews, as indeed 1906 may be regarded in many ways as the last chance for Russia to follow a constitutional path. Neither in this question nor in others was Stolypin prepared to flout the will of the emperor. Before long the constitutional edifice had been shaken to its foundations. With the assassination of Stolypin in 1911 the descent into the abyss begins. Let me close with two general reflections. First, on Russia, The failure of Russia to solve the problem of relations with its Jewish inhabitants was only part of its general failure to adapt its outmoded political structure to the pressures of modern development. It was not accidental that Plehve, whose Jewish policy was so disastrous for the Jews, also laid the foundations for the future irremediable rift between the monarchy and liberal society by refusing to come to terms with the spokesmen of the incipient movement for moderate constitutional reform. For the Russians the Jewish question was fundamentally bound up with the question of liberalism?and its only real solution was to accept the principle, which Catherine had at least understood and which Alexander II had tried to implement, that you cannot build a just and harmonious society so long as any one section of it remains unequal before the law. The conflict with the Jews was thus only one aspect of the failure of the Russian monarchy?for there is no doubt that primarily the failure lay with the last two emperors?to opt for legal order in preference to autocracy, arbitrariness and paternalism. And next, the Jews. As I see it, what the Russian Jews wanted above all was to be allowed to fuse with and become an integrated part of the Russian society to which they felt they belonged. That is why the life of the Russian Jew during the reign of Alexander 1 V. N. Kokovtsov, Iz moego proshlago, Vospominaniia, 1903-19 gg., Vol. I, Paris, 1933, pp* 236-9. 2 V. A. Maklakov, Vtoraiia gosudarstvennaia Duma (Vospominaniia sovremennika), Paris, n.d.. p. 40, note.</page><page sequence="17">RUSSIAN BACKGROUND OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN JEWISH IMMIGRATION 231 II, in spite of many hardships, leaves me with an impression of some kind of harmony, and certainly of hope. After 1881, and after 1906, this hope faded. No doubt it was this hopelessness which helped to drive so many Jews into the revolutionary parties, through which they expected to rebuild a new society in which membership of this race or that would no longer condemn one to be forever an outcast. What is sometimes forgotten is the large number of Jews who made common cause with the liberals: the great names of Russian Jewry included those of the men who felt themselves at one with both Jews and Russians and who were drawn to those Russians who realized that the salvation of the Jews was an integral part of the salvation of Russia. Had the liberal solution succeeded, and consequently had the integration of Russian Jewry into Russian society taken place, how different might the history of the world have been. As it was, three consequences of this failure, of different magnitude and importance, maybe, but each of great significance for mankind, emerged. First, the triumph in Russia, if in a different form, of that autocracy, arbitrariness and paternalism which at any rate some of the revolutionaries believed they had overthrown in 1917; and as a logical consequence, the holocaust carried out by Stalin in the 'thirties of virtually all the Jewish revolutionaries; and the survival of antisemitism in Russia to the present time. Next, the Zionist move? ment, with its momentous consequences, since but for the treatment by Russia of her Jews it is at the least unlikely that it would have gathered the force that it did in the early part of the century. And lastly the great Anglo-American emigration movement, which formed the starting point of this enquiry.</page></plain_text>