ter of fact it is only once a week, after market, that one may find a few old peasants incapable on the high roads, whereas the streets of Belgrade resound with shouts and brawling every evening up till midnight; and as long as the offenders are Serbs, and not foreigners, the police are extremely indulgent. For the latter, however, no pity is shown if he is in the wrong, and scant sympathy if he has cause of complaint. Indeed, it is scarcely advisable for him to go abroad alone at night, or to resort to any place of public amusement except in company of friends. Should he attempt it, the exuberant patri otism of the Serbs would be tolerably sure to find vent in insulting epithets, if not in more active aggression. Time, however, and a little more friction with the rest of the world will smooth down many of the angularities of these young nations which are apt to strike a visitor with unpleasant and, perhaps, undue force. On the whole, if the reader never carries away more disagreeable recollections from the places of his sojourn than does the writer from the Balkans, he may be congratulated on his good fortune. Fortnightly Review. TSAR v. JEW. BY THE COUNTESS OF DESART. 16 Now there arose a new king over Egypt which knew not Joseph; and he said to his people, Behold the people of the children of Israel are too many and too mighty for us: come let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply, and it come to pass that, when there falleth out any war they also join themselves unto our enemies. And the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve them with rigor." So said Pharaoh in the first chapter of Exodus, and so quotes an antiSemitic writer as one of the reasons for the improvement of the Jews off the face of Russia; a second reason being that though a large number of Slavs try their utmost to avoid fulfilling their soldiering duties, twenty-three out of twenty-eight per cent. of those who shirk the conscription are Jews. It is useless to try and discuss any proposition with such a logician; but the two points above mentioned are half-a-dozen pages apart, and the casual reader may easily miss their curious connection, and be carried away by the plausible arguments in between to imagine that the essayist has proved his case against the race he sweepingly condemns. But the question of the Russian Jew, not as connected with Lord Mayor's meetings, past or present, but as concerning the pauper immigration into the East End of London, has become one of such burning interest to millions of human begins that it is well worth careful sifting and elucidation, and is no longer one between the Tsar and his Semitic subjects only. The Jewish question is emphatically not a religious question. Except in Spain and, to a slighter extent, in Italy, it never has been a religious question. The Inquisition persecuted the Jew, as it persecuted the Mussulman and the Protestant as the "Ingoldsby Legend" has it :Turks, heretics, infidels, jumpers and Jews. No one else ever did in the narrow sense of the word. The Romans tolerated him; Charlemagne and his successors placed him under a spiritual ban and left him severely alone, and we find no traces of persecution in the early centuries of the Christian era. And why? The reason is not very recondite or far to seek. If Front de Bœuf had been placed in the Palace of Truth instead of the Castle of Torquilstone, would he have suggested heretical doctrines as the reason for making Isaac of York acquainted with the gridiron in his dungeon? Did King John draw the teeth of his Semitic subjects because they had not submitted to the rites of baptism? It took some time after the lawless period that followed the disintegration of the Roman Empire for wealth once more to accumulate in the hands of individuals ; and the knights and soldiers of fortune acquired it quicker than the slow-working and much-harassed trader. But unpleas ant consequences might have followed had John's and Front de Bouf's victims been christened Norman or Saxon. He whom the Church had placed outside the pale of justice and charity had alone no defend ers. prefers to mate with the Roman Catholic and the Protestant with the Protestant. Therefore, the Jewish community remains dogmatically the Jewish community all the world over, though its numbers increase. But in Russia only is it also linIt was power trading on the superstition guistically a Jewish community. The of its neighbors. Have motives so very Russian Jew is a legacy from the partition much altered since those days? Human of Poland, and, like the rest of the counnature is unfortunately the same all the try, knew not Russian when he was forciworld over, whether Saxon or Gael, Teu- bly annexed. The wealthy Jew can of ton or Celt, Slav or Semite. When a course easily learn the language; but how crowd of ill-fed, ill-housed, uneducated is the poor one to do so when the native and moneyless folk see a minority in their holds aloof from him save for the necessimidst possessed of luxuries they yearn for ties of business; and the law steps in to yet cannot obtain, it takes little eloquence forbid the attendance of more than a certo persuade them that, as that minority is tain percentage of Jewish children in the outside the pale of spiritual welfare, it national schools, a percentage calculated, ought also to be placed outside that of not on the number of Jewish, but of temporal welfare and its goods given over Christian children. to those whom Providence and the executive Government consider more deserving. "Heaven helps those that help themselves" is a proverb liable to more than one interpretation. The Gordon riots were not accepted in England as a reason for turning all the Roman Catholics out of Great Britain; yet it is now seriously argued that the antiSemitic risings justify the removal of the Jews from Russia. As far as I can make out, the Russians object to the Jews: 1. Because they increase rapidly and their infant mortality is a tenth smaller than that of the Christian Russians. 2. Because they do not amalgamate with and become lost in the Slav races. 3. Because they are not agriculturists and show no desire to till the soil. 4. Because they are principally middlemen, and belong to no guild. 5. Because they shirk soldiering. 6. Because they evade the laws made against them. Reason Number 1 may surely be left to take care of itself; or perchance many curates of the Anglican Church with small salaries and large families may explain. Number 2 is essentially a religious, or rather sectarian, complaint up to a certain point; and beyond that point only proves the condition artificially produced by one of those laws which the Russians declare are simply maintained for self-defence. That is to say, a Jewish parent naturally prefers to see his children marry into Jewish families, just as the Roman Catholic When equal facilities of education are given to both in Russia, the Jew and the moujik will talk the same tongue, and "Yiddish" (the Polish dialect of Hebrew) will disappear from that country as it is disappearing from Whitechapel or the Ghettos of Frankfort and Rome. 3. Why are the Jews not agriculturists? The Russians say because they are physically and intellectually incapable of the pursuit. If so, whose fault is that? They were not created so. In the Old Testament there is much description of certain kingdoms of Judah and Israel whose exports consisted almost exclusively of corn and wine, and whose towns were few and far between. But the conqueror overwhelmed and dispersed them to the four corners of the earth and the Jews perforce turned to other means of livelihood. It would indeed have been marvellous had the agricultural instinct remained in the Jew during the seventeen and a half centuries in which, whatever privileges were given to or withheld from him, all nations alike were agreed as to this--that the Jew, as a Jew, could not and should not hold land. It is curious that most of the Judophobes in this country should. belong to the party that asserts that an Irish tenant, notwithstanding fixity of tenure and compensation for disturbance, cannot possibly succeed in the struggle * "Yiddish" is merely the phonetic spelling of the German word "Jüdisch," as pronounced by the German Polish Jew. for life unless he is given the fee simple of the acres he farms; and at the same time agrees with the Russian that the Jew is unfit to be a landowner because, when he was not even allowed to become the leaseholder of the house he dwelt in, he did not devote his energies to tilling the soil in which he was by law forbidden to hold the slightest interest. Till the beginning of this century such a law existed all over Europe. It remained the law of Austria till after 1848; it is to this day the law in Russia. enough and powerful enough to form itself into a monopoly. What remained, then, for the Jew to do? He might be a jeweller, since such a trade required no shop-front to reveal the profession to the casual passer-by, in spite of guild or livery, if he had capital. But if he had no capital? There was evidently nothing left but "trade" in its original and simplest form; the which is still exemplified in the present day by the clothes merchant and the bric-a-brac seller --that "trade" which begins and is developed by the middleman. It surely does not require any deep scientific knowledge in this century to recog When the full development of a counnize that heredity is a fact to be reckoned try has made such progress that the market with. We acknowledge it in cows, in is brought virtually to every man's door horses, in dogs; why, or rather how, it is possible to do without the middledeny it in man? Does the Russian be- man, and to save the pocket of the purlieve that the Orloff trotter is a creature chaser while giving more to the producer, radically different from the common as Lord Dunraven and his committee have horse; or does he admit that the speed been trying to prove in England. But in and form of that valuable breed are the an immense empire, sparsely populated, result of careful selection and training and not as yet well provided with railways through many generations? Are not the and other means of locomotion, I fail to Barzois-those marvellous hounds of of see how the producer and purchaser are which any two will master the fiercest to get on without an intermediary to bring wolf-carefully mated according to qual- them together. How is the small farmer, ity and ferocity as well as strength and trader, or even workman, to sell his comcolor? Yet he insists that, after seven- modities where the expenses of "transit are teen hundred years of forcible divorce from enormous, unless the middleman is ready land, fifty years should have sufficed to to take the commodities and the expenses reintroduce into the Jewish nature the together off his hands? If the middleold love of vineyard and cornfield which, man gives as little and asks as much as he since A.D. 70, Roman and Teuton, Celt can, he is only acting on what Adam and Slav, have so determinedly and im- Smith has laid down as one of the bases partially striven to wean him from. of sound political economy-buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market; and it is surely better for the petty producer to sell for a very tiny profit than not to sell at all. 4. But it was not only from the possession of land that the Jew was everywhere excluded in the good old days, and is now excluded in Russia. The guilds were not in the habit of opening their portals to the Hebrew dogs; nor do they do so now in Russia. What would the patron saint have said to the confraternity that brought so vile an outcast under his sacred banner? Yet most of the trades allowed no one to practise their particular craft unless that person was possessed of the freedom of the guilds. Wherefore it is evident that Jews could not follow those trades. They might be workmen ; they could never be master joiners or builders, turners or carpenters, tailors or bootmakers, armorers or upholsterers; or in fact become independent professors of any handicraft that had grown lucrative But, argues the anti-Semite, we do not want the Jew for that the Slav koulak will do as well, and him no one minds. Now koulak does not mean middleman at all, but usurer; and though we know that in all languages usurer and Jew are looked upon as convertible terms, it does not follow that middleman and usurer are synonymous. Nor are they really so in Russia; for the first quality the antiSemitic critic ascribes to the koulak is that he never moves from the village he is born in, and does not, like the Jew, carry his disagreeable calling from place to place. So, unless the Russian peasant, the moujik, conducts his business on lines similar to those of Messrs. Dillon and Sheehy in the late Sligo election-who, while residing under the same roof, communicated with each other through the London newspapers-it is hard to see how the koulak can act as middleman. The usurer has no reason or motive for wandering. Probably he begins by lending his stray pennies at interest to his school or playfellows; and his neighbors are the clients nature has supplied him with. He has no need to look further afield; and his business increases or decreases according to the circumstances of those about him. Neither is usury necessarily his only occupation; it is but a comfortable little extra way of adding to his income. When the moujik has successfully sold his small crop of grain to the middleman, he no longer requires the help of the koulak to pay his score at the publican's. The koulak, who was at first simply the moujik who had the half-crown ready to help the poor debtor to whom the publican threatened to supply no more vodka till the score was wiped out, once more becomes the moujik. There are, however, heavier debts than the bill for vodka to be met, whether convenient or not; and the saving and thrifty neighbor round the corner has not enough spare cash for the rates and taxes of his friend as well as his own. So the Jewish middleman is appealed to, who is presumably richer, the essence of whose trade is to wander among small and poor communities and purchase the fruits of their labor for larger and richer ones. Thus circumstances lead to the middleman becoming usurer as well though to those familiar with the ways of the usurer of the Western world, I would recommend the perusal of the article headed "Russian versus Jew" in Vanity Fair of the 14th of April. Would they view with equal horror the usurer who demands "ten per cent'' ? Still the fact remains that in Russia the middleman generally is also a moneylender, and that in the other countries of Europe the Jewish trader has largely developed into nothing but a money-lender. In Russia now, and elsewhere in the Middle Ages, laws were enacted as a means of increasing the government treasury; any one who had the money could buy immunity from them, and they were only enforced against the poor to show the rich This that they must buy themselves off. principle was allowed to influence all officials, and was invariably put in force against the hated and despised Jew, to whom wealth meant home and protection for wife and children, and poverty misery without hope or redress. What wonder, then, that the whole mental energy of the race should be turned toward solving the one pressing question of existence-how to get rich quickest? What wonder that, after the lapse of centuries, none should be so proficient in that particular branch of human industry? Another fact made much of is that the moujiks have often risen in riot against the Jews, but never against the koulaks. Naturally. Even the most illiterate peasant will think twice before he is persuaded to run the risk of being hanged or trans ported for the sake of saving his neighbor from being distrained upon for a few kopecks. But the temptation is very different when the neighbor pleads: "If you will help me to rid myself of my debt to my Jewish creditor by joining in an attack on the Jews, you will be amply repaid for your trouble by what you can plunder from their houses during the riot, and you know that no punishment to speak of will follow even if we should be individually found out." The Jew who can be robbed in a pardonable anti-Semitic riot is a less dangerous victim than the Russian creditor who can have the righteously indignant borrower and rioter sent to jail. Finally, let those who believe the absence of the Jew trader will so vastly benefit the Russian farmer examine the last reports of the tax-gatherers for the winter quarter just gone by, and those of the Nijni-Novgorod Fair of 1890, when, for the first time, no Jew was allowed to attend. 5. The Jew is by law ordered to be a soldier; yet three-quarters of the recruits who shirk their term of service are Jews. A little observation of what goes on in the Russian army may account for this fact without necessarily implying that the Jew objects to soldiering quá soldiering. The attractions of the Russian army for the Jews are, for example, that their Christian comrades shun their companionship, and are allowed to heap abuse and indignity on them unrebuked. Then, no matter what his conduct, his gallantry, his talent, his merit, the Jew cannot rise from the ranks. In the second of two articles that have appeared in Vanity Fair on the 4th and 11th of last April respectively on this subject-articles written by a hand very easy to recognize this very important grievance is met by the airy remark, The Russian must also serve and is very seldom promoted !'' I should like to know what the inventor of the conscription would have said to this sentiment, and how it would have tallied with his justification of the system that a marshal's baton is hid in every recruit's knapsack. But then the misogynist of Austerlitz would not have admitted" O. K.'s," right to argue on any subject. Nor is this law against the possible rise of the Jewish conscript one of those where the exception proves the rule. There is no possibility of exception, and the Jew is fully aware of this. I myself happen to know of a curious illustration of what a Jew may expect in the army of the Tsar. My authority for it is the late Chancellor, the famous Prince Gortchacow, who told it to prove that his Government was helpless to relax the law. In the Russian army, during the TurcoRussian war, was a young Jew who distinguished himself to such an extent that his General actually petitioned the Tsar to grant him a commission. The Tsar did so, and the commission arrived. Thereupon all the officers in the regiment to which the young man was appointed resigned in a body although they had been eye-witnesses of the exploits that had led to the promotion, and knew all the circumstances. The commission was cancelled. Comment is needless. In the rest of Europe, since the embargo was removed-and the Western nations were at least logical in holding that the man who could not be an officer could not be a soldier either-there are plenty of Jewish soldiers. There are few, perhaps, in England; but a goodly number in France and Germany, where the conscription has given the young Jew the taste for soldiering, which he not unnaturally had lost during centuries in which. the necessity for self-preservation created the hereditary instinct for the avoiding of physical danger. 6. Finally, the Russian Jew is reproached with a constant and systematic evasion of NEW SERIES.-VOL. LIV., No. 2. the law. For example, many houses ostensibly owned by Christians belong to Jews; they live in places outside the Pale of Settlement; they cause themselves to be registered as clerks of certain merchants simply to obtain the right of living in certain towns, when they are not, and never intend to be, clerks to those merchants. This simply means that the Pale of Settlenent, large enough in the time of its founder, the Empress Catherine the Second, became too small for its population as the generations increased; and, when the Jews found that it was easy to obtain all sorts of concessions by paying for them, it was natural they should put their earnings to such a use. They are perpetually being blamed for only pursuing one profession, and outnumbering the Orthodox population in the towns where they reside; yet when they try, by the only means in their power, to practise other trades, or disseminate themselves more widely, they are at once denounced as law breakers. As to the crime of holding land and houses in other names than their own, this accusation turns, boomerang-like, on the accusers for to deny to solvent citizens the rights of citizenship is in itself a proof of " something rotten" in the State : while the fact that good Orthodox Russians aid and abet the very transparent and much-winked-at fraud shows the feeling of the country on the subject. 66 The Jew must be got rid of at any price-as one would get rid of microbes, cries Prince Metchersky. "He must be shown," says Mr. Skalkoffsky, "that his halcyon days in Russia have gone by." Therefore the penal laws against him are enforced, say they; and these laws the Jew can easily avoid by leaving the country. Per This sounds very reasonable and plausible; but let the reader take a map of Russia and look out on it the south-west provinces and the fifteen governments that comprise the "Pale of Settlement." haps it may astonish him to find that its boundaries do not at any one point "march" with the confines of the empire, but are well inland-one of the laws being that no Jew may settle within a certain number of miles of the frontier. Therefore, the first step the Russian Government takes for enabling the Jew to rid 13 |