A WRITER in Chambers’s Journal for June, treating of this subject, gives some notable particulars. He finds that the Jewish race, taken as a whole, is at once the richest, the cleverest, and the most miserable on the face of the civilised earth. The great business houses, the banks, railways, and the newspapers of Austria and Hungary are, in the main, controlled by them. In those countries and in Russia the success of the Jews in managing money, and their frequent appearance as grinding and extortionate creditors, keep the envy and hatred of the Gentiles at a red heat, and provoke outrages and deeds of revenge.
The majority of living Jews are subjects of the Russian Emperor. Some six millions of them are pent up in the sixteen western provinces of Russia and the ten provinces of Poland. Rapid increase and low death-rate of the “Chosen People” impale their Russian rulers on the horns of a dilemma. Massacre is no longer available as an expedient for thinning out the superfluous Hebrew subjects of the Tsar. Pestilence possesses no terrors for the Jew; long residence in the slums of Europe has rendered his constitution immune against the terrors of smallpox or typhoid or other fever. If pestilence or massacre is not within the region of practical Russian politics, the ministry of which Monsieur Pobedonostzeff is the responsible spokesman is equally unable to let the Children of Israel go and to give them chances similar to those of the orthodox inhabitants of Russia.
One dire consequence of this overcrowding and constant multiplication of the inhabitants of Russian Jewry is the spiritual, moral, and physical degeneration of its inhabitants. The continual misery, the absence of hope, the constant assertion of their inferiority by the ruling authority, have modified the original characteristics of the majority of the Russian Jews. They are not permitted to be gardeners, to hold land, to live in the country, or to take part in agriculture; and they are debarred from the healthy means of life open to the rest of their fellow-subjects. The consequence is that, in order to provide bread for his family—the Jew marries early as a matter of course—many of them are compelled to resort to dishonesty in order to escape starvation.
Probably the five and three-quarters or six million Jews under the rule of the Tsar form the unhappiest community on the face of the earth. Intellectually endowed far beyond the average European, they (except a small fraction of them) are deprived of the means of education, and their spirits are depressed by the compulsory restrictions arbitrarily imposed upon them. What wonder, therefore, that a considerable number of the Russian Jews are driven by the errors of the Russian government to exploit vice, since they are not permitted to develop industry? If many Russian Jews live by preying on the weakness and passion of others, the reason is neither that they have a double dose of original sin, nor that parasitism is an indelible characteristic of the race, but that the poor Jew is compelled by the government of Russia to make a choice between starving and wrong-doing.
To keep the Jew from contact with the main body of the Russian people is, accordingly, an integral part of Russian policy. He is not allowed to settle in Siberia, and, unless a drastic change be made in the administration and control of Jewish subjects of the Tsar, all the raw materials for a bloody tragedy are to be found within the Russian pale.