XXII The Slav and the Jew — The Slav’s Envy and Jealousy of the Jew
Now that I have had a glimpse of Russia, you ask me, “Why is the Slav always so eager to do to death the Jew?” Wherefore this hatred which so constantly flames out in grievous pillage and wanton murder and blood-thirsty massacre of the children of Israel?
You say to me that in America for two centuries we have had the Jew; that we now have millions of Jews, and that they are patriotic and loyal citizens of the Republic; that Jews sit in our highest courts and render able and fair decisions, enter the senate of the United States and sit in congress, are sent to West Point and Annapolis and prove themselves devoted and efficient officers of the army and navy, are lawyers and doctors and distinguished members of the learned professions; that they display intelligence, industry and thrift, and are among the foremost citizens of the Republic, and that many of these Jews, or their fathers and mothers, have come direct from Russia. And you ask me “Why is it then that within the dominion of the Czar the Slav makes such constant war upon the Jew?”
If I were briefly to sum up my impressions of the real cause of the Slav’s hatred of the Jew, I should say, jealousy and envy, and then ask you to remember that the Slav is yet at heart a semi-Asiatic and a barbarian.
When journeying from St. Petersburg to Moscow the Russian lieutenant-colonel said to me: “In America you select real men for Presidents of whom Roosevelt is the finest type, but in France the JEWS and financiers set up their tool for President.” In a nut shell this high Russian officer expressed the feeling of his own race toward the Jew. The Jew is a Jew and the Jew is a financier. The Russians are jealous of his acquired wealth and of his ability to gather it and they hate him.
A few days later, traveling from Moscow to Warsaw, we found ourselves sitting in a dining car with an elaborate bill of fare before us and yet we were like to starve right then and there. The menu was printed in Russian; the attendants and waiters talked nothing but Russian. We knew no Russian and spoke in English, in German, in French, in Danish without avail. The servants just stood there shaking their heads and saying, “Nyett, Nyett.” (“No, No.”) We were famishing but could order no food. Just then a tall woman of courtly manner, elegantly gowned, came toward us from another table and said in perfect English that she had long lived in London, though now she resided in Russia, and then, giving our orders to the waiters, she saved us from impending famine. She afterward told me that her passport had lapsed, and that the Russian Government now refused to let her leave Russia because she was a Jewess, while at the same time, they forbade her to remain longer in Moscow, she having recently become a widow, and under the harsh laws of Russia thereby lost her right of domicile within the city. She hoped to escape to America by bribing the officials at the border.
At Vilna, I fell into acquaintance with a young Pole from Warsaw, who spoke seven languages and among them German and English fluently, although he had never been outside the dominions of the Czar. He was a strict Jew, and he expressed great surprise when I assured him that in America a Jew is treated just the same as a Christian. He said he had heard that to be indeed really the fact, and he expressed the intention of some day coming to America to see for himself. He seemed both perplexed and gratified when he found that I showed him the same consideration I did my Gentile acquaintances.
In Moscow we drove past the imposing front of the great Jewish Synagogue. The doors were barred. The structure was falling into decay. I learned that it had been closed for nigh twenty years by order of the Imperial Governor of Moscow, Prince Vladimir, uncle of the Czar; nor might any Synagogue now be opened in Moscow; nor might any Jew now worship in any edifice; nor might any outside Jew now come and live in Moscow; nor might any Jew living in Moscow come back if he had once left the limits of the city; nor might he own any land in the city, nor practice a profession; nor might he marry a Christian, nor might a Christian marry him. The Jews were also subjected to extra and particular special taxes, arbitrarily levied and collected by the autocratic government. The Jew, right here in “Holy Moscow,” soul and heart-center of the vast Russian Empire, was pillaged under the autocratic rule of the Czar, persecuted under the hand of the Holy Orthodox Church, plagued and preyed upon by a perpetually jealous and malevolent populace.
The Russian army officer sneering at Monsieur Loubet, President of France, whom he called the “tool of Jews and Financiers;” the courtly Jewish lady; the intelligent Jewish merchant of Warsaw, who was so much astonished that I should show him the courtesy of an equal, the lowly izvostchik driving me in his droschky and pointing out the closed and moldering Synagogue; each and all discovered in their divers ways the attitude of the Slav toward the Jew; and the officer revealed in his criticism of the ruler of Russia’s ally, the Republic of France, the real underlying secret cause of the Russian’s animosity and hatred of the Jew. That cause of hatred is the Jew’s ability to prosper without and in spite of the fostering care of the autocracy.
The Jew was a cultivated citizen-of-the-world when the Slavic ancestors of the Russian were unlettered nomads roving the illimitable wastes of Scythia. In the temples and libraries of ancient Egypt the Jew acquired the culture and the learning of the Pharaohs; amidst the palaces and hanging-gardens of Imperial Babylon and Nineveh the Jew learned the arts and the sciences of the Assyrian and Persian; Plato and Aristotle and the Greek philosophers recognized in the Jew a spiritual culture of exalted type, and granted him to possess a learning as encompassing as their own; the Roman, practical, and master of the then known world, paid homage to the cultivated intelligence of the Jew.
The monotonous plains of Russia were yet filled with nomadic hordes of pagan barbarians when Cordova was a paved city, its streets illuminated by night, its libraries and its University the center of the most advanced learning of the age; when the gigantic and splendid cathedrals of England and France were everywhere raising their mighty walls and spires for the perpetual glory of God and the inspiration of mankind; when the fleets of Lisbon and Genoa were discovering the farthest and most distant splendors of the Orient and Occident; when Venice was mistress of Byzantium and Florence patron of Rome; when Hebrew savants, under the benign influence of Saracen rule, were among the most learned and renowned leaders of Moslem science; when the Israelites of Italy and France were intermarried among the proudest of the nobility and were even counselors of Kings; when Hebrew learning and Hebrew wealth gave added momentum to the impulse of the Renaissance. While during the centuries of the world’s reawakening, even as during the preceding centuries of the Crusades, just as throughout the long duration of the dominion of Rome and of the Eastern Empire, the Jew was ever recognized for his learning, culture and wealth.
When St. Cyril and his Byzantine monks, in the seventh century, gave Greek Christianity to the Russian Pagan, the Russian yet remained content with outward forms and ceremonies. He continued pagan at heart and persevered in worshiping the ancient ghosts and spirits, even as in many parts of Russia he does to-day. He put on a Christian coat, but he kept his pagan hide; and the Russian Orthodox Christian has always remained a semi-pagan.
The great mass of the Russian people were serfs sold with the land up to 1860, when Alexander II gave them nominal freedom, but a freedom without lands and without schools; a so-called freedom which has left the individual peasant, the mujik, as landless, as bitterly poor, as benightedly ignorant to-day as he was a thousand years ago; nor does the autocratic-bureaucracy of the Czar give him hope of a better day. I journeyed through some of the richest farming lands in Russia, and the farmers, the mujiks, whom I saw tilling the soil, plowing and digging in the fields, were so poor that their feet were wrapped in plaited straw, too impoverished to afford the luxury of a leathern boot! The government absorbs all the profits of the crops in payment for these lands and in taxes, as return for having made the mujiks nominal owners of the soil and emancipating them from serfdom.
On the other hand, the nobles are forbidden by caste spirit and tradition to enter into any career except the service of the state. The younger nobles and ruling breeds among the Russian people are all sucked into the employ of the state by the maelstrom of bureaucracy. The youths of the nobility and gentry, and the more or less educated classes, must enter the navy, the army, and the service of the state. A government job for life is their only hope. They are not permitted to make money for themselves independently; they can only make money for the government of the Czar and for themselves through “Graft.”
The government wishes to do everything in Russia. It deliberately invades the spheres of private enterprise; it deliberately seeks all the profit; it deliberately destroys the ambition and the power of the person; it deliberately annihilates and stifles individual initiative. In Russia, the government runs all the railroads, most of the mines, many of the iron mills. It raises cotton; it raises wheat; it farms and it manufactures. It buys and sells. It runs all the telegraphs and telephones and express business. It opens all private letters and reads all the printed books and newspapers. It permits no letter to go through the mails, nor book nor newspaper to be read, which it deems to express sentiments inimical to the supremacy of the autocracy. I was threatened with imprisonment in Russia for snapping a kodak without government permit. I was under police and military supervision and escort all the time I traveled in Russia, even short as it was. Nor did I dare to send a letter to America from Russia, but wrote my thoughts with locked doors, and mailed my writings only when safe beyond the eye of the Russian government spy.
Thus we find that, on the one hand, the peasantry are crushed, thrust down and pitilessly held in ignorance and superstition and bitter poverty; on the other hand, all the best ability and brains of the governing classes are commandeered into the army, or navy, or life-long government service, and with meager salaries and small pay. The big grafts, the soft snaps, the juicy chances must all belong to the government and flow into the coffers of the Czar to keep fat and easy the Imperial family and the swarms of parasitic tid-bit hunters who leech them.
But even in autocratic Russia, the grasping clutch of autocracy cannot hold up all the avenues of commerce, however far-reaching its embrace may be. Hence, in those lines of enterprise, not absorbed and appropriated by the government, there is left open a clear path to whosoever may have the acumen to seize the opportunity. Here is the chance of the Jew. Endowed with a keen and subtle intellect, educated by his own masters often to the highest training of the intelligence and disciplined by the hardships of persecution, he is at once an overmatch for the ignorant, brutal, poverty-haunted mujik, and fully the equal of the best breeds of governing Slavs. Those intellects which are the equals of his own are not in competition with him. The ablest of the Slavs are earning a small salary in the army, in the navy, or as government officials; making what they can for themselves by more or less open graft, it is true, but without the incentive of other personal gain. So the Jew gets on in Russia. This progress is in spite of the jealousy and the hatred and the pillaging hand of the envious Slav.
There is, here and there, considerable wealth among many of the Jews in Russia. This is not true of all the Jews. Most of the Jews are poor, frightfully poor, made and kept so by the laws; but there is wealth among some of the Jews. The few wealthy Jews do not always keep these riches within the dominions of the Czar. The Russians complain that the rich Jews, while making their money in Russia, yet lay it up in the banks of Berlin, of Vienna, of Paris and particularly of London. When a Russian Governor wishes to squeeze a little extra pocket money out of the Jews of his district, his city, his province, he cannot always lay hands on their money hoards. Sometimes, then, he lets the street urchins plague them a little; the squeezed and squalid peasant is allowed to vent his envy of their wealth, even to knocking a Jew down; now and then, these meanly-minded boys, these pinch-bellied peasants get out of hand and, stung by their blood lust, too hastily massacre more Jews than the Governor intended. This is about the size of the job that Governor Von Raaben found to his credit in Kischineff. The poor Jews suffered for the prosperity of their rich brethren. The embittered and down-crushed mujik, galled and soured by reason of his own hapless and seemingly hopeless condition, vented his spleen at the first handy object, and the Jew was handier, though not more hated, than the uniformed official of the governing autocracy.
The Russian, as an individual, is of a kindly nature. He is good to his wife, good to his children, good to his beasts. He has none of the Roman-Spanish pitilessness to dumb creatures. But the Russian, after all, is an Asiatic. The old saying, “Scratch a Russian and you’ll find a Tartar,” is as true to-day as when the Cossacks of Catherine II impaled and crucified men and women and children of the fleeing Mongol horde, when these simply sought to migrate beyond the hectoring reach of Russian rule.
No bloodier chapter mars the annals of history than that of the Russian slaughter of nigh the entire Tekke Turkoman race in her warfare of 1881 on the shores of the Caspian, at Geok Tepe, when seven thousand women and children were stricken down in cold blood as they fled from Kuropatkin’s ruthless Cossacks.
Nor is the world done shuddering yet at the atrocious barbarities under General Gribski, Governor of Blagoveschensk, who commanded the deliberate drowning of the Chinese inhabitants of that city but a few years ago, in 1898, and in a season of prevailing peace, drove them before the knouts and bayonets of his Cossacks into the hopeless waters of the river Amoor by unnumbered thousands, old men and women and little children, so that for many weeks, nay months, the great river was so choked with the swollen bodies of the dead that navigation was at a standstill.
No Roman sack and pillage of a conquered city, not even the taking and wreck of Jerusalem by Titus and his legions, equals in horror and cold blood these late Russian slaughters; not even the fire and sword of Attila and his avenging Huns wrought such woe and terror as have been wrought in these recent years by the servants of the Czar; nor are the tormented souls of Alva and his Spanish veterans more deeply marked with blood-soaked scars than is the Russian autocracy of to-day; nor mediaeval, nor modern times, nor pagan, nor Moslem warfare, have known so monstrous a series of godless massacres of helpless humankind as those now standing to the credit of the Russian autocracy during the last twenty-five years.
The crime of Kischineff is no more heinous than have been the slaughters of Geok Tepe, Blagoveschensk and a thousand lesser human killings, nor more heart-sickening than were those awful visitations of Slavic blood-lust upon creatures defenseless, helpless, abjectly terror-struck. It is only that it was committed in a season of profound peace, against a peaceful people, and at a time when all the world had the leisure to hear the dying wails of the hapless women and helpless children raped and ravished and torn asunder in the open day.
Notwithstanding these crimes which mar the pages of recent Russian history, none would be more astonished than the Russian himself, if he were made aware of the world-wide condemnation these crimes provoke. He would protest against so harsh an estimate of Russian conquest; at most, when confronted with the facts, he would shrug his shoulders and urge that the responsibility lies not upon Holy Russia, but upon those who oppose her destiny to conquer and absorb. The thoughtful Russian will declare that after all it is no more than the inevitable struggle of the survival of the fittest, and demonstrate that there are no feuds of race, other than the universal hatred of the Jew, within the dominions of the Czar.
From the Russian viewpoint these arguments are not unreasonable; the vast military establishment upon which rests the autocracy, necessitates foreign wars with weaker peoples, if for no other reason than to keep a busied soldiery from thinking too much upon grievances at home; through commercial expansion in Asia, won by bayonet and sword, the autocracy has sought to secure compensation for the suppression of commercial opportunity at home!
The problems of Russia are, after all, economic rather than racial, and it is up to Russia to solve these in accordance with the lessons and example of the enlightened nations of the west; let the nobility and educated classes, who are now sucked into and absorbed by the bureaucracy, take full part in the commercial and industrial life of the empire and receive full reward for the exercise of their energy, intelligence and skill; let them lift from the mujik the crushing weight of the Imperial taxes, divide with him the almost illimitable acreage of the Imperial domain; and leave to him his fair share of the earnings won by his sweat and toil, and there will be no more Geok Tepes, Blagoveschensks, nor Kischineffs, nor will there be longer hatred of the Jew.