<INCORPORATION INTO RUSSIA.
[1772: Partition of
Poland-Lithuania: At one blow there are millions of new
Jews in Russia]
Russia, which obtained the lion's share of the Jewish
population, had had no Jews under its rule since the 15th
century, when the "Judaizing" movement caused such a scare
that Jews had been totally excluded from the country. In
campaigns before 1772 the Russian armies would drown Jews
or kill them in other ways in cities they had taken. This
could not be done with the vast masses of Jews she now
acquired.
Of the other powers, both Prussia and Austria were already
dedicated to the mercantilist-absolutist system of
discriminating between individual Jews and controlling
their population. Both were now confronted by large
numbers of Jews, the majority of whom were poor, and
uncontrollable in their demographic growth.
[The difficulties to
manage the new situation with the Jews in former
Poland-Lithuania]
Empress *Catherine II was prepared to see the Jews as an
integral part of the town population in the newly acquired
districts, and she defined their legal status as such,
granting them even the right to vote for municipalities.
This almost immediately created difficulties: the Russian
autocratic government did not permit townsmen to settle in
villages; yet, many Jews were living in them. To this was
added the aim of the now politically dispossessed Polish
nobility to take over the place the Jews had filled in the
economy of the villages.
The Russian government, on its side, was troubled by the
situation, in which it found itself socially allied to the
Polish Catholic nobility, while fro a religious and
national point of view it felt obliged to promote the
interests of the Belorussian and west Ukrainian
Greek-Orthodox peasantry. Jewish merchants began to enter
eastern, originally Russian, districts, and to compete
with local merchants. the government therefore began to
consider ways and means of dealing with this new Jewish
aggregate and the problems it raised.
[The creation of the Pale
of Settlement for the Russian Jews - fixed borderlines
1830s-1917]
Czar *Alexander I met, in the committee he created for
clarifying this problem, with two opposed opinions similar
to those currently debating this question in the West.
Some members of the commission considered that Jews had
first to be granted rights so as to improve them and "make
them harmless". Others considered that the Jews had first
to be rendered harmless and to be "improved" before they
could be granted new rights.
The statute for the Jews promulgate in Russia in 1804 was
largely based on the second view. One of the main measures
to prevent their causing harm to the peasants, by inducing
them to buy alcoholic drinks and damaging them in other
ways, was the demand that Jews should leave all the
villages within four years. Another result of this trend
was the unique invention of drawing a second borderline
within the border of the state: Jews were not permitted to
settle or live in the territory east of this line. The
permitted area included regions taken over from Poland
with an addition of several more in the southeast of the
state. Thus the *Pale of Settlement of the Jews was
created in Russia (in a process of line drawing and area
redistributions that went on well into the 1830s), to remain in
existence until the Revolution of 1917.
[Expulsion of the Jews
from the villages within the Pale of Settlement -
alcohol business 1840s-1860s]
The Pale of Settlement, from its creation, was doubly
constricting. Jews could not go beyond its borders, while
within them they were driven from the villages to the
townships and cities. As the Jews were an integral part of
the village economy, and village occupations constituted
the livelihood of a considerable number of Jews, their
expulsion from the villages was not easy to implement;
many decrees and counter-decrees were issued through the
greater part of the 19th century, and still it was not
accomplished in full. Jews also left the villages because
of other reasons.
The Polish uprisings of 1830 and 1863 caused much
impoverishment among the Polish nobility; many of its most
enterprising members emigrated from the country, (col.
716)
and the Jewish village economy was thus much impaired. In
the 1840s Jews tried to carry on their former business in
alcoholic beverages through leasing the vodka monopoly
from the government. From the 1860s, however, they even
left this branch.> (col. 719)
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