Read Ebook: Jewish Immigration to the United States from 1881 to 1910 Studies in History Economics and Public Law Vol. LIX No. 4 1914 by Joseph Samuel

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The Russian peasant still practices a primitive system of agriculture. His method of extensive cultivation, the three-field system in vogue, his primitive implements, his domestic economy of half a century ago, with its home production for home consumption, which is still maintained in many parts of Russia to this day--all these present conditions not far removed from those of the middle ages of Western Europe.

The existence to our day of this almost primitive economy finds its explanation in the fact that serfdom existed in Russia, in all its unmitigated cruelty, until comparatively recent times. Its abolition through the Emancipation Act of Alexander II--antedating our own Emancipation Proclamation by a few years--struck off the chains that bound twenty millions of peasants to the soil. The emancipation, however, was not complete. The land the peasants received was insufficient for their needs. Other conditions co-operated in the course of time with this primary one, to create a situation of chronic starvation for the great mass of the Russian peasants. Forced by the government to pay heavy taxes, in addition to redemption dues for the land, which they paid until recently, and receiving little help from either government or the nobility for the improvement of their position, they are virtually exploited almost as completely as before the emancipation.

Thus, though freed in person, the peasants are to a great extent bound by economic ties to their former masters, the nobles. These two social-economic classes maintain towards each other practically the same relative position held by them before the emancipation. The manor still controls the hut.

The former servile relations have persisted psychologically as well. The Russian peasant is still largely a serf in his mentality, in his feeling of dependence, in his inertia and lack of individual enterprise, and, above all, in the smallness of his demands upon life. This fact permeates, as it serves to explain, many aspects of contemporary Russian life.

The industrial and commercial stage of Russian economy began with the emancipation, which set free a great supply of labor. The changes that have taken place have nevertheless not obliterated many of the landmarks of the feudal, pre-reformation period. The economic activities of the last half-century present a curious juxtaposition of old and new, medieval and modern. Cottage and village industries but little removed from the natural economy of the earlier period exist by the side of great factories and industrial establishments employing thousands of workmen. Fairs and markets still play a large part in supplying the needs of the peasants, rapidly as they are being supplanted by the commercial activities of the towns. The industrial laborers, recruited mainly from the country, retain largely their peasant interests, relations and characteristics. The payment of wages in kind, which is still in vogue in many parts, and the right of inflicting corporal punishment retained by the employers, give evidence of the strong impress of the servile conditions of the past.

Vast changes have nevertheless taken place since the emancipation. Capitalism has made rapid, if uneven, progress. Under the fostering care of the government, industry and commerce have made immense strides. The factory system has taken firm root and has been developing a specialized class of industrial laborers. Great industrial centers have sprung up; towns have grown rapidly. The middle class, hitherto insignificant, has increased in number, wealth and influence. Among the peasants as well, freedom has given birth to the spirit of individualism. The differentiation of the peasantry into wealthier peasants and landless agricultural laborers, the great mass of the peasantry occupying the middle ground, and the gradual dissolution of the two great forces of Russian agricultural life--the patriarchal family and the village community--have been the most important results.

Russia is clearly in a state of transition from the agricultural or medieval to the industrial and commercial or modern economic life. This transformation of the economic structure is being effected under great difficulties and the strong opposition of the ruling classes, whose privileges are threatened by the new order of things.

The Russian social and political order reflects the medieval background which formed the setting for her entrance upon the modern stage. The class distinctions, naturally obtaining, are hardened into rigidity by the law, which divides Russian society into a hierarchy of five classes or orders--the nobles, the clergy, the merchants, the townsmen and the peasants--each with separate legal status, rights and obligations.

The individual is thus not an independent unit, as in the legal codes of Western Europe or the United States. Accompanying the legal stratification there is an exceedingly strong, almost caste-like, sense of difference between the members of the different groups.

This emphasis on the person is characteristic of the medieval social order. In Russia it finds additional expression in the control of individual movement by means of the passport, without which document a Russian may be said to have no legal existence.

Even more striking is the position of the Russian Church, as well as the religio-national conception which dominates the Russian mind and according to which orthodoxy and nationality are regarded as one. The Russian Orthodox is the only true Russian; all others are foreigners. In the alliance of church and state--which in Russia reaches a degree of strength not attained in any other European state--in the complete control exercised by the Church over the lives of the faithful and the clergy, in secular as in religious matters, in its intolerant attitude towards other creeds and its unceasing attempts to suppress them--it presents characteristics strongly reminiscent of the position of the medieval church in Western Europe.

The one great political fact of Russia has been the autocracy. The degree of control which the autocratic Czars exercised unopposed over their subjects marks an important difference between the political development of Russia and that of the countries of Western Europe. At an early period the Czars had transformed the nobility into a body of state officials, thus at a blow depriving them of any real powers, apart from the will of the Crown, and making them serve the interests of the state. In this way the nobles, or the landed aristocracy, became the main source from which the members of the bureaucracy were recruited. The lack of a middle class of any real size and influence, which could play a part in the demand for political rights, explains in a measure the strength of the autocratic powers. The autocracy in turn has been largely dependent upon its servant, the bureaucracy. To such an extent has the Russian government been the expression of the will and interests of this all-powerful body as to justify Leroy-Beaulieu's designation of Russia as the "Bureaucratic State".

Thus the autocracy, the nobility-bureaucracy and the church have been the dominating forces in the economic, social and political life of Russia.

In the light of this analysis, the political struggles that have been so conspicuous a feature of Russian life during the last half of the 19th century become an accompaniment as well as an expression of the progressive development of Russia towards modern economic, social and political institutions.

Russian liberalism,--largely revolutionary because of the denial of even elementary rights, such as the freedom of person, of speech, of the press and of meeting,--rights which were secured to Englishmen through the Magna Charta--has had the serious task not only of securing these rights but at the same time of creating in Russia the conditions of modern civilization. For the twenty years in which its spirit ruled, during the reign of Alexander II, the reforms begun under its influence amounted to a veritable revolution. The economic, social, political and juridical reforms of this epoch generated new forces and began the modernization of Russia. These reforms encountered the formidable opposition of the nobility and the church and finally of the autocracy, when the latter felt that its position was gradually being undermined, especially by the demand for a constitution. With the assassination of Alexander II, the liberal era was brought to a close, and a reaction was ushered in which has lasted to our day.

Summarizing his impressions of Russian life and institutions obtained while serving as Ambassador to Russia, Andrew D. White remarked: "During two centuries Russia has been coming slowly out of the middle ages--indeed, out of perhaps the most cruel phases of medieval life." One of the phases of this process has been the bitter struggle between the feudal and the modern forces that has occupied Russia for the last third of a century.

In Roumania, in spite of a liberal constitution modeled upon the Belgian, granting all rights enjoyed by citizens of a free state, the underlying economic, social and, in a measure, political conditions point to a state of things little removed from the medieval forms of life. The main social-economic classes are the large landed proprietors, composed chiefly of the old nobility or boyars, and the peasants, who were formerly serfs. In the hands of the former are concentrated the greater part of the land. Five thousand large landed proprietors together owned nearly half of the cultivable land. Nearly a million of peasants, on the other hand, comprising with their dependents a great majority of the population, together owned a little over two-fifths of the cultivable land.

This situation is an inheritance from the servile system which existed in Roumania until 1864, when it was legally abolished. The freedom granted to the peasants was, however, more formal than real. The land given them being insufficient for their needs, and pasture land especially having been denied them, they were as a rule compelled to lease land or pasture right from their former masters at ruinous rates, often paying by labor on their former masters' estates. Thus the essential feudal services were in the main continued, especially as the lease and labor contracts, generally drawn up in the interests of the landed proprietor, were often usurious and extremely oppressive. In twenty years there was little change from the previous condition of serfdom, so that a law was necessary, in 1882, to permit the peasants to work at least two days during the week on their own land.

Since this period there has been practically little change in this essentially feudal relation of the peasantry to the landed proprietors. As the owners of the great estates are a ruling power in the political life of the country, the greater part of peasants being disqualified from voting through property and educational requirements, the former have been enabled to keep the peasantry in this condition of semi-servitude. The result is a state of ignorance, misery and degradation on the part of the peasantry that is difficult to parallel in another European country. That the peasants are not entirely passive under their wrongs is shown in the repeated uprisings against their masters and in the two great social revolutions of 1888 and 1907, both of which were put down by military force.

Roumania's advent into industry and commerce may be dated from the eighties of the last century, and was initiated by the industrial law of 1887, which sought to create a national industry by means of subsidies, land grants and other favors to undertakers of large industrial enterprises. Since then the growth has been sufficiently rapid to place Roumania as the industrial and commercial leader of the Balkan States. Relatively, however, it is still very backward. Only 14 per cent of the population is urban. The industrial laborers are estimated at no more than 40,000. There are only a few cities. Only the largest--Bucarest--has above 100,000 inhabitants, three other cities have between fifty and seventy-five thousand inhabitants. The chief industrial establishments, such as saw mills, flour mills and distilleries, are concerned mainly in the working up of the raw materials produced in the country. Nevertheless, industrial progress has made for the growth of a small but influential middle class, which divides the control of affairs with the large landed proprietors. Its influence can be traced in the electoral law, which gives the urban classes, constituting the backbone of the liberal party, a majority in the Chamber of Deputies.

Industrially and commercially, Austria, far more than Hungary, has indeed made really remarkable progress. Yet in this respect the greatest contrast exists between the various Austrian provinces. Certain of these--Galicia and Bukowina, for instance--are not only the most backward in these pursuits, but their agricultural population is even relatively increasing. Even in the industrially advanced provinces, such as Lower Austria and Bohemia, the transitional nature of the industrial life is evident in the unspecialized character of a larger portion of the town laborers, many of whom are peasants temporarily employed in factories and mines.

The transition to modern economic and social conditions is, nevertheless, well advanced. This is seen in a decrease of the agricultural classes and an increase of the industrial and commercial classes in the thirty years from 1869 to 1900. Another sign is the fairly strong differentiation of the economic-social classes, in both the agricultural and the industrial groups, which has advanced quite rapidly. The middle class, while neither as large nor as influential as in the countries of Western Europe, has played an important r?le towards hastening this transition.

Politically, the Dual Monarchy occupies a middle ground between absolutist Russia and constitutional England. The court, the nobility and the Roman Church with its strong aristocratic leanings, represent the dominant power in Austria. The economic and social changes of the transitional period have been accompanied by politico-economic struggles which have played a vital part and have cut through and across the racial, national and religious conflicts of this much-distracted conglomeration of peoples. Amid the confusion of parties, with their complexity of programs, may be distinguished the German-Austrian liberals, representatives of the middle class or industrialists, whose historic mission was to create a modern state in Austria, and who carried out, in large measure, their program of constitutionalism, economic freedom and the secular state. Against them were arrayed the powerful forces of the agrarian party or the landed aristocracy--the upholders of the feudal economic-social order of privilege and class distinction, the clericals--the upholders of the idea of the Christian State--and the representatives of the lower middle class, composed chiefly of petty artisans and traders, whose ideal was the medieval industrial organization, largely co-operative and regulated, as opposed to the individualistic and competitive system of the modern era, with its great concentration of wealth, capital and power in the hands of the middle class. That the present structure of Austria is so much of a compromise and crosspatch between modern and medieval economic, social and political forms, and contains so much that is essentially incongruous, is due largely to the successful struggle which the chief parties of the medieval order--the feudal-clericals--the party of the upper classes, and the Christian Socialists--the party of the lower classes--have waged against the growing constitutionalization, industrialization and secularization of Austria--in short, against the transformation of Austria into a modern state.

This brief review of the economic and social conditions in Russia, Roumania and Austria-Hungary has shown that, broadly speaking, these countries present points of similarity in their situation and their recent movement. In all of these countries, economic and social conditions closely resembling those that obtained in the countries of Western Europe several centuries ago were found until comparatively recent times. The abolition of serfdom in Russia and in Roumania, and of feudal dues in Austria-Hungary, paved the way for the entrance of these states into modern European civilization. The succeeding period has been marked by a rapid transition from the old domestic economy to a modern exchange economy, through the growth of industry and commerce. The medieval conditions of the earlier period have nevertheless not been entirely obliterated. They exist, in Russia, in the privileges and powers of the nobility, in the inferior status and oppressed condition of the peasantry, in the strong class distinctions, in the restraints upon economic activity and upon movement. Though in smaller measure, the same conditions are found in Austria-Hungary, especially in Galicia. In Roumania, so far as the peasantry is concerned, the pre-emancipation conditions remain practically, if not legally, in force. Owing to the increase of population, the minute subdivision of the estates of the peasants, the backwardness of their agricultural methods, and their over-taxation, the position of the peasants has been rendered precarious. Revolutionary uprisings directed chiefly against the landed proprietors have been a recurring expression of their discontent.

An important consequence has been the rapid evolution of the industrial and commercial, or the middle class. The growth of the middle class has been accompanied by a struggle in each of these countries between the privileged classes of the feudal state and the middle class, including in the latter the educated classes and the industrial workers of the towns.

It is in this middle class that the Jews are chiefly to be found. Owing to this fact, as well as through the action of historical conditions, the Jews occupy an exceptional position in the economic activities and the social life of each of the countries of Eastern Europe. A survey of their economic and social position in each country will serve to clarify the last thirty years of their history in Eastern Europe and to give some of the causes underlying their vast movement from these countries to Western Europe and particularly to the United States.

FOOTNOTES:

An interesting statement of the principles of the Slavophiles may be obtained from Simkhovitch .

Owing to the similarity of conditions in Russia and Roumania, particularly as regards the Jews, Roumania has been considered, practically throughout, immediately after Russia.

THE JEWS IN EASTERN EUROPE: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL POSITION

The economic and social life of the Jews in Eastern Europe has moved along the familiar channels of commerce, industry and urban life characteristic of the Jews in all countries during the middle ages. An examination of the economic position and function and the principal social characteristics of the Jews reveals the fact that they play an important part in each of these countries. This we shall see by tracing their principal economic activities and some significant phases of their social life.

A review of the occupations of the Jews in the Russian Empire shows that those engaged in the manufacturing and mechanical pursuits constituted 39 per cent of the total Jewish population gainfully employed. This was the largest occupational group. Commerce engaged 32 per cent. Together the industrial and commercial classes comprised seven-tenths of all Jews engaged in gainful occupations. On the other hand, only 3 per cent were employed in agricultural pursuits.

It is in comparison with the occupations of the non-Jewish population in Russia that the significance of this distribution becomes evident. Of the non-Jews in Russia, agricultural pursuits engaged 61 per cent, manufacturing and mechanical pursuits 15 per cent, and commerce only 3 per cent. The non-Jews engaged in industry and commerce thus constituted somewhat less than one-fifth of the total non-Jewish population gainfully employed. More than twice as many Jews, relatively, as non-Jews were engaged in industrial pursuits and practically twelve times as many Jews as non-Jews in commercial pursuits.

This difference of occupational grouping makes itself felt in the participation of the Jews in the principal occupational groups. Of the total Russian population gainfully employed, the Jews were 5 per cent. They constituted, however, 11 per cent of all engaged in industry, and 36 per cent of all engaged in commerce. Thus, in the Russian Empire the Jews formed a considerable proportion of the commercial classes and a large proportion of those engaged in industrial pursuits.

Properly to gauge the economic function of the Jews in Russia, comparison should be made not with the population of the Russian Empire but rather with that of the Pale of Settlement, where nearly 95 per cent of the Jews live. There the contrast was even stronger. Of the Jews, 70 per cent were employed in industry and commerce as compared with 13 per cent on the part of the non-Jews. Though the Jews are only 12 per cent of the total working population of the Pale, they formed 32 per cent of all engaged in industry and 77 per cent of all engaged in commerce. This clearly shows that the Jews constituted the commercial classes and a significant part of the industrial classes of the Pale. In other words, what is true of the place of the Jews in the occupational distribution of all Russia is still more true of the Pale. The Jews are preponderatingly industrial and commercial, in striking contrast to the rest of the population, which is preponderatingly agricultural.

What is the nature of their activities and their function in the industrial and commercial life of Russia? The great majority of Jews engaged in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits are artisans. In the present relatively backward stage of Russian industrial development these are chiefly handicraftsmen, who mainly supply the needs of local consumers. These artisans, who number more than half a million, support nearly one-third of the Jewish population.

The most important industry is the manufacture of clothing and wearing apparel, which employed more than one-third of the Jewish working population and supported more than one-seventh of the total Jewish population. It is in effect a Jewish industry: practically all the tailors and shoemakers in the Pale are Jews. They predominate as well in the preparation of food products, in the building trades, in the metal, wood and tobacco industries. Hampered by legal restrictions, lack of technical education, and lack of capital, they nevertheless have become an essential part of the economic life of the Pale, supplying the needs for industrial products not only of the Jews but of the entire Pale, and, especially of the peasants.

In the development of large-scale industry, the Jews have taken a smaller part than the Germans or foreigners, owing to the conditions above referred to. Yet, in 1898, in the fifteen provinces of the Pale, more than one-third of the factories were in Jewish hands. Jewish factory workers were estimated at one-fifth of all the factory workers in the Pale.

Trade and commerce engage Jews chiefly, supporting nearly two-thirds of the total Jewish population.

In other branches of commerce, the Jews are almost as strongly represented. As sellers to the village and city populations, they carry on the largest part of the retail trade of the Pale. The great majority of the merchants, however, are petty traders or store-keepers. The wholesale merchants enrolled in the guilds, on the other hand, constitute a large proportion of all the guild merchants.

Thus, through their activity as petty artisans, traders and merchants, the Jews preponderate in the industrial and commercial life of the Pale. As manufacturers and wholesale merchants they play a less important but nevertheless significant part in all Russia.

In general the Jewish merchants are quite strongly distinguished from the Russian merchants in their employment of the competitive principles and methods common to the commercial operations of Western Europe and the United States. Their principle of a quick turnover with a small profit, and their use of credit, are not in vogue among the Russian merchants who operate on the basis of customary prices and long credits.

In their social characteristics as well, the Jews are strongly set off from the rest of the population. The Jews are essentially urban, the non-Jews are overwhelmingly rural. In all Russia, 51 per cent of the Jews lived in incorporated towns, as against only 12 per cent of the non-Jews. Though the Jews constituted 4 per cent of the total population, they constituted 16 per cent of the town population. In the Pale, where they constituted 12 per cent of the total population, they comprised 38 per cent of the urban population. Their concentration in the cities of the Pale is striking. In nine out of the fifteen provinces of the Pale, they constituted a majority of the urban population. In twenty-four towns, they were from two-fifths to seven-tenths of the population. In the important cities of Warsaw and Odessa they were one-third of the population.

The urban and occupational distribution of the Jews places them higher than the great majority of the non-Jews among the social classes into which the Russian people are legally divided. Townsmen are of a higher rank than peasants. Nearly 95 per cent of the Jews belong to this category and only 7 per cent of the Russians. The vast majority of the Russians--86 per cent--are peasants. Only 4 per cent of the Jews are of this class. Again, 2 per cent of the Jews are merchants, as against only .2 per cent of the Russians. Thus in these two classes of townsmen and merchants there were twelve times as many Jews, relatively, as Russians.

The higher cultural standing of the Jews may be partly measured by the relative literacy of the Jews and of the total population. According to the census of 1897, in the Jewish population ten years of age or over there were relatively one and a half times as many literates as in the total population of the corresponding group. In each of the age-groups there were relatively more literates among the Jews than among the total population. In the highest age-group, that of sixty years of age and over, the Jews had relatively more literates than any of the age-groups of the total population, indicating that the educational standing of the Jews half a century ago was higher than that of the Russian population of to-day.

The fact that the Jews dwell chiefly in towns has considerably to do with their higher educational standing. If the statistics of relative literacy of the Jewish and the non-Jewish population in the towns were obtainable, the chances are strong that they would not show a much higher rate of literacy on the part of the Jews. At the same time the difficulties that are put in the way of Jewish attendance in the elementary schools must be regarded as a considerable factor in explaining this possibility.

The participation of the Jews in the liberal professions, which implies the possession of a higher education, is also very large, even with the great obstacles that have been placed in the way of the entrance of the Jews into the universities, into the liberal professions and the state service. Relatively seven times as many Jews as Russians are found in the liberal professions.

The economic activities of the Jews in Roumanian industry and commerce closely resemble those of their Russian brethren. The large part taken by the Jews in Roumanian commerce may be gathered from the fact that, in 1904, one-fifth of those who paid the merchant-license tax were Jews. Equally great is their participation in large-scale industry, where, as an inquiry in 1901-2 shows, nearly one-fifth of the large industries were conducted by Jewish entrepreneurs. In some of the most important ones--the glass industry, the clothing industry, the wood and furniture industry and the textile industry--from one-fourth to one-half of the total number of entrepreneurs were Jews.

The latest inquiry--that of 1908--shows that the Jews were one-fifth of all inscribed in the corporations as artisans. They formed more than one-fourth of the master-workmen and nearly one-sixth of the laborers. In the five principal industries Jewish master-workmen formed from nearly one-tenth to nearly one-half. In the following trades Jews formed between one-fourth and nearly two-thirds of the entire workers: watchmakers, tinners, modistes, tailors, glazers, housepainters, coopers and bookbinders. In all the garment industries nearly one-third of the workers were Jews. The principal trades of the Jews, in which two-thirds of the Jewish industrial workers were found, were, in order: tailors, shoemakers, tinners, joiners and planers, and bakers. The Jews in Roumania were thus more strongly concentrated in industry and less in commerce than their Russian brethren.

As masters and workmen they play a part in Roumanian large-scale and small-scale industry nearly four and a half times as large as their proportion in the total population. Their participation in commerce is equally large.

The Jews in Roumania present the same social characteristics, relatively to the surrounding population, as the Jews in Russia. The Jews were overwhelmingly concentrated in the towns. 80 per cent of the Jews dwelt in the towns; 84 per cent of the non-Jews dwelt in the villages. Of the population in the department-capitals the Jews constituted one-fifth. Of the population of the other towns they constituted more than one-tenth. In some of the department-capitals, notably Jassi, the Jews were a majority of the total population. In six other department-capitals they constituted from one-fourth to one-half of the population.

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