It seemed as if the Government was intent on making a one-sided compact

    with Russian Jewry: "We shall deprive you of all the elementary rights

    due to you as men and citizens; we shall rob you of the right of

    domicile and freedom of movement, and of the chance of making a

    livelihood; we shall expose you to physical and spiritual starvation,

    and shall cast you out of the community of citizens--yet you dare not

    swerve an inch from the path of your civic obligations." A lurid

    illustration of this unique exchange of services was provided by the

    manner in which military duty was imposed upon the Jews. Russian

    legislation had long since contrived to establish revolting restrictions

    for the Jews also in this domain. Jews with physical defects which

    rendered Christians unfit for military service, such as a lower stature

    and narrower chest, were nevertheless taken into the army. In the case

    of a shortage of recruits among the Jewish population even only sons,

    the sole wage-earners of their families or of their widowed mothers,

    were drafted, whereas the same category of conscripts among Christians

    were unconditionally exempt. [1] Moreover, a Jew serving in the army

    always remained a private and could never attain to an officer's rank.

    [Footnote 1: Compare p. 201.]

    As if the Government intended to make sport of the Jewish soldiers, the

    latter were deprived of their right of residence in the localities

    outside the Pale where they had been stationed, and as soon as their

    term of service had expired, were sent back into the territory of the

    Russian-Jewish ghetto. Thus, even Nicholas I, was out-Nicholased. The

    discharged Jewish soldiers who had served under the old recruiting law

    enjoyed, both for themselves and their families, the right of residence

    throughout the Empire. [1] The new military statute of 1874 [2] withdrew

    from the retired Jewish soldiers this reward for faithfully performed

    duty, and in 1885 the Senate sustained the disfranchisement of these

    Jews who had spent years of their life in the service of their

    fatherland. A Jew from Berdychev, Vilna, or Odessa, who had served five

    or six years somewhere in St. Petersburg, Moscow, or Kazan, was forced

    to leave these tabooed cities and return home on the very day on which

    he had taken off his soldier's uniform.

    [Footnote 1: See above, p. 172.]

    [Footnote 2: See p. 199 et seq.]

    Yet, despite this curious encouragement of Jewish patriotism, the

    Government had the audacity to charge the Jews continually with the

    "evasion of their military duty." That a tendency towards such evasion

    was in vogue among the Jews admits of no doubt. It would have been

    contrary to human nature if people who were subject to assaults from

    above and kicks from below, whose right of residence was limited to

    one-twentieth of the territory of their fatherland, who were robbed of

    shelter, air, and bread, and deprived of the hope to place themselves,

    even by means of military service, on an equal footing with the lowest

    Russian moujik, should have felt a profound need of sacrificing

    themselves for their country, and should not have shirked this heaviest

    of civil obligations to a larger extent than the privileged Russian

    population, in which cases of evasion were by no means infrequent. In

    reality, however, the complaints about the shortage of Jewish recruits

    were vastly exaggerated. Subsequent statistical investigations brought

    out the fact that, owing to irregular apportionment, the Government

    demanded annually from the Jews a larger quota of recruits than was

    justified by their numerical relation to the general population in the

    Pale of Settlement. On an average, the Jews furnished twelve per cent of

    the total number of recruits in the Pale, whereas the Jewish population

    of the Pale formed but eleven per cent of the total population. The

    Government further refused to consider the fact that, owing to

    inaccurate registration, the conscription lists often carried the names

    of persons who had long since died, or who had left the country to

    emigrate abroad. In fact, the annual emigration of Jews from Russia, the

    result of uninterrupted persecutions, reduced the number of young men of

    conscription age. But the Russian authorities were of the opinion that

    the Jews who remained behind should serve in the Russian army instead of

    those of their brethren who had become citizens of the free American

    Republic. The "evasion of military duty" and the annual shortage of a

    few hundred recruits, as against the many thousands of those enlisted,

    was charged as a grave crime against that very people towards which the

    Government on its part failed to fulfil even its most elementary

    obligations. Reams of paper were covered with all kinds of official

    devices to "cut short" this evasion of military duty by the Jews. On one

    beautiful April morning of 1886, the Government came out with the

    following enactment:

    The family of a Jew guilty of evading military service is liable to

    a fine of three hundred rubles ($150). The collection of the fine

    shall be decreed by the respective recruiting station and carried

    out by the police. It shall not be substituted by imprisonment in

    the case of destitute persons liable to that fine.

    In addition, a military reward was promised for the seizure of a Jew who

    had failed to present himself to the recruiting authorities.

    By virtue of this barbarous principle of collective responsibility, new

    hardships were inflicted upon the Jews of Russia. Since the law provided

    that the fine for evading military service be imposed upon the _family_

    of the culprit, the police interpreted that term "liberally," taking it

    to include parents, brothers, and near relatives. The following

    procedure gradually came into vogue. In the autumn of every year, the

    Russian conscription season, the names of the young Jews who have

    completed their twenty-first year are called out at the recruiting

    station from a prepared list. When a Jew whose name has been called has

    failed to present himself on the same day, the recruiting authorities

    issue an order on the spot imposing a fine on his family. The police

    then appear in the house of his parents to collect the sum of three

    hundred rubles. In default of cash, they attach the property of the

    paupers and have it subsequently sold at public auction. In the case of

    those who possess nothing that can be taken from them the police insist

    on their giving a signed promise not to leave the town. Their passports

    are taken from them, so that, not being able to absent themselves from

    town to earn a living, they are frequently left to starve. If the

    parents are dead or absent, the brothers and sisters of the culprit, and

    then his grandfathers and grandmothers are held answerable with their

    property.

    Thus, a large number of Jewish families were completely ruined, merely

    because one of their members had emigrated abroad, or, as was frequently

    the case, had surrendered his soul to God in his beloved fatherland

    itself, and the relatives had failed to see to it that the dead soul was

    stricken from the recruiting lists. Yet, despite all these efforts,

    there still remained a considerable number of uncollected

    fines--"arrears," as they were officially termed--to the profound regret

    of the Russian Jew-baiters, who had to look on while the victims were

    slipping unpunished from their hands.

    [S. Dubnov "History" t2]