Jews in the Russian Empire
(Part 4 of 8)
Renewed oppression – the “May Laws”
The events following the murder of Alexander II in 1881 dash all hopes the Jews might have had for further improvement of their situation. The assassination, by a small group of revolutionaries, takes place in an atmosphere of great social unrest, and the beleaguered regime falls back on a well-tried recipe: blaming the Jews.
Beginning in Elizabetgrad, a wave of pogroms spreads throughout the southwestern regions, more than 200 in 1881 alone. The authorities condone them through their inaction and indifference, sometimes even showing sympathy for the pogromists. An official investigation confirms: the plunderers were convinced that the attacks were sanctioned by the Czar himself. The same investigation blames "Jewish exploitation" as the cause for the pogroms.
At your left, the pogroms of the 1880s generated a wave of Jewish migration that continued for decades. These refugees, photographed in the port of Liverpool in May 1882, were among the first of the estimated 2 million Jews who left Russia between 1881 and 1914, mostly for the United States.
At your right, group of Jewish soldiers in Troitskossovsk in 1887. Jewish soldiers were not allowed to spend their leave in places where they were stationed but had to return to the Pale of Settlement.
With the so-called "Temporary
Laws" of May 1882 a new period of anti-Jewish discrimination and severe
persecution begins. It lasts until 1917. The area of the Pale of Settlement
is reduced by 10 percent. Jews are once more prohibited from living in villages,
to buy or rent property outside their prescribed residences, denied jobs in
the civil service and forbidden to trade on Sundays and Christian holidays.
The anti-Semitic campaigns intensify after Alexander III and his family miraculously
survive a railway accident in 1888. The head of the Holy Synod and the Czar's
spiritual adviser, K. Pobedonostsev, interprets this as a "sign from above"
to turn away from the path of reform.
In all major cities and ports of Europe Jewish migrants from Russia became a familiar sight. This scene depicts the arrival of a group of Russian Jews at the Gare de Lyon, Paris, in 1892. Le Petit Journal, Paris, 1892.
In 1887, the number of Jewish students entering secondary schools in the Pale is restricted to 10 percent. As in some towns Jews constitute 50 to 70 percent of the population, many high school classes remain half empty. In 1891 a degree is passed that the Jews of Moscow, who had settled in the city since 1865, are to be expelled. Within a few months about 20,000 people are forced to give up their homes and livelihood and deported to the already overcrowded Pale.
Alexander III dies in 1894 during a holiday in Yalta, some weeks after he had ordered the Jews from that city expelled as a precautionary measure.