A N T I-S E M I T I S M and although at the general election of 1898 it managed still to return twelve members to the Reichstag, it had ceased to be regarded as a serious element in politics. The causes of the decline of German anti-Semitism are not difficult to determine. While it remained a theory of nationality and a fad of the metaphysicians, it made considerable noise in the world, but without exercising much practical influence. When it attempted to play an active part in politics it became submerged by the ignorant and superstitious voters, who could not understand its scientific justification, but who were quite ready to declaim and riot against the Jew bogey. It thus became a sort of Jacquerie which, being exploited by unscrupulous demagogues, soon alienated all its respectable elements. Its moments of real importance were due not to inherent strength but to the uses made of it by other political parties for their own purposes. These coalitions are no longer possible, not only because anti-Semitism has ceased to be respectable, but because, in face of the growing strength of Democratic Socialism, all supporters of the present organization of society have found it necessary to sink their differences. The new social struggle has eclipsed the racial theory of nationality. The Social Democrat is now the enemy, and the new reaction counts on the support of the rich Jews and the strongly individualist Jewish middle class to assist it in preserving the existing social structure. More serious have been the effects of German antiSemitic teachings on the political and social life of the countries adjacent to the empire—Russia, Austria, and France. In Russia these effects were first seriously felt owing to the fury of autocratic reaction to which the tragic death of the Tsar Alexander II. gave rise. This, however, like the Strousberg Krach in Germany, was only the proximate cause of the outbreak. There were other elements which had created a milieu peculiarly favourable to the of the German craze. was In Russia. ^ £rsttransplantation p]ace the mediaeval anti-Semitism still an integral part of the polity of the empire. The Jews were cooped up in one huge ghetto in the western provinces, “marked out to all their fellow-countrymen as aliens and a pariah caste set apart for special and degrading treatment” {Persecution of the Jews in Russia, 1891, p. 5). In the next place, owing to the emancipation of the serfs which had half ruined the land-owners, while creating a free but moneyless peasantry, the Jews, who could be neither nobles nor peasants, had found a vocation as money-lenders and as middlemen between the grain producers and the grain consumers and exporters. There is no evidence that this function was performed, as a rule, in an exorbitant or oppressive way. On the contrary, the fall in the value of cereals on all the provincial markets, after the riots of 1881, shows that the Jewish competition had previously assured full prices to the farmers (Schwabacher, Denkschrift, 1882, p. 27). Nevertheless, the Jewish activity or “ exploitation,” as it was called, was resented, and the ill-feeling it caused among land-owners and farmers was shared by non-Jewish middlemen and merchants who had thereby been compelled to be satisfied with small profits. Still there was but little thought of seeking a remedy in an organized anti-Jewish movement. On the contrary, the abnormal situation aggravated by the disappointments and depression caused by the Turkish war, had stimulated a widespread demand for constitutional changes which would enable the people to adopt a statemachinery more exactly suited to their needs. Among the peasantry this demand was promoted and fomented by the Nihilists, and among the land-owners it was largely adopted as a means of checking what threatened to become a new Jacquerie (Walcker, Gegenwdrtige Page Russlands,
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1873; Innere Krisis Russlands, 1876). The tsar, Alexander II., strongly sympathized with this movement, and on the advice of Count Loris Melikoff and the council of ministers a rudimentary scheme of parliamentary government had been drafted and actually signed when the emperor was assassinated. Meanwhile a nationalist and reactionary agitation, originating like its German analogue in the Hegelianism of a section of the lettered public, had manifested itself in Moscow. After some early vicissitudes, it had been organized, under the auspices of Alexis Kireieff, Chomjakoff, Aksakoff, and Kocheleff, into the Slavophil party, with a Romanticist programme of reforms based on the old traditions of the pre-Petrine epoch. This party gave a great impetus to Slav nationalism. Its final possibilities were sanguinarily illustrated by Muravieff’s campaign in Poland in 1863, and in the war against Turkey in 1877, which was exclusively its handiwork (Statement by General Kireieff: Schiitz, Das heutige Russland, p. 104). After the assassination of Alexander II. the Slavophil teaching, as expounded by Ignatieff and Pobyedonostzeff, became paramount in the Government, and the new tsar was persuaded to cancel the constitutional project of his father. The more liberal views of a section of the Slavophils under Aksakoff, who had been in favour of representative institutions on traditional lines, were displaced by the reactionary system of Pobyedonostzeff, who took his stand on absolutism, orthodoxy, and the racial unity of the Russian people. This was the situation on the eve of Easter 1881. The hardening nationalism above, the increasing discontent below, the economic activity of the Hebrew heretics and aliens, and the echoes of anti-Semitism from over the western border were combining for an explosion. A scuffle in a tavern at Elisabethgrad, in Kherson, sufficed to ignite this combustible material. The scuffle grew into a riot, the tavern was sacked, and the drunken mob, hounded on by agitators who declared that the Jews were using Christian blood for the manufacture of their Easter bread, attacked and looted the Jewish quarter. The outbreak rapidly spread. On 7th May there was a similar riot at Smiela, near Czergassy, and the following day there was a violent outbreak at Kieff, which left 2000 Jews homeless. Within a few weeks the whole of Western Russia, from the Black Sea to the Baltic, was smoking with the ruins of Jewish homes. Scores of Jewish women were dishonoured, hundreds of men, women and children were slaughtered, and tens of thousands were reduced to beggary and left without a shelter. Murderous riots or incendiary outrages took place in no fewer than 167 towns and villages, including Warsaw, Odessa, and Kieff. Europe had witnessed no such scenes of mob savagery since the Black Death massacres in the fourteenth century. As the facts gradually filtered through to the western capitals they caused a thrill of horror everywhere. An indignation meeting held at the Mansion House in London, under the presidency of the Lord Mayor, was the signal for a long series of popular demonstrations condemning the persecutions, held in most of the chief cities of England and the Continent. Except as stimulated by the Judeophobe revival in Germany the Russian outbreak in its earlier forms does not belong specifically to modern anti-Semitism. It was essentially a mediaeval uprising animated by the religious fanaticism, gross superstition, and predatory instincts of a people still in the mediaeval stage of their development. This is proved by the fact that, although the Russ.an peasant was supposed to be a victim of unbearable Jewish “ exploitation,” he was not moved to riot until he had been brutalized by drink and excited by the old fable of the Blood Accusation. The modern anti-SemiLc element came
