the law into their own hands.  In scores of places throughout the years 1881 and 1882, the mob plundered and fired their shops and houses, beat the wretched inmates, and in some cases killed them outright.  At Elisabetgrad and Kiev the Jewish quarters were systematically pillaged and then given over to the flames.  The fury reached its climax at the small town of Balta; the rabble pillaged 976 Jewish houses, and, not content with seizing all the wealth that came to hand, killed eight of the traders, besides wounding 211 others.

Doubtless these outrages were largely due to race-hatred as well as to spite on the part of the heedless, slovenly natives against the keen and grasping Hebrews.  The same feelings have at times swept over Roumania, Austria, Germany, and France.  Jew-baiting has appealed even to nominally enlightened peoples as a novel and profitable kind of sport; and few of its votaries have had the hypocritical effrontery to cloak their conduct under the plea of religious zeal.  The movement has at bottom everywhere been a hunt after Jewish treasure, embittered by the hatred of the clown for the successful trader, of the individualist native for an alien, clannish, and successful community.  In Russia religious motives may possibly have weighed with the Czar and the more ignorant and bigoted of the peasantry; but levelling and communistic ideas certainly accounted for the widespread plundering—­witness the words often on the lips of the rioters:  “We are breakfasting on the Jews; we shall dine on the landlords, and sup on the priests.”  In 1890 there appeared a ukase ordering the return of the Jews to those provinces and districts where they had been formerly allowed to settle—­that is, chiefly in the South and West; and all foreign Jews were expelled from the Empire.  It is believed that as many as 225,000 Jewish families left Russia in the sixteen months following[233].

[Footnote 233:  Rambaud, Histoire de la Russie, ch. xxxviii.; Lowe, Alexander III. of Russia, ch. viii.; H. Frederic, The New Exodus; Professor Errera, The Russian Jews.]

The next onslaught was made against a body of Christian dissenters, the humble community known as Stundists.  These God-fearing peasants had taken a German name because the founder of their sect had been converted at the Stunden, or hour-long services, of German Lutherans long settled in the south of Russia; they held a simple evangelical faith; their conduct was admittedly far better than that of the peasants, who held to the mass of customs and superstitions dignified by the name of the orthodox Greek creed; and their piety and zeal served to spread the evangelical faith, especially among the more emotional people of South Russia, known as Little Russians.