[Footnote 1:  See Vol.  I, p. 299.]

  1.  To acquire immovable property on all manorial estates on which
  the peasants had passed from the state of serfs into that of
  tenants.

  2.  To settle freely in the formerly prohibited cities and city
  districts, [1] not excluding those situated within the twenty-one
  verst zone along the Prussian and Austrian frontier. [2]

  3.  To appear as witnesses in court on an equal footing with
  Christians in all legal proceedings and to take an oath in a new,
  less humiliating form.

[Footnote 1:  See above, pp. 172 and 178.]

[Footnote 2:  See above, p. 95.]

Bestowing these privileges upon the Polish Jews in the hope of bringing about their amalgamation with the local Christian population, the Tzar forbids in the same ukase the further use of Hebrew and Yiddish in all civil affairs and legal documents, such as contracts, wills, obligations, also in commercial ledgers and even in business correspondence.  In conclusion, the ukase directs the Administrative Council of the Kingdom of Poland to revise and eventually to repeal all the other laws which hamper the Jews in their pursuit of crafts and industries by imposing special taxes upon them.

This ukase of Alexander II., though revoking only part of the insulting restrictions in the elementary civil rights of the Jews, was given the high-sounding title of an “Act of Emancipation.”  The secluded hasidic mass of Poland was glad to accept the legal alleviations offered to it, without thinking of any linguistic or other kind of assimilation.  On the other hand, the assimilated Jewish intelligentzia, which had joined the ranks of the Polish insurgents, was dreaming of complete emancipation, and confidently hoped to attain it upon the successful termination of the revolutionary enterprise.

In the meantime the revolution was assuming ever larger proportions.  The year 1863 arrived.  The demonstrations on the streets of Warsaw were succeeded by bloody skirmishes between the Polish insurgents and the Russian troops in the woods of Poland and Lithuania.  The Jews took no active part in this phase of the rebellion.  As far as Poland proper was concerned, their participation was limited to the secret revolutionary propaganda.  In Lithuania again neither the Jewish masses nor the newly arisen class of intellectuals sympathized with the Polish cause.  In that part of the country the systematic Jew-baiting of the Polish pans, or noble landowners, was still fresh in the minds, and the Jews, moreover, were pinning all their faith to the emancipation to be bestowed by St. Petersburg.  The will o’ the wisp of Russification had already begun to lure the Jewish professional class.  In many Lithuanian localities the Jews who failed to show their sympathy with the Polish revolutionaries ran the risk of being dealt with severely.  Here and there, as had been the case in 1831, the rebels were as good as their word, and hanged or shot the Jews suspected of pro-Russian sympathies.