As for the central Government in St. Petersburg, the only thing it wanted to know was whether the pogrom had any connection with the secret revolutionary propaganda which, beginning with the Jews, might next set the mob against the nobility and Russian bourgeoisie.  Since the official inquiry failed to reveal any political motives behind the Odessa riots, the St. Petersburg authorities were set at ease, and were only too glad to take the word of the satraps of the Pale who reported that the anti-Jewish movement had started as “a crude protest of the masses against the failure to solve the Jewish question”—­viz., to solve it in a reactionary spirit—­and as a manifestation, of the popular resentment against Jewish exploitation.

The old charge of separatism against the Jews thus found a companion in a new accusation:  their economic “exploitation” of the Christian population of the Pale.  The Committee appointed at the recommendation of the Council of State was enjoined to conduct a strict inquiry into both these “charges.”  Concretely the work of the Committee reduced itself to a consideration of two questions, one relating to the Kahal, or “the amelioration of the spiritual life of the Jews,” and the other referring to the feasibility of thinning out the Pale of Settlement with the end in view of weakening the economic competition of the Jews.

The material bearing on these questions included, apart from Brafman’s “standard work,” a “Memorandum concerning the more important Administrative Problems in the South-west,” which had been submitted in 1871 by the governor-general of Kiev, Dondukov-Korsakov, to the Tzar.  The author of the memorandum voices his conviction that “the principal endeavors of the Government must be concentrated upon the Jewish question.”  The Jews are becoming a great economic power in the South-western provinces.  They purchase or mortgage estates, and obtain control of the factories and mills as well as of the grain, timber, and liquor trade, thereby arousing the bitter resentment of the Christian population, particularly in the rural districts. [1] Moreover, the Jewish masses, refusing to follow the lead of the handful of Russified Jewish intellectuals, live entirely apart and remain in the throes of talmudic fanaticism and hasidie obscurantism.  They “possess complete self-government in their Kahals, their own system of finance in the basket tax, their separate charitable institutions,” their own traditional school in the heders, of which there are in the South-west no less than six thousand.  In addition, the Jews possess an international organization, the “World Kahal,” represented by the Alliance Israelite “Universelle in Paris, whose president, Adolph Cremieux, had had the audacity to protest to the Russian Government against acts of violence perpetrated upon the Jews.  For all these reasons the governor-general is of the opinion that “the revision of the whole legislation affecting the Jews has become an imperative necessity.”