The barbarism of these proposals was covered by the fig-leaf of enlightenment.  When the benighted Jewish masses will have fused with the highly cultured populance of Russia.  In other words, when the Jews will have ceased to be Jews, then will the Jewish question find its solution.  In the meantime, however, the Jews are to be curbed by the bridle of disabilities.  The referee of the Committee on the question of the Pale of Settlement, Grigoryev, frankly stated:  “What is important in this question is not whether the Jews will fare better when granted the right of residence all over the Empire, but rather the effect of this measure on the economic well-being of an enormous part of the Russian people.”  From this point of view the referee finds that it would be dangerous to let the Jews pass beyond the Pale, since “the plague, which has thus far been restricted to the Western provinces, will then spread over the whole Empire.”

For a long time the Committee was at a deadlock, held down by bureaucratic reaction.  It was only toward the end of its existence that the voice from another world, the posthumous voice of dead and buried liberalism, resounded in its midst.  In 1880 the Committee was presented with a memorandum by two of its members, Nekhludov and Karpov, in which the bold attempt was made to champion the heretic point of view of complete Jewish emancipation.  The language of the memorandum was one which the Russian Government had not heard for a long time.

In the name of “morality and justice” the authors of the memorandum call upon the Government to abandon its grossly utilitarian attitude towards the Jews who are to be denied civil rights so long as they do not prove useful to the “original” population.  They expose the selfish motive underlying the bits of emancipation which had been doled out to the Jews during the preceding spell of liberalism:  the desire, not to help the Jews, but to exploit their services.  First-guild merchants, physicians, lawyers, artisans were admitted into the interior for the sole purpose of developing business in those places and filling the palpable shortage in artisans and professional men.  “As soon as this or that category of Jews was found to be serviceable to the Russian people, it was relieved, and relieved only in part, from the pressure of exceptional laws, and received into the dominant population of the Empire.”  But the millions of plain Jews, abandoned by the upper classes, have continued to languish in the suffocating Pale. [1] The Jewish population is denied the elementary rights guaranteeing liberty of pursuit, freedom of movement and land ownership, such as only a criminal may be deprived of by a verdict of the courts.  As it is, discontent is rife among these disinherited masses.  “The rising generation of Jews has already begun to participate in the revolutionary movement to which they had hitherto been strangers.”  The system of oppression must be set aside.  All