In consequence of the early marriages then in vogue, most youths at the age of eighteen were married.  The impending separation for a quarter of a century, added to the danger of the soldier’s apostasy or death in far-off regions, often disrupted the family ties.  Many recruits, before entering upon their military career, gave their wives a divorce so as not to doom them to perpetual widowhood.

At the end of 1834 rumors began to spread among the Jewish masses concerning a law which was about to be issued forbidding early marriages but exempting from conscription those married prior to the promulgation of the law.  A panic ensued.  Everywhere feverish haste was displayed in marrying off boys from ten to fifteen years old to girls of an equally tender age.  Within a few months there appeared in every city hundreds and thousands of such couples, whose marital relations were often confined to playing with nuts or bones.  The misunderstanding which had caused this senseless matrimonial panic or beholoh,[1] as it was afterwards popularly called, was cleared up by the publication, on April 13, 1835, of the new “Statute on the Jews.”  To be sure, the new law contained a clause forbidding marriages before the age of eighteen, but it offered no privileges for those already married, so that the only result of the beholoh was to increase the number of families robbed by conscription of their heads and supporters.

[Footnote 1:  A Hebrew word, also used in Yiddish, meaning fright, panic.]

The years of military service were spent by the grown-up Jewish soldiers amidst extraordinary hardships.  They were beaten and ridiculed because of their inability to express themselves in Russian, their refusal to eat trefa, and their general lack of adaptation to the strange environment and to the military mode of life.  And even when this process of adaptation was finally accomplished, the Jewish soldier was never promoted beyond the position of a non-commissioned under-officer, baptism being the inevitable stepping-stone to a higher rank.  True, the Statute on Military Service promised those Jewish soldiers who had completed their term in the army with distinction admission to the civil service, but the promise remained on paper so long as the candidates were loyal to Judaism.  On the contrary, the Jews who had completed their military service and had in most cases become invalids were not even allowed to spend the rest of their lives in the localities outside the Pale, in which they had been stationed as soldiers.  Only at a later period, during the reign of Alexander II., was this right accorded to the “Nicholas soldiers” [1] and their descendants.

[Footnote 1:  In Russian, Nikolayevskiye soldaty, i.e., those that had served in the army during the reign of Nicholas I.]