The full weight of conscription fell upon the poorest classes of the Jewish population, the so-called burgher estate, [1] consisting of petty artisans and those impoverished tradesmen who could not afford to enrol in the mercantile guilds, though there are cases on record where poor Jews begged from door to door to collect a sufficient sum of money for a guild certificate in order to save their children from military service.  The more or less well-to-do were exempted from conscription either by virtue of their mercantile status or because of their connections with the Kahal leaders who had the power of selecting the victims.

[Footnote 1:  See above, p. 23, n. 1.]

4.  The policy of expulsions

In all lands of Western Europe the introduction of personal military service for the Jews was either accompanied or preceded by their emancipation.  At all events, it was followed by some mitigation of their disabilities, serving, so to speak, as an earnest of the grant of equal rights.  Even in clerical Austria, the imposition of military duty upon the Jews was preceded by the Toleranz Patent, this would-be Act of Emancipation. [1]

[Footnote 1:  Military service was imposed upon the Jews of Austria by the law of 1787.  Several years previously, on January 2, 1782, Emperor Joseph II. had issued his famous Toleration Act, removing a number of Jewish disabilities and opening the way to their assimilation with the environment.  Nevertheless, most of the former restrictions remained in force.]

In Russia the very reverse took place.  The introduction of military conscription of a most aggravating kind and the unspeakable cruelties attending its practical execution were followed, in the case of the Jews, by an unprecedented recrudescence of legislative discrimination and a monstrous increase of their disabilities.  The Jews were lashed with a double knout, a military and a civil.  In the same ill-fated year which saw the promulgation of the conscription statute, barely three months after it had received the imperial sanction, while the moans of the Jews, fasting and praying to God to deliver them from the calamity, were still echoing in the synagogues, two new ukases were issued, both signed on December 2, 1827—­the one decreeing the transfer of the Jews from all villages and village inns in the government of Grodno into the towns and townlets, the other ordering the banishment of all Jewish residents from the city of Kiev.

The expulsion from the Grodno villages was the continuation of the policy of the rural liquidation of Jewry, inaugurated in 1823 in White Russia. [1] The Grodno province was merely meant to serve as a starting point.  Grand Duke Constantine, [2] who had brought up the question, was ordered “at first to carry out the expulsion in the government of Grodno alone,” and to postpone for a later occasion the application of the same measure to the other “governments