The center of gravity of the system of oppression lay, as it always did, in the restrictions attaching to the right of domicile and free movement—­restrictions which frequently made life for the Jews physically impossible by cutting off their access to the sources of a livelihood.  The “Temporary Rules” of the third of May displayed in this domain a dazzling variety of legal tortures such as might have excited the envy of medieval inquisitors.  The “May laws” of 1882 barred the Jews from settling outside the cities “anew,” i.e. in the future, exempting those who had settled in the rural districts prior to 1882.  These old-time Jewish rustics were a thorn in the flesh of the Russian anti-Semites, who hoped for a sudden disappearance of the Jewish population from the Russian country-side.  Accordingly, a whole set of administrative measures was put in motion, with a view to making the life of the village Jews unbearable.  In another connection [1] we had occasion to point out that the Russian authorities as well as the Christian competitors of the Jews made it their business to expel the latter from the rural localities as “vicious members,” by having the peasant assemblies render special “verdicts” against them.  This method was now supplemented by new contrivances to dislodge the Jews.  A village Jew who happened to absent himself for a few days or weeks to go to town was frequently barred by the police from returning to his home, on the ground that he was “a new settler.”  There are cases of Jewish families on record which, according to custom, had left the village for the High Holidays to attend services in an adjacent town or townlet, and which, on their return home, met with considerable difficulties; because their return was interpreted by the police as a “new settlement.”  In the dominions of the anti-Jewish satrap Drenteln the administration construed the “Temporary Rules” to mean that Jews were not allowed to move from one village to another, or even from, one house to another within the precincts of their native village. [2]

[Footnote 1:  See p. 318 et seq.]

[Footnote 2:  Evidence of this is found in the circular of the governor of Chernigov, issued In 1883.]

Moreover, the police was authorized to expel from the villages all those Jews who did not possess their own houses upon their own land, on the ground that these Jews, in renting new quarters, would have to make a new lease with their owners, and such a lease was forbidden by the May laws. [1] These malicious misinterpretations of the law affected some ten thousand Jews in the villages of Chernigov and Poltava.  These Jews lived habitually in rented houses or in houses which were their property but were built upon ground belonging to peasants, and they were consequently liable to expulsion.  The cry of these unfortunates, who were threatened with eviction in the dead of the winter, was heard not in near-by Kiev but in far-off St. Petersburg.  By a senatorial ukase, published in January, 1884, a check was put on these administrative highway methods.  The expulsion was stopped, though a considerable number of Jewish families had in the meantime been evicted and ruined.