themselves to science or literature, without the diploma from a higher educational institution in their pockets.  The number of these Jews who obtained their right of residence through a legal fiction, by enrolling themselves as artisans or as employees of the “privileged” Jews, was very considerable, and the police expended a vast amount of energy in waging a fierce struggle against them.  The city-governor of St. Petersburg, Gresser, who was notorious for the cruelty of his police regime, made it his specialty to hunt down the Jews.  A contemporary writer, in reviewing the events of the year 1883, gives the following description of the exploits of the metropolitan police: 

The campaign was started at the very beginning of the year and continued uninterruptedly until the end of it.  Early in March the metropolitan police received orders to search most rigorously the Jewish residences and examine the passports.  In the police stations special records were instituted for the Jews.  St. Petersburg was to be purged of the odious Hebrew tribe.  The contrivances employed were no longer novel, and were the same which had been successfully tried in other cities.  The Jews were raided in regular fashion.  Those that were found with doubtful claims to residence in the capital were, frequently accompanied by their families, immediately dispatched to the proper railroad stations, escorted by policemen....  The time for departure was measured by hours.  The term of expulsion was generally limited to twenty-four hours, or forty-eight hours, as if it involved the execution of a court-martial sentence.  And yet, the majority of the victims of expulsion were people who had lived in St. Petersburg for many years, and had succeeded in establishing homes and business places, which could not be liquidated within twenty-four hours or thereabout....  The hurried expulsions from the capital resulted in numerous conversions to Christianity....  Amusing stories circulated all over town concerning Jews who had decided to join the Christian Church, and had applied for permission to remain in the capital for one or two weeks—­the time required by law for a preliminary training in the truths of the new faith—­but whose petition was flatly refused because the police believed that a similar training might also be received within the boundaries of the Pale of Settlement.

As a matter of fact, fictitious conversions of this kind were but seldom resorted to in the fight against governmental violence.  As a rule, the evasion of the “law” was effected by less harmful, perhaps, but no less humiliating and even tragic fictions.  Many a Jewish newcomer would bring with him on his arrival in St. Petersburg an artisan’s certificate and enrol himself as an apprentice of some “full-fledged” Jewish artisan.  But woe betide if the police happened to visit the workshop and fail to find the fictitious apprentice at work.  He was liable to immediate expulsion, and the owner of the shop was