no less exposed to grave risks.  Some Jews, in their eagerness to obtain the right of residence, registered as man-servants in the employ of Jewish physicians or lawyers. [1] These would-be servants were frequently summoned to the police stations and cross-examined as to the character of their “service.”  The answers expected from them were something like:  “I clean my master’s boots, carry behind him his portfolio to court,” etc.  Several prominent Jewish writers lived for many years in St. Petersburg on this “flunkeyish” basis—­among them the talented young poet Simon Frug, [2] the singer of Jewish sorrow who was fast establishing for himself a reputation both in Jewish and in Russian literature.

[Footnote 1:  Under the Russian law [see p. 166] Jews possessing a university diploma of the first degree were entitled to employ two “domestic servants” from among their coreligionists.]

[Footnote 2:  See p. 330.]

It can easily be realized how precarious was the position of these men.  Any day their passports might be found ornamented by a red police notation ordering their expulsion from the capital within twenty-four hours.  All Russia was stirred at that time by the sensational story of a young Jewess, who had come to St. Petersburg or Moscow to enter the college courses for women, and in order to obtain the right of residence found herself compelled to register fictitiously as a prostitute and take out “a yellow ticket.”  When the police discovered that the young woman was engaged in studying, instead of plying her official “trade,” she was banished from the capital.  In 1886, England was shocked by the expulsion from Moscow of the well-known English Member of Parliament, the banker Sir Samuel Montagu (later Lord Swaythling).  Despite his influential position, Montagu was ordered out of the Russian capital “within twenty-four hours,” like an itinerant vagrant.

None of these tragedies, however, was able to produce any effect upon the ringleaders and henchmen of the Russian inquisition.  The energy of the authorities spent itself primarily in the fight against the natural, yet, according to the Russian code, “illegal” struggle of the Jews for their existence and against the sacred right of man to move about freely.  The merciless Russian law, trampling upon this inviolable right, drove human beings from village to town and from one town to another.  In the hotbed of militant Judaeophobia, in Kiev, raids upon “illegal” Jewish residents were the order of the day.  During the year 1886 alone more than two thousand Jewish families were evicted from the town. [1] Not satisfied with the expulsion of the Jews from the towns prohibited to them by law, the authorities contrived to swell the number of these towns by adding new localities which were part of the Pale and as such open to the Jews.  In 1887, the large South-Russian cities Rostov-on-the Don and Taganrog were transferred from the Pale of Settlement [2] to the tabooed territory of the Don Army.  Those Jews who had lived in these cities before the promulgation of the law were allowed to remain, but the new settling of Jews was strictly forbidden.