CHAPTER XXX

BARON HIRSCH’S EMIGRATION SCHEME AND UNRELIEVED SUFFERING

1.  NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT

Towards the end of the eighties the plan of promoting Jewish emigration from Russia, which had been abandoned with the retirement of Count Ignatyev, was again looked upon favorably by the leading Government circles.  The sentiments of the Tzar were expressed in a marginal note which he attached to the report of the governor of Podolia for the year 1888.  The passage of the report in which it was pointed out that “the removal of the Jewish proletariat from the monarchy would be very desirable” was supplemented in the Tzar’s handwriting by the words “and even very useful.”  In reply to the proposal of the governor of Odessa to deprive Jewish emigrants of the right to return to Russia, the Tzar answered with a decided “yes.”  The official Russian chronicler goes even so far as to confess “that it was part of the plan to stimulate the emigration of the Jews (as well as that of the German colonists) by a more rigorous enforcement of the military duty “—­a design which, from the political point of view, may well be pronounced criminal and which was evidently at the bottom of the severe military fines imposed upon the Jews.  The same open-hearted chronicler adds: 

It may be easily understood how sympathetically the Government received the proposal of the Jewish Colonization Association in London, which had been founded by Baron de Hirsch in 1891, to remove, in the course of twenty-five years, 3,250,000 Jews from Russia. [1]

[Footnote 1:  This figure represents the official estimate of the number of Russian Jews.  In other words, the Government hoped to get rid of all Jews.]

The name of Maurice de Hirsch was not unknown to the Russian Government.  For a few years previously it had had occasion to carry on negotiations with him, with results of which it had scant reason to boast.  This great German-Jewish philanthropist, who was resolved to spend hundreds of millions on the economic and agricultural advancement of his co-religionists in Eastern Europe, had donated in 1888 fifty million francs for the purpose of establishing in Russia arts and crafts schools, as well as workshops and agricultural farms for the Jews.  It was natural for him to assume that the Russian Government would only be too glad to accept this enormous contribution which was bound to stimulate productive labor in the country and raise the welfare of its destitute masses.  But he had forgotten that the benefits expected from the fund would accrue to the Jewish proletariat, which, according to the catechism of Jew-hatred, was to be “removed from the monarchy.”  The stipulation made by the Russian Government to the representatives of Baron Hirsch was entirely unacceptable:  it insisted that the money should not be handed over to Jewish public agencies but to the Russian Government