The new Passport Regulation of 1894 orders to insert in all Jewish passports a physical description of their owners, even in the case of their being literate and, therefore, being able to affix their signature to the passport, whereas such description was omitted from the passports of literate Christians.  In some places the police deliberately tried to make the Jewish passports more conspicuous by marking on them the denomination of the owner in red ink.  Even in those rare instances in which the law was intended to bring relief, the Government managed to emphasize its hostile intent.  The law of 1893, legalizing the Jewish heder and putting an end to the persecutions, which this traditional Jewish school had suffered at the hands of the police, narrowed at the same time its function to that of an exclusively religious institution and indirectly forbade the teaching in it of general secular subjects.  There are cases on record in which the keepers of these heders, the so-called melammeds, were put on trial for imparting to their pupils a knowledge of Russian and arithmetic.

However, the most effective whip in the hands of the Government remained as theretofore the expulsion from the governments of the interior.  In 1893, this whip cracked over the backs of thousands of Jewish families.  Durnovo, the Minister of the Interior, issued a circular, repealing the old decree of 1880, which had sanctioned the residence outside the Pale of Settlement of all those Jews who had lived there previously.[1] That decree had been prompted by the motive to prevent the complete economic ruin of the Jews who were settled in places outside the Pale and had created there industrial enterprises.  But such a motive, which even the anti-Semitic Ministry of Tolstoi had not been bold enough to disregard, did not appeal to the new Hamans.  Many thousands of Jewish families, who had lived outside the Pale for decades, were threatened with exile.  The difficulties attending the execution of this wholesale expulsion forced the Government to make concessions.  In the Baltic provinces the banishment of the old settlers was repealed, while in the Great Russian governments it was postponed for a year or two.

[Footnote 1:  Compare p. 404.]

There was a particularly spiteful motive behind the imperial ukase of 1893, excluding the Crimean resort place Yalta from the Pale of Settlement, [1] and ordering the expulsion from there of hundreds of families which were not enrolled in the local town community.  No official reason was given for this new disability, but everybody knew it.  In the neighborhood of Yalta was the imperial summer residence Livadia, where Alexander III. was fond of spending the autumn, and this circumstance made it imperative to reduce the number of the local Jewish residents to a negligible quantity.  To avert the complete ruin of the victims, many were granted reprieves, but after the expiration of their terms they were ruthlessly deported.