In the same year another influential foreigner made an unsuccessful attempt to improve the condition of the Russian Jews by emigration.  A rich Jewish merchant of Marseille, named Isaac Altaras, came to Russia with a proposal to transplant a certain number of Jews to Algiers, which had recently passed under French rule.  Fortified by letters of recommendation from Premier Guizot and other high officials in France, Altaras entered into negotiations with the Ministers Nesselrode and Perovski in St. Petersburg and with Viceroy Paskevich in Warsaw, for the purpose of obtaining permission for a certain number of Jews to emigrate from Russia.[1] He gave the assurance that the French Government was ready to admit into Algiers, as full-fledged citizens, thousands of destitute Russian Jews, and that the means for transferring them would be provided by Rothschild’s banking house in Paris.  At first, while in St. Petersburg, Altaras was informed that permission to leave Russia would be granted only on condition that a fixed ransom be paid for every emigrant.

In Warsaw, however, which city he visited later, in October, 1846, he was notified that the Tzar had decided to waive the ransom.  For some unexplained reason Altaras left Russia suddenly, and the scheme of a Jewish mass emigration fell through.

[Footnote 1:  A law on the Russian statute books forbids the emigration of Russian citizens abroad.  See later, p. 285, n. 1.]

5.  THE ECONOMIC PLIGHT OF RUSSIAN JEWRY AND AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENTS

The attempt at thinning the Jewish population by emigration having failed, the congested Jewish masses continued to gasp for air in their Pale of Settlement.  The slightest effort to penetrate beyond the Pale into the interior was treated as a criminal offence.  In December, 1847, the Council of State engaged in a protracted and earnest discussion about the geographical point up to which the Jewish coachmen of Polotzk should be allowed, to drive the inmates of the local school of cadets on their annual trips to the Russian capital.  The discussion arose out of the fact that the road leading from Polotzk to St. Petersburg is crossed by the line separating the Pale from the prohibited interior.  A proposal had been made to permit the coachmen to drive their passengers as far as Pskov.  But when the report was submitted to the Tzar, he appended the following resolution:  “Agreeable; though not to Pskov, but to Ostrov”—­the town nearest to the Pale.  Of this trivial kind were Russia’s methods in curtailing Jewish rights three months before the great upheaval which in adjoining Germany and Austria dealt the death-blow to absolutism and inaugurated the era of the “Second Emancipation.”

As for the economic life of the Jews, it had been completely undermined by the system of ruthless tutelage, which the Government had employed for a quarter of a century in the hope of “reconstructing” it.  All these drumhead methods, such as the hurling of masses of living beings from villages into towns and from the border-zone into the interior, the prohibition of certain occupations and the artificial promotion of others, could not but result in economic ruin, instead of leading to economic reform.