2.  POLITICAL REACTION AND LITERARY ANTI-SEMITISM

Such “measures” were not long in coming.  The only restriction the Government of Warsaw failed to carry through was the enforcement of the law of 1812 forbidding the Jews to deal in liquor.  This drastic measure was vetoed by Alexander I., owing to the representations of the Jewish deputies in St. Petersburg, and in 1816 the Polish viceroy was compelled to announce the suspension of this cruel law which had hung like the sword of Damocles over the heads of hundreds of thousands of Jews.

On the other hand, the Polish Government managed in the course of a few years (1816-1823) to put into operation a number of other restrictive laws.  Several cities which boasted of the ancient right de non tolerandis Judaeis[1] secured the confirmation of this shameful privilege, with the result that the Jews who had settled there during the existence of the duchy of Warsaw were either expelled or confined to separate districts.  In Warsaw a number of streets were closed to Jewish residents, and all Jewish visitors to the capital were forced to pay a heavy tax for their right of sojourn, the so-called “ticket impost,” amounting to fifteen kopecks (71/2c) a day.  Finally the Jews were forbidden to settle within twenty-one versts of the Austrian and Prussian frontiers. [2]

[Footnote 1:  See Vol.  I, pp. 85 and 95.]

[Footnote 2:  The law in question was passed by the Polish Government on January 31, 1823, barring the Jews from nearly one hundred towns.  It was repealed by Alexander II. in 1862.  See below, p. 181.]

At the same time, the Polish legislators were fair-minded enough to refrain from forcing the Jews, these disfranchised pariahs, into military service.  In 1817 an announcement was made to the effect that, so long as the Jews were barred from the enjoyment of civil rights, they would be released from personal military service in Poland, in lieu whereof they were to pay a fixed conscription tax.  About the same time, during the third decade of the nineteenth century, was also realized the old-time policy of curtailing the Jewish Kahal autonomy, though, as will be seen later, this “reform” did not proceed from the Government spheres, but was rather the product of contemporary social movements among the Poles and the Jews.

The political literature of Poland manifested at that time a tendency similar to the one which had prevailed during the Quadrennial Diet.[1] Scores of pamphlets and magazine articles discussed with polemical ardor the Jewish problem, the burning question of the day.  The old Jew-baiter Stashitz, a member of the Warsaw Government who served on the Commission of Public Instruction and Religious Denominations, resumed his attacks on Judaism.  In 1816 he published an article under the title “Concerning the Causes of the Obnoxiousness of the Jews,” in which he asserted that the Jews were responsible for Poland’s decline.  They multiplied with incredible rapidity,