The opposition to the authorities was particularly vigorous in the Kingdom of Poland where the rank and file of Hasidim were ready to suffer martyrdom for any Jewish custom, however obsolete.  The fight was drawn out for a long time and even reached into the following reign, but the victory remained with the obstreperous masses.  Though at a later period, as the result of general cultural tendencies, the traditional Jewish costume made way in certain sections of Jewry for the European form of dress, it was not in obedience to police measures, but in spite of them.  Compulsory assimilation was as little successful now as had been compulsory isolation in the Middle Ages.  The medieval rulers had imposed upon the Jews a distinct form of garment and a “yellow badge” to keep them apart from the Christians.  Nicholas I. employed forcible means to make the Jews by their style of dress appear similar to the Christians.  The violence resorted to in both cases, though different in form, sprang from the same motive.

3.  NEW CONSCRIPTION HORRORS

There was yet one domain in which the squeezing and pressing power of Tzardom could fully employ its destructive energy.  We refer to military conscription.  This genuine creation of the imperial brain became more and more intolerable, serving in Jewish life as a penal and correctional agency, with its “capture” of old and young, its inquisitorial regime of cantonists, its deportation for a quarter of a century and longer into far-off regions.  Even the Russian peasants were stricken with terror at the thought of Nicholas’ conscription, which in the reminiscences of the portrayers of that period is pictured as life-long deportation, and they frequently shirked military duty by fleeing from the land-owners and hiding themselves in the woods.  How much more terrible must then conscription have been for the Jew, whose family was robbed both of a young father and a tender son.  No means was left unused to evade this atrocious obligation.  The reports of the governors refer to the “immeasurable difficulties in carrying out the conscription among the Jews.”

Apart from innumerable cases of self-mutilation—­to quote the words of one of these reports written in 1850—­the disappearance, without exception, of all able-bodied Jews has become so general that in some communities, outside of those unfit for military service because of age or physical defects, not a single person can be found during conscription who might be drafted into the army.  Some flee abroad, whilst others hide in adjacent governments.

Those in hiding were hunted down like wild beasts.  Their life, as a contemporary witness testifies, was worse than that of galley slaves, for the slightest indiscretion brought ruin upon them.  Many resorted to self-mutilation to render themselves unfit for military service.  They chopped off their fingers or toes, damaged their eyesight, and perpetrated every possible form of maiming to evade a military service which was in effect penal servitude.  “The most tender-hearted mother,” to quote a contemporary, “would place the finger of her beloved son under the kitchen knife of a home-bred quack surgeon.”