The petition reflects the humiliating attitude of men who were standing on the boundary line between slavery and freedom, whose cast of mind had been formed under the regime of oppression and caprice.  Pointing to the example of the West where the bestowal of equal rights had contributed to the success of Jewish assimilation, the St. Petersburg petitioners were not even courageous enough to demand equal rights as the price of assimilation, and professed, perhaps from diplomatic considerations, to content themselves with miserable crumbs of rights and privileges for “the best among us.”  They failed to realize the meanness of their suggestion to divide a nation into best and worst, into those worthy of a human existence and those unworthy of it.

3.  THE EXTENSION OF THE RIGHT OF RESIDENCE

After some wavering, the Government decided to adopt the method of “picking” the best.  The intention of the authorities was to apply the gradual relaxation of Jewish rightlessness not to groups of restrictions, but to groups of persons.  The Government entered upon the scheme of abolishing or alleviating certain restrictions not for the whole Jewish population but merely for a few “useful” sections within it.  Three such sections were marked off from the rest:  merchants of the first guild, university graduates, and incorporated artisans.

The resuscitated “Committee for the Amelioration of the Jews” [1] displayed an intense activity during that period (1856-1863).  For fully two years (1857-1859) the question of granting the right of permanent residence in the interior governments to merchants of the first guild occupied the attention of that Committee and of the Council of State.  The Committee had originally proposed to restrict this privilege by imposing a series of exceedingly onerous conditions.  Thus, the merchants intending to settle in the Russian interior were to be required to have belonged to the first guild within the Pale for ten years previously, and they were to be allowed to leave the Pale only after securing in each case a permit from the Ministers of the Interior and of Finance.  But the Council of State found that, circumscribed in this manner, the privilege would benefit only a negligible fraction of the Jewish merchant class—­there were altogether one hundred and eight Jewish first-guild merchants within the Pale—­and, therefore, considered it necessary to reduce the requirements for settling in the interior.

[Footnote 1:  Compare above, p. 49.]

A long succession of meetings of this august body was taken up with the perplexing problem how to attract big Jewish capital into the central governments and at the same time safeguard the latter against the excessive influx of Jews, who, for the sake of settling there, would register in the first guild and, under the disguise of relatives, would bring with them, as one of the members of the Council put it, “the whole tribe of Israel.”  After protracted discussions, a resolution was adopted which was in substance as follows: