At the end of 1915, as German troops occupied Russian Poland and parts of the Pale of Settlement, the German High Command, led by General Erich Ludendorff, issued a proclamation in the name of “My Dear Jews.” At first glance this was an astounding document: the Jews in question were enemy aliens and over a half-million Jews were fighting under the Russian flag. Yet it is difficult to imagine an analogous action on the part of the Russian side. While the Germans sought to enlist at least the passive support of Russian Jewry, the Russian High Command viewed the Jews as collectively disloyal. The Germans published their manifestos to the Jews in Yiddish; the Russian government banned its use. German propaganda portrayed the friendly relations of its troops with these exotic Ostjuden; the Russian forces forcibly expelled whole Jewish communities from the front lines, creating a massive refugee problem in the interior. As the Pale of Settlement was de facto disassembled, the Russian Council of Ministers agreed to legalize the status of Jewish refugees only with great reluctance. Even then it maintained some areas off limits for Jews.^[1]
It can thus be said that both the German and the Russian side were in agreement: Russia’s Jewish subjects could not be considered loyal to their country and its monarch. This was in striking contrast to the patriotism of German and Austro-Hungarian Jews. Indeed, the loyalty of the latter had reached mythic proportions, summed up in the word Kaisertreu, a special loyalty to the Habsburg Empire and to the Emperor Franz Joseph that was particularly notable among the Orthodox Jews of his realm.
Indeed, why should anyone expect Jews to be loyal to the Russian Empire? Germans had long considered Russia’s treatment of her Jews to be “barbaric” and “Asiatic.” While German Antisemites might bludgeon the Jews with words, Russian mobs battered them to death in pogroms. (And even then, overt Antisemitism in Germany was muted as a result of the civic truce, or Burgfriede.) German Jews had achieved a status approaching full civil emancipation, while the position of the Jews seemed best characterized by the term Reichslцsingkeit (denial of rights). Literally hundreds of special enactments for Jews, most of them discriminatory, filled the law codes of Imperial Russia. There were the residence restrictions of the Pale itself for the Jewish masses, and for acculturated Jews there was the numerus clausus on admission of Jews into secondary and higher education, and restrictions on their entry to the Bar. Major points of discrimination were accompanied by a host of petty restrictions and indignities borne by every Russian Jew. Mistreatment took other, more demotic forms. On the eve of the war, pogroms had become endemic in the Empire. While the government may not have initiated them, as legend claimed, the Tsar himself nonetheless considered them as evidence of popular support for the Autocracy: “bei zhidov, spasai Rossiiu!”: “Beat the Yids, save Russia!”
The Jews responded in kind. There was hardly a movement of political opposition, ranging from the center to the radical left, that did not number Jewish adherents. Minister of the Interior V. Pleve claimed – albeit with some exaggeration – that 40% of all subversives in Russia were Jews, while he boosted the number to 90% in the western provinces of the Empire. Most Russian ministers equated Jews with revolution, and with the destruction of the Russian state. It was precisely this attitude that gave rise to such fantasies as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the literary portrait of a Jewish plot to achieve world domination, that celebrated its centenary in 2003.
But this situation can be stood on its head. The political militancy of a few Jews, however visible, should not disguise the fact that most Jews followed the advice of their rabbis to be “lower than the grass and quieter than the water.” The Jewish masses posed no threat of armed uprising or rebellion. Pogroms were conducted against Jews, not by them.^[2]
This said, there is an additional aspect of the problem that is usually overlooked: even in opposition the Jews were very much an “imperial people,” committed to the survival of a “great Russian state,” whether democratized or socialized. This was a major sticking point that poisoned the relations between the Jewish Bund and the Polish Socialist Party (PPS).^[3] The Jews of the Ukraine – one could hardly speak of “Ukrainian Jewry” – used up much of their political capital among Ukrainian nationalists in the aftermath of the February Revolution by insisting on the retention of a unified empire.^[4] The political movement that claimed the largest number of adherents in the Empire, Zionism, was also the one that was most disengage politically, and least likely to challenge the political status quo.^[5]
In short, the concept of a Kaisertreu Russian Jewry need not have become a contradiction in terms, the more so because the Russian state had many opportunities to transform the apathy and passive acceptance of the Jewish population into a grateful loyalty. There are many reasons for this failure, and many of them are inherent in the nature of the late imperial state, unable to decide between an identity that was rossiiskii (multi-national, imperial) and one that was russkii (ethnically Great Russian). Another factor runs like a red thread through Russian treatment of the Jews – the state’s inability to differentiate them from another national minority that could never be considered loyal or reliable – the Poles. This essay will argue that many of the policies that have been viewed as “antisemitic” derived, not so much from hostility to the Jews, as from fear of the Poles. The failure of Russian statesmen to employ the strategy of divisa et imperia reveals their lack of imagination and skill when dealing with the western borderlands. Instead of mobilizing available resources to create an economically strong and politically stable Empire, they built a backward “prison-house of nations.”

ORIGINS

Ironically, the Russian Empire’s first engagement with the Jews produced something akin to Ludendorff’s “To My Dear Jews” manifesto. As a result of the first partition of Poland in 1772, Russia acquired the two Belorussian provinces of Mogilev and Vitebsk (Polotsk). Thirty years previously, Empress Elisaveta Petrovna had expelled from the Russian Empire all Jews who refused to convert to Russian Orthodoxy. This was accompanied with very harsh conditions: the expellees were allowed to take only copper coins out of the country.^[6] The current ruler, Empress Catherine II, wished to assure her new Jewish subjects that such intolerant policies were a thing of the past. She instructed the new Russian administrator of the region, Count Zakhar Chernyshev, in addition to a calming manifesto to the Poles, to issue a special proclamation, the so-called “Plakat”, specifically to the Jews. It specifically included the Jews within the promise of freedom of religion and full property rights. They too were to benefit from “the welfare to come under Her benevolent protection.”^[7]
Catherine was as good as her word. In 1785 she issued the so-called Charter to the Towns (Gramota na prava i vygody gorodam Rossiiskoi imperii) which granted extensive rights of self-government to the municipalities of the Empire. Among its provisions were guarantees to non-natives (inogorodtsy) and non-Russian Orthodox (inovertsy) that they would be represented on law courts and town councils. A ruling of the Governing Senate in 1786 specified that the provisions of the Charter applied to Jews. This ruling was an example of how the interests of the Russian state – in this case, Catherine’s desire to encourage urban development – could take precedence over the rights granted to Poles, for it overrode restrictions, dating to the time of the Commonwealth, that limited participation of Jews in local government. (Jews were expected to govern themselves through their own autonomous communities, the kahal.) The issue became more crucial after the subsequent partitions of 1793 and 1795, when the Empire acquired Lithuanian towns that were governed by Magdeburg Law, which often included a provision barring Jews from residence – de non tolerandis Judaeis. The lawsuits engendered when Jews attempted to exercise their rights under the Charter to the Towns led the state, under the reforming Emperor Alexander I, to create in 1802 a committee charged with systematizing Russian legislation relating to the Jews. Another task of the committee was to devise ways of limiting “the Jewish exploitation of the peasantry.” This concept of exploitation, that was to underlie the so-called “Jewish Question” in Russia, originated with Polish landowners who were attempting to deflect official investigations into the wretched condition of the enserfed peasantry on their estates.^[8]
The resulting code, the Statute for the Jews (Polozhenie dlia evreev) of 1804, did not give the Polish nobles as free a hand with their Jews as they would have wished. It specifically barred them from enserfing their Jewish tenants – as some had recommended – and retained the substantial autonomy Jews exercised within their own community, the kahal, even when it operated on the estates and private towns of the Polish nobility. The nobles also paid a price for their earlier scapegoating of the Jews. Article 34 of the Polozhenie barred Jews from holding leases for production and sale of spirits, and restricted their residence in peasant villages. This inspired a number of attempted expulsions of Jews from the Belorussian countryside – exactly those Jews who served the nobles as their contractors and leaseholders (arendatory).
These episodes indicate the extent to which the Russian state was aware of the role of Jews in the Polish feudal economy. They also reveal its willingness to seek utility from Jewish mercantile activity, even at the expense of the interests of Poles, be they townsmen or landholding nobles.^[9]

INTERLUDE

The creation of the autonomous Kingdom of Poland (Kongresowka) represented a Russian effort to resolve its Polish Question even while claiming a large share of the spoils of the victory over Napoleon. It also marked a distinct parting of the ways between the Jews of the Kingdom and those of the Empire (i.e., the Pale of Settlement). Before the fatal Polish uprising of 1830, that resulted in the abrogation of its autonomous institutions, Poles in the Kingdom of Poland were left to develop their own distinct policies towards the Jews. This system would remain unique, for despite the subsequent twists and turns of Russian policy, and the oft-stated wishes of Russian bureaucrats, it proved impossible to devise a unified system of law that would cover both Polish and “Russian” Jews. To cite but two examples: recruitment of Jews into the Russian army occurred at different times and under different circumstances for Jews in the Pale (1827) and in the Kingdom (1843). The notorious Temporary Laws of May, 1882, were never applied to Kongresowka. To complicate matters further, acculturated Jews in the Kingdom became Polonized, while those in the Pale were Russified. Indeed, a theme in Polish Antisemitism at the end of the century was the claim that “Russified Litvaks” were flooding into Poland and russifying it. Despite the efforts to be discussed below, Polish Jews were lost to the imperial Russian cause.
The suppressor of the November Uprising of 1830, General Ivan Pashkevich, was the ruthless Russian administrator of Poland until his death in 1856. His demise came at the end of the disastrous Crimean War, the accession to the throne of Alexander II, and the on-set of the Reform Era in Russia. It was a propitious time for Polish hopes. Preoccupied with the enormous task of devising a program of peasant emancipation, the Russians needed a quiescent Poland, and were willing to make concession to obtain it. The rebels of 1830 were amnestied, institutions were renewed or created – and they all promptly took on a political cast. Two parties evolved: the “Whites” sought reform and political autonomy; the “Reds” envisioned a national uprising in support of complete national independence and social reform. Both sides courted the Jews, seen as an economic force that could lend strength to the Polish cause. The years 1861-1862 saw growing unrest in Warsaw, marked by patriot events and demonstrations. The Chief Rabbi of Warsaw, Dov Beer Meisels, openly support the Poles, going so far as to participate in a funeral for those killed when Russian troops opened fire on a demonstration.
The Russians were aware of Polish overtures to the Jews, and began to discuss counter-measures.^[10] A long-serving Jewish Committee functioned in St Petersburg, under the Chairmanship of Count D. N. Bludov. On 30 April/12 May 1861, Valerian Platonov, Under-Secretary of the Polish Council of State, wrote to Alexander II with the suggestion that “it would be useful to do something for the Jews; several proposals on the subject which are before the Jewish Committee could receive immediate implementation.” Count P. D. Kiselev, former chairman of the Jewish Committee, and Dmitri Miliutin, the Minister for War, both recommended that the Jews be cultivated as a counterweight to the Poles.^[11]
These proposals were pre-empted by events. In the hopes of quelling Polish unrest, Alexander II placed at the head of the Polish administration Marquis Alexander Wielopolski, one of the very few Poles who advocated close collaboration with Russia as the best option for securing the restoration of Poland. Through 1862, Wielopolski pursued an ambitious program of domestic reform. Included in these measures was the virtual emancipation of Polish Jewry. Jews were permitted to own real estate, urban and rural. All residence restrictions were removed. Jews could serve as witnesses before notaries, and their testimony was to be given equal weight in court proceedings. Oaths were changed to make them more acceptable to Jews. Wielopolski’s emancipation aimed at assimilation, so Yiddish and Hebrew were banned from legal transactions.^[12] Wielopolski was one of the few statesmen of imperial Russia, Polish or Russian, who set a high value on Jewish commercial activity. Thus, he ordered his bureaucrats to review any legislation that placed restrictions on Jewish economic activity. He also proposed a new tax system for the Jews.
A number of Russian officials were disquieted by Wielopolski’s overtures to the Jews. Among them was Valerian Platonov, who, as noted above, had called for an imperial initiative. He wrote to the Tsar on 10/22 November 1861 to warn him that

Marquis Wielopolski clearly wishes and hopes to merge (slit’) the Jewish with the Polish population by means of measures he intends for them, and to turn those who are actually Jews into Poles of the Mosaic Confession. I dare to suggest that such merging would be quite contrary to the interests and views of the government. The Jews, whose number exceeds 600,000, could easily be attracted to the side of the government which should not make Poles out of them, but leave them as Jews, with their religion, language and nationality (na-rodnost’).^[13]

Despite these misgivings, the Tsar approved Wielopolski’s Jewish reforms, in part because they were presented as a tool for the economic development of the region. Consequently, when the Wielopolski program foundered on the rocks of the January Uprising of 1863, and most of the concessions granted to Kongresowka was rescinded, Jewish emancipation – its economic motives unchanged – was left intact. Michael Ochs, who has chronicled the fate of the Jews in Kongresowka, suggests that the retention of emancipation was also motivated by a desire to “divide and rule,” seeking to undermine the economic interests of the Polish petty gentry, the szlachta, by building up the Jews.^[14] If this was indeed the case, it was a failure. Acculturated Jews retained their Polish patriotism, and remained “Poles of the Mosaic Confession” until the great split that characterized the decade before the First World War.^[15] It is a historical irony that the unsuccessful strategy that the Russian government pursued in Russian Poland, was abandoned in precisely the area where it had the most chance of success, the Russian-Polish borderlands.

POLES AND JEWS: AN ENEMY IN COMMON

The provinces that comprised the governor-generalships of the Northwest and the Southwest were “borderlands”: for Russian they were the “western provinces” and “the Southwest;” for Poles, they constituted the “frontiers of 1772,” (i.e., territories lost to the partitions, but still claimed by Polish memory). These provinces were also co-terminus with the so-called Pale of Jewish Settlement, those territories to which Russian law consigned most of the Empire’s Jewish population. Much of this territory has been part of the holdings of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which was merged with Poland to create the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Reflecting this past, the cultural and economic elite of these borderlands was composed of Poles and Polonized Lithuanian nobles, whose power and influence far outweighed their numbers. For the Russian state, this really was a frontier, where the Russian presence was confined to military and administrative personnel, and a few Russian landowners who had been awarded estates in the region. The peasants were largely Lithuanians, Belorussians, and Ukrainians, despite the efforts of imperial ideologues to pretend that the latter two ethnic groups were really “Russians.”
The events leading up to and flowing from the January Uprising concentrated a good deal of attention to the borderlands in general, and in particular to the Northwest provinces (Vilna, Grodno and Minsk) where some local Poles had supported the Uprising, and where armed insurgent bands had operated. As a consequence, the Northwest region became a laboratory for russification experiments, designed to replace Polish with Russian influence.^[16] Exactly how this was to be done remained a much-debated topic. Since economic power in the region rested upon the ownership of land, an obvious starting point was to replace Polish noble landowners with Russians.
In the case of Poles who had been in open rebellion, this was easily done. They were executed or exiled, and their estates sequestered. Properties thus became available for transfer into Russian hands. The problem lay in attracting the Russians. This was resolved by creating a generous system of discounts and credits for Russian who purchased sequestered estates.^[17] This strategy was only partially successful. Russians, usually in the guise of state servitors, were willing enough to acquire properties at knock-down prices, but less enthusiastic at actually residing on them. The usual expedient of the new owners was to follow the Polish lead and lease out estates to middlemen. These had to be capitalists, because renting land to peasants was too time-consuming and complicated. In addition, the peasant emancipation was just in the process of being completed in the Western provinces, and its implications and opportunities were still unclear.
This left still another problem. What was to be done with the Poles who had been loyal – or at least uncompromised – in 1863? There was no pretext for alienating their estates, but methods had to be found to lessen their influence. While politics took center stage at this juncture, there was the enduring question of how the area might be developed for the economic benefit of the Empire’s exchequer. Essentially the same challenge existed in the Pale as in the Kingdom: should an attempt to made to attract Jews to the Russian cause through relaxing legal restrictions and opening economic opportunities, in order to create a loyal element that was “imperial” and Kaisertreu? In some respects, the opportunities in the Pale were even greater, since Russian did not have to complete with the attractions of culture and tradition that reigned in the Polish ethnic heartland. In the Pale, Polish power and influence in every sphere was clearly on the wane, while Jews collectively possessed the financial resources and entrepreneurial skills required for regional development.
Those who urged the government to seize the opportunity were led by the veteran governor-general of the Southwest (Kiev, Polodia and Volynia provinces), Prince I. I. Vasil’chikov. In his own bailiwick, Vasil’chikov had relaxed residence restrictions in Kiev, resulting in a flood of Jews into that hitherto closed city.^[18] In 1862 he presented a memorandum to the central government recommending that the Jews be used as a regional counterweight to Polish nationalism.^[19] In the aftermath of the January Uprising, he urged the government to relax restrictions on the Jews:

In Jewry, numerous, educated, and liberated from restrictions, the government may find an oppositionary force against the tempestuous Poles. Polish nationalism, which is strong in the state not because of numbers but because of education, the privileges of birth and chiefly because of the restrictions placed upon other estates, cannot be neutralized and balanced by physical force alone... The whole secret consists in bestowing an advantage on the other, apparently insignificant, Jewish element, which nonetheless contains resources of vital strength that can be nurtured and strengthened at the expense of other forces that are hostile to the government.^[20]

Vasil’chikov’s greatest accomplishment in this regard was to convince the government, in 1862, to allow Jewish capitalists to acquire landed estates in the Ukraine. The government not only acquiesced, but extended the right to the entire Pale of Settlement.^[21]
The Jews responded to this initiative with enthusiasm. They became agricultural-industrial innovators, pioneering the production of sugar from sugar-beets, an achievement that placed cheap sugar on the peasant table, and created a dynasty of Jewish “Sugar Barons,” the Brodskys.^[22] The Russian-Jewish intelligentsia^[23] also rallied around the russification campaign in the Northwest, as illustrated by the enthusiastic proponent of Russian-Jewish co-operation, L. O. Levanda.^[24] M. F. de Pule, an activist in the cause of Russification, declared that “when we appeared in the western area with the banner of Russification, there was no more satisfactory ground for our activities, no more ardent accomplices, than educated Jews.”^[25]
In the end, the government lost its nerve. On 5 March 1864 it announced a program of privileges and loans available for the purchase of state land and private estates in the western provinces. The law applied “to persons not of Polish descent of all provinces in the Empire, and of all social estates, except Jews.”^[26] Additional provisions of the law stipulated that the owners and their heirs or inheritors were forbidden “to sell, mortgage, or in any other way transfer such a property to persons of Polish origin or to Jews.” Furthermore, “it is not permitted to give these properties as leases or any form of control to persons of Polish origin and to Jews. The latter may only be distillers and leaseholders of taverns.” Early in 1866 the government announced a new russifying program, whereby state land in the western provinces was to be made available to Russians on state service in the region, and to Russians who wishes to settle permanently in the area. (This was clearly designed to remedy the problem of the physical absence of Russians in the borderlands!) Again, it was specified that under no circumstances was this land to be sold, given, mortgaged or leased to persons of Polish origin or to Jews.^[27]
What was the significance of these two laws? The government was well-aware of the role that Jews had traditionally played in the western provinces as the financial agents of the Poles. Every member of the Polish petty nobility, the szlachta, had his Jewish steward, legend had it. Jews were a major source of credit for Polish landholders, and many estates were mortgaged to Jews. Given the choice between the complicated task of winning over the Jews, and taking more creative approach to the legislation regulating their economic life, and the easier path of merely classifying Poles and Jews together as enemies of the Empire, the regime took the simpler option. The folly of this decision was revealed in a remarkably short time, less than two years after the restrictions were put in place. A law of 8 December 1868 qualified the earlier measures in regard to a ban on lease-holding of estates, except for distilleries and taverns. Jews were permitted to serve as lease-holders of mills and factors located on estates. Why?

Because in the Western region manufacturing and trade is found almost exclusively in the hands of Jews, and outside their milieu (vne ikh sredy) it is almost impossible to find people capable of operating mills and factories for the management of which is required a certain level of knowledge and skill, and the prohibition to rent them out will place the new Russian landowners in a very difficult position, and may even lead to the ruin of some mills and factories and would have a unfortunate impact upon manufacturing and the economy in general, as well as on the task of establishing Russian estate-owners in the Western region.^[28]

The implication of these events – that the Jews were a valuable tool for the Empire’s economic progress, especially in the total absence of any alternative – was entirely lost on the Russian bureaucratic mind. Instead, there was a growing assumption that all Jewish economic activity was harmful. (As Hans Rogger has pointed out, this was in contrast to both pre- and post-emancipation thinking on the Jewish Question which located “Jewish exploitation” in the Jews’ dealings with the peasantry, while encouraging Jewish industry and manufacturing.^[29]) In 1872, for example, Vasil’chikov’s successor, Prince A. M. Dondukov-Korsakov submitted a memorandum to the Jewish Committee then sitting in St Petersburg to review legislation on the Jews. He noted that Jews in his governor-generalship formally leased 819 private estates, but has so many unregistered rental contracts that “it can be said that one-sixth of all estates are in their hands.” In addition, Jews owned 108 sugar factories, 500 distilleries, 119 breweries, 527 other factories, 15,000 shops and 190,000 public houses, inn and taverns. (From which, the Prince neglected to note, the state derived over one-third of its total income.)^[30] Jews dominated trade in lumber and grain, the export market in these and other commodities, and were major contractors for the government. Instead of applauding the Jews as the economic engine that drove regional development, he complained that this economic power was dangerous in Jewish hands, the more so because “the cause of every last Jew is also the cause of the world-wide Jewish kahal… that powerful yet elusive association.”^[31] The Jews were now being viewed as a danger in their own right, not just as allies of the Poles, although this association would linger long in official thinking as well.^[32] This prejudice developed over time, finding expression in efforts to restrict Jewish involvement in joint stock companies, and alarmed cries at the successes of Jewish entrepreneurial activity, such as railway contracting.^[33] All this was despite the fact that Russia made good use of the banking activities of a number of Russian Jews, including the House of Gintsburg and the extended Poliakov family.^[34]
The equivalence of Jews and Poles in official thinking can be seen in other areas where the government imposed restrictions in the post-emancipation era. In 1865, in the aftermath of the January Uprising, War Ministry sought ways to limit the influence of Poles in the military. On 6 June 1866, the Ministry ordered that henceforth Polish doctors could only be admitted into the military (where they would have officer rank) with the specific permission of the commander of the military district where they proposed to serve.^[35] Ironically, at almost the same time (10 May 1865), the Senate loosened the qualifications necessary for Jews to serve as military doctors.^[36] By 1880, elements of the military – traditionally very judeophobe – began to question the reliability of Jewish military doctors. The initiative came from the Commander of the Forces of the Warsaw Military District, and it was directed against both Jews and Poles. He proposed to ban both Jews and Catholics (i.e., Poles) from service as military doctors with forces attached to fortresses of the district. The proposal was accepted by the War Minister, with the proviso that it be kept secret.^[37]
This vote of no-confidence in Jews was soon decoupled from the Poland case, and became public. In 1880, force commanders of military districts in the Pale began to complain that Jewish military doctors were lax in the performance of their duties, and were having a negative effect on the sanitary conditions of the army. In response, the War Minister ordered that a norm be established for admission of Jews into the prestigious Military-Surgical Academy in St Petersburg. This measure, which anticipated the imposition of the numerus clausus on the admission of Jews to secondary and higher education in 1887, created a massive public scandal. Jewish military doctors were the pride of Jewish society – the ultimate example of those acculturated Jews who had “made it” in Russian society. They were members of one of the most prestigious institutions of Russian society, and the only Jews who could attain officer rank. This was thus a public insult that cast aspersions on the loyalty and competence of all Russian Jews. It prompted an outraged outpouring of comment in the Jewish press.^[38]
The army’s pursuit of “Jews and Catholics” was not restricted to prestigious positions such as military doctors, but extended to men in the ranks with special skills. In 1887, Jews and Catholics were barred from service as clerks and scribes in military chancellery offices in the Vilna, Warsaw and Kiev military districts. And in 1891 this was extended to the whole Empire. In 1893 the positions of machinists, millers and their assistants, as well as master craftsmen and fitters in factories that were under the control of the military were barred to Jews and Catholics.^[39] On the eve of the war, conservatives were calling on a cessation of recruitment of Jews into the army in general, since the obligation to provide military service was one of the central arguments that Jewish activists advanced in support of their claim for total emancipation in the Empire. Given these attitudes and outlooks, it was small wonder that the Russian military was notorious for its obsession that the Jewish population in the war zone were all traitors and spies for the Germans.

Jews as Revolutionaries

Given the highly visible and important role that Jews played in the Russian revolutionary movement, scholars have usually assumed that the regime’s equation of Jews with revolutionary disloyalty was based on objective reality, however much exaggerated. A careful examination of the emergence of this motif, however, suggests that it was in place well before the Jews began to appear as revolutionary activists in any real numbers. I have suggested elsewhere that Germany, where Jews were prominent as theoreticians and activists of the socialist movement, may have been the source for this pre-occupation.^[40] But the Polish-Jewish link it present here as well. Feodor Dostoevsky, who had no love for either Poles or Jews, observed in a letter devoted to the demonstration in front of Kazan Cathedral in 1878, that “when will people finally realize how much the Yids (Zhidy) and perhaps the Poles are behind this nihilist business?”^[41] Writing in 1880, N. P. Ignatiev, soon to be appointed Minister of Internal Affairs, claimed that “there is in St Petersburg a very powerful Polish-Yid group, under whose direct control are banks, the stock exchange, the Bar, a large part of the press and other public activities. By many ways and means, legal and illegal, they have enormous influence upon the bureaucracy, and the whole course of affairs. In its individual parts this group is linked to the plunder of the exchequer and to sedition.”^[42] After his appointment, in August of 1881, Ignatiev confided to the Austrian ambassador that Poles and Jews were “the basis for the secret organization of the Nihilists.”^[43] There were the private ruminations of authors and statesmen, but so widespread did these claims become in the Russian press that the revolutionary movement felt compelled to reply. An issue of the underground paper of the Social Revolutionary movement, Narodnaia volia, published two articles devoted to “Statistics on State Crimes in Russia.”^[44] Using public and private figures that classed political prisoners by religion, the author sought to show that Orthodox Christians comprised 74 per cent of the accused, followed by Catholics (presumably Poles) at 15 per cent, and Jews a 4 per cent, slightly less than the percentage of Jews in the population of the Empire as a whole. Thus, the author claim, the revolutionary movement was neither a “Polish intrigue,” (as claimed by the conservative Moscow newspaper Moskovskie vedomosti) nor an undertaking of the Jews (as asserted by the Judeophobe Petersburg newspaper, Novoe vremia). Needless to say, such arguments had little effect on the official mind-set.
There were objective reasons for the subsequent flood of Jews into the revolutionary movement. These included the concentration of Jews in urban centers like Odessa, Vilna and Warsaw, which were breeding grounds of revolutionary activity; the movement of Jews into the industrial proletariat that formed the constituency of the Bund; the frustrations of young Jewish students, stymied in their efforts to attain secondary or higher education, even as they were surrounded by a radicalized student youth. Nor, of course, should the impact of Rechtslцsigkeit be ruled out.
The Russian secret police worked very hard to identify the ideological traits and motivations of their revolutionary adversaries. The training manuals that they produced to guide investigators were often objective and accurate. But objectivity departed the scene when matters turned to the Jews, exemplified by a speech which the Minister of the Interior, V. K. Pleve, gave to a delegation of Odessa Jews in 1903, during which he claimed that the overall percentage of Jews in the revolutionary movement was 40%, and in the western provinces, 90%. Officials were forever calling in rabbis and community leaders and advising them to control “their” youth, as though the Orthodox had any impact upon the revolutionaries who scorned them as exemplars of the outmodes old ways.
There was perhaps something comforting in the belief that “real Russians” were loyal and the revolution was the monopoly of “disloyal Yids” (and Poles). Already inclined to think of the Jews in conspiratorial terms, officials needed only to change the focus. Instead of a Jewish conspiracy to “re-enserf the Russian peasantry” and “suck out their vital juices,” there was a Jewish plot to take control of the whole Christian world. But fantasy is seldom a reliable guide for state policy in the real world. The failures of the Russian state to shape a Jewish policy based on reality was to cost it dear.

Conclusion

The argument of this essay has been that there was nothing inevitable about the failure of Jews to become loyal subjects of the Romanov dynasty and their Empire – Kaisertreu, in the manner of Habsburg Jewry. Servitors of the Russian Empire on a number of occasions recognized the utility of the Jews’ role in the economic development of the Empire. They saw too the possibility of rupturing the ties between the Jews and the politically unreliable Poles, especially in the contested borderlands that comprised the Pale of Settlement. The strategy involved weakening the basis of Polish economic strength – landownership – while giving broader economic scope to the Jews, especially the ability to acquire the lands lost by Poles. This was the intent of the law of 26 April 1862.
This promising initiative was abandoned. Russian statesmen in both the center and the Pale chose to view the Jews purely as economic allies of the Poles, who had to be treated with identical severity if the goals of Russification were to be achieved. Indeed, Poles and Jews became inextricably linked in official thinking as a collective anti-Russian force. (The irony was that the Russian state was embarked upon this course even as the tradition of Polish-Jewish cooperation in the Kingdom of Poland began to break down, leading to the Polish indictment of Jews as agents of Russification.)^[45] The link extended to the conceptualization of Jews as part of the anti-governmental revolutionary movement well before there was an objective basis for this claim.
The consequences of these beliefs can be found in the course of Russian legislation towards the Jews. Promising initiatives to dismantle the Pale of Settlement (the Law of 28 June 1865, the Maklov Circular of 1880)^[46] gave way to the May Laws of 1882 and the mass expulsion of the Jews from Moscow in 1891. Restrictions were placed on the access of Jews to higher education, creating an intellectual Jewish proletariat that offered promising material for the revolutionary movement. Obstacles to the full admission of Jews to the Bar ensured that Jewish advocates were almost uniformly to be found in opposition.^[47] Denial of places in the civil service ensured that Jewish pens were in the service of the anti-governmental press.
The judeophobe mindset of the imperial government created conditions that actively encouraged the movement of Jews into political opposition, be it revolutionary or “bourgoise.” Even a movement such as Zionism, that might have provided a harmless safety-valve, had to labor under the suspicion of the authorities. Periods of enforced change, such as the Revolution of 1905, brought little benefit for the Jews, as the state sought to exempt them from the generalized rights that had been offered to all other citizens (always excluding the Poles, of course). The anti-Jewish pogroms that marred the era were viewed by the Tsar as an expression of support for the regime. This led the government to offer at least symbolic approval for right-wing elements that utilized Antisemitism as a form of ideological glue. It became literally impossible for Jews to join the right-wing of Russian politics. The only options readily available were apathy – the choice of the majority – or active opposition. The specter of the “revolutionary Jew” that haunted late imperial Russia was very much a creature of its own creation.
Failure demands a penalty, and the Romanovs did not escape Nemesis. A Jew commanded the firing squad that liquidated the imperial family on the night of 16-17 July 1918. One anonymous witness saw an appropriate biblical parallel, and scribbled a couplet on the walls of the room where the execution took place. It was taken from Heinrich Heine’s poem “Belshazzar,” a poetic retelling of the story of the handwriting on the wall, and slightly changed to include a pun on Belshazzar’s name:

Belsatzar ward in selbigen Nacht
Von seinen Knechten umgebracht.^[48]