From: mars1933@hotmail.com   
      
     The pogroms have consistently been portrayed by   
   (mainly Jewish) historians as "irrational manifestations of hatred   
   against Jews,"2 where peasant mobs were the unwitting dupes of ma-   
   levolent Russian officials.   
      
      Little or no historiography has been dedicated to peeling back the   
   layers of "refugee" stories to uncover what really happened in the   
   Russian Empire in the years before and during the riots. This lack of   
   historical enquiry can be attributed at least in part to a great   
   reluctance on the part of Jewish historians to investigate the pogroms   
   in any manner beyond the merely superficial. In addition, historical   
   enquiry by non-Jewish historians into the subject has been openly   
   discouraged. For example, when Ukrainian historians discovered   
   evidence proving that contemporary media reports of Jewish casualties   
   in that nation were exaggerated, JewishGen, a Jewish genealogy web-   
   site, responded by stating: "We believe that [these facts] are more   
   than irrelevant because it redirects public attention from the major   
   topic: the genocidal essence of pogroms."4   
      
      It should suffice to state here that this response contravenes the   
   very essence of historical enquiry-to uncover history as it actually   
   happened, irrespective of the uncomfortable truths which may lie   
   therein. The statement could be translated as "Let's not let the facts   
   get in the way of a politically useful story." Also, as this essay   
   will show, the tendency to portray the riots as "genocidal" is   
   completely lacking in foundation.   
      
    By 1774, complaints were reaching Russian officials from non-Jewish   
   merchants who argued that Jewish ethnic networking was propping up the   
   monopoly of exports, and that this monopoly would shortly have dire   
   implications for the consumer.13 These revelations were the key   
   motivating factors in the decision to expel Warsaw's Jews in 1775, and   
   until the early 19th century there was a kind of stand-off between   
   Poles and Jews.14 Napoleon's establishment of the Duchy of Warsaw in   
   1807 did little to alter the situation, as Napoleon acceded to local   
   sentiment which held that Jews should not feel the benefit of the new   
   constitution until they had "eradicated their peculiar   
   characteristics."15 In 1813, the government of the Duchy moved to   
   break the Jewish monopoly on liquor, banning all Jews from selling   
   alcohol in the villages, bringing an end to the activity of "tens of   
   thousands" of Jewish liquor merchants in the provinces. Not   
   surprisingly, when the Duchy was dissolved in 1815 following   
   Napoleon's failed attempt to invade Russia, Polish Jewry shed no   
   tears.   
      
       In late 1815, the Congress of Vienna was held. One of the key   
   tasks of the Congress to give its assent to the formation of a new   
   autonomous Polish kingdom under the sovereignty of Russia. Although   
   the bulk of Polish Jewry remained within the newly established   
   kingdom, tens of thousands also poured forth into other areas of the   
   Russian Empire, ushering in an uncomfortable age of fraught   
   Russian-Jewish relations. The immediate reaction of the Russian   
   government to the acquisition of such large, and unwanted, Jewish   
   populations was to prevent the penetration of these populations from   
   intrusion into the old Russian territories; the solution reached was   
   one of containment. A new kind of settlement was created in provinces   
   along the western frontier which became known as the "Pale of   
   Settlement." Although a large amount of negative connotations have   
   been attributed to the Pale, it was not an impermeable fortress.   
   Certain Jews were permitted to reside outside these provinces, they   
   could visit trade fairs, and Jews were even permitted to study at   
   Russian universities provided they did not exceed quotas. By 1860,   
   more than half of world Jewry resided in the Pale.   
      
      It was largely Klier's work in the late 1980s which began to truly   
   shed light on the origins of Russian-Jewish relations prior to 1914.   
   Klier, born into a Catholic family in Kansas, "rejected what might be   
   called the Fiddler on the Roof pieties and simplifications. In book   
   after book, he emphasised that what the tsars and their ministers   
   wanted, above all else, was for the Jewish settlements to be orderly   
   and productive."18 Klier further stressed that the much-maligned Pale   
   of Settlement was simply the only response that the Russian   
   administration could come up with, faced as they were with the   
   "baffling question" of how to deal with the "fanaticism of   
   ultra-Orthodox Jewry" which was thoroughly "unassimilable to official   
   purposes."19   
      
      In 1841, investigations were carried out into Russia's Jewish com-   
   munities, and the subsequent reports pointed to three significant   
   problems. The first was persistent Jewish difference in dress, lan-   
   guage, and religious and communal organization. The idea underpin-   
   ning this aloofness from non-Jewish society, the "Chosen" status of   
   the Jews and an accompanying ethnic chauvinism, was said to be par-   
   ticularly harmful to relations between Jews and other peoples, par-   
   ticularly when it was reinforced through "a system of male education   
   that was thought to inculcate anti-Christian interpretations of the   
   Talmud."20   
      
      The second, related, problem was that Jewish economic practices   
   were also rooted in this aloofness. The Talmud "encouraged and justi-   
   fied unreserved economic exploitation based on cheating and exploit-   
   ing the non-Jews,"21 thus validating Max Weber's theory of "internal"   
   and "external" ethics, whereby "members of a cohesive social unit ob-   
   serve different moral standards among themselves compared with   
   those observed in relation to strangers."22   
      
      The third aspect of the Russian "Jewish Question" was the issue of   
   Jewish loyalty. The Jews of the Russian Empire had evidently retained   
   the kahal of pre-partition Polish Jewry. The kahal was a formal system   
   of Jewish communal leadership and government, entirely separate   
   from the Russian state. Although tacitly tolerated by the state for   
   its tax collection capabilities, Jewish loyalty to the kahal was   
   absolute, going well beyond the merely fiscal. Almost all Jews   
   continued to resort to Jewish courts for legal disputes among Jews.   
      
       The mutual assistance offered by the kahal was felt to have had   
   economic implications-"it was the mutual support provided by the kahal   
   that ensured that Jews were more than a match for any competitor,   
   even the arch-exploiter of the Russian village, the kulak."26   
      
   Having emancipated the peasantry and adopted a paternalistic concern   
   for the former serfs, the government also viewed with alarm the   
   rapidity with which the "Jews were exploiting the unsophisticated and   
   ignorant rural inhabitants, reducing them to a Jewish serfdom."28   
      
    Jews were beginning to swamp higher education establishments. In   
   Odessa, there were reports that in school after school, Jews were   
   "driving Christians from the school benches," and "filling up the   
   schools."31   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)