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Tsarist Anti-Semitism and Russian-American Relations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Ann E. Healy
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Extract

For over a hundred years the fate of Russian Jews has been of special concern to many Americans. During the first half of this period, tsarist policies toward the Jews were the major irritant in the otherwise comparatively harmonious relations between the United States and Russia. The result was a recurring diplomatic dispute over the Jewish question, the course of which provides a barometer for gauging the changing situation of the Jews in the Russian empire. The dispute centered largely on individual acts of discrimination by Russian officials against Americans. Many of them involved naturalized citizens of Russian origin, most of whom were Jews. Behind the State Department protests on their behalf lay the more complex issue of mounting American indignation at the increasingly difficult situation of Jews in Russia after 1880.

American reactions varied from holding public meetings on the issue to exerting pressure on United States government agencies. Former president Ulysses Grant was one of the main initiators of a rally in New York in 1882 protesting anti-Jewish atrocities in Russia. The pogroms received considerable coverage in the Western press: the April 1882 Century, for instance, carried a vivid account of riots that raged for more than twenty-four hours in Elizavetgrad during Easter Week of 1881 and spoke of “world wide sympathy, and a protest almost unprecedented in its swiftness.”

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , Fall 1983 , pp. 408 - 425
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1983

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References

1. See “The Outrages in Russia,” and Z. Ragozin, “Russian Jews and Gentiles from a Russian Point of View,” Century, 23, no. 6 (April 1882): 949, 905-907. Ragozin's article, like many subsequent attempts by Russians to explain tsarist restrictions on Jews to an American audience, revealed strongly held, deepseated racist attitudes, no more likely to be affected by foreign protests than the firm belief in white superiority held by many of her readers. To Ragozin, Jews were hated “not because they believe and pray differently … but because they are a parasitical race … because their ways are crooked, their manner abject… . The readiness with which they appeal to foreign sympathy and interference,” which any citizens would regard as “state treason of the worst kind,” was “but another phase of their oriental nature” (pp. 919-20).

2. G. la. Krasnyi-Admoni, ed., Materialy dlia istorii antievreiskikh pogromov v Rossii, vol. 2 (Petrograd, 1923), p. iii.

3. Hans Rogger, “Tsarist Policy on Jewish Emigration,” Soviet Jewish Affairs, 3, no. 1 (1973): 28.

4. Lawrence Fuchs, The Political Behavior of American Jews (Glencoe, Illinois: 1956), pp. 49-50, 59.

5. James D. Richardson, comp., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents (New York, 1897), 12:5623.

6. U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1891 (hereafter FRUS), 1892, p. 739.

7. FRUS, 1894, p. 535.

8. Golitsyn, N. N., Istoriia russkago zakonadatel'stva o evreiakh (St. Petersburg, 1886), p. xiii Google Scholar; see Levanda, V. O.'s compilation Polnyi khronologicheskii sbornik zakonov i polozhenii, kasaiushchikhsia evreiev (St. Petersburg, 1874)Google Scholar.

9. Iulii Gessen, “Graf N. P. Ignat'ev i ‘Vremennye pravila’ o evreiakh 3 maia 1882 goda,“ Pravo, nos. 30-31 (1908), p. 1632. The May Laws are in Polnoe sobranie zakonov rossiiskoi imperii, 3, no. 834, May 3, 1882, p. 181.

10. These and other aspects of tsarist Jewish policies are discussed in the following excellent articles by Rogger, Hans: “The Jewish Policy of Late Tsarism: A Reappraisal,” Weiner Library Bulletin, 25 (1971): 43, 48-49Google Scholar; “Russian Ministers and the Jewish Question: 1881-1917,” California Slavic Studies, 8 (1975): 21, 23-25; “Government, Jews, Peasants and Land in Post-Emancipation Russia,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviitique, 22, nos. 2-3 (April-September): 184-85.

11. Jackson Taylor, Jr., “Dmitrii Andreevich Tolstoi and the Ministry of the Interior, 1881— 1889” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1970), pp. 56-57.

12. National Archives, Records of the Department of State, Diplomatic Instructions, Russia (hereafter Dept. of State, Russia, Instructions), Record Group 59, 16:221.

13. FRUS, 1881, pp. 990-92; John W. Foster, Diplomatic Memoirs (Boston and New York, 1909), p. 163.

14. FRUS, 1881, pp. 1000, 998-99.

15. FRUS, 1881, p. 997; William M. Malloy, Treaties, Conventions, International Acts, Protocols and Agreements between the United States and Other Powers: 1776-1909 (Washington, D.C., 1910), 2:1514, 1519.

16. Dept. of State, Russia, Instructions, 16:230-31.

17. For an informative discussion of tsarist policy on emigration see the article by Hans Rogger cited in n. 3.

18. Dept. of State, Russia, Instructions, 18:181.

19. Ibid., 17:124.

20. Dept. of State, Russia, Instructions, 16:371-72, 382-83.

21. Ibid., 17:587-88.

22. Kirk H. Porter and Donald Bruce Johnson, National Party Platforms: 1840-1964 (Urbana, I11., 1966), p. 88.

23. Ibid., p. 94.

24. Petr A. Zaionchkovskii, The Russian Autocracy Under Alexander III (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1976), pp. 75-76.

25. Dept. of State, Russia, Instructions, 16:602-603.

26. Ibid., 16: 364.

27. FRUS, 1895, p. xxxii.

28. Dept. of State, Russia, Instructions, 16:670.

29. Ibid., 17:589-90.

30. Ibid., 18:465.

31. FRUS, 1895, p. 1068.

32. U.S. Congressional Record: Senate, 55th Congress, 1st Session (May 25, 1897), p. 1221.

33. Dept. of State, Russia, Instructions, 17:355-56; Adler, Cyrus's The Voice of America on Kishineff (Philadelphia, 1904)Google Scholar contained an almost five-hundred-page account of the movement. For the official United States reaction see Taylor, Stults, “Roosevelt, Russian Persecution of Jews and American Public Opinion” Jewish Social Studies, 33, no. 1 (January 1971): 21.Google Scholar

34. Oscar, Straus, Under Four Administrations (Boston and New York, 1922), pp. 172–73Google Scholar. See John Hay's letter to Schiff, Jacob in Tyler Dennett's John Hay (New York, 1934), p. 398.Google Scholar

35. Adler, Voice of America on Kishineff, pp. xii-xiii.

36. Robert Maddox's master's thesis, “The American Jewish Committee and the Passport Question,” University of Wisconsin, 1958, contains an interesting account of the origins of the American Jewish Committee, pp. 5-10 passim; see also Salo Baron, Steeled by Adversity (Philadelphia, 1971), pp. 357-59.

37. Proceedings of the Fiftieth Anniversary Observance of the American Jewish Committee (New York, 1958), p. xi; American Jewish Committee, First Annual Report, 1908, pp. 4, 6.

38. American Jewish Committee, Fourth Annual Report, 1911, pp. 20-21.

39. Philip C. Jessup, Elihu Root (New York, 1938), 2:66. On June 22, 1906 both houses of Congress approved the following resolution without objection: “The people of the United States are horrified by the report of the massacre of Hebrews in Russia … those bereaved thereby have the hearty sympathy of the people of this country.” Congressional Record, 59th Congress, 1st Session, 1906, pp. 8919, 9004.

40. U.S. Congress House Foreign Affairs Committee, Termination of the Treaty between the United States and Russia; Hearing, December 11 (and 12), 1911, on H.J.R. 166 (Washington, D.C., 1911), p. 240 (hereafter Termination, Hearing); Stults, “Roosevelt, Russian Persecution,” p. 13.

41. Termination, Hearing, p. 93.

42. Cyrus Adler and Aaron M. Margalith, With Firmness in the Right (New York, 1946), pp. 278-80.

43. “The Passport Question,” The American Jewish Year Book, 1911-1912, pp. 40-41.

44. Porter and Johnson, National Party Platforms, p. 139.

45. Ibid., p. 148.

46. Adler and Margalith, With Firmness, pp. 281-82.

47. Cyrus Adler, ed., Jacob H. Schiff: His Life and Letters, (Garden City, N.Y., 1928), 2:147.

48. “The Passport Question in Congress,” The American Jewish Year Book, 1909-1910, pp. 40-41.

49. Fuchs, Political Behavior, p. 54.

50. Charles Reznikoff, Louis Marshall, Champion of Liberty: Selected Papers and Addresses (Philadelphia, 1957), pp. 100, 57-58.

51. The complete text of Louis Marshall's address is in The American Jewish Year Book, 1911-1912, pp. 76-87. See especially pp. 84-87; 76-77.

52. Simon Wolf, Presidents I Have Known from 1860-1918 (Washington, D.C., 1918), pp. 309, 293-316 passim; Reznikoff, Louis Marshall, p. 86.

53. Adler, Jacob H. Schiff, 2: 147, 151.

54. Reznikoff, Louis Marshall, pp. 73-76.

55. A. O. Sachs, “The Abrogation of the Russian American Treaty of 1832,” (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1947), pp. 75-76, n. 17.

56. American Jewish Committee, Sixth Annual Report, 1913, p. 8.

57. Sachs, “Abrogation,” pp. 76-77, 82.

58. American Federation of Labor, Report of Proceedings of the Annual Convention (November 1911), pp. 354-55.

59. Termination, Hearing, p. 77.

60. Congressional Record, Senate, 62nd Congress, 2nd Session, pp. 181-82.

61. Sachs, “Abrogation,” p. 82; FRUS, 1911, p. 695.

62. Maddox, “American Jewish Commitee,” pp. 73-74.

63. FRUS, 1911, pp. 695-96.

64. Ibid., pp. 698-99.

65. Congressional Record, 62nd Congress, 2nd Session, December 18 and 20, 1911, pp. 453-55, 552-54, 559.

66. FRUS, 1911, pp. 696-97.

67. Vladimir Kokovtsov, “Russia's Attitude on the Abrogated Treaty,” Collier's, 48 (January 27, 1912): 10.

68. Reznikoff, Louis Marshall, pp. 103-104.

69. FRUS, 1911, p. 697.

70. Adler, Jacob H. Schiff, 2:150-51.

71. John V. Hogan, “Russian-American Commercial Relations,” Political Science Quarterly,

27 (1912): 635-36, 640.

72. David R. Francis, Russia from the American Embassy (New York, 1921), pp. 9-10.

73. George Thomas Marye, Nearing the End in Imperial Russia (Philadelphia, 1929), p. 22.

74. Cited in Benson L. Grayson, Russian-American Relations in World War I (New York, 1979), p. 54.

75. New York Times, February 24, 1916, p. 12.