The Beginning of an Ethnic War

In school, I brought these fascinating facts up with some of my teachers. They in turn were as incredulous as I had been. One suggested that the Jewish involvement in the Communist revolution might have been a result of the long-running historical persecution of Jews by the Czars and, indeed, by much of the Russian intelligentsia. For instance, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and many other prominent Russian writers had criticized Jewish machinations in their books and articles. Russians didn't like it that the Jews used the Russian language for doing business among Gentiles but spoke Yiddish among themselves. Jews were also accused of having an "us versus them" mentality rather than assimilating with the Christian majority.

There had been a running feud between the Russians and the Jews for centuries, and from these conflicts arose "pogroms" to suppress the Jews. This war without borders can be illustrated by the Jewish reaction in the 1880s to the anti-Semitic Russian May Laws. The May Laws of 1882 attempted to restrict Jews from some professions and mandate resettlement of most Jews to their original area of the empire, the Pale of Settlement (a huge area, originally set up in 1772, encompassing an area about half the size of Western Europe, extending from the Crimea to the Baltic Sea, to which the Jews had been restricted).

In retaliation, Jewish international financiers did their best to destroy the Russian economy. Encyclopaedia Britannica describes the happenings this way:

The Russian May Laws were the most conspicuous legislative monument achieved by modern anti-Semitism.... Their immediate result was a ruinous commercial depression which was felt all over the empire and which profoundly affected the national credit. The Russian minister was at his wits end for money. Negotiations for a large loan were entered upon with the house of Rothschild and a preliminary contract was signed, when...the finance minister was informed that unless the persecutions of the Jews were stopped the great banking house would be compelled to withdraw from the operation....¹

In response to the economic and other pressures put upon Russia, the Czar issued an edict on September 3, 1882. In it he stated:

For some time the government has given its attention to the Jews and to their relations to the rest of the inhabitants of the empire, with a view of ascertaining the sad condition of the Christian inhabitants brought about by the conduct of Jews in business matters....

With few exceptions, they have as a body devoted their attention, not to enriching or benefiting the country, but to defrauding by their wiles its inhabitants, and particularly its poor inhabitants. This conduct of theirs has called forth protests on the part of the people,... thought it a matter of urgency and justice to adopt stringent measures in order to put an end to the oppression practiced by the Jews on the inhabitants, and to free the country from their malpractices, which were, as is known, the cause of the agitations.²