History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II | Page 9

an equally tender age. Within a few months there appeared in every
city hundreds and thousands of such couples, whose marital relations
were often confined to playing with nuts or bones. The
misunderstanding which had caused this senseless matrimonial panic or
_beholoh,_[1] as it was afterwards popularly called, was cleared up by
the publication, on April 13, 1835, of the new "Statute on the Jews." To
be sure, the new law contained a clause forbidding marriages before the
age of eighteen, but it offered no privileges for those already married,
so that the only result of the beholoh was to increase the number of
families robbed by conscription of their heads and supporters.
[Footnote 1: A Hebrew word, also used in Yiddish, meaning _fright,
panic_.]

The years of military service were spent by the grown-up Jewish
soldiers amidst extraordinary hardships. They were beaten and
ridiculed because of their inability to express themselves in Russian,
their refusal to eat trefa, and their general lack of adaptation to the
strange environment and to the military mode of life. And even when
this process of adaptation was finally accomplished, the Jewish soldier
was never promoted beyond the position of a non-commissioned
under-officer, baptism being the inevitable stepping-stone to a higher
rank. True, the Statute on Military Service promised those Jewish
soldiers who had completed their term in the army with distinction
admission to the civil service, but the promise remained on paper so
long as the candidates were loyal to Judaism. On the contrary, the Jews
who had completed their military service and had in most cases become
invalids were not even allowed to spend the rest of their lives in the
localities outside the Pale, in which they had been stationed as soldiers.
Only at a later period, during the reign of Alexander II., was this right
accorded to the "Nicholas soldiers" [1] and their descendants.
[Footnote 1: In Russian, Nikolayevskiye soldaty, i.e., those that had
served in the army during the reign of Nicholas I.]
The full weight of conscription fell upon the poorest classes of the
Jewish population, the so-called burgher estate, [1] consisting of petty
artisans and those impoverished tradesmen who could not afford to
enrol in the mercantile guilds, though there are cases on record where
poor Jews begged from door to door to collect a sufficient sum of
money for a guild certificate in order to save their children from
military service. The more or less well-to-do were exempted from
conscription either by virtue of their mercantile status or because of
their connections with the Kahal leaders who had the power of
selecting the victims.
[Footnote 1: See above, p. 23, n. 1.]
4. THE POLICY OF EXPULSIONS
In all lands of Western Europe the introduction of personal military
service for the Jews was either accompanied or preceded by their

emancipation. At all events, it was followed by some mitigation of their
disabilities, serving, so to speak, as an earnest of the grant of equal
rights. Even in clerical Austria, the imposition of military duty upon the
Jews was preceded by the Toleranz Patent, this would-be Act of
Emancipation. [1]
[Footnote 1: Military service was imposed upon the Jews of Austria by
the law of 1787. Several years previously, on January 2, 1782, Emperor
Joseph II. had issued his famous Toleration Act, removing a number of
Jewish disabilities and opening the way to their assimilation with the
environment. Nevertheless, most of the former restrictions remained in
force.]
In Russia the very reverse took place. The introduction of military
conscription of a most aggravating kind and the unspeakable cruelties
attending its practical execution were followed, in the case of the Jews,
by an unprecedented recrudescence of legislative discrimination and a
monstrous increase of their disabilities. The Jews were lashed with a
double knout, a military and a civil. In the same ill-fated year which
saw the promulgation of the conscription statute, barely three months
after it had received the imperial sanction, while the moans of the Jews,
fasting and praying to God to deliver them from the calamity, were still
echoing in the synagogues, two new ukases were issued, both signed on
December 2, 1827--the one decreeing the transfer of the Jews from all
villages and village inns in the government of Grodno into the towns
and townlets, the other ordering the banishment of all Jewish residents
from the city of Kiev.
The expulsion from the Grodno villages was the continuation of the
policy of the rural liquidation of Jewry, inaugurated in 1823 in White
Russia. [1] The Grodno province was merely meant to serve as a
starting point. Grand Duke Constantine, [2] who had brought up the
question, was ordered "at first to carry out the expulsion in the
government of Grodno alone," and to postpone for a later