nd outside of culture, and united
by the dark sense of hatred against everything surpassing its
understanding and defenceless against brute force. I speak of the
populace which thus defines itself in the words of Pushkin, our great
poet, who himself suffered so cruelly from the aristocratic populace:

"We are insidious and shameless,
Ungrateful, faint-hearted and wicked;
At heart we are cold, sterile eunuchs,
Traducers, born to slavery."

It is mainly this populace that is the bearer of the brute principles,
such as anti-Semitism.

The Jews are defenceless, and this is especially dangerous for them in
the conditions of Russian life. Dostoyevsky, who knew the Russian soul
so well, pointed out repeatedly that defencelessness arouses in it a
sensuous inclination to cruelty and crime. In late years there have
appeared in Russia quite a few people who have been taught to think
that they are the finest of the wheat, and that their enemy is the
stranger, above all--the Jew. For a long time these people were being
persuaded that all the Jews are restless people, strikers and rioters.
They were next informed that the Jews like to drink the blood of
thievish boys. In our days they are being taught that the Polish Jews
are spies and traitors.

If this preaching of hatred will not bring bloody and shameful fruits,
it will be only because it will clash with our Russian indifference to
life and will disappear in it; it will split against the Chinese
wall, behind which our still inexplicable nation is hidden.

But if this indifference be stirred up by the efforts of the hatred
preachers,--the Jews will loom up before the Russian nation as a race
accused of all crimes.

And it is not for the first time that all the troubles of Russian life
will be blamed on the Jew; time and again was he the scapegoat for our
sins. Only recently he paid with his life and goods for the help he
rendered us in our feverish struggle for freedom. I think no one has
forgotten the fact that our "emancipatory movements" strangely wound
up with anti-Jewish riots.

* * * * *

When the many-raced populace of Jerusalem demanded the death of the
defenceless Jew, Christ, Pilate, believing Christ innocent, washed his
hands, but allowed him to be put to death.

How then will honest Russian men and women act in Pilate's place?
Their judgment is awaited.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "If I am not for myself who is for me