And stained by the yoke of slavery,
Full of godless flattery, of vicious lying,
And ev'ry possible knavery.

But the full weight of "the yoke of slavery" and "falsehood's
blackness," by which pre-reformatory Russia was marked, fell upon the
shoulders of the most hapless section of Russian subjects, the Jews. The
tragic gloom of the end of Nicholas' reign finds its only parallel in
Jewish annals in the beginning of the same reign. The would-be "reforms"
proposed in the interval, in the beginning of the forties, did not
deceive the popular instinct. The Jews of the Pale saw not only the hand
which was holding forth the charter of enlightenment but also the other
hand which hid a stone in the form of new cruel restrictions. Soon the
Government threw off the mask of enlightenment, and set out to realize
its reserve program, that of "correcting" the Jews by police methods.

It will be remembered that the principal item in this program was "the
assortment of the Jews," i.e., the segregation from among them of all
persons without a certain status as to property or without definite
occupations, for the purpose of proceeding against them as criminal
members of society. As far back as 1846 the Government forewarned the
Jews of the imminent "bloody operation over a whole class," against
which Governor-General Vorontzov had vainly protested. [1] All Jews were
ordered to register at the earliest possible moment among the guilds and
estates assigned to them, "with the understanding that in case this
measure should fail, the Government would of itself carry out the
assortment," to wit: "it will set apart the Jews who are not engaged in
productive labor, and will subject them, as burdensome to society, to
various restrictions." The threat fell flat, for it was rather too much
to expect that fully a half of the Jewish population, doomed by civil
disabilities and general economic conditions to a life of want and
distress, could obtain at a stroke the necessary "property status" or
"definite occupations."

[Footnote 1: See above, p. 64 et seq.]

Accordingly, on November 23, 1851, the Tzar gave his sanction to the
"Temporary Rules Concerning the Assortment of the Jews." All Jews were
divided into five categories: merchants, agriculturists, artisans,
settled burghers, and unsettled burghers. The first three categories
were to be made up of those who were enrolled among the corresponding
guilds and estates. "Settled burghers" we