umors began to spread among the Jewish masses
concerning a law which was about to be issued forbidding early marriages
but exempting from conscription those married prior to the promulgation
of the law. A panic ensued. Everywhere feverish haste was displayed in
marrying off boys from ten to fifteen years old to girls of 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 pop