f the past, beginning
with the time of Elizabeta Petrovna. What was favorable was suppressed;
the unfavorable was most rigorously enforced. Jews living outside the
Pale were driven back into it on the slightest pretext and in the most
inhuman manner. To increase the already unendurable congestion, the Pale
was made smaller than before. In accordance with the first clause of the
"May laws," Jews were expelled from the villages within the Pale itself.
In 1888 the districts of Rostov and Taganrog, which till then had
belonged to the Pale, and had been developed largely through Jewish
enterprise, were torn away and amalgamated with the Don district, in
which Jews were not permitted to reside. This was followed by expulsions
from St. Petersburg (1890), Moscow, (1891), Novgorod, Riga, and Yalta
(1893), and the abrogation of the time-honored privileges of the Jews of
Bokhara (1896). Even those who, as skilled artisans or discharged
soldiers, had been privileged to reside wherever they chose, were
expelled with their wives and the children born in their adopted city.
Their only salvation lay in conversion. Converts were especially
favored, and were offered liberal inducements. By becoming a convert to
the Orthodox Russian Church, a Jew is immediately freed from all the
degrading restrictions on his freedom of movement and his choice of a
profession. Converts, without distinction of sex, are helped financially
by an immediate payment of sums from thirteen to thirty rubles, and
until recently were granted freedom from taxation for five years. If a
candidate for Greek Christianity is married, his conversion procures him
a divorce, and, unless she likewise is converted, his wife may not marry
again. By conversion, a Jew may escape the consequence of any misdeed
against a fellow-Jew, for, to quote the Russian code, "in actions
concerning Jews who have embraced Christianity Jews may not be admitted
as witnesses, if any objection is raised against them as such." The
penal code provides that Jews shall pay twice and treble the amount of
the fine to which non-Jews are liable under similar circumstances. Jews
were excluded from the professions to which they had turned in the
"sixties" and "seventies," and in which they had been eminently
successful; they were not allowed to hold any civil or municipal office;
they were forbidden even to be nurses in the hospitals or to give
private instruction to children in the homes.

And still persecu