Suchergebnisse

Writing in 1862, the testy Slavophile publicist and editor Ivan Aksakov complained:
The expressions: 'idea of the age,' 'liberal idea,' 'human thought' — act in our progressive society as some sort of scarecrow (pugalo), to frighten the most courageous critic. This is that sort of sign for which every lie is willingly concealed, a lie often not only not liberal and not humane, but forcibly disturbing and insulting to the rights of life, and the daily existence of the voiceless mass, to the advantage of the imaginarily-oppressed (mnimo-ugnetennyi), the clamerous, vocal minority …. As in the case of the Jewish Question, we only bow and scrape civilly and — it is necessary to recognize — not quite sincerely, before any new privilege for the [the Jews], not taking into account the significance and limits of such a privilege.

A Russian proverb knowingly reminds us that "the law is like a wagon-tongue —whichever way you point it, there it goes." It is useful to remember this observation when examining the position of the Jews in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire. The legal basis for that position, which was characterized by exclusion and discrimination, has commonly been traced to the period from 1772 to 1796, when Russia's Jews first entered the empire in large numbers. This study will describe the creation of the legal "wagon-tongue" during the late eighteenth century, and will suggest that the legal precedents cannot be understood by only considering the directions in which the law was later to be pointed. Emphasis will be placed on the initial evolution of an ad hoc body of law, confused, contradictory, and ambiguous, capable of subsequent interpretation and elaboration with either sympathy or hostility.