History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II | Page 9

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 population, the so-called burgher estate, [1] consisting of petty artisans and those impoverished tradesmen who could not afford to enrol in the mercantile guilds, though there are cases on record where poor Jews begged from door to door to collect a sufficient sum of money for a guild certificate in order to save their children from military service. The more or less well-to-do were exempted from conscription either by virtue of their mercantile status or because of their connections with the Kahal leaders who had the power of selecting the victims.
[Footnote 1: See above, p. 23, n. 1.]
4. THE POLICY OF EXPULSIONS
In all lands of Western Europe the introduction of personal military service for the Jews was either accompanied or preceded by their emancipation. At all events, it was followed by some mitigation of their disabilities, serving, so to speak, as an earnest of the grant of equal rights. Even in clerical Austria, the imposition of military duty upon the Jews was preceded by the Toleranz Patent, this would-be Act of Emancipation. [1]
[Footnote 1: Military service was imposed upon the Jews of Austria by the law of 1787. Several years previously, on January 2, 1782, Emperor Joseph II. had issued his famous Toleration Act, removing a number of Jewish disabilities and opening the way to their assimilation with the environment. Nevertheless, most of the former restrictions remained in force.]
In Russia the very reverse took place. The introduction of military conscription of a most aggravating kind and the unspeakable cruelties attending its practical execution were followed, in the case of the Jews, by an unprecedented recrudescence of legislative discrimination and a monstrous increase of their disabilities. The Jews were lashed with a double knout, a military and a civil. In the same ill-fated year which saw the promulgation of the conscription statute, barely three months after it had received the imperial sanction, while the moans of the Jews, fasting and praying to God to deliver them from the calamity, were still echoing in the synagogues, two new ukases were issued, both signed on December 2, 1827--the one decreeing the transfer of the Jews from all villages and village inns in the government of Grodno into the towns and townlets, the other ordering the banishment of all Jewish residents from the city of Kiev.
The expulsion from the Grodno villages was the continuation of the policy of the rural liquidation of Jewry, inaugurated in 1823 in White Russia. [1] The Grodno province was merely meant to serve as a starting point. Grand Duke Constantine, [2] who had brought up the question, was ordered "at first to carry out the expulsion in the government of Grodno alone," and to postpone for a later occasion the application of the same measure to the other "governments entrusted to his command." Simultaneously considerable foresight was displayed in instructing the grand duke to wait with the expulsion of the Jews "until the conclusion of the military conscription going on at present." Evidently there was some fear of disorders and complications. It was thought wiser to seize the children for the army first and then to expel the parents--to get hold of the young birds and then to destroy the nest.
[Footnote 1: It may be remarked here that the principal enactments of that period, down to 1835, were, drafted in their preliminary stage by the "Jewish Committee"