History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II | Page 5

the transmission of Novosiltzev's memorandum,
the Tzar directed the Minister of the Interior and the Chief of the
General Staff to submit to him for signature an ukase imposing military
service upon the Jews. The fatal enactment was signed on August 26,
1827.
2. The Recruiting Ukase of 1827 and Juvenile Conscription
The ukase announces the desire of the Government "to equalize
military duty for all estates," without, be it noted, equalizing them in
their rights. It further expresses the conviction that "the training and
accomplishments, acquired by the Jews during their military service,
will, on their return home after the completion of the number of years
fixed by law (fully a quarter of a century!), be communicated to their

families and make for greater usefulness and higher efficiency in their
economic life and in the management of their affairs."
However, the "Statute of Conscription and Military Service," subjoined
to the ukase, was a lurid illustration of a tendency utterly at variance
with the desire "to equalize military duty." Had the Russian
Government been genuinely desirous of rendering military duty
uniform for all estates, there would have been no need of issuing
separately for the Jews a huge enactment of ninety-five clauses, with
supplementary "instructions," consisting of sixty-two clauses, for the
guidance of the civil and military authorities. All that was necessary
was to declare that the general military statute applied also to the Jews.
Instead, the reverse stipulation is made: "The general laws and
institutions are not valid in the case of the Jews" when at variance with
the special statute (Clause 3).
The discriminating character of Jewish conscription looms particularly
large in the central portion of the statute. Jewish families were stricken
with terror on reading the eighth clause of the statute prescribing that
"the Jewish conscripts presented by the [Jewish] communes shall be
between the ages of twelve and twenty-five." This provision was
supplemented by Clause 74: "Jewish minors, i.e., below the age of
eighteen, shall be placed in preparatory establishments for military
training."
True, the institution of minor recruits, called cantonists, [1] existed also
for Christians. But in their case it was confined to the children of
soldiers in active service, by virtue of the principle laid down by
Arakcheyev [2] that children born of soldiers were the property of the
Military Department, whereas the conscription of Jewish minors was to
be absolute and to apply to all Jewish families without discrimination.
To make things worse, the law demanded that the years of preparatory
training should not be included in the term of active service, the latter
to start only with the age of eighteen (Clause 90); in other words, the
Jewish cantonists were compelled to serve an additional term of six
years over and above the obligatory twenty-five years. Moreover, at the
examination of Jewish conscripts, all that was demanded for their

enlistment was "that they be free from any disease or defect
incompatible with military service, but the other qualifications required
by the general rules shall be left out of consideration" (Clause 10).
[Footnote 1: From Canton, a word applied in Prussia in the eighteenth
century to a recruiting district. In Russia, beginning with 1805, the term
"cantonists" is applied to children born of soldiers and therefore liable
to conscription.]
[Footnote 2: See Vol. I, p. 395, n. 1.]
The duty of enlisting the recruits was imposed upon the Jewish
communes, or Kahals, which were to elect for that purpose between
three and six executive officers, or "trustees," in every city. The
community as such was held responsible for the supply of a given
number of recruits from its own midst. It was authorized to draft into
military service any Jew guilty "of irregularity in the payment of taxes,
of vagrancy, and other misdemeanors." In case the required number of
recruits was not forthcoming within a given term, the authorities were
empowered to obtain them from the derelict community "by way of
execution." [1] Any irregularity on the part of the recruiting "trustees"
was to be punished by the imposition of fines or even by sending them
into the army.
[Footnote 1: The term "execution" (_ekzekutzia_) is used in Russian to
designate a writ empowering an officer to carry a judgment into effect,
in other words, to resort to forcible seizure.]
The following categories of Jews were exempted from military duty:
merchants holding membership in guilds, artisans affiliated with
trade-unions, mechanics in factories, agricultural colonists, rabbis, and
the Jews, few and far between at that time, who had graduated from a
Russian educational institution. Those exempted from military service
in kind were required to pay "recruiting money," one thousand rubles
for each recruit. The general law providing that a regular recruit could
offer as his substitute a "volunteer" was extended to the Jews, with the
proviso