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do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone
back to part thirty one of our reading of two
hundred Years Together by Alexander Sulshanesen. How are you doing today,
doctor Johnson, I.
Speaker 2: Am under attack by a a A. I don't know
what the what the collective name is, but a swarm
of stink bugs. I don't know what the what the
real name is, but they're there. I think a swarm
would be a somewhat dramatic but but there's a lot
of them, and the cats are useless. They don't really
care about them too much. But yeah, you never know
what's going to happen around here. Since me and you
were both in the middle of nowhere, this sort of
thing is to be expected. I haven't had a stink
bug attack in a while, but this year is bad.
How are you doing?
Speaker 1: Doing good? I had a couple get in, had a
couple of wasps in the last week get in So
not why not white Anglo Saxon Protestants like real wasps?
Speaker 2: Oh right right, the infact?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, so yeah, I had to my cat. My
cats don't care about the stink bugs either, but the wasps, oh,
they want to get stung by those really bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, you all have seen the pictures of the
dogs who get stung by a bee and their their
faith looks like, you know, looks like a looks like
a cattris mint.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right. Moving on. In addition to the grain trade,
the wood trade and sugar industry, where they occupied a
predominant position, other areas must be cited in which the
Jews largely contributed to development flour milling, fur trade, spinning mills, confection,
the tobacco industry, the brewery. In eighteen thirty five they
were also present at the major fairs in Nizhni Novgorod.
In Transba trans Bakalia, they launched a livestock trade which
took off in the nineties, and the same happened in Siberia.
For their production of coal andero andero suji hard coal
and the extraction of gold, where they played a major role,
and after eighteen ninety two the Ginsburg devoted themselves almost
exclusively to the extraction of gold. The most prosperous enterprise
was the Lena Gold Mining Company, which was controlled in
fact from eighteen ninety six until its death in nineteen
oh nine by Baron Horace Ginsburg, son of Everel Ginsburg,
founder of the bank of the same name and president
of its branch in Saint Petersburg. The son of Horace
David also Baron remained at the head of the Jewish
community of Saint Petersburg until his death in nineteen ten.
His sons, Alexander and Alfred, sat on the board of
Lena the gold mining company. Another son, Vladimir, married the
daughter of the owner of the Kiev sugar factory l I. Brodsky.
Horace Ginsburg was also the founder of the gold extraction
companies from I'm not going to read these names and
a few others. In nineteen twelve, a huge scandal about
the Lina mines broke out and caused quite a stir
throughout the co. The operating conditions were abominable, the workers
had been misled appropriately. The Tsarisk government was accused of
everything and demonized. No one in the regional liberal press
mentioned the main shareholders, notably the Ginsburg Suns.
Speaker 2: If you go to my archives the Orthodox Nationalist on
Radio Albion, you will find, I want to say, six
weeks ago, maybe two months, maybe a little bit more,
I did a lecture on precisely that last few sentences. There.
The Jewish leftists on the outside, Jewish leftists on the
inside pretended to be opponent, but in fact the agenda
was the same, and it goes to show the press
to a great extent, not like in the US under
Jewish control, there was no censorship at all, at least
non effective. Maybe the few in Petersburg may have been,
but yeah, they went out of their way to make
sure that. I mean, mining is rough to begin with.
When you think that you're the miners are goyam, it
gets even worse. And of course everything that the press
said at the time was translated into English in Britain
and then eventually found its way to America. And not
a shred of that story was ever challenged by anybody.
I have a you know, I spent an hour. I
have a paper I don't know, in very rough form
right now on that same topic. But it was see,
given the time period nineteen twelve, this was you know,
the war was only a couple of years years away,
and the left, which was Jewish, used this without ever
saying who ran it, blaming the mono. Two people got killed,
and of course in a very strategic area. Now besides that,
I'm happy that fills and eats and notes that these
people are marrying each other, you know, sugar gold. You know,
Jews are clearly involved in monopolizing very lucrative industries, fundamental industries,
I mean coal. You can't get any more fundamental than that.
Especially at the time the ross Childs had an interest
in the oil in Baku, Azerbaijan today Baku of course
the capital city. So they were not just dominating these
industries which were very strategic, but marrying into one another,
so you have even more cohesiveness, even more ethnic focus.
I guarantee you that was an arranged marriage for the
sake of strategy more than anything else. But there's a
lot here. And but as far as that Lena is concerned,
the revolutionaries made a big deal about that, blaming the
monarchy for it for some reason, while it was the
Jews who created and violated all of the bizarrest factory legislation.
You can't treat workers like that in Russia. It's hard
to enforce. But they did it anyway. And of course
they essentially invented a story, whether you know, like the Pilgrams,
like someone like like Bloody Sunday, like all the other
things that the press there invented and was taken as
absolute truth in France, Britain and then eventually in the
US and that is that Lena in particular, is repeated
word for word from leftist propaganda in the academic literature
on the topic today.
Speaker 1: At the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews represented thirty
five percent of the merchant class in Russia. Schulgin gives
us what he observed in the Southwest region. Where have
they gone? Russian traders? Where is the Russian third state?
In time we had a strong Russian bourgeoisie. Where have
they gone? They were ousted by the Jews, lowered into
the social ladder, to the state of Mushiks. The Russians
in the Southwest region have chosen their own fate. It
is clear, and at the beginning of the century, the
eminent politician va I Gorko observed the place of the
Russian merchant is more and more frequently taken by a Jew.
The Jews also gained influence and authority in the booming
sector of the cooperative system. More than half of the
mutual credit and savings and loan companies were in the
Palist settlement. Eighty six percent of their members in nineteen
eleven were Jewish.
Speaker 2: I don't have a lot to add here, because we've
dealt with this already the difference between the Jewish merchants
and pretty much any other merchant in the world. We've
already discussed the forms of come petition, their creation of advertising,
the so called general store where everything else was specialized,
you know, the push cart. These things were unheard of,
trying to undercut, undercut competition. The push cart was important
because there was no overhead, and that was used to
lower the price. And then of course once everyone else
is out of business, they brought it back up again.
And you know, this wasn't this wasn't a significant factor
in the merchant class prior to the Jews being in
Russian great numbers. After the partition of Poland. There's a
mountain of literature on this. None of it can really
talk about this the way we do. But music. This
is another word for peasant, maybe a lower peasant. But
when you talk about the merchant class, you can't just
use that words. It's an abstraction. The way that the
Jews approached it and the way that Russians and pretty
much everyone else approached it are very different. And even
when we go back to the Italian republics, I've dealt
with these. You know, a few centuries early, and they
created the Renaissance. Jews are in almost every every aspect
of this, sometimes taking Italian sounding names. They were kicked
out of every one of those republics as well in
dealing with Byzantium. Eventually they helped bring it down, the
empire down. It gets dangerous though when you start you're
starting to see the banking industry falling under their under
their control. And if it wasn't for the monarchy keeping
control of the currency at that level, the entire financial
system would have been completely essentially under rough child control,
with their branches all over all over the west of Russia,
our history would be very, very different.
Speaker 1: We have already spoken of the construction and operation of
the Russian rail ways by the Polyakov brothers, Bleak and Varshavsky.
What with the exception of the very first lines, almost
all the railways that were later built were made by
concessionary companies in which the Jews occupied the command posts,
but as of the eighteen nineties, the state was the
first builder. On the other hand, it was under the
leadership of David Margoline that was created in eighteen eighty
three the Great Shipping Company on the Dnieper and its tributaries,
the main shared holders of which were Jews. In nineteen eleven,
the company owned the fleet of seventy eight vessels in
accounted for seventy one percent of the traffic on the Dnieper.
Other companies operated on the western Vienna, the Niemen Joined
the Marensky Canal and the Volga. There were also about
ten oil companies belonging to Jews from Baku. The biggest
were the oil company belonging to the brothers S and M.
Polioch and to Rothschild and to the Joint Stock Company
of the Caspian Black Sea, behind which was found the
name of Rothschild. These companies were not allowed to extract oil.
They specialized in refining and exporting.
Speaker 2: You keep in mind, in the early years of Putin's
presidency they tried to you know, the the oligarchic class
that was created in the wake of the fall of
the USSR was almost exclusively Jewish. And if you remember
Michael Kodokoski, the oil magnate, you know, he was one
of the most corrupt billionaire at like you know thirty,
was arrested on his way to sell Siberian oil fields
to Exonmobile Putin says, it doesn't mean there's a million
reasons we have to arrest this guy. But if those
fields would have been sold to not only a foreign
but a hostile power, Russian sovereignty couldn't have existed. Now
I always have to, you know, use the qualifier that
domestically oil natural gas comprize maybe ten percent of at
the most of Russian GDP. I mean, Norway is far
more dependent on oil than Russia is. Externally, it's it's
higher than that. It could be as high as forty
percent or more, depending on how we define oil you
know how much. You know that's because that's a huge industry.
So this isn't the first time. This clearly has been
a plan of the Jewish mentality for a long time
in Russia. And when you talk about coal, things like
sugar oil, you know, the basics, like lifestyle. That's the
foundation of an economy. And had the revolution that occurred
and had the monarchy remained, they would have had to
deal with this in one way or another. The revolution
was either going to look like it did in nineteen
seventeen or like it did in nineteen ninety five. It's
pretty much the same group of people with the same outcome.
But you know, I think by this point in the discussion,
we realized that the Jews have been you know, bringing
these people in after the partitions of Poland was a disaster.
Despite how well russ was doing at the time, contrary
to all the mythology, while the peasantry was doing and
even the merchant class was doing, despite all that, this
actually was despite the fact that the Jews had taken
over some of this, and this would have continued in centralization.
And depending on let's say that Zara Nicholas survived, whoever
would have come later, they may have found one pliable
enough to give over the currency to the Rostile family.
That what if is kind of important. But the revolution
was going to occur under Jewish control in one form
or another, or Russia would be the largest expulsion of
Jews in the many, many times that's occurred in history
in terms of the number of people removed. One of
those three things would have had to happen.
Speaker 1: But it was in finance that the economic activity of
the Jews was the most brilliant. Credit is an area
where Jews have long felt at home. They have created
new ways and it perfected the old, they played a
leading role in the hands of a few large capitalists
and in the organization of commercial commercial investment banks. The
Jews brought out of their ranks not only the banking aristocracy,
but also the massive employees. The Bank of evsil Ginsburg
found that in eighteen fifty nine in Saint Petersburg grew
in strength and thanks to its links to the Mendelshin
in Berlin, Warburg and Hamburg, the Rothschilds in Paris and Vienna.
But when the financial crisis of eighteen ninety two broke
out and because of the government's refusal to support its
banks with loans, as it happened twice before, e Ginsburg
withdrew from business. By the seventies, there existed a network
of banks founded by the three Poliakov brothers, Jacob, Samuel
and Lazar. These are the asof Don Commercial Bank to
be later managed by B. Kamenka, the Mortgage Lending of Moscow,
the Don Land Bank, the Polyakov Bank, the International Bank,
and a few other houses which will later form the
Unified Bank. The Bank of Siberia had a Solovaychik at
its head. The Commercial Bank of Warsaw was directed by
I Bliok in several other large establishments, Jews occupied important
posts in two large banks, only the Commercial Bank of
Moscow and that of the Volga Kama. There were no
Jews either in the leadership or among the staff. The
Poliochoff brothers all had the rank of secret counselor, and
as we have said, all three were granted hereditary nobility.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's not much to add to this, there's no
denying it. Talking like this can get you sent to
prison in the European Union and in Canada. But this
is where you know, liberal republics come from. That's essentially
what a republic is. A monarchy is able to keep
a lid on this as much as humanly possible. I'll
repeat myself. If Nicholas the second had survived, there would
have had to have been a mass expulsive or nationalization,
which kind of makes makes more sense, or else they
would have simply taken over the economy entirely. You know
that a handful of them, and foreign policy would have
been dictated by banking connections in Britain and France. So
these are extremely important issues and numbers, but you're not
going to find them in your typical textbook which means
a historian out there in academi you're writing about this
and not talking about this this era and not mentioning
this sounds ridiculous. Whether he knows that he simply can't
do it or he just doesn't know, it doesn't matter.
But talking about the Russian economy the turn of the
century and not mentioning all of this, which is what
they do. You see the distortion that's going to come
out in these textbooks and the theories that then are
based on that without knowledge of this stuff. Clearly, this
was an ethnic economy at certain levels, and it was
only a strong monarchy that was able to make sure
the land stayed in peasant hands, the artel or the
kind of the commune, although in the cities with shared
tools and everything else, you know, for artisans, they were protected.
It's one of the reasons that the commune existed was
to make sure that land was completely inalienable. How that
not existed, and had the monarchy not been there, the
peasants would have been completely dispossessed and then mobilized by
the Jews to take over whatever Russian government existed.
Speaker 1: Thus, at the dawn of the twentieth century, the Palest
Settlement had already completely emptied itself of its substance. It
had not prevented the Jews from occupying solid positions in
the vital sectors of the country's life, from economy and
finance to the intellectual sphere. The Pale no longer had
any practical utility. Its economic and political purpose was outdated.
It had only filled the Jews with anti government bitterness
and resentment. It had thrown oil on the fire of
social discontent, and had struck the Russian government with the
seal of infamy in the eyes of the West.
Speaker 2: You know, when you're this privilege, as the Jews were,
with this level of power, and of course they were
only promoting each other, you have to invent problems. They're
still revolutionaries, despite how well they're treated. One has nothing
to do with the other. So you have to create problems.
You have to invent stories to give some mental justification
for killing people. And that's where all of this, you know,
the pograms and everything else came from. The Palff Settlement
was a very privileged part of the Empire. It's always
been very poors. Now, of course, it essentially didn't exist,
and it was a home base essentially for them discontent.
What are they talking about? No other group in Russia?
Maybe the Germans, Yeah, maybe the Germans were doing better,
but Germans were finding their presence in the state and
sometimes in the army. The Jews, of course, outside of that,
in finance and even the other industries that they controlled,
it was still financial. They weren't out in the fields,
you know, or or in the foundry. They were, you know,
it was still a matter of finance. When you have
your friends in all these other industries and you're marrying
you know, industries to each other through their children, you
have a very powerful and very hostile, tiny minority in
the country. But they still were revolutionaries, so they had
to create things, you know, and and given that the
neuroticism of the Jewish mind, it wasn't that hard to do.
So again, writing a history of the revolution and not
mentioning any of this is what you're going to get
is sounds nice, but you know, it's it's they're they're
they're operating with access to maybe half the information, the
other half they're not allowed to talk about. So what
do you get? What? What products are you going to
get there? And that's why academia is a joke in
these industry, in these areas.
Speaker 1: But let us be clear this Russian Empire, with the
slowness and school neurosis of its bureaucracy, the mentality of
its leaders, where and in what way did it fall behind?
All through the twenty of the nineteenth century and decades
before the revolution, it had been unable to settle a
dozen major problems affecting the life of the country. It
had not been able to organize local civil self government,
install zeensvas in Russia in rural districts, carry out agrarian reform,
remedy the state of pernicious state, the pernicious state of
humiliation of the church, or communicate with civil society and
make its action understood. It had managed neither the boom
of mass education nor the development of Ukrainian culture. To
this list, let us add another point where the delay
proved catastrophic, the revision of the real conditions of the
Pale settlement, the awareness of their influence on all positionings
of the state. The Russian authorities have had one hundred
years and more to solve the problems of the Jewish population,
and they have not been able to do so. Neither
in the sense of an open assimilation, nor by allowing
the Chows to remain involuntary isolation that which was already
theirs a century before.
Speaker 2: This is a very weird paragraph, and I don't know,
I don't know what he's what he's getting at. Civil
self government at the local level was already there. The
state apparatus may have in Petersburg, may have empowered it,
but it was there even before Alexander the Second. It
was empowered under Alexander the Second and the reforms of
eighteen sixty one, a Graarian reform had been done already.
The humiliation of the church, unfortunately, I mean, that's that's
a bit dramatic. But after Peter the Great, you know,
I have I'm working on a book on this topic.
I have many lectures on it to force the church,
and this has nothing to do I had many great
saints in this era. This is, you know, at the
level of of you know, the empire as a whole,
and it was very especially financially, it was very tightly
controlled at that level, not doctrine or anything like that.
But from Peter the Great to Catherine the Second, these
essentially westernized non or were they converted to Orthodoxy, but
they really weren't Orthodox at all. Peter the Great was Freemason.
The Freemasons dominated the country in the middle of the
eighteenth century. Yeah, they did do a lot of damage
to the church. That took, you know, one hundred years
to be able to work through, and of course it
ended in nineteen seventeen anywhere. So he's right on that one.
Mass education was a fact too. I don't know what
mass means, but the massive amounts of money, the increasing
amounts of money spent on education was extraordinary. Under Alexander
and Nicholas Ukrainian culture. That was a huge error on
their part. That's true. But the Jewish question, which we've
been talking about for god know, it feels like three
years now, he couldn't be any more correct. But it
certainly wasn't from a lack of trying, and it wasn't
from a lack of commissions. That just seemed to be
the habitual answer to things, and it never came up
with an answer. The only one that really mattered was
the first one, the Djjavin Commission. He explained the problem,
but as Jews became more and more powerful, that was forgotten,
and as members of the Senate and Russian elites, many
of whom were unfortunately Freemasons and Westernizers were in business
with these people. So as the commissions went on, as
the nineteenth century went on, they became less and less
relevant because they were being very closely watched, if not staffed,
by the Jews themselves. We spent a lot of time,
and I have a paper on the Djurjavin Commission. It
was extremely important. You don't read about it very much,
you don't hear about it very much. That stated the issue.
Everything else was really a way to muddy the waters.
And so it certainly wasn't from lack of trying. But
as we've said one hundred times, the state was in
a very very difficult position by the middle of the
nineteenth century as well as as well as where we are,
not too long before World War One.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, during the decades from the seventies to the beginning
of the twentieth century, Russian Judaism experienced a rapid development
and undeniable blossoming of its elite, which already felt cramp
not only within the limits of the Palist settlement but
in those of the Empire. When analyzing the concrete aspects
of the inequality and Jewish rights in Russia, the palest settlement,
and the numerous clausus. We must not lose sight of
this general picture. For if American Judaism grew in importance,
the Jews of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth
century still constituted nearly half of the Jewish population of
the planet. This is to be remembered as an important
fact in the history of Judaism. And it is still
and it is still mister Bakerman, who looking behind him
over the ditch of the Revolution wrote in nineteen twenty five,
before Tsarist Russia was home to more than half the
Jewish people. It is natural, consequently, that the Jewish history
of the generations that are closest to us is mainly
the history of the Jews of Russia. And even though
in the nineteenth century the Jews of the West had
been richer, more influential, and more cultured than we were,
the vitality of Judaism was nevertheless in Russia. And this
vitality grew stronger and stronger at the same time as
the Russian Empire flourished. It was only with provinces populated
by Jews were united to Russia that this rebirth began.
The Jewish population grew rapidly in number, to such an
extent that it was able to leave a very numerous
colony overseas. It had amassed and possessed important capital in
its hands. A middle class had grown an acquired authority.
The standard of living of the lower strata had also
grown incessantly. By a variety of efforts, the Jews of
Russia had been able to overcome the physical and moral
at objection which they had brought from Poland. European culture
and education reached Jewish circles, and we went so far
in this direction. We have amassed such spiritual wealth that
we have been able to afford the luxury of having
a literature in three languages. All this culture, all this wealth.
It is in Russia that the Jews of Eastern Europe
have received them. Russian Judaism, by its numbers and by
the greenness of the energies it contains, proved to be
the backbone of all the Jewish people.
Speaker 2: I don't know what he means by the moral objection
with an A, not an O, because wherever they went
in the European world, they were privileged, or they became privileged.
It's true the numbers were extremely high. The Russian economy
was doing with a few like that. There was a
panic in Russia for a very short time, but in general,
inflation was zero, taxes were low, the couse of living
was low, and wages were to say the least competitive
anywhere else. So it isn't as if the Jews, you know,
dominated everyone else lived in poverty. That's certainly not the case.
I do think that has a lot to do with
the policies of the monarchy, especially under Alexander of the
Third d of the third we talked about Judaism. We're
talking about an ethnic group. The religious aspect of it
was not relevant and was not important. It was only
significant when it had something to do with, you know,
justifying their cohesiveness, justifying revolution or whatever. But that was
a secondary concern. This is an ethnic minority, not a
religious one, and a hostile minority. And of course they
were always in contact with Jewish elite centers at this
point of course, Istanbul, Antwerp, Amsterdam, uh London, increasingly New
York and this, you know, that kind of shape that
it makes I probably should mention Paris, and they they
functioned as a unit. But in terms of sheer numbers, yeah,
it was dominated by by the Russian, by the Russians,
and it was a huge problem for the empire. The
Jews were a problem wherever they go, but they were
they were an elite in the Turkish Empire, and even
there they changed their names to sound more more Turkish,
sometimes to sound more Arabic, depending on where they were,
and but their policies were always the same everywhere, and
it's it's typified by Gazadia, and that's why I focus
so much on that in in my own research. But
it isn't because of the Jews that the Russian economy
was doing very well. It was despite them.
Speaker 1: You mentioned they're changing names. I'd try to remind people
as much as possible, or educate people as much as possible,
that every Prime minister of Israel, with the exception of Monocolm. Bagan,
changed their name to sound more Middle Eastern.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's Exhamir. Yeah, it's a common tactic, and sometimes
we forget about that. It's like the Sephardic Jews. Their
last names don't sound everyone thinks Goldstein and Goldblatt Sephardic names.
Sometimes they sound Italian or Spanish. You have to be
very careful.
Speaker 1: A more recent author, our contemporary, confirms in nineteen eighty
nine the correctness of this painting, brushed by his elder
witness of the time. He wrote, the public life of
the Jews of Russia had reached at the turn of
the two centuries a degree of maturity and amplitude which
many small peoples in Europe might have envied. If there
is a reproach that cannot be made to the prison
of the people, it is to have denationalized people, be
it the Jews or others. Certain Jewish authors, it is
true deplore the fact that in the eighties the cultivated
Jews of the Capitol had hardly been involved in the
defense of Jewish interests. That only Baron Ginsburg and a
few other wealthy Jews with good relations. The Jews of
Petersburg thirty to forty thousand in nineteen hundred lived unconnected
with one another, and the Jewish intelligentsia in its majority
remained aloof indifferent to the needs and interests of the
community as a whole. Yet it was also the time
when the Holy Spirit of the Renaissance hovered over the
palest settlement and awakened in the younger generations the forces
that had been dormant for many centuries among the Jewish people.
It was a veritable spiritual revolution among Jewish girls, that
thirst for instruction showed literally religious signs already even in
Saint Petersburg, a large number of Jewish students frequently higher
education institutions. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a
great part of the Jewish intelligentsia felt that it was
its duty to return to its people.
Speaker 2: I think the claim that wealthy Jews in the big
cities didn't care about Judaism as a whole, I think
that's if it existed. This writer is wildly exaggerating it.
Their entire their power comes from their cohesiveness, So I
think this might be somewhat of an exaggeration on the
author's part, not cholten Eaton, whoever he's quoting here.
Speaker 1: Thanks to this spiritual awakening at the end of the
nineteenth century, very diverse and sometimes contradictory trends emerged in
Russian Judaism. Some of them will be called upon to
determined to a large extent, the destinies of our land
throughout the twentieth century. At the time, the Jews of
Russia envisaged at least six possible orientations, however incompatible with
the each other. Namely, first, the safeguard of their religious
identity by isolation, as had been practiced for centuries, but
this path became more and more unpopular. Second, assimilation, Third
the struggle for national and cultural autonomy, the active presence
of Judaism in Russia as a distinct element. Fourth immigration,
Fifth adherence to Zionism. Sixth adherence to the Revolution.
Speaker 2: This is a very important list, and he's absolutely correct.
You notice that for the most part, while they are
very different, they don't contradict isolation, immigration don't have much
of an impact. But again, I would like to see
that better defined. We don't even know what assimilation means.
It's certainly not conversion. Zionism, I guess, would be a
form of immigration, but it's certainly not. It's not logically
contradicted by adherence to the Revolution. National cultural autonomy is
the exception of emigration is perfectly compatible with all of them.
And you could also be you know, assimilated and still
struggle for national and cultural autonomy. I don't know what
the identity by isolation unless it simply means that the
old Hasidic idea of just not really being involved with society.
I don't think it means that. But the more I
look at this list, the more I realize how close
they all are to each other, because but even in emmigration,
they still are going to maintain their contacts, depending on
who it is, with their families and their community back home.
Mostes has already connected Zionism and and the Revolution, but
Jews have never been particularly religious in the modern era,
so religious identity, I want to say, maybe a racial
identity there, and it became more and more unpopular because
there was I don't think it was meant to be exploitative,
So yes, there definitely it's more different emphasis emphasis rather
than you know, a path you can go on. You
can go on two or three of these at the
same time. And the only thing emigration and Zionism. The
right wing in Russia, the Black Hundreds in particular, took
that as partially a solution their literature. Black Hundreds literature
near the end of the Russian Empire suggested a mass
deportation to the Middle East, and the support of something
like an autonomous entity there somebody getting them out of
the country. For the most part, I think that was
also in the Christian Socialist Party of in Austria. The
right wing in general kind of had that as a
as a solution. So these these are more personality types
than actual ideological agendas for the most part. And it's
not like, you know, those who supported Zionism hated the revolutionaries.
It was just a matter of what are we going
to do now vers what a we're going to do
in fifty years. And the one thing that holds them
all together, including assimilation, is cohesiveness. Because unless assimilation means
the conversion to Orthodoxy, than that that's probably the vaguest
option here. Then assimilation really just means maintaining a Jewish identity,
but just not you know, telling people about it, just
kind of acting like a normal person in day to
day life. So I'll conclude by saying that these are
personality types, not necessarily agendas that someone's going to be
dedicated to.
Speaker 1: In particular, indeed, the proponents of these different tendencies were
often united in the work of a culturation of the
Jewish masses. In three languages Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian, and
in welfare works. In the spirit of the theory of
small gestures in vogue in Russia in the eighties, mutual
aid was embodied in Jewish association, some of which, after
the Revolution were able to continue their action in emigration.
This was the case with the Society for the Dissemination
of Education among the Jews of Russia, which have been
founded in eighteen sixty three. By the mid nineties, the
society had already was already opening its own schools with
besides in education in Russian courses in Hebrew. It convened
Pan Russian conferences on the theme of Jewish popular education.
In eighteen ninety one began the works of a Commission
of Jewish History and Ethnography, which in nineteen oh eight
became the Society of Jewish History and Ethnography. It coordinated
the study of Jewish history through Russia and the collection
of archives. In eighteen eighty, the King of Railways, Samuel Poliakov,
founded the Society of Craft and Agricultural Labor among the Jews.
The latter collected a good deal of money and devoted
the bulk of its efforts at the beginning of its effort,
of its efforts to the transfer of Jewish artisans outside
the Palist settlements of the central provinces, we have seen
that after the initial authorization given in eighteen sixty five
to this transfer, the craftsmen moved only in small numbers.
What happened after the pograms of eighteen eighty one and
eighteen eighty two. We can think now they will certainly leave.
They have the help. They have the help the SCL
plus a subsidy from the government for the displacement. They
will not remain there moping around, confined in the damned
pale where one was condemned to a wretched death. But no,
after more than ten years of efforts on the parts
of the SCIL, only one hundred and seventy artisans moved.
The SCIL decided that to help artisans inside the Pale
by purchasing tools, setting up workshops, and then creating professional schools.
Speaker 2: This is I mean, he's funny. He knows he's funny
in writing this, but he's tongue in cheek talking about
what your typical academic things was going on in the
Pale at the time. The Pale wasn't in prison. You
could pretty much do whatever you want. Taxes were lower.
As we've said before, it was the privileged part of
the empire. And he's deliberately stating it as if well,
Jews were so tormented by the government apparently, but that's
okay because they'll get a subsidy from the same government
to move else where, which, of course he worded it
that way very much on purpose. And you know, the
mentality was that this, oh, these were minor civil wars, Well,
why would there be displacement after a program that wasn't
you know, very few people died, mostly were Russian arm
Jews usually started it. And that's simply that's a fact
of the matter. We've dealt with that already. Wasn't a
whole lot of property damage. But that's how it's going
to be explained. And we know that that's the case,
at least in part because they wouldn't leave. Why would
why would Polionkov give a damn whether they stay in
the pale or not. The only possible reason he could
have is that in spreading them around, he can increase
their influence. But again, artisans now, and I'm talking about
like we would say, basically the trades today working with
your hands in a very skilled way. We've already established
that that's a small minority of the Jewish population, So
I think this was kind of a made up issue
more than anything else. Just like they wouldn't form the land,
they really weren't going to work with their hands. It
certainly existed, you know, butchers and things like that, but
it was hardly an important part of other Jewish community
at the time.
Speaker 1: Immigration was taken over by the Society for Colonization by
the Jews, whose creation followed the opposite course, first abroad,
then in Russia. It was founded in London in eighteen
ninety one by Baron Maritz von Hirsch, who for the
purpose made a donation of two million pounds sterling. His
idea was the following, to substitute the chaotic immigration of
the Jews of Eastern Europe with a well ordered colonization
oriented towards the countries requiring cultivators, and thus to bring
back at least part of the Jews to the cultivation
of the land, to free them from this anomaly, which
arouses the animosity of the European peoples to seek for
the Jews who leave Russia a new homeland and to
try to divert them from their usual activity trade, make
them farmers, and thereby contribute to the work of the
rebirth of the Jewish people. This new homeland it would
be Argentina. Another objective was to divert the wave of
Jewish immigration away from the shores of the United States, where,
owing to the influx of immigrants the wage decline induced
by their competition, there rose the specter of antisemitism, as
it was proposed to populate this land with Jews. Of Russia.
An office of the Society for Colonization opened in Saint
Petersburg in eighteen ninety two. It set up four hundred
and fifty information offices and twenty neighborhood committees. They received
the candidates for emigration to help them obtain their exit
papers from the territory. They negotiated with the maritime messengers.
They procured travelers with tickets at reduced prices. They published
for assures on countries likely to welcome new settlers. Slosberg
denounces in passing the fact that no person not holding
a double title as a banker or a millionaire had
access to their direction.
Speaker 2: Well, I think our listeners already have figured out that
this society for colonization, the justification for it is complete propaganda.
And the Hirsch and others who set it up knew
that this had nothing to do with making them cultivators.
I guarantee you that it's a double entendre that cultivators
meaning you know, the revolution for Jewish power or wherever.
What they really mean is they're sending Jews to places
that don't have a lot of them, but still there's
a lot of potential for moneymaker to create a network
to even out the numbers. I've heard of Argentina before,
idn't obviously didn't last long. I don't know why Argentina.
The Zionist movement was. Zionist movement tended to focus on
Middle East, but emigration, which is specifically the issue here.
There was a lot of other places, of course, depending
on what year we're talking about. Let's say, you know,
nineteen hundred, the Jews were just starting to get a
toe hold in places like New York, especially Brooklyn, places
like that. But this has nothing to do with getting
people to farm the land that was written with the
Goyamin mind acting like that that's even an issue. Obviously,
that's not the case, it's about power, it's about evening
out the population. It's about making sure that there's a
substantial community in most politically or economically significant parts of
Europe and the Americas.
Speaker 1: I know this is something we keep bringing up, but
you know, most people and maybe this is the first
episode some people will hear. But this Society for Colonization
was opened in Saint Petersburg in eighteen ninety two, and
they opened up four hundred and fifty offices and had
twenty neighborhood committees. If all of the Russia, if all
of the Jews were in jail in the palest settlement,
how do they have four hundred and fifty information offices
in Saint Petersburg in eighteen ninety two?
Speaker 2: There were magical people.
Speaker 1: Since the end of the nineteenth century, the emigration of
Jews from Russia had been growing steadily for various reasons,
some of which have already been mentioned here. One of
the most serious of these was a compulsory conscription. If
so many young men, it is Denikin who writes it,
chose to mutilate themselves, was it not better to emigrate,
Especially when we know that conscription simply did not exist
in the United States. The Jewish authors are silent on
this motif and the Jewish and cycle itself. In the
article the emigration of the Jews of Russia does not
say a single word of it. It is true that
this reason does not explain on its own the immigration
boom in the nineties. Another reason, also of significance the
provisional Regulations of eighteen eighty two. The third major shock
was the expulsion of Jewish craftsmen from Moscow in eighteen
ninety one, and also this other very violent the establishment
of the state monopoly on spirits in Russia in eighteen
ninety six, which deprive all the tenets of drinking places
of their income and reduce the revenues of the distillers.
Celias Berg, those who had been expelled from the villages
or provinces of the interior were volunteers for immigration. Shee
Aronson notes that in the eighties and average of fifteen
thousand Jews emigrated each year, and that they were up
to that was up to thirty thousand in the nineties.
Speaker 2: Well, that's probably a legitimate list of things. We already
talked about the monopolization of of vodka, and it did
did hurt to Jews to some extent. We also keep
in mind we've dealt with this a while ago, that
the word craftsmen, and this is relevant to the to
the other paragraph we just were talking about. Jews were
never very honest as to what they did. They would
claim to be a cultivator or a craftsman and have
nothing to do with it. I think it was a
few weeks ago we came across that that issue in
jol Zenniensen, and it was precisely because they were not craftsmen.
They were they were merchants trying to undersell Russian merchants
that they they were. They were kicked out that and
beyond the fact that they were of course revolutionaries. But
the establishment of the of the monopoly, and this is
this is roughly around the time where the Union of
the Russian People was being founded in Ukraine, there was
some reaction. Nicholas the second was well aware of the
Jewish issue. Whether that was important or not, I'm not
one percent sure, but I'm willing to say that that
was a big chunk of the reason why you had
this immigration, which as far as Russians were concerned, was
a very good thing.
Speaker 1: The attitude of the Russian authorities in the face of
this growing immigration, a genuine boons of the state was benevolent.
The Russian government readily agreed to the establishment of the
SCJ and Saint Petersburg and the measures that had adopted
to promote emigration. It did not interfere in any of
its aspects, authorizing the age group of the conscripts to
emigrate with their families. It issued free exit visas and
granted special rates on trains. On one condition, however, once gone,
the emigrants were never to turn to Russia again.
Speaker 2: Well, now that's a commission I can get behind.
Speaker 1: It's a commission I can get behind. But enforce Again,
It's always about enforcement, isn't it.
Speaker 2: They were smugglers, you know, they acted as a as
a crime syndicator, which is why they adapted so easily
in the US, in New York and in a few
other places Chicago. During Prohibition, there were plenty of people
in Russia who knew what was going on, including in
the royal family. The peasantry always knew what was going on.
Russian merchants more that anyone knew what was going on.
So Jews were starting to realize that they're pushing, but
they have no conception of pulling back. That's not in
their vocabulary. So emigration was sort of a way to
release some of the pressure. Their population was exploding, but
both the royal family and many other segments of the
population had had enough.
Speaker 1: It's across the ocean. It was necessary at that at
the time to pass through England, which meant that in
the English port cities there was provisionally a crowd of
Jewish immigrants, some of whom remained and settled in Great Britain,
while others returned there after an attempt to settle in
the United States. As early as eighteen ninety, English public
opinion rebelled against the policy of the Russian government. The
Jewish question is constantly occupying the columns of the British
newspapers in America too. The question of the situation of
Jews in Russia remains day after day of actuality. Having
assessed the propositions that this migratory flow was likely to take,
Great Britain soon closed its doors.
Speaker 2: Well, we've dealt with this as well. Britain, especially its media,
was so dominated by Jews. I mean, this was the
home of the Rothchnold family, that this became an obsession
like race in America. It's the same mentality. It was
a way to whether the ultimate point or purpose of
British policy was to overthrow the monarchy and bring about
a liberal, leftist revolution. What occurred, you know, the February Revolution,
the Masonic Revolution in Russia, that was the point. Jews
realized that so long and Karl Marx said this, angles
said this. Most major Marxist writers at the end of
the nineteenth century said this, after Marx, so long as
the Russian Empire exists, that is, so long as the
Russian monarchy exists, revolution throughout Europe is not going to happen.
For that to happen, the Russian crown has to go.
And this was said by Jews all over the place.
It was simply too wealthy, too large, growing too quickly,
and too aware of the Jewish problem. And after the
reigns of Alexander and Nicholas, Nicholas the first, before before them,
before ilex Ander the second, you know, this knowledge of
what the Jews were in Russia was growing. The monarchy
in Russia was a huge block to rothschild domination of
that market. The currency and gold reserves and everything else.
The monarchy had to go, which is one of the reasons,
probably maybe the dominant reason why the Jewish question was
such an obsession in the so called British media at
the time.
Speaker 1: They do one last paragraph and leave it off there
because it looks like there's a little bit of a.
Speaker 2: Break here, okay.
Speaker 1: The immigration to Argentina had also stopped in eighteen ninety four.
The Jewish Encyclopedia described this as a brooding crisis. In
the Argentine Question, Sleiosperg spoke of the disenchantment of immigrants
in Argentina. The disc ground old rebelled and sent collective
petitions to the administration of Baron Hirsch. The Duma debates
highlighted a situation similar to the experience in New Russia.
Immigration to Argentina provides examples that confirm that in many
cases people have received land on very advantageous terms, but
have abandoned it to engage in other trades more in
line with their abilities.
Speaker 2: If Russians at this point hadn't learned this, then they
really they need to find another job. This is one
thing absolutely undeniable, Like the sun's gonna come up in
the morning. That last sentence is absolutely and precisely true.
You didn't need Argentina. I don't know that much about
the immigration there or why there. You don't need the
Argentine situation to convince you of that. That's been the
experience in Russia for the last one hundred years.
Speaker 1: All right, So we'll come back with episode thirty two.
I encourage everyone to go to the show notes. Go
to the show notes on the videos that are posted
on YouTube, on Rumble and on Odyssey. Click the links
and support doctor Johnson's work so he can keep educating
us here.
Speaker 2: Thank you, my friend.
Speaker 1: Of course I appreciate it, and I'll talk to you
in a couple of days. Thank you, doctor Johnson.