The Jews Under the Peace Treaties

United States.

As already stated, one result of the disruption of Jewish life in eastern Europe was that the centre of gravity tended to shift to the United States. An American Jewish re lief committee, later incorporated in the joint distribution com mittee, was founded in 1914 and took the lead in organising relief work among the Jews in the stricken areas in eastern Europe and elsewhere. The funds raised for this purpose in the United States during the War and the post-War period are stated to have reached a total of $6o,000,000. American Jewry was also active in the defence of Jewish rights in eastern Europe, though in this field at least an equally prominent part was played by the English Jews, who also contributed considerable sums for relief work. At the same time, the American Jews began to play a part of growing importance in the Zionist movement, and were con cerned in the negotiations leading up to the Balfour Declaration, of which President WilSon was a consistent advocate. (See ZION ISM.) Population.—The Jews of the world have increased in round numbers from 2,500,000 in 1800 to 12,000,000 in 1900, to 14,900, 000 in 1914, and to 15,800,000 in 193o. Migration to the United States gave that country 4,350,000 Jews by 193o, or over 4% of its population. Poland with 3,000,00o Jews, comprising o% of the population, Soviet Russia with 2,700,000 or about 6% of its total, and Rumania with i,000,000 or nearly 5% of its popula tion, faced minority problems of a major character, contrasting with Germany's 580,000 Jews, less than one per cent of its popu lation. Renewed persecutions during the thirties, particularly in Germany (q.v.), have accelerated migration, and the relatively minor trek back to Palestine has increased the Jewish population there to around 300,000.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Annual Reports of the Anglo-Jewish Association; Reports of the Joint Foreign Committee of the London Jewish Board of Deputies and the Anglo-Jewish Association; Reports of the London Federation of the Ukrainian Jews; Bulletins of the Joint Distribution Committee, New York; Lucien Wolf, The Legal Sufferings of the Jews in Russia (1912) ; The Ritual Murder Accusation and the Beilis Case; Protest from leading Christians in Europe, published by The Jewish Chronicle and The Jewish World (1913) ; Israel Cohen, Jewish Life in Modern Times (1914) ; La question juive en Roumanie, published by the Committee Pro Causa Judaica (Zurich, 1818) ; L. Chasanowitch, Les Pogromes anti-juifs en Pologne et en Galicie (1919) ; Les droits nationaux des juifs en Europe Orientate, published by the Committee of Jewish Delegations (1919) ; Memorials Submitted to President Wilson by the American Jewish Congress (1919) ; La question juive devant la conference de la paix, published by the Alliance Israelite (1919) ; Lucien Wolf, Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question (1919) ; Report of Sir Stuart Samuel on His Mission to Poland (Cmd. Paper 674, 192o) ; The Truth about the Protocols, reprinted from The Times (1921) ; Capt. Vidkun Quisling and M. Jean de Lubersac, Reports on Massacres in the Ukraine, published by the Fund for the Relief of the Jewish Victims of the War in eastern Europe (1922) ; J. A. Rosen, Report on Jewish Colonization Work in Russia (1925) ;

La question juive en Pologne, published by the Committee of Jewish Delegations (1925) ; Israel Cohen, A Report on the Pogroms in Poland (1919) ; "Les aspects demographiques internationaux de la situation des juifs en Allemagne," Journal Societe de Statistique de Paris (Oct.

1933) vol. 74. (H. M. J. L.) Russia.—Modern persecution of the Jew began in Russia, which, before the World War, was the home of one-half of the world's Jewish population. When the period opened, Mendel Beilis, and with him Judaism as a religion and the whole Jewish people, stood arraigned in the courts of the tsar at Kieff to answer the hideous charge of ritual murder. In vain the friends of humanity in Eng land, France and Germany protested that this accusation of cannibalism was an utterly baseless libel on Judaism, an insult to Western culture, and a dishonour to those who formu late it. The Russian bureaucracy recoiled from no means that would ensure the conviction of Beilis, as it would have furnished a convenient apologia for pogroms, past and future. However, in Nov. 1913 an all-Russian jury acquitted Beilis.

One other instance, to show the atmosphere in which Russian Judaism had to live during the last years of the Romanoffs. In the same year, at the International Congress for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic held in London, Hertz called the atten tion of the world to the infamy of the tsarist "yellow ticket," by which any Jewish woman, if she was willing to be registered as a prostitute, was permitted free and unrestricted residence through out the empire ; whereas all other Jews and Jewesses were confined to the "Pale of Settlement." That same territory was one of the fiercest battlegrounds of the World War. The Jewish cities were taken and retaken by the rival armies, with attendant bombard ments, burnings and pillagings. Added to these were the sum mary expulsions and calculated inhumanities which the Russian military authorities perpetrated against the Jewish population. As a result, important communities were ruined, and their re ligious institutions, their rabbinical academies, together with every form of Jewish cultural activity, destroyed to their foundations. Of the surviving communities, hundreds were later annihilated during the massacres of the Jewish population in the Ukraine dur ing the years 1919-21, massacres that for thoroughness and extent are surpassed by those in Armenia alone.

The Russian revolution continued the break-up of Russian Jewry and its religious life. At first constitutional, the revolution brought full religious emancipation to all; but in the unique perse cution of all religion that began soon after the Bolshevists came into power, Judaism had to suffer most. Jewish communists have, from the first, taken a sinister delight in the proscription of all Jewish religious teaching. Synagogues were confiscated and con verted into workmen's clubs (as late as Sept. 14, 1925), and even into stables.