These “temporary measures” have remained in force to this day.  With them was resuscitated all the inimical legislation of the past, beginning with the time of Elizabeta Petrovna.  What was favorable was suppressed; the unfavorable was most rigorously enforced.  Jews living outside the Pale were driven back into it on the slightest pretext and in the most inhuman manner.  To increase the already unendurable congestion, the Pale was made smaller than before.  In accordance with the first clause of the “May laws,” Jews were expelled from the villages within the Pale itself.  In 1888 the districts of Rostov and Taganrog, which till then had belonged to the Pale, and had been developed largely through Jewish enterprise, were torn away and amalgamated with the Don district, in which Jews were not permitted to reside.  This was followed by expulsions from St. Petersburg (1890), Moscow, (1891), Novgorod, Riga, and Yalta (1893), and the abrogation of the time-honored privileges of the Jews of Bokhara (1896).  Even those who, as skilled artisans or discharged soldiers, had been privileged to reside wherever they chose, were expelled with their wives and the children born in their adopted city.  Their only salvation lay in conversion.  Converts were especially favored, and were offered liberal inducements.  By becoming a convert to the Orthodox Russian Church, a Jew is immediately freed from all the degrading restrictions on his freedom of movement and his choice of a profession.  Converts, without distinction of sex, are helped financially by an immediate payment of sums from thirteen to thirty rubles, and until recently were granted freedom from taxation for five years.  If a candidate for Greek Christianity is married, his conversion procures him a divorce, and, unless she likewise is converted, his wife may not marry again.  By conversion, a Jew may escape the consequence of any misdeed against a fellow-Jew, for, to quote the Russian code, “in actions concerning Jews who have embraced Christianity Jews may not be admitted as witnesses, if any objection is raised against them as such.”  The penal code provides that Jews shall pay twice and treble the amount of the fine to which non-Jews are liable under similar circumstances.  Jews were excluded from the professions to which they had turned in the “sixties” and “seventies,” and in which they had been eminently successful; they were not allowed to hold any civil or municipal office; they were forbidden even to be nurses in the hospitals or to give private instruction to children in the homes.

And still persecution did not cease.  Not satisfied with starving the bodies of five millions of Jews, Russian legislators were determined to crush them intellectually.  The Slavophils could not brook seeing “non-Russians” surpass their own people in the higher walks of life.  The Jews, finally successful in emancipating themselves from the trammels of rabbinism, had transferred their extraordinary devotion from the Talmud to secular studies.