Sidebar by Martha Quillen
Local History – February 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
Assuming that we couldn’t be the only ones with scant knowledge of Jewish/Russian history and culture, we thought we’d expand on some of the things Nancy Oswald refers to in her article.
By the time the Cotopaxi colonists arrived, Russia had a very long history of repressing Jews. In 1791, Catherine II restricted Jewish residents to an area called “the Pale of Settlement.” Jews paid higher taxes, couldn’t lease land, run taverns, or obtain equal educations. In 1827, Nicholas I established the Cantonist Decrees which called for the conscription of Jewish boys between the ages of 12 and 18, to serve in the military for a period of twenty-five years, during which time, every effort would be made to convert them to Christianity.
But the woes of the Russian Jews were lessened somewhat under Czar Alexander II.
Many other Russians, however, were seething with resentment in the mid nineteenth century. The country was huge, backward, poor, and slowly changing from an economy shackled with serfdom, to a modern industrial nation. Alexander II abolished serfdom, and made it possible for the peasantry to own land, but not without opposition from the landowners. And following the emancipation of the serfs, Alexander II earned more enmity. The serfs had more freedom, but they were dirt poor and bitterly disappointed in their new state of deprivation.
Under Alexander II, the Jews lived in relative safety. Although enmity toward them was widespread and they were still oppressed, the Czar relaxed many of the more onerous regulations of earlier days. But on March 13, 1881, Czar Alexander II was killed in a bombing attack by revolutionaries — who were summarily caught and executed.
In the waning years of the eighteenth century, revolutionary zeal had spread from America, to France, to South American, until democracy had become a staple in the outside world. By the 1860’s, lots of Russians were agitating for an end to their monarchy. In 1861 and ’62, revolutionary leaflets littered St. Petersburg. But a subsequent uprising in Poland and assassination attempts on the Czar strengthened, rather than loosened, the forces of repression.
The plight of the Jews rapidly worsened under Alexander III. In the months following the assassination of Alexander II, dissidents called on the people to rebel. Whereupon anti-Jewish riots, said to be government arranged, rattled the country. In May, the new Czar published “temporary laws” which made it illegal for Jews to live outside of towns and villages. Under the May Laws, deeds of sale held by Jews on property outside of towns were canceled, and Jews were banned from trading on Sundays and Christian holidays. Jews were consequently rousted from the countryside, and became the object of violence.
In response, large numbers of homeless, unemployed Jews — displaced from their homes and hence their rural occupations — left the country, which may have been what Czar Alexander III had in mind when he instituted the May Laws in the first place.
Oswald referred to one other item in her story, which we had to look up: a Sefer Torah. It’s a scroll handwritten on animal skin, containing the first five books of the Old Testament, which is enshrined in synagogues to be used for public readings and prayer during religious services. The scroll must be fastidiously created by a certified Sofer (someone tested in the laws of writing the Torah). All ingredients used to make the scroll must be Kosher, and the spacing between words and paragraphs must be exact. There are 304,805 letters in a Sefer Torah, and if a single letter is missing or added it isn’t acceptable.
This article was pieced together from information obtained from an ordinary Encyclopaedia Britannica and about a dozen websites, among them www.torah.net, www.jewishgates.com, www.torahtots.com, www.aish.com, www.Brittanica.com, and www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org.
