The Pete Quiñones Show - Reading Solzhenitsyn's '200 Years Together' w/ Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson - Episodes 1-10

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

9 Hours and 34 MinutesPG-13Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson is a researcher, writer, and former professor of history and political science, specializing in Russian history and political ideology.Here are episodes 1-10 in which Pete reads Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's '200 Years Together," and Dr' Johnson provides commentary.Dr Johnson's PatreonDr Johnson's CashApp - $Raphael71RusJournal.orgTHE ORTHODOX NATIONALISTDr. Johnson's Radio Albion PageDr. Johnson's Books on AmazonPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

I want to welcome everyone back to the Piquaneda show, and yeah, this is the first episode of something I'm really excited about. I'm here with Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson. How are you doing, Dr. Johnson? I'm doing very well. We're finally settled in. We've got snow on the ground. It's like 15 degrees here in Pittsburgh. I'm happy.

Well, it's in the 40s here in the south, and that never makes anyone happy down here. Yeah, they're panicking now. Yeah, everybody's buying milk and eggs because they're making French toast. All right. So we're going to embark on a journey here. And so I guess the best way to start is to ask you to talk a little bit about this book and what it is. Who wrote it? What it's about?

And before we start getting into the text, why you think it's important? Well, you know, we couldn't have picked a better book. It's become infamous in the West, mainstream in Russia now, 200 years together by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who everyone knows. Although at the time he was alive and a Soviet anti-Soviet dissident, he was unpopular in the West. They liked, you know, liberal dissidents like, you know, Brojki and people like that. But here you have a man who won the Nobel Prize for literature, as we all know, for the Gulag a copelago.

And he has written 15 years ago now, something like that, 20 years, a book on Jews in Russian history. And it caused a tremendous stir. It took ages to have it translated. I've been using this book for a long time. I've cited from it a thousand times. I get so many ideas from it. but since this point of view and the Jews is fairly mainstream in Russia, it's done very well. This was his, as far as I know, his very last book, it doesn't seem complete, but I could translate little bits of it.

I'm not secure enough in my linguistic ability to do anything of any length. but the American press certainly has almost denied that it exists and it's essentially the history of Russia from written history to the end of the Soviet era and the role of the Jews in all of this and it's something that if there was anything up my alley personally it would be this

so he caused a huge stir and the Jews never quite trusted him even when he won the prize and he had a lot of enemies at the time in the U.S., just as many as he had in the Soviet Union. So this is extremely significant

and I can't praise it enough. I can't tell you the number of times I've been inspired by this, papers and everything that came from something I read in this book. It's really extraordinary. Awesome. All right. Well, the way this is going to work is I'm just going to, I'm going to read the text, and you interrupt me whenever. I don't care if it's the end of a sentence, the end of a paragraph, or if it's in the middle of a sentence. You're here to provide commentary on this, all right? No problem. All right. Let's do it. All right. Chapter 1, before the 19th century, from the beginnings in Khazaria.

In this book, the presence of the Jews in Russia prior to 1772 will not be discussed in detail. However, for a few pages, we want to remember the older epochs. One could begin that the paths of Russians and Jews first crossed in the wars between the Kiev-Rousse and the Khazars. But that isn't completely right, since only the upper class of the Khazars were of Hebraic descent, the tribe itself being a branch of the Turks that had accepted. the Jewish faith. If one follows the presentation of J.D. I'm going to need your help with some of the pronunciations on the names because I'm just terrible

on some of these. So I believe I could be pretty bad too. Okay. All right. So I'll just start over again. It sounds Lithuanian. I think he's Jewish, but I'm not 100% sure. Okay.

If one follows the presentation of J.D. He is Jewish. It says it right in there. Yeah. Sorry about that. Respected, yep, no problem, respected Jewish author of the mid-20th century, a certain part of the Jews from Persia moved across the Durban Pass to the lower Volga, where Atil, west coast of Caspian on Volga Delta, the capital city of Kazarian Kanate rose up starting 724 A.D. The tribal princes of the Turkish Khazars at the time, still idol worshippers, did not want to accept either the Muslim faith, lest they should be. subordinated to the caliph of Baghdad, nor to Christianity, lest they come under vassalage

to the Byzantine emperor, and so the clan went over to the Jewish faith in 732. But there was also a Jewish colony in the Bosbrin Kingdom on the Taman Peninsula at east end of the Crimea, separating the Black Sea from the Sea of Azov, to which Hadrian had Jewish captives brought in 137, after the victory over Bar Kokpah. Later, a Jewish settlement sustained itself without break under the Goths and Huns in the Crimea, especially Kaffa, Theodosia, remained Jewish. In 933, Prince Igor, 912 to 945, Grand Prince of Kiev, successor of Oleg, regent after the death of Riruk, founder of the Kiev Kingdom,

in 862, temporarily possessed Kirch and his son's Sviatoslav, Grand Prince 960 to 972, rested the Don region from the Khazars. The Kiev Rus already ruled the entire Volga region, including Atil, in 909, and Russian ships appeared at Semander, south of Atil on the west coast of the Caspian. Descendants of the Khazars were the Kumiks in the Caucasus. In the Crimea, on the other hand, they combined with the Pollyt Sea nomadic Turkish branch from Central Asia in the Northern Black Sea area and the Caucasus since the 10th century called Kuman by Western historians. Second map is here to form the Crimean Tatars. but the Karayim, a Jewish sect that does not follow the Talmud, and Jewish residents of the Crimean, did not go over to the Muslim faith.

The Khazars were finally conquered by Tamerlane, much later, by Tamerlane or Timor, the 14th century conqueror. A few researchers, however, hypothesized. Okay, well, there's so much. Okay, good. there's a lot here. And of course, he's only going to skim over this stuff. The bulk of it is, you know, 18th, 19th century and, of course, the Soviet Union. But I get a lot of questions and there's a lot of talk about Khazaria. And I've spent a ridiculous amount of time on it. And I know that reading this for someone who's not a specialist in the area can be torture, but you did perfectly fine. But I think ancient Khazaria is, essential to understanding the Jewish mind. You see it in the map there where it's in a tremendously strategic area. It reached from the Caucasus to the Sea of Azo, the entire Crimean step.

And it is a commercial empire. It's capital, Attila, lay at the mouth of the Volga. Now, my information on this comes from the famous Russian research, or Lev Gumulev. But Shulteneyton, and there's a lot of debate on this, says that only a small portion of the population became Jewish. Although he actually mentioned, it sounds like he's saying something racial. I can't tell if he's talking about Jews as race or the religion itself. But Gumilev suggests that the Khazar Civil War from 810 to 820 is what led to mass conversion. So the Turkish groups that you're talking about, the Plovsi, the Petschnigs, they harassed Kiev and Rus.

They were financed by and Qasaria, and they were also middlemen. If you wanted to trade the Black Sea, Point South, you had to pay a substantial toll to the Khazarkon. And this was a huge source of income. And as soon as Kiev got large enough, they put an end to it. But another key point is that these groups were the core of the slave trade. Nomads were used by the Jews and Slavs were coveted. There's also no relation between the word Slav and the word slave. That's ridiculous.

but slowly but surely the money lending mentality that took root there spread all over the place and once that was destroyed once the con it was destroyed specifically after that point they moved to places nearby Muntarakhan they orchestrated the nomadic attacks on Russia and slowly they filtered into Kiev itself. And because they were so experienced in banking and this kind of, you know, usury, that they were very easily able to dominate their Gentile competitors. So this is a constant problem. It's a huge portion of what eventually became the Jewish mentality.

The battle of Kiev and Russian orthodoxy in the one side and the Khazar Jews and the other. and then much later on the invasion essentially the demographic invasion of Jews into Europe from that part of the world that helped define what Russia is and although he doesn't go into great detail here he's setting up I mean he has to mention this because the rest of the book is based on it the Khazars were known for their extreme levels of violence they accepted no rules of war they use a lot of mercenaries and no one was sad when they when they were finally conquered but that mentality

became the core of what we all know is the Ashkenazi Jewish way of life and it's something it's really a closed book to most Americans including most American historians and the only time it ever shows up

in any kind scholarship is when there's something specific about Russia. Khazar, Kanaat was the most violent, unpredictable and wealthy of these early medieval empire. And they filled the vacuum left by the death

of Attila, the Hun. But the location alone created this wealthy, usurious elite there. And you really can't defend it. So

but there was no doubt as he already mentioned that the ruler at the time Boulin his son Obadiah I think it was he was you know the motives were political but

Judaism or Talmudic Judaism the way that people understood it at the time it had its own sacred books it was all you know it was recognized but there was no

political power that they would be beholden to because Aria actually became that that political power. Hebrew became the official script of the empire. There was changes in burial patterns to more Judaized ones over time.

And if I've written in the past, I quoted Ahmad Ibn Thadlong, wrote about 922, he said, The Khazars and their king are all Jews. But they have just recently been Judeans. So that's a very, brief background into the Khazar Empire. Okay, I'm going to continue reading where we left off.

A few researchers, however, hypothesized exact proof is absent that the Hebrews had wandered to some extent through the South Russian region in west and northwest direction. Thus, the Orientalist and Semitist Abraham Harcabi, for example, writes that the Jewish congregation in the future Russia, quote, emerged from Jews that came from the Black Sea coast and from the Caucasus, where their ancestors had lived since the Assyrian and Babylonian captivity. J.D. Bruscus also leans to this perspective. Another opinion suggested is the remnant of the ten lost tribes of Israel. This migration presumably ended after the conquest of, this is a good one, Timur-Tumut-Turacans,

eastern shore of the Kirt Straits overlooking the eastern end of the Crimean Peninsula, the eastern flank of the old Bosporan Kingdom, 1097, by the Polovsi. According to Harcabi's opinion, the vernacular of these Jews, at least since the 9th century, was Slavic, and only in the 17th century when the Ukrainian Jews fled from the pogroms of Kemmelnetsky, Bogdank Emolnetzky, Ukrainian Cossack 1593 to 1657, led the successful Cossack rebellion against Poland with help from the Crimean Tartars. Did Yiddish become the language of Jews in Poland? In various manners, the Jews also came to Kiev and settled there. Already under Igor, the lower part of the city was called Kossari.

In 933, Igor brought Jews that had been taken captive in Kirch. Then in 965, Jews taking captive in the Crimea were brought there. In 969, Khosurin from Atil and Samander, in 989 from Chirsan, and in 1017 from Tumaturakan. In Kiev, Western Jews also emerged. In connection with the caravan traffic from west to east, and starting at the end of the 11th century, maybe on account of the persecution in Europe during. the First Crusade. Later research has confirmed, like, were you going to say something?

Nope. Okay. Later researches confirmed, likewise, that in the 11th century, the Jewish element in Kiev is to be derived from the Khazars. Still earlier, at the turn of the 10th century, the presence of a Khazar force and a Khazar garrison was chronicled in Kiev. And already, in the first half of the 11th century, the Jewish Khazar element in Kiev played a significant role.

In the 9th and 10th century, Kiev was multinational and tolerant. At the end of the 10th century, in the time when Prince Vladimir, Vladimir I. Sivavatslovich, 980 to 1015, the saint, grand prince of Kiev, was choosing a new faith for the Russians, there were not a few Jews in Kiev, and among them were found educated men that suggested taking on the Jewish faith. The choice fell out otherwise that it had 250 years earlier in the Khazar Kingdom. Karasim, 1766 to 1826, Russian historian, relates it like this. After he, Vladimir, had listened to the Jews, he asked where their homeland was. In Jerusalem, answered the delegates. but God has chased us in his anger and sent us into a foreign land.

And you whom God has punished dare to teach others, said Vladimir, we do not want to lose our fatherland like you have. After the Christianization of the Rus, according to Bruscus, a portion of the Khazar Jews in Kiev also went over to Christianity and afterwards in Novgorod, Novgorov. Perhaps one of them, Luca Ziatta, was even one of the first bishops and spiritual writers. You know, it's very common to talk about the story of how Vladimir, you know, the founder of Orthodox Russia, chose the Orthodox faith. And it isn't so much that the chronicles are telling a story or a myth that he actually listened to representatives.

of the faith available to him at the time, Judaism included, and it has him saying these pithy things that Roman church is very dry. You can't drink in Islam. And I'm sure he said something like that. But these are just abbreviations of what I'm sure are very lengthy discussions. This was illiterate society in Kiev. And so I don't want to people thinking this was just something, you know, made up. Of course, there are political considerations. But when St. Vladimir chose, what they would, I guess, call the Greek faith, the Byzantine faith, Roman faith at the time, Eastern Roman faith, he took it very seriously because he had being a former pagan, he had, you know, got hundreds of wives. He wasn't, well, he was always a talented ruler.

He didn't have his passions in check. he set them all free he led a completely different life after his conversion than before so I have the feeling that this was something that you know he already had contact with a lot of these people not just from

Byzantine Bulgaria was a substantial source because the language was vaguely similar that that part of the world was more of a source than Byzantium directly and so

but it made sense from a purely political point of view to worry about what each one would offer Judaism was not an option

precisely because of the of the Khazar issue but he certainly listened to them they had already become by this time a powerful

fourth in Kiev economically and politically and politically and And we will, as, you know, in the next few paragraphs, he will explain exactly how. Okay. Christianity and Judaism being side by side in Kiev inevitably led to the learned zealously contrasting them. From that emerged the work significant to Russian literature, sermon on law

and grace by Hilarion, first Russian metropolitan, middle 11th century, which can contributed to the settling of a Christian consciousness for the Russians that lasted for centuries. The polemic here is as fresh and lively as in the letters of the apostles. In any case, it was the first century of Christianity in Russia. For the Russian neophytes of that time, the Jews were interesting, especially in connection to their religious presentation, and even in Kiev, there were opportunities for contact with them. The interest was greater than later in the 18th century, when they again were physically close. Then, for more than a century,

the Jews took part in the expanded commerce of Kiev. In the new city wall, completed in 1037, there was the Jews gate, which closed in the Jews' quarter. The Kiev Jews were not subjected to any limitations, and the princes did not handle themselves hostily, but rather indeed vouchsafed to them protection, especially Zviat Topolk Izzyzlovich. You know, they didn't have tape reporters back then.

So, you know, I'm usually reading this stuff. I mean, my professors use the word, you know, pronounce these. But, you know, I'm usually reading it rather than hearing it. So who knows how close I am? I just do it phonetically, whatever. Yeah. All right. Zviat to Polk.

Izzyoslavich, prince of Novgorod 1078 to 1087, Grand Prince of Kiev, 1093 to 1113, since the trade and enterprising spirit of the Jews brought the prince's financial advantage. That seems to be a pattern, like when you read Sombart, where a lot of princes and a lot of politicians invite the Jews in because they make the money, but then eventually other Jews come in and start basically doing business with the people and the people usually end up in debt because of usury. And is that pretty accurate? That's, yeah, Poland was an even more extreme version of that. We'll talk about that, you know, not too long from now.

I have a paper, actually a series of papers on the topic of the next paragraph because it confirms exactly what you're thinking. They never know, you know, when people are good to them. And by the way, there's no doubt that these are Kazar. In fact, the term was used to describe or refer to these people. One of many. I think every once in a while, Khazar is still used in the Russian language. But it doesn't take long, especially when you have factional fighting.

I just published a paper on the Serbian Despotet, just prior to the collapse to the Turks. And when you have amongst your own people factions and infighting, bringing in foreigners, especially foreigners that have money, although very short-sighted, it looks good to them. It's a very short-sighted policy. But the same thing happened with the Jews. If you have a faction, if you have a rival, then getting a nice loan from the Jews may be just what's necessary. to raise the mercenaries or whatever they're going to do to get rid of them

and given the fact given the time period you know they weren't all that educated in what the Jews were going to do the church may have been the closest to that

they quickly took advantage they quickly took over and then his opponents were able to use that against him and we'll talk about the riot here in this next paragraph and then after that's done

I'll I'll explain in more detail. Okay. In 1113, Vladimir, later known as Manamak, out of qualms of conscience, even after the death of Sviatta Polk, hesitated to ascend the Kiev throne prior to one of, pronounce that name for me, because I know he's important in your history. Svatsislavich. Svatsoslavich. And exploiting the anarchy, rioters plundered. the house of the regimental commander Puttiata and all Jews that had stood under the special protection of the greedy Sviotapolk in the capital city. One reason for the Kiev revolt was

apparently the usury of the Jews, probably exploiting the shortage of money of the time. They enslaved the debtors with exorbitant interest. For example, there are indications in the statute of Vladimir Monomac that Kiev money lenders received interest up to 50% per annum. Karamson, therein, appeals to the Chronicles, and an extrapolation by Basel, Tatshistev, 1686 to 1750, student of Peter the Great, first Russian historian. In Tassasiev, we find, moreover, afterwards they clubbed down many Jews and plundered their houses because they had brought about many sicknesses to Christians and commerce with them had brought about great damage. Many of them who had gathered in their synagogue seeking protection defended themselves

as well as they could and redeemed time until Vladimir would arrive. But when he had come, the Kievites pleaded with him for retribution toward the Jews because they had taken all the trades from Christians and Anders Svianz Polk had had much freedom and power. They had also brought many over to their faith. As I mentioned, I have a paper on this. Now, this was an anti-Eusory uprising in 1113. Savatapok, the second, is Slavich, ruled Kiev, largely dependent on Jewish usury. That was his basis of financial support.

In fact, even the chronicles say that the Turkic, you know, the nomadic invasions from the south were God's punishment on him for this. Upon the death of Yaroslav, the wise 1054, his successor was Izyoslav. And then you have cities like Turov who were splitting away. Isisov was considered a good man at the time. but once Vatsoslav died you had four princes vying for power

this is when Jewish money starts looking good to some of these some of these people it wasn't just the Jews it was Poles of some of the nomads even even the Germans but prior to this because the usurers for a while had been given free reign

the rural commune even the lower nobles you know a powerful oligarchy had developed on their backs that bondage was a form of slavery. More and more land was forfeit due to debt. There was even a salt embargo that the Jewish speculation caused, which is one of the things that led to a major riot. And the mob went straight to the Jewish corner and deceit and knew the chronicles talk about the, not just the chronicles, the Patiricon, the lives of the saints of the Kiev caves, say that this group of people who ruled were,

aware of their illegitimacy. It was all based on usury, which almost inherently is based on deception. The death of the prince unleashed a major revolt of the population, but it was not just part of it. Usury was the explicit purpose of it. It was an agrarian revolt against unearned money, unearned income. It wasn't directed against feudalism because that didn't exist at the time. But that's just a very lazy way of talking about it. You didn't have systematic usury amongst clergy in monasteries at the time because that economy wasn't really monetized. Jews controlled banking at the time in Eastern Europe. And it's always the same. Every time we see an anti-Jewish riot anywhere, it's always the exact same set of accusations. And probably

problems. Because you didn't have much of bureaucracy in Kiev, in fact, I don't think you had any at all. Even church prohibitions on usury really couldn't be enforced very well. You can call Jewish banking even at the time a system, and it had global connections. I mean, what we know, like the Roth trial that's far into the future, but the very tiny outlines of this were were available. People like Spatapak tolerated Jewish trade and in Russian slaves. Even the governor of Crimea at the time was a Jew, although formally a Christian, he was in fact Jewish. Well, you know,

Azaria had been smashed a century earlier, but that didn't mean the mentality in the Jews that came from it went away. It just took, this domination, took a very different form. And at that point, Jews were using the Kuman raiders, the nomadic crimes of the South, to obtain slaves. And so they had Jewish patronage. After, I mean, just before the revolt, these raids had increased substantially.

The slaves were taken and then sold to Jewish merchants on Crimea, specifically the island of Khafa. So that was the cause of this rebellion. and that, you know, factional fighting brings out the worst than everybody. And when you need money, when you're worried about your position, you'll pretty much reach out to anyone who's willing to help. But as you said, there's always a huge price to pay.

And any chaos, you know, Kiev and Rus' history is complicated because you have a lot of independent cities with their own royal lineage. And the worst the chaos gets, the better it was for the Khazzoa elites at the time. In fact, the first Kievan synagogue was built under Shavata Polk. So, and whenever they went to Poland for assistance, it's amazing how they suddenly became Judeo-files.

So, you know, they got a regular subsidy, but at the price of either justifying or turning a blind eye to the literal and metaphorical enslaving of, rural swaths in the south of the south of the country you know when you bring this up to Jews what they will say is that well they were just invited there why are you blaming them

the leaders invited them there you should be blaming you should be blaming the leaders well this is exactly what I mean they're invited for that specific reason they needed money and in this case with the chaos after the

after Asyoslav A son of Yeroslav You know You had wars against Polotsk My God They even went to Rome

And he actually converted To Catholicism There were a lot of minor civil wars That plagued old Kiev And that means These guys were going anywhere they could To get assistance And not just mercenaries

Because you have to pay them so it was Izzyzlov that that was that's where the Jews first really penetrated and yes uh you know by invite another the Polish case is a totally different story but inviting them taking out loans um yeah it did absolutely open the door for their completely anti-social behavior and that mentality uh never went away Spathaplok's guard is what protected the synagogue from from these from these riders and I want to mention too that the stereotype of the defenseless Jew is an absurd myth because they still you know look to Khazaria so at the point we're talking about here just prior to that that riot that uprising Jewish history had much of the country in debt and especially when facing unrest among princes foreign occupation defeats for From the Turks to the south, the population had enough. In that very year, the mob looted the Jewish quarter.

And yes, it was an urban movement, but this was against the mentality of the merchant class and those profiting from them. They're foreigners. They had no connection to the soil. They had no connection to the population. And factional fighting, regional fighting, even within princely families. this is exactly what caused these quote-unquote invitations, or at the very least, taking out loans from these people and hence justifying their existence. Okay, moving on. According to M.N. Popovsky, the Kiev program of 1113 had social and not national character.

However, the leaning of this class conscious historian towards social interpretations is well known. After he ascended to the Kiev throne, Vladimir answered the complainants. Since many Jews everywhere have received access to the various princely courts and have migrated there, it is not appropriate for me without the advice of the princes, and moreover, contrary to right, to permit killing and plundering them. Hence, I will, without delay, call the princes to assemble to give counsel. In the council, a law limiting the interest was established, which Vladimir attached to Yaroslav's statute, to Yaroslav statutes.

Karamzine reports appealing to Tatishev that Vladimir banned all Jews upon the conclusion of the council, and from that time forth there was none left in our fatherland. But at the same time, he qualifies. In the chronicles, in contrast, it says that in 1124, the Jews in Kiev died, in a great fire. Consequently, they had not been banned. Bruscus explains that it was a whole quarter in the best part of the city at the Jew's gate next to the Golden Gate. At least one Jew enjoyed the trust of Andre Bogaglioski or Andre Bogoglowski in Vladimir. Among the confidants of André was a certain Ephraim Moishik, whose patronomic Moishevich indicates his Jewish derivation,

and who, according to the words of the Chronicles, was among the instigators of the treason by which Andre was murdered. However, there is also a notation that says that under Andre Bogoliopsky, many Bulgarians and Jews from the Volga territory came and had themselves baptized and that after the murder of Andre his son Georgi fled to a Jewish prince in Dagestan in any case the information on the Jews This is one of the reasons I say this

This isn't unfinished book He's kind of all over the place Andre Babelowski is a totally different situation He was a northerner, a very different kind of economy. Moscow comes from his mentality. He's a saint. He was murdered by one of his Jewish physicians.

But back to the riot, 1113, it was very popular. It was aimed at Jews, but also those Gentiles that had business relationships with them. And these were well known. so it was a nobility who feared for their property that sent form on a mock to restore law and order and they exaggerated how nasty the mob was trying to scare him but the targets of the mob were very clear

it was very articulate so he does mention briefly some of the new laws that were passed by him at a meeting of the princess as an anti-usory legislation that somehow is going to be enforced and it was drawn up, interest couldn't be compounded. Charging for money and usury were considered different. The interest charge could never, and this is common in other pieces of legislation, it could never amount to more than the principle.

Any violation of these things that tried to charge more, the debtor was then freed from the obligation to pay it all. The maximum rate of interest couldn't exceed 20% a year and certain forms of smallholder and, you know, urban artisan property was protected and debt slavery was outlawed. An interest couldn't be collected for longer than two years. After that, the loan did not collect it. It wasn't an interest-bearing loan anymore. If a debtor had to work off a loan he had the full rights of a citizen. He wasn't a slave in that sense. However, there was one exception

where slavery is permitted if the debtor tries to defraud the creditor. Now, because you don't have a regular bureaucracy at the time, this is really mostly an urban elite matter. The rural areas weren't monetized. The monasteries really weren't monetized.

So we're really talking about people in almost the physical reach of the ruling class at the time. And, but this just goes to show how bad things had become in that regard. And this is a place anywhere the Jews were brought in. And even, you know, 20% a year, you know, he had the opinion that really isn't much he can do about it. He can't enforce much. And he also doesn't want to hurt the economy that he had nothing to do with. by saying that this is simply impossible and interest can't be charged.

So he tried to moderate it as best as best he can. The church was a central institution behind. So, and many of the, you know, the bishops and monks were talking about this at this point. And the mentality, the practices of the cons are well known. and they were making the connection between Jews, the Khazars Empire, and that usurious mentality. The viciousness that the Khazars always remained within the Russian mentality in one form or another. And it was key, as I said before, to understanding the Russian mind in general.

Moving on. In any case, the information on the Jews and the time of the Sistar Rus, is scanty, as their numbers were obviously small. The Jewish Encyclopedia notes that in the Russian heroic songs, The Jewish Tsar, the warrior Shidawin in the old Bielina about Ilya and Dobrina, is a favorite general moniker for an enemy of the Christian faith. At the same time, it could also be a trace of memories of the struggle against the Khazars. Hence, the religious basis of this hostility and exclusion is made clear.

On this basis, the Jews were not permitted to settle in the Muscovirus. The invasion of the Tatars pretended the end of the lively commerce of the Kiev Rus, and many Jews apparently went to Poland. Also, the Jewish colonization of the Volignia and Galicia continued, where they had scarcely suffered from the Tatar. Tatar invasion. The encyclopedia explains, during the invasion of the Tatar's 1239, which destroyed Kiev, the Jews also suffered, but at the second half of the 13th century, they were invited by the Grand Princes to resettling Kiev, which found itself under the domination

of the Tatar's. On account of the special rights, which were also granted to the Jews in other possessions of the Tadars, envy was stirred up in the town right. residents against the Kiev Jews. Similar happened not only in Kiev, but also in the cities of North Russia, which under the Tatar rule, were accessible for many, possibly Moslem, merchants from Khorisham and Kiva, who were long since experienced in trade and the tricks of profit seeking. These people bought from the Tatar's the principalities right to levy tribute, they demanded excessive interest from poor people, and in case of their failure to pay, declared the debtors to be their slaves and took away their freedom.

The residents of Vladimir Sustal and Rostov finally lost their patience and rose up together at the peeling of the bells against the usurers. A few were killed and the rest chased off. A punitive expedition of the Khan against the mutineers was threatened, which, however, was hindered via the mediation of Alexander Nevsky. In the documents of the 15th century, Kievite Jewish tax leasers are mentioned who possessed a significant fortune. Yeah, again, he's kind of all over the place here.

He's just jumped ahead a century, a century and a half. But the Carter invasion disrupted everything. And certainly, you know, the farther north you go and the farther west you go, the less of an impact it had. The swamps of Novgorod made it very difficult for them to get up there. If so, we're told, I'm of the opinion that the Tartars, the Mongols were not Asiatic in the sense of what we consider not Asiatic. All of the contemporary pictures of them don't show them with Asian features. but and I never hear of any reference to translators being necessary at least and I'm sure there were Central Asians involved in mercenaries and everything else

but there's a lot of the Mongol invasion story that doesn't quite add up but that's we can't get into that here it is true though that it disrupted the economy and the entire Kiev and Commonwealth all these independent cities because of the consonant fighting using foreigners to settle scores and all of that they really didn't put up a huge resistance again that's partially because they weren't total foreigners but at least order was imposed on this and he mentions properly that that many Jews went to Poland this is roughly around the time that they were invited in which is a totally separate topic we We've actually, we've dealt with this topic on your show before some months ago. I also love how the Jewish encyclopedia says the motivation is envy against the Kiev Jews. But once the shock, the implication here of what I'm reading is that once the shock and the invasion kind of wore off, rebuilding is something that incentivized a lot of princes, especially in Kiev.

to bring Jews in. Also, though, the so-called Mongol or partner invasion pretty much eliminated. Kievros eliminated that old social system. I mean, people like Dugan think that this is really what, and it's a good thing, and it helped build because Moscow came out of all of this. But I guess the broader point is that because conquerors want tribute, and at least some of the time they want it in cash

although not all the time this is a field day for usurers and here you have given the chaos at the time debtors were actually turned into slaves at least until everything is paid off

so so this is important but he doesn't spend a lot time on it. But I think I know what he's getting at here. So that's kind of a summary of the mentality at the time. And, you know, this did nothing but benefit usurers, at least in the short term. Okay. New section, new heading. This is the Judaizing heresy. A migration of Jews from Poland to the east, including white Russia, Belarus, should also be noted in the 15th century. There were lessers of tolls and other assessments in Minsk, Poloks, and in Smolensk, although no settled congregations were formed there.

After the short-lived banishment of the Jews from Lithuania, 1496, the Eastward movement went forth with particular energy at the beginning of the 16th century. The number of Jews that migrated into the Muscovy Rus was insignificant, although influential Jews at that time had no difference. difficulties going to Moscow. Toward the end of the 15th century in the very center of the spiritual and administrative power of the ruse, a change took place that, though barely noticed, could have drawn an ominous unrest in its wake and had far-reaching consequences in the spiritual domain. It had to do with the Judaizing heresy. St. Joseph of Volokomsk, Kolomsk, you want to say it? Sometimes it's such Voloch. That's the shortened version of it.

So let's just say St. Joseph of Valach that's good. Okay. St. Joseph of Valach, 1439 to 1515, who resisted it, observed since the time of Olga and Vladimir, the god-fearing Russian world has never experienced such a seduction. According to Cromsson, it began thus, the Jew Zechariah, who in 1470, had arrived in Novgorod from Kiev, figured out how to lead astray two spirituals, Dionus and Alexi. He assured them that only the law of Moses was divine. The history of the Redeemer was invented. The Messiah was not yet born.

One should not pray to icons, etc. Thus began the Judaizing heresy. Sergei Solovyev 1820 to 79, to 79 great Russian historian, expands on this that Zechariah accomplished it, with the aid of five accomplices who were also Jewish, and that this heresy obviously was a mixture of Judaism and Christian rationalism that denied the mystery of the Holy Trinity and the divinity of Jesus Christ.

The Orthodox priest, Alexi, called himself Abraham, his wife he called Sarah, and along with Dionis corrupted many spirituals and lay, but it is hard to understand how Zechariah was able so easily to increase the number of his Novgorod pupils, since his wisdom consisted entirely and only in the rejection of Christianity and the glorification of Judaism. Probably Zechariah seduced the Russians with the Jewish Kabbalah, a teaching that captured curious ignoramuses, and in the 15th century was well known when many educated men sought in at the solution to all important riddles of the human spirit. The Kabbalists extolled themselves.

They were able to discern all secrets of nature, explain dreams, prophesy the future, and conjure spirits. Okay. In the Western literature, the academic literature here, the writers, given that their academics are always dancing around this topic, I have a paper on this topic too. It's one of the more interesting and generally mysterious events of Russian history. And it's not a shock that it came via Novgorod. Novgorod was strictly financially the wealthiest part of Russia at the time. It was the largest city in the Hanseatic League, so at very close ties with central and western Europe.

To summarize it simply, there was a small group of revolutionary Jews who sought to take over Russia. And that generally is what we call the Judaizer heresy or the Judaizer movement. And the result was, again, this is like Khazaria, the rejection of this,

thanks to Joseph of Volokamansk and Gennedius of Novgorod, and they were also surprised about how easy it was to penetrate the city and its clergy so easily. So And allegedly, the leader of this, Sharia, was a kerrite.

I don't know how firm that is. But it really doesn't matter because we're talking about alchemy. We're talking about the Kabbalah. So 1471, I believe, was his appearance of Novgorod. And it was just before the re-conquest in Spain and the mass exodus of Jews from the Pyrenees Mountains. and as he mentioned the anti-Jewish laws in Lithuania and he had a small group

and his propaganda was pretty successful amongst the high elite and because people were afraid of being called anti-Semitic they simply reduce it to just saying they were opposed to church corruption they were opposed to icons

or liturgy but it was an organized movement they had cells of five many and they realized how critical the church was in anywhere in Russia. So going after the elite of the church, very much like the Reformation, was top priority. There was no attempt to convert to lower classes whatsoever. It was condemned in 1488 to condemn the entire Judaizing movement. And here you have now official Orthodox doctrine.

banning this kind of Judaism. There was even a very primitive conception of Zionism, condemned in another synod two years later in 1490. So the agenda, you know, you don't have

tons of written sources. A lot of this was word of mouth. But, and this is right at the very beginning of the of the Florentine Renaissance. So these people were at the cusp of everything, showing how close this is to the Kabbalah at the time. This was the creation of a new man, astrology, Gnostic alchemy, the combination of scientific theory at the time with social revolution. So these clergy that were converted, they were able to see themselves as a vanguard of a new Russia that, by the way, they would rule.

revolutionary movements in modernity they all have this character they were very pious for show this is something the Jews were expert at but their converts did the exact same kind of thing but these men now had access to credit money in an ideology that justified it all

and that meant that he had a lot of influence in the close circles of Zor Ivan III one of the greatest czars of the era. It spread to Novgorod because you still had remnants of slavery there, but this ideology justified it. The division of the world into the elite

and the cattle and, of course, promising tremendous power. But they were very good at what they did. They were always excellent propagandists, and Russians at the time were just not used to it. We know propaganda very well. We are involuntary experts

in propaganda. But at the time they didn't have much experience and the more towards the interior of Russia you got central Russia today, the less experience they had with Jews. Now apparently by roughly 1,500 they had allegedly about

1,000 adherence in several Russian cities. So But as their converts got deeper or something very much like a degree system, they realized later on, once they had access to all this stuff, they did have to renounce Christ. Because Dionysius, as you mentioned, one of the first so-called converts, was told that he could remain a Christian and still practice the Gnostic sciences. You had the exact same thing with people like Bruno in the Florentine. Renaissance, but their job was to appear as Christian as humanly possible. And so it looked good on the outside. Now, to the extent that the Talmud was directly involved, because he, at least the leader was a Karait, at least he said he was, it doesn't matter too much because the Kabbalah is the central issue here, whether Talmudist or Karait, the Gnostic mythos, is still learning the secrets of nature and hence controlling. it and hence remaking it and therefore unlimited power could be theirs um and kadamsin does mention

it he does he does talk about the arcane sciences the keys of solomon and at a very rudimentary level this is exactly what invaded novgorod and the attempt to even take the royal family itself and because the whole thing was based on deceit and a show of christian piety despite this being a vehemently anti-Christian movement they did pretty well for a very short time until the church St. Gannadius in particular St. Joseph wasn't a bishop, he was an habit

of a very large monastery realized what was going on and in these I think there were three synods total condemned it and condemned all aspects from then on to today of Judaism or anything that smacks of Judaization.

So like how the Khazar Empire and the battle against it helped define the old Russian mentality, this is another variation of that. Because once this was condemned, once it was understood what was going on here, the church was now armed against it. And so here again, you have the Russian idea being partly a reaction to its opposite or Judaism. Okay. moving on jay gessen a jew a jew a jewish historian of the 20th century represents in contrast to the opinion it is certain that jews participated neither in the introduction of the heresy nor it spread but with no indication of his sources the encyclopedia of brockhaus and ephron of ephron eighteen ninety to nineteen o six the russian equivalent of the nineteen eleven britannica explains apparently the genuinely jewish element played no outstanding role limiting its contribution to a few rituals.

The Jewish Encyclopedia, which appeared about the same time, writes on the other hand, today since the publication of the Salter of the Judaizers and other memorials, the contested question of the Jewish influence on the sex must be seen as settled in a positive sense. The Novgorod heretics respected an orderly exterior appeared to fast, humbly, and and zealously fulfilled all the duties of piety, they made themselves noticed by the people and contributed to the rapid spreading of the heresy. When after the fall of Novgorov, Ivan Vasilievich, the third, 1440 to 1505, English name would be John's son of Basil, Grand Prince of Moscow, united the greater Russian territory under Moscow's rule. Visited the city. He was

impressed by their piety and took both of the first heretics, Alexi and Dionys, to Moscow in 1480, and promoted them as high kings of the Assumption of Mary and the Archangel cathedrals of the Kremlin. With them also, the schism was brought over, the roots of which remained in Novgorod. Alexi found special favor with the ruler and had free access to him, and with his secret teaching enticed not only several high spirituals and officials, but move the Grand Prince to appoint the Archimandrite, the head abbot in Eastern Orthodoxy, Zossima, as metropolitan, that is, the head of the entire Russian church, a man from the very circle of those he had enticed with the heresy. In addition, he enticed Helena to the heresy, daughter-in-law

of the great prince, widow of Ivan the Younger, and mother of the heir to the throne, the Blessed Nephew Dimitri. The rapid success of this movement and the ease with which it spread is astonishing. This is obviously to be explained through mutual interests. When the Psalter of the Judaizing and other works, which could mislead the inexperienced Russian reader and were sometimes unambiguously anti-Christian, were translated from Hebrew into Russian, one could have assumed that only Jews in Judaism would have been interested in them.

but also the Russian reader was interested in the translations of Jewish religious texts and this explains the success which the propaganda of the Judaizing had in various classes of society. The sharpness and liveliness of this contract reminds me of that which had emerged in Kiev in the 11th century. This is one of these things that you come across in Russia and there's not a whole lot of examples of this happening elsewhere because the Talmud is very clear, the enemy of Jews is Rome, Rome in the very broad sense of the term, the opposite of the usurious mercantile

mentality. The thin end of the wedge, Russia was, of course, being a third Rome, was the most mercantile city and, you know, loosely. I mean, this is, this is not a nation state in our sense of the term, but certainly unified religiously and linguistically. Novgorod worried about, you know, the monarch putting limits on their greed, always had kind of a rebellious elite. Aligarchs in Novgorod saw Moscow as a threat to their ambitions and any excuse, any justification for their wealth, and the war against oligarchy is going on to this very day in Russia, the kind of pseudo-intellectual

ideology that was being adopted here in dribs and drabs slowly over time. This early Kabbalah, or early introduction of the Kabbalah, was really in a attempt to justify secession from Moscow and even to carve out a separate identity. Judaizing movement used the very lowest forms of lust to entice people. Contemporary sources, they connect this to sodomy, which could mean a lot of things, fornication, adultery, homosexuality, which strongly suggests that their adherence were engaged in this and now had an excuse for their perversion. This is hinted at, only hinted at in the condemnation of Zosima,

as you've already mentioned, of Novgorod, the Senate of 1490. Of course, he was deposed as a result of this. But it is important to note that because the Russian church wasn't ready for this, Russia wasn't ready for this, St. Ghanadius did talk about the need to change things to streamline both monastic education and priestly education. A lot of these people were easy targets. This wasn't just a manifestation of, quote, Western rationalism, rejecting the liturgy and things like that.

But this was a materialist and anomalous movement, but Russian at the time didn't really have a, it wasn't a great language to communicate this stuff. It was just that foreign to it. they didn't substitute the Old Testament for the new, which is a very common in Western literature on this on this topic. They took pieces of the Old Testament, mixed them with books of magic and alchemy.

And so one of the things that St. Gannadius did was authorize a translation of the Bible, a new one, and laying out the most authoritative sources to show what was actual scripture and what was interjected into it, what was manipulated. And that's why this Bible came out at the time because the, you know, Sharia and all the Judaizers were adding things

or giving, you know, providing glosses to scriptural statements that had no basis in reality. And so some of the, you know, lower clergy thought, you know, this stuff was really in the Bible. Bible. So Gannadia said, okay, some of this ignorance has to go. We need to have our own authoritative Bible and make sure that these people know what the Bible says versus what these and other people have added to it. So again, the entire thing is based on deceit. And with a group of people, and we could see it, we could see it today with people who aren't used to it, who aren't used to this kind of mentality, they're, you know, they're easy pickings.

So this was a key, not just political, legal, but an intellectual, spiritual watershed in Russian history. The Novgorod Archbishop Ganadi uncovered the heresy in 1487 sent Irifference. refutable proofs of it to Moscow, hunted the heresy out and unmasked it, until in 1490 a church council assembled to discuss the matter under the leadership of the just-promoted metropolitan Sussima. With horror, they heard the complaint of Ghanadi that these apostates insult Christ and the mother of God, spit on the cross, call the icons like idolatrous images, bite on them with their teeth, and throw them into impure places, believe in neither the kingdom of heaven nor the resurrection of the dead and enticed the weak while remaining quiet in the presence of zealous Christians.

From the judgment of the council, it is apparent that the Judaizers did not recognize Jesus Christ as a son of God that they taught the Messiah has not yet appeared, that they observed the Old Testament Sabbath Day rather than the Christian Sunday. It was suggested to the council to execute the heretics, but in accordance with the will of Ivan III, they were sentenced instead to imprison and the heresy was anathematized. In view of the coarseness of the century and the seriousness of the moral corruption, such a punishment was extraordinarily mild. The historians unanimously explained this hesitation of Ivan in that the heresy had already spread

widely under his own roof and was practiced by well-known influential people. Among them was Fyodor Kudson, even Ivan's plenipotentiary, on a potentiary secretary, so to speak, foreign minister, famous on account of his education and his capabilities. The noteworthy liberalism of Moscow flowed from the temporary dictator of the heart, F. Kourtsin, the magic of his secret salon was enjoyed even by the grand prince and his daughter-in-law.

The heresy was by no means in abatement, but rather prospered magnificently and spread itself out. At the Moscow court, astrology and magic, along with the attractions of the pseudo-scientific revision of the entire medieval worldview, was solidly propagated, which was free-thinking, the appeal of enlightenment, and the power of fashion. And this is one of the few places where you're going to get this laid out. I've read pretty much everything in, at least in English, on the Judaizing heresy. And they really don't say anything. They're not familiar enough with how the Gnostic archana goes, what the Kabbalah really is, even in rudimentary forms. You know, people like Theodore Kuditsen, who, well, yeah, he's right.

He's a foreign minister. He spoke many languages. to go to someone like that and to say, oh, no, this is what the New Testament really says. The church, that's just for the ignoramuses. You know, we'll entertain them with pictures and everything else. But the elite, the intellectuals like you, you know, we'll tell you what the truth really is. And we've come from afar in some exotic place with this secret knowledge. And it's embarrassing today.

But that's the approach with some of the. in his case, very educated people. And plus the fact that it justified bad habits, it justified any kind of sexual deviance. You don't have to fast anymore. How great is that? And plus, you get to keep more of your money. And Novgorod has an excuse to not listen to Moscow anymore.

You know, it's not a huge mystery as to why it was so successful. But we have to remember, this is how Jewish revolutionaries have functioned. every time it goes back this far and even further than this it's always the same cellular esoteric exoteric

distinction this flattery whatever method they needed to use it's time to destabilize a system and a mentality based on logos and also taking advantage of the naifte of people

who don't really know about this and aren't used to this kind of propaganda. The concept of propaganda existed, but it wasn't a systematic thing. People at the time had no idea what that would even mean. So this was how this was spread and it was a materialist doctrine. But the very simplistic, one and two syllable ways that this is described, even amongst academics in English. there's obviously no excuse for it and of course beyond ignorance they're terrified of being

called anti-Semitic all right we've got four more paragraphs to the next section and then we'll that's where we'll break it and pause till the next episode all right

the Jewish encyclopedia sets forth moreover that even the is it Do you pronounce it, Yvonne or Ivan? Ivan. Ivan, okay. The Jewish Encyclopedia sets forth, moreover, that Ivan III, out of political motivations, did not stand against the heresy.

Would Zechariah's help, he hoped to strengthen his influence in Lithuania, and besides that, he wanted to secure the favor of influential Jews from the Crimea, of the princes and rulers of Taman's Peninsula, Zecharias de Gisulfi, and the Jew Kosi, a confinant of the Kofos, a confinant of the Mangli Ghire. After the Council of 1490, Sosemah continued to sponsor a secret society for several years, but then was himself discovered, and in 1494, the Grand Prince commanded him to depose himself without process and to withdraw into a cloister without throwing up dust into all appearances

willingly. The heresy, however, did not abate. For a time, in 1498, its votaries in Moscow seized almost all the power and their charge, Dimitri, the son of Princess Helena, was coronated as Tsar. Soon Ivan III coronated himself with his wife Sophia Palayalogas, and in 1502, his son Vasili inherited the throne. Curison by this time was dead. Of the heretics, after the Council of 1504, one part was burned, a second part thrown in prison,

and a third fled to Lithuania, where they formally adopted the Mosaic faith. It must be added that the overcoming of the Judaizing heresy gave the spiritual life of the Moscovy Rus at the turn of the 16th century, a new impetus, and contributed to recognizing the need for spiritual education, for schools for the spiritual, and the name of Archbishop Ganadi is associated with the collecting and publication of the first church-Slavic Bible of which there had not been, not to that point been a consolidated text corpus in the Christian East. The printing press was invented and after 80 years this Ghanadi Bible was printed

in Ostrog as the first church Slavic Bible with its appearance, it took over the entire Orthodox East. Even Academy member S.F. Platanoff gives a generalizing judgment about the phenomenon. The movement of Judaism, no doubt, contained elements of the West European rationalism. The heresy was condemned its advocates had to suffer, but the attitude of critique and skepticism produced by them over against dogma and church order remained. Today's Jewish Encyclopedia remembers the thesis that an extremely negative posture towards Judaism and the Jews was unknown in the Moscovy Rus up to the beginning of the 16th century, and derives it from this struggle against the Judaizers.

Judging by the spiritual and civil measures of the circumstances, that is thoroughly probable. J. Gesson, however, contends it is significant that such a specific coloring of the heresy as Judaizing did not lessen the success of the sex and in no way led to the development of a hostile stance toward the Jews. I think because of their lack of experience with this mentality, You can think of like your average normie American. Ask him what a Jew is.

And he's probably going to say something like, well, they don't believe Christ is the Messiah. Their law is the Old Testament and the first five books of it. And, you know, the law of Moses or something like that. And it goes no, it goes no further than that. Some are even stupid enough to say, oh, they go to a different church than we do. a very Protestant kind of mentality. But that's not too far off from what Solzhenitsyn and people he's citing are talking about here. It's people who had no experience with this with the very concept of revolution, which was foreign to most people, at the time.

But because they had no experience with this, they didn't have really a developed conception. of what the Jews were at the time. Despite the fact that you had plenty of church fathers talking about it at great length, but the way that these people presented themselves, it was a very different story. You know, we're not those kind of Jews. You know, for a people who were generally very good, unfortunately, very naive, it took someone like St. Joseph or St. Benadius to finally realize what was going on around them. And this should sound familiar to us. A handful of people finally realize what's

going on around them. And then, at least in this case, you had a rational and more or less just political system that could react to this and take action against it. Now, what the Jewish encyclopedia is talking about the Lithuanian issue and the finances, you know, that may or may not be true. But Ivan III eventually realized what was happening thanks to these two very important churchmen at the time and took action against it. But he's also right to say that it didn't go away. That mentality is always there. It's really there in any Christian country. Right under the surface, I think it essentially became Protestantism, especially under Calvin in the West. But anywhere you go. The Catholic Orthodox country, this mentality is just under the surface. It's so much

easier to slide down into sin than to ascend into virtue. And these people just justified it. And revolutionary ideologies always do, things like that. Had they become more successful and even converted Ivan, what would have happened is anyone's guess. But I don't think Russia would have would have continued to exist for for a much longer as anything we know today. All right. Well, I'm as per normal when I release this, your links to everything, your work and where people can support you will be included in the show notes. But remind everybody right now. Well, my main base is Radio Albion.

the orthodox nationalist wordpress.com is, or you can just go to Radio Albuans page and follow the links to, you know, with my name. I have a link there, the Russian Orthodox medievalist for direct donations. All my books are there. I have something like 13 out now

on topics very much like this. And, of course, this has been my specialty, you know, most of my adult life. In fact, January 1st was the 35th anniversary of me deciding to do this full-time, you know, for better or for worse. That was the date. And so going to radio album, you will be able to see all the ways to donate, contact me, because this is my full-time job. I require donations and support to be able to function, to remain independent, and continue to expose this stuff. And I know I've been very influential in several circles. And whether we like it or not, Russia is the center of the world.

And I have no Russian blood in me, but it's a simple fact of life. And Sultan Easton is bringing us into the doorway here as to what that really means. change. All right, until episode two. Thank you very much. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. It is episode two with Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson, reading 200 years together by Alexander Solzhenycin.

How are you doing today, Dr. Johnson? Well, I have two dogs, both at the vet, for totally different things. And, but other than that, For once, I'm in a very good move. That's good to hear. I'm sorry about the dogs. Whenever our furry friends are hurting or need help that is distressing. It can be definitely take our minds off of things.

That's right. All right. Let's jump right in from where we left off. The header here says, you're in. No, you're out. Okay, you're in. Judging by its stable manner of life, it was in neighboring Poland that the biggest Jewish community emerged, expanded and became strong from the 13th to 18th century. It formed the basis of the future Russian Jewry, which became the most important part of world Jewry until the 20th century.

Starting in the 16th century, a significant number of Polish and Czech Jews emigrated into the Ukraine, white Russia, and Lithuania. In the 15th century, Jewish merchants traveled still unhindered from the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom to Moscow. But that changed under Ivan IV, Ivan the Terrible. Jewish merchants were forbidden entry. When in 1550, the Polish king, Sissigmund August, desired to permit them free entry into Russia, this was denied by Ivan with these words, quoting, we absolutely do not permit the entry of the Jew into my lands, because we do not wish to see evil in our lands, but rather may God grant that the people in my land may have rest from that irritation. And you, our brother, should not write us on account of the Jews again, for they had alienated the Russians from Christianity, brought poisonous plants into our lands, and done much evil to our lands. According to a legend, Ivan IV, the terrible, upon the annexation of Politzk in 1563,

ordered all Jews to be baptized in response to complaints of Russian residents against evil things and bullying by Jews, leisers, and other empowered by Polish magmates. Those that refused, apparently about 300 persons, are supposed to have been drowned in his presence in the Vina. but careful historians as J.I. Gessen do not confirm this version, even in moderated form, and do not mention it once. Well, you know, we've spoken about this topic concerning the connection of the Polish nobility, which was an oligarchy in the period of time we're talking about, and the Jews. This is the cause of the Cossack uprisings. it helped create Ukrainian identity

it's well profitable this deal essentially the Jews were brought in to take care of the financial concerns of the elite excuse me so and this is the

tax farming the lease holding system in order to keep the king toothless the monarch really didn't have much power in in Poland and of course the Orthodox Church was often either banned

or worse than that even in Ukraine and the Cossacks presented themselves as the guardians of orthodoxy

and this kind of communitarian idea the Polish nobles really became quite indolent because most of their work

financially speaking, was done by these Jews. While the noble oligarchy maintained political control over the country, they had lost economic control over the country. Now, as far as a quote from Ivan the Terrible, assuming that's genuine, and I think it is, or at least in some version,

he's referring to the Judaizers that we talked about last time. It's not like he didn't have experience with Jews, not nearly like the Poles or Ukrainians did, but he's talking about the Judaizer issue that we've dealt with before. This is the poison that he's talking about. No doubt he knew at least to some extent

what the Jewish mentality was. He knew what was going on in Poland. He was extremely literate. And so that's what he's referring. to. Now, financial stuff, that came a little bit later as far as the Russians are concerned. But even in border areas, he was aware of what was happening. And it's part of the reason that the regime created these, going way back, these myths about him being this awful ruler, he was nothing of the kind. Even the word terrible had a different meaning back then

than it does now. Grossney is a Russian word. It means awesome. It means awe-inspiring. Even the older English translation or uses of that word is very different from what it is today. Ivan IV was a great ruler and a great man. But that's a topic for a separate occasion. Okay. Onward. Instead of that, Gessen writes that under the false Dimitri I, 1505 to 06, both

Jews and other foreigners in relatively large number were baptized in Moscow. The story goes according to In the Time of Troubles by Sergei Ivanov, regarding the 15-year period 1598 to 1613 of confusion following the failed Rurik dynasty that the false Dimitri II, the thief of Tushino, was born a Jew. The sources give contradictory information regarding the ancestry of the thief of Tuchino. Solzheneson relates that after the, there's a note in here by the translator, Sochanesan relates that after the times of troubles, Jews like Polish-Lithuanian folk in general had restricted rights in Russia.

There was prohibition of peddling in Moscow or to travel beyond Moscow at all, but ordinances were contradictory. Mikhail Fyodorovich, Michael, son of Theodore, 1613, became first Romanov, chosen as Tsar, did not pursue a principal policy against Jews. Alexis Mikhailovich, Alex, son of Michael, Tsar 1645, no sign of discriminating against Jews in the law book. Free access granted to all cities, including Moscow, during the seizure of Lithuania, as well as later wars, treatment of Jews in captivity was not worse than other foreigners. Yeah, he's skipping over a lot of this because it's not really The number of Jews within the Russian Empire at the time was fairly small

They were concentrated in Poland, Lithuania Now, the false Demetri's that you mentioned I don't know if we've dealt with that or not But it's a very strange phenomenon because The revolt against Boris Gudnov whose death signaled the beginning

of the of the time troubled Ivan the Terrible did have he was married several times sources are very ify

as to how many but his the very last the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible was Dimitri

of Uglick and sources generally say that he as a young kid was playing with something he shouldn't have and he bled to death, the knife or something like that. But very quickly, the enemies of Boris Goodenov claimed

that because Dmitri was a threat to him, he had him murdered. Now, the false Dmitri story is that the person, well, he was claiming to be Dmitri, but the false Dmitri won, which was by far the most important, important one because he actually took over. The story goes is that he escaped assassination, someone else was killed in his place, ran to Poland, actually Lithuania, and then Poland converted to Catholicism to gain

the support of the, at least the support of the Jesuits there, raised a private army of maybe 3,500, clearly he had some charisma, there's even an argument that he really was someone who was born into the royal family and led a very small invasion of Russia but because people were accusing Boris of some terrible things including murdering this kid which is probably not true he ended up having a substantial following and once Boris Good Enough died in the middle of this

the oligarchy in Moscow who had been always under the thumb of the state, much as humanly possible, that was Ivan the Terrible's whole thing, was able to come into power again and used him as their instrument. His behavior in Moscow, when he did take over, was pretty bad.

And he eventually was murdered by this same oligarchy. And so it's a very interesting phenomenon. This is a very, I didn't do it justice here, but because he had the backing to some extent of the Polish state that was probably the only time that you had a direct connection with the Jewish-run Poland. You know, the born-a-jew thing, I've heard that a hundred times.

The translator is right here saying that this is very, you know, contradictory. It's difficult to get accurate information. But bringing foreigners in to run the place like Peter would do later. The only time that occurred at this point was under false Dmitri. The second one didn't really take over.

But Dmitri the first did. He's not considered a legitimate czar at all, but he did take power. So he may have brought some Jews with him. He brought a lot of foreigners there. And given the nature of Polish society at the time, this may be the first kind of concentrated experience that the average Russian noble

had had with the Jews. And then the others, after the time of trouble was over, Mikhail and Alexis, it wasn't a huge issue, at least not formally in law. After the Treaty of Androsovo, 1667, in which Smolensk,

Smalensk, Kiev, and the whole eastern bank of the Nieupper River remained Russian. Jews were invited to stay, and many did. Some converted to Christianity, and some of these became heads of noble families. A small number of baptized migrated to a Cossack village on the dawn,

and a dozen Cossack families descended from them. Samuel Collins and Englishmen residing in Moscow at the time related that in a short time, the Jews have, in a remarkable way, spread through the city and court, helped by the mediation of a Jewish surgeon. Now, that small section backs up kind of what I said about the false demetries. the Treaty of Androsovo was a terrible as far as much of Ukraine yeah those three cities or those two cities became Russian but the others the right bank was Polish all of the gains of the Cossack Orthodox uprisings were nullified and Poland imposed serfdom on formally free people and because of now of this of this close connection you did have an influx of Jews directly

coming from this these baptisms of course probably weren't real as Samuel Collins would say but it doesn't take many of them to cause a lot of financial trouble so Andrew Sovo was a way to completely disenfranchise the Cossacks both from Moscow

and from Poland and all of a sudden the Jews start becoming more relevant in Russian politics. Theodore III, son of Alexis, Theodore 1676 Tsar, Jews not to be assessed toll on entry to Moscow because they are not allowed in, whether with or without wares, but the practice did not correspond to the theory. In the first year, Peter the Great, doors were open to talented foreigners, but not Jews on account of their being rogues and deceivers. Yet there is no evidence of limitations imposed on them nor special laws. Indeed, Jews were found close to the emperor,

Vice-Chancellor Baron Peter Chafirov, close confidant Abram Velazovsky, later accused of thieving, his brother, Isaac Velasovsky, Anton de Viera, the general police master of Petersburg, Viviard, head of secret police, and others, to A. Velazette, Velovsky. Veselovsky. Going fine. Sorry. No problem.

Peter wrote that what matters is competence and decency, not baptism or circumcision. Sounds familiar, huh? Sounds like some people are making that, still making these same arguments today for mass immigration from cultures that or the complete opposite of ours. Right. Yes. Peter the Great was a revolutionary. You know, I've written substantially

on him. I'm working on a book on the topic. He was a freemason. He had no regard for human life and he wanted to force modernity on Russia as much as humanly possible.

So it's no shock that he brought, because he toured Europe and assuming it was the same Peter that came back who left is a whole theory about that too foreigners then were invited in and of course that trickle became I mean the guy was raised in the German quarter

of Moscow Peter the Great had nothing but contempt for Russia and it's no shock to anybody that and I'm sure this list of Jews is only the beginning but the more modernized and monetized the Russian

economy became the more Jews from Poland, Lithuania were very interested in in immigrating. Don't forget, this period of time, at least 80% of the world's Jews lived in the Polish Empire. It was the largest

country in Europe at the time. Their obsession with the Talmud, their dominance over the peasantry, their total lack of, you know, they had no ethnic or religious connections with the peasants who lived on the lands that they oversaw, serfdom was deepened, you know, usury was normal, the peasants were repressed

to the absolute bone, uprisings were constant, and Jewish usury does have a big role in this, that they're always looking for new pastures, especially after 1648 rebellion that we had a whole show on, not that long ago. So this shouldn't surprise anybody. And this was the first time now you have Jews in high places. And so what began with the Judaizers that we talked about in the past now was starting something far more serious and something more damaging to Russia. Because Peter was a Freemason, the 18th century was an extremely difficult time for Russia. You had very few legitimate czars or emperors except for a little.

Elizabeth. And the Masons literally ran the country under Byron, Lord Byron, under the two anas, which you'll mention here in a little bit, after so-called Catherine the first. And the country was absolutely great. So this was a brutal time in Russian history. And this is the outcome of the Petrine Revolution. Jewish houses in Germany inquired whether Russia would guarantee their commerce with Persia but never received it. At start of the 18th century, there was increased Jewish trade activity in Little Russia, Ukraine, a year before Russian merchants got the right. Hetman, a Ukrainian chief, Skorapodzky, gave order several times for their expulsion, but this was not obeyed and Jewish presence actually in priest. Catherine the first, 1724, Zarina, decreed removal of Jews from Ukraine and Russian cities, but only lasted one year. Peter the second. Catherine, the first, I have a better claim to be as honor of Russia than Catherine did. Peter got bored with his wife, Udoxia, and on campaign in Central Europe met this, I don't know if she was a prostitute or what.

And she got passed around, you know, and he kind of married her, despite there was nothing wrong with his wife. And eventually she died of venereal disease and throsis of the liver. She was a complete alcoholic. She had no power. I don't think she knew where she was most of the time. She didn't decree anything. It was an oligarchy that had grown under Peter. now the capital of course has been moved to

St. Petersburg by this time so it was someone in that circle that decreed this and the same thing goes for the anas that you see coming up here. They had very little power they tried on a lot of clothes I think that was their big thing and there were two of them

so that means that there was an oligarchy people like Menshikov and others ran the country because of their position charging rents and all of this and, of course, this was very interesting to Jews. And the only time anything was done about it was under the Empress Elizabeth, who, in my opinion, was the only real legitimate Tsar of the almost entire 18th century. Okay, moving forward.

Peter the 2nd, Tsar 1727, permitted Jews into Little Russia, first as temporary visits on the ground of their usefulness for trade, then more and more reasons found to make it permanent. under Anna, 1730 Zarina, this right was extended to Smolens and Slavodzky. In 1734, permission was given to distill brandy, and in 1736, it was permitted to import vodka from Poland to Russia. Baltic financier Levi Lipman probably bailed out the future Zarina Anna financially while she was living in Corland.

Later, he achieved a high rank in her court. and financial administration and received various monopoly rights. So at this time, the person who was running the Russian Empire was Lord Byron, Johann Byron, who was a high-level German Freemason. Of course, he didn't officially have the title, who despised Russia and Russians, and just simply raped the place for his own pleasure as much as humanly possible. the fact that the Jews being given the fact that he was a

Mason that Jews were came in and first very powerful ones not just in Coorland the Coorland issue but people like Lipman and many like him were of course achieving high rank and

you see how slowly this is going on how gradually you know oh it's okay if we allow them to bring vodka in despite the fact that it was destroying Poland and this was one of the ways that resentment against the Jews

because they had a total monopoly at this point of distilling alcohol the nobles weren't even allowed to do it this went strictly to the Jews as a huge source of income so this was just empowering the Jews in Poland so slowly but surely here you know 1830s 20s 30s maybe in the early 4th

you have the slow trickling in of very powerful Jews who until Elizabeth started to dominate this absolutely illegitimate and tyrannical state in St. Petersburg at the time. Okay. Do you know how to pronounce the word? Is this Ukesi? Ucas, yeah. Ucas, okay.

All right. Onward. Elizabeth, 1741 Zarina, however, issued a Ucas imperial Russian decree one year after taking the throne, December 1742. Quote, Jews are forbidden to live anywhere in our realm. Now it has been made known to us that these Jews still find themselves in our realm, and under various pretexts, especially in Little Russia, Ukraine, they prolong their stay, which is in no way beneficial.

But as we must expect, only great injuries to our loyal subjects from such haters of the name of our Savior Jesus Christ, we order all Jews, male and female, along with their entire possession, to be sent without delay from our realm over the border and in the future not allowed back in, unless it should be that one of them should confess our Greek Christian religion. at this point the state in st petersburg before she took over in 1741 and she's peter's daughter the state has completely disintegrated it was there and it could be powerful but the people who were running it had no right to be there whatsoever elizabeth was explicitly a russian nationalist and she realized that this uh the treaty van du thomvo sovo that somehow justified the Polish domination of Orthodox people in Western Ukraine and Polish domination

means Jewish domination that this is leading to the beginning of this kind of colonization of the Russian Empire despite the fact that there were very few Jews here at the time it was a slow trickle but even she or she should be

congratulated for understanding this so early there's a reason that she did this and when she said this, this is what, less than a year after she took over, she was saying that the Masonic tyranny is over. And I had to completely reform this state administration from the ground up. That was ruined by Catherine Second, but that's a, again, that's a separate issue. So this is a big deal in Russian history, and it shouldn't surprise anyone that it comes from Elizabeth.

the only bright spot in the Russian 18th century. This was the same religious intolerance that shook Europe for centuries. The way of thinking of that time was not unique in any special Russian way, nor was it an exclusively Jew-hostile attitude. Among Christians, a religious intolerance was not practiced with any less cruelty. Thus, the old believers, men of the same Orthodox faith, were perfectly. persecuted with fire and sword. This U-case of Elizabeth was made known throughout the realm, but immediately attempts were made to remove the ruler to relent.

The military chancellor reported to the Senate from Ukraine that already 140 people were evicted, but that the prohibition for Jews to bring goods in would lead to a reduction in state income. The Senate reported to the Tsarina that trade had suffered great damage in Little Russia as well as the Baltic provinces by the U-case of the previous year to not allow Jews into the realm and also the state burst would suffer by the reduction of income from tolls.

The Tsarina answered with the resolution, I desire no profit from the enemies of Christ. The Senate was a Peter's creation. It essentially was the oligarchs of the realm were appointed there. and they already had contacts over the border and you see how they're trying to address her but we're going to lose money you have to let them in you have to keep them here

we're going to lose money otherwise they were trying to do exactly what the Polish nobles were doing and I have the feeling she was aware of that and their control over Western Ukraine they're coming over the border into Russian Ukraine after the Treaty of Andrew Sovo and as slowly monetized economy

these guys are losing money the oligarchs were losing money it was a clear case of oligarchy in the one side and royalism or the common good on the other and this is how they approached her like she was in third grade saying that we're all going to go broke

I mean I'm sure they did lose profits the state not us but the state is going to go broke if you enforce this same arguments we hear today you just you know you're not a you're not a people you're an economic zone and if the economics go wrong oh my god we're going to we have to have the proper economics we need we need to keep the money flowing the damn damn the people and damn the culture all right so schoen discusses contradictory resources as to the number of jews that were

actually evicted, ranging from almost none to 35,000, the latter figure having questionable origins. Strong resistance to the edict by Jews, land proprietors, and state apparatuses meant it was enforced almost as little as previous attempts had been. Catherine II, Zarina 1662, in consequence of a coup and also being a neophyte to Orthodoxy herself, was unwilling to start her reign opening things up for Jews. though the Senate advised for it. Jews pressed for it and had spokesmen in Petersburg, Riga, and Ukraine. She found a way around her own law in permitting their entry for colonization into New Russia,

area between Crimea and Moldova, which was still a wasteland, was organized secretly from Riga and the nationality of the Jews was kept more or less secret. Jews went from Poland Jews went there from Poland and Lithuania Catherine the second as he says took over in a coup she had her husband Peter murdered

Catherine was barely spoke Russian and even later on she had a very heavy accent she was a lot like your typical 18th century monarch here Russia is backward you know and the only thing her peasants are good for

is exploitation so once she murdered her husband that was a pretty serious thing to do or she had others do it of course the same Senate that was trying to talk Elizabeth into relenting approached Catherine

Catherine desperately in need of money and allies went for this was the enlightened thing to do this is a European thing to do the very fact that she had to keep it secret, which when I read this the first time was news to me, that their identity, you know,

wasn't really talked about because there would be, it would be the typical revolt as you had in all over, all over Ukraine a century before. And it says, you know, the next section, it's a note from the translators. In the first partition of Poland, in 1772, Russia took Belarus, along with 100,000 Jews. So now, Poland. Poland is no longer a functional state, mostly because of this issue. Russia is taking pieces of it that used to be in Kiev and Rus. And in many cases, unaware that it had huge numbers of Jews

that were Talmudic parasites. And this even gets into the mainstream literature. This isn't just people like us. The mainstream literature, you know, talks about Cossack Rebellion, says their Jewish behavior was a body. They really thought that the Messiah is coming, therefore there has to be no, if this was the paradise of the Jews, the Messiah is coming, so there's no restraint on our action. The fact we control this country so intensely that this is the New Israel and the Messiah is going to arrive here. Well, instead of the Messiah, they got Bogdan Kimmonietki, a line that I got from me, Michael Jones, which is perfect for this. So now Russia has a serious Jewish problem that came from its success, the same Jewish problem that brought the Polish society to absolute tyranny.

And the fact that she had to keep it a secret always makes me smile. But that's when you have a foreign woman needing allies, needing money, needing support. The Senate already is making money over the border. with these people, or in connection with these people. All of a sudden, what was a trickle, now becomes a flood. In the first partition of Poland, 1772, Russia reacquired white Russia, Belarus, along with her 100,000 Jews. After the 11th century, more and more Jews came into Poland because princes and later kings encouraged all active industrious people from Western Europe to settle there.

Jews actually received special rights, 13th century from Balaslav the Pious, in 14th century from Casimir the Great, in 16th century from Sigismund and Stephen Bathony. Though this sometimes alternated with repression, in the 15th century by Vardislav Jagia and Alexander, son of Casimir. There were two pogroms in Krakow. In 16th century, several ghettos were constructed partly to protect them. The Roman Catholic spirituals were the most continuous source of a hostile stance.

Nevertheless, on balance, it must have been a favorable environment since in the first half of the 16th century, the Jewish population increased substantially. There was a big role for Jews in the business activity of landlords in that they became leasers of the brandy distilling operations. After the Tatar devastation, Kiev in the 14th century came under Lithuania and or Poland, and in this arrangement, more and more Jews wandered from Padolia and Volina into Ukraine in the regions of Kiev, Poltava, and Chernigov. This process accelerated when a large part of Ukraine came directly under Poland in the Union of

Lublin in 1569. The main population consisted of Orthodox peasants, who for a long time had special rights and were free of tolls. Now began an intensive colonization of the Ukraine by the Polish Schlatzah, Polish nobility, with conjoint action by the Jews. The Cossacks were forced into immobility and obligated to perform drudgery and pay taxes. The Catholic lords burdened the Orthodox. Orthodox peasants with various taxes and service duties, and in this exploitation, the Jews also

partly played a sad role. They leased from the Lord, the propination, the right to distill vodka and sell it, as well as other trades. Quoting, the Jewish leaders who represented the Polish Lord received, of course, only to a certain degree, the power that the landholder had over the peasants, and since the Jewish leasers strove to ring from the peasant to maximum profit, the rage of the peasants rose not only against the Catholic landlords, but also against the Jewish leasers.

When from this situation, a bloody uprising of the Cossacks arose in 1648, under the leadership of Komonezky, Jews as well as Poles were the victims. 10,000 Jews died. The Jews were Lord, you guys. Let me summarize. But you know what? Why don't do the next paragraph, and then I want to summarize the Polish issue. Go ahead. Sure.

The Jews were lured in by the natural riches of the Ukraine and by Polish magnates that were colonizing the land and thus assumed an important economic role. Since they served the interests of the landlords and the regime, the Jews brought on themselves the hatred of the residents. N.I. Kostomatov adds that the Jews leased not only various branches of privileged industries, but even the Orthodox churches, gaining the right to levy a fee for baptisms. Well, he mentions the population increase. And I know, because I've written on this for so long, between the beginning of this process, roughly, you know, 1350 to the first partition. of Poland. The percentage increase in the Jewish population was 75 times. The Christian population only went up between four and five times. They were expulsion from western cities, 11th to the

16th century, led to this huge immigration. But you also saw a huge increase in wealth and monetization. And this is what led to the size. continuous expansion of Poland. This was the golden age of Polish Jews from 1,500 to 1648 until Kim Longyitsky. But as many have noted, this just papers over the tremendous tyranny internally. The revolt of the Cossack.

And this was happening all the time. Just 1648 was a particularly big one. The Polish magnates had huge estates. like the size of you know Switzerland and as time went on thanks to you shrie

wealth was concentrated into fewer and fewer hands and the Jews were in control although not necessarily direct ownership of it fueled a system of imperial rule and

you had this increasing proletariat you know men who didn't own anything and and this was you know but but it did matter because the elites were to say the least partners with these Jews and Jews were able to maximize their the nobles incomes and of course as well as their own they were the intermediaries they were the managers of the elites estates they were granted monopolies and I mentioned before for the monopoly over the right to distill alcohol

and you know and ultimately this was used to gain the maximum benefit from the peasantry so many of their of their economic fraud was done in a state of inebriation of course they didn't drink

at all so that was 1633 actually um you know the Polish elite were not engaged in commerce, but they didn't know how or they didn't care, they handed the job of extracting incomes to the nation's Jews. And, of course, they would get a fee for every one of these short-term leases. This was the Arenda system. The organization of the Jews was in the Kahal system. And this was a completely independent, fairly large body. There was a bunch of them all throughout the empire. and they were completely closed off. They had zero connection with the peasantry.

And there was no financial incentive. There was no ethnic incentive to create any kind of connection with the local population. The tax farmers have the support of the state. There's a few Polish writers, something like half of the income. The large estates was generated by tax farming those leases which were granted to the Jews. They had no goodwill and they didn't care. The Jews were not a part of the community that they exploited. So the intense contempt of the Goyim, he was, you know, the levels of exploitation were extraordinary.

And when the Jews took over the liquor business in 1633, they were able to manipulate the price of grain because they were able to divert it to very profitable you know in distilling alcohol and they promoted alcohol consumption you didn't have a explosion of chronic drunkenness

and alcoholism which just led to more resentment against Jews the whole point of this control was to find more and more weaknesses in the peasant population peasants were never stupid but they do have weaknesses

and you know a lot of Jewish historians I've cited greats here many times who talks about the Polish nobleman as someone who's completely disconnected from his own country.

They were extravagant. They were always in debt almost childlike. And they got this way because they had the Jews taking care of everything. He was not just a financier. He was the advisor. The migration to Poland brought with it capital.

And that capital put it at disposal of the elite, and their estates expanded dramatically. This is the downfall of the polar system. That's how it got so huge. And it was a weird situation because you had the nobles who ruled the state in their CM or their parliament, which was a pure oligarchy. They ruled the state, but they didn't rule the finances. and it's almost as if they didn't understand that the expansion of the empire was a bad thing for them their profits were all short term

and um um even even you know sighing himself himself august the second he had jews everywhere surrounding him they used to call the protestant semi-jews to the Reformation um and you know uh just you know it's rare that the king was usually involved in this but in this

case, he was. And the more powerful they became, the more of the peasants were absolutely tormented. This was the worst kind of serfdom in European history. But the fact that the nobles were always in debt, and of course I had to pay usurious rates, it wasn't just a peasantry that was under their control. It was the nobles that were under their control too. So, I mean, the old stereotype is this really easy-going, lazy Polish magnate. They didn't have substantial martial arts. They had a bit of an exaggeration. And the Jesuits noticed this, but there was never any such thing, as Jones says, and a few others.

There was no counter-reformation in Poland. And there was a reason for this. There's no shock that Calvinism and even more extreme versions of Protestantism took over in parts of of Poland Jewish historian Greats I think his line was

Poland became a second Babylon for the Jews so much so that even even in 1572 the Jews

were able to name Sigmund the second's successor along with the Protestants you know the Huguenots

in France as well as a Turkish monarch in Istanbul brokered by Solomon Oskunazi, who had been an advisor to the grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire, as well as before that, he was a chief doctor to the Polish monarch.

The point is, when you have this level of power, it's based on these international ties. And the fact that through this financial web, they could figure out who his successor was, even over the heads of the oligarchy, who, you know, even in the 1570s was, were totally under the heel of Jewish usury. And they benefited, at least in the short term, so they, you know, they let these kind of things go. Polish oligarchs had no good reason to change the system. So, you know, revolts were constant and religious battles were constant, I think, 70% or 65% of the people living in Poland were non-Polish. And this is the reason that it eventually fell apart. These kind of rents upon rents, usury upon usury, can't sustain an economy.

And this is ultimately what destroyed Poland. After the uprising, the Jews, on the basis of the Treaty of Belia Zerkhov, 1651, were again given the right to resettle in Ukraine. The Jews were like before resident and leaser of the royal industries and the industries of the schlachta, and so it was to remain. Going into the 18th century, brandy distilling was practically the main profession of Jews. This trade often led to conflicts with the peasants who sometimes were drawn into taverns, not so much because of well-to-do, but on account of their poverty and misery. Included among the restrictions placed in the Polish Jews in response to demands of the Catholic Church was the prohibition against Jews having Christian house servants.

Because of the recruitment coupled with the state tax increases in neighboring Russia, not a few refugees came to Poland where they had no rights. In the debates of Catherine's commission for reworking a new law code, 1767 to 68, one could hear that in Poland already a number of Russian refugees are servants to Jews. What he's talking about here, this is a little convoluted. He's talking about Russians leaving Russia to go to Poland. And so these refugees, or so it said, were, you know, working for the Jews almost immediately

when they cross the border. I think since we've come to a new section, we should probably end it right there and pick it up on the next one. We've been going about 45 minutes. You want to end this one early and just start to hold a new section, a new next time? Yeah, I have no problem with that at all.

I know it's, he's, he's being so cursory. Because don't we get to the revolution, a late 19th century, Soviet era. He, you know, this is going to be far different. And he goes into tremendous detail. But he's just giving a smattering of what was going on prior to the, prior to the 19th century. So he's kind of all over the place and very cursory about it.

So I'm trying to fill in. some of the gaps for people who aren't specialists in the area. Correct. And this next section, which I've read and studied, is very important to really understand what was to come in the future and especially Russian attitudes towards Jews. So we'll leave this for next time. As always, I will include all of your links in the show notes

so that people can donate to you and subscribe to you. and we'll pick this up again in a couple days. I appreciate that, my friend. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Take care. Bye-bye. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show. This is part three of our reading of 200 years together by Alexander Solzhenitsky. How are you doing, Dr. Johnson?

Have you ever been in a position where you had to draw blood from a dog twice a day by any chance? Because, you know, that's what I have to do. that's what I can't imagine I can't imagine that that pup is enjoying it very much well my dog was just diagnosed with diabetes so now it's it's chaos so but we're going to do everything you know everything everything everything we possibly can and we have a good vet so I just wondered if anyone else had this had this joyous responsibility but I assume maybe it's just me for now. That does sound hard, especially since you do care about the animal too. So, yeah, yeah. Nope, I'm just giving a very sharp- clawed cat antibiotics twice a day. And yesterday he got me pretty good.

So it's fine. I think I'll live. Yes, I think I will too. Let's get going. Yeah, let's get going here. We are up to the section, the Kahal and Civil Rights. And here we go. The Jews of Poland maintained a vigorous economic relation to the surrounding population,

yet in the five centuries that they live there, did not permit any influence from outside themselves. One century after another rolled by in post-medieval European development, while the Polish Jews remained confined to themselves and were always an anachronistic appearance. They had a fixed order within themselves. Here it is granted that these conditions, which later remained intact, also in Russia until the middle of the 19th century,

were favorable for the religious and national preservation of the Jews from the very beginning of their diaspora. The whole Jewish life was guided by the Khahal, which had developed from the communal life, of the Jews and the rabbis. You know, even on our own show on these, there are similar topics, the two of us, my own show, the Kahul comes up quite a bit

because it was a, essentially a totalitarian system where every aspect, I mean, no different than the Talmud itself, the cell of Jewish life, it was completely autonomous in the sense that it didn't have to answer to anybody, there was the so-called four lands council

where they divided up their parts of the Polish Empire I think it was a greater lesser Poland Galicia and Volina were the four lands and they were in charge of everything and taken together

that council what's the most powerful institution in the entire Polish Empire so they collected taxes old age pensions quote unquote there was the economic center

of everything you couldn't go and I think we've mentioned this before if there's a dispute between or among Jews you can't take it to the secular or Polish legal system

it was purely oligarchic there was a lot of abuse because again there was no answering to anybody and and you know it was a very Eventually, it collapsed in the 19th century, early 19th century, but it was totally isolated.

And once this began to weaken, this is where the Hasidic Jews, to some extent, came from. The Talmud was the doctrine, but slowly but surely, the Kabbalah entered into a basic discourse. It was persecuted quite a bit, not as such, but when the, then the, Hasidics first showed themselves with all these messianic claims that were persecuted all over the Jewish world.

So reading some of the documents, contemporary documents, that's how the Kahul worked. One of the things that they did is that they told children stories. And this is why it was so successful and very few Jews actually left it that if you were to leave

the Kahul and go off on your own, the goyam are animals. They'll kill you. You have to stay within the cahol, and that's the only way you're going to be able to function. And that was a story that they told, you know, young men to keep them from leaving. And that's how they tolerated this oligarchy, because there were plenty of poor Jews within the cahal.

And, but as time went on, it, and Poland itself didn't exist anymore. as an empire, it started to fall apart, but there's always this mentality. One of the themes of this discussion we've had so far is that Poland, Lithuania, defined overwhelmingly what we mean by the word Jewish and Talmudic and

rabbinical because there were so many of them here, they were so wealthy. And even though the Kahal took a huge hit with Kimmanyinsky and subsequent revolts later on, That just fed into their storytelling that for no reason.

They envy us. And therefore, at any moment, if you leave this boundary, you're going to be murdered or tortured or whatever because they envy our intelligence or something like that. So they were completely, and this is how they were able to exploit people. The Slavs was such tremendous abandon because not only were they protected by by the polls the estates that they worked with them

but that they had no connection they had no kinship but they had no connection with the outside world they spoke Yiddish they had no

very few of them spoke local languages maybe elites may have but you know this is how they this is how the exploitation became a matter of course because they're not our people

their cattle, this is what they deserve. Okay, moving on. What may have started, as a democratic institution, took on the qualities of an oligarchy bent on maintaining its own power. In turn, the rabbis and Kahal had a mutually exploitative relation in that the rabbis were the executive enforcement arm of the Kahal, and the rabbis owed their position to appointment by the Kahal. Likewise, the Kahal owed the maintenance of its power more to the secular regime than to its own people. The fact that the Jewish people have held themselves together in their diaspora for 2,000 years, inspires wonder and admiration. But when one examines certain periods more closely, like the Polish-Russian one in the 16th and into the middle of the 17th century,

and how this unity was only won by means of methods of suppression exercised by the Kahilat, then one no longer knows if it can be evaluated merely as an aspect of religious tradition. If the slightest traits of such isolationism were detected amongst us Russians, we would be severely faulted. When Jewry came under the rule of the Russian state, this indigenous system remained in which the hierarchy of the Kahal had a self-interest. According to J.I. Gessen, all the anger that enlightened Jews felt, against the ossifying Talmudic tradition became stronger in the middle of the 19th century.

Quoting, the representatives of the ruling class of jury staked everything on persuading the Russian administration of the necessity to maintain the century's old institution, which reflected the interest both of the Russian power and of the ruling Jewish class. The Kaholin connection with the rabbis held all the power and not seldom abused it. It misappropriated public funds, trampled the rights of the poor, arbitrarily increased taxes and wreaked vengeance on personal enemies. At the end of the 18th century, the governor of one of the administrative regions attached to Russia wrote in his report,

the rabbis, the spiritual council and the cahal, which are knitted closely together, hold all things in their land and lord over the conscience of the Jews and in complete isolation rule over them without any relation to the civil order. Now, as Solzhenitsyn is trying to explain. I mean, the first thing in the previous paragraph, he says that if we're Russians or Orthodox people had this kind of arrangement within the places where we lived or in Russia itself. In other words, if we were strictly ethno-nationalist, we would be attacked right and left, which of course they are. The Jews do it.

This is multiculturalism. So that's pretty clear what he's talking about here, and that's certainly not. a religious matter. The distinction is very much like Islam, which came from Judaism to a great extent, like Islam, the differences between philosophy, civil state, law, religion, ethnic self-interest, all of that, these lines are blurred or non-existent. You know, God isn't really the issue. It hasn't been. It never has been, especially in the Kabbalah. God is an abstraction. to them and they are really almost the manifestation of God

on earth so it's very easy for that to quickly become we are our own our own Messiah and that's exactly I think still the dominant idea among Jews the Jews

today but to the extent that the Gaha continued to exist in certain places they had enough power to approach you know the first the first the first few partitions of Poland where some of these areas came

on to the Russian administration all of a sudden now Russia has hundreds of thousands of Jews that it didn't have much contact with before what was a trickle now was a huge flood and at least for a while the Russians did the Russian

administrate locally didn't want to break it they didn't want to really break the Polish aristocracy that continued to exist there too It was a tremendously disruptive force in the extreme western parts of the empire. But there were people like Catherine Great and a few others who tried to break it down, tried to so-called liberate the Jews by having them assimilate the same problem in Germany.

And it was more or less an unpopular option. As time went on, of course, Zionism was very rare at the time, but growing in strength. so that's where we are right now in history there was a still and i have a whole paper on this the the special mission that czar paul and um alexander the first sent to western gabriel durzavin actually being sent to western russia to figure out why the peasants hate the jews so much and i have a paper on that which i got initially from this book just a hint of it. And, you know, when I started reading this stuff, you know, the Russians

were very naive. And he came back to to Petersburg saying, oh, there's very good reasons for this contempt. You would have no idea what they do here. But things changed. They became more cunning when the Polish Empire was no more. Another had a new

sovereign to deal with. And you had more and more Jews leaving the Cahol at this point. and I had a tremendous influence in the Capitol, especially when Dersovins started to say, in his naifte, that my God, the exploitation is extraordinary. And I don't know if we're going to get to that at some point,

but my paper on that, I think that was in the Barns Review. I published it there. And that comes from this very book. In 18th century Eastern European Jury, two movements developed, the religious one of the Hasidum and the Enlightenment one favoring secular culture spearheaded by Moses Mendelssohn,

but the Kellehot suppressed both with all its might. In 1781, the rabbinit of Vilna placed the ban over the Hasidim, and in 1784, the Assembly of Rabbis in Mogilev declared them as outlaws and their property as without owner. Thereafter, mobs laid waste to the houses of the Hasidim in several cities, It was an intra-Jewish program. The Hasidam were persecuted in the most cruel and unfair manner. Their rivals did not even feel embarrassed to denounce them before the Russian authorities with false political charges.

In turn, the officials in 1799, based on the complaint of the Hasidics, arrested members of the Kelaht of Vilna for embezzlement of tax money. The Hasidam movement expanded, being especially successful in certain provinces. The rabbis had Hasidic books publicly burned, and the Hasidim emerged as defenders of the people against abuses of the Kellehot. Quote, it is apparent that in those times the religious war overshadowed other questions of religious life. Well, he's right here. He's talking about the Hasidic movement being not quite revolutionary, but very close to being revolutionary. The same thing happened in Spain, the Sephardine, even worse, with the Karaits and Samaritans. This cruelty towards anything that disrupts their drive to unity knows very few matches lying about them, going to the secular authorities, which they normally would condemn,

and saying, thinking, this happened in the New Testament. happened to the Ottoman Empire, the Jews would go to the secular authority and say, you know, this group of people, our enemies are plotting against you, or they're refusing to pay taxes, or they won't, you know, they're condemning, they're refusing to assist in the war effort or whatever it is. And they would normally be believed. And so contrary to their condemnation, earlier condemnation of going to the outside authorities, they do it all the time to destroy the Hasidic movement. So you have a, and eventually this distinction more or less collapsed.

But the Hasidim turned out to be a semi-populist movement based more on the Kabbalah than on the Talmud. Of course, they don't reject Talmud by any means, but it was a matter of emphasis. And the Kabbalah became more and more popular through this growing and irrepressible movement of the of the of the of the Hasidic rabbi the part of white Russia that fell to Russia in 1772 consisted of the provinces of Polatsk later the Debsk and Mogilev in a communique to those governments in the name of Catherine it was explained that their residents of whichever sex and standing they might be would from now on have the right to public exercise of faith and to own property in addition to all

rights, freedoms, and privileges which their subjects previously enjoyed. The Jews were thus legally set as equals to Christians, which had not been the case in Poland. As to the Jews, it was added that their business stay and remain intact with all those rights that they today enjoy, i.e. nothing would be taken away from Polish rights either. Through this, the previous owner that Kelahat survived. The Jews with their Kahal system remained isolated from the rest of the population and were not immediately taken into the class of traders and businessmen that corresponded to their predominant occupations. In the beginning, Catherine was on her guard only against any hostile reaction of the Polish nobility, from whom power threatened to slip away,

but also against giving an unfavorable impression to her orthodox subjects. But she did extend wider rights to the Jews, whom she wished well and promised herself of their economic utility to the nation. Already in 1778, the most recent general Russian regulation was extended to white Russia. Those holding up to 500 rubles belong to the class of trade-plying townsmen, those with more capital, to the class of merchant, endowed into one of three guilds according to possession. Both classes were free of the poll tax and paid 1% of their capital, which was declared according to conscience. We know what happens when the Jews are quote-unquote liberated.

Not that they were in any second-class position in Poland or in Russia, or what you might call second class comes from the Jews themselves in the nature of the Kaha'l system. but Russians were just Russians the great merchants were all believers generally speaking in the Russian Empire but now they have to compete with these incredibly shrewd completely unified aliens as far as their concern who have contacts with with liquidity and capital all over the world especially in Constantinople and northern Europe the Netherlands in particular in London, of course, but have been doing this for generations upon generations upon generations.

They will support one another, but when it comes to the Goyan, no matter where they are, exploiting them ruthlessly is not only tolerated, but almost a sacramental act. So this automatically put the Cahal, again, which was thanks to the Hasidics and many other things, was starting to wane in importance.

The so-called Enlightenment was, you know, drawing Jews to the town, especially the capital. but I put them in a tremendously advantageous position, and slowly but truly, Russians started realizing why the Cossacks were so anti-Judaic. This regulation was a particularly great significance. It set aside the national isolation of Jews up to that time. Catherine wanted to end that. Further, she subverted the traditional Polish perspective on Jews as an element standing outside the state. Moreover, she, she weakened the cahal system, the capability of the cahal, to compel.

Quoting, the process began of pressing Jews into the civil organism. The Jews availed themselves to a great extent of the right to be registered as merchants, so that, for example, 10% of the Jewish population of the Mogulav province declared themselves as merchants, but only 5.5% of the Christians. The Jewish merchants were now freed from the tax obligation. to the Kahal, and did not have to apply to the Kahal anymore for permission to be temporarily absent. They had only to deal with the cognizant magistrate. In 1780, the Jews in Mogolev and Skloff greeted Catherine upon her arrival with odes. With this advance of Jewish merchants, the

civil category Jews ceased to exist. All other Jews had now likewise to be assigned to a status, and obviously the only one left for them was townsmen. But at first, few wanted to be reclassified as such, since the annual poll tax for townsmen at the time was 60 Kopecks, but only 50 Kopecks for Jews. However, there was no other option. From 1783, therefore the Jewish townsmen, nor merchants, needed to pay their taxes to the Khaal,

but instead to the magistrate, each according to his class, and from him they also received their travel passes. So now, Jewish elites have to deal with a completely different reality. The one thing that they have going for them, and this is ongoing, really straight into the 19th century, is the naifte of maybe not the locals so much, but those in St. Petersburg, who, and this is prior to Dershavin's investigation into the causes of anti-Jewish rioting in Belarus, because this is where we're mostly talking about. the far west and you know we've we've heard we've heard this argument before catherine needed allies she went to the nobility she freed them from all um service obligations which completely upended the the social order made her very unpopular but in that same process saw the jews as economically valuable remember last time we talked about the emperor

Elizabeth, when someone said to her, we're going to lose money if they, if you throw them out. And she said, I don't care. Well, here, Catherine cares for not just a political, but for a financial reason, too. So like so many Americans, the elite in Petersburg saw the Jews as, um, um, this very industrious, utile and mostly isolated group of people. Bringing them closer to the mainstream meant that we could have greater access to their money and their ability, having no idea what they were doing. And remember, the relation between the Kahul and Polish elite was still existing in

these, in Ukraine and other parts of the far west. So that didn't go away. So they had absorbed into themselves a very exploitative group of people who, and slowly, you know, you'll have Russians realizing this. But at this point, people like Catherine had no. idea how intense the exploitation really was. And it was mostly later, I think after her death, did it become more and more obvious when Dersovan was sent to Belarus. Moving on. The new order had consequences for the cities, which only took status into consideration,

not nationality. According to this arrangement, all townsmen, thus also all Jews, had to had the right to participate in the local class governance and occupy official posts. Corresponding to the conditions of that time, this meant that the Jews became citizens with equal rights. The entry of Jews as citizens with equal right into the merchant guilds and townsmen class was an event of great social significance. It was supposed to transform the Jews into an economic power that would have to be reckoned with and raise their morale. It also made the practical protection of their life interests easier. At that time, the classes of traders and tradesmen, just like the municipal

commonwealth, had a broad self-determination, thus a certain administrative and judicial power was placed into the hands of Jews, just like Christians, through which the Jewish population held a commercial and civil influence and significance. Jews can now not only become mayors, but also advisory delegates and judges. At first, limitations were enacted in the larger cities to ensure that no more Jews occupied electable positions than Christians. In 1786, however, Catherine sent to the Great General of White Russia a command written by her own hand to actualize the equality of Jews in the municipal class self-governance, unconditionally and without any hesitation, and to impose an appropriate penalty upon anyone that should hinder this equality. remember Catherine

the second was in my opinion an illegitimate monarch she murdered her way and quite literally slept her way to the throne of Russia she didn't speak Russian very well and when she took over in a coup like we said last time she needed allies and the Jews

seemed to be one very potent source of money and support she found herself without fully realizing it in the same position that Polish nobles were relative to, or a similar position, the Polish nobles had to the Jews. What happens when you, you know, claim that ethnicity doesn't mean anything with the

Jewish population? Well, the law may say that the concept of Jew doesn't exist, but the Jews don't accept that. And all this means is that the Jews are going to be able to outperform everybody, given the nature of their experience that, you know, Russia never really had a very strong merchant backbone. It was a land power. It was a royalist, a land power,

not a commercial republic. The old believers, because they were outside of the mainstream, developed a mercantile interest. Although, of course, there was no use for you or anything like that with them. But in her search for allies, giving away lands to people who would support her, she was bringing Russia into a situation. serious problem. And what ended up

happening is she started to notice that peasants were rioting, everything that happened in Poland. And so now she's saying that Jews have to have the same representation as their numbers and will punish anyone who doesn't go along with this. So clearly

there's a relationship, a very unhealthy relationship here growing between the Kahul, what's left of it, and Catherine. It should be pointed out that the Jews thus were given equal rights not only in contrast to Poland, but also earlier than in France or the German states. Under Frederick the Great, the Jews suffered great limitations. Indeed, the Jews in Russia had from the beginning the personal freedom that the Russian peasants were only granted 80 years later. Paradoxically, the Jews gained greater freedom than

even the Russian merchants and tradesmen. The latter had to live exclusively in the cities, while in contrast, a Jewish population could live in colonial colonizations in the country and distill liquor. Although the Jews dwelt in clusters not only in the city but also in the village, they were accounted as part of the city contingent, inclusive of merchant and townsmen classes. According to the manner of their activity and surrounded by unfree peasantry, they played an important economic role. Rural trade was concentrated in their hands, and they leased various posts belonging to the landowner's privilege,

specifically the sale of vodka and taverns, and therewith fostered the expansion of drunkenness. The white Russian powers reported, the presence of Jews in the villages act with harm upon the economic and moral condition of the rural population because the Jews encouraged drunkenness among the local population. In the stance taken by the powers at B, it was indicated among other things that the Jews led the peasants astray with drunkenness, idleness, and poverty,

that they had given them vodka on credit, reception of pledges for vodka, but the brandy operations were an attractive source of income for both the Polish landowners and the Jewish commissioners. Granted, the gift of citizenship that the Jews received brought a danger with it. Obviously, the Jews were also supposed to acquiesce to the general rule to cease to breaches. brandy business in the villages and move out. In 1783, the following was published, quote, the general rule requires every citizen to apply himself in a respectable trade in business, but not the distilling of schnapps, as that is not a fitting business, and whenever the proprietor

permits the merchant, townsman, or Jew to distill vodka, he will be held as a lawbreaker. And thus it happened. They began to transfer the Jews from the villages to the cities to deflect them from their centuries-old occupation, the leasing of distilleries and taverns. Just briefly, people don't realize how small the bureaucracy was in St. Petersburg, especially in the 19th century. People think this is just this top-heavy bureaucracy, and that was not the case. Politics was local in Russia, even more so than in the West. They could panse. a statute or an executive decision

but enforcing it is another matter it's very easy for a Jew to take someone who's deeply in debt to them and hand over that right that distilling right to someone else member of the Guiam they did this in Poland all the time when you have

they're already colonizing just as much that they did under Polish rule in Russia and expanding just like they had done they had done before. So you didn't have a lot of enforcement mechanisms. And this, I'm almost positive, this law was largely unenforced. Or if it continued, it continues under different circumstances,

but the Jews continued to profit from it. Naturally, to the Jews, the threat of a complete removal from the villages naturally appeared not as a uniform civil measure, but rather as one that was set up specifically to oppose their national religion. The Jewish townsmen that were supposed to be resettled into the city and unambiguously were to be robbed of a very lucrative business in the country fell into an inner city and inner Jewish competition. Indignation grew among the Jews and in 1784 a commission of the Kellehap traveled to St. Petersburg to seek the cancellation of these measures. At the same time, the Kellehat reasoned that they should, with the help of the administration,

regain their lost power in its full extent over the Jewish population. But the answer to the Zarina read, as soon as the people yoke to the Jewish law have arrived at the condition of equality, the order must be upheld in every case so that each, according to his rank, and status enjoys the benefits and rights without distinction of belief or national origin. But the clenched power of the Polish proprietors also had to be reckoned with. Although the administration of White Russia forbid them in 1783 to lease the schnapps distilling to an unauthorized person, especially Jews, the landlords continued to lease the industry to Jews. That was their right,

and inheritance of centuries-old Polish custom. The Senate did not venture to apply force against the landholders, and in 1786, removed their jurisdiction to relocate Jews into cities. For this, a compromise was found. The Jews would be regarded as people that had relocated to the cities, but were retained the right to temporary visits to the village. That meant that those that were living in the villages continued to live there. The Senate permission of 1786 permitted the Jews to live in villages, and Jews were allowed to lease from the landholders the right to produce and sell alcoholic beverages, while Christian merchants and townsmen did not obtain these rights.

So ultimately, very little change. Because of a lack of enforcement, it wasn't going to change anyway. But, I mean, for the most part, we're not talking about Russians here. this is still a heavily Polish Ukrainian part of the part of the world I mean Russians are involved but this was simply a piece of the Polish

empire that had been absorbed into Russia previously part of Russia but so you know at this point Poland was gone as an empire

so but the aristocracy there the I should say the oligarchy there was just as angry as any Jew was at this at this regulation that says that they can't they can't confer this monopoly but they did it anyway and having something so stupid like this this you know temporary visits to the villages like that's going to make any difference um uh because russons started to realize the money elites anyway landholders the money that they could make by partnering with the jews on this stuff and the one and the one class that suffered badly uh as always was

the peasantry. Even the efforts of the delegation of Kellehot in St. Petersburg was not wholly without success. They did not get what they came for, the establishment of a separate Jewish court for all contentions between Jews. But in 1786, the significant part of their supervisory right was given back. The supervision of Jewish townsmen, the majority of the Jewish population. This included not only the division of public benefits, but also the levying of poll tax and adjudicating the right to separate from the congregation. Thus, the administration recognized its interest in not weakening the power of the cahal. In all Russia, the status of traders and businessmen,

merchants and townsmen, did not have the right to choose their residences. Their members were bound to that locality in which they were registered in order that the financial position of their would not be weakened. However, the Senate made an exception in 1782 for white Russia. The merchants could move, as the case might be, as it was propitious for commerce from one city to another. The ruling favored especially the Jewish merchants. The Russian oligarchs, the elite of the elite, were found in the Senate. That's what the Senate was. It was Petrin, and these were people who either directly or indirectly profited from incorporating these parts of the old Polish Empire into Russia. This 1782 exception clearly was self-interested.

They didn't want, you know, a city that had a lot of opportunities, you know, temporarily gaining all this population and poorer cities losing population. because usually, you know, they know what a debt bubble is. They know how that doesn't really work. Monetization was slowly creeping into these areas. People were using cash more and more. Certainly in the Senate, they were. But White Russia or Belarus, they make this exception entirely because to allow Jews to go from one place to another,

which I guarantee you they were doing anyway. However, they began to exploit this right in the greater extent than had been seen before. Jewish merchants began to be registered in Moscow in Smolensk. Jews began soon after the annexation of white Russia in 1882 to settle in Moscow. By the end of the 18th century, the number of Jews in Moscow was considerable. Some Jews that had entered the ranks of the Moscow merchant class began to practice wholesaling. Other Jews, in contrast, sold foreign goods from their apartments or in the courts, or began peddling, though this was at the time forbidden. in 1790 the moscow merchants submitted a complaint in moscow has emerged a not insignificant number of jews from foreign countries and from white russia who as opportunity afforded joined the moscow merchants guild and then utilized forbidden methods of business which brought about very hurtful damage and the cheapness of their goods indicated that it involves smuggling but moreover as is well known they cut coins it is possible that they will

do this in Moscow. As amends to their thoroughly cagey findings, the Moscow merchants demanded their removal from Moscow. The Jewish merchants appealed with a counter-complaint that they were not accepted into the Smolensk and Moscow merchant guilds. If you read a mainstream Jewish historian today, all they're going to tell you is that this complaint from a merchant guilds, or not just in Russia, but anywhere. It comes from envy. It comes from the fact that they weren't as business-minded, as Jews were. But there's this curious comment here that peddling was forbidden. It's true. Advertising, this occurred in every Western European country too. Advertising, leaving your guild's specific area, engaging in competition, and certainly

artificially manipulating prices this was new to them of course they had a valid complaint of course they were smuggling of course they were cutting coins of course they were doing what Walmart does and underselling everybody

which you couldn't do prior to this and then taking over when your competition starts to suffer the fact that Jews had access to credit all over the world the Russians didn't so much that they could charge for loans they could charge a much better rate only of course to raise it later on

all the the older regulations on usury they were flaunting uh flouting i should say and and making a mockery of it um and you notice at this particular period of time the jews weren't even didn't answer it they simply said we're we're being excluded and this is why we'd have to do this but they They weren't saying that we weren't doing it or trying to defend themselves in any way. Ultimately, the argument came to be that our business acumen assists the state, the same way that it assisted, allegedly, the Polish nobility. And because of that, you need to tolerate us. But you see already, this is a very short period of time after the partitions of Poland, that they're already colonizing, not just the western parts of the empire, But Moscow itself and other major cities are going up against a totally unprepared,

really non-mercantile traditional medieval approach to economics, things like a just price, and through their Machiavellian methods, completely undercut everybody. They had every right to complain. But again, because of their command of credit and capital, from a practical point of view, the state was very, hesitant to do much about it at the time. The Council of Her Majesty heard the complaints. In accordance with the Unified Russian Order,

she firmly established that the Jews did not have the right to be registered in the Russian towns and harbors, but only in white Russia. By no means is usefulness to be expected from the migration of Jews into Moscow. In December 1791, she promulgated a highest order Ukes, which prohibited Jews, quote, to join the merchant guilds of the inner provinces, but permitted them, quote, for a limited time to trade reasons to enter Moscow.

Jews were allowed to utilize the rights of the Merchant Guild in Townsman class only in white Russia. The right to permanent residency and membership in the Townsman class, Catherine continued, was granted in New Russia, now accessible in the vice regencies of Yakaterinislav, and Torida. Shortly thereafter, these became the provinces of Yakotorinislav, Torida, and Chersan. That is, Catherine allowed Jews to migrate into the new expansive territories into which Christian merchants and townsmen from the provinces of Interior Russia generally were not permitted to emigrate. When in 1789, it was, when in 1796, it was made known that groups of Jews already

had immigrated into Kiev, Chernigov, and Novgorod, Siervsk, provinces, it was likewise granted that to utilize the right of the Merchant Guild and the townsmen class. What this amounted to, in my opinion, is that

the Jews were given permission, sometimes direct, sometimes indirect, to function as if they're a member of the The Merchant Guild without having to conform to its specific practices, including the rejection of advertising and undercutting and stuff like that, sending them into different areas that were just being settled, New Russia, for example, which is close to the Black Sea, and therefore they're connected with the rest of the world there, meant that they were colonizing.

these areas and dominating them and growing tremendously wealthy as an ethnic body in the Russian Empire. And so this is just getting started here. And the problem with debt is that you end up taking, you know, someone defaults, you end up taking their lands either in your own name or someone else's name. And the money just was rolling in. And Russia didn't have that mentality. They weren't a self-interested, self-seeking mercantile.

group of people, especially in the central provinces. So this was already becoming a disaster for Russia financially. The pre-revolution Jewish encyclopedia writes, the U-Ks of 1791, both laid the groundwork for setting up the pale of settlement, even if it wasn't so intended. Under the conditions of the then-obtaining social and civic order in general, and of Jewish life in particular, the administration could not consider bringing about a particular,

particularly onerous situation and conclude for them exceptional laws, which among other things would restrict the right of residency. In the context of its time, this U.K.S. did not contain that which, in this respect, would have brought the Jews into a less favorable condition than the Christians. The U.K. of 1791, in no way limited the rights of Jews in the choice of residency, created no special borders, and for Jews, the way was opened into new regions into which, in general, people could not emigrate. The main point of the decree was not concerned with their Jewishness, but that they were traitors. The question was not considered from national or religious point of view, but only from the viewpoint of usefulness.

The U-Case of 1791, which actually privileged Jewish merchants in comparison to Christian ones, was in the course of time the basis for the future pale of settlement, which almost until the revolution cast, as it were, a dark shadow over Russia. By itself, however, the Uchus of 1791 was not so oppressive in its outworking as to prevent a small Jewish colony from emerging in St. Petersburg by the end of the reign of Catherine II. Here lived the famous tax leaser Abraham Peretz and some of the merchants close to him. And also, while the religious struggle was in full swing, the rabbi Avgidore Chumovitz and his opponent, the famous Hasidic Sadek Zalman, Burychovic. In 1793 and 1795, the second and third partition of Paul

Poland took place in the Jewish population from Lithuania, Poldolia, and Volina, numbering almost a million, came under Russia's jurisdiction. This increase in population was a very significant event, though for a long time not recognized as such. It later influenced the fate of both Russia and the Jewry and the Jewry of East Europe. After centuries long wandering, Jewry came under one roof in a single great congregate. quote unquote. You notice that because the cahal is not really functioning like it used to,

it's greatly weakening, they weren't able to discipline any of the Hasidic Jews. They by this point had become quite powerful and had a whole different philosophical, more sophisticated point of view than your rabbis who were purely Talmudic in the way Cahal system. But Schulton-Etsin is absolutely right. Now, all the problems of the Jews and what they caused in Poland has been totally

transferred to Russia to a ruling class that generally speaking didn't know what they were getting themselves into. They were simply being told, and you know, this name of Peretz, as you read up here,

Abram Peretz, that family and others very much like it will come up again and again in Russian history or really the history of St. Petersburg. So the Hasidic rabbis could do what they please. So they were in a privileged position compared to Russians. They were highly experienced in manipulation, including manipulation of the state or nobility. and keep in mind something else

that so much of new Russia the closer they get to the Black Sea the more that they and they have a folk understanding of this reestablishing Khazaria because some of these colonies the pale of settlement actually did include portions of the old

Khazar Empire but don't listen when people tell you the Jews couldn't leave the pale of settlement it's a lie they were all over the Russian Empire and their position in the pale, generally speaking, was privileged. They were not subject to the draft, you know, in war time. But they knew how, more than anything else,

to manipulate both local and now, St. Petersburg itself, especially using the Senate. And, you know, this is going to have world-shattering consequences. When you go through the early Bolsheviks, You go through their backgrounds. So many of them are from this pale, from wealthy merchant families, post-Kahal wealthy merchant families.

For the most part, you know, semi-isolated but not entirely so. Jewish nationalists. And once they reached a certain level of wealth, cohesion, and then spread all over the empire, revolution was around the corner, unfortunately. All right. In the now vastly expanded region of Jewish settlement, the same questions came up as before. The Jews obtained rights of merchant guilds and townsmen, which they had not possessed in Poland, and they got the right to equal participation in the class municipal self-government, then had to accept the restrictions of this status. They could not migrate into the cities of the inner Russian provinces and were liable to be moved out of the villages. With the now huge extent of the Jewish population, the Russian regime no longer had a way to veil the fact that the Jews continued to live in the villages

simply by modeling it as a temporary visit. A burning question was whether the economic condition could tolerate so many tradesmen and traders living amongst the peasants. In order to diffuse the problem, many Steadel were made equal to cities. Thus, the legal possibility came about for Jews to continue living there. But with the large number of Jews in the country, and the high population density in the cities, that was no solution. Now, it seemed to be a natural way out that the Jews would take advantage of the possibility offered by Catherine to settle in the huge, scarcely occupied New Russia. The new settlers were offered inducements, but this did not succeed in setting a colonization

movement into motion. Even the freedom of the new settlers from taxes appeared not to be attractive enough to induce such a migration. Thus, Catherine decided in 1794 to induce the Jews to emigrate with contrary measures. The Jews were relocated out of the villages. At the same time, she decided to assess the entire Jewish population with a tax that was double that paid by Christians. Such attacks had already been paid for a long time by the old believers, but applied to the Jews. This law proved to be neither effective nor of long duration.

when we're talking about migration and this happened actually a few more times they wanted them to be small landholders and to actually begin cultivation again this naifte they didn't realize that was absolutely out of the question even in the lands of the former Kaiser Empire

because even there they were in cultivating the land it was still a mercantile essentially toll-based economy at least that part of it that was that was monetized it just didn't matter the legal establishment

in late 18th century Russia was no match for people who almost professionally pour over the text of the Talmud which is all these

very fine legal arguments on everything you could you could think of reading that thing even parts of it is is brutal um you know this is way beyond machiavelli and so they could find loopholes in anything um they had no moral standards except their own self preservation and their own profit so it's essentially a way to slowly begin living off of corruption but then corrupting everyone else uh everyone else around them monetization in so many parts of the

village in west and southern Russia came from a Jewish usurious demand and so I also think that this is a very natural place to stop only because there's a big distinction once Catherine dies and Paul Short Rain comes in and then Alexander I'm everything changes and I shouldn't say everything changes there's there's a total there's a there's a substantial alteration and attitudes from the monarchy and those around them. Catherine was a disaster. She didn't really, you know, she shouldn't even have been there in the first place. She wasn't a Germanic background, didn't speak Russian very well, that kind of thing.

But we can talk about the D'Urjavan mission, which Paul and then Alexander sent several times out to the countryside to find. find out why are their constant rights? Why are there so much contempt? They honestly didn't know. And Dershavan starts off as somewhat vaguely phylo-Semitic. Thinking that he's going to find out that they're jealous or that they're not going to, you know, that they're not a good businessman. And he found out that was absolutely wrong.

And so much of what later on became the Russian point of view on Jews came from Dersavis, that whole investigative committee that he shared and the reports just from empirical observation of what Jews were doing in the countryside and in this city and I think that distinction was not great at the time at least as far as they were concerned because they could use as temporary

manipulating the words like temporary as we talked about before no one's going to out legal argue a Jew when it comes to their own self-interest you know it isn't going to work especially Russians at that time de Javan and the

investigative committee will change. Still, they're going to be able to buy their way into Russian lives. And it's going to be a back and forth throughout the 19th century. We've come to the very end of the 18th century now. And this seat change removes some of the naivte from the Russian monarchy and to a lesser extent, the ruling class. And that's something that we're going to talk about at some length because it's very important and very few people even have heard of it before.

I had already taken notes to say where I had broken off so that we can get into Paul the first rain on the next episode. So, awesome. All right. As per usual, in the show notes to this will be all the places where people can subscribe to you and to also donate because, yeah, this is how you make your living. And I look forward to the next. episode because this is where we really start getting into the meat of a lot of, I mean, we've already discussed a lot of resentments that are still felt today, but this is where we start getting into a lot of the things that are even more current on their minds. Yeah, and as all this is going on, I mean precisely as all this is going on, slowly but surely,

you have peasants and Russian merchants building this resentment and just like in Poland it explodes with the Cossacks in Kimmelnitskyy's 1648 it will continue to explode from time to time maybe not that systematically and because no one wanted that apple card upset the Western parts of the

empire were generating a lot of money and cash not just in kind no one wanted that unstable And that's why it was so important to figure out what was going on. Now, what came out of it is a separate issue. But all of this is building, the pressure cooker is building, and Jews simply can't continue to say that, you know, we did nothing wrong. You're just ignorant.

You're just going, you're jealous or whatever it might be. We're just smarter than you. They can't. And that's part of why this book is very successful and why it was a huge and continues to be a huge seller in Russia itself. and this book when it came out changed just like things were changing in this point in history

this book itself changed a lot of elite Russian opinion on the Jews in the in the Putin era all right until the next time thank you Dr. Johnson all right my friend thank you I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekino show

this is part four of our reading of 200 years together by Alexander Solzhenice And how are you doing today, Dr. Johnson? I'm doing well. We're kind of snowed in out here, which as far as I'm concerned is a great thing. But you would think that people who live around here were born and raised in Barbados by the way they complain. I mean, we're in Appalachia for Christ.

This is how it is. But it's absolutely beautiful where I live now. It's all fields and everything. And it's really, it's absolutely extraordinary. We got four or five inches in Alabama And you would think that people would have freaked out by that And no, it didn't even I think the only thing that was cleaned out

In the local supermarket In the very small supermarket was milk That was it Everybody else was just like, yeah, we're going to stay in the house I wonder if COVID just hardened everybody To these kind of things No one really responds to these kind of Because, you know, 10 years ago

It would have been mass panic Something like that Yeah, all the all the milk, eggs, and toast would have been gone because obviously when you're snowed in, you just eat French toast. That makes sense to me. All right.

Here we go. Picking up right where we left off, page 24. And we're off. Those were the last regulations of Catherine. From the end of 1796, Paul I reigned. The Jewish Encyclopedia evaluates him in this way. The time of the angry rule of Paul I first passed well for the Jews. All edicts of Paul I concerning the Jews indicate that the monarch was tolerant and benevolent

toward the Jewish population. When the interest of Jews conflicted with Christians, Paul I by no means automatically cited with the Christian. Even when in 1797 he ordered measures to reduce the power of the Jews and the spirituals over the peasants, this was actually not to be able to. set up against the Jews. The point was the protection of the peasants. Paul recognized also the right of the Hasidim not to have to live in secrecy. He extended the right of Jews to belong to the merchant and townsman class, even to the Corlin province, which was no Polish inheritance, and later,

it also did not belong to the pale of settlement. Consistent with the policy, he denied the respective petitions of the parishes of Kofno, Kamenes, Podosk, Kiev, and Vilna, and to be permitted to move the Jews out of their cities. Paul had it inherited the stubborn resistance of the Polish landholders against any changing of their rights. Among these was the right over the Jews and the right to hold court over them. They misused these rights often. Thus, the complaint of the Jews of Berichich, Ukraine, against the princes of Razeville, stated, in order to hold our religious services, we must first pay gold to those to whom the prince

has leased our faith, and against Catherine's former favorite Simon Zorich, one ought not to have to pay him for the air one breathes. In Poland, many Steadel and cities were the possession of nobles and the landowners assessed arbitrary and opportunistic levies that the residents had to pay. This is one of these really balsy statements. I know the verbiage here in translation is a little muddled, but the Jews somehow are projecting what everyone else in the Polish Empire, when it existed, was complaining about them. They're simply accusing everyone else of the exact same thing.

the truth is the opposite was the case Jews continued to hold in former Polish areas the leases to pretty much everything and just like the Khazar Empire charged tolls on it and I think what he means here by spirituals I don't remember because I've translated bits and pieces of this

by spirituals I think he means certain heretics I also inherited from you know the Sosinians and non-transerxes They weren't huge in Russia. They're not talking about old, old believer. I think that's what he's talking about. Unless it's just a, I don't know where the, I don't know what the word is that he's translating that way.

Do you think, could it possibly be liquor? Well, the way he states it, it sounds like he's referring, oh, reduce the power of the Jews and the spirituals. Yeah, it's possible. It sounds like they're referring to a group of people. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it does, yeah. So it could be.

It could be just a strange, you know, spirits. It's just muddled in how it's stated. But we'll talk here in a minute about the commissions to study the Jewish problem in the western parts of the empire by Tsar Paul, by the way, has been canonized for a whole bunch of very good reasons. I have an icon of him in my office here. And part of it was eventually what he, you know, was to the, at least in part, against the Jews. Because everywhere they go, you have even small towns were begging the authorities to allow him to throw the Jews out. It's everywhere.

And for all the same reasons. And because St. Petersburg wasn't all that aware of the Jewish mind at the time, although they were slowly getting an education, the commissions of Derjean, will change the Russian point of view on the Jews, probably forever. Der Javen and the Belarus famine. Since the start of the reign of Paul I, there was a great famine in white Russia, especially in the province of Minsk. The poet Gavrilla Romanovich Derzavin, then serving as senator,

was commissioned to go there and determine its cause and seek a solution, for which task he received no money to buy grain, but instead had the right to confiscate possessions of negligent landowners, saw their stockpile, and distribute them. Der Javin was not just a great poet, but also an outstanding statesman who left behind unique proofs of his effectiveness, which we will want to delve into in the following. The famine, as Der Javen confirmed, was unimaginable. He writes, when I arrived in White Russia, I personally convinced myself at the great scarcity of grain among the villagers, due to the very serious hunger, virtually all nourished themselves from fermented grass mixed with a tiny portion of meal or pearl barley.

The peasants were malnourished and sallow like dead people. In order to remedy this, I found out which of the rich landowners had grain in their storehouses, took it to the town center and distributed it to the poor, and I commanded the goods of a Polish count, in view of such pitiless greed, to be yielded to a trustee. after the nobleman was made aware of the dire situation he awoke from his slumber or better from his shocking indifference towards humanity he used every means to feed the peasants by acquiring grain from neighboring provinces and when after two months the harvest time arrived the famine ended when der javen visited the provincial government he so pursued the noble rulers and district police captains that the nobility banded together and sent the czar a scurrilous complaint against der javen and that's something for the rest of his life he's going to have to deal with why don't you keep going and uh for a couple of paragraphs because then i'm going have a lot to say after after that okay D'Irjavan discovered that the Jewish schnapps distillers exploited the alcoholism of the peasants,

quoting, after I had discovered that the Jews were profit-seeking used the lure of drink to beguile grain from the peasants, converted into brandy and therewith cause a famine. I commanded that they should close their distilleries in the village of Riosno. I informed myself from sensible inhabitants, as well as nobles, merchants, and villagers about the manner of the life of the Jews, Jews, their occupations, their deceptions, and all their petty fogging with which they provide the poor dumb villagers with hunger, and on the other hand, by what means one could protect them from the common pack and how to facilitate for them an honorable and respectable way out to enable them to become useful citizens.

Afterwards, in the autumn months, Der Javen described many evil practices of the Polish landlords and Jewish leasers in his memorandum on the mitigation of famine in white Russia and the lifestyles of the Jews, which he also made known to the Tsar and the highest officials of the state. This memorandum is a very comprehensive document that evaluates the conditions inherited from the polls as well as the possibilities for overcoming the poverty of the peasants, describing the peculiarities of the Jewish way of life of that time and includes a proposal for reform in comparison to Prussia and Austria. The very explicit practical presentation of the recommended measures makes this the first work of an enlightened Russian citizen concerning Jewish life in Russia in those first years in which Russia acquired Jews in a large mass.

That makes it a work of special interest. The memorandum consists of two parts. One, on the residents of white Russia in general, in reviews of the memorandum, we usually find no mention of this important part. and two on the Jews All right, so I can't I can't overstate the importance of this as far as Russian history is concerned

and this is a document that you would think a lot of our people would be very interested in but is almost nowhere to be found until this book came out because and there's two two czar that are going to send him from the senator javan to to investigate both paul and

Alexander their concern was because there was a lot of unrest against the jews they needed to figure out um what was causing it we know what was causing it but at the time they didn't know and because there was quite a bit of money to be made there uh they didn't want that apple card upset at all so initially it was called the committee for the organization of jewish life under the two emperors. And D'Jarvan was not an anti-Semite, if anything, he was a phylo simine, who was very neutral in this regard. And let me quote directly from the Senate, their draft, I translated myself from Katasanov, who mentioned it in 1993, the draft and purpose of the mission of the committee.

And it says, to discover the cause of the financial complaint from peasants and the nature of their lives. These complaints are to the detriment of agriculture and economic life generally in these areas where the Jews live. This committee will deal with these issues and seek funds to remedy the present situation of the Jews. So there was a great interest in civic peace here. It's difficult to bring in an entirely, almost half a country into an empire. It's always a delicate operation. And so, Zarpal, who was a very good man in all respects, was very very, very, concerned that this data be objective.

He maybe naively wanted to incorporate Jews into Russia without creating friction. Well, you know, good luck with that. It also was, this area was very ethnically mixed. Of course, the Cossacks were there, Ukrainians, Poles, obviously, Germans, Hungarians and Czechs. So he had to tread very lightly. The context is that the Baltic grain trade, although it was up and down depending on the era, it continued to be very profitable. So maintaining peace in that part of the empire was not just a security issue, but an economic necessity. Now, throughout this period of time, the revolutionaries in France, of course, loathed the Russian monarchy, thought maybe that approaching the Polish elites,

and create a pseudo-nationalist movement to separate themselves from the empire, that meant that this situation became even more great because you really can't talk about Polish elite without talking about Jews. So in both of these commissions under both emperors, the purpose was to understand the social relations in the area, and it was even put in such a way

that it was to assist Jews in their transition from Polish to Russian rule. so this was not a negative thing but Orthodox peasants were to get a fair hearing as to why they're so upset why the unrest is constant why they always want to throw the Jews

out of their towns and of course the two purposes are very closely related now initially Drozavins said he wasn't even talking about the Jews he was motivated primarily by ending the arrogant action of Polish nobles not Jews necessarily

initially he saw the Jews as just like employees of the polls but pretty soon he's good that's going to be that error is going to be dispelled and a lot of the members of this commission which he shared most of the names here are not Russian Yopatoki Zartorsky and Kachubei who was minister of the interior

these aren't necessarily Russian names so you had polls here who had connections with these Polish elites and these are Polish elite names anyway. So, you know, if anything, it was, it was weighed in their favor. They were very close to aristocratic Polish interests and Jewish money. So there's no way you can call this commission anti-Jewish or anti-Polish. So, but the very fact that these guys, these lifelong enemies of Russia has, have already been integrated as senators, show you, you know, how. the Tsardom viewed ethnic relations.

So, but also, as we said last time, Jews in fairly small numbers, but with a lot of money are already infiltrating Russia's major cities. East Olsen, East Olsen, Eastern will mention that too. Ginsburg, Noyiken, Peretz especially, many of them in, well, maybe 100 years from then, they're going to be buying up the sugar plantations or beet plantations in Ukraine. A lot of the railroads were financed by them, just like the Rothschild did in Austria, and the Lena Goldworks. So the Jewish Encyclopedia may say that it was illegal for Jews to own land. There was no laws restricting it, at least at the time.

And the Kahul, of course, was the core institution. So they wanted to integrate Jews into the system. despite being raised in this Cajal system. So, and we've already spoken about the Polish nobility and, and what their motivation is for bringing these Jews in and keeping them as a lot more than just accounts. The alliance between Polish nobles and the Cajal, even under Russia, seemingly was, was unbreakable. So, so let's continue here. But I've translated pieces of Dersavins' essence.

days. And I've used a writer by the name of Vladimir Kolzikov writing in a Belarusian journal who covered, you know, once I discovered this in Sultan Eaton's book, I just read everything I could on this topic. I came across a lot of amazing things. This is how my paper came into existence. And we'll catch up with all that here in a little bit. Dejaven begins by establishing that the agricultural economy was in shambles. The peasants there were lazy on the job, not clever. They procrastinate every small task and are sluggish and field work. Year in, year out, they eat unwinnowed corn in the spring,

Kolatucha or Balatusha from eggs and rye meal. In summer, they content themselves with a mixture of a small amount of some grain or other with chopped and cooked grass. They are so weakened that they stagger around. The local Polish landlords are not good proprietors. They do not manage the property themselves, but lease it out, a Polish custom. But for the lease, there are no universal rules protecting the peasants from overbearing or to keep the business aspect from falling apart. Many greedy leasers, by imposing hard work and oppressive taxes, bring the people into a bad way

and transform them into poor homeless peasants. This lease is all the worst for being short term made for one to three years at a time so that the leaser hastens to get his advantage from it without regard to the exhausting of the estate. No, no, no, you're fine. One more paragraph will be good. Okay. The emaciation of the peasants was sometimes even worse. Several landlords that leased as traffic in spirits in their village to the Jews signed stipulations that the peasants may only buy their necessities from these leasers, triple price.

Likewise, the peasants may not sell their product to anyone except the Jewish leaseholder, cheaper than the market price. Thus, they plunge the villagers into misery, and especially when they distribute again their hoarded grain. They must finally give a double portion, whoever does not do it is punished. the villagers are robbed of every possibility to prosper and be full. So it doesn't take long for Drozavid in this committee, regardless of their ethnic backgrounds, to realize what was going on here. This was an abuse of the peasantry that it's not even serfdom at this point.

So, of course, peasants weren't lazy. That's just a manner of speaking. They couldn't work. They were malnourished. But keep in mind, he also noticed that the barns were full of grain and they were either going to export or for alcohol. Now, D'Jarjavon's powers, I think we already mentioned, they were mostly for information, but he could order abuses to end as far as food distribution. he did order the distribution of the produce specifically from one Polish noble

Ognizki and he wrote Emperor Paul saying that he has the names of these offending landlords deliberately starving peasants and he stopped a cart and this is from the Kozlakov article from 2014 he stopped a cart

of a small caravan in Belarus owned by powerful Jewish merchants full of grain and flour and he ordered that it go back to its initial owner and be distributed to the peasant. He absolutely forced landlords to make

permanent adjustments to their way of living. But Polish nobles were doing this, of course, at the behest of Jews. They were both profiting tremendously. Even things like, you know, short-term leases. Well, that means that they could just

raise the price. because of the export trade, which was booming at the time. There was a huge demand in the West for Russian grain through the Baltic ports. That means the mass of production had to be increasing.

And so the peasants were pressed very, very hard. But of course, in a contradictory kind of way, remember, these were mostly absentee landlords. They weren't necessarily there being able to see the fields. This is very common at the time. Jews were giving them this information. And that's something else.

Dersavin said nine years at a minimum. And this has to be enforced. He wanted the vodka monopoly to end. I mean, and this is the significance of the Tsarist system because Paul had the power to do this. You could never do this in a republic. You couldn't do this in the U.S. today. But obviously now, just right away, within a very short period of time,

he's making some powerful enemies but obviously both the Poles and the Jews were very very much alarmed now let me quote Dershavin here I translated this oh hey actually no yeah that my first quote here

is actually from Shulton Isan or is included in the book but Shulton Isan will go on here we'll see in a little bit to detail a lot of the specific methods used to torment these these poor people and it really is it really is sad showing the mentality of of that system just at the

time it became part of the Russian Empire I think a lot of the people who are listening to this will try to apply it to like today like our system and say oh they're just being they're just being dup they're making bad decisions I don't think they realize they're not living under the same system or even cast structure that we you know they have a cast structure that isn't really a cast structure, but you know what I mean. And I think people just look at it, oh, how could they be due? Well, it's, these people aren't exactly free. They're not like, you know, it's like if things are bad in Alabama, you can move, you know, you can move to Montana if you have, you know, if you have the means to do it. These people don't really have

options. Well, that's correct. Then he develops in more detail the problem. of the liquor distilling. Schnapps was distilled by the landlords, the landed nobility, the schlachta of the region, the priest, monks, and Jews. Of the almost million Jews, two to three thousand live in the villages and live mainly from the liquor traffic. The peasants, after bringing in the harvest, are sweaty and careless in what they spend. They drink, eat, enjoy themselves, pay the Jews for their old debts, and then whatever they ask for drinks. Whatever they ask for drinks. For this reason, the short shortages already manifest by winter. In every settlement, there is at least one, and in several

settlements, a few taverns built by the landlords, where for their advantage, and that of the Jewish leaseholders, liquor is sold day and night. There the Jews tricked them out of not only the life-sustaining grain, but that which is sown in the field, field implements, household items, health, and even their life. And all that is sharpened by the moors of the Koleda. Jews travel, especially during the harvest in autumn through the villages and after they have made the farmer, along with his whole family drunk, drive them into debt and take from them every last thing needed to survive. In that, they box the drunkard's ears and plunder him. The villager is plunged into the deepest misery. He lists also other reasons for the impoverishing of the peasants. doubtless behind these fateful distilleries stand the Polish landlords. Proprietor and leaser act in behalf of the owner and attend to making a profit. To this class, Guess and asserts belong not just the Jews, but also Christians, especially priests.

But the Jews were an irreplaceable, active, and very inventive link in the chain of exploitation of these illiterate emaciated peasants that had no rights on their own. If the white Russian settlement had not been injected with Jewish tavern managers and leasers, then the widespread system of exploitation would not have functioned, and removing the Jewish links in the chains

would have ended it. And this is the first time that something so bold and clear and obvious was stated to people with power. But it put the emperor in a very difficult position. money was clearly coming in here almost as if to buy the cooperation of the authorities

but the whole point of Drozhaven's mission was that this you know this can't continue the export trade was tremendous but Paul being the emperor that he was said very much like we heard with the Empress Elizabeth

a couple last week maybe saying that it doesn't matter the profit is not coming first here. The very fact that the nature of, you know, the nature of serfdom, even though that's a very broad word, it's not inherently exploitative. But when you add this kind of manipulation, you, we take this stuff for granted, advertising, public relations, flowery words used to fool people. That's kind of normal. You see it on TV all the time, but this is something that a lot of people, especially in the Russian cities, we're not used to.

And the manipulation was extremely, the very fact that they were taking advantage of alcoholism, promoting it, is, it was foundational here. Something else, D'ar Chauvin had a huge problem with. And that was the foundation for everything else that came after it, that so long as we have them hooked on this stuff, we could do what we please. It is, however, self-defeating. Regardless of what you think about the signs in this conflict, it was a totally unsustainable system because their health is going to give way. You need workers, but the population was growing, and I suppose this could be for the medium term, you know, it lasted this long. But as the grain prices went up, the intensity of the oppression also went up, squeezing every bit. And so this is what Dershavin sees.

As soon as he gets off his horse, he sees something that I don't think we would be prepared to look at. And this was considered normal in the western parts of the Russian Empire. After this, Dershavin recommended energetic measures, as for example, for the expurgation of these burdens of peasant life. The landlords would need to attend to this problem. Only they alone who are responsible for the peasants should be allowed to distill liquor under their own supervision and not from far-remove places and to see to it that every year a supply of grain for themselves and the peasants would be on hand and indeed as much as would be needed for good nutrition. If the danger arises that this is not done, then the property is to be confiscated for the state coffers. The schnobs distilling is to begin no sooner than the middle of September and end middle of April. The whole time of land cultivation is to be free of liquor consumption.

In addition, the liquor is not to be sold during worship services or night. The liquor stores should only be permitted in the main streets near the markets, mills, and establishments where foreigners gather. But all the superfluous and newly built liquor stores, whose number has greatly englanded, increased since the annexation of white Russia, are immediately to cease use for that purpose, the sale of liquor in them to be forbidden. In villages and out-of-the-way places, there should not be any that the peasant not sink into drunkenness. Jews, however, should not be permitted to sell liquor either by the glass or the keg, nor should they be the brewmasters in the distilleries, and they should not be allowed

to lease the liquor stores. Koledos are also to be forbidden as well as the short-term leasing of operations. By means of exacting stipulations, the leaser is to be prevented from working an operation into the ground. Under threat of punishment is market abuse to be forbidden, by which the landlords do not permit their peasants to buy what they need somewhere else or to sell their surplus somewhere other than to the proprietor. There were still other economic proposals

in the manner the scarcity of food can in the future be prevented in the white Russian province. And this is just, you know, Dershavin had to sit down and figure out how the system worked. Keep in mind that the Koldov system was very insidious.

It was simply, but simple, getting peasants drunk, specifically at harvest time, because they had money then, and to entice them to take out large loans and, of course, you know, very high rates. But Dershavin did not want to bring this news back to the capital because the implications, and he did, of course,

but the implications are tremendous. Since Jews function as the middlemen of the Polish economy, whether in Russia or the old Polish empire, if you want to solve the peasant problem, you either expropriated them or assimilate them. emperor paul i think very naively thought uh had a had a third option and that was settling these jews on the land as small proprietors and nearly every jew refused this they were not going to become business you know it's not nearly as profitable uh as what they were unproductive

parasites jews made their money gouging peasants and and you know they took from the lords all the time because they were going in. They were capital to be manipulated. And we'll see here in this book, we're still in part one of this book. He will, Solzhenitsyn will quote Dershavin's own writings on this at length. And at the time,

when I discovered this, it wasn't in English yet. So we'll get here in a second to exactly what Dersovin said about the nature of the system. and this also includes Jewish ownership over Orthodox and even Catholic parishes. I mean, yeah, Polish nobles were

as illiterate as peasants were. But so it's not just that peasants were often ethnically alien, especially to the Jewish mind, but they were religiously alien. That makes exploiting them, destroying them much easier than if they were of the same

the same stuff. So you couldn't even get married. If Jewish owned least on an Orthodox church, you couldn't get married without paying them. On top of everything else, you were paying them. And this, this in particular, was very obnoxious to the to the peasants. Peasants, by the way, that had proven to the world that there were very efficient cultivators of tremendous amounts of grain. But none of that benefited them. Starting from the Renaissance, you know, we're talking even 300 years.

A spike in Western populations, which was continuing, drove grain prices through the roof. That's where the money economy came from. Urban development came from. And the higher, as I said, the higher the price goes, the more the oppression develops. So this was incredibly obnoxious. So the Slavic grain was exported by a Jewish network, headquartered in several cities. You know, as far as I can see, it was Antwerp, Constantinople, crack out Poland of course and London

and they have satellite branches in Spain and Amsterdam and a very small one even in St. Petersburg so they had access to capital that no one else did now there were poor Jews I think we talked about that already within the Cajal system which was weakening but was not gone

but it was incredibly obnoxious and the only people who really profited from them were the nobles in the one side Polish landowners on the one side, and of course their Jewish advisors on the other. In the second part of the memorandum, Zerzavin going out from the task

given by the Senate submitted a suggestion for the transformation of the life of the Jews and the Russian kingdom. Not in isolation, but rather in the context of the misery of white Russia and with a goal to improve the situation. But here he set himself the assignment to give a brief overview

of Jewish history, especially the Polish period in order to explain the current customs of the Jews. Among others, he used the conversations with the Berlin-educated enlightened Jew physician Ilya Frank, who put his own thoughts down in writing. Quote, the Jewish popular teachers mingle mystic Talmudic pseudo-exegesis of the Bible with the true spirit of the teachings. They expound strict laws with the goal of isolating the Jews from other peoples and to instill a deep hatred against every other religion.

Instead of cultivating a universal virtue, they contrive an empty ceremony of honoring God. The moral character of the Jews has changed in the last century to their disadvantage, and in consequence, they have become pernicious subjects. In order to renew the Jews morally and politically, they have to be brought to the point of returning to the original purity of their religion. The Jewish reform in Russia must begin with the foundation of public schools in which the Russian, German, and Jewish languages would be taught. What kind of prejudice is it to believe that the assimilation of secular knowledge is tantamount to a betrayal of religion and folk, and that working the land is not suitable for a Jew? Dershavin declined in his memorandum a suggestion by Noda Heimovich Notkin, a major merchant from Sklof, whom he had also met with,

whom he had also met. Although not getting demurred from the most important conclusions and suggested to D'Urjavan that he that had to do with Jews, he was at the same time in favor, if possible, of excluding Jews from the production of liquor and saw it as needful for them to get an education and pursue a productive career, preferably working with their hands, whereby he also held out the possibility of emigration into the fruitful step for the purpose of raising sheet. and crops. Yeah, good luck with that. But that was the attempt all the way until

Zarniklas II to try to create something where, you know, but these people are claiming to be the nobles of the world, the mediators of the world, the presence of God on earth. They are not going to pull weeds. That's for the, that's for the cattle. I'm not so sure if your typical Polish knoll

especially the large ones was there on hand to see what was going on. They were getting, of course, information from their middlemen. The Jews were there on hand. So the point so far is that you can't get a more objective understanding of how the Jews operated in the Polish Empire or the Russian than this. From a guy who didn't even think the Jews were the problem, he soon realized that they were. the problem. There is no way getting around this, which is why you don't hear about it very much.

Even in texts dealing with you know, surf them in Central Europe or something like that Eastern Europe doesn't come up because there's absolutely nothing. There's no answering this. This is how it was. This was the mentality coming from Khazaria

that created the modern Talmudic Jew and this experience solidified all of this in their mind this is how money is to be made this is who we are and if there's any kind of a reaction you know the messiah is coming soon you know they always seem to think think that so they have no limits on their on their behavior and then we'll truly will be the masters of of the planet this was normal this was fully acceptable to the jewish mind at the time

and this shocked a lot of people and of course needless to say drosven was in a lot of of trouble for bringing this back to St. Petersburg. Following the explanation of Frank who rejected the power of the Kehlup, Dershavin proceeded from the same general consequences. The original principles of pure worship

and ethics of the Jews has been transformed into false concepts by which the simple Jewish people is misled and constantly is so led, so much so that between them and those of other faiths a wall has been built that cannot be broken through,

which has been made firm, a wall that firmly binds the Jews together and surrounded by darkness separates them from their fellow citizens. Thus, in raising their children, they pay plenty for Talmud instruction and that without time limit. As long as the students continue in their current conditions,

there is no prospect for a change in their ways. They believe that, themselves to be the true worshippers of God and despise everyone of a different faith. They're the people are brought to a constant expectation of the Messiah. They believe that their Messiah, by overthrowing all earthlings, will rule over them in flesh and blood and restore to them their former kingdom, fame, and glory. Of the youths, he wrote, they marry all too young, sometimes before they reach 10 years old, and though nubile, they are not strong enough.

Regarding the Cahal system, the inner Jewish collection of levies provides to the Cahalot every year an enviable sum of income that is incomparably higher than the state taxes that are raised from individuals in the census lists. The Cahal elders do not excuse anyone from the accounting. As a result, their poor masses find themselves in the condition of severe emaciation and great poverty, and there are many of them. In contrast, the members of the Kahala are rich and live in superfluity. By ruling over both levers of power, the spiritual and secular, they have a great power over the people. In this way, they hold them in great poverty and fear. The Kahelot issues to the people every possible command which must be performed with such exactitude and speed that one can only wonder. It's no accident that Dersavin went to various Jewish scholars, usually of German background,

who were part of the, you know, the so-called Jewish Enlightenment, because these were the people who first started talking about how powerful the Talmud was over the minds of the Kahl, especially in Eastern Europe. The fact that they were paying for this instruction. Now, of course, this is a massive group of books, but it seems to me it makes sense. that the part of the Talmud that they were specifically interested in were the parts where they condemn the Gentiles

as animals and everything else and that justifies things like slavery and usury and profiting at the expense of others. Occasionally it was the Jews, but that was technically against the rules.

And the Talmud ends up being both a religious or fall religious justification as well as a secular one, because their incomes were guaranteed by the unity and the cohesion that the Talmud studies provided. This is extremely important. And I think many of them at the time saw the Talmud essentially a secular book that gives us instruction as to who we are and what we're supposed to do.

And so as always, even though they were in Eastern Europe in great numbers, cohesion matters more than anything else. And that's why alcohol and manipulation and I remember these taverns wasn't just alcohol. You know, they had prostitutes there, their version of whatever pornography was back there, which also comes up in a lot of the pest and complaints to St. Petersburg. They saw them as animals and wanted to keep them in a state as animalistic as possible. And therefore, again, Dajavan was in a rough position because he had to say this. He wrote about this at great length, realizing, though, that this is now putting the Russian government in a position where it's going to have to, to some extent, intervene and disrupt the financial cash cow that that part of the empire had become. Dershavan identified the nub of the problem thusly. The Jews' great numbers in white Russia is itself a heavy burden for the land

on account of the disproportion to that of the crop farmers. This disproportion is the outstanding one of several important reasons that produces here a shortage of grain in other edible stores. Not one of them was a crop farmer at that time, yet each possessed and gobbled up more grain than the peasant with his large family, who had harvested it by the sweat of his brow. After all, in the villages, they are occupied in giving the peasant all their necessities on credit at an extraordinary rate of interest, and thus the peasant, who at some time or other became a debtor to them,

can no longer get free of it. Arching over this are the frivolous landlords that put their villages into Jewish hands, not just temporarily but permanently. The landowners, however, are happy to be, be able to shift everything onto the Jews, according to their own words, they regard the Jews as a sole reason for the wasting of the peasants, and the landlord only rarely acknowledges that he, if they were removed from his holdings, would suffer no small loss since he receives from them no small income from the lease. And that last point is what we've been talking about

since this began what I've been talking about in my historical work in this part of the world for decades it became a symbiotic relationship very difficult to sustain and the victims were the peasantry and despite their much greater numbers they were in in no position physically or mentally to band together against them

and they were apparently easy to manipulate and remember this is at the very beginning of the monetization of the economy something that your average peasant was very was not used to Jews were very much used to it I don't even think the lords were used to it but money then became this kind of talisman

a symbol rather than actual products that the peasant made so Dersovin was forced to conclude and many Polish nobles too now that they're under a very different kind of government that this relationship was completely

unhealthy, unsustainable and they're destroying everything in their path. It's purely parasitic. The Jews produced absolutely nothing here and the absentee landlord. I mean they have some excuse because

they were rarely on most of these properties. So, you know, they have The stomach is not an entire excuse, but this was absolutely unjustified no matter what. The Talmud, however, absolutely justified it. And that's why the Jews were in a very special position here, and they continue to be. Thus, D'Ur Javan did not neglect to examine the matter from a variety of angles. In fairness to the Jews, we must point out also that during this grain shortage,

they have taken care to feed not a few hungry villagers. though everyone also knows that that came with a bill. Upon the harvest being brought in, they will get it back a hundredfold. In a private report to the Attorney General, Der Javin wrote, It is hard not to err by putting all the blame on one side. The peasants booze away their grain with the Jews and suffer under its shortage. The landholders cannot forbid drunkenness, for they owe almost all their income to the distilling of liquor.

and all the blame cannot be placed even on the Jews that they take the last morsel of bread away from the peasant to earn their own life sustenance. To Ilya Frank, D'Urjavan once said, since the providence of this tiny scattered people has preserved them until the present, we must take care for their protection. And in his report, he wrote with the uprightness of that time,

if the most high providence to the end of some unknown purpose leaves on account of his purposes this dangerous people to live on the earth then governments under whose scepter they have sought protection must bear it they are thus obligated to extend their protection to the Jews so that they may be useful both to themselves and to the society in which they dwell because of all observations in white Russia and of his conclusion and of all he wrote in the memorandum and especially because of all these lines and probably also because he

praised the keen vision of the great Russian monarchs which forbade the immigration and travel of these clever robbers into their realm is der javin spoken of as a fanatical enemy of Jews a great anti-Semite he is accused though unjustly as we have have seen of imputing the drunkenness and poverty of the white Russian peasant exclusively to the Jews, and his positive measures were characterized as given without evidence to serve his personal ambition. Yeah, he was called, you know, even by now, amongst high society Jews had a tremendous influence.

It was growing. It wasn't huge in St. Peterborough, but it was growing. The Jews were putting out newspapers. they were well armed. These weren't innocent people and militarily speaking. They could fight back.

But this had been hidden from public view for four centuries. And neither Paul nor Alexander had any preconceived notion here. They were never prejudiced against them. Djos had no animus against Jews before them. And, you know, as I've said a hundred times,

the commission exposed something that put the state in a very difficult position. The resettlement plan which came from Zar Paul, it was only partially carried out

and he was, by the way, murdered soon after. Alexander I would reorganize the whole thing. He didn't continue Paul's policies, though.

And don't forget at this very same time when Alexander the first took over, Napoleon was talking about restoring the Sanhedron in the Middle East under his protection.

So this was kind of this proto-Zion nationalism suggested that Jews would become the declared enemy of anyone who would rival the French emperor. So the concept in Paul's mind and Alexander's mind, well, if they're satisfied with Russian rule, they would have no reason to serve Napoleon. Again, naive. But rather than expelling them, which was, it would be extremely difficult to do and

very costly, his primary concern was to. to ensure a loyal Jewish presence in Western Russia. The second committee, which under Alexander, and I'm quoting it here, the committee was to carefully consider the proposals of Der Zavid and make observations unto the improvement of the Jews, not only in Belarus, but also in other regions, purchased from Poland, as well as in the provinces of the south.

So even at this point, there was absolutely no animus against the Jews here. but there was a lot of animus against Dershavon and Paul from the Cajal. But that he was in no wise prejudice against the Jews is indicated in that his whole memorandum emerged in 1800 in response to the actual misery and hunger of the peasants. The goal was to do well by both the white Russian peasants and the Jews. He distinguished them economically. and his desire was to orient the Jews toward a real productive activity of whom, as Catherine

planned, a part first and foremost was supposed to have been relocated in territories that were not closed. As a critical difficulty, Der Javin saw the instability and transientness of the Jewish population, of which scarcely one-sixth was included in the census. Without a special extraordinary without a special extraordinary effort, it is difficult to count them accurately because being in cities, stettel, manner courts, villages, and taverns, they constantly move back and forth.

They do not identify themselves as local residents, but as guests that are here from another district or colony. Moreover, they all look alike and have the same name and have no surname. And not only that, all wear the same black garments, one cannot distinguish them and misidentifies them when they are registered or identified.

especially in connection with judicial complaints and investigations. Therein, the Kehelot takes care not to disclose the real number in order to not unduly burden their wealthy with taxes for the number registered. The very structure of this institution was adversarial to any government that they were, that they were, you know, whose territory they were in. They didn't have, you know, they didn't have surnames. You had no way to identify them. They were constantly moving.

They saw themselves as aliens. Their sole purpose is to exploit the goyam around them by one way or another. No real, no real principles other than that. There was no way to, you know, it's difficult to arrest them. It's difficult to treat them. You know, you don't know who's who. Clearly they're all, you know, they look. like i mean they're not kidding here um there was simply no way to to track them down the worst of them

down they were they didn't identify themselves as local residents because they weren't local residents they were constantly in motion uh they had no connection to any place especially in in in a christian country and except as enemies except as parasites there's no other way to state it and no one could could debate this here. Let's do one more section, and then we'll move on and pick up on the next episode. You mean a paragraph? Is it one paragraph, and you'll be, and you'll comment, and then we'll be, we can move on? All right.

Okay. D'Javan sought, however, a comprehensive solution to reduce the number of Jews in the white Russian villages without causing damage to anyone and thus to ease the feeding of the original residence, yet at the same time, for those that should remain, to provide better and less degrading possibilities for earning their sustenance. In addition, he probed how to reduce their fanaticism, and without retreating in the slightest from the rule of toleration toward different religions, to lead them by a barely noticed way to enlightenment,

and after expunging their hatred of people of other faiths, above all, to bring them to give up their besetting intention of stealing foreign goods. The goal was to find a way to separate the freedom of religious conscience from the freedom from punishment of evil deeds. Again, yes, it's naive. But there wasn't much more they can do. The money economy was in their hands. The grain trade was in their hands. Um, it wasn't as if the peasants were able to take over it and do much for themselves.

That would take a long time. Um, but again, this is the first time the Talmud was exposed and pointed to in, uh, in Russia as the cause here and all of the means of manipulation. You did have a handful of Russians who could read the language. Uh, I would think more in, in, uh, Kiev than, uh, than anywhere else. but this you know essentially he he's saying we want to keep Jews from being Jews you know this is their Khazar background this is this is simply what they do so long as they're in exile so long as they are in in Christian or any other non-Jewish land and that that concept never quite you know and if they press too hard

you're going to have constant unrest the most productive developments of that part of the country we're going to have to leave and so they're in trouble either way and that goes from from this point in history all the way up to 1917 it was a constant problem after the collapse of Poland because there really was no obvious solution given the circumstances here except and again to think that they're just going to give up this give up their tremendously profitable life appealing to their humanity or something like that It was naive, but they didn't think they had a choice here at the dawn of the 19th century. I think a lot of people will look at this, and as I said earlier, I think, well, they're, I mean, it's the, it's the peasants' fault for being exploited.

And really, if you understand the situation, if you understand the, if you have an understanding of what the average peasant, what their worldview was, what their education was. really what you're looking at is you're basically looking at like if a parent exploited a child and that's kind of a good that's kind of I think it's a good comparison because when you consider that these people really should be considering all that they've been given there should be a sense of nobles to oblige to these peasants I mean that's just what makes it all the more insidious yeah and that was never going to happen peasants were shrewd they were brilliant on the land

the way that they you know dealt with animals city people always thought they had special powers because they could you know they knew the cycles of nature so extremely well yeah they couldn't explain it in scientific terms but they actually were highly intelligent

they were very motor and you know as the years went on they became very political too at least a certain stratum. In the Polish Empire, of course, the Cossacks were the core of their rebellion. They rebelled all the time. But after Catherine destroyed the Zaporosia, smashed their fortresses,

Peter had done the same 100 years earlier, the Cossack military force was now not really the factor that it was, you know, for Kim Mniewski's time. They didn't have the armed assistance of paramilitary organization to assist them. There were plenty of uprisings, especially under Catherine. Of course, Pugachev occurred under Catherine, where also an old believer rebellion. But, and that's exactly, though, what Tsar Paul and Alexander wanted to avoid.

They didn't want to play into anyone's hands, especially the enemy. this is the era of revolutionary France here and that's all they needed was to play into into French hands so they were in a very difficult position and Dersavann exposed this and what they do to Dershavin he died a natural death

Paul didn't unfortunately but Dershavent's reputation they dragged through the mud for no other reason and they realized that he was right showing even at this point how powerful the Jews were in the Russian Empire, despite their few numbers in places like St. Petersburg. All right, we'll pick up right in the middle of the page on the next episode.

And once again, I encourage people to go to the show notes. They will be linked everywhere. And I actually have hot links on wherever the videos are so that you can support Dr. Johnson's work. I appreciate that. Once again, yeah. And once again, thank you. And until part five. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekanino show.

We are here for part five of 200 years together by Alexander Solzheny. And I listened back to one of the episodes that we did, and I actually said in the beginning that his name was Alexander Solzheniski. I actually pronounced it that way. I felt like a tarred after I did that. we've all done things like that i do weird things like that all the time yeah i i could i can assure you not it's hard i i promise okay um so how are you doing well i'm doing very well the snow keeps coming down makes me very happy um you know we are we are snowed in an apalachia and it's uh puts me in a good mood i have to tell you awesome awesome yeah yeah being uh being trap being what people call

trapped inside the house as long as you have everything you need is not as bad as a lot of people try to make it out to be. Yep. That's very true. No complaints out of me. Yep. All right. So we have, we're going to start to pick up where we left off. And this is a long paragraph. So let's just jump right in. Thereafter, he laid out by layers and explicitly the measures to be recommended. And in doing so, gave proof of his economic and statesman like competence. First, that the Jews should have no occasion for any kind of irritation to send them into fight or even to murmur quietly. They are to be reassured of protection in favor by a manifest of the Tsar, in which should be strengthened the principle of tolerance towards their faith and maintenance of the privileges granted by Catherine, only with one small change for the previous principle. But those that will not submit to these principles shall not be given.

freedom to emigrate, a demand that far exceeded in point the freedom, the 20th century Soviet Union. Immediately thereafter, it states, after a specific time interval, after which all new credit is temporarily forbidden, all claims of debt between Jews and Christians to be ordered, documented, and cleared in order to restore the earlier relation of trust so that in the future, not the slightest obstruction should be found for the transformation of the Jews to a different way of life, for the relocation into other districts or in the old places, for the assignment of a new life conditions. Free of debt, the Jews are thus to be made as soon as possible into free man for the reforms.

From the vantage point of the publication of the manifest, are all dues assessed by Jews, for the equalization of debt of poor people is to apply to poor Jews to deflect the payment of Cahal debts or for the furnishings for migrants. From the one group, no taxes to be levied for three years, from the other for six years, and instead, that money is to be dedicated

to the setting up of factories and workplaces for these Jews. Landowners must abandon obligating Jews in their Stettles to set up various factories, and instead begin on their estates to cultivate grain in order that they may earn their bread with their own hands, but under no circumstances is liquor to be sold anywhere, secretly or openly, or these landowners would themselves lose their rights to the production of liquor.

It was also a non-negotiable to carry out a universal exact census of the population under responsibility of the Cahal elders. For those that had no property to declare as merchant, or townsmen, two new classes were to be created with smaller income. Village burgers and colonists, where the denotation Christianian farmer would not be used because of its similarity to the word Christian. The Jewish settlers would have to be regarded as free as not as serfs, but under no condition or pretext may they dare to expand themselves into the domain of magistrates and town fathers,

so that they not gain any special rights over Christians. After they have declared their wish to be enrolled in a particular status, then must the necessary number of young men be sent to Petersburg, Moscow, or Riga, one group to learn the keeping of merchant books, second to learn a trade, the third to attend schools for agriculture and land management. Meanwhile, some energetic and precise Jews should be selected as deputies, for all these areas where land is designated for colonization. There follows minutia on the arrangement of plans surveying the land, housing construction,

the order to release different groups of settlers, the rights in transit, the grace period in which they would remain tax-free, all these details that D'Urjavan laid out so carefully we passed by. Thank God. On the inner, I'm sorry? I said, thank God for that. On the interordering of the Jewish congregation, in order to place the Jews under the secular authorities just the same as everyone else, the Kahilat may not continue in any form. Together with the abolishment of the Kahilat is likewise abolished all previous profiteering assessments, which the Kahilat raised from the Jewish people, and at the same time, the secular taxes are to be assessed, as with the other subjects, not doubled.

and the schools and synagogues must be protected by laws. The males may not marry younger than 17, nor the females, than 15 years. Then there is a section on education and enlightenment of the Jews. The Jewish schools to the 12th year, and thereafter the general schools are to become more like those of other religions. Those, however, that have achieved distinction in the high sciences are to be received in the academies and universities as honorary associate's doctors, professors, but they are not to be taken into the rank of officers and staff officers because although they may also be taken into the military service, they will, for example, not take up arms against the enemy on Saturday, which in fact often does happen. Presses for Jewish books are to be constructed, along with synagogues, along with synagogues are to be constructed Jewish hospitals, poorhouses, and orphanages. well there's a lot here now these are you know i can only assume that people hearing this

have heard the previous four otherwise nothing's going to make any sense at this point but what we're talking about are the results of der zavins commission under the emperor paul will be murdered pretty soon and the jews will succeed at least temporarily in getting rid of Dershavid from these committees. We're going to talk about that in more detail when we get to the section of Alexander I. But there's a lot of contradictory things here.

Now, I neglected to mention last time that Dersavins' understanding of the Jews, at least in part, came from many of the so-called liberated Jews, Jews that had no connection to the Cahal, especially in Germany, not quite assimilationist at this point, but leading the so-called Jewish Enlightenment. I don't know if everything that they told him was accurate, because in discussing the Jews with these individuals, I don't know if they're ever named. I think one of them is. but this whole notion of trying to place them directly under Tsarist law, which is, of course, an Orthodox government, especially under Paul,

was simply out of the question. There seems to be this drive to, and this is all done with the best philosemitic intentions. Now, if they didn't like this, there was a slight misreading that they were allowed to emigrate. If they didn't like this, with all their property and everything else. My favorite part of this is, again, this is, there's a translation issue. I didn't translate this when I first did it, this section, a long time ago. But the, but the, the, Schultzhenitsen says, there's a specific interval if this is to be instituted. after which all new credit

is temporarily forbidden and all claims of debt between Jews and Christians are to be ordered, documented, and then cleared. Now, between Jews and Christians, well, the debt only went one way, and I think we all know that. And the point of that is

to make it easier. This is almost a sort of a form of coercion for the quote-unquote transformation of the Jews to a different way of life. including their relocation, new life conditions. Now, the way Djersovin stated this, he's really talking about this being a benefit to Jews, but we all know the Jews were the creditors.

The only time they may not have been is within their own, because he does mention poor Jews here, who are not treated very well, but are kept to the cahal. And then, in fact, he comes out. and says the Cajal is going to be eliminated. There's this back and forth, whether it's strong, whether it's weak, it was weakening at the end of the Polish Empire.

It grew in strength again. But because there was a lot of poor Jews in the Cahal, they were no longer going to be bound to it and were free to become townsmen or merchants or anything else. That they were not serfs. They would be granted land. And really the only condition, other than the dent thing, is that they couldn't employ any Christians. So they're trying to completely remake Jewish life, which given the context, is extremely naive.

That word's going to come up a lot because it really is. They're going to be tax-free for a while. There are so-called profit-curing assessments, which is all the scams that we talked about. already and they'll be under secular taxation but on the other hand their their grant of land will be free and clear they will not be served under any circumstances their schools will be protected and everything else but this today in 2025 we realize that this is a very strange approach to the Jewish question and Russia was not the only place that tried this and this was an ongoing thing

Sir Nicholas II was trying to do stuff like this and they could serve in the army but not any high rank so there's a sense of assimilation of the Jews who might assimilate but for the elite they'll be granted almost a certain privilege status

but not such that they can lord it over anybody but of course all of this failed there was no the profiteering arrangements that he said saying you're going to be eliminated. That's what it was to be a Jew. Even the middle layer of Jews. You know, their protection, if they weren't engaging in this kind of

profiteering, they wouldn't need protection anymore. The attacks on the Jews all for the same reason, undercutting competition, destroying entire villages, using debt to dominate entire regions. You know, but of course this isn't going to work. Even if Paul had lived, there was no chance that the dudes were going to accept this. I think that maybe there was an idealized version of Jewish life in Germany, that small group that left the shuttle and became more or less Germans. They had to take last names, so they took, you know, the most aristocratic last names, you know, Goldstein and these were all German names and, you know, took the highest level

name they possibly could because they had no choice. As far as I know, that was being done here, and it was eventually done. They couldn't just use their first names anymore. And of course, when they say a detailed census, that had to have rubbed the cahal the wrong way because so much of what they were doing was hidden based on deceit and being able to identify them and where they lived would harm at least some of this smuggling it's no different than what the so-called Russian mafia which of course is a Jewish mafia

it does today so long as they're not on what we today call Israeli soil in the Middle East and see these same people who have no course no right to that land they have no obligation

the very fact that these people were moving from place to place which Dersavvin wanted to have Paul stop this whole concept meant that they had no connection. It was much easier to manipulate people or to exploit people that you don't know. No relationships can be, you know, that was very difficult to do anyway. The alcohol didn't have much of an outside connection. But if this is going to dissolve, you know, essentially what he's saying is those Jews that are increasingly dissatisfied with the Kahul system and its tremendous inequality,

we could bring into into Russian society as much as humanly possible. So what it comes down to is it's kind of a massive contradictions, a mass of naifte, I think maybe some good, some bad information, but this agenda in one form or another

is going to be tried and it will fail all the way up until the Bolshevik revolution. thus der javen concluded quite self-consciously thus this cross grain scattered people known as jews in this its sad condition will observe an example of order especially regarding enlightenment the first point will bear fruit if not today and immediately definitely in the coming times or at worst after several generations in unnoticed way, and then the Jews would become genuine subjects of the Russian throne. While Der Javin was composing his memorandum,

he also made it known what the Kehlat thought about it and made it clear that he was by no means making himself their friend. In the official answers, their rejection was formulated cautiously. It stated, the Jews are not competent for cultivating grain nor accustomed to it, and their faith is an obstacle. They see no other possibilities than their current occupations, which serve their sustenance, and they do not need such, but would like to remain in their current condition. The Kehulat saw, moreover, that the report entailed their own obsolescence, the end of their source of income, and so began quietly, but stubbornly and tenaciously, to work against Dershavin's whole proposal.

It's common for kind of normies out there, and I got this argument a hundred times, to say that the Jews were in these profiteering relationships because they weren't allowed to be anything else. The claim is that they couldn't own land, they couldn't be in the professions, which of course is question begging, number one. but here they're being offered the chance to be normal people and at least the elders of the Cahal are rejecting it. The faith is a problem. We don't know how to do any of this. We don't want to do any of this. There's nothing else but these current occupations

and they want to remain in their current condition. So when anyone brings up that they weren't allowed to be things and therefore could only be usurers, and scam artists well you simply quote this and this shows that and it wasn't just in Russia either the time and again

they were offered to be regular citizens and they largely refused now of course things changed after World War II as far as the foundation of Israel and Zionism was concerned but we'll see here coming up

some of the things that they did they eventually did get Dershavan off that committee later on because despite his phylo-Semitic approach when this whole thing first started he learned exactly what the Jew really is so this was kind of a

way using as little coercion as possible to use their own divisions to try to get them out of that way of life and to become protected actual citizens of the Russian Empire but they come out and

say, no, this is not what we want. This opposition expressed itself, according to Djerjavan, by means of a complaint filed by a Jewess from Leosno to the Tsar, in which she alleged that, in a liquor distillery, Dershavin horribly beat her with a club until she, being pregnant, gave birth to a dead infant. The Senate launched an investigation. Dershavin answered, as I would. was a quarter hour long in this factory, I not only did not strike any Jewess, but indeed did not even see one. He sought a personal reception by the Tsar. Let me be imprisoned, but I will

reveal the idiocy of the man that has made such claims. How can Your Highness believe such a foolish and untrue complaint? The Jew that had taken the lying complaint was condemned to one year in penitentiary, but after two or three months, Dershavin accomplished his being set free, this now under the reign of Alexander I. Paul, murdered in May 1801, was unable to come to any resolution in connection with Dershavin's memorandum. It led at the time to small practical results, as one could have expected, since Dershavin lost his position in the change of court. So when I say that, that, you know, normal Christian people in Russia, elsewhere, were not prepared for the Jewish mind. This is what I'm talking about.

This is stock and trade, making up, you know, ridiculous crimes, trying to pin it on people who don't like them or know too much about them. And in this case, it was very ridiculous. There was no witnesses. There's no evidence. There's no nothing. the person who created this and it's hard to tell whether it was about a Jewess but was it a male Jew who initially made the complaint

the very fact that they were heard so quickly shows you exactly the honesty with the Russians approach the Jewish question but it's stuff like this that slowly educated the Russians as to what they're up against going this far willing to do anything to smear a man to destroy a man and inventing crime they did this all they did this in

they did this in the Turkish Empire all the time where Greek Orthodox teachers that were reviving on a national basis the Greek Greek nation you know the Jews would then go to the Turks and said that they're fomenting rebellion they're violent they're leading the people astray they hate you you know that they're telling everyone not to pay taxes, whatever it took, and in that case, it was often successful

to get them killed or otherwise neutralized. And Dershavin, this was a huge education for the Russian elite, and things for better or for worse are going to change when the new czar comes in. Not until the end of 1802 was the committee for the assimilation of the Jews established to examine Der Javen's memorandum and prepare corresponding recommendations. The committee consisted of two Polish magnates close to Alexander I, Prince Adam Zartorisky, and Count Severin Potaki, as well as Count Valerian Suboff. Der Javen observed regarding all three that they, too, had great holdings in Poland,

and would notice a significant loss of income if the Jews were to be removed, and that the private interests of the above-mentioned worthies would outweigh those of the state. Also on the committee were Interior Minister Count Kachubi and the already mentioned Justice Minister, the first in Russian history, Dershavin himself. Michael Sparansky also worked with the committee. The committee was charged to invite Jewish delegates from the Kehlot of every province and these, most merchants of the First Guild, did come. Besides that, the committee members had the right to call enlightened and well-meaning Jews of their acquaintance.

The already known Nodanotkin that had moved from White Russia to Moscow and then St. Petersburg, the Petersburg tax leaser Abram Perrits, and who was also close friend of Sparonsky, Yehuda Leib Nevaevich and Mendel Satanaver, both friends of Peretz and others. Not all took part in the hearings, but they exercised a significant influence on the committee members. Worthy of mention, Abraham Parrot's son Gregory was condemned in the December's trial and exiled, probably only because he had discussed the Jewish question with Pestal, but with after suspecting anything of the December's conspiracy and because his grandson was the Russian Secretary of State a very high position. Neveshavich, a humanist but no cosmopolitan, who was

deeply tied to Russian cultural life, then a rarity among Jews, published in Russian the crying voice of the daughter of Judah, 1803, in which he urged Russian society to reflect on the restrictions of Jewish rights and admonished the Russians to regard Jews as their countrymen and thus that they should take the Jews among them into Russian society. Well, we all know what that means. These are the same people who were opposed to Dershavin's recommendations that we just discussed. But when he says something, you know, nothing changes.

This is the exact same kind of language that they use today worldwide. that Russians have to reflect on the restrictions on on Jewish rights despite the Jews saying these aren't restrictions this is this is who we are that we're Russians just like you he knows this is a lie and taking Jews in Russian society means if you make us just like you pretend that we're not Jews

which in some places you know they try to do we know we're going to win we know we're going to be dominant especially after the 18th century especially after the murder of Paul because they knew that that any restraint at least temporarily was going to be removed from their activities

and that would just be like the liberation of the Jews after the French Revolution it's an automatic because they're so cohesive versus the peasant class and even the mid-level noble class in Russia that they're always going to come out ahead They had a mentality that the Russians simply didn't have.

We'll talk about the Decemberus, I think, as time goes on at the end of, or because of Alexander's death. But the manipulation of using terms and talking about liberation, forcing Russians to reflect on things, knowing full well what the truth was, it's day to day. This wasn't debate. This was just an attempt to, first of all, sideline Drizavid and to influence this fairly young new emperor, Alexander, as much as humanly possible, at least in the beginning of his reign, they were quite successful. The committee came to an overwhelmingly supported resolution. The Jews are to be guided into the general civil life and education to steer them toward productive work. It should be made easier for them to become employed in trades and commerce.

The constriction of the right of free mobility should be lessened. They must become accustomed to wearing ordinary apparel for the custom of wearing clothes that are despised strengthens the custom to be despised. But the most acute problem was that Jews, on account of the liquor trade, dwell in the villages. Notgan strove to win the committee to the view of letting the Jews continue to live there, and only to take measures against possible abuses on their part. The charter of the committee led to tumult in the Kehila, Gessen wrote,

a special convocation of their deputies in 1803 in Minsk resolved to petition our czar may his fame become still greater that the worthies assume no innovations for us. They decided to send certain delegates to Petersburg explained that an assembly had been held for that purpose and even called for a three-day Jewish fast. Unrest gripped the whole pail of settlement, quite apart from the threatening expulsion of Jews from the villages. The Kehelot took a negative stance toward the cultural question out of concern to preserve their own way of life. As answered to the many points of

the recommendation, the Kehelot explained that the reform must in any case be postponed 15 to 20 years. And the reason for that is pretty clear. Something like this is going to, at least on the surface, divide Jewish society. And don't forget, the Hasidic movement was continuing to grow at this point, who rejected most of this anyway. Saying unrest gripped the whole pail of settlement. Well, on the one hand, they're getting the benefits of expanding their cost. commerce outside of the countryside.

On the other hand, there's going to be Jews who are going to lose a lot of money because the liquor trade and their, you know, very secretive way of going about things might be threatened here. Of course, you know, wearing normal clothes, on the one hand, that could be considered a kind of assimilation. On the other hand, that could be a very effective way of disguising themselves. Going back, you know, centuries, you had when Jews did wear in the cities, kind of ordinary clothing. There had to be some mark on them to identify them, at least to each other, if not

ordinary people, because you're not dealing with the same kind of mentality. E. Michael Jones, Michael Hoffman, so many other people on the Jewish question have brought this out in great detail. And Barron Metal, E. Michael Jones' book, which I recommend, you know, 1,500 pages, deals with the Jewish question precisely on these issues for many chapters and that the mentality didn't fit and this is where Zionism ultimately came from the mentality the Jews didn't fit a settled agricultural people

they were the opposite of a settled agricultural people so the point of postponing this was first of all we have to see what Alexander is going to become and we need to settle any kind of actual for apparent divisions amongst our own people. Der Javen wrote, there were from their side various rebuttals aimed to leave everything as it was.

In addition, Gurdko, a white Russian landowner sent Der Javen a letter he had received. A Jew in white Russia had written him regarding one of his plenipotentiaries in Petersburg. It said that they had, in the name of all Kahelot-Berab,

the world, put the sherem or harem the ban under Javan as a prosecutor and had gathered a million to be used as gifts for this situation as has forwarded it to St. Petersburg and had forwarded it to St. Petersburg. They appealed for all efforts to be applied to the removal of Der Javan as attorney general and if that were not possible to seek his life. However, the thing they wanted to achieve was not to be forbidden to sell liquor in the the village taverns. And in order to make it easier to advance this business, they would put together opinions from foreign regions, from different places and peoples, and how the situations of the Jews could be improved. And in fact, such opinion, sometimes in French, sometimes in German,

began to be sent to the committee. Dejaven was labeled as a persecutor. This kind of, you know, given the fact that they lived among the goingy, it was delicate. but as a persecutor his life was now forfeit gathered a million meaning a million gold rubles for bribery that's what gifts mean in this case getting people

and this is a very common tactic getting Jews from all over the world to write the the monarch God knows you know I haven't seen a lot of these or if they've even been preserved but what they said concerning any of the all the false claims against or Javvin

The one that we mentioned, there were many others. Many of them never quite, you know, got to Petersburg, but anything. He simply knew too much. He saw how the Jewish mind worked directly. He went from at least a neutral to someone who was a tremendous critic of the Gahal. Now he wants to dissolve the Gahal. And I think there was a lot of money that went into the convocation of this second committee, with all the names we just listed, people who were already economically,

related to the Jews, many of these being Polish, including Jews themselves. You know, you don't have a lot of strict Orthodox people on that committee. These people all had an interest in this and whether or not there was a direct relation with Jewish bribery, but they had to cash and Dersavvin had to go. Thank God he died a natural death, but once they labeled him like that, they also inherently labeled anyone who was following him, anyone who was following him, anyone who, who thought that what he was doing was a good idea. So he couldn't be accepted. He had to be opposed, although the opposition may have come from different sources and for different reasons and different interests.

He was now labeled as a persecutor, as Amalek, and I know there were assassination attempts on him, but they all failed, and eventually he's going to retire and die in natural death. besides this noda notgan became the central figure that organized the little jewish congregation of petersburg in eighteen o three he submitted a brief to the committee in which he sought to paralyze the effort the effect of the proposal submitted by der javen der javen writes notgan came to him one day and asked with feigned well wishing that he der javen should not take a stand all alone against the colleagues on the committee, who are all on the side of the Jews, whether he would not accept 100 or, if that is

too little, 200,000 rubles, only so that he could be of one mind with all his colleagues on the committee. Der Javen decided to disclose this attempt at bribery to the czar, bribery to the czar, and prove it to him with Gurkow's letter. He thought such proofs prove effective, and the czar would start to be wary of the people that surrounded him and protected the Jews. Sparonsky also informed the czar of it, but Spironsky was fully committed to the Jews, and from the first meeting of the Jewish committee, it became apparent that all members represented the view that the liquor distilling should continue in the hands of the Jews as before.

D'Urjavan opposed it. Alexander bore himself ever more coldly toward him, and, dismissed his Justice Minister shortly thereafter, 1803. That means at this point, Dersavent is all by himself, and he's aware of it. He's aware of what may be in store for him. The false accusations didn't work while Paul was still alive. That didn't end. But when that failed, they figured, well, he's not going to say no to 200,000

rubles to agree with everybody else. but he went to the young czar and told him about it, and it meant absolutely nothing. Sparonski was one of Alexander's early teachers. And he was, at least for the day, fairly liberal. He was as much a part of this Jewish network as the other members that we've mentioned, D'Javan, knowing what they really are. I mean, that's not to say the other members didn't know what the Jew really is,

just that they profited from him. And so now Dershavan has to deal with the fact that he has the entire globe's Jewish wealth, which was tremendous, most of it, most of which were, you know, centered in just a few cities with the population, mostly being now in Russia. But it says Speransky was fully committed to the Jews. And so even bribe, even the attempt to bribe Dersavid, and I think it was just dismissed, you know, there were no witnesses or anything. but and it all came down at least at this point to liquor distilling manipulation of the peasantry using alcohol so God knows if they were willing to pay 200,000 to Dersovan these other men despite the fact that they're already making money off the Jews how much additional were granted to them to focus on the issue of liquor distilling and now the young Alexander is very different from the older Alexander

in fact I am of the opinion that he voluntarily left the throne and became a monk that's very controversial I did a whole show on that one time but he matured quite a bit and at least

but early on he was a you know I think Napoleon of course 1812 the invasion changed him completely and Napoleon had already you know at that point promised the Jews their own essentially

a resurrection of the Khazar Empire you know and so many of the Jews fought for him and this is part of the reason why the military issue was so was so sensitive in Russia so Speransky is the bad guy here and it really is a minor miracle that Dershavin

wasn't murdered but he was dismissed from his post besides this Dershavin's papers indicate that he whether in military or civil service, always came into disfavor and was hot-headed and everywhere soon took his leave. One has to admit that Dershavin foresaw much that developed in the problematic Russo-Judaic relationship throughout the entire 19th century, even if not in the exact and unexpected form that it took in the event. He expressed himself coarsely, as was customary

then, but he did not intend to oppress the Jews. On the contrary, he wanted to open the Jews path to a more free and productive life. Well, I want to say something about Zarpal before we move on to the next section. Now we're getting into far more substantial and detailed parts of the book. As I mentioned earlier, Zarpal was canonized. He, like most Russians, except for the membership of this committee, hated his mother, Catherine, Catherine II. and he tried to reverse this masonic, this cosmopolitan spirit that had infected the upper levels of the nobility, especially those found in the Senate. Orthodox nationalists, he released from prison because Catherine the Great had thrown many of them in the dungeon.

They didn't have a formal prison system, but they did have private dungeons. He spent a lot of his own money opening peasant schools and villages, educating them. Not just, of course, about the Jewish question, but everything else. He banned Freemasonry, which was one of the reasons that now, it's not just there was an economic connection with the Jews. Now there's a semi-quazzi theological connection with the Jews through freemasonry. He also said, given the damage that women have done, the two annas,

both Catharines, he forbade women from ever becoming empress again, and that lasted as long as the empire lasted. Paul wanted to create a class of peasant yeoman Not necessarily apart from the commune But remember this was still a time of serfdom Which only affected I have a whole I've written on this substantially A portion of your typical Russian farmer

Typical Russian peasant was under serfdom On the 18th century that the peasants were squeezed a little bit harder earlier versions of serfdom were not I don't even like calling it that but he made it easier for peasants to complain against their lords he knew what this elite was becoming

just to ask you later on would make fun of them because they were trying to speak foreign languages especially French and it never quite sounded right offering serfs generous you know loan possibilities to buy

noble land Paul was aware of the massive grain prophets that were coming to Jews and their friend throughout the Baltic ports. He attempted to use his power to artificially lower or lower the price of bread, which means by the time he was murdered, there was not one single faction of the elite that he didn't irritate. Paul's program, and I've written on this too, and why the very members of the committee the first committee and their allies

hated him so much he wanted to force Russia's elite back into their older service capacity which was abolished by his mother Catherine

you received you were a noble but that title to land and peasant labor implied that you had service obligations so everyone

in Russia had a someone to serve a job to do when that was abolished by Catherine trying to get you know their support that meant that nobles really didn't have a purpose they became parasitic and hence saw a fellow traveler amongst amongst the Jews

Paul said that nobles exist you know it wasn't a tightly class-based society like in the West Peter the Great tried to change that a little bit but but nobles either as a class or just as a de facto entity, they existed only to serve the state, the nation, the church. Otherwise, they have no reason to exist.

They have no reason to have serfs because all their titles, all their privileges were connected to serving the state, either usually in a military capacity, but sometimes in a diplomatic capacity. And so their answer was to finally murder Paul. And they brought Catherine's grandson, Alexander de power who they thought and people like Sparansky

certainly thought would be more responsive to enlightenment and that centered at least in part around um around the Jewish question um the way D'Jurzavin thought about all of this

um for the day it was it was well thought out we only have a thumbnail sketch here he knew too much about how the Jews operated he he condemned how the old, you know, rabbinical system in the Cajal functioned.

The Cajal maintained and empowered rich Jews at the expense of everybody else, Jew and Gentile alike. It was when he declared war on the Jewish monopoly over vodka sales. That's when the Cajal turned on him. The gloves were off. Russians were all the way up to the revolution. We're not used to propaganda. They weren't very good at it.

he became the subject of endless moral terror, slander, blackmail, violence, and threats. And he mentions the Talmud in his opinion. As I mentioned, many interviews with Jews of all types, both foreign and domestic, that Talmud is what made your typical Jew hate everyone else. The basic view was that when their so-called Messiah comes, all the wealth of the world that wasn't already in their hands would then accrue to them

and that's why under the Polish system messianic ideas flourished all over the place given their fantastic wealth what else could this mean we have such control here but of course Kim Monyinsky showed that to be a bit premature but this

Jewish yoke you know both the nobles who profited from it as well as Jews themselves they were aware this was a parasitic burden that the Egoium had to bear. Interest compounded over, God knows how long, ensured that no one, Polish and Russian nobles included, could ever get out of debt.

That doesn't mean the nobles can't still profit. Nobles, especially in Poland, or of Polish background, were often ignorant of their financial condition. They saw the Jews as their best friends. So this clear community of interest kept the noble Jewish alliance in Poland and the Russian Empire alive, and as far as the Polish Empire goes

the price was destruction of the falling apart of the empire by the 1790s but the Russians never quite got their hands on the question after Napoleon after Dershavan's stuff became his writings became well known and of course he became a very famous poet

apart from this question the Russians slowly but surely were educated. Certainly Nicholas I, who will be his successor, knew the issue. Alexander II, not so much. Alexander III, is our Nicholas II. We're aware of it, but they didn't have the enforcement mechanisms at hand.

So from Paul to Nicholas, the point was to elevate the status of the Russian peasant, the Russian merchant make them, you know, make them, you know, they own property. They always own property. But via the commune, of course, in Zornikilus's time, they were able to own it in their own right. By the time of the revolution,

of the time of World War I, something like 90% of Russian land was owned by peasant owners. And so, and also the idea that low interest or zero interest loans would be available for peasants to buy their own, to escape somehow the Jewish debt burden. And Drozovinclair was aware of that even mentions it in his memorandum where he says, you know, we'll protect the Jews, but you have to clear these debts.

And he put it in such a way where it acted like it went both ways. But no, the debts only were Jews, you know, being creditors of non-Jews, of Russians and Poles, with or without their knowledge. So, and they never were. were able to succeed. Certainly, they weren't able to succeed, settling them on the land. And the kind of stuff that was said about Dersavun by the Jews, they just applied that same contempt, the big lie, which was their, you know, stock and trade, as I mentioned, against anyone who didn't like them. And that really continues today. Some Zars at this point knew more than

others about the Jewish question. Some realized that the financial interest was too great for them to do that much about Alexander the 3rd probably and Nicholas' son more than anyone else knew what was happening but it was very difficult to do a lot about it because unrest in the wealthier commercially oriented Western parts,

exactly the parts we're talking about now they made too much money they couldn't afford a lot of unrest here so to some extent they had to leave it as it was but rather than talking about the Jews as such the solution was to elevate the common Russian peasant, which by World War I, more or less succeeded. Russian peasant was better off than any other part of Europe at the time.

So, and this is, you know, Paul was legitimately canonized. He was extremely pious. And just that alone, the Jews were aware of what kind of man he was. And eventually Alexander I was going to learn that. But it's, you know, it's going to. going to take a while. And now that we're at a whole new section of Alexander I think this is a perfect place to stop. Sure. Let me, let me throw a question out there before we get out of here. How much of the wealth that they were accumulating in liquor and in their devices that

they were in charge of? How much of that was getting sent out internationally? Oh, that's a very a difficult question. I don't know how this system worked. It was a network. I think the concentration of wealth was in Constantinople or Istanbul.

It depended on what trade, Antwerp, London, and now Western Russia, the money that was sent out, it really depended on circumstances. I don't know in any detail how that circulated. If it's

circulated. Well, were they paying a, were they, were they paying a Vig back to the, back to Istanbul? Um, well, the, the chief, she, it, because, because of, you know, them being driven out of so many places, the chief rabbis tended to shift. Um, Istanbul, because of, you know, they were the, the, they dominated the Turkish empire, uh, in, in all of these professions. They were, you know, far more so than in Russia.

Russians ran the Russian Empire. But as far as the financial position of Turkey, of the Ottoman Empire, that was in Jewish hands. So that's why I want to say that that's really where the center was, especially right now at the point we're talking about, the transition to the 19th century. but Vig usually means you know weekly interest how that circulated how that moved from place to place I simply don't know

but the the point to remember is that any time a Jew needed to dip into that for the sake of their communities undercutting their Gentile competitors they had access to it and that meant that they could offer interest rates at least initially

lower than anybody else and it put these governments in a terrible position. The Ottomans were, you know, dominated more than anyone else were in a point where pretty soon, after Napoleon, England will be, Antwerp will soon be. Russia

was always the problem because they were never able to control the Russian currency. This is why these people were moving to Petersburg. But that's my opinion. It changed all the time. it depended on grain prices that went out of the Baltic

but you know and you don't know at any given time which Jewish community had the most available liquidity it's not like this was a there was a papacy it's not like there was even a chief synod somewhere it didn't function like that they were quite autonomous but fanatically devoted as you see here

with trying to condemn Dersav and getting all these people including from Turkey writing the czar saying how awful he is they had access to liquidity if they needed it. Whether that automatically put an obligation onto the Cajal elsewhere, I don't know. I think so, but I don't know that in detail. I don't want to say anything and be wrong about it. Okay, no problem at all.

All right, so we'll pick up chapter two in the next episode. As always, I will include your links in the show notes so that people can support your work. And we appreciate people doing that. Please, people, go do that. Go to anywhere this is posted, you will see the link. You will see links in the description. And, yeah, we'll be back for episode number six and start chapter two. Thank you, Dr. Johnson.

Appreciate you. See you soon. I want to welcome everyone back to part six of our reading of 200 years together by Alexander Solzhenyessen. Dr. Johnson, how are you today? I'm in a pretty good mood, but, you know, I'm, I'm almost certain I did damage my rotator cuff in the move. I just noticed, like, a few days ago, that my soreness wasn't healing in my shoulder. And the weirdest things are very painful.

The weirdest moves, I'm pretty sure that's a rotator cuff thing. So given my mentality, it'll probably be another three years before I decided to go to a orthopedist for treatment. but I've never had a problem like that before, and it's very, very odd, very strange. Yeah, that I've had rotator cuff issues as well. I can't even really throw a snowball without my arm feeling like there's glass grinding around in there. Well, thank God is my left arm. My right arm seems fine.

Cool. All right. We are up to chapter two. So as per normal, I'm going to start reading and stop me whenever. Chapter 2, during the reign of Alexander I. At the end of 1804, the committee in charge of the organization of the Jews concluded its work by drafting a regulation on the Jews, known as the Regulation of 1804, the first collection of laws in Russia concerning Jews. The committee explained that its aim was to improve the condition of the Jews to direct them toward a useful activity by opening this path, exclusively for their own good, and by discarding anything that might divert them from it,

without calling for coercive measures. The regulation established a principle of equal civil rights for Jews, Article 42, quoting, all Jews who live in Russia, who have recently settled there, or who have come from foreign countries for their commercial affairs, are free and are under the strict protection of the laws in the same way other Russian subjects are. In the eyes of Professor Gradovsky, we cannot but see in this article the desire to assimilate this people to the whole population of Russia. You see, there was a reason that there were restrictions on Jewish business practices in Eastern Europe as well as Western Europe. Remember, things like advertising or underselling somebody, luring customers away.

from another outlet. I mean, these were unknown in both parts of Europe. But the Jews introduced this and it was something very new. And so when you remove restrictions, you allow that mentality. And there's this blatant dishonesty.

A lot of theft, a lot of smuggling. I mean, the Rothschilds were involved early on in smuggling. they had very low overhead because they had the push carts more than they were more than a stable place and this is why the guilds were so upset and they would sell like in a general store kind of a way the old system was it was a specialization you would you would sell one area of things and and through dishonesty through simple simple lying you know they had more access to liquidity they could they could undersell anybody this is why the restrictions came into existence. When you remove, when you claim that we're all equal citizens, you allow that to develop. There aren't specific, there aren't race specific restrictions on activity. So all that does is empower this mentality.

All of the complaints from Spain to France to Germany to Poland to Russia, they're identical. every way, that this is how they're behaving, they're engaging in, underselling money as well as goods, and they're able to take over very quickly because they're not bound by the same moral code that we are, that Christian people are. This naivete that we've been talking about almost since the beginning, it doesn't seem to go away. You still have it now. All these attempts to make them normal people, ordinary citizens, fail miserably, and no one ever seems to learn their lesson. The regulation gave the Jews greater opportunities than Der Javen's original proposals.

Thus, in order to create textile or leather factories, or to move to agricultural economy on virgin lands, it proposed that a government subsidy be directly paid. Jews were given the right to acquire land without serfs, but with the possibility of hiring Christian workers. Jews who owned factories, merchants, and craftsmen had the right to leave the palest settlement for a time for business purposes, thus easing the borders of this newly established area. All that was promised for the current of the coming year was the abrogation of double royalties, but it soon disappeared. All the rights of the Jews were reaffirmed, the inviolability of their property, individual liberty, the profession of their

religion, their community organization. In other words, the Kahalem system was left without significant changes, which in fact undermined the idea of a fusion of the Jewish world within the Russian state. The Kahalem retained their old right to collect royalties, which conferred on them a great authority, but without the ability of increasing them. Religious punishments and anathemas were forbidden, which assured a liberty to the Hasidum. In accordance with the wishes of the Qahalam, the project of establishing Jewish schools of general education was abandoned, but all Jewish children are allowed to study with other children without discrimination in all schools, colleges, and all Russian universities. And in these establishments, no child

shall be under any pretext deviated from his religion or forced to study what might be contrary or opposed to him. Jews who, through their abilities, will attain a meritorious level in universities in medicine, surgery, physics, mathematics, and other disciplines will be recognized as such and promoted to university degrees. It was considered essential that the Jews learned the language of their region, change her external appearance, and adopt family names. In conclusion, the committee pointed out that in other countries, nowhere were used means so liberal, so measured, and so appropriate to the need of the Jews. Jay Heson agrees that the regulation of 1804 imposed fewer restrictions on Jews than the Prussian regulations

of 1797, especially since the Jews possessed and retained their individual liberty, which a mass of several million Russian peasants subjected to serfdom did not enjoy. The regulation of 1804 belongs to the number of acts imbued with the spirit of tolerance. I don't want to give the impression that it was just the Russian Empire that you had this naifte. Napoleon did the exact, we'll be talking about him here in a little bit. Napoleon did the exact same thing. Most European nations, kingdom, cities tried to do the same thing, had the same mentality. not fully aware of how deeply the Talmud penetrated into the Jewish mind.

The fact is, the Jewish economic thought was completely opposed to economic thought at the time, whether it be in France, Germany, or Russia, especially when you're talking about the landed powers. It was labor-based It was based on productivity It was based on the common good A strict moral code For the Jews, it was the exact opposite It was based on

Exploitation, usury, manipulation And of course it's the latter mentality That has taken over That's called capitalism today I always recommend E Michael Jones As Baron Metal Even though it's 1,500 pages long it'll change how you view

economics and it's even I was surprised about how much had changed in a very short period of time in terms of things like competition you know I mentioned advertising and all this that these things were simply

out of the question but having a fixed residence was certainly resisted having a taking a last name was resisted because so many criminal activities were taken as normal that the way that the call worked is that they can get away with a lot

and they could always be smuggled out if worse came to worse. They all kind of look the same to the average person, so they were able to get away with a lot. But none of this seemed, and there's really no excuse in my mind, because of how they behaved in Poland, there was no excuse for that they had to have known, at least to some extent, but somehow they believe that they were different.

Their system was different. We're going to civilize them. And of course, you know, from then to today, it never worked. It hasn't changed. And even with something like Zionism, the black hundreds believed in, you know, getting rid of them, sending them to, you know, the Middle East or somewhere. But even that, Zionism can't function without their full control over the foreign policy apparatus of, the major or the major powers so even that doesn't really

solve the problem so the theme so far here has just been that Gentiles sometimes can't enter into the Jewish headspace and it is difficult to think in those terms but it is essentially

your libertarian capitalist free market mentality was being created at the time and that imposed later on we call that economics and capitalist economics today The messenger of Europe, one of the most read journals of the Times, wrote, Alexander knows that the vices we attribute to the Jewish nation are the inevitable consequences of oppression that has burdened it for many centuries.

The goal of the new law is to give the state useful citizens and to Jews a homeland. However, the regulation did not resolve the most acute problem in accordance with the wishes of all Jews, namely the Jewish population, the Caholam deputies, and the Jewish collaborators of the committee. The regulations stipulated that no one among the Jews in any village or town can own any form of stewardship of inns or cabarets under their name or nor the name of a third party, nor are they allowed to sell alcohol or live in such places, and propose that the entire Jewish population leave the countryside within three years by the beginning of 1808.

We recall that such a measure had already been advocated under Paul in 1797, even before the Derjavan project appeared. Not that all Jews, without exception, were to be distanced from the villages, but in order that by its mass, the Jewish population in the villages would not exceed the economic possibilities of the peasants as a productive class. It is proposed to reduce the number of them in the agglomerations of the districts. This time it was proposed to direct the majority of the Jews to agricultural labor in the Virgin lands of the Pale of Settlement, New Russia, but also the provinces of

Ostrachan and the Caucasus, exonerating them for 10 years of the royalties they up to then had to pay with the right to receive a loan from the Treasury for their enterprises, to be reimbursed progressively after 10 years of franchise. To the most fortunate, it was proposed to acquire land in personal and hereditary ownership with the possibility of having them exploited by agricultural workers. In its refusal to allow desolation, the committee explained, as long as this profession remains accessible to them, which in the end exposes them to recriminations, contempt, and even hatred of inhabitants, the general outcry toward them will not cease. Moreover, can we consider the measure of removing the Jews from the village as repressive when they are offered so many

other means not only to live in ease, but also to enrich themselves in agriculture, industry crafts, and that they are also given the possibility of possessing land in full ownership. How could this people be regarded as oppressed by the abolition of a single branch of activity in a state in which they are offered a thousand other activities in fertile, uninhabited areas suitable for the cultivation of cereals and other agricultural products. You know, we said, I think, the last time on Saturday, we mentioned that, you know, if the committee and how philosemitic this committee is, we went through that in some detail. But if they're using the word oppressed, that means at the time Jews had to have been

using that word, writing to the committee saying how terrible it is that we're not allowed to have the monopoly on an alcohol anymore. Furthermore, it seems that the committee, again, profiting from a lot of these people, given who it was, we talked about that, I guess that was, I think that was last time. They seem to reduce the contempt for Jews just for alcohol, missing all the other things that Drozhaven himself spoke about. Yes, the alcohol was a key element in it, but it certainly wasn't, it wasn't the only thing. But that was sufficient for the Jews to create this legend that they were terribly oppressed. And I just don't know what was possessing these people and thinking that they would ever become peasants.

I don't know what the mentality was. unless it was a, it was a scam, but I've never come across any evidence concerning that. And you're out of Russian peasant, who was a landowner relative to the MIR, you know, serfdom was not quite what people think it is. I mean, they had full title to it, not in the 18th century, but it was getting much better. the privileges that were being given to Jews were not being given to the average Russian peasant and I'm not sure where they got the idea

that Jews were willing to take out a loan it's like were they impoverished they needed a loan for this I'm just not there maybe there's a certain insulation from reality here but of course to remove that was the entire point

of Djaven's committee in the first place. But by this point, you know, he wasn't involved. And a group of phylo-Semitic mostly polls were, and Jews themselves, were involved in this committee. So it was this feedback loop all the time that really served their interests. But claiming, you know, to claim that they're oppressed has been such a longstanding weapon here. It was serving almost to take advantage of the moral code of your average. a gentile man and of course none of it worked these are compelling arguments however hesson finds that the text of the committee testifies to a naive look on the nature of the economic life of a people consisting in

believing that economic phenomena can be changed in a purely mechanical way by decree from the jewish side the projected relocation of the jews from villages and the ban imposed on them on making alcohol, the secular occupation of the Jews, was perceived as a terribly cruel decision, and it was in these terms that it was condemned by Jewish historiography 50 and even 100 years later. Given the liberal opinions of Alexander I, his benevolence toward the Jews, his perturbed character, his weak will, without a doubt forever broken by his ascension to the throne at the cost of his father's violent death, it is unlikely that the announced deportation of the Jews, Jews would have been energetically conducted, even if the rain had followed a peaceful

course. It would have undoubtedly been spread out over time. But soon after the adoption of the 1804 regulations, the threat of war in Europe was outlined, followed by the application of measures favoring the Jews by Napoleon, who united a Sanhedron of Jewish deputies in Paris. The whole Jewish problem then took an unexpected. turn, Bonaparte organized in Paris a meeting of the Jews whose main aim was to offer the Jewish nation various advantages and to create a link between the Jews scattered throughout Europe. Thus, in 1806, Alexander I ordered a new committee to be convened to examine whether special steps should be taken and postpone the relocation of the Jews.

Napoleon added a brand new variable to all of this. but as I've said already, Napoleon was just as naive about this as the, as your typical Gentile at the time was, or at least in ruling circles. The synhedron was simply a mass mobilization to use the money and the power of the Jews for his own benefit. But Napoleon did also believe in the idea that maybe at some point this will be a mechanism by which we could. have, you know, Jewish landowners and Jewish farmers and have them be normal Europeans, but they're not normal Europeans. They're aliens, and Zionism is based entirely on that concept. We don't belong here. We don't think like these people.

That was the initial concept of Zionism. So that means, as far as Alexander's concerned, and he's absolutely right, Alexander was a very weak man. It's very hard. I have a few papers out on him. It's very hard to get a grasp on what he was doing. And it's true. His father was murdered.

He is the oldest son. And he was under the influence of a lot of rotten people, one of the worst of which was Alexander Gulitzen, who I've lectured on not too long ago on my own show. and the so-called Bible Society and everything else. I want to point out that another thing that was going in favor of the Jews at the time was freemasonry, which Alexander, of course, he was never a member in the lodge, but tolerated. And people like Sparansky, people like Wollitsyn were members and promoted it all over the place.

They used all kinds of flowery rhetoric, but this was an anti-Christian organization that had taken up its, It's being right in the cabinet, so to speak, of Tsar Alexander, given the fact that he was so easy to manipulate. Now, that changed a little bit later. I mean, there were heroes, people like the Archimandryphotios, who argued against all of this. But having a guy like that, the very opposite of Tsar Paul, just made life easier for the Jews,

certainly easier for the free mates, Freemasonry is just, you know, Judaism or the Kabbalah for Gentiles. You know, I think, you know, we've spoken about that. I've been writing on that since I was in college. But so Napoleon, really the French Revolution in general, but Napoleon added a brand new variable. Now we can't do anything. Our loyalties will do that revolutionary movement, which of course was already

happening. but and Napoleon if you know because they went you know Alexander went back and forth with Napoleon Napoleon was able to manipulate him like everyone else until of course the um the invasion in 1812 but um Alexander was terrified of what what Bonaparte could do what Napoleon can do and there had been battles in his early years that the Russians lost especially up in the mountains despite very good leadership so this was a brand new variant that, of course, worked in the Jews' favor. Napoleon had increased the, in France itself,

you know, the emancipation of the Jews from any possible restrictions on their behavior. He had a very idealistic and very naive view of what the Jews were and, or at a very minimum, wanted to harness all of that for his own purposes. And, of course, that put Alexander in the Russian ruling class in general in a very difficult position. as announced in 1804 the Jews were supposed to abandon the villages by 1808 but practical difficulties arose and as early as 1807 Alexander I received several reports highlighting the necessity of postponing the relocation an imperial decree was then made public requiring all Jewish societies to elect deputies and to propose through them the means which they consider most suitable for successfully putting into practice the measures contained in the regulation of December 9th, 1804. The election of these Jewish deputies took place in the western provinces, and their views were transmitted to St. Petersburg. Of course, these deputies expressed the opinion that the departure of the Jews residing in the villages

had to be postponed to a much later time. One of the reasons given was that in the villages, the unkeepers had free housing, whereas in towns and cities they would have to pay for them. The Minister of Internal Affairs wrote in his report that the relocation of Jews currently residing in villages to land belonging to the state will take several decades, given their overwhelming number. Toward the end of 1808, the Emperor gave orders to suspend the article prohibiting the Jews from renting and producing alcohol and to leave the Jews where they lived until a subsequent ruling. Immediately afterwards, 1809, a new committee said, said of the Senator Popoff was instituted for the study of all problems and the examination of the petitions formulated by the Jewish deputies. This committee considered it indispensable to put an energetic end to the relocation of the Jews and to retain the right to the production

and trade of vodka. The committee worked for three years and presented its right report to the emperor in 1812. Alexander I did not endorse this report. He did not wish to undermine the importance of the previous decision, and had in no way lost his desire to act in favor of the peasants. He was ready to soften the measure of expulsion, but not to renounce it. Thereupon, the Great War broke out with Napoleon, followed by the European War, and Alexander's concerns changed purpose. Since then, displacement out of the villages never was initiated as a comprehensive measure in the entire pill of settlement, but at most in the form of specific decisions in certain places.

You know, contrary to popular belief, in contrast to, say, you know, France and Britain, the Russian Empire didn't have a huge bureaucracy in St. Petersburg or anywhere else. And even if they did, the long distances that they had to travel to enforce anything worked against them, and especially the weather, this was always a problem. So I'm not 100% sure when a regulation like this was put out. I'm not sure how they were planning on enforcing it. It's not like they were thinking about using the Army for this. You didn't have a formalized system of policing.

You certainly didn't have a prison system. So much of the best of the Middle Ages was still retained in Orthodox Russia. And that's why this election of deputies was a way to create a communication with Peter's so that they could carry this out themselves. The war, of course, stopped all of that. And the Jewish question had never quite left the Russian mind, but obviously there were more important things happening. There was a Jewish element to the invasion,

which has already been hinted at here. But I'm not sure how they were going to make this happen. And this third committee, which is not particularly significant, most of the work had already been done and the information had already been gathered so I'm not really sure it doesn't matter very much the first two were really the only ones that make a difference

but how this was going to be carried out is something that's never been was never, not even discussed at the time in terms of coercion during the war according to a certain source the Jews were the only inhabitants not to flee before the French army, neither in the forest nor inland. In the neighborhoods of Vilnius,

they refused to obey Napoleon's order to join his army, but supplied him forage and provisions without a murmur, nevertheless in certain places it was necessary to resort to requisitions. Another source reports that the Jewish population suffered greatly from the abuses committed by Napoleon's soldiers, and that many synagogues were set on fire, but goes even further by stating that Russian troops were greatly helped by what was called the Jewish post set up by Jewish merchants, which transmitted the information with a celerity unknown at the time in serving as relay. They even used Jews as couriers for the connections between the various attachments of the Russian army. When the Russian army resumed possession of the land,

the Jews welcomed the Russian troops with admiration bringing bread and alcohol to the soldiers. The future Nicholas I first, Grand Duke at that time, noted in his diary, it is astonishing that they, Jews, remained surprisingly faithful to us in 1812 and even helped us where they could at the risk of their lives. At the most critical point of the retreat of the French at the passage of Berezina, the local Jews communicated to the Russian command, the presumed crossing point. The episode is well known. But it was, in fact, the successful ruse of General Laranque, he was persuaded that the Jews would communicate this information to the Russians and the French, of course, chose another crossing point. There's a lot of controversy as to, first of all, whether or not this is true that they generally back the Russian government. And why? Those two questions, I don't think there's a solid answer yet.

I think that the basic idea is that Napoleon was far more of a dictator with strong will than Alexander was. That, again, the French methods of coercion were far greater than anything that the Russians were able to do domestically. And he's too far away to really be anything but a symbol. It doesn't take a genius to realize that it doesn't matter. Even if you def holding Russia is almost. impossible. The sheer manpower and supply you need is so overwhelming that it's just an invasion of Russia seems absolutely absurd. It's conceivable that the Kahul didn't think that he was really going to win here. And that because possibly also because of the

behavior of the French they're invading force, that they just, you know, turned many Jews. against them. So, you know, because of these committees, I guess the Jews said, well, let's stay with the devil that we know, rather than devil that we only know from it, from a, we don't know, or know just from a very long distance. So this is, this is going to be an area of controversy for a while, I think. After 1814, the reunification of Central Poland brought together more than 400,000 Jews. The Jewish problem was then presented to the Russian government with more acuteness and complexity. In 1816, the government council of the Kingdom of Poland, which in many areas enjoyed a separate

state existence, ordered the Jews to be expelled from their villages. They could also remain there, but only to work the land, and this was without the help of Christian workers. But at the request of the Kahal of Warsaw, as soon as it was transmitted to the emperor, Alexander gave orders to leave the Jews in place by allowing them to engage in the trade of vodka on the sole condition that they should not sell it on credit. It is true that in the regulations published by the Senate in 1818, the following provisions are again found to put an end to the coercive measures of proprietors, which are ruinous to the peasants, for non-repayment of their debts to the Jews, which forces them to sell their last

possessions. Regarding the Jews who run inns, it is necessary to forbid them to lend money at interest to serve vodka on credit, to then deprive the peasants of their livestock or any other things that are indispensable to them. Characteristic trait of the entirety of Alexander's reign, no spirit of continuation in the measures taken, the regulations were promulgated, but there was no effective control to monitor their implementation. Same goes with the statute of 1817 with regard to the tax on alcohol. In the provinces of Great Russia, desolation was prohibited to the Jews. However, as early as 1819, the prohibition was lifted until Russian artisans had sufficiently perfected themselves in this trade.

That last line has always intrigued me, this notion that they have to catch up, that they have to go down that same slippery slope that we today kind of take for granted. But he, Schultznyton, again, is right here, that there's no spirit of continuation. You can't get a hold of Alexander's political ideas. It really depended on who he was listening to. Of course, liberalism had a completely different presence now, given, you know, its ultimate sion, Napoleon, invading Russia. there was revolutionary and Masonic movement within the Russian nobility, thanks to the, you know, thanks to the Freemations, thanks to the presence of the Jews in Russia. And that movement, they tried to take over during the Decembrist rebellion, which I don't think we'll talk about today after his death.

But he was turning on liberal. He was turning on his previous teachers. But even in doing that, he never landed someplace where you could, you can, you know, there's there are principles here that he's going to adhere to. I mean, he wanted a constitution. He wanted a bill of rights. He went back and forth on the Jewish question. I think the invasion hardened him a little bit. But, you know, here what we're talking about here is the war is over. Russia is the predominant power in Europe. he's created the Holy Alliance which was an ecumenical body and even his religious ideas were mostly they had he was not a Mason but they had this Masonic and ecumenical tone to them that's what the so-called Bible Society was all about this wasn't almost explicitly

Masonic undertaking he was a member of it for a while so you can't you can't get a hold of him he was and this was unlike his successors there you know and they were very very firm about it but he was so um he was so fluid that even the war wasn't able to to ground him in any way uh sultan he mentions that and he also as i said before the concept of bureaucratic enforcement it didn't exist not that that ever occurred to alexander um so you never knew what he was going to do you never knew what what direction he was going to go in and it uh it it called

a lot of problems. Of course, Polish owners who were too concerned by their profits opposed the eradication of Jewish distilleries in the rural areas of the western provinces, and at that time, the Russian government did not dare act against them. However, in the Shernigof province, where their establishment was still recent, the successful removal of distilleries in the hands of owners and Jews was undertaken in 1821, after the government. governor reported following a bad harvest that the Jews hold in hard bondage to peasants of the crown and Cossacks. A similar measure was taken in 1822 in the province of Boltava. In 1823,

it was partially extended to the provinces of Mogulov and Vitebsk, but its expansion was halted by the pressing efforts of the Kahalam. Thus, the struggle led over the 25-year reign of Alexander against the production of alcohol by the transplantation of the Jews out of villages gave little results. But distilling was not the only type of production in the palest settlement. Owners leased out various assets in different sectors of the economy. Here a mill, they're fishing, elsewhere bridges, sometimes a whole property, and in this way not only peasant serfs were leased, such cases multiplied from the end of the 18th century onwards,

but also the serfs churches, that is to say, Churches, as several authors points out, Kostomarov, Katkof, and Shulgin. These churches, being an integral part of an estate, were considered as belonging to the Catholic proprietor, and in their capacity as operators, the Jews considered themselves entitled to levy money on these, on those who frequented these churches, and on those who celebrated private offices. For baptism, marriage, or funeral, it was necessary to receive the authorization of a Jew for a fee, the epic songs of Little Russia burst with bitter complaints against the Jewish farmers who oppress the inhabitants.

It's worthwhile to point out that the 18th century and the purges of the Orthodox church that Peter engaged in, the post-petring state, and even to a great extent, Catherine, the church had to rebuild itself. we're still talking about the fairly early 19th century it didn't have the authority especially with the massive old believer movement that took over the villages not for the Jewish issue but they had a far more realistic

understanding of the Jewish issue they didn't have the moral authority that they used to nothing changed from the Polish Empire to the era we're talking about nothing changed the fact that Poland doesn't have an empire and it doesn't have political independence doesn't mean any part of its social structure changed in any way

and because they were generating money and the empire didn't want to irritate the Jews and hence lose some of that and cause a lot of unrest in these very key parts of the empire a lot of this stuff was left alone they're still owning churches and charging a fee for

the entire Palo settlement where Jews had tremendous privileges was just economically speaking just slightly different from the old Polish system of exploitation and it's going to take much stronger czars to be able to address this directly

but this you know Alexander was probably the worst person to have had as emperor in this period of time and he was one of these people who he knows that they're something wrong, but A, doesn't know what it is in detail, and B, doesn't know what to do about it. He did legitimately want to do the right thing. He just didn't know how. And, you know, customato, who I've written on substantially, you know, he talks about this quite a bit. Because of

their predominance in Ukraine, Ukrainian writers were far more realistic about, you know, the Cossacks have been broken. They existed, but not like they had in Kimmelnitsky's time. Catherine the Great thought of that. And Peter, you know, even before with Ivan Mizhampa. So that check on Jewish power was gone or greatly weakened. So it's depressing, but so much of the bad stuff about serfdom came from exactly these kind of institutions, whether it be alcohol or, you.

you know, they, or debt, where they were able to take control of entire villages. And it was very hard for the state to do much about it. But the last thing they wanted was unrest, but they were creating the conditions for unrest and riots against the Jews. Today, of course, we just consider it normal, so we don't do anything. The Russian governments had long perceived this danger. The rights of the farmers were likely to extend to the peasant himself and directly to his, work, and the Jews should not dispose of the personal labor of the peasants, and by means of a lease, although not being Christians, become owners of peasant serfs, which was prohibited

on several occasions, both by the decree of 1784, and by the ordinances of the Senate of 1801 and 1813, the Jews cannot possess villages or peasants, nor dispose of them under any name whatsoever. However, the ingenuity of the Jews and the owners, managed to circumvent what was forbidden. In 1816, the Senate discovered that the Jews had found a means of exercising the rights of owners under the name of Crestencia. That is to say, after agreement with the owners, they harvest the wheat and barley sewn by the peasants. These same peasants must first thresh and then deliver to the distilleries leased by these same Jews. They must also watch over the oxen that are brought to graze in their fields, provide the Jews with workers and wax.

thus the Jews dispose of all these areas, while the landlords receiving from them substantial rent referred to as Christentia sell to the Jews all the harvest to come that are sown on their lands, one can conclude from this that they condemn their peasants to famine. It is not the peasants who are, so to speak, claimed as such, but only the Christensia, which does not prevent the result from being the same. this is a big area where the theme of naifte comes in the Talmud is nothing more than hair splitting I've read huge chunks of it over the years and it's agony from from beginning to end it is it's what's now taken for granted in American and legal practice but that was not the understanding of law

in the Middle Ages or the Russian Empire the business in empire anywhere else you know natural law and custom and tradition and church law was the foundation of everything at least at the local level the Jews of course were the complete opposite of all of that they were able to just change the names and they could falsify whatever they wanted they could talk their way out of anything and this naivete would just just kept them from being punished for it this story here It's just one out of a thousand examples. All they have to do is change the name. And it's all of a sudden okay.

These regulations were written in such a way that they could argue about definitions. They could argue about what does it mean to own something? What does it mean to what is a peasant exactly? And they could nullify anything. And this is something that the peasants themselves were knew far better than the elite in Petrograd. Despite all the prohibitions, the practice of Christencia continued its crooked ways. Its extreme intricacy resulted from the fact that many landowners fell into debt with their Jewish farmers, receiving money from them on their estate, which enabled the Jews to dispose of the estate and the laborer of the serfs.

But when, in 1816, the Senate decreed that it was appropriate to take domains back from the Jews, he charged them to recover on their own the sums they had lent. The deputies of the Kahulam immediately sent a humble petition to his majesty, asking him to annul this decree. The general administrator in charge of foreign affairs, the prince N. N. Gulletson convinced the emperor that inflicting punishment on only one category of offender with the exception of owners and officials. The landlords could still gain if they refused to return the capital received from the Christentia and furthermore keep the Christensia for their profit. If they have abandoned their lands to the Jews in spite of the law, they must now return the money to them.

The future December's P.I. P.I. Pestel, at that time an officer in the Western provinces, was by no means a defender of the autocracy, but an ardent Republican. He recorded some of his observation. observations on the Jews of this region, which were partially included in the preamble of his government program, recommendations for the provisional supreme government. Quoting, awaiting the Messiah, the Jews consider themselves temporary inhabitants of the country in which they find themselves, and so they never, on any account, want to take care of agriculture. They tend to despise even the craftsmen and only practice commerce.

The spiritual leaders of the Jews who are called rabbis, keep the people in an incredible dependence by forbidding them in the name of faith, any reading other than that of the Talmud. A people that does not seek to educate itself will always remain a prisoner of prejudice. The dependence of the Jews in relation to the rabbis go so far that any order given by the latter is executed piously without a murmur. The close ties between the Jews give them the means to raise large sums of money for their common needs, in particular to incite different authorities to concession and to all sorts of embezzlement, which are useful to them, the Jews. That they readily accede to the conditions of possessors,

one can see it ostensibly in the provinces where they have elected domicile. All commerce is in their hands. A few peasants are not. By means of debts in their power, this is why they terribly ruin the regions where they reside. The previous government, that of Catherine, has given them outstanding rights and privileges, which accentuate the evil they are doing. For example, the right not to provide recruits, the right not to announce deaths, the right to distinct judicial proceedings subject to the decisions of the rabbis, and they also enjoy all

the other rights accorded to other Christian ethnic groups. Thus, it can be clearly seen that the Jews form within the state, a separate state, and enjoy more extensive rights than Christians themselves. Such a situation cannot be perpetuated further, for it has led the Jews to show a hostile attitude towards Christians and has placed them in a situation contrary to the public order that must prevail in the state. Here you have what, you know, given the time period, it's a liberal constitutionalist who, of course, at the time all believed in violent revolution and imposing, you know, their views of a high level Mason

the Decembrists were the elite of the elite many of whom were free Masons hated the monarchy or at least wanted a monarch they can control so even people who you would think might be allies

of the Jews turn on them this is really because of the Dershavin committee this information now is disseminated everywhere even concerning the Talmud where you know

this is their economic system. And given the nature of what the economic system in Russia was prior to this, it means that commerce is, as he says, entirely in their hands. The old believers were a separate issue. They were pretty good merchants themselves. And they also maintained a great degree of in-group cohesion. The Palaos settlement was a highly privileged place. The Jews dominated entirely. It was a huge region. some of which was in the old Khazar Empire so there's no excuse for not understanding this

there's no excuse for the naifte when you have someone like this this is a very well-crafted understanding and things like this were set all over Europe at the time today of course in certain parts of Europe you'll go to prison for mentioning this but but this is what people finally realize that this is this is a

destructive entity that has been you know that we've brought into this country that even with the profits that some of the elite get from their dealings with the Jews eventually that's going to go away because remember the nobles and the old Polish Empire was or as much in debt as anybody else and that was happening happening here that even the elite were were in debt to these people and that just means increasing levels of power almost nesting levels of power as as as as they come to dominate this was this was serfdom wasn't the issue this was the issue this was direct domination of the peasantry um that was not the case with the with with serfdom this was taking a free population a communal population but a free population and

turning them into slaves and it didn't distinguish really between nobles and and peasants they were all part of this hellish cycle of debt, the state found it very difficult to deal with this for reasons we've already mentioned. But it seems that even now, we say 18, 18, late 1810s, maybe 1820, nothing has changed. And the difference between now and then is that what they were reacting against in Russia today is just take it for granted. Well, that's just economics. we have five short paragraphs and we come to a natural stopping point in the final years of Alexander I reign economic and other types of prohibitions against Jewish activities were reinforced in 1818 a Senate decree now forbade that never make Christians be placed in the

service of Jews for debts in 1819 another decree called for an end to the works and services that peasants and servants perform on behalf of the Jews. Galitzin, always him, told the council of ministers, those who dwell in the house of the Jews not only forget and no longer fulfill the obligations of the Christian faith, but adopt Jewish customs and rights. It was then decided that Jews should no longer employ Christians for their domestic service. It was believed that this would also benefit the needy Jews who could very well replace Christian servants. but this decision was not applied. This is not surprising among the urban Jewish masses.

There was masses, there was poverty and misery. For the most part, they were wretched people who could scarcely feed themselves, but the opposite phenomenon has never been observed. The Jews would hardly work in the service of Christians. Undoubtedly, some factors opposed it, but they also apparently had means of subsistence coming from communities between which solidarity reigned. However, as early as 1823, Jewish farmers were allowed to hire Christians.

In fact, the strict observance of the decision prohibiting Christians from working on Jewish lands was too difficult to put into practice. During these same years, to respond to the rapid development of the sect of Subotniki, in the provinces of Veronic, Samara, Tula, and others, measures were taken for the palest settlement to be more severely respected. Thus, in 1821, Jews accused of heavily exploiting the peasants and Cossacks were expelled from the rural areas of Chernegiv province and in 1822 from the villages of the Poltava province. In 1824, just for a second, I have no idea what that paragraph is saying. I think what I'll do after this is I'll go to the original Russian and see what it is.

there's a few paragraphs that are like that here but that measures were taken I don't know what they're talking about but the idea is clear though that it's the cycle seems to be that they dominate the areas they hold peasants in serfdom

and the state being what it is and being as far away as it is is almost helpless to do anything about In 1824 during his journey in the Ural Mountains, Alexander I noticed that a large number of Jews in factories by clandestinely buying quantities of precious metals bribed the inhabitants to the detriment of the treasury and the manufacturers and ordered that the Jews be no longer tolerated in the private or public factories of the mining industry.

The treasury also suffered from smuggling all along the western frontier of Russia goods and commodities being transported and sold in both capitals without passing through customs. The governor has reported that smuggling was mainly practiced by Jews, particularly numerous in the border area. In 1816, the order was given to expel all the Jews from a strip 60 kilometers wide from the frontier and that it be done in the space of three weeks. The expulsion lasted five years was only partial, and as early as 1821, the new government authorized to Jews to return to their former place of residence. In 1825, a more comprehensive, but much more moderate decision was taken.

The only Jews liable to deportation were those not attached to the local Kehalam or who did not have property in the border area. In other words, it was proposed to expel only intruders. Moreover, the measure was not systematically applied. you know it seems that the peasantry the cost of groups

they're taking matters into their own hands and the most that the state was able to do at the time and Alexander was learning very quickly as to what was going on is just let it happen they're going to be they're going to be expelled

you know this is as democratic as you can get by their, by their wage and, and, and, and, and, but even, even the laws, uh, or the regulations that were laid out. Solzhenitsyn has now said it like five times. I said it 10 times. It's very difficult to enforce this. Um, because you really don't have a, a, a modern state in the sense that, you know, the U.S. or Britain is. Um, and, um, the Jews were able to take advantage of that and were able to argue with it but now you're starting to see some action and no one can blame them at the time and this is part of the reason why jews then and now were so desperate to keep a lot of this information away from the public to keep to make sure this is all censored because in their

minds this was all for no reason and they're just jealous that we have money and they're stupid goyum and we have the right to rule them and they don't like that you know that's about as sophisticated as it gets so um but the last phrase this measure was not systematically applied it's uh russia was not ready for this kind of thing and um that most places weren't what happened with the destruction of poland meant that russia now had to deal with a couple of million jews whose entire reason for existing was exploitation and manipulation and getting around the law and criminality that they took for granted as perfectly normal you know what's uh what's eye opening here and i think is something that i hope people are

starting to realize is that the system of exploitation as far as commercial system of exploitation that is going on which is being reported which is you know some some people are trying to fight against has just been institutionalized in the United States and in the West large scale. I mean, to the point where this is who we consider this to be who we are and that if you fight against it, if you say, well, we shouldn't do things this way, well, you're unpatriotic and you're a communist.

The Jews were also a huge part of that movement as well. You know, the communists in Russian history, the Jews created the Soviet Union. They also took advantage in the 1990s after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It doesn't matter. It ends up being the same. It ends up with this enriched elite that then once they take over, want to make sure that no one knows that they're this enriched elite that has taken over. And, of course, always fraud and lies in manipulation.

And more than anything else, their obsession with internal cohesion, which is how they dominate, which is how they do this. Yeah, it's taken for granted now. This is called free market capitalism. It comes from this very Jewish idea, and it has no moral or even practical truth to it. All right, Dr. Johnson, I'm going to, once again, encourage people to go to the show notes of this. I put all Dr. Johnson's links so that you can donate to him. This is what he does. This is his full-time job, and the reason he is so well-versed

and knows so much about this is because he can do it full-time. So continue to support him so that he can gobble up this knowledge and put it into language that we can understand. Thank you, Dr. Johnson, always. I appreciate that. You're welcome. talk to you soon i want to welcome everyone back to part seven of our reading of alexander solzhenycin's 200 years together how are you doing today dr johnson

i'm doing very well i got to do something about my shoulder but i'm in a good mood it's like three degrees out and sunny so this is like my perfect day all right it's three to three degrees and sunny okay we just went over 40 here so it's It's balmy compared to the way it's been recently. They're saying it's going to go up to the 20s, so, you know, I'm just going to deny that for now. We needed some melt-off here anyway. We had central Alabama shouldn't have ice, and we had ice, so all right. But that is true.

All right, let's get going. We're going to pick up right where we left off last time. So here we go. The regulation of 1804, and it's art. stipulating the expulsion of the Jews from villages of the western provinces naturally posed a serious problem to the government. Where were they to be transferred? Towns and villages were densely populated and this density was accentuated by the competition prevailing in small businesses given the very low development of productive labor.

However, in southern Ukraine stretched new Russia, vast, fertile, and sparsely populated. Obviously, the interest of the state was to incite the mass of nonproductive Jews expelled from the villages to go to work the land in New Russia. Ten years earlier, Catherine had tried to ensure the success of this incentive by striking the Jews with a double royalty while totally exempting those who would accept to be grafted to New Russia. But this double taxation, Jewish historians mentioned it often, was not real, as the Jewish population was not. not censored, and only the Kahal knew the manpower while concealing the numbers to the authorities in a proportion that possibly reached a good half. As early as 1808, the royalty ceased to be demanded and the exemption granted by Catherine no longer encouraged any Jews to migrate. Just briefly, New Russia is in essence where the current war in Ukraine is.

is um is taking place um and it's no coincidence that this is somewhat close to the um because it's on the black sea it's close to the old kazar empire i have paper after paper i'm actually looking for some place to publish it um on the new kazadia idea um because something like that was going on here i don't know what he means by low development productive labor or really if this expulsion ever really took place and how it took place if it took place if it did. I mean, they'll say it did regardless either way, but it goes so far to show just how angry they made people that the government, despite, you know, not wanting to do it for the sake of peace and to remove them from the villages, that is to say, from the rural areas. And the only reason they were there was to take advantage of the peasantry. Of course, they're in urban people.

They've always been an urban people. But so this is, we're getting into a very interesting part of Russian and Ukrainian history here. This time, and for the Jews alone, more than 30,000 hectares of hereditary but not private. But non-private land was allocated in New Russia with 40 hectares. hectares of state land per family. In Russia, the average lot of the peasants was a few hectares, rarely more than 10. Cash loans for the transfer and settlement, purchase the livestock equipment, etc., which had to be repaid after a period of six years within the following 10 years. The prior construction of an Isba log house was offered to the settlers in this region,

not only the peasants, but even some owners lived in mud houses. To exempt them of all royalties for 10 years with maintenance of individual freedom in these times of serfdom and the protection of the authorities. The 1804 regulations having exempted Jews from military service, the cash compensation was included in the royalty fee. Yeah, this is anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic Zaris Russia here. Look at the privileges that they're not going to take it, but these were the privileges that were offered and existed until the end, almost to the end, really 1905,

in the Pail of Settlement. But to this day, they'll tell you that this was a prison house of nations like Trotty and London wanted to say. I mean, yeah, of course, the Pailiff said they took all the tax breaks and everything else, but working the land, out of the question. The Enlightened Jews, few at the time, Notkin Levinson supported the governmental initiative, but this result must be achieved through

incentives in no way coercive and understood very well the need for their people to move on to productive work. The 80 years of the difficult saga of Jewish agriculture in Russia are described in the voluminous and meticulous work of the Jew V. N. Nikitin, as a child he had been entrusted to the Cantonists where he had received his name, who devoted many years to the study of the archives of the enormous unpublished official correspondence between St. Petersburg and New Russia, an abundant presentation interspersed with documents and statistical tables, with tireless repetitions, possible contradictions, and the reports made at sometimes very distant times by inspectors of divergent opinions, all accompanied by detailed and yet incomplete tables,

None of this had been put in order, and it offers for our brief exposition much too dense material. Let us try, however, by condensing the citations to draw a panorama that is simultaneously broad and clear. The government's objective, Nikitin admits, in addition to the colonization program of unoccupied lands, was to give the Jews more space than they had to accustom them to productive things. physical labor to help guard them from harmful occupations by which, whether they liked it or not, many of them made the life of the peasant serfs even more difficult than it already was. The government bearing in mind the improvement of their living conditions proposed to turn them to agriculture. The government did not seek to attract Jews by promises.

On the contrary, it endeavored that there should be no more than 300 families transferred each year. It deferred the transfer so long as the houses were not built on the spot. and invited the Jews, meanwhile, to send some of their men as scouts. Initially, the idea was not bad, but it had not sufficiently taken into account the mentality of the Jewish settlers, nor the weak capacities of the Russian administration. The project was doomed in advance by the fact that the work of the earth is an art that demands generations to learn. One cannot attach successfully to the earth people who do not wish it or who are indifferent to it.

This is one of the most significant paragraphs we've come across so far. And what stands out is the fact that this proves without question that Tsar's Russia, at this fairly late date, was not an authoritarian state. The state didn't have much power, especially in the countryside. They couldn't do this. The level of totalitarianism that you would have to develop, I mean, we have it, of course, it's typical in post-maternity that's going to have to wait for the 20th century

the empire didn't have the resources to do anything like this or maintain it once it was done these enlightened Jews that he's mentioned I guess didn't bother to tell the administrators or the Tsar himself that they're not going to work the land in an alien place you know this is a third or fourth time we've mentioned these enlightened Jews from Germany

and even Russia they seem to be telling them you know half truth yeah they supported this but there's no way that they didn't know that this was they knew this was going to fail I refuse to believe otherwise

so these enlightened Jews who you know the good Jews in the minds of the of the administration at the time that they were playing a game themselves there's the next line I'll read it for you the journalist Orchanski considered Jewish agriculture

that could have been a success but only if Jews have been transferred to nearby crown lands of Belarus where the peasant way of life was under their control before their eyes well the place wasn't the problem it was the people

and yes what you just read that you just can't transfer somebody there and give them a hoe and expect them to to know what they're doing. So much of that agrarian mentality has been lost. The peasant knowledge of the earth was extraordinary. It was beyond anything any scientist could talk about today,

but in a practical, non-theoretical sense. So there's a lot going on here, but it has nothing to do with the place. It has nothing to do with the administration or the attitude or the incentives. Jews are not going to work a land until they go where they think they belong but of course Zionism was a very minor

if it even existed at all at this point it was very small group of people but the only place that they're going to work the land I mean you did have a couple of Jews who took who did this many of them converted you know I mean legitimately converted but it's a small percentage

And for all of this discussion with enlightened Jews elsewhere, any Jew who knew anything would say this isn't going to work for a whole bunch of reasons. The religious is just one of them. The 30,000 hectares allotted to Jews in New Russia remained inalienable for decades. Apostiori, the journalist IG Orchanski considered the Jewish agriculture could have been a success, but only if Jews had been transferred to the nearby crown lands of Belarus, where the peasant way of life was under their control before their eyes. Unfortunately, there was scarcely any land there. For example, in the province of Grotna, there were only 200 hectares, marginal infertile land, where the entire population suffered from poor harvests. At first, there were only three dozen families willing to emigrate. The Jews hoped that the expulsion measures from the western provinces would be reported if it had been foreseen,

in 1804 that its application would extend on three years, but it was slow to begin. The fateful deadline of January 1, 1808, approaching, they began to leave the villages under escort from 1806 onwards. There was also a movement in favor of emigration among the Jews, the more so as the rumor indicated the advantages which were connected with it. The demands for emigration then flooded en masse. They rushed there, as it were, the promised land. like their ancestors who left Caldea and Canaan, entire groups left surreptitiously, without authorization, and some even without a passport. Some resold the passport they had obtained from their other departing groups and then demanded that they be replaced under the pretext they had lost it. The candidates for departure were day by day more numerous and all insistently demanded land, housing, and substance.

it's pretty clear what's happening here the czarist government had heard enough about their manipulation of the peasantry so they built this what is a very bizarre plan to settle them in various places with free everything including exemption from the draft I think they were exempt anyway but and remember this is we've gone back a couple decades

this is now prior to several years prior to the invasion of Napoleon they're going to take advantage of the benefits but they're not going to work the land we just read that the Jews were not part of any census I don't know if that was really ever the case maybe the very or very early 20th century so there's no way to check who's where and who's going where and why

they didn't have last names they were not that there was no way to you know there was no like today everything is under surveillance they had nothing like that back then plus the very long distances bad weather in the swamps which is with a problem here in this part of Belarus

there was no way even if you could make this happen you know by force there's no way you could maintain it no one knew what was going on however they figured well this may happen anyway so we're going to take advantage of all these benefits, but not work the land.

We're going to get all this stuff for free and not do anything and see what happens. The influx succeeded the possibilities of reception of the support office of the Jews created in the province of Keroson. Time was lacking to build houses, dig wells, and the organizations suffered from the great distances in this region of the steps, the lack of craftsmen, doctors, and veterinarians. The government was indiscriminate of the people. the good provisions and sympathy toward the migrants, but the Governor Richelieu demanded in 1807 that the entrances be limited to 200, 300 families per year while receiving without limitation

those who wish to settle on their own account. In case of a bad harvest, all these people will have to be fed for several years in a row. The poorest settlers were paid daily allowances. However, the governors of the provinces allowed those over quota who wished to leave without knowing the exact number of those who were leaving, hence many vicissitudes along the way due to misery, sickness, death. Some quite simply disappeared during the trip. Distances across the step between 100 and 300 kilometers between a colony in the office, the inability of the administration to keep an accurate count and establish a fair distribution meant that some of the migrants were more helped than others. Some complained that they did not

receive any compensation or loans. The colony inspector, too few in numbers, they did not have time to take a closer look. They received a miserable wage, had no horses, and walked on foot. After a period of two years of stay, some settlers still had no farm, no seeds, nor bread. The poorest were allowed to leave wherever they pleased, and those who renounced their condition as farmers recovered their former status as bourgeois. But only a fifth of them returned to their country of origin, and the others wandered, the loans granted to those who had been scratched off the list of settlers were to be considered definitively lost. Some reappeared for a time in the colonies.

Others disappeared without looking back or leaving a trace. The others pounded the pavement in the neighboring towns by trading according to their old habit. I've read about this in other sources, especially Russian language sources, and no matter who's writing about it, it just gets dumber and dumber. I have no idea what these people thought was going to happen. But there's no way. I mean, even if they weren't Jews, there was no way this was going to work. There's not the slightest doubt in my mind that these people were able to use their, you know, the inability of the state to track them to get more than one loan, all these different subsidies that no one else was getting at the time.

Of course, they went back to their old, old habits. It's all that they were going to do and they were going to take advantage of this very dumb plan to be able to do it. without having to pay any taxes, without having to, you know, I really have any social service whatsoever except to themselves. No one really knows because it's very difficult to tell who went where. And, of course, they took full advantage of it. The more you read about it, you know, even if it was a success, it was going to fail miserably.

Because once they get there, what are they going to do? They didn't know the first thing about working the land. That was beneath them. And, you know, chances on, if somehow by magic this would have worked out perfectly, they would have figured out a way to get Orthodox peasants or Catholic peasants to work for them and just not report it and, you know, bribe people. I think that's what would have happened if this would have been magically successful. That's the best case scenario here.

If this would have all worked out, they would have figured out a way to get the going on to do the backbreaking work. the many reports of the office and inspectors provide insight into how the new settlers were operating to train the settlers who did not know where to start or how to finish the services of peasants of the crown were requested the first plowing is done for the most part through hired russians the habit is taken of correcting defects by a hired labor they sow only a negligible portion of the plot allotted to them and use poor quality seeds one has received specific seeds but does not plow or sow another when sewing loses a lot of seeds and same goes during harvest some due to lack of experience they break tools or simply resell them they do not know how to i mean the jokes write themselves it's not it's not funny though um no they do not know

how to keep the livestock they kill the cattle for food then complain that they no longer have any They sell cattle to buy cereals. They do not make provisions for dried dung, so their isbas, insufficiently heated, become damp. They do not fix their houses, so they fall apart. They do not cultivate vegetable gardens. They heat the houses with straw stored to feed the cattle. Not knowing how to harvest, neither to mow nor to thresh. The colonists cannot be hired in the neighboring hamlets.

No one wants them. They do not maintain the good hygiene of their homes, which favors diseases. They absolutely did not expect to be. personally occupied with agricultural labor doubtlessly they thought that the cultivation of the land would be assured by other hands that once in possession of great herds they would go and sell them at the fairs the settlers hope to continue receiving public aid they complain of being reduced to a pitiable condition and it is really so of having worn their clothes up to the rope and that is the case but the inspection administration replies if they have no more clothes it is out of idleness

for they do not raise sheep, and so neither linen nor hemp, and their wives neither spin nor weave. Of course, an inspector concluded in his report, if the Jews cannot handle their operations, it is by habit of a relaxed life because of their reluctance to engage in agricultural work and they're an experience. But he thought it fair to add, agriculture must be prepared from earliest youth, and the Jews, having lived indolently until 45 to 50 years, are not in a position of transforming themselves into farmers in such a short time. The Treasury was obliged to spend two to three times more on the settlers than expected, and extensions kept on being demanded.

Richelieu maintained that the complaints came from the lazy Jews, not from the good farmers. However, another report notes that, unluckily for them, since their arrival, they have not been comforted by an even remotely substantial harvest. This is everything I said in between the paragraphs before, not realizing that this was coming. Once you know the Jews pretty well, you know what's going to happen here. They come right out and say it.

The Jews who were a part of this didn't expect to be occupied with agricultural labor. But that was the whole point. They were expecting to scam. You know, it's like taking a mafioso from Brooklyn. They were going to take advantage of the plan. They weren't going to do anything to in return, which was the whole point.

The whole point was to get them to farm. You know, no one told them that this isn't going to. I can't imagine at some point, someone had to have said something that Jews can't do this. Religiously, it's out of the question. And even if it wasn't a religious issue, they have no background in this. You're not going to go from being a parasite to now. working the land for much less money. I don't care how many taxes you don't have to pay.

It's just shocking. And every time I read about this, I'm still shocked about how stupid this was. I don't think Jews suffered really much at all. I think they just said so. But they took advantage of everything, you know, complained all the time. And they got more money as a result.

At any given moment, they could have, you know, went to Constantinople or whatever and got subsidies if they absolutely needed it. So I don't think they said. suffered really. But this is, I can't get over the idiocy of this plan. In response to the many fragments communicated to St. Petersburg to signal how the Jews deliberately renounced all agricultural work, the ministry responded in the following way.

The government has given them public aid in the hope that they will become farmers not only in name, but in fact. Many immigrants are at risk, if not incited to work, to remain debtors to the state for a long time. The arrival of Jewish settlers in New Russia at the expense of the state, uncontrolled and ill-supported by an equipment program, was suspended in 1810. In 1811, the Senate gave the Jews the right to leased the production of alcohol in the localities belonging to the crown, but within the limits of the pale of settlement. As soon as the news was known in New Russia, the will to remain in agriculture was shaken for many settlers. Although they were forbidden to leave the country, some left without any identity papers to become inkeepers in villages dependent on the crown, as well as in those belonging to landowners. In 1812, it appeared that of the 848 families settled there were in fact only 538.

88 were considered to be on leave, parties earning their living in Kerasan, Nikolaev, Odessa, and even Poland. As for the others, they had simply disappeared. the entire program, the authoritative installation of families on land, was something unprecedented not only in Russia but in the whole of Europe. The government now considered that in view of the Jews now proven disgust for the work of the land, seeing that they do not know how to go about it, given the negligence of the inspectors, it appears that the migration has given rise to major disturbances, therefore the Jews should be judged indulgently.

on the other hand how can we guarantee the repayment of public loans by those who will be allowed to leave their status as farmers how to palliate without injury to the treasury the inadequacies of those who will remain to cultivate the land how to alleviate the fate of those people who endured so many misfortunes and are living on the edge as for the inspectors they suffer not only from understaffing a lack of means and various other shortcomings but also also from their negligence, absenteeism, and delays in the delivery of grain and funds. They saw, with indifference, the Jews selling their property, there were also abuses in exchange of payment they granted permits for long-term absences, including the most reliable workers in a family, which could quickly lead to the ruin of the farm. Yeah, there's going to be injury to the Treasury. That we know for certain. even after 1810 to 1812 the situation of the jewish colonies showed no sign of improvement tools lost broken or mortgaged by the jews oxen again slaughtered stolen or resold field sown late while awaiting warmth use of bad seeds and in too close proximity to houses always on the one and same plot no groundwork sewing for five consecutive years on fields that had only been plowed once without alternating the sewing of wheat and potatoes insufficient harvest from one year to another, yet again without harvesting

seeds, but the bad harvest also benefit the immigrants. They are then entitled to time off. Livestock left uncared for, oxen given for hire or assigned as carriages. They wore them down, did not nourish them, bartered or slaughtered them to feed themselves, only to say later they had died of disease. The authorities either provided them with other, or let them leave in search of a livelihood. They did not care to build safe pens to prevent livestock from being stolen during the night. They themselves spent their nights down to sleep.

For shepherds, they took children or idlers who did not care for the integrity of the herds. On feast days or on Saturdays, they left them out to graze without any supervision. Moreover, on Saturday it is forbidden to catch the thieves. They resented their rare co-religionist who, with the sweat of their brow, obtained remarkable harvests. The latter incurred the Old Testament curse the harem for if they

show the authorities that the Jews are capable of working the land, they will eventually force them to do so. Few were assiduous in working the land. They had the intent while pretending to work to prove to the authorities by their continual needs, their overall incapacity. They wanted first and foremost to return to the trade of alcohol, which was reauthorized to their co-religionists. Livestock, instruments, seeds were supplied to them several times, and new loans for their subsistence were relentlessly granted to them. Many, after receiving a loan to establish themselves, came to the colonies only at the time of the distribution of funds, only to leave again. With this money to neighboring towns and localities in search for other work, they resold

the plot that had been allocated to them, roamed, lived several months in Russia, agglomerations at the time intense moments of agricultural labor and earn their living by deceiving the peasants. The inspector's tables show that half of the families were absent with or without authorization and that some had disappeared forever. An example was the disorder prevailing in the village of Isre Levka in the province of Kersan, where the inhabitants who had come to their own account considered themselves entitled to practice other trades. they were there only to take advantage of the privileges.

Only 13 of the 32 families were permanent residents, and again, they only sowed to make it seem legitimate while the others worked as tavern keepers in neighboring districts. Now, I have a theory about this. I haven't written on it quite yet. We've already discussed that many members of the Senate and the committees that both Paul and Alexander empowered to look into the Jewish question,

There was already close economic times with some Russian oligarchs with the Jews as middlemen, especially those of Polish background that were now part of the Russian Empire. The more I read about this, the more I think that no one could possibly believe this would work. because even if these people had the best of intentions, there's no way to track them. So it's very possible that this was simply a scam that they may have worked out to get a large sum of money that they had no intention of paying back

and all of these grants and then getting peasant labor from elsewhere to help them, quote unquote, with learning how to farm. And all of this were not paying taxes or anything else. I'm willing to believe something like that only because it makes me less depressed about the whole thing.

Clearly, this is a scam. Right here, they came to the colonies only at the time of the distribution of funds and then leave again. And in the previous paragraphs, it said, you know, well, they don't know what they're doing, so let's bring peasants in to assist them. I don't know where you could just transfer them

or where they came from, but so they had non-Jewish peasant labor this was a huge scam and it's almost you know so either this was the most naive plan that was ever created or this was something worked out

with some of the elites in the Senate the oligarchs in the Senate and many of those who knew the situation in Poland profited from the situation in the old Polish Empire and they they whacked up the money between them It's got to be one of those two things. And I think maybe it may well be the latter. Is it safe to say that when you look at people like Victoria Newland, Robert Kagan, this guy who was just not only Attorney General Secretary of State Blinken, Crystal, all of these guys, people whose families come from the pale of settlement, that they look at this and they're like, this is why we have such anima.

for Russia. And when you look, it's like they can't even take into account that their behavior was what caused so much of this. Yeah, I think that so many of the neocons, Russian Jews, initial followers of Trotsky, but when that split with Stalin occurred, it wasn't ideological. Stalin was, did the same thing Trotsky did. Trotsky just didn't have a huge bureaucracy. to work with like Stalin that they ended up becoming anti-Sovian but that was always

anti-Russian Russia is the symbolic Rome and the Talmudic mentality it has to be destroyed the Soviet Union didn't count it wasn't a part of that it was for most of its existence

as we'll read here later a very Jewish enterprise but I have never done this. I know there's a few people who have mentioned it taking some of these neocons and tracing their family tree seeing exactly whether they were part of the anti-Zaris revolution or either the Mensovics or anyone else.

But there's no way, you know, I think that that Machiavellian mentality sees this kind of charity his weakness. Let's us assume it wasn't a scam and there was good intentions behind this. because Alexander could only do what his advisor said that was the whole point of the committees

and the Senate was created by Peter the Great for that purpose that was appointed and very wealthy men that if it if it wasn't a scam Jews saw this as just you know

the weakness the ignorance was contemptible and you know we normal people would see it as an attempt to work out the Jewish problem, however naive it was. Machiavellian is going to see it as in tremendous weakness. We could do whatever we want to these people. And there's going to give us more privileges.

To think that, you know, Tsaros Russia just inherently hated Jews for no reason. Yeah, you're exactly right. It was, you know, anytime in the U.S. and the Soviet Union cooperated economically almost all the time. I have paper after paper on that. You've read Anthony Sutton, three-volume work explaining in detail. You know, the U.S., the West in general, with the U.S. in particular, built Soviet industry. It created and then rebuilt it after World War II. But then once it lost its profitability in the late 60s and early 70s, then they wanted to go to Israel.

And all of a sudden, this anti-Semitic nonsense was. You know, the anti-Zionist stuff in Russia or in the Soviet Union came into prominence. So I think whatever battles with the Soviet Union existed, it wasn't the Soviet, you know, Trotky was not, never became anti-communist by any means. He didn't like Stalin. Trotsky was to a great extent of Jewish nationalist, as, you know, people like Moses Hess before him, well. And, you know, it wasn't ideology that separated those two. So what was anti-Soviet, at least in certain circles, was, in fact, anti-Russian. You know, it's the things that are happening to Russia today, now that it's taken the nationalist and Eurasian point of view, would never have even been dreamed of against the USSR.

There were no sanctions on the Soviet Union. Joe Biden himself with Richard Lugar and a few others from 1972 to the early 80s was traveling to the USSR working out different agreements now with Putin they don't want to talk to him at all they call him a murderer and everything else so in other words the gulag was perfectly acceptable to them

Nationalist Russia that's something else that has to be destroyed and it's these very same people today you mentioned Blinkin and all the yes there is definitely a connection I don't know why Leo Strauss gets put into there. Strauss didn't write on this topic at all, but I think your instincts are right.

I don't know about the exact family tree, but for them to say that Russia, the Russian Empire didn't like, you know, of course they could construe this as persecution, and yet the Pala settlement was the most privileged part of the entire Russian Empire. it is true that when you read the biographies as I've done of many of the Jewish revolutionaries in the very early days of the Soviet Union they are traced back to the pale of settlement

upper middle class merchant families that's where these communists came from they had no connection to the working class at all and Leninism of course had no connection with workers that was just a pretext that had nothing to do with anything nothing to do with labor at all so there's definitely a connection here. And I think the contempt for Russia came from this refusal to understand them. You know, this, how can you come up with a plan so stupid and expect it to succeed? Of course, Napoleon is going to, you know, change things. But at this point, there was no chance of this ever being successful. The numerous reports of the inspectors note in particular and on several occasions that the disgust of Jewish women for agriculture was a major

impediment to the success of the settlers. The Jewish women who seemed to have put themselves to work in the fields subsequently diverted from it. At the occasion of marriages, the parents of Jewish women agreed with their future son-in-laws for them not to compel their wives to carry out difficult agricultural labor, but rather higher workers. They agreed to prepare ornaments, fox and hair furs, bracelets, headdresses, and even pearls for days of celebrations. These conditions led young men to satisfy the whims of their wives to the point of ruining their farming. They go so far as to indulge in possessing luxurious effects, silks, objects of silver and gold,

while other immigrants do not even have clothing for the wintertime. Excessively early marriages make the Jews multiply significantly faster than the other inhabitants. Then by the exodus of the young, families become too little provided for and are incapable of ensuring the work. The overcrowding of several families and houses too scarce generates uncleanliness and favor scurvy. Some women take bourgeois husbands and then leave colonies forever. Judging from the reports of the control office, the Jews of the various colonies continually complained about the lack of the steps. So hard it must be plowed with four pair of

of oxen. Complaints included bad harvest, water scarcity, lack of fuel, bad weather, disease generation, hail, grasshoppers. They also complained about the inspectors, but unduly, seeing that upon examination, the complaints were deemed unfounded. Immigrants complained shamelessly of their slightest annoyances. They ceaselessly increased their demands. When it is justified, they are provided for via the office. On the other hand, they had little reason to complain about limitations to the exercise of their piety or of the number of schools open in the agglomerations. In 1829, for eight colonies, there were 40 teachers.

They just figured the more they complain, the more money they're going to get. It's almost like they realize that they have the state over a barrel here. There's not enough. The inspection office was very small. all probably very easily bought off they were already already had laborers you know Christian laborers brought in from else where they were doing most of the work yeah they were unfounded because they didn't exist um you know poor Jews suffered but they suffered anywhere I'm assuming the basic uh Cahal system was just reproduced I can't say that for certain

though and that may have been one of the problems with this with this remember there's only They're not that many people here. Yeah, the number of families was, given the Jewish population of the Russian Empire, it was very small. So they're ceaselessly increasing their demands. They just saw that, you know, the goyam, they'll do whatever we say, and we can still take advantage of them. However, as pointed out by Nickerson, in the same step during the same period in the same virgin lands, threatened by the same locusts, cultivations by German colonists, Mennonites, and Bulgarians had been established. They also suffered from the same bad harvest, the same diseases, but however, most of them always had enough bread and livestock, and they lived in beautiful houses without buildings, their vegetable gardens were abundant, and their dwellings surrounded by greenery. The difference was obvious, especially when the German settlers at the request of the authorities, came to live in the Jewish settlements to convey their experiences to set an example.

Even from a distance, their properties could be distinguished. in the Russian colonies the houses were also better than those of the Jews however Russians had managed to get into debt with some Jews who were richer than them and paid their debts while working in their fields the Russian peasants Nicodem explains under the impression oppression of serfdom were accustomed to everything and stoically endured all misfortunes that is how the Jewish settlers who had suffered losses following various indignities were assisted by the vast living spaces of the step that attracted fugitive serfs from all regions. Chased by sedentary settlers, the latter replied by the looting, the theft of cattle, the burning of houses, well-received, however, they offered their work and know-how. As reflective and practical men, and by instinct of self-preservation, the Jewish cultivators preferred receiving these fugitives with kindness and eagerness. in return, the latter willingly helped them in plowing, sewing, and harvesting. Some of them, to hide better, embrace the Jewish religion. These cases came to light in 1820.

The government forbade Jews to use Christian labor. Well, this just gets better and better. So you have people who are fleeing something, you know, the law or something like that. Classically, this step was where you would go. I mean, many Cossacks were recruited that way centuries earlier. but they suddenly become Jews become very tolerant oh this is perfect

we'll put them to work and we'll even make them Jews just so no one can track them anymore and of course the the implication here is that there's other settlers in these areas that did fine but you know that's to be expected

but you know the example I think of when you're reading this is Sammy the Bull Gravano who was second in command to John Gotti he went into the witness protection program after becoming a rat to his boss and he was sent to Arizona and

he was kicked out of the witness protection program because he became a drug dealer in other words that's what he does he's a criminal he's not going to get a job at Burger King and work for minimum wage

after living the life he did before. It's actually a very good illustration of what's happening here. No, he that's what he is. That's what he does. He doesn't know anything else. And the exact same thing is happening here and the scam and the Machiavellian

thinking that we know of in the Talmudic mentality of the Jews today, this is where it really shows itself in such sharp relief. And the very fact that the state was trying to do this to help them is irrelevant. Because charity is

construed by them as weakness. Meanwhile, in 1817, the 10 years during which the Jewish settlers were exempt from royalties had passed, and they were now to pay by the peasants of the crown. Collected petitions emanating not only from the colonists, but also from public officials, demanded that the privilege should be extended for a further 15 years. A personal friend of Alexander I, Prince Galitzin, Minister of Education and Religious Affairs, also responsible for all problems concerning the Jews, took the decision to exempt them from paying royalties for another five years

and to postpone the full repayments of loans up to 30 years. It is important to note on the honor of the authorities of St. Petersburg that no request of the Jews before and now has ever been ignored. You've said this already, but I want to remind people that this Prince Gulitin was a high-ranking Freemason. In fact, Freemasonry at this point had deeply penetrated the elite, at least up in the far north where St. Petersburg is, and in the Senate. Galitzin was a hedonist and yet was placed in charge of the church through the synod. And, of course, being a Freemason was half Jewish to begin with. And this was the guy that was put in charge of this, at least the ultimate guy that was put in charge.

charge of this project. So now, you know, I'm starting to think, yeah, maybe this was a scam from the beginning, because this is how these people operate. Among the demands of the Jewish settlers, Nicotin found one which seemed to him to be particularly characteristic. Experience has proven, in as much as agriculture is indispensable to humanity, it is considered the most basic of occupations, which demands more physical exertion than ingenuity and intelligence, and all over the world, those affect. to this occupation are those incapable of more serious professions, such as industrialists and merchants, it is the latter category in as much as it demands more talent and education,

which contributes more than all others the prosperity of nations, and in all periods it has been accorded far more esteem and respect than that of the agricultures. The slanderous representations of the Jews to the government resulted in depriving the Jews of the freedom to exercise their favorite trade, that of commerce, and to force them to change their status by becoming farmers, the so-called plebs. Between 1807 and 1809, more than 120,000 people were driven out of villages and were forced to settle in uninhabited places, hence their claim to return to them the status of bourgeois with the right, attested in the passport, to be able to leave without hindrances, according to the wishes of each individual.

These are well-weighed and unambiguous formulas. From 1814 to 1823, the farming of the Jews did not prosper. The statistical tables show that each registered individual cultivated less than two-thirds of a hectare. As they tried to cut off the harshest work in the eyes of the inspectors, they found compensation in commerce and other miscellaneous trades. Well, what Nikitin is either saying or reporting here, this may have been the mentality at the time but of course it's a line

a tremendous amount of intellectual knowledge maybe not theoretical knowledge goes into agriculture it isn't just physical labor I'm just talking about you know farming per se but running a household dedicated to farming and being able

I mean you have to be a businessman there too and it's always a struggle but it's not more serious, as he said, to become an industrial or a merchant. Maybe you have to be more scheming. Maybe you have to be more Machiavellian. Maybe you have to be more devious to be a merchant. But for him to say or report someone else saying that

that's somehow intelligence and makes it superior to agriculture, and therefore, the Jews couldn't possibly lower themselves to this. This is typical of the mentality of the elite, especially in the Masonic orders, in St. Petersburg, and it reflects the mentality of the Jews, too. We have three quarters of a page before we come to a natural stopping point, and that should probably take us up to an hour. Sounds good. Half a century later, the Jewish journalist, I.G. Archonski proposed the following interpretation. What could be more natural for the Jews transplanted here to devote themselves to agriculture,

to have seen a vast field of virgin economic activity and to have precipitated themselves there with their customary and favored occupations, which promised in the towns a harvest more abundant than that which they could expect as farmers. Why, then, demand of them that they should necessarily occupy themselves with agricultural labor, which undoubtedly would not turn out well for them,

considering the bubbling activity that attracts the Jews in the city's in formation. The Russian authorities at that time saw things differently. In time, the Jews could become useful cultivators. If they resumed their status as bourgeois, they would only increase the number of parasites in the cities. On record, 300,000 rubles spent on nine Jewish settlements, a colossal sum considering the value of the currency at the time. It sounds like money laundering. Oh, yeah.

A huge money laundering. operation in Ukraine that never happens in 1822 the additional five years of royalty exemption had elapsed but the condition of the Jewish farms still required new franchises and new subsidies the state of extreme poverty of the settlers was noted linked to their inveterate laziness disease mortality crop failures and ignorance of agricultural work. I think what Orchansky is trying to say in a kind of a roundabout way is that, you know, we've talked about the naivete of the elite here. There's also a possibility.

I think they all knew exactly what the Jewish mind is, what the cahal really was. They existed by non-productive labor, usury, rents, and, and monetized commerce in a way that no one else had done at the time in Russia. That had to end. Unrest was going to happen. Mass indebtedness was going to happen. We can't have that. But how they get from that fact, that's absolutely true, to we're going to make farmers out of them,

and they're going to work the land. That's where I can't make that connection. And that's why more and more I'm starting to think this really was a scam from the beginning, Agolietzen was a part of it, that these subsidies were just another way to manipulate the Goyim, despite the fact that you did have poor Jews who were, you know, doing this, suffer. But they were suffering anyway. Nevertheless, the young Jewish generation was gradually gaining experience in agriculture. Recognizing that good regular harvest were not in the realm of the impossible, the settlers

invited their compatriots from Belarus and Lithuania to join them. All the more since there had been bad harvest there, the Jewish families flocked en masse. With or without authorization, as in 1824, they feared the threat of general expulsion in the western part of the country. In 1821, as we have already mentioned, measures had been taken to put an end to the Jewish distilleries in the province of Chernegoff, followed by two or three other regions. The governors of the western provinces let all the volunteers go without much inquiry as to how much land was left in New Russia for the Jews. Let's be careful.

We have to remind ourselves that the Kahul already was willing to excommunicate anyone who did well actually farming the land with their two hands. We've read that already for the reasons we've already said it's almost funny. That's going to make us all look bad. and they're going to think that we could all do it. So anytime you have a successful farm, you put successful in quotes, it's almost guaranteed Christian labor and the Jews are somehow able to bribe or manipulate the inspectors

and they go back to Petersburg and say, oh, yeah, this family's doing real well. So either way, it's a scam. From there, it was announced that the possibilities of recession did not exceed 200 families per year, but 1,800 families had already started the journey. some straight in nature, others settled along the way. From then on, the colonists were refused all state aid, but with 10 years exemption of royalties.

However, the Caholam were interested in getting the poorest to leave in order to have less royalties to pay, and to a certain extent, they provided those who left with funds from the community. They encouraged the departure of the elderly, the sick, and large families with few able-bodied adults useful to agriculture, and when the authorities demanded a written agreement from the levers, they were provided with a list of signatures devoid of any meaning. Of the 453 families who arrived in a neighborhood at Akaterina Slav in 1823, only two were able to settle at their own expense. What had pushed them there was the mad hope of receiving public aid,

which might have dispensed the newcomers from work. In 1822, 1,016 families flocked to the new Russia from Belarus. The colonies were rapidly filled with immigrants to whom provisional hospitality was offered. Confinement and uncleanliness engendered diseases. Also, in 1825, Alexander I prohibited the relocation of the Jews. In 1824 and 1825, following further bad harvest, the Jews were supported by loans, but in order not to give them too much hope, their origination. was concealed, they supposedly came from the personal decision of an inspector or as a reward

for some work. Passports were again issued so that the Jews could settle in towns. As for paying royalties, even for those settled there for 18 years, it was no longer discussed. So it's not just the state here. The state wasn't able to go to the Kahul and just heard them to New Russia. Now the previous paragraph says exactly what was. going on. The elders, the wealthy elders that Gahal just wanted to get rid of a lot of people they didn't want around anymore. Those who weren't productive, maybe those who weren't particularly devoted, families that were overpopulation, they were trying to deal with it by getting rid of them. In the meantime, they get all of these subsidies along the way. And of course, eventually, it was

abandoned. Nothing was done. God knows how many rubles were spent. I think, some Jews did get wealthy off of this and yet the mentality throughout Europe continued that maybe we could make farmers out of them it's you know and of course as you know the kibbutz in in Israel yeah that's okay although they do use often foreign labor for that too but but as far as a foreign land goes especially of all places official officially orthodox Monarchus, Russia, working the land was absolutely out of the question. All right, we hit a perfect stopping point, and we'll pick it up in a couple days. On the next episode, I will, once again, as I will at the end of every episode,

encourage people to, I provide links, especially in the videos. If you go to YouTube, Bit Shoot, Odyssey, and Rumble, there are hot links that you can support Dr. Johnson's work with. So I encourage you to do that. Of course, sir. All right. We'll see you in a couple days. Thank you very much.

All right, my friend. I want to welcome everyone back to part eight of our reading of 200 years together by Alexander Solzhenycin. Dr. Johnson, how are you doing today? You know, we're at part eight and we're only at page 44. This is going to be one hell of a year. I'm telling you. it's uh somebody said that i should probably start numbering the episodes like right now it should be

zero zero eight yes at least all right let's jump right in um we are yep here we go at the same time in 1823 a decree of his majesty's orders that in the provinces provinces of bilah russia the shall cease all their distillery activities in 1824, abandoned farmhouses and relay stations, and settle permanently in the towns and agglomerations. The transfer was implemented. By January 1824, some 20,000 people had already been displaced. The emperor demanded to see to it that the Jews were provided with activities and substance during this displacement, so that without home base, they would not suffer under these conditions or more present. needs such as that of food. The creation of a committee composed of four ministers, the fourth

ministerial cabinet created for the Jewish affairs, produced no tangible results either in terms of funding, nor in administrative capacities, nor in the social structure of the Jewish community, which was impossible to rebuild from the outside. In this, as before in many other domains, the Emperor Alexander I, appears to us to be weak-willed in his his impulses, inconsistent and constant and inconsistent with his resolves, as we can see him passive in the face of strengthening secret societies which were preparing to overthrow the throne. But in no case should his decisions be attributed to a lack of respect for the Jews. On the contrary, he was listening to their needs, and even during the war of 1812 through 1814,

he had kept at headquarters the Jewish delegate Zendl Sonnenberg and Licent Dillon, who defended the interests of the Jews. Dylan, it is true, was soon to be judged for having appropriated 250,000 rubles of public money and for having extorted funds from landowners. Sonnenberg, on the other hand, remained for a long time one of Alexander's close friends. On the orders of the Tsar, 1814, a permanent Jewish deputation functioned for a number of years in St. Petersburg for which the Jews had themselves raised funds, for there were plans for major secret expenditures within government departments. These deputies demanded that throughout

Russia, the Jews should have the right to engage in the trade, farming, and distillation of spirits, that they be granted privileges in matters of taxation, that the backlogs be handed over, that the number of Jews admitted to the members of the magistrate no longer be limited. The emperor benevolently listened to them, made promises, but no concrete measures were taken. A lot of the Russian and Polish elite in the Senate were in a really rough position because although they profited from their relationships with the Jews, they also got scammed over and over again. You bring someone into this new department, and the first thing they do is embezzle a quarter of a million rubles. then and extract rents from from landowners so this was always a double-edged sword these aren't the older 17th century Polish landowners who really didn't care or never even kept records

this is a this is a very different story um and it is important to note that he was none he was Alexander passive for these secret societies that will attempt a revolution um upon his death, the elite of the elite, but he initially supported them, bringing someone like the Lietzen into head the Synod of all things, and a church that he really didn't like, and this was a case with these procurators of the Synod, many of them were Masons, many of them were non-Orthodox. He laid the groundwork for his own demise. the Bible Society was a strictly Masonic

Western institution that he was promoting that were pushing all of these very bizarre translations and eventually it was ended but when the Decemberist revolt was put down and Nicholas I took over this is all going to change and that goes along with his policy towards the Jews but Alexander I think is learning

slowly but truly that the more you do for them the worst things you're going to get for you because they see any concession as a matter of weakness. And that's not something that Nicholas I'm not a mistake that he was going to make later on. In 1817, the English missionary society sent the lawyer Lewis Weil an equal rights activist for the Jews to Russia for the specific purpose of acquainting himself with the situation of the Jews of Russia. He had an interview with Alexander I, to whom he handed a note. Deeply convinced that the Jews represented a sovereign nation, while affirmed that all Christian peoples, since they had received salvation of the Jews, were to render to them

the highest homage, and to show them their gratitude by benefits. In this last period of his life, marked by mystical dispositions, Alexander had to be sensitive to such arguments. Both he and his government were afraid of touching with an imprudent hand the religious rules of the Jews. Alexander had great respect for the venerable people of the Old Covenant and was sympathetic to their present situation. Hence his utopian quest to make this people access the New Testament. To this, and in 1817 with the help of the emperor, the Society of Christians of Israel was created, meaning Jews who converted to Christianity, not necessarily orthodoxy, and because of this enjoyed considerable privileges, they had the right everywhere in Russia to trade and carry on

various trades without belonging to guilds or workshops, and they were freed, they and their descendants forever of any civil and military service. Nevertheless, the society experienced no influx of converted Jews and soon ceased to exist. I should note that the English missionary society, this is connected to the Bible Society. this was a strictly ecumenical mission which Alexander was a part of at least for a while it shows you that this is what

Protestantism is and this is why both Poles and Russians called Protestants a a Judaism of the church going that this far back Protestants were saying these ridiculous things

about the Jews actually believing that they're the people of the Old Testament it's not like they were ignorant of the Talmud it just was something that wasn't accessible to them they believe the superficial explanations that many of the Jews had given them

and you know that ever since Cromwell for Christ's sake Judaism was was deeply a part of the other British elite and ruling class Alexander had been so badly misled by people like this

and I'm one of these people who believes that he absconded the throne and became Kuzmich actually I did a lecture on that some time ago to atone for many of these errors the worst thing that could have happened to the Russian Empire at the time was the murder of Tsar Paul

because things like this would not have gone this far but it was just this promotion of ignorance by groups like the Bible Society the English Missionary Society showing them homage You know, these are the people who claim to be against idolatry. You see how little has changed with the bulk of these Protestants, especially from Britain.

The good dispositions of Alexander I, in regards to the Jews, made him express his convictions, put an end to the accusations of ritual murders, which arose against them. These accusations were unknown in Russia until the division of Poland from where they came. In Poland, they appeared in the 16th. century transmitted from Europe where they were born in England in 1144 before resurfacing in the 12th to 13th century in Spain, France, Germany, and Great Britain. Pops and monarchs fought off these accusations without them disappearing in the 14th nor 15th century. The first trial in Russia took place in Seno near Vedwitzk in 1816 was not only stopped by Her Majesty's decision, but incited the Minister of Religious Affairs Galitzin

to send the authorities of all provinces the following injunction henceforth not to accuse the Jews of having to put to death Christian children solely supported by prejudices and without proof. In 1822 to 23 another affair of this kind broke out in Villehe

also in the province of Vibesk Vitebsk. However, the court decreed in 1824, the Jews accused in many uncertain Christian testimonies of having killed this boy, supposedly to collect his blood, must be exonerated of all suspicion. Nevertheless, in the 25 years of his reign, Alexander I did not sufficiently study the questions to conceive and put into practice a methodical solution satisfactory to all regarding the Jewish problem as it was in Russia at the time. A lot of this shouldn't make any

sense to you. It isn't so much that if there's an accusation that a Jew murdered somebody, we should have a trial. It's that these accusations are not allowed. I was very impressed. I did a whole lecture last year, I think, on the Belize case in Kiev. And then, of course, I also read Ariel Toav's book. I think he was from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. giving credence to a lot of these rituals from these are very extreme um, heistic and extreme orthodox groups,

small though they are. I was very impressed by Toav's book. Uh, there was a strong amount of evidence. Golitsyn, this shouldn't surprise you. That he was outraged that anyone would, would, uh,

accuse the Jews of this kind of thing. Um, the assumption, I guess, is that it's impossible. They're incapable of this. Uh, this wasn't just a matter of prejudice. Where did it come from? In the legal system at the time, you can't just have something based on prejudice and without proof go before a judge. It was a normal system at the time, and it improved under Alexander II.

So this was just almost a veneration of the Jews by these people. The Masons were deeply, you know, hated any. This was their master race. and you know this is getting you give them an inch and this is the kind of crap that you get Golitsyn certainly was profiting from this was profiting from them and they wouldn't have reacted with this irrationality saying that you're not allowed to even say this unless there was actual evidence that these extreme groups are doing this are killing kids how to act what to do with this separated people who has not yet grafted onto Russia

and which continues to grow in number is also the question to which the Decembrist Pestel who opposed the emperor sought an answer for the Russia of the future, which he proposed to direct. In the truth of Russia, he proposed two solutions. Either make the Jews merge for good in the Christian population of Russia,

above all, it is necessary to deflect the effect, harmful to Christians, of the close length that unites the Jews amongst themselves, or which is directed against Christians, which completely isolates the Jews from all other citizens. Convene the most knowledgeable rabbis and Jewish personalities, listen to their proposals, and then take action. If Russia does not expel the Jews,

all the more they shouldn't adopt unfriendly attitudes towards Christians. The second solution would consist in helping the Jews create a separate state in one of the regions of Asia Minor. To this end, it is necessary to establish a gathering point for the Jewish people and to send several armies to support it. We are not very far from the future Zionist idea. The Russian and Polish Jews together will form a people of more than two million souls. Such a mass of men in search of a country will have no difficulty in overcoming obstacles, such as the opposition of the Turks.

Crossing Turkey from Europe, they will pass into Asiatic Turkey and occupy their enough place and land to create a specifically Jewish state. However, Pestl acknowledges that such an enormous undertaking requires, special circumstances and an entrepreneurial spirit of genius. Nikita Moravov, another Decemberist, stipulated in his proposed constitution, that Jews can enjoy civil rights in the places where they live, but that the freedom to settle in other places will depend on the particular decisions of the people's supreme assembly. I'm not sure if this is one of the first proposals. about this mass relocation

to either Asia Minor, which is Turkey, or elsewhere in the Middle East. And I'm not even sure that they're referring to the fact, well, these are so-called people of the Old Testament, therefore they should go back to what we call Israel today. Jews did very, very well

under the Ottoman Empire. That's going to change the dawn of the 20th century. And it also goes to show what the Decemberist movement was. They attempted to essentially overthrow the monarchy at the death of Alexander I. They were high-ranking masons,

Judeo-files, and I'm not sure had they taken over what they would have done. They were very unpopular, unlike Nicholas I, who eventually prosecuted them, although they got fairly weak sentences. I'm not sure if this is the first time

this has been mentioned, but the Zionist idea had very few followers amongst Jews at the time. But this is at least a very early mention of the Zionist ideal and but you know almost I mean several armies

well who are they going to be fighting were they going to invade the Turkish Empire what what you know and this seems to be the kind of mentality that's that's all over the elite Russian impolishment attitude towards the Jews just one unrealistic idea after another

nevertheless the instances proper to the Jewish population the Kahalo opposed with all their might, the interference of state power, and all external influence. On this subject, opinions differ. From the religious point of view, as many Jewish writers explain, living in the diaspora's historical punishment that weighs on Israel for its former sins. Scattering must be assumed to merit God's forgiveness and the return to Palestine.

For this it is necessary to live without failing according to the law and not to mingle with the surrounding peoples. That is the ordeal. But for a liberal Jewish historian of the early 20th century, the dominant class and capable of any creative work, deaf to the influences of its time, devoted all its energies to preserving from the attacks of time, both external and internal, a petrified national and religious life. The Cahal drastically stifled the protests to the weakest. The cultural and educational reform of 1804 confined itself to illusory illusory blurringed. the distinctive and foreign character of the Jews without having recourse to coercion or even taking mercy on prejudices. These decisions sowed a great disturbance within the Kahal, and that they harbored a threat

to the power it exercised over the population. In the regulation, the most sensitive point for the Kahul was the prohibition of delivering the unruly to the Harem, or even more severe, the observation that to keep the population and servile submission to a social order as it had been for centuries, it was forbidden to change garb. But it cannot be denied that the Kahulam also had reasonable

regulatory requirements for the life of the Jews, such as the Kasaki rule, allowing and forbidding the members of the community from taking on a particular type of farming or occupation, which put an end to excessive competition between Jews. Thou shalt not move the bounds of thy neighbor, Deuteronomy 1914. In 1808, an unidentified Jew transmitted an anonymous note fearing reprisals from the Cahal to the Minister of Internal Affairs entitled

Some Remarks Concerning the Management of the Life of the Jews. He wrote, many do not regard as sacred the innumerable rights and rules, which divert attention from all this is useful, enslaved the people to prejudices, take by their multiplication an enormous amount of time and deprive the Jews of the advantage of being good citizens. He noted that the rabbis pursuing only their interests have enclosed life in an intertwining of rules, have concentrated in their hands all the police, legal, and spiritual authority, more precisely the study of the Talmud and the observance of rights as a unique means of distinguishing oneself and acquiring affluence have become the first dream and aspiration of the Jews.

And although the governmental regulation limits the prerogatives of the rabbi and Kellehim, the spirit of the people remain the same. The author of this note considered the rabbis and the kaha'al as the main culprits of the ignorance and misery of the people. Despite the fact that this system of rule in Eastern Europe is long gone, there is a kind of neo-Kahal amongst Jews, especially in places like Ukraine. that have a very similar system. The Talmudic idea, even if it's not directly studied, its basic prejudices are still instilled in young Jews all the time. We have this rule that they're already, I don't know what's certain type of farming.

It was farming in general. So any attempt to settle them on land by the very rule of the Kahal is not going to work. And you notice here that competition among Jews, Jews is out of the question. We're in competition with Gentiles. It can never be amongst each other. I know Willis Cardo used to say when I was working for him years ago that if the Jews didn't have us, they'd be slaughtering each other because they, you know, they functioned by this creation of an enemy, this prejudice that they, that they, that the Gentile world is

savage and inhuman and literally inhuman but now the German Jewish mostly confined to Germany the Jewish Enlightenment you did have this kind of talk in the second paragraph you mentioned about how

wicked not so much the Talmud as such but we know it is the Talmud as such but how it's being applied that the Kahal uses these prejudices. I mean there's nothing in that series of books, that evil series of books that, you know, it's a totalitarian system. It regulates everything you do, even in the bathroom, even in how you eat and everything else. But this is one of the

means that poor Jews who are put upon by the elites were kept in line. So with the series of, and so this is more or less a rejection of the Talmud by a lot of these people. In Eastern Europe, you didn't have a lot of that, especially at this point, because the Kahal was so powerful. In Western Europe, you had a stronger Jewish enlightenment that realized what was going on. But since the bulk, the overwhelming majority of the world's Jews were within the old Polish and Russian Empire, this is the mentality that still exists today. And this is exactly where it comes from. Another Jewish public man, Gila Markovic, a native of Prussia, wrote that the members of the Vilnius Kahal, with the help of the local administration exerted a severe repression against all those who denounced their

illegal acts. Now deprived of the right to the harem, they kept their accusers for long years in prison, and if one of them succeeded in getting a message from his cell to the higher authorities, they sent him without any other form of trials to the next world. When this kind of crime was revealed, the Cahal spent large sums to stifle the affair. Other Jewish historians give examples of assassinations directly commissioned by the Jewish cahal. In their opposition to governmental measures, the caholam relied essentially on the religious sense of their action. Thus, the union of the cahal and the rabbis, desirous of maintaining the power over the masses, made the government believe that every act of a Jew was subject to such

and such a religious prescription. The role of religion was thereby increased. As a result, the people of the administration saw in the Jews, not members of different social groups, but a single entity closely knit together. The vices and infractions of the Jews were explained not by individual motives, but by the alleged land amorality of the Jewish religion. The kahaal is not that far off from any other form of organized crime. And in this case, it's not so much the religious element that veils their action, but it really relies then and now

Jewish power relies on public ignorance which is why they're so obsessed with censorship and have always been even in pre-modern times public ignorance is absolutely essential the Kabbalah the Talmud and all these associated books are almost entirely closed

to the Gentiles and of course that's that's on purpose now I think you know Fatima Americans are such that even if they knew they wouldn't know what to do. I think they'd rather kill themselves than do any harm to their social debtors. But the knowledge of this kind of thing is what they fear the most. So keeping all their books closed, their practice is secret. And the Cahal was essential to this. This was the main source of their power as far as the Gentile world was concerned. The union of Cajalum and rabbis did not want to see or hear anything. It extended its lead and cover over the masses. The power of the Cahal only increased while the rights of the elders and rabbis were limited

by the regulation of 1804. This loss is offset by the fact that the Cahal acquired, it is true only in a certain measure, the role of a representative administration which it had enjoyed in Poland. The Cahal owed the strengthening of its authority to the institution of deputies. This deputation of the Jewish communities established in the Western provinces in charge of debating at leisure with the government the problems of Jewish life was elected in 1807 and sat intermittently for 18 years. These deputies endeavored above all to restore to the rabbis the right to the harem. They declared that to deprive the rabbis of the right to chastise the disobedient is contrary to the religious aspect which the Jews are obliged by law to have for the rabbis.

rabbis. These deputies succeeded in persuading a member of the committee of Senator Popov 1809 that the authority of the rabbis was a support for the Russian governmental power. The members of the committee did not resist in front of the threat that the Jews would escape the authority of the rabbis to delve into depravity. The committee was prepared to maintain in its integrity all this archaic structure to avoid the terrible consequences evoked by the deputies. Its members did not seek to know who the deputies considered to be violators of the spiritual law. They did not suspect that they were those who aspired to education. The deputies exerted all their efforts to strengthen the authority of the cahal

and to drink at the source of the movement towards culture. They succeeded in deferring the limitations previously taken to the wearing of traditional Jewish garb, which dated back to the Middle Ages and so blatantly separated the Jews from the surrounding world. Even in Riga, the law that ordered the Jews to wear another garment was not applied anywhere, and it was reported by the emperor himself while awaiting new legislation. All requests of the deputies were not satisfied. Far from it.

They needed money, and to get it, the deputies frightened their communities by ominously announcing the intentions of the government and by amplifying the rumors of the capital. In 1820, Markovic accused the deputies of intent. potentially spreading false news to force the population to pay to the cahal the sums demanded. In 1825, the institution of the Jewish deputies was suppressed. You know, the cahal couldn't function unless it was able to influence the state itself, both local and, you know, federal. And that was the case all over the place, you know. Zionism, and this is one of the reasons that Natura Carta, the Hasidic group that's against Israel,

they say that Zionism can't exist unless Jews take over the foreign policy establishment of their host countries, which is something that they're repulsed by. In other words, there's very good reason to distrust the Jews in this respect. But here you have a state within a state, very wealthy, completely unified, at least in Eastern Europe. and to maintain its secrecy in this ideology especially secret is one of the reasons that they were able to function. They had the money to penetrate the governing system,

the elites around them, who did profit from their connection with the Jews. So all of this is based on this obsession with unity, cohesion, which is why the herm was so important. And I think with that line that you, you know, read very slowly, the movement towards culture, that means movement towards enlightenment, which did at the time threaten the kaha'al. Life was very different in Western Europe for them than in Eastern Europe.

Maintaining especially younger and possibly more rebellious Jews and basic ignorance, except for the Talmud, was very important. So the entire system was based on deceit, control and you know spreading false news this is 1825 and and we're talking about it and this is how the you know and superb organization and that's the case today there are even for a handful of Jews in a country there are hundreds of organizations they're at 100% mobilization and that mentality didn't begin here but it's very obvious here and I don't think the suppression of the Jewish deputies really really mattered one way or

the other, because one thing about the Kahulis, despite the fact that it is very rigid, it can also adapt to circumstances. One of the sources of tension between the authorities and Kahulam resided in the fact that the latter, the only ones authorized to levy the capitation on the Jewish population, hid the souls during the censuses, and concealed a large quantity of them. The government thought that it knew the exact numbers of the Jewish population in order to demand the corresponding amount of capitation, but it was very difficult to establish it. Is capitation taxation?

You know? Oh, yeah, yeah, per capita. Okay, gotcha. For example, in Berdicev, the unrecorded Jewish population regularly accounted for nearly half the actual number of Jewish inhabitants. According to the official data that the government has succeeded in establishing for 1818, the Jews were 677,000, an already important number, for example, by comparison with the data of 1812, the number of male individuals had suddenly doubled. But it was still an undervalued figure, for there were about 40,000 Jews from the Kingdom of Poland to add.

Even with reduced figures of the Khaalum, there were unrecovered taxes every year, and not only were they not recuperated, but they augmented from year to year. Alexander I personally told the Jewish representatives of his discontent at seeing so many concealments and arrears, not to mention the smuggling industry. In 1817, the remission of all fines and surcharges, penalties, and arrears was decreed, and a pardon was granted to all those who had been punished for not correctly recording souls, but on the condition that the Caholam provide honest data from then on. But no improved

Yeah These people just don't learn But no improvement ensued In 1820 the Minister of Finance announced that all measures aimed at improving the economic situation of the Jews were unsuccessful Many Jews were wandering without identity papers A new census reported a number of souls

Two or three times greater if not more than those previously provided by Jewish societies However, the Jewish population was constantly increasing. Most researchers see one of the main reasons for this growth as being the custom of early marriages prevalent at that time among the Jews, as early as 13 years old for boys, and from 12 years old onward for girls. In the anonymous note of 1808 quoted above, the unknown Jewish author writes that this custom of early unions is at the root of innumerable evils and prevents the Jews from getting rid of inveterate customs and activities that draw upon them the general public's indignation and harms them as well as others. Tradition among the Jews is that those who are not married at a young age are held in contempt and even the most destitute draw on their last resources to marry their children as soon as possible, even though these newlyweds incur the vicissitudes of a miserable existence.

Early marriages were introduced by the rabbis who took advantage of them, and one will be better able to contract a profitable marriage by devoting himself to the study of the Talmud and the strict observance of the rights. Those who married early were indeed only occupied with studying the Talmud, and when finally came the time to lead an autonomous existence, these fathers, ill-prepared for labor, ignorant of the working life, turned to the manufacture of alcohol and petty trading. the same goes for crafts by marrying the 15-year-old apprentice no longer learns his trade but becomes his own boss and only ruins the work in the mid-1920s in the provinces of grodna and vilnius there was a rumor that it would be forbidden to enter into marriage before reaching the age of majority which is why there was a hasty conclusion of marriages between children who were little more than nine years old these early marriages debilitated the life of the Jews. How could such a swarming, such a desensification of the population, such competition in similar occupations leads to anything else in misery?

The policy of the Caholam contributed to the worsening of the material conditions of the Jews. Well, keep in mind that, you know, as everyone knows, their relatively small numbers are always a source of anxiety. And we all know Kevin McDonald's book on these methods of adapting these cultural norms that compensated for the lack of numbers, which is what, you know, essentially all conversation about the Jews for us revolve around. This is partly why they're the way that they are. So having large families, and you see this with the Hasidics today, and clearly the lack of any work ethic for the bulk of these people didn't change their financial position. These are still very wealthy institutions. This is the ultimate in parasitism. There's still this huge controversy in Israel today about the Hasidics in Jerusalem who do not work. They claim to study Talmud. They live on welfare and all the other scams that they're involved in.

And as the Israeli military situation gets worse and worse, they want to draft these people. But since they were there prior to the establishment of Israel, most of them oppose the state of Israel, but don't mind taking money from it. They want to draft these people. And so there's riots and all this stuff. And so work other than studying the Talmud is out of the question for a bulk of the question for a bulk of of these people. Therefore, the elite engaged in what they say, petty training, trading scams, alcohol, extracting rents, crimes of all kinds to maintain themselves as a very powerful organization. They were parasites in every sense of the word, and the Jews themselves were not shy about talking about this. You're just not allowed to say it today, and you go to prison in much of Europe, if you even mention it. Manasha Illyere, a distinguished Talmudist, but also a supporter of the rationalism of the Age of the Enlightenment, published in 1807 a book, which he sent to the rabbis. It was quickly withdrawn from circulation by the rabbinit, and his second book was to be destined to a massive book burning. He addressed the dark aspects of Jewish life. He stated, misery is inhumanly great, but can it be otherwise when the Jews have more mouths to feed than hands to work? It is important to make the matter. is understand that it is necessary to earn a living by the sweat of their brow.

Young people who have no income contract marriage by counting on the mercy of God and on the purse of their father, and when this support is lacking, ladenwood family, they throw themselves on the first occupation come, even if it is dishonest. In droves, they devote themselves to commerce, but it later cannot feed them all. They are obliged to resort to deceit. This is why it is desirable that the Jews turn to agriculture, an army of idlers under the appearance of educated people, live by charity and at the expense of the community. No one cures the people. The rich only think of enriching themselves. The rabbis think only of the disputes between Hasidim and Minnogdis, Jewish Orthodox,

and the only concern of the Jewish activists is to short circuit the misfortune presented in the form of governmental decrees, even if they contribute to the good of the people. Thus, the great majority of the Jews in Russia lived on small trade crafts and small industries or served as intermediaries. They have inundated the cities of factories and retail shops. How could the economic life of the Jewish people be healthy under these conditions? However, a much later Jewish author of the mid-20th century was able to write, recalling this time, it is true that the Jewish mass lived cheaply and poorly, but the Jewish community

as a whole was not miserable. Well, the solution to the problem was organized crime. Remember that there were no gun laws in the Russian Empire, really, of any substance. The Cahal was armed, and later in the 19th and early 20th century, they were heavily armed. This old myth of these poor scholars wandering around being attacked for no reason by the animal Gentiles, It's just that. It's a myth. It's a story.

They, you know, despite all of these alleged problems, they continued to do very well. And the only way that that could be is through crime, through the extraction of rents, things like prostitution. Because, you know, the distillery issue and owning these taverns that wasn't just about alcohol. These are also, you know, hostels really, or maybe like we would call a motel. where prostitution was promoted. Of course, so long as it's Gentile women. And this is why they were so despised,

but an increase in numbers meant that they were able to defend themselves. And that really, you know, that really hasn't changed. This is one of the reasons that Zionism, you mean the Black 100 supported some version of Zionism in the early 20th century.

They simply don't belong here. They contribute very little. especially at the local level, and everyone is starting to hate them, again, which is why secrecy is so important then and now. There is no lack of interest in the rather unexpected testimonies of the life of the Jews in the Western provinces seen by the participants in the Napoleonic expedition of 1812 who passed through the region. On the outskirts of Dojitza, the Jews are rich and wealthy.

They trade intensively with Russia, Poland, and even go to the Leipzig Fair. At Klovoque, the Jews had the rights to distill alcohol and make vodka and mead. They established our own cabarets, inns, and relays located on highways. The Jews of Mogulov are well-off, undertake large-scale trading, although a terrible misery rains around the area. Almost all the Jews in those places had a license to sell spirits. Financial transactions were largely developed there. Here again is the test. testimony of an impartial observer. In Kiev, the Jews are no longer counted. The general characteristic of Jewish life is ease, although it is not the lot of all. On the level of psychology and

everyday life, the Russian Jews have the following specific traits, a constant concern about their fate, their identity, how to fight, defend themselves. Cohesion stems from established customs, the existence of an authoritarian and powerful social structure charged with preserving the uniqueness of their way of life. Adaption to new conditions is to a very large extent collective and not individual. And this is how they were able to function. If you go to Wikipedia and put in Cahal, which I don't recommend you do, or the pale of settlement, you'll get this story about how awful it was and the Jews were so terribly repressed

but everyone at the time knew that that was a complete lie by using these methods that got them hated everywhere promoting alcoholism cabarets what the heck is that at the time you know that's essentially your adult bookstore hotel relays on highways

just like the Khazar Empire they controlled these trade routes and trade routes were difficult in a place as large as Russia with the weather and the mud as well as the ice and snow so they were absolutely dominant in this respect and the increase in numbers just meant that they were able to go to more places Jews were not confined to the pale of settlement

they weren't confined to anything the only thing that the Kahul demanded was that they be confined to them because that is the nature of cohesion That is their one and only concern because the more cohesive and organized they are, the more powerful they are. And it's a collective mentality, not an individual one. So if they promote individualism and free market and capitalism to Europe, that just weakens Gentiles. They don't think in those terms.

And there's all these punishments for intra-Jewish competition going to the non-Jewish authority. to report, you know, a crime of a Jew, which is Rodeaf, which is their death. So cohesion, cohesion, cohesion. This is how they functioned, and that's how they function today. I think it's interesting that you're starting to see mention of early ideas of having their own homeland back in Palestine and that people are promoting it. and because they want them to leave. But they don't,

no one's taken into consideration that not every one of them's going to want to go back and that they can use it as, they can use it as their center of power as they remain a diaspora in other nations. I mean, you, it's almost like they talk about it today. It's almost like Jews talk about it in the United States today, how they're a diaspora. Well, how are you a diaspora if you have a homeland?

How are you a diaspora? You just don't want to live there. You just, your whole life is being somewhere else, being the other, and being able to take advantage of that. Yeah, you know, the concept of Zionism in and of itself, and Sven Longshank used to say this all the time, I don't necessarily have a problem with it. The problem with Zionism is, A, the fact that it has to wipe out people that it is. It imposes itself upon, and number two, it can't function unless it completely dominates the major powers, the dominant power surrounding them, especially the U.S. and Western Europe. But the concept that Jews should have their own state away from us in and of itself, and this was the right-wing position, the Christian Socialist Party and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Union of the Russian people in Russia, this was their solution. but because, you know, there's only a certain number of people who are willing to go.

They're going to be surrounded. They're surrounded by enemies, no matter where they go, that their position will be very untenable unless they have sponsors all over the world. And that requires millions of Jews to stay behind and be that pipeline of money and support from one country to, you know, what we call Israel today. so Zionism in and of itself isn't the problem it's what it has to do to function that's the problem now that the Hasidic idea is to say that well Zionism only works

when their Messiah comes and that that will be the center of the world and all the wealth will flow to it so and that's what Notary Carter says except for the last part but prior to that the Notori Carter position Some of the Hasidim say that trying to be the best neighbor that you can be to avoid being attacked, to avoid exactly doing this kind of thing.

This may be unique to deter Ricardo, and I've had many conversations with Rabbi Weiss over the phone and in person about this kind of thing. Yes, maybe it's a sanitized idea, but they put their money where their mouth is all the time. I mean, the JDL burnt down their main synagogue in Muncie, New York. So, but when these people were promoting the so-called Zionist idea at the time, of course, there's no way that they could have known that in moving there, they're still going to need to dominate and have sponsors that they control and maintain that kind of secrecy and maintain that kind of cohesion. Right now, the position of Israel is extremely difficult. they are so overstretched in the security department you have a lot of out migration

you have a very weak economy now and very little social trust especially given the Netanyahu administration and the people who are running it for the first time if you recall you know both prior to the Hamas invasion

and even after criticizing Israel sort of became mainstream which was partially damage control, but it did frighten a lot of people, that a lot of Jews, that we can't have this. The reason that that happened, of course, is that Netanyahu with his settler administration was engaging into this overt, but very conservative Jewish nationalism, you know, about homosexuals, you know, the religious rule, the country. And so secular Jews were, you know, really despised the guy, not to mention all of the constitutional and legal reforms,

that gave his cabinet a tremendous amount of power. Now, I don't believe that the Hamas invasion was staged. I don't believe that they encouraged, that the Lakud encouraged it. I have a paper out on that. I don't think that's true. It's a very dangerous game to play. So the point of all this is that they're very difficult situation. coupled with the

total depopulation of much of Ukraine now that's also dangerous this is why you have maybe not in public so much but the new Khazadia idea and you still have the Jewish oligarchs in charge of Ukrainian

policy but you know Ukraine is not an independent country but the oligarchs have a tremendous amount of power and contacts with Jews around the world you know they control control Kievan policy, essentially as surrogates for Jewish, you know, the administration of so-called Joe Biden was heavily Jewish.

And under Trump, it's massively pro-Zionist. You couldn't get more Jewish if you tried here. So now, the fall of, the tragic fall of Assad may have allowed them to breathe a sign of relief, but what might happen as a result of that as settlers now are going into Golom. but you know there's there's only a few million of them there they're tremendously divided now for the first time in a very long time thanks to to netanyahu what happened at the so-called international criminal court the south african case this is now public all of a sudden these jews are coming out saying we're opposed to all of this but they would never say that back when they turned Gaza into a open-air prison in 2006 and especially 2006 and prior to

that. So this is a lot of damage control. But the Israeli defense forces are so stretched and the Iranians proved that they could penetrate the so-called Iron Dome with no problem. I think the best thing that happened to them was the fall of Assad. But that's all going to depend on what happens. Yes, these militias, ISIS, these are all Western creations. They're financed by the West. But anything could happen. Even the West can't keep track. of who's who they're always changing their name to avoid detection um Israel is using this as an excuse to continue to attack Syrian territory but they're really you know because of these divisions uh this a citizen in Jerusalem that's just you know seems minor now by comparison out migration a struggling economy shipping is still a problem thanks to the Houthi in in Yemen, they're in a rough position and I can't help but think, I know, I don't want to jump the gun, but colonization of a depopulated Ukraine based on the new Khazardia idea, I mean, Crimea is never going to go back, it's always going to be Russian, much of eastern Ukraine

is going to remain Russian, but that still leaves a large territory that is just traumatized beyond belief that is now very thinly populated. to get worse. Is it possible that there may be out migration there? Of course, they certainly have the money to make this work. You know, Israel, to me, is, you know, the promised land of the Jews is New York. It's really the U.S. today, far more so than this little state that's always on the verge of, you know, especially with the Iranian power. And, you know, Iran is a first world country. And that's, you know, the U.S. was driven out of Afghanistan. I mean, nothing is guaranteed with these people.

And once the Ukraine wars, you know, it's drawing to a close, Russians may start to focus more on the Middle East. In Gaza, the war of attrition is not going Israel's way. They're suffering huge losses that they'll never admit to. And the same goes for Lebanon. And now that bombing hospitals, which is old news, they've been. been doing this for years, poisoning wells in early Zionism. You have Jews talking about this all the time.

Now this is mainstream. Israel's position is iffy. Anything can happen. So rather than use the Samson option, which is you know, to destroy themselves with nuclear weapons, which is, I don't know if they would ever do that, their own

nuclear weapons essentially come up and come back down again, the possibility of another community in a depopulated Ukraine it's something that's still there and so there's simply not enough of them in Israel they're stretched all over the place now with Golan I mean how many settlers can they possibly

send out? Settlers don't work they never do they require tremendous military assistance to function because everyone hates them they're heavily armed for the first time you have like normal people talking about settlers

you know that was unthinkable 10 years ago so it's you know it's conceivable that this may have

and there are organizations I mean no one's more organized than Ukrainian Jews you know the largest Jewish institutions are in Ukraine

and you have so many organizations tremendous control over the Kiev state apparatus it's Jewish from top to bottom at least in ruling circles

you have now a Jewish essentially a Jewish administration in the US for God knows how many decades that's definitely that's definitely impossibility I always thought that Israel in the Jewish mind is it's not as important as we make it out to be

their power is mostly in the US and Britain it's in London it's in D.C. It's in New York and they have tremendous power but it's not formally a Jewish state. So what comes out of all this, I don't know. But they still have a kind of neo-Kahal system in Ukraine. But even there, you see divisions.

Kulomoisky's in prison. Zelensky, who is very unstable, is very erratic. I mean, he really is breaking down. He's going to have to be killed or replaced if this is going to continue. The military isn't going to be listening to him anymore. to the extent that there is a military. These divisions are absolutely intolerable to Jews, as we've been saying. So what comes out of this, this is these very interesting times to be a Jew.

What ends up happening in Ukraine, as far as Jewish angle is concerned, versus what happens as the IDF really has continued, they're not winning. They're not winning in Gaza. They're not winning in Lebanon. They've lost in Lebanon several times. now casualties are very high and with all of this criticism something radical has to happen and what that might be is we're not in any position to predict but there may be a reversal

of of you know the delimination of the khal it may return again on Ukrainian territory right we have a few more sentences and then we're at our natural stopping point Right. We must do justice to this organic unity of land, which in the first half of the 19th century gave the Jewish people of Russia its original aspect. The world was compact, organic, subjective exations, not spared of suffering and deprivation, but it was a world in itself. Man was not stifled within it. In this world, one could experience joie de vivre, one could find one's food, one could build one's life to one's taste, and in one's own own way, both materially and spiritually. Central fact, the spiritual dimension of the community was

linked to traditional knowledge and the Hebrew language. But in the same book devoted to the Russian Jewish world, and other writer notes that the lack of rights, material misery, and social humiliation hardly allowed self-respect to develop among the people. And things like cognitive dissonance, mental illness, which is, you know, Jewish stock and trade, complete neuroticism is part of the results of this. This almost sociopathic drive for power and control may well derive from this, and it's modern guys anyway, from this lack of self-respect given the fact of they know, that their history is nonsense. And of course, that's not always the case. But some of them, the bulk of them probably have to be aware that we are a deceptive people.

Which is really where initially the modern Zionism came from. We don't belong here. We're not of these people. We have to go. But that turns out to be a lot more difficult than they ever realized. So whichever side of the Jewish psyche ends up winning, here is going to be very interesting. All right.

We'll come back for episode nine in a few days. As always, I will encourage people to go to the show notes. There are multiple ways to support Dr. Johnson's work. And again, we thank you for providing the knowledge and the context that's required to understand this text. Thank you. It's my pleasure, my friend. I'll talk to you soon.

See you in a couple days. Thank you. All right, ma'am. I want to welcome everyone back to part nine of our reading of 200 years together by Alexander Solzscheyce and Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson is here. How are you doing, Dr. Johnson? I'm doing okay. I'm doing all right. This is going very well, I think.

And I think we're getting some pretty good feedback from it. I don't know. I haven't looked, but I've heard from others that that's the case. Oh, yeah, we're getting a lot of feedback, especially on Twitter, on something. social media. So, yeah, no complaints yet. We had one person who contacted us who knows Russian really well to mention that we were, there was a word that we were wondering if it was talking about, it was spirituals. And he said that in the Russian, he said it's definitely referring to some kind of

clergy, some kind of spirit, some kind of expert clergy kind of thing. Yeah, that was my first thought, but then you know, there's a lot rough in this translation. So, and we've had a few

terms like that. I haven't seen the original in a very long time. I have it around here somewhere. but um and i'm we have we have we have at least one russian speaker who's following us and he's following us in the original in the original um russian and no complaints so far he just wanted to say that um that one word would be would relate that in some way there well i i sure can't speak it uh i could read it slowly um and uh but you know and i've translated bits and pieces but certainly not secure enough in my abilities

to do anything of any of any length especially with someone like Shultz and I don't want to do him any any disservice all right well we're coming up to the end of a chapter here so this may be a shorter episode than normal

but it'll give us both a chance to take a little bit of a break I guess if we only go for a little bit so let's let's jump right in as normal. Stop me anytime. The picture we have presented of these years is complex, as is almost any problem related to the Jewish world. Henceforth, throughout our development, we must not lose sight of this complexity, but must constantly bear in mind without being disturbed by the apparent contradictions between various authors.

Long ago, before being expelled from Spain, the Jews of Eastern Europe marched at the head of other names. nations. Today, in the first half of the 17th, today, their cultural impoverishment is total. Deprived of rights cut off from the surrounding world, they retreated into themselves. The Renaissance passed by without concern for them, as of the intellectual movement of the 18th century in Europe. But this Jewish world was strong in itself. Hindered by countless religious commandments and prohibitions, the Jew not only did not suffer from them, saw in them the source of infinite joys. In them, the intellectual found satisfaction in the subtle dialectic of the Talmud, the feeling in the mysticism of the Kabbalah. Even the study of

the Bible was sidelined and knowledge of grammar was considered almost a crime. Well, the context of this is that he's talking about the first half of the 17th century. so maybe just before the uprising of Kim Ilnyetsky you know we've already you know one of the big issues one of the being you know as we're summarizing everything so far one of the big issues is that Jews especially in Eastern Europe were given every opportunity to become normal citizens and ultimately this is where Zionism comes from

you know Zionism initially was pretty healthy with people like Herzl came out and said there's a reason that they don't like us here we are completely alien to them it's not our fault and it's certainly not their fault but you know we can't be here anymore so they could never be ordinary citizens they were given every opportunity

we were just talking about this to be landowners to be normal citizens so talking about I don't know what he means at the head of other nations he may just mean wealthier they certainly have the superiority

complex but in Eastern Europe of course it's a different story now I'm not sure if if Jews especially at the time would agree with that but the Enlightenment started at least for them in places

like Germany in northern Europe they cut themselves off from the surrounding world Talk about a theme. That's a theme that comes up over and over again. The theme of exile and how it's been reinterpreted over the years. Takunulam is what happens when that exile is over, having no connection necessarily with the state of Israel, as we know it today,

recruiting into themselves. It wasn't as if they were doing anything else prior to that. Now, the Renaissance passed them by as if this was an entirely Gentile phenomenon. the you know the alchemists were heavily influenced by what we today call the cabala um the enlightenment in europe was as much of a threat as it was an opportunity you know jews were always identifiable but the enlightenment allowed them to leave the kaha leave the shuttle and um you're not as important in the west but but then act like they're they're an ordinary citizen there which of course is not true.

Now, they certainly, you know, I think poor Jews were definitely hindered by all of this. He's talking about the Talmud. He could only be talking about the Talmud. I'm not sure what joy he means here. I think he may mean an intellectual joy. But the so-called subtle dialectic, where everything is based on hair splitting, that served them very well in Gentile society. some of the themes that have come up over the last nine and eight episodes

have been the fact that people's especially when they're new arrivals that they come in contact with are not ready for this group of people who are very strict among themselves but totally maccabellian with everybody else yes many popes and many patriarchs burned the talmud that's true but who the heck is going to read that? You know, I've read when I was at Nebraska, I still remember the Sostino edition in the basement, this big blue, this beautiful bound set of books,

took up half a shelf, and it was just agony from page one. There are some places, you know, like Sanhedron, more interesting than others, but it was painful. It's a closed book to everybody. People aren't ready for this level of economic dominance, concept of competition of the push cart mentality free trade none of this was even

conceptualized prior to the Jews moving into an area Russia had it particularly bad because although they've had experience with Jews that we talked about weeks ago but when Poland was dismembered all of a sudden Russia now had something like 85% of the world's population within their borders pretty much overnight. Another theme, which comes directly from that, is this awful, naeufte, almost this childlike approach to the Jews, this idealistic approach to the Jews,

that they're just like us, except that they're bound by these many rules. And if we just convince them not to, you know, take the Talmud so seriously or the Kahul so seriously, maybe they'll be just like us. and it simply doesn't work that way so far we haven't heard really about the Karaits although

there were many of them within the Russian Empire at this point wherever the Karaits went they immediately were met with extreme persecution by the Talmudas I'm not sure about Samaritans I think maybe they were they were confined

to the Middle East but you had plenty of car rights especially roughly around the Crimean area even today to some extent but the Talmudists were wiping them out from day one as soon as the Talmud became dominant and of course the author in this quote

himself seems to imply a dialectic between the Talmud and the Kabbalah and there's something to that I see it in a lot of Jewish publications a lot of Jewish entertainment the Jew is in two different pieces one is like the IDF soldier

very practical and conservative in a very broad sense and the other is this hippie if you've ever seen the movie Meet the Parents with Robert De Niro especially the second one you have this you know there's two

people getting married Ben Stiller is in it the Jew of course he comes from this hippie family the Kabbalah side and Robert De Nirok, who plays a Jew is a veteran, he's high intelligence you know, it implies almost

to the Mossad and they're coming together and I always thought that that movie actually I don't know if he played a Jew or not but it really didn't matter because the concept was very clear when a Jewish family has made

there's always these two pillars like you see in the Masonic Lodges, the severity of the Talmud and the sort of mysticism, as he says, of the Kabbalah. And that always goes straight through every Jew. And I love what he says here. Study the Bible.

Well, the Bible has nothing to do with Judaism. Michael Hoffman taught us all that. He taught me that even when I was in grad school, their connection with the first five books of the Bible. the, you know, is zero. They use some of that verbiage, but only to interpret it and reinterpret it and reinterpret it as they see fit over the centuries.

But what we've discovered, and you know, it's been a while since I've come across this in great detail, is that even with experience with the Jews, someone like Alexander I first never quite seemed to cross that Rubicon. Maybe near the end of his life, he still thought that these were just ordinary

people. And if I can just get to them somehow. And at this point, people like D'Rajavan had already learned. Now, of course, Nicholas is going to be a very different story, thank God. But there was an elite attempt, highly Masonic, to keep Nicholas from the throne.

The thing that Jews weren't involved in that is to be very naive. But this naivete, still to this day, it hasn't gone away. Because things like the Kabbalah and Talmud are completely closed off to us. people don't know what a Jew is

when the American thinks of a Jew he thinks of Seinfeld and actually I've come across this many times oh I love Seinfeld Jews are great with this normie mentality so you get a lot out of this quote and those seem to be the dominant themes

even like in Kiev when there's a reaction against them there's always a way to sneak back in because they have access to this credit it's hard to keep them away for long because you're always going to reach a point where your backs against the wall politically and you desperately need that kind of money, that ready liquidity to use to hire mercenaries or do whatever.

That means they could never stay away for very long. There's always somebody, even the same person, who is just false into temptation and brings them in. And because of that connection to free trade, money, the monetization of non-monetary societies, which is a disaster because that leads to debt. These are some of the recurring things, even up until this point, you know, the first quarter of the 19th century that we've come across so far.

I think it was interesting that you brought Seinfeld up there when, you know, I'm old enough, remember when it was on, and I remember the last episode, and people literally hated the last episode because in the last episode, they were judged as terrible people. They were judged as selfish, self-serving people who cared about no one but themselves. And it's almost like, well, maybe I should stop my commentary right there.

No, I remember it. I remember it very well. it wasn't funny it was disappointing sometimes I wonder if this was how you repressed knowledge about yourself I think this has a lot to do with horror horrors like this too

it's the return of the repressed this was almost a sort of confession to the world couched in this perfectly harmless circumstance frankly they didn't really care about each other very much their friendship was skin deep the only non-Jew in that

was Michael Richards, but he is a 33rd degree Freemason, so he's kind of like honorary in that sense. Never said a word against their interests, but that episode because it wasn't particularly funny

and if you remember the victim of that robbery was, I can't think of the comedian, the fact guy. Oh, he died. He's very funny. His whole stand-up was how fat he was. And, you know, very

clueless. He looked like you're, you know, the poor soul, fat guy. And they were pointing and laughing at him as he was getting, getting robbed. And you don't see him again. But, so it wasn't just that he clearly, you know, I think the assumption is that he wasn't Jewish. But he looked like a very pathetic person, which is exactly the kind of mark that Machiavellians look for. John Panette, that's it. John Panette, who always made me laugh, who had a great career, who had a great career, I believe a friend of Jerry, at least in their stand-up days, you know, they thought it was funny that this guy, well, you know, this is what Darwinism is in their mind, you know, the week, the week has to go.

He can't adapt. And if you remember in that episode, he was looking straight at the camera or, you know, straight at them as if to say, what are you doing? And that just made him laugh even harder. And it wasn't funny. You know, as just an ordinary person, I like Seinfeld. I got a lot of the references A lot of people didn't

As far as I was concerned They didn't have accent Because their accent was pretty much the same as mine Especially back then But there's a lot of references in there That you have to really know To get like the Marble Rye and things like that But yeah

I thought about that for a while When that came out And I thought of it as some sort of a semi-confession This is good you know The Jewish angle didn't come up much in Seinfeld once in a while like Uncle Leo or someone like that but the fact that they were Jews

once in a blue moon would show up because everyone else was playing non-Jews so yeah that was almost a confession the Machiavellian mentality and that John Pennett character who's getting robbed

is your typical normie being robbed either by Jews or someone else and they're going to profit from it one way or another. That there was this law, I think they were in Massachusetts, and that was a good Samaritan law, and they got in trouble from it. And then in their trial, everyone

in previous episodes who didn't like them, that they screwed over, that they hurt, came to literally point the finger at them. And I guess it ended with them at a jail cell altogether, strangely enough. I don't know if this is some sort of

a confession or a warning, but it wasn't even meant to be funny. It wasn't funny at all. So there was something more going on there. I don't know if Larry David has said anything about it in the past, but that is the Machiavellian mentality. And oh, wait a minute, the Guiam with these good Samarant laws, well, maybe you may get in trouble for that.

So I don't know. I'm glad you brought it up. I can't believe it all came back to me so quickly. But I'm always mining Seinfelds for symbols. It's very important. The strong attraction of the Jews to the Enlightenment began in Prussia during the second half of the 18th century and received the name of Hascala, Age of Enlightenment. This intellectual awakening translated their desire to initiate themselves in European culture

to enhance the prestige of Judaism, which had been humiliated by other peoples. In parallel with the critical study of the Jewish past, Hascalam militants, the Masculum, the Enlighten educated, wanted to harmoniously, unite Jewish culture with European knowledge. At first, they intended to remain faithful to traditional Judaism, but in their tracks, they began to sacrifice the Jewish tradition and take the side of assimilation by showing increasing contempt for the language of their people, Yiddish, that is. In Prussia, this movement lasted the time of a generation, but it quickly reached the Slavic provinces of the empire, Bohemia and Galicia. In Galicia, supporters of Hasgola, who were

are even more inclined to assimilation, were already ready to introduce the Enlightenment by force, and even often enough had recourse to it with the help of authorities. The border between Galicia and the Western provinces of Russia was permeable to individuals as well as to influences. With a delay of a century, the movement eventually penetrated into Russia. you know one of my favorite one of my favorite renaissance era or very late or very early Enlightenment era philosophers is Baruch de Spinoza very misunderstood man I believe his his metaphysics is a disguised attempt to bring the Trinity with you know substance attribute and mode because all three are infinite

and I've spoken about especially in writing about Spinoza quite a bit bit. And he spent quite a bit of time criticizing, and he was driven out of the synagogue in the Netherlands. He was a Sephardic at one point driven out of his family, driven out of Spain. And he is one of the original first people to attempt to provide a contribution to European metaphysics. And I think something happened. I'm convinced that he had a conception of the Trinity that, and one of the reasons, and he's very difficult to read, you know, he thought in mathematical terms.

And Spinoza was despised by the inward-looking Jew, as these people would say. And he was pretty much a completely secular man. He was very critical of the, you know, the so-called medieval Jew of the day. But I'm not so sure that Enlightenment automatically meant assimilation. It just meant that they were using certain aspects of European material culture for their own benefit. Yeah, they didn't have to dress in the traditional outfit anymore, but maybe that doesn't mean that they don't see themselves as Jews, although I'm sure it happened on occasion. it just meant that they were more able to mingle amongst the Gentiles without Gentiles really knowing it

I mean it had paid off big in Britain maybe not in Spinoza's time but I mean they had a prime minister they had they had roughly around the same time we're talking about here you know the middle of the 19th century so I'm not sure that those two things go together but I guarantee you the very strict Jews in the Cahal

did think that those two things went together. You know, the Enlightenment at its root was anti-Christian that couldn't but attract the Jewish mind at the time. At the beginning of the 19th century in Russia, the government endeavored precisely to overcome Jewish particularism outside of religion and worship, as a Jewish author euphemistically specifies, confirming that this government

did not interfere with the religion or religious life of the Jews. We have already seen that the regulation of 1804 opened the doors of primary schools, secondary schools, and universities to all Jewish children, without any limitations or reservations. However, the aim of all efforts of the Jewish ruling class was to nip in the bud this educational and cultural reform. The Ghal endeavored to extinguish the slightest light of the Enlightenment. to preserve in its integrity the established religious and social order, the rabbinit and Hasidim

were endeavoring to eradicate the seedlings of secular education. Thus, the great masses of the palest settlement felt horror and suspicion for Russian schooling and did not want to hear about it. In 1817 and again in 1821 in various provinces, there were cases where the Kahalam prevented Jewish children from learning the Russian language in any school, whichever it was. The Jewish deputies in St. Petersburg repeated insistently that they did not consider it necessary to open Jewish schools where languages other than Hebrew would be taught. They recognized only the Heather Elementary School of the Jewish language and the Yeshiva. Graduate School

intended to deepen the knowledge of the Talmud. Almost every important community had its Yeshiva. the Jewish body in Russia was thus hindered and could not free itself on its own I'm not sure I think some of this is just very short-sighted thinking the elders of any given Cahal the leaders of any given shuttle didn't like the idea that young Jews wanted to branch out it would it would diminish their power it would diminish their income and I don't think they realize just how powerful Jews were going to become precisely because of the Enlightenment,

the so-called liberation from the shuttle. And we know today that, yes, not every Jew is an expert on the Talmud, but that Talmudic mentality has become so dominant in modern societies and post-modern societies that you don't have to be a part of a shuttle or alcohol or anything else to think that way. We're born thinking that way. And I don't think they couldn't have known that at the time, but they became so dominant. Their mentality is so powerful solely but truly, especially in the West, that they realized that our mentality, our money, gave us such power that we were able to take over the basic, the default mechanisms of the Western mind.

And things that were revolutionary, say, you know, in 1848, were part for the course for Jews. Today, we see it as perfectly normal. Capitalism, free market, that was extremely revolutionary. There is nothing conservative about that. Karl Marx was clear. Marxism or communism could never happen unless free trade destroyed the national and agrarian particularism of European ethnicities. That's why free trade was so important to him. And why he hated Russia with such intensity.

The point of free trade was to create a single, you know, united Europe. that loses its individual languages and ways of life. Christianity is left in the dust because, you know, it's all about money now. Only then could there be a revolutionary proletariat. You can't have a revolutionary proletariat that's religious, that's ethnically based. That's why urbanization was so important. Monetization is so important. Karl Marx was subjectively aware of this, which is where his Uday and Fragha came from.

His work on the Jewish question, which Marxists wish he never wrote. But he was well aware of what was going on. Only later did he realize that that's exactly the mentality that we need to create a totally deracinated proletariat. They have no nation, they have no religion, they have nothing but us, promising them the moon, and they'll follow us because they have nothing else to follow. It's extremely important. I've had talks with Jews that I know, and they'll tell me, well, you know, I've never read the Talmud. I've never, I'm like, the Talmud in your culture is like in the United States where you'll have some boomer who will be like, oh, you know, we have, you know, everything's fake news. You can't trust anybody. And, you know, our wars, you know, if you have someone who's saying our wars are, you know, we shouldn't be going to war in this place and everything. And then you start criticizing like anything. They'll be like, well, we're a free country. And we have the Constitution.

they're not this is something that's built into us this is something that is drilled into us over over you know over a couple centuries now where we believe we have freedom of speech where we believe we have that where we believe we have that and it immediately comes out and it's a reaction by a lot of people and it's the same thing with this kind of talmudic thinking with this with this radical like collectivism where you know you if you criticize a group of Jews for doing something you have to criticize them all individually but Jews will be like oh Sandy Kofax was such a you know he was such a great example of a Jew because you know he didn't look look how look how successful he was as a pitcher and then he didn't he wouldn't pitch on

Saturdays he's such a credit to the Jewish race it's like well you you You want to collectivize only when it's the good stuff and when the bad stuff. No, this is something that is so deeply ingrained that people can't even see it anymore. Just like the Americans who spout, it's a free country, you know, we can do whatever we want. Well, because the media is in Jewish hands, for the most part, mainstream media, very tightly controlled by that. The prejudice is, is that because it's privately owned, therefore it's independent. independent. This is a prejudice that you see in every newspaper, every analyst. Only state-run media is, can be controlled. And of course, the minute you start explaining, well, that doesn't,

that doesn't worry. I trust state media in places like Syria and, you know, Romania more than I do privately help. The control is the same. And you do work with the state to smash a points of view that you don't like, especially during war time. So it's just, you know, this system really It relies on ignorance. It relies on fear. It relies on confusion. And just like with Marxism, it relies on people not having any alternative. They don't really have an identity. They don't even have a sexual identity anymore. Everything is being broken down in the postmodern mentality, except for this one group of people who are just fanatically cohesive and extremely well organized. Jews suffer with that too, but, you know, we're not talking about individuals. This conversation I've had with, is so stupid. They're not all like that argument? I said, yeah, that's not the point.

You know, I'm not talking about individuals here. I'm talking about a group. Individuals derive from the group. A group can have, you know, I talk about the Jews. I'm not talking about my dentist up the street or the guys I went to high school with. I mean, I have to explain this to you But this is And even their racial identity

You know, after in 2020 That we're talking about, your Jews would go on As white people, we have to We have to look into ourselves After the thing in Minnesota But of course, the minute Their Jewish identity comes up They will deny being white

You know, their conception Is solely for Jewish interests that's the only concept even if it's not something that they often vocalize it's implied and their dominance is so overwhelming right now although I think we're living in an era where this is slowly changing but but to think that that someone like Donald Trump is going to help anything the only thing Donald Trump did in this regard is in his first campaign when he went to APAC and said I don't need your money but that was probably the first and last thing he did that irritated the Jews as Jews at least as far as Israeli Jews are concerned he's a he's a fanatic you would think that a guy the only Gentile to really dominate in Manhattan real estate he knows what the Jews are there's no way he doesn't they respect him because he did win against them in places like Manhattan and New Jersey when I was a kid he knows better but that was the first and last good thing he ever did. But whenever anyone challenges you with that idea, that I'd all like that, you simply say, I'm not talking about individuals. I'm not talking about my dentist. I'm talking about Jews as a body, and they most certainly think as a body. But the first cultural

propagandists also emerged from it, unable to move things without the help of Russian authorities. In the first place, Isaac Bear Levinson, a scholar who had lived in Galicia, where he, he, He had been in contact with the militants of Hasgola, regarded not only the rabbinette, but also the Hasidim, as responsible for many popular misfortunes. Basing himself on the Talmud itself and on rabbinical literature, he demonstrated in his book instructions to Israel that Jews were not forbidden to no foreign languages, especially not the official language of the country where they lived, if necessary in private, as well as in public life. that knowledge of the secular sciences does not pose a threat to national and religious sentiment. Finally, that the predominance of commercial occupations is in contradiction with the Torah as with reason, and that it is important to develop productive work. But to publish his book, Levinson had to use a subsidy from the Ministry of Education.

He himself was convinced that cultural reform within Judaism could only be achieved with the support of the higher authorities. I think these are sort of the people that those like Alexander I were looking to. The German Jews that we had cited a few times that Alexander had spoken to. But to what extent do these people, he certainly thinks as a Jew, and he's right, the Jews that dominated in the Ottoman Empire spoke Greek. Of course, they spoke Turkish, as well as their own language. And this was the case everywhere. Eastern Europe was a slightly different story

But he's absolutely right But it's doubtful That the run-of-the-mill Jew would agree with this last section here It can only be achieved with the support of the higher authorities And what he means by productive work That's another matter But today, of course, we consider I mean not me and you

But Normies consider commercial occupations to be productive work later it was gessonovsky a teacher in warsaw who in a note to the authorities without relying on the talmud but on the contrary by opposing it imputed to the khal and the rabbinit the spiritual stagnation which had petrified the people he stated that solely the weakening of their power would make it possible to introduce secular schooling that it was necessary to control the melhammed primary school teachers and to admit as teachers only those deemed pedagogically and morally suitable, that the cahal had to be dismissed from the financial administration, and that the age of nuptial's contract had to be raised. Long before them, in his note to Minister of Finance, Gilamarkovich, already quoted, wrote that

in order to save the Jewish people from spiritual and economic decline, it was necessary to abolish the caholam to teach the Jew languages, to organize work for them in factories, but also to allow them to freely engage in commerce throughout the country and use the services of Christians. Later in the 1930s, Litman Fagin, a Chernigov merchant and a major supplier took up most of those arguments with even greater insistence, and though Berkendorf, his notes ended up in the hands of Nicholas I, Fagin benefited from the support of bureaucratic circles. He defended the Talmud but reproached to Melamid for being the lowest of the incompetence who taught a theology founded on fanaticism, inculcated in children, the contempt of other disciplines, as well as

the hatred of the heterodox. He also considered it essential to suppress the Caholam. Heson, the sworn enemy of the Cahill system, affirms that the latter, by its despotism, aroused among the Jews, an obscure resentment. you know i was born and raised in union county new jersey and in my town the town was at least when i was a kid divided uh in terms of power between jews and italians i grew up knowing you know many jews never treated poorly by them and different occupations went to different groups it was just a matter of tradition um but it was pretty clear among the jew even in my neighborhood, Jews would fight like crazy.

The only time that they would stop fighting is if somehow we were involved. You know, your stricter Orthodox and your more secular Jews, they fought like cats and dogs. But the minute they thought that as a group they were threatened, all of that would go out the window. But I've seen this with my own eyes. My father was a funeral director. You open a Gentile funeral home in a semi-Jewish area. What do you think is going to happen? Nothing is more impure than Gentile corpses.

He had to fight, but he fought with a guy named Marty Goldstein. And the other more right-wing Jews were bringing people in from Brooklyn to try to shut this down. And I, you know, many years later, vaguely remember guys like Marty saying, you can't trust these people. They're crazy. they're talking about the more strict Jews but I learned later on that even though they don't trust the more extreme

and vice versa they know that there's a network if they need to they could plug into if things hit the fan and I don't know if that started with all the criticism of Israel and the mainstream criticism of Netanyahu I'm not 100% sure if that's happening yet but I learned that even if they're not

or if they don't like it. Secular Jews are well aware that there's this network that they could plug into if they need help regardless of what they're thinking about it when times are normal, normal for them. Long, very long was the path that enabled secular education to penetrate into Jewish circles. Meanwhile, the only exceptions were in Vilnius

where under the influence of relations with Germany, the Maxillum intellectual group had gained strength and in Odessa, the new capital of New Russia, home to many Jews from Galicia, due to the permeability of frontiers, populated by various nationalities in the throes of intense commercial activity. Hence, the Cahal did not feel itself powerful there. The intelligentsia, on the contrary, had the feeling of its independence and blended culturally by the way of dressing by all external aspects in the surrounding population. Even though the majority of the majority of the Odessite Jews were opposed to the establishment of a general educational establishment, principally

due to the efforts of the local administration in the 30s in Odessa, as in Kishinif, were created secular schools of the private type, which were successful. Then in the course of the 19th century, this breakthrough of the Russian Jews towards education irresistibly intensified and would have historical consequences for Russia as for all mankind during the 20th century. Thanks to a great effort of will, Russian Judaism managed to free itself from the state of threatening stagnation in which it found itself and to fully accede to a rich and diversified life. By the middle of the 19th century, there was a clear discernment of the signs of a revival and development in Russian Judaism, a movement of high historical significance which no one had yet foreseen.

And that's where we'll end and we'll start next time. as we'll see the very different reign of Tsar Nicholas I, the first. But so, but we end with something that we had kind of seen coming already, that the kaha'al is on its last legs, that this is something that young Jews don't want to be a part of anymore. They have access to a huge world of a very rapidly growing European world that the more extreme Jews, especially in Eastern Europe, really couldn't be a part of.

Their friends were financing it, but at least in terms of education, they weren't a part of it. At the same time, they knew that other Jews, even strict ones around the world, were not as bound to an institution like to Kahul as they were in parts of Ukraine

and the old Polish some part. We know that that Kahul isn't going to last much longer. and that just meant that Jewish life was going to get a lot more complicated there were more variables because whether it be just enlightenment which essentially was a war against the gahal or assimilation

now assimilation didn't necessarily mean you're not a Jew anymore it's just you weren't necessarily identified as one that you kind of were normal you know you you were part of the normal society most of the time not necessarily you weren't a Jew anymore

I don't think that they maybe back then they did but there was very little threat of conversion I mean legitimate actual conversion but in the short-sighted mentality you know they painted

enlightenment and assimilation in the worst possible ways it was self-interested of course Odesia ends up becoming the capital of Jewish Ukraine then and now

the Odessa lounge in Brooklyn is the headquarter of Jewish organized crime the Russian mob as the regime keeps calling it despite it being 100% Jewish and very few Russian names are involved Odessa is a powerful symbol it became a Marxist state flying the red flag before the revolution

which is some of the reason why they were fights not pogroms as they would like to tell you but battles between Russians and Jews I'll repeat this again for the third time now that Jews were well armed regardless of whether they were involved in the Kahul system or not they were tightly bound together

they had plenty of money you didn't really have gun control loss at the time and no way to enforce them if they existed and that's why the whole pogrom thing is such nonsense because more Russians died in those battles than Jews the Jews were heavily armed. By the time these guys got to the Middle East in the

1940s, which was a creation of Stalin, they were already experienced in weaponry and everything else. This ridiculous myth that the Normie believes of these poor Jews who were so put on were just helpless

merchants who just wanted to have a better life is nonsense. Their youth was extremely well armed and extremely well trained in the use of these weaponry, just for their own interests. But now the stagnation, I suppose you could call it stagnation. Maybe in a cultural sense it was, but not in a financial sense. Jews knew the money that could be made, not just in Russia, but all over the world,

that Jews all over the world were making this money, but the way to do it wasn't necessary to walk around being obvious. You have to learn the language. You have to learn the basic entertainment and cultural norms. but that in no way means that you're not a Jew anymore. In fact, it means you have to hold even harder onto a Jewish identity

because you don't have the obvious trappings. You know, you're not wearing the black hat and all the things that we associate with the Hasidab. It's not obvious anymore. But so the Kahul is going to end. And contrary to what the leaders of the Kahul were saying, it just meant more power for Jews, more influence for Jews. and they were able to apply Talmudic studies in one way or another

to an entire wide world, which, as we know today, was certainly not in the interests of Gentiles. All right, well, let's end it there. Next episode, we will start chapter three, which is titled during the reign of Nicholas I first. And as I do at the end of every episode, I encourage you to go to the show notes of this. of hot lengths there for Dr. Johnson's work and where you can support him.

Please go support him because this is what he does. He studies this, he reads this, and then he comes here and shares the knowledge and the background that we need to understand this text and many other subjects that he's written on. Just check out my episodes, the rundown episodes that I've done with him, and also Radio Albion, where, what do you have one or two releases a week there? Yeah, I have the Orthodox Nationalist, which has been going on for a very long time, which is an hour, and then the Daily Nationalist, which comes out on Thursdays, actually comes out every day, but my day for it is Thursday,

which deals mostly with current events, you know, especially in the East. But I have to tell you, I'm glad you say this, because I did, I'm doing what I was told I couldn't do, When I was in grad school, the prejudice was that unless you get a job, whether it be historian, political science, whatever, unless you get a job in academia, maybe in a think tank somewhere, you can't function as an academic or you can't function as a scholar. Well, I did that. I did whatever, but very few people can do. E. Michael Jones was clearly an inspiration because he did the same thing. Yes, I've taught at universities all over the country. But, you know, especially after 2020, there was no way that could continue.

continue. And especially the shift to online classes, which I'm not going to do. I need an audience. I was extremely popular, which made me even more of a problem. I got along with everyone personally, but people were finding out, my God, this guy was the editor of the Barns Review. You know, that became a big problem. But it's only because of my donors and people like you who promote me that I've been able to do what I was told was impossible to live the life of a scholar in an academic totally outside of any institutions, let alone a university. That means I answer to God alone, and it's only because of my donors and friends that that's even remotely possible.

And that's why every day I thank God for them. Let's bring back patronage, people. Let's bring back patronage. It's really important. Thank you, Dr. Johnson. I really appreciate it. You're welcome, my friend. I'll talk to you next time.

I want to welcome everyone back to Part 10. of our reading of 200 years together by Alexander Solzhenyessen. Dr. Johnson. How are you doing today? Well, you know, among many other things, it occurred to me that this is part 10. We're on page 54 of a 656-page document.

That's the first thing. The second thing for our listeners is that I'm getting, when I bought this house, the roof needed to be fixed and it's being fixed right now. And of course, at precisely when we begin recording, these illegals, I think they're illegals, are out there right outside my office door. So far, so good. I haven't heard, I mean, window. I haven't heard anything. I hear them. I don't know what they're doing, but if you hear hammering, I'm not sure what we're going to do, but maybe we could treat it as a symbol of some kind.

Yes, yes, it will be, it will definitely be divine. I think at this point we can, in episode happening in, yeah, in episode 10 that this would start happening, yes. but I think it's just a matter of it's just a plain old matter of scheduling and I told you I had banging going on in this house about an hour ago so yeah right the good kind or the bad kind oh the bad kind yeah yeah I say hammering so there's no there's no mix up okay be careful all right chapter three I'll start reading and We'll go and see, and if the, if hammering or, um, the starts, we'll, uh, we'll work through it and, uh, laugh about it.

So, all right. All right. All right. Chapter three during the reign of Nicholas I first. With regard to the Jews, Nicholas I first was very resolute. It was during his reign, according to sources, that more than half of all illegal acts relating to Jews from Alexis Mikhailovich. to the death of Alexander II were published, and the emperor personally examined this legislative

work to direct it. Jewish historiography has judged that his policy was exceptionally cruel and gloomy. However, the personal interventions of Nicholas I did not necessarily prejudice the Jews, far from it. For example, one of the first files he received as an inheritance from Alexander I first was the reopening on the eve of his death, while on his way to Tegaron, Tegonrog, of the Velaide affair, the accusation against the Jews for having perpetuated a ritual murder on the person of a child. The Jewish Encyclopedia writes that to a large extent the Jews were indebted to the verdict of acquittal to the emperor who sought to know the truth, despite the obstruction on the part of the people he trusted. In another well-known case linked to accusations against the Jews, the assassination of Misoslav, the emperor willingly turned to the truth.

After having, in a moment of anger, inflicted sanctions against the local Jewish population, he did not refuse to acknowledge his error. By signing the verdict of acquittal in the Velahak case, Nicholas wrote that the vagueness of the requisitions had not made it possible to take another decision, adding, nevertheless, I do not have the moral certainty that Jews could have committed such a crime or that they could not have. Repeated examples of this kind of assassination with the same clues, but always without sufficient evidence, suggest to him that there might be a fanatical sect among the Jews, but unfortunately, even among us Christians, there also exists sects just as terrifying and incomprehensible. Nicholas I and his close collaborators continued to believe the certain Jewish

groups practice ritual murder. For several years, the emperor was under the severe grip of calumny that smelled of blood. Therefore, his prejudice that Jewish religious doctrine was supposed to present a danger to the Christian population was reinforced. You're going to see a bit of a shift in this era there's always that naivte but Nicholas I was a bit more realistic about Jewish texts Jewish ideology and the Jewish way of thinking

he severely limited the ability of the Jews to publish the Talmud in Yiddish or Russian I think there was only one place he allowed for that to happen in the far in the far west this is the first time in roughly our era

that ritual murder has shown up in Russia I bet you I could find other examples but this is you know with newspapers and everything this is the first mention of it I am not familiar with this case it's very difficult to find information on it matter what language I search in

I don't recall if it was in Ariel Tov's book or not but we all know it's the same kind of thing I know there's no doubt in my mind

that there is a fanatical group of the Haredi that do this kind of thing. I've spoken to members rabbis and Notori Carter

about this they reject the concept the problem is is that these accusations are common they all have the same pattern and they've been made

since ancient times now things changed with the mass media the telegraph which I don't know if that had been invented at this point but we're in the middle of the 19th century roughly

but things change when you have that and this is what Russia had brought into itself with the partitions of Poland. I think there were several million Jews

in the Russian Empire at the time. But Nicholas I was a very strong monarch. He was incorruptible. Among Russian monarchists, Nicholas the first is one of the favorites. He was extremely

forthright. He was very simple in his way of life. He was very pious. He tended to idealize Peter the Great a little bit. And he knew that the oligarchy, no matter what background they had, was his enemy. And that's where the so-called secret police came from. The point was to make sure that those with money aren't, especially after the December's revolt, which was put down in between Alexander and Nicholas, which was very brief, but it left a mark on Russia. It had quite a bit of Jewish support.

These were essentially liberal constitutionalists. who wanted a secular, you know, a state trying to promote Constantine rather than Nicholas. Nicholas took over. And among monarchists, again, he's extremely important. Jews didn't like him for this reason. And you notice what's being quoted here. He didn't care who he offended. He didn't have a prejudice one way or another.

It is possible that Jews can do something like this. but he's not so he approached this this objectively now so far the cases that have been brought have led to acquittals

for the Jews accused which does say something I mean Russia had a very fair system I don't know I like the Belize case which I have a whole lecture about I don't know if that was just or not but

when you read the Anglo-American literature on Nicholas I, it is almost uniformly negative. They just repeat Bolshevik propaganda, liberal propaganda about him. And Solzhenitsyn actually makes reference to that. He's made reference to it already. So more and more Russian Orthodox, and I stress the Orthodox part, elites are learning about what

the Jewish mind really is. But Nicholas was not going to commit himself one way or another to the concept of ritual murder. The danger was understood by Nicholas and the fact that the Jews could convert Christians to Judaism. Since the 18th century, the high-profile conversion of the Judaism of Vosnitsyn, a captain of the Imperial Army, had been kept in mind. In Russia from the second half of the 17th century onwards, groups of Judaizers multiplied. In 1823, the Minister of Internal Affairs announced in a report the widespread of the heresy of Judaizers in Russia and estimated the number of its followers at 20,000 people. Persecutions began, after which many members of the sect pretended to return to the bosom

of the Orthodox Church, while continuing to observe in secret the rights of their sect. A consequence of all this was that the legislation on the Jews took at the time of Nicholas I, a religious spin. The decisions and actions of Nicholas DeFerce with regards to the Jews was affected, such as his insistence on prohibiting them from having recourse to Christian servants, especially Christian nurses, for work among the Jews undermines and weakens the Christian faith in women. In fact, notwithstanding repeated prohibitions, this provision never was fully applied, and Christians continued to serve amongst the Jews.

you could go back to the earliest days of the church or the earliest days of Christian civilization in Byzantine or elsewhere and you'll hear this over and over and over again that there's a prohibition on Christians working for Jews it is so constant and repeated it's proof in my mind that the treatment of Christians working or indentured to Jews, usually because of dead or something like that, was abominable, especially for women, because if you know your Talmud, you know that the worst you can get caught. I mean, if you cheat on your wife with a Gentile, the most that you're going to get accused of is beastiality, not adultery.

This is something that's, you know, you're seeing the cliché, and it's a very real cliche that I've seen with my own eyes of the wealthy Jew with the young Gentile blonde. That's not propaganda. I've seen it. It's such a common thing. Jewish women kind of just have, you know, they don't have a reputation for attractiveness. So they just kind of throw up their hands. There's not much they can do if the, you know, an older Jew is powerful. we see this in the Weinstein case

you know so there's a sexual element it's not so much a religious element no one's fearful that they're going to be converted if remember you don't have reform Jews at the time that distinction comes later especially in Eastern Europe

especially in Russia these are all supposed to be fairly strict Talmud's because the Talmud doesn't see Gentiles as most of us know, the guillium, the cattle, as human, they're not protected by the rules and the laws that would govern normal intercourse with humans. And that has more to do with anything else. Because there's almost nothing in any legislation passed by any government talking about relations

with Jews that doesn't mention that you may not hire or indenture Gentiles. Sometimes they mention women specifically sometimes in this case they do sometimes they don't but I think it's very very clear what the issue is and in Russia and I'll repeat this the bureaucracy was small

enforcing law in an empire this big with roads which were always iffy under the best of conditions it's hard, it's difficult everything was at the local level and Jews can buy local government they can get away with quite a bit

so it's very important to notice this and because it's repeated all the time the treatment had to have been terrible and that's why it is such a constant in all of this legislation The first measure against the Jews, which Nicholas considered from the very beginning of his reign, was to put them on an equal footing with the Russian population with regard to the subjugation to compulsory service to the state, and in particular requiring them to participate physically

in conscription, which they had not been subjected to since their attachment to Russia. The bourgeois Jew did not supply recruits, but acquitted 500 rubles per head. This measure was not dictated solely by governmental considerations to standardize the obligations of the population. The Jewish communities were in any case very slow to pay the royalties, and moreover, Russia would receive many Jews from Galicia, where they were already required to perform military service, nor by the fact that the obligation to provide recruits would reduce the number of Jews not engaged in productive work. Rather, the idea was that the Jewish recruit, isolated from his closed community, would be better placed to join. the lifestyle of the nation as a whole, and perhaps even orthodoxy. Taken into account, these considerations considerably tightened the conditions of the

conscription applied to the Jews, leading to a gradual increase in the number of recruits and the lowering of the age of the conscripts. It cannot be said that Nicholas succeeded in enforcing the decree on the military service of the Jews without encountering resistance. On the contrary, all instances of execution proceeded slowly. The Council of Ministers discussed at length whether it was ethically defensible to take such a measure in order to limit Jewish overcrowding, as stated by Minister of Finance, George von Kankran, all recognized that it is inappropriate to collect humans rather than money. The Kahalam did not spare their efforts to remove this threat from the Jews or to postpone it.

When exasperated by such slow progress, Nicholas ordered a final report to be presented to him in the shortest delays, this order, it seems, only incited the caholam to intensify their action behind the scenes to delay the advancement of the matter. And they apparently succeeded in winning over to their cause one of the high officials, whereby the report never reached its destination. At the very top of the imperial apparatus, this mysterious episode concludes Jay Heson could not have occurred without the participation of the cahal. A subsequent retrieval of the report was also unfulfilled, and Nicholas, without waiting any longer, introduced a conscription for the Jews by decree in 1827. Then in 1836, equality in obtaining medals for the

Jewish soldiers who had distinguished themselves. This is the first time that that particular issue had come up. It was almost taken for granted that Jewish boys were not to be conscripted. Of course, they couldn't join voluntarily, given the nature of the, of the, of the, of the Kahal. Remember, it's still extremely difficult for the government or any government at the time to know how many Jews there were. The Kahul went out of their way to mislead census officials or not cooperate with census officials. The fact they didn't have last names and the things like this, we've mentioned this before. The numbers for taxation and things were always iffy. And that's deliberate. And so as far as either taxes or conscription, the number of Jews, you know, there was always a certain quota that each region had to, you know, recruiting sergeant would come around and each group of villages had to supply one person. That's normally how it went in times of war. The conscription was usually for 20 years. But that changed depending on what was going on in the world. So it was very difficult to know.

how, you know, what, what the quota would be for any group of Jews. But the fact that Nicholas simply didn't care, he knew he was going to get pushed back for this. He didn't care. Turning these men, you know, 18-year-olds into soldiers, you know, it might be the first time that any of these guys have ever come across honest work. Honest work for a cause bigger than themselves. Conscription was such an outrage to the Jews because, you know, You know, we're not fighting for not only a Gentile power, but the Gentile power. And even today, you still have riots in Jerusalem from the Hasidics who don't recognize Israel, who refuse to be drafted.

And as a war, you know, drags on over there, it's getting worse and worse, manpower-wise. So the notion that these people should be forced to fight for essentially Rome in their minds, for an orthodox. power that spreads orthodoxy explicitly was an outrage. And you see here they're doing anything they can. They're paying people off. They're lying about their numbers. They're lying about their locations. They're keeping a full report from coming to Nicholas. Nicholas is not stupid. He knew exactly why the report never showed up. And he said, screw it. I am drafting you. We're doing it now. And that's the big difference between Nicholas and Alexander. Totally exempted from recruitment were the merchants of all guilds, inhabitants of the agricultural colonies, workshop leaders, mechanics, and factories, rabbis, and all Jews having a secondary or higher education. hence the desire of many Jewish bourgeois to try to make it into the class of merchants bourgeois society railing to see its members required to be drafted for military service undermining the forces of the community, be it under the effect of taxation or recruitment. The merchants, on the other hand, sought to reduce their visible exposure to leave the payment

of taxes to the bourgeois. Relations between Jewish merchants and bourgeois were strained, for at the time the Jewish merchants, who had become more numerous and wealthier, had established strong relations in governmental spheres. The Kahul of Grudna appealed to St. Petersburg to demand that the Jewish population be divided into four classes, merchants, bourgeois, artisans, and cultivators, and that each should have not to answer for the others. In the idea proposed in the early 30s by the Kahalam themselves, one can see that the first step toward the future categorization carried out by Nicholas in 1840, which was so badly received

by the Jews. The Kahulam were also charged with the task of recruiting among the Jewish mass, of which the government had neither recorded numbers nor profiles. The Kahal put all the weight of this levy on the backs of the poor, for it seemed preferable for the most deprived to leave the community, whereas a reduction in the number of its wealthy members could lead to general ruin. Kahulam asked the provincial authorities, but they were denied, the right to disregard the turnover in order to be able to deliver the recruits, the tramp, recruitment, the tramps, those who did not pay taxes, the insufferable troublemakers, so that the owners who assume all the obligations of society should not have to provide recruits belonging to their families. And in this way, the Kahulam were given the opportunity to act against certain members of the community. Well, this shouldn't be surprising. We're at an era where warfare is changing.

Wars up until this point, roughly, were compared to today, low casualty events. We are coming to an era where things like, you know, science is being applied to weaponry, which is never anything good. The machine gun is going to be developing soon, super accurate rifles, new tactics. And, but, so that was, that was one issue. But conscription wasn't like, you know, it's not like the U.S. during Vietnam that every healthy male, 18 or over, gets drafted. As I mentioned before, a recruiting sergeant would be given charge of a certain region. A village or a group of villages, depending on how big they are, had to provide one healthy male. So it would make sense for the, so we're not talking about.

mass conscription here. It's the very concept that the state could do this. So it shouldn't surprise you that the Cajal is giving over people that they didn't like in the first place and this happened all the time

but we're still healthy and whatever to send off to get rid of them. And that's what they were doing. But depending on what was going on, that number could be increased. And you see the exact same thing happening. The American Civil War, you could buy your way out of conscription in the north.

This was common. And unfortunately, it is true that it always fell onto the relatively poorer members of the population to do the fighting. And nothing has changed. However, with the introduction of military service among the Jews, the men who were subject to it began to shirk and the full count was never reached. The cash taxation on Jewish communities had been considerably diminished, but it was noticed that this did not, this did by no means prevent it from continuing to be refunded only very partially. Thus, in 1829, Nicholas I, granted Grodna, Grodna's request that in certain provinces, Jewish recruits should be levied in addition to the tariff imposed in order to cover tax arrears. In 1830, a Senate decree stipulated that the appeal of an addition to,

recruit reduced the sums owed by the kaha'al of 1,000 rubles in the case of an adult, 500 rubles in the case of a minor. It is true that following the untimely zeal of the governors, this measure was soon reported, while Jewish communities themselves asked for the government to enlist recruits to cover their arrears. In government circles, their proposal was welcomed coldly, for it was easy to foresee that it would open new possibilities of abuse for the koholam. However, as we can see, the idea matured on one side as well as on the other. Evoking these increased stringencies in the recruitment of Jews by comparison with the rest of the population,

Hessen writes that this was a glaring anomaly in Russian law, for in general, in Russia, the legislation applicable to the Jews did not tend to impose more obligations than that of other citizens. Nicholas the first keen intelligence inclined to draw clearly legible perspectives, legend has it that the St. Petersburg-Moscow railway was, as a result, mapped out with a ruler. In his tenacious determination to transform the particular Jews into ordinary Russian subjects, and, if possible, into Orthodox Christians, went from the idea of military recruitment to that of Jewish Cantonists. The Cantoness, the name goes back to 1805, was an institution sheltering the children of the soldiers, lightning in favor of the fathers, the burden of service which lasted 25 years. It was supposed to extend the sections for military orphans created under Peter the Great, a kind of school for the government which provided the students with technical knowledge

useful for their subsequent service in the army, which in the eyes of civil servants now seems quite appropriate for young Jewish children or even highly desirable to keep them from a young age and for long years cut off from their environment. In preparation to the Cantonese Institution in 1827 decree, granted Jewish communities the right to recruit a minor instead of an adult from the age of 12, that is, before the age of nuptiality among the Jews. The New Jewish Encyclopedia believes that this measure was a very hard blow, but this faculty in no way meant the obligations to call a soldier at the age of 12. It had to do,

it had nothing to do with the introduction of compulsory conscription for Jewish children, as wrote erroneously the encyclopedia, and as it ended up being accredited in the literature devoted to the Jews of Russia, then in the collective memory. The column even found that in, found this a profitable substitution, and used it by recruiting the orphans, the children of widows, sometimes bypassing the law protecting only children, often for the benefit of the progeny of a rich man. Men from the age of 18, the Cantonists performed the usual military service so long at the time, but let us not forget that it was not limited to barracks' life. The soldiers married, lived with their families, learned to practice other trades,

they received the right to establish themselves in the interior provinces of the empire, where they completed their service. But unquestionably, the Jewish soldiers who remain faithful to the Jewish religion and its ritual suffered from being unable to observe the Sabbath or contravene the rules on food. Yeah, this is interesting, and it often gets overlooked. For some reason, it gets forgotten about because you have someone who gets drafted, or God forbid someone who gets killed, you now have a child with Justice's mother. now normally in the peasant commune there were methods for taking care of that

you know it was it was you know traditional and compulsory for everyone else in the community to go and take care of that family because it's no one's fault but that wasn't always the case so this whole concept was that you can a young a young man who now is going to be struggling because he's either literally or figuratively an orphan can go to what amounts to a boarding school

in the civil service. It was somewhat, depending on the personality of the kid, it was somewhat of a privileged way to go. And of course, so once they reach majority, they're able to go into the army

for a while. And again, Jews use this to their advantage. but it was also a way, and the Gahal knew this, to take a young Jew, and by the time he comes back, all those years later, he's not really a Jew anymore. He can't do, he's not really able to do this. You had clergy all over the army, but you didn't have rabbis. In fact, what you were supposed to get, at least in the Jewish case, was a very patriotic soldier.

who now has a pension and everything else and it probably a very good education but the very fact that this was actual productive patriotic work for of all places Russia did drive the cahol crazy

although they would again all of this is manipulation and not to mention the fact that despite the wealth of these institutions they have back taxes Nicholas is not playing around he's not going to go the way of Alexander He knows that they lie

He knows that that's institutionalized He knows that there's this Intent contempt For Gentiles in the Kahul So anything that they can steal Anything that they can smuggle Any lies that they can tell the tax man Or anyone else is not only justified

But considered praiseworthy So in some cases The Kahul was willing To go with this Cantonese program For the sake of not having to pay a certain amount of taxes. It really depended on the cahold. It depended on the circumstances. And of course, it's shocking to us. But the, but you know, Jews are going to do. This is the nature of what we were dealing with at the time. And they realized very quickly that Nicholas was

very different from what they had experience in the past. Minor's place with Cantonists separated from their family environment naturally found it difficult to resist the pressure their educators who were encouraged by reward. to successfully convert their pupils during lessons of Russian arithmetic, but above all of catechism that were also rewarded for their conversion. Moreover, it was facilitated by their resentment toward a community that had given them up to recruitment. But conversely, the tenacity of the Jewish character, the faithfulness to the religion inculcated at an early age, made many of them hold their grounds. Needless to say, these methods of conversion to Christianity were not Christian

and did not achieve their purpose. On the other hand, the accounts of conversions obtained by cruelty or by death threats against Cantonists supposedly collective drownings in the rivers for those who refuse baptism. Such stories receive public attention in the decades that followed fall within the domain of pure fiction. As the Jewish Encyclopedia published before the Revolution, the popular legend of the few hundred Cantonists allegedly killed by drowning was born from the information published in a German newspaper, according to which 800 Cantonists were taken away one fine day to be baptized

in the water of a river, two of them perished by drowning. And don't be shocked if even now you come across historians who repeat this nonsense using the Jewish Encyclopedia as a source, this older version. I don't think, I can't say with 100% certainty, but I don't think it's in the more modern editions of the encyclopedia. But no conversion was done by force. No conversion can be done by force. You didn't have these underground Jews or anything like that. But this was, to some extent, the point of all of this.

And he mentions, and he's right to mention, the fact that the Cahal gave them up, forced them into this. And so, I don't know, maybe these aren't my friends, my family, after all. Now, the percentage of conversions, I simply don't know. They were not punished for being Jews throughout. the system. As we've already mentioned, there's a whole special line of Jewish medals that Nicholas had struck for Valiant Service. So the conversions that did happen, they occurred not by force, not in using secret Jewish rights afterwards, but they were legitimate. And we mentioned a few paragraphs ago, the rise of the Judaizers.

Sometimes it's tough to tell the difference when the sources mentioned Freemasons, which were not tolerated under Nicholas, although they still existed, and the Judaizers. I don't know if there's a huge difference, especially at the time. Judaizers, going back to the time of the Muscovite Empire, we talked about some time ago, were essentially a cult alchemists only in the elite of society

but the higher levels of of masonry are the same way so I don't know if there's a huge difference between the two but they used to call Protestants especially Calvinist Judaizers and there's a good reason for that but whether they

depending on the author associating masonry with Judaism it's not totally illegitimate but I don't necessarily know in every case what or who they're referring to The statistical data from the military inspection archives to the general staff for the years 1847 to 1854, when the recruitment of Jewish Cantonists was particularly high, showed that they represented on average only 2.4% of the many Cantonists in Russia.

In other words, that their proportion did not exceed that of the Jewish population in the country, even taking into account the undervalued data provided by the Kahalim during the censuses. Doubtlessly, the baptize had an interest in exculpating themselves from their compatriots in exaggerating the degree of coercion they had to undergo in their conversion to Christianity, especially since as part of this conversion, they enjoyed certain advantages in the accomplishment of their service. Moreover, many converted Cantonists remained secretly faithful to their other religion, and some of them later returned to Judaism. In the last years of the reign of Alexander of the first, after a new wave of famine in Belarus, a new senator had been sent on mission.

He had come back with the same conclusions as der Javan a quarter of a century before. The Jewish committee established in 1823, composed of four ministers, had proposed a study on what grounds it would be expedient and profitable to organize the participation of the Jews in the state and to put down in writing all that could contribute to the improvement of the civil situation of this people. They soon realized that the problem thus posed was beyond their strength, and in 1825, this Jewish committee at the ministerial level had been replaced by a director's committee, the fifth, composed of the directors of their ministries who devoted themselves to studying the problem for another eight years. In his eagerness, Nicholas preceded the work

of this committee with his decisions. Thus, as we have seen, he introduced conscription for the Jews. This is how he set a deadline of three years to expel the Jews from all the villages of the western provinces and put an end to their activity of alcohol manufacturing, but, as under his predecessors, this measure experienced slowdowns, stoppages, and was ultimately reported. Subsequently, he prohibited Jews from holding taverns and diners from living in such places and ensuring the retail side of alcohol in person, but this measure was not applied either. Another attempt was made to deny the Jews one of their favorite jobs, the maintenance of post houses with their ins and taverns, but again, in vain because, apart from the Jews,

there was not enough candidates to occupy them. Well, you could feel Nicholas's frustration because we, as we're reading this, you feel the frustration. How many times do they have to have reports all saying the same thing? How many times do they have to have to ban Jewish activity in terms of distilling liquor, only for it to fail over and over again. This is, I think, one of the reasons that conscription was introduced for them. They admitted, as we just read, that what the committee initially wanted to do was, quote, beyond their strength. They simply didn't have the resources to do it. And in post houses are part of the reason. When you have roads, like in Russia, especially

when the countryside being so humongous, post houses for travelers were very important. It's extremely difficult to enforce this when you have so many of these in so many different places. As I said before, we're not just talking about an inn. We're talking about places where all manner of illegal activity took place, especially prostitution. In other words, another word for having

you know, Gentile women serve the Jews. Maybe her family owed quite a bit of money or something like that. Setting a deadline for the expulsion

the Jews from the villages. Again, this is never going to be 100% accomplished. You know, slowdowns, stoppages, ultimately abandoned. So he just then

put out a blanket prohibition. The only reason that there were not enough candidates is that there wasn't enough Gentiles willing to invest in this which could be a costly occupation

especially when you're in the middle of nowhere the whole point of a posthouse is that it is in the middle of nowhere so it does make sense you're going to have a tough time finding people Jews are perfectly okay with this because they you know they circulated in a particular area which made it very difficult to to track them at any given time but Nicholas is extremely frustrated

how many times have we gone through this same procedure since you know the murder of Paul Zar Paul and given what Russia is Russia couldn't have been a tyranny because there was no way to enforce that

the only type of political violence was against the elite that despised the monarchy and as the 19th century wears on that gets worse some worse. Elites are always the one that tries to get rid of a monarch. The elites are always the one that tries to revolutionize society in their interests.

So the oligarchy, especially as masonry continues, it's corrosive work, Judaism. He's going to have to start dealing with this with greater and greater levels of severity. But this was only

applied to the elites in the major cities because that really was the only way that any of this stuff could be enforced. The Jews were aware of that, they were also aware of the fact that they're not dealing with a weak-willed man like Alexander. In 1827, a leasing

system of the distilling activities was introduced throughout the empire, but there was a considerable fall in the prices obtained at the auctions when the Jews were discarded, and it happened that there was no other candidates to take these operations, so that they had to be allowed to the Jews, whether in the

towns or in the countryside, even beyond the area of residence. The government was, in fact, relieving the Jews of the responsibility of organizing the collection of taxes on liquor and thus receiving a regular return. Long before the merchants of the First Guild were allowed to reside in any part of the empire, all farmers enjoyed the freedom to move and resided in capitals in other cities outside the palest settlement. From the midst of the farmers came prominent Jewish men like Litman Fagin, also already mentioned, and Evsel Gunzburg. He had held an alcohol manufacturing tenancy in a besieged, in a besieged Sevastopol.

In 1859, he founded in St. Petersburg a banking establishment, one of the most important in Russia. Later, he participated in the placement of Russian treasury bonds in Europe. He was a founder of the dynasty of the Gunsburg Barons. Beginning in 1848, all Jewish merchants of the First Guild were allowed to lease drinking places, even where Jews had no right to reside permanently. The Jews also received a more extensive right with respect to the distillation of alcohol. As we remember, in 1819, they were allowed to distill it in the provinces of Great Russia until Russian artisans acquire sufficient competence.

In 1826, Nicholas decided to repatriate them to the palest settlement, but in 1827, he conceded to several specific requests to keep distillers in place. for example, in the state factories of Erkuts. Vladimir Solyov quotes that the following thoughts from Mr. Kotkov. In the western provinces, it is the Jew who deals with alcohol, but is the situation better in other provinces of Russia. The Jewish inkeepers who get the people drunk ruin the peasants and cause their doom, and are they present throughout Russia? What is happening elsewhere in Russia

where the Jews are not admitted and where the flow of alcohol is held by an Orthodox bartender or a Kulak? Let us listen to Leskof, the great connoisseur of Russian popular life. Quoting, in the provinces of Greater Russia where Jews do not reside, the number of those accused of drunkenness

or crimes committed under the influence are regularly and significantly higher than within the palest settlement. The same applies to the number of deaths due to alcoholism. And this is not a new phenomenon. It has been seen. So it has been so since ancient times. And he's right. And I, and again, you can almost hear the frustration. By the way, this is a very early use of the word Kulak to refer to like a low-level oligarch. But, no, that Vladimir Slovia, that is not the philosopher. That's the historian,

Vladimir Solovi, and Katkov was a conservative publisher at the time. We, from the very beginning, we see that Jews used alcohol, no matter where they are, to drive the peasants into debt, to be able to manipulate them, to be able to get them to sign things, and they flaunted the law wherever they could, and it was relatively easy to do when it was hard to track them. those of us who were interested in organized crime end up talking about the Jews an awful lot

know that during prohibition the Jews were the dominant factor they liked using the Italians they put them but the Jews were far more powerful all over the place. Jews founded Las Vegas the Jews were the first people to import

heroin roughly around that same period of time in 1920s and but of course in the history books they'll talk about Italians they love putting out now of course they claim

that it's the Russian mafia where in fact it's exclusively exclusively Jewish and amazingly there is no RICO cases against them you don't hear about these guys

going to go into prison almost no one in the FBI speak Yiddish etc etc and it's no different at this in this period of time we're talking about 100 years earlier none of this is new and it didn't matter what the law said

depending on where you are it's easy to flaunt it so once in a while the popular the populist took matters into their own hands the problem with that is if that got too big now you have instability

and I'll repeat again that the Jews were armed and were quite willing to defend themselves don't let anyone say otherwise so it's very easy to see the frustration here

we're not dealing remember this is a Russian Empire it's not a nation state St. Petersburg doesn't relate to the provinces like Washington D.C. relate to New Jersey it's a more or less decentralized system

I don't want to go so far as I say it's a confederation under a monarch, but it's not that far away from that. And so when Nicholas is trying to centralize things, it becomes extremely difficult, and he didn't know how many of the elite who could carry this kind of stuff out were trustworthy, was trustworthy. Another huge frustration, which is why a very specific police force was founded to keep a watch on them. And it was only to see where Masonry had shown itself. Was anyone doing anything in secret? This, of course, is called a secret police and everything is awfully totalitarian in a system that was the very opposite of totalitarian. That's how the history books are written. You can't talk about the suffering of the peasant without talking about the Jews and yet almost everyone writing on this subject refuses to mention them except as the eternal victim. However, it is true. Statistics tell us that in the Western and Southern provinces of the Empire, there was one drinking place per 297 inhabitants, whereas in the eastern provinces, there were only one for 585. The newspaper, The Voice, which was not without influence at the time, was able to say that the trade of alcohol, the Jews, was the wound of this area, namely the Western region, and an intractable wound at that. In its theoretical considerations, I.G. Orchansky tries to show that the stronger the density in

drinking places, the less alcoholism there was. We must understand that, according to him, the peasant will succumb to temptation, will succumb less to temptation if the flow of drinks is found under his nose and solicits him 24 hours a day. Remember, Derjavan, the bartenders trade night and day, but will the peasant be tempted by a distant cabaret when he will have to cross several muddy fields to reach it. No, we know only too well that alcoholism is sustained not only by demand, but also by the supply of vodka. Orchansky nevertheless pursues his demonstration. When the Jew is interposed between the distiller and the drunken peasant, he acts objectively in favor of the peasant because he sells vodka at a lower price. But it is true

that he does so by pawning the effects of the peasant. Certainly he writes, some believe nevertheless that Jewish tenants have a poor influence on the condition of the peasants, but it is because in the trade of bartending, as in all the other occupations, they differ by their know-how, skill, and dynamism. It is true that elsewhere, in another essay of the same collection, he recognizes the existence of fraudulent transactions with the peasants. It is right to point out that the Jewish trade is grossly deceitful, and that the Jewish dealer, tavernkeeper, and usurer exploit a miserable population. especially in the countryside.

Faced with an owner, the peasant holds on firmly to his prices, but he is amazingly supple and confident when dealing with a Jew, especially if the latter holds a bottle of vodka and reserve. The peasant is often brought to sell his wheat, dirt cheap to the Jew. Nevertheless, to this crude, glaring, arresting truth, or Chansky seeks attenuating circumstances, but this evil that eats away the will of the peasants, how to justify it.

Now, I've read the Orchansky book, The Set of Essays. He is a Jew, and he's simply, he's objective enough where he just can't hide the truth. The tavern where the Jew dominated and owned was the locus of the worst elements of peasant life. and it was a simple den of iniquity. Nicholas was well aware of this. He was well aware that there's alcohol, there's going to be all kinds of irrational decisions. He uses the word cabaret.

We know exactly what he's talking about here. The exact same thing happened in the U.S. under the Jews during Prohibition. And it's, nothing has changed. We've already mentioned this goes back. back to ancient times. There's certain fathers of the church that talk about this. There's a canon in, I forget, which synod banning the clergy from ever going to a tavern. Now, the definition of a tavern then is a little different from today, but it was always the Jewish notal point for control and domination.

there's nothing specifically that pushes the Russian to vodka the Jewish press will always say that they're drunks and everything else no this was brought to them rocket didn't exist in Russia until until Peter the Great it was a supply chain that the Jews

had had put together and selling their their product farmers selling their product dirt cheap despite the fact that there were members of communes that they had to answer to. It didn't matter when there's a bottle of a bottle of vodka there. And the the girls, the Gentile girls that they had there, and God knows

what else they were doing, that's been lost to history, but not the logic, is a, you know, just continue to eat away at the mentality of the peasant. So when industrialization occurred and the peasant then goes from the countryside to the city, he's already halfway there. He's already halfway derationated. None of this would have happened without a Jewish influence. And lots of this was done with the circulation of Jews.

It wasn't the same guy every time, but this tightly cohesive and centralized body of Jews was up against a very large but very decentralized Gentile system that under Nicholas was doing everything that couldn't stop this. It produced a lot of money. It produced a lot of liquidity for the system. it did, despite themselves, produce a lot of tax money, a huge amount of tax money, but everyone knew who mattered. Gentiles knew that this was absolutely destructive, even those

who were profiting from it, knew how destructive this was. And the Jew is at the, was and is at the center of it using these sorts of institutions. If you go look at the Jewish control over the speakeas of American, in the 20s of American Prohibition, there's no difference that I could see between that and what was going on here. This is just a constant in the Talmudic mind. Would you say that before the Jews really started to have any kind of influence in the culture of Russia, the singular culture of Russia, was it a singular culture? Was it a culture where, you know, even if it was regional, you knew what it was.

It didn't have to be written down. You didn't need laws. It was just people who shared, you know, something in common. And then you introduce a people into them. And it doesn't even have to be Jews with, you know, the way they operate with their manipulation, with the way they do commerce, everything like that. Any kind of culture that gets introduced to a culture, especially a very simple people and agrarian people, that it's going to clash.

it's going to cause problems and you see people today arguing saying, oh, multiculturalism works perfectly fine. Look at the United States. It's like, well, I mean, how can you argue that when you have the, you know, the obvious example here of one people, a historic people who when they encounter a people who are not who are advanced in their way of I'm sorry you know there's no better word manipulation I mean how could you even argue that introducing a foreign culture into a culture is actually a good thing that's that's been the theme since I think the first word that I uttered in this in this series you had a fairly prosperous um Russian Orthodox society, of course, there were regional differences, but Russia grew because these were very similar people.

They're speaking the same language. They had the same religion. They had the same calendar. They had the same fan, all this stuff. Similar, but unidentical systems in terms of economics. That was the big regional side of it. And then all of a sudden, you introduce a cancer from a group of people who are aware that they're this destructive entity. and that their whole mentality revolves around how do we latch on to this host how do we keep him from dying while still being able to take advantage

bleeding him slowly and as we mentioned the concept of the Messiah that once Jews reach critical mass of power and influence well the Messiah am you seeing it now? The Messiah must be coming. So now any incentive that they ever had to pull back is gone because pretty soon everyone's going to be our slave.

That occurred in Poland. I'm not sure among the your strict Jews in Russia at the time. You have it right now amongst Jews in America looking to people like Schneerson. And I'm going to be talking about that in my daily nationalist here in a little bit. And as I said, I think the first day, I said that the Russian mind, the normal Gentile mind, especially the Christian mind, wasn't ready for what they had to face with this totally Machiavellian group of people who would do anything. Always at someone else's expense to turn a profit and to control.

So it's not just they take over, but then they have to go out of their way to make sure that no one knows that they've taken over. So now they have to start controlling government agencies and everything else. It ends up being this cycle, this spiral of domination that's now reached. It's zenith in Zionism. That's on the front page even today. The connection between, you know, when the Jews reached a critical mass in the U.S., roughly around the time prohibition, American women, you know, instituted prohibition,

mostly females now you had pornography issues for the very first time court cases about that court cases about yeah of course the violating the Volstead Act the existence of organized crime

becoming extremely powerful and extremely wealthy in the major cities in every case you had powerful Jews at every step of the way they reached a certain level and there used to be a reaction to this kind of thing Of course, now there isn't, or is there.

I mean, you know, this may be changing, but Nicholas was the first Russian leader to really know this and to really get his hands around this. But at his disposal, he didn't have the resources that a, you know, a 20th century state would have. This is not a state. This is an empire for better or for worse. And it didn't function like the modern nation state does. and he was aware not just at the local level with the peasantry

he was aware how freemasonry and Judaism was affecting his own elite and he had to take substantial action right up until the time of the revolution which was also very Masonic

and Judaic you know this was this constant back and forth battle at one level or another Nicholas was the first to really understand this in the 19th century

and this is why he is treated so harshly in the historical literature today. All right. We'll leave it there. We're at a natural stopping point. We'll come back in a few days. I, as I do at the end of every episode, encourage you to go to the show notes of this episode. I have links. I have hot links to support Dr. Johnson's work.

And I ask you to please do that. So, Dr. Johnson, once again, thank you. The knocking was at a moment. minimum. Oh, did you hear something? Yeah, it actually seemed charming at a certain point. Okay. Well, progress is being made.

Thank you, Dr. Johnson. Talk to you in a few days. Talk to you soon, my friend. Bye-bye.