Investor Presentaiton
integration into the non-Jewish society, its unintended aftermath offered a secular Jewish identity
to the educated."24
By the time of the 1905 Revolution, Jews had suffered anti-Semitic sentiments and laws
from the tsarist government for centuries. The Pale of Settlement is a prime example, as it was
created in 1791 to delineate legal boundaries to restrict the territories where Jews could live and
work.25 More recently, as Jonathan Frankel notes in Prophecy and Politics, the period between
1881 and 1917 was particularly difficult for Jews under Alexander III and Nicholas II. During
this era Jews suffered from “a population explosion, chronic under-employment (and
unemployment), poverty; by periodic waves of pogroms and governmental harassment; by a
massive emigration" and more. 26 Alexander III was particularly harsh on Jews during his reign,
which ended in 1894. Government officials had shown their lack of willingness to stop pogroms,
and in many cases actually encouraged them. Often, Jewish families were also forcibly evicted
from large cities, such as Moscow, and forced to relocate to the Pale. 27
Simultaneous to these years of crisis among Russian Jews was a period of noticeable
decline within the Russian imperial government, economy, and military. From a defeat in Crimea
at the Hands of the Ottomans, the British, and the French in 1856, to rising political strife and
terrorism from failed reforms and the unsatisfactory emancipation of serfs under Alexander II,
the Russian empire was in a weakened position at home and abroad. The creation of the Duma
during the Revolution of 1905 was a result of these continuous struggles. The new legislative
24 Shtakser, The Making of Jewish revolutionaries, 11.
25 Alfred D. Low, Soviet Jewry and Soviet Policy, (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1990), 13.
26 Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917, 1.
27 Ibid, 138.
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