[24] Ruppin, _op. cit._, p. 65. [25] Rubinow, _op. cit._, pp. 577-578. [26] In a personal communication to the writer, Dr. Rubinow gives it as his opinion that the Jews as a group consisting primarily of artisans and merchants will show a very much higher rate of literacy than a group of factory employes, and, we may add, of unskilled laborers, to which groups the majority of the non-Jews in the towns belong. [27] Ruppin, _op. cit._, p. 62. [28] On the economic activities and social characteristics of the Jews in Roumania, _cf._ Ruppin, _Die Juden in Rumaenien_, p. 27 _et seq._ [29] _Enquete sur les artisans_ (Bucarest, 1909), p. 157 _et seq._ [30] Thon, _Die Juden in Oesterreich_ (Berlin, 1908), p. 112. [31] Thon, _op. cit._, p. 124. [32] Thon, _op. cit._, p. 127. [33] _Grenzboten: Galizische Wirtschaft_, vol. lxii, p. 402. CHAPTER IV THIRTY YEARS OF JEWISH HISTORY IN EASTERN EUROPE I. RUSSIA Religious intolerance had been the prime motive of Russia's policy of completely excluding the Jews from her borders. Through the partitions of Poland from 1772 to 1795, she became the unwilling ruler over the destinies of millions of Jews living in Lithuania, Western and Southwestern Russia and Poland proper. The historic medieval principle by which the Jews were regarded as an alien and heretic race living among the Christian peoples--a principle that had, with the growth of modern ideas, been rapidly losing its hold upon the West-European nations--expressed Russia's attitude towards the Jews and conformed to her strongly medieval outlook and organization of this period. Thus, at the time when the emancipation of the Jews had begun to be in Western Europe a concomitant of social progress, Russia set to work to recreate almost typically medieval conditions for a vaster Jewish population than had ever before been assembled in any European country. The Jews were placed in the position practically of aliens, whose activities were regulated by special laws. The first and the most far-reaching of these laws limited their right of residence to those provinces in which they lived at the time of the Polish partitions. In this way originated that reproduction on a vast scale of the medieval Ghetto--the Pale of Jewish Settlement. The elementary right of free movement and choice of residence, which was denied to the Jews, has remained the principal restriction to which they are subjected.