Memphis daily appeal. [volume] (Memphis, Tenn.) 1847-1886, 1882-02-01
sa..ou.s HotcI-Japuary srst
DEVASTATING IN RUSSIA.
Horrible aud Barbarous Treatment of
an Unfortunate People.
New York Tribune.

The minute accounts published in London
of the persecution of the Hebrews in Russia
cannot fail to excite the compassion and in
dignation of the Euglish-speaking world.
The Pail Mall Gazette has given startling
emphasis to the mesger references made in
the officially revised dispatches from St.
Petersburg to the riotous disturbances of
the last nine months, and its scathing
invectives are fully justified by the details
furnished by correspondent OF the
Times London). 1t is a most hideous record
of rapine, lust and inhumanity. If the Turk
ish butchers in Bulgaria were more blood
thirsty and barbarous, the Russian mobs are
every whit as cruel and debased, swayed as
they have been by passionate hatred of the
Jews which is dlstinctively medieval in
spirit. Moreover the authorities have not
only been wholly supine the Turkish
government, but they have openly abetted and
officially justified these hateful and frenzied
outbreaks of savagery and fanaticism. The
signal for these atrocities was given a
few weeks after the assassination::of the car.
At Elizabethgrad, town in South Russia,
where the Jewish community formed at least
a third of the population, mob, having
sacked a wine shop and become inf smed
with liquor, attacked the synagogues. For
forty-eight hours the rioters remained in
possession of the Jewish quarter, the soldiers
who were called out to suppress the revolt
Joining heartily in the work of destruction,
pillage and lust As many as one hundred
shops and warehouses and five hundred
houses were demolished, the losses of the
victims being estimated at 81, 500, 900.
This was the first outbreak. 1t was fol-
lowed in a week by riots in Smielo and Kieff
where the troops and police again sup
ported the mob, participating fully in this
double assault upon property and virtue.
At Kieff the attack was deliberately an
nounced in advance, and when the governor
was called upon to protect twenty thousand
Hebrew residents OF the city, he refused to
give his soldiers any trouble "for the sake
of a pack of Jews" The consequence was
that two thousand OF the hated race were
left without shelter, and in the sight of hus-
bands and fathers m arried women and young
girls were made the victims OF the most
brutal assaults From this time until the
end of the year there was scarcely town in
Southern and Southwestern Russia where
similar scenes were not enacted. As many as
one hundred and sixty villages and towns
were at different times during eight months at
the mercy of besotted rabble. The frenzy
spread from town to country until it reached
the pettiest hamlet where there was single
Jew with a little ready money to lend. 1t
finally famed ont in the ancient capital
during Christmas week, when an alarm of
fire was raised simultaneously in two syna-
gogues and thousand houses and shops
not permit US to illustrate adequately the
cruelties and lndignities to which these
wretched victims of persecution were
exposed, much less to catalogue the
horrors by naming the places and
reckoning the losses in life and property
that were sustained. Many Of the incidents
are heartrending and revolving. We read
of heartless mob breaking into house.
and finding neither Jewesses nor treasure in
the empty rooms, sullenly wreaking its dis
appointment on baby, which is hurled out
OF a window and falls dead at the feet OF
platoon Of Cossacks. Then follows a recital
of an attack upon a Jewish congregation, the
women who escaped worse fate in the syn
agogue being driven into the river and forced
Hebrew innkeepers wine cellars ends BY
cutting the throats of his wife and
six daughters; child crouching in
ditch sees a band of rufians muir
der its mother and set fire to the house;
an innkeeper is cooped in one OF his
empty wine barrels and cast into the Dneiper;
men, women and children are roasted alive;
a father defending his daughter from stair
way to roof is hurled to the pavement; and
women who have been envious of the silks
and satins which wealthy Jewesses have
fiaunted before their eyes outriyal the hays
of the Paris Commune in malevolence and
shamelessness. In a thousand ways the
vengeance of an ignorant peasantry and
a debased populace has been wreaked
without regard to age or sex, until
thousands on thousands OF households have
been reduced to shame and beggary. The
Russian authorities have, in almost every in
stance. openly encouraged the rioters, and
have only interviewed with any energy when
the riot was three days old and the mob had
exhausted its re- ources of wanton cruelty
and barbarous atrocity. The attacks have
invariably been planned in advance,
Saints day and Sundays being gener-
ally chosen, and wooden crosses being
sometimes erected before the doors of
christians as sign that they should be
spared. The Jews have known when they
were to be prosecuted, and have begged for
military aid, but it was never granted. Many
of the mobs have believed that TIE govern
ment had handed over the property OF the
Jews 70 the impoverished classes, and that
the movement had received the sanction OF
an imperial ukase. This shameless apathy
of the local and imperial authorities Is the
most disheartening feature of this relapse
into medieval Jew-baiting.