and the October pogroms of 1905.


4. THE CONFERENCE OF JEWISH NOTABLES AT ST. PETERSBURG

The horrors of Balta cast their shadow upon the conference of Jewish
delegates which met in St. Petersburg on April 8-11, 1882. The
conference, which had been called by Baron Horace Günzburg, with the
permission of Ignatyev, was made up of some twenty-five delegates from
the provinces--among them Dr. Mandelstamm of Kiev, Rabbi Isaac Elhanan
Specter of Kovno--and fifteen notables from the capital, including Baron
Günzburg himself, the railroad magnate Polakov, and Professor Bakst. The
question of Jewish emigration was the central issue of the conference,
although, in connection with it, the general situation of Russian Jewry
came up for discussion. There was a mixed element of tragedy and
timidity in the deliberations of this miniature congress, at which
neither the voice of the masses nor that of the _intelligentzia_ were
given a full hearing. On the one hand, the conference listened to
heartrending speeches, picturing the intolerable position of the Jews;
and one of the delegates, Shmerling from Moghilev, who had just
delivered such a speech, was so overcome that he fainted and died in a
few hours. On the other hand, the most influential delegates,
particularly those from the capital, were looking about timorously,
fearing lest the Government suspect them of a lack of patriotism. Others
again looked upon emigration as an illicit form of protest, as
"sedition," and they clung to this conviction, even when the conference
had been told in the name of the Minister of the Interior that it was
expected to consider the question of "thinning out the Jewish population
in the Pale of Settlement, in view of the fact that the Jews will not be
admitted into the interior governments of Russia."