Other historians point to a rapid increase in the Jewish population of the
Pale, which quadrupled during the nineteenth century. Without the ability
to expand in response to population increase, the towns and villages of the
Pale became increasingly crowded and impoverished, especially after
Alexander I evicted Jews from local villages in 1804. In any case, other than
the 20,000 Jews who became farmers in Novorussia, little changed for Jews
until the reign of Nicholas I.
Nicholas I, raised to be a general, became tsar in 1825 following the pre-
mature death of his brother Constantine. For Nicholas, all solutions were
military solutions. Thus, he believed that the most effective ways of helping
non-productive subjects serve the state more efficiently was conscription.
Similarly, he regarded conscription as the surest method of Russifying the
non-Russian population, including the Jews.
In 1827, he ordered the conscription of Russian Jews. Jews were not the
only group conscripted for the first time; Polish nobles, for example, were
also conscripted. Yet Jews were conscripted into special units known as
Cantonist units. Jewish conscripts were conscripted from the age of 12 and
required to serve for twenty-five years. Moreover, they were subject to intense
missionary pressure during their term of service.
The harshness of this imperial order was exacerbated by the fact that, like
peasant communes and towns, the leadership of the Jewish community, the
kahal, was responsible for supplying the annual quota of Jewish recruits.
Given the nature of cantonist military service, this was tantamount to send-
ing Jewish boys away possibly never to return. Once the most obvious
suspects had been tapped to fill the quota – miscreants, the religiously lax,
children of the poor, orphans, and the weak-minded – the kahal had to choose
among less obvious candidates. The difficulty of finding volunteers forced the
kahal to hire khappers(literally, grabbers) – thugs who would locate and drag
off the remaining children. The participation of the kahal in supplying
recruits undermined the confidence of rank-and-file Jews in their leaders. No
longer was it clear that the kahal, traditionally the protector of its con-
stituency from outside threats, had their best interests in mind.
During the 1840s, Nicholas went a step further in his attempt to Russify the
Jews. Convinced that the main impediment to Russification was the leadership
of the Jews itself – which was ironic, given its assistance in delivering recruits –
Nicholas attempted to eliminate the kahal, without success. He then attempted
to transform rabbinic leadership into a government agency by synthesizing his
own rabbinate. In 1849, he created government-sponsored rabbinical training
academies in Vilna and Zhitomir. The graduates of these schools would be
assigned to individual Jewish communities as government rabbis. In addition to
performing the standard rabbinic functions, these rabbis would provide a
detailed registry of birth, marriages, and deaths, and would be the official liaison
between the Jewish community and the state. This initiative also failed, as most
Jewish communities had a government rabbi and an unofficial actual rabbi.
174 The age of enlightenment and emancipation, 1750–1880