Passlosen — Jews Without Lawful Permit

Published in the Kurlandskya Gubernskie Vedomosti, summer 1855 · Courland · Latvia

This database consists of 990 male Jews declared to be “Passlosen”, or “without lawful permit”, in the official Russian Government Gazette for Kurland gubernia, the Kurlandskya Gubernskie Vedomosti. The lists were first identified in the course of the more general project of the Courland Research Group to index all entries relating to the Jewish community of Courland appearing in the Gazette between 1853 and 1900. They are of sufficient historical and genealogical importance to merit publication as a free-standing database, ahead of the completion of the wider Vedomosti index.

The lists are organised town by town and were published throughout the summer of 1855. In chronological order they appeared as follows.

At least as many non-Jews were listed as Jews; they have not been included in the database. In all the original lists save one, the Jews are listed at the end of the non-Jewish passlosen. Only in the case of the Libau (Liepaja) list are the two communities intermingled.

A sample passlosen list from the Kurlandskaya Gubernskie Vedomosti, August 6, 1855. This list includes both Jews and non-Jews from the town of Grobin (Grobina).

The Jews of Courland lived outside the Pale, but had to be lawfully registered in the towns in which they lived. The residence permit or pass system appears to have been administered by the local Kahal, the Jewish administrative authority for each town or city, which was in turn answerable to the Russian civil authorities who laid down the criteria.

Jews from the Pale were not permitted to serve in the military until 1827, and paid a tax in lieu of service. Courland was not in the Pale and the same regulations did not apply: Courland Jews were not banned from military service but could pay a sum of money in lieu, or pay a substitute to serve in their place, and a complicated system of exemptions had grown up around this. See the Courland Family lists.

That relatively relaxed position changed under Tsar Nicholas I (1825–1855), who pursued a policy of conscripting large numbers of Jewish males to serve a compulsory 25-year term. Boys as young as twelve were eligible to be called, and there is anecdotal evidence of boys younger than twelve being removed from their homes. The Kahal, which survived in Courland until the 1860s, was charged with selecting which recruits would be taken from the Recruits Enlistment Registers. It had no choice but to co-operate, because the sanctions for default were worse than the duty itself:

The Vedomosti has numerous examples of the hardships that these policies caused and the impact that it had on ordinary Jewish people. Regular announcements are found in the years 1853–1856 of named individuals fleeing military service or failing to turn up for duty. These can be very poignant. For example the following extracts are all found in the Vedomosti:

As the Crimean war continued these announcements increase. It is notable however that avoidance/evasion of military duty was not a phenomenon of the Jewish community only. Many of those listed for military default of one sort or another in the Courland Vedomosti were in fact non-Jews.

Jews did not only appear in the Vedomosti for default. One entry in 1855 thanks the Jewish merchants of Mitau, Eckstein, Friedlander, Friedlieb, Goldberg, Jacobs, Kallmeyer, Klein, Kretschmann, Levinsohn, Lippert, Salzmann, Schmahmann, Stern and Taube, who contributed the sum of 800 roubles for the relief of wounded soldiers.

Kurlandskaya Gubernskie Vedomosti, June 15, 1854: Report of the Jewish donors to the Fund for Wounded Soldiers.

The best evidence that we have is an account by Herman Rosenthal, (born 1843 Friedrichstadt, died 1917 New York). Rosenthal became the head of the Slavic and Baltic Division of the New York Public Library and wrote extensively about the history of the Russian Jews and was an expert in the Jewish history of Courland. His major review articles are found in the major Funk & Wagnalls Jewish Encyclopaedia published in 1904 [and 1916] of which he was an editor.

Rosenthal was a gifted scholar, linguist and historian. The longest of the lists of Jews without lawful permit was drawn up relating to Jews in Friedrichstadt, where Rosenthal was born. In 1855 when the Friedrichstadt Passlosen list was published Rosenthal would have been 12 or 13 and just old enough to be eligible to be called as a recruit. The policy of recruitment and the enforcement of military obligations must have been discussed in the Rosenthal household. It seems reasonable to infer that when Rosenthal makes mention of the recruit policy that he speaks from at least some vivid personal knowledge.

It appears from the account given below that the Kahal was the likely source of the list of Jews without lawful permit. The account he gives of the Russian Government’s conscription policy towards the Jews is one he was likely to have experienced at first hand. He tells us that:

“… From 1853 the Kahal was empowered to seize within their own district all the Jews who had no passports and belonged to other Jewish communities, and to enrol them in their own quota of recruits. The Kahal had no alternative save to enforce the law as it stood. For every recruit who failed to report for duty or who fled military duty the Kahal had to furnish 2 young men in their place. In addition arrears of tax were punished by imposing a further burden in terms of an additional levy of recruits.

“The heads of families whatever their standing, had the right to seize such Jews and to deliver them to the authorities as substitutes for themselves or for members of their families. Among other objects the government thereby intended to rid itself of those Jews whom the Kahals refused to supply with passports in order avoid the increase of tax and conscription arrears.”

If Rosenthal’s account is correct, the passlosen lists were drawn up by the Kahal, backed by the authority of the Tsar, to enforce the conscription of Jewish recruits. Precisely what happened to the people on the list is something further research may tell us. The enforcement measures were likely to have had a pernicious effect on the community, since they encouraged Jew to turn against Jew, and the decline in the standing of the Kahal can be linked to its role as reluctant enforcer of conscription and collector of government taxes.

The worst of the abuses of military conscription passed with the death of Nicholas I in 1885 and the end of the Crimean War in 1886.

The Courland Research Group has a photocopied set of all Jewish entries between 1853 and 1859 and continues to receive material. The originals of these newspapers are frail and are rapidly perishing as the newsprint from the time is not of particularly good quality. We are looking to see how scans of pages relevant to individual geneaological searchers can be made available.

This database can be searched via the JewishGen Latvia Database or the JewishGen Unified Search.