Forced conscription of the 'unfit'

The razbor — the "sorting" — was meant to arrange the Jews of the Russian Empire into useful categories: licensed merchants, registered craftsmen, farmers. All the others, the mass of small peddlers, intermediaries, and the poor, were declared useless and handed over to military service, whose duration was then counted in decades and from which one rarely returned as a Jew. The classification was entrusted to the communities themselves, who were required to designate their own, and it is this that gave it its particular harshness: it transformed communal administration into an instrument of conscription and divided families between those who could purchase a license and those who could not. The reform was never carried to its conclusion, but it left behind the memory of the child-snatchers.