expansion of the economic role of the state rendered the role of the traditional Mercurian mediator between the countryside and the town economically irrelevant, legally precarious, and increasingly dangerous. The state took over tax collection, liquor sales, and some parts of foreign trade; the landlord had less land to lease or turned into a favored competitor; the peasant had more produce to sell and turned into a favored competitor (by doing much of the selling himself); the Christian industrialist turned into an even more favored—and more competent—competitor; the train ruined the peddler and the wagon driver; the bank bankrupted the moneylender; and all of these things taken together forced more and more Jews into artisanal work (near the bottom of the Jewish social prestige hierarchy), and more and more Jewish artisans into cottage-industry production or wage labor (in craft shops and increasingly factories). And the more Jews migrated to new urban areas, the more frequent and massive was violence against them. 15 The imperial state, which presided over Russia’s industrialization and thus the demise of the traditional Jewish economy as well as the killing and robbing of individual Jews, did its best to prevent the former middlemen from finding new opportunities. Jews were barred from government employment (including most railway jobs), all but fifteen of Russia’s provinces, more than one-half of the Pale’s rural districts, and a variety of occupations and institutions. Their access to education was limited by quotas, and their membership in professional organizations was subject to arbitrary regulation. The ostensible—and, apparently, true—reason for these policies was to protect Christian merchants, students, and professionals from Jewish competition, and Christian peasants from Jewish “exploitation.” The state that had used the Jews to extract revenue from the peasants was trying to protect the peasants it still depended on from the Jews it no longer needed. The more it protected the peasants, the graver the “Jewish problem” became. The imperial government did not instigate Jewish pogroms; it did, however, help bring them about by concentrating the Jewish population in selected places and occupations and by insisting on separation even as it fostered industrial growth. Fin de siècle Hungary and Germany (and later most of Russia’s western neighbors) contributed to the growth of political anti-Semitism by combining vigorous ethnic nationalism with a cautiously liberal stance toward Jewish social and economic mobility; late imperial Russia achieved a comparable result by combining a cautious ethnic nationalism with a vigorous policy of multiplying Jewish disabilities. 16 The most dramatic and easily observable Jewish response to this double squeeze was emigration. Between 1897 and 1915, about 1,288,000 Jews left the