Rasputin and the Jews

A Reversal of History

By Delin Colon

CreateSpace, 2011, 110 pages

 

This eye-opening book relies on dozens of sources, people close to Rasputin, friends
and enemies, and reveals the truth about him. Delin Colon is the great-great
niece of Rasputin’s Jewish secretary.

 

Grigory Rasputin (born around 1870, died by assassination in 1916) was an uneducated,
nearly illiterate, but highly intelligent and very religious man. He made a
couple of pilgrimages to Israel. He was the spiritual advisor to Russia’s last
Tsar and Tsarina. He was unfairly vilified by the fanatically anti-Semitic
Russian society because, contrary to them, he advocated equal rights for all of
Russia’s citizens, including peasants, the poverty-stricken, and Jews; his
strong ethically-held anti-war views; and his opposition to the death penalty.
The distorted history by his detractors pictures this saintly man as hypnotizing
the Tsar and his wife and forcing them to obey his wishes. Actually, the Tsar
frequently refused to follow Rasputin’s advice.

 

Rasputin “took up the causes of the oppressed, sometimes receiving up to 200 people a
day.” He prayed with people and gave spiritual advice. He never took a penny
for his services. He was an empathic and herbal healer, a man of peace who
wanted to avoid war because he realized that it would result in millions of
deaths, including cruelty to enemy soldiers and civilians, and would lead to
the demise of his country. (Russia lost four million lives during World War I.)
His strongly-held views about equal rights for all people took no cognizance of
the person’s faith and background. He felt that “all religions were valuable
and were just different ways of understanding God.” He opposed the death
penalty because he was convinced that many condemned people were innocent.

 

Delin Colon describes in detail the terrible history of anti-Semitism and oppression of
Jews in Russia by all but one ruler since Peter the Great spread the fear and
paranoia about Jews during his rule from 1696 to 1725. He said that he’d rather
have Muslim in Russia than Jews. There were times when Jews were expelled from
Russia. Horrible restrictions were always placed upon them that affected every
aspect of life. There were many “pogroms,” state sponsored murders of Jewish
communities, where lives were lost and property confiscated.

 

Rasputin criticized these practices. “Instead
of organizing pogroms and accusing Jews of all evils, we would do better to
criticize ourselves.” In 1910, he took the side of 307 Jewish dentists who were
charged with becoming dentists only to avoid having to live in the pale, the
area the government insisted that Jews live. He saved them from being killed.
In 1913, he stood up for Mendel Bellis at the infamous “blood libel trial,”
where Jews were accused of killing Christians and using their blood when they
baked matzot for Passover. He helped Jewish children enter schools despite
restrictive quotas. He stopped some pogroms by alerting the Jewish community of
the intended attack. During World War I, he helped free a Jewish doctor from a
German prison. These are only several of the many humanitarian acts that Colon
describes in her book.

 

The Tsar brought Rasputin to his court in 1905 because he heard that Rasputin was a
mystical man, and the Tsar was very superstitious. He also heard that he was a
healer; and Rasputin later used herbs to stem the bleeding of the hemophiliac
son of the Tsar. However, the Tsar did not always listen to his advice. “When
the Tsar issued a manifesto promising autonomy to Poland, Rasputin encouraged
him to also grant equal rights to the Jews,” but the Tsar refused.  He recommended to the Tsar that despite the
vast profits that the government made from the sale of vodka, the Tsar shut
down these stores, because the drinking was unhealthy and the cause of misery
to the less fortunate classes, and the Tsar refused. He advocated
“expropriating land from the aristocracy, with compensation, and distributing
it among the peasants so that they could have food to eat and dignity, but the
Tsar refused.

 

What did the Tsar himself think of Rasputin? He said, “he’s simply a Russian, good,
religious, with a simple spirit; when in pain or doubt, I like to talk with him
and invariably, I feel at peace with myself.” When the Tsar heard that his
relatives had murdered Rasputin, he said, “I am filled with shame that the
hands of my kinsmen are stained with the blood of a simple peasant.”

 

Scholars have concluded that if Rasputin’s programs would have been adopted by the
misguided Tsar, they “would have been a viable means of averting the 1917
revolution.”

 

It is tragic that a person should be vilified because he sought to aid people, and
it is even more heartrending that all too many people accepted these lies as
true. We owe Delin Colon thanks for revealing the truth.