Dual conscience

Dual conscience is the term Mary Antin uses to name the split ethical code that governed Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement, a moral double standard that allowed a Jew to cheat a Gentile while regarding the same act as a sin against a fellow Jew. Antin presents this not as a vice but as a survival strategy forced upon her people by the Czar's oppressive rule. The concept is central to her account of the Old World, explaining everything from petty commercial fraud to the casual deception of a railroad company, and it serves as a moral baseline against which the freedoms of America are measured. The gradual disappearance of this dual conscience in the New World is one of the book's quiet measures of what Americanization truly meant.

The Moral Code of the Pale

Antin introduces the dual conscience as a direct consequence of the Czar's tyranny. The Gentiles, she acknowledges, had their excuse for malice, claiming that Jewish merchants and money-lenders preyed upon them and that shopkeepers gave false measure. Rather than denying this, Antin defiantly admits it: "Yes, I say, we cheated the Gentiles whenever we dared, because it was the only thing to do." The justification lay in the impossible conditions of the Pale, where the Czar issued endless commands—"you shall not do this and you shall not do that"—until little remained that a Jew might honestly do except pay tribute and die. With thousands of Jews cooped up where only hundreds could live, and every means of living taxed to the utmost, the starving captives of the Pale behaved as hungry brutes do, preying upon each other. Yet their humanity showed in their discrimination between victims: whenever possible, they spared their own kind and directed their cunning wiles against their racial foes. Antin frames this as the code of war, arguing that a Jew could hardly exist in business without developing this dual conscience, which allowed him to do to a Gentile what he would call a sin against a fellow Jew. She calls such spiritual deformities self-explained in the step-children of the Czar, and reflects that a glance over the statutes of the Pale leaves one wondering that the Russian Jews have not lost all semblance to humanity.

The economic realities of the Pale made such a code inevitable. The bewildering array of duties and taxes owed to the Czar—taxes on houses, on rents, on business, on profits, collected by the town, the county, and the central government, with the chief of police always present—left little honest margin for survival. The excise duties on tobacco, which Antin's uncle explained to her, taxed the tobacco, the paper, the mouthpiece, and the finished product separately, with no tax only on the smoke, which the Czar must have overlooked. Business did not pay when prices were so swollen by taxes that people could not buy, and the only way to make it pay was to cheat the Government of part of the duties. Yet playing tricks on the Czar was dangerous, with spies watching the Government's interests, and those who sold cigarettes without the government seal got more gray hairs than bank notes out of their business. The constant risk, the worry, the dread of a police raid in the night, and the ruinous fines in case of detection left very little margin of profit or comfort. The people's helpless shrug and their question—"What can one do? One must live"—captured the moral atmosphere in which the dual conscience flourished.

The Code in Practice: Cousin Rachel's Ruse

Antin's most vivid illustration of the dual conscience in action is the story of her first journey to Vitebsk with her father's cousin Rachel, a young woman who earned her dowry by selling spools, combs, and small wares. Cousin Rachel, who had developed in business that dual conscience—one for her Jewish neighbors and one for the Gentiles—decided to carry the young Mary on the train without a ticket. Mary was small, though of an age to pay half-fare, and the stratagem was simple. Approaching the ticket office, Rachel whispered to her to stoop a little, and she stooped; the ticket agent passed her. In the car, Rachel bade her curl up in the seat, threw a shawl over her, and told her to pretend to sleep. Mary heard the conductor collect the tickets, knew when he was looking at her, heard him ask her age, and heard Cousin Rachel lie about it. When the conductor was gone, she sat up, looked out the window, saw everything, and was perfectly, perfectly happy.

Mary's reaction to this deception is as instructive as the ruse itself. She smiled at her cousin in perfect understanding and admiration of her cleverness in beating the railroad company. She knew then, as she knew when writing, beyond a doubt, that her Uncle David's daughter was an honorable woman. The logic of the dual conscience made this paradox coherent: with the righteous she dealt squarely; with the unjust, as best she could. Cousin Rachel was in duty bound to make all the money she could, for money was her only protection in the midst of the enemy; every kopeck she earned or saved was a scale in her coat of armor. Antin notes that this code was learned early in life in Polotzk, so she was pleased with the success of the ruse, though she should have been horrified if she had seen Cousin Rachel cheat a Jew. The episode reveals how thoroughly the dual conscience was internalized by children, who absorbed it not as a moral failing but as a necessary and even admirable skill.

The Gendered Division of the Moral World

The dual conscience operated within a social order that assigned sharply different moral and practical roles to men and women. A girl's real schoolroom was her mother's kitchen, where she learned to bake, cook, manage, knit, sew, and embroider, and while her hands were busy, her mother instructed her in the laws regulating a pious Jewish household and in the conduct proper for a Jewish wife. A girl was born for no other purpose than to be a wife. Marriage was a sacrament, and to rear a family of children was to serve God, fulfilling the ancient promise given to Jacob that his seed should be abundantly scattered over the earth. Parenthood was the great career, but while men might also busy themselves with the study of the Law, woman's only work was motherhood. To be left an old maid was the greatest misfortune that could threaten a girl, and the girl and her family would strain every nerve to ward off that calamity, whether by contributing to her dowry, hiding her defects from the marriage broker, or praying and fasting that God might send her a husband.

This gendered order shaped the moral development of the Antin sisters in ways that the dual conscience alone cannot explain. The family tradition held that Mary was the quicker, the brighter of the two, and that hers could be no common lot, while Frieda was relied upon for help. When Mary failed as a milliner's apprentice while Frieda made excellent progress at the dressmaker's, their fates were sealed: it was understood, even before they reached Boston, that Frieda would go to work and Mary to school. Mary accepted these arrangements without much reflection, taking everything planned for her advantage as a matter of course, and she records with shame that she did not consider how little it was that contented her sister. Frieda, for her part, showed no envy, only a woman's acquiescence in her fate, becoming a woman with all a woman's cares while her younger sister was bidden to dance at the May festival of untroubled childhood. The dual conscience of the Pale thus operated alongside a domestic hierarchy that quietly sacrificed one daughter's education for another's glory.

The American Transformation

The dual conscience was a product of the Old World's oppression, and its fate in America marks the moral transformation of the immigrant. Father himself conducted his daughters to school on their first day, a mission he would not have delegated to the President of the United States. Almost his first act on landing on American soil, three years before, had been his application for naturalization, and he took the remaining steps with eager promptness, becoming a citizen at the earliest moment allowed by law. The boasted freedom of the New World meant to him far more than the right to reside, travel, and work wherever he pleased; it meant the freedom to speak his thoughts, to throw off the shackles of superstition, to test his own fate, unhindered by political or religious tyranny. This was the moral atmosphere in which the dual conscience became obsolete, replaced by a single standard of conduct under the Constitution.

The schoolyard incident in which Mary declared her freethought illustrates the new moral order. When her classmates—Rachel, Kitty, Maggie, Sadie, Annie, and Beckie—surrounded her, mocked her, and threatened her with hell flames and utter extinction for saying there was no God, Mary held her ground. She had been surprised into the dispute, glibly repeating phrases she had heard her father use without really understanding his atheistic doctrines, but as her opponents grew and unanimously condemned her, her indifference turned into a heat of indignation. She perceived that a crowd of Free Americans were disputing the right of a Fellow Citizen to have any kind of God she chose, and she knew from her father's teaching that this persecution was contrary to the Constitution of the United States. "This is a free country," she reminded them in the middle of the argument. The teacher, Miss Bland, later explained to her, as Miss Dillingham had done on the occasion of her whispering during prayer, that it was proper American conduct to avoid religious arguments on school territory. Mary felt honored by this private initiation into the doctrine of the separation of Church and State, her alarm about the safety of the Constitution allayed by the teacher's calmness. The dual conscience of the Pale, which had taught Jews to deceive Gentiles as a matter of survival, here gave way to a civic conscience that protected the right of every citizen to believe as he chose.

The Persistence of the Old Dispensation

The dual conscience did not vanish instantly upon arrival in America, and Antin's account of her sister Frieda's engagement reveals how the Old World's moral and social codes lingered. Before the family had been two years in America, Frieda was engaged to be married, under what Antin calls the old dispensation. Frieda came to America too late to avail herself of the gifts of an American girlhood; had she been two years younger, she might have dodged her circumstances, evaded her Old-World fate, gone to school, imbibed American ideas, and clung to her girlhood longer instead of marrying at seventeen. Antin confesses her fondness for the American way and her sense that it was a pitiful accident that her sister came so near and missed by so little the fulfilment of her country's promise to women. A long girlhood, a free choice in marriage, and a brimful womanhood were the precious rights of an American woman, and Frieda, through no fault of her own, was denied them.

Father was too recently from the Old World to be entirely free from the influence of its social traditions. He had put Frieda to work out of necessity, and the necessity was hardly lifted when she had an offer of marriage, but he would not stand in the way of what he considered her welfare. The young man who sued for her was a good workman, earning fair wages, of irreproachable character, and refined manners, and Father had known him for years. The act of releasing Frieda from the workshop was really in the nature of a sacrifice on Father's part, for he was still in the woods financially and would sorely miss her wages. Yet Antin laments that there was no one to counsel him to give America more time with her sister, who attended night school and was fond of reading; in books, in a slowly ripening experience, she might have found a better answer to the riddle of a girl's life than a premature marriage. The dual conscience of the Pale, which had governed the moral economy of survival, here gave way to a subtler tragedy: the persistence of Old-World social expectations even when the economic necessity that had justified them was lifting.

The Legacy of the Concept

Antin's own trajectory demonstrates the distance traveled from the dual conscience of the Pale. She went to college, though not to Radcliffe; receiving an invitation to live in New York that she did not like to refuse, she went to Barnard College instead, where she took all the honors that she deserved and learned at least to think in English without an accent. She earned enough to pay Mrs. Hutch the arrears and satisfy all her wants, and her favorite abode became a tent in the wilderness, where she would be happy to serve a cup of tea out of a tin kettle. The moral world of the Pale, with its dual conscience and its code of war, had been replaced by a world of open doors, free libraries, and lecture halls, where the immigrant child was welcomed at a hundred open doors of instruction and initiated with pomp and splendor and flags unfurled. The dual conscience, which had been a spiritual deformity self-explained in the step-children of the Czar, was one of the foreign idiosyncrasies that Mary overcame on her way from the ship through the public schools to the college gate. Its disappearance was not a loss but a liberation, the sign that the shackles of the Pale had finally fallen away.